But honestly, what do you think would happen if the US military were suddenly defunded?
A lot of bullshit pork contracts would have their fat trimmed, we'd murder less people for profit, or both.
Well, when you put it like that!
... We have limited resources to throw at space. This is the time to throw them at something that will give us some return.
We have limited resources to throw at space because we have limited resources down here - but I know a place with ~limitless resources and it's called space. True, it's full of mostly nothing, but where there is something there tends to be a whooooooole lot of something.
What's on the moon anyhow? Rocks? Are you sure that's all? We can't really be sure unless we look.
What I really would want to know why I should care?
It depends on how much you care about the future, and how far into the future you care to care.
If you care only about tomorrow and don't care that much about what happens tomorrow, then you should not care in the least.
If you care about the next 10 years, and care a good amount about it, then you should care a bit because AI research is information science research, and humans are information animals and tool animals and thus information tools are very important and AI is a very powerful information tool - even if mostly theoretical at this point.
If you care about the next century, and you care a lot about it, then you should care a lot - because this next 100 years will be the first century of a real-time information web splayed over the planet between the little human individuals scurrying about on the surface, and the wealth of information stored and transmitted (which might be the same thing!) will continue to grow - and to make use of that gargantuan information store, we need information processing capabilities beyond anything we have today, and certainly beyond the capability of unaided, or non-computationally aided, human minds.
If you care about the next millennium and beyond, then you should find my ideas interesting and subscribe to my newsletter because I want us to be around for the long haul because I like people and I think we are neat and I think the universe, being rather impartial, could do with a bit more intelligence. Brains, after all, are the best way I know of for the universe to appreciate itself and so I think we should appreciate the inevitability that to appreciate larger things, we need larger brains.
(Hans Moleman is inside a phone booth at the bird sanctuary with birds attacking him.)
Hans Moleman: (into the phone) Hello, I need the largest seed bell you have. (pause) No, that's too big.
My point is that some things can be too big: but not a supercollider.
Humorbot 5.0: So I said, "Super-collider? I just met her!" [audience laughs] And then they built the super collider.
Also insert here some observation about theoretical maximum energies, public misunderstandings and political obstacles.
There are men and women in the Congo, slaving away in giant pits in order to extract gold and other precious metals from the earth. This gold will go into phones and tablets made by companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Anthony Levandowski has never worked in a pit mine nor will his children...
And maybe if you would let him finish working on his robots, then no one's children will! Alas, it seems that no mind can be flexible enough to wrap itself around the reasoning of narrow-minded. I mean, these protesters' points are not so wrong, the problem is merely that their reasoning is so not complete - and yet they take complete action!
I wonder if ignorance must remain unaware of itself in order to survive...
when I was a child. The odd thing, is that my memory is mostly about my father's reaction, and the look on his face. A look of shock and disbelief. The failure of infallible American tech.
It was the failure of 'infallible' American money.
Money and technology are such strange bedfellows. On the one hand the connection between them is obvious and inextricable, but on the other lies the question of progress. Money is required to develop and ultimately build a technology, and yet by virtue of the money invested that technology is expected to create money - usually more than was invested in the first place. So, in an way, from money's perspective all that technology is designed to do is to create money - anything else that technology does is a mere byproduct of the process of developing it to make more money.
In other words, according to money, any technology which does nothing but make more money is a perfect technology.
This might explain why things like FOSS and any "Open" technology movement is perceived as so vile and abominable a thing by money. How can a technology not take nor make money? I think it causes money to be a little nervous that technology can exist without it. After all, since money is anything accepted as payment for goods or services, doesn't that mean that money can actually be nothing?
And by the way I asked money if it cared that I anthropomorphize it and it said it couldn't care less.
"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe
