Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:I donno... (Score 1) 186

Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.

LK

Don't agree at all and I think that's a morally dangerous approach. We're looking for a scientific definition of "desire" and "want". That's almost certainly a part of "conscious" and "self aware". Philosophy can help, but in the end, to know whether you are right or not you need the experimental results.

Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.

One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.

LK

Comment Re:I donno... (Score 2) 186

An LLM can't suddenly decide to do something else which isn't programmed into it.

Can we?

It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.

Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.

LK

Comment It's 2025 (Score 5, Interesting) 71

It's 2025. We've known for a couple of decades that Win32/Win64 and Windows and its main ecosystem only work because various hacks into the kernel to make it all run more smoothly. Even the video driver architecture basically has built in restarts when buffers blow up.

It's a shitty proprietary operating system which somehow, every time they try to clean it up, it gets worse under and on top of the hood. I stopped using Windows for my own personal devices four years ago, and will not go back. Ubuntu, Debian and MacOS offer cleaner UIs, and even if the software libraries are a bit smaller, at least I'm not a prisoner to endless ads.

Christ I had to set up a Win11 laptop yesterday, and between setting up the OS and Edge I had to turn down "offers" and additional tracking functionality around seven or eight times. Actually more, because then I set up a non-privileged user profile, and had to do it all again. And that was Win11 Pro. I can only imagine how much worse the Home editions are.

Comment Re: Curious catch 22 (Score 1) 238

China's population decline, as standards of living increase, will largely take care of the problem. China, like every nation that is now on the other side of the economic growth-population growth curve, will have to figure out how to deal with the next half century. But nothing is going to make factories less automated, and between population decline and foreign tariffs, they are only going to push automation further to fill the gap.

Comment Re:Curious catch 22 (Score 1) 238

Which will not prevent automation. Look at the history of technological advancement, from the Paleolithic to today. Each major innovation has disrupted labor in some form or another, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, in a proximal sense, but in the long run societies adapt. You cannot block innovation, and if you do, you simply surrender the field to the nation that is willing to throw out the status quo.

Comment Re:Ford CEO has been driving chinese EV for months (Score 4, Insightful) 238

All North America can think about is building more pipelines. The oil obsession, in the face of climate change and economics, means we're just going to fall further and further behind. Sure, for a while tariffs will serve to keep EVs and economy cars out, but not even the United States can defy gravity forever, and when it all comes crashing back to Earth, North American automanufacturers, the heart of North America's industrial capacity, will be shattered.

Or the automakers could just ignore the dictates of the White House. But at this point, we're stuck in a tragedy of the commons, with strong encouragement from political leaders in the US and Canada, who lack either the wit or the courage to make the final break.

Slashdot Top Deals

EARTH smog | bricks AIR -- mud -- FIRE soda water | tequila WATER

Working...