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Comment How do you know? (Score 1) 186

Think of the physical brain as the TV set. "Consciousness" is the program sent to the TV set. Without the TV set you can't see the program, but no one would claim that the TV set IS the program. In essence the program manifests via the TV set. There is nothing particularly special about the brain. It's grey matter is as physical as the TV set. There is no reason why a sufficiently complex and advanced TV set cannot host consciousness. Karel Capek dealt with this very idea in the very first use of the term, "robot" in "RUR Rossum's universal robots" (They were actually androids, not mechanical, but the point remains.) One day this will become a serious issue.

Comment Re:Don't worry AI spam will ruin this too. (Score 1) 7

This is always the danger of beginning birders adding their findings to ebird. Many of us use another app, Merlin, made by the same organization, to listen to birds around us to help us identify birds by their sounds. The preferred method (the one we hope everyone does, but know that they don't all do) is to use Merlin to give you a list of birds to look for, then once you can confirm the bird is in the area, track it on ebird. Merlin uses "AI" to identify birds in the area, but makes mistakes. People trying to use Merlin to ID a bird using a picture are even more prone to errors than the part that identifies with sound. If someone just dumps what Merlin hears into ebird, and it's not a particularly uncommon thing for people to do, it can clog up the database with this AI spam.

I'm certain any ornithologists using the data would treat it like a CAPCHA, where they only count data that agrees among several accounts, instead of treating any individual count as being truthful.

Comment Transparency (Score 5, Insightful) 114

One reason for quarterly reporting is that it gives greater transparency and insight into how a business actually works. Many businesses are seasonal. Most obviously, virtually all retail has its best quarter at the end of the calendar year. But many other types of businesses have key cycles each year that are tied to, for example, the buying habits of their largest customers. Suppliers matter, too; if farms have a bad quarter due to weather or other factors, for example, you're going to want to watch how that impacts food producers somewhere down the line.

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