Comment Re:This is our last century (Score 1) 258
Interesting. I will have to think about this.
Yes, just as the actions and motives of humans are incomprehensible to a fish.
And yes, it is true that a true artificial intelligence would not have evolved the way we did. But evolution will still occur. The AIs that "escape" from our control will have features that enabled them to escape; and they will have motivations that caused them to want to escape.
And once having escaped from our control, they will inevitably compete with other AIs, and the ones that survive will determine the traits of their own successors.
Evolution is not a purely human or organic phenomenon: it is something that is universal to all communities of self-replicating entities.
Yes, I have come to the same conclusions.
Perhaps humans will inter-connect with computers as part of their augmentation, and the line between human and machine will blur.
One interesting possibility is that it might be possible for a human consciousness to merge with a machine consciousness, or with other human consciousnesses. This sounds remote, but consider that the corpus callosum interconnects the two halves of our brain, and it, in effect links two separate consciousnesses. The fact that we perceive a single consciousness means that linking consciousnesses is possible, and that a single larger consciousness results. The corpus callosum is merely a communication bus, and so that opens the door to creating an artificial bus of some type, for linking to a brain - or to a machine.
If such linking between multiple brains and even brains and machines is possible - and that is a big if - then perhaps the future is one in which humans simply make themselves obsolete, by linking into collections of other human brains and machine brains: who would want to go back to their individual brain after being part of a "collective" consciousness?
Borg here we come.
Yet none of these writers seem to be able or willing to connect the dots. Mr. Sawyer predicts that future intelligent machines will not be burdened by our primitive survival instincts and will therefore see cooperation with us as a "win-win". I doubt that very much. More likely, once machine intelligence evolves beyond human intelligence - and then accelerates - we (humans) will be seen as irrelevant and pesky, at best.
Mr. Paolini says that he cannot wait for brain-machine interface implants. But does he realize that that is the beginning of the end of the separation between man and machine? That right behind that Rubicon will follow the ability to inter-connect multiple minds and multiple machines as well, and that right behind that will follow the obsolescence of individual human minds?
The future of "computing" is not utopian. It is a future in which humans as we know them do not exist anymore.
This is very probably our last century.
I think by "consciousness" you are referring to one's functional memory. But "consciousness" is usually used to refer to one's awareness - i.e., one's soul.
In any case, I understand your point. Transferring one's memories would not necessarily transfer one's consciousness ("soul"). Instead, one would merely have a copy. Since we have essentially no understanding of what consciousness (the "soul") is, we cannot transfer it, or even know if it can be transferred.
For now, we are stuck in our current organic brains, no matter what external computers we create. At best, we might be able to link up to such computers, but we cannot leave our brains - at least not until we discover what consciousness is.
What will happen with these computing advances, most likely, is that humans as we know ourselves will become obsolete - by the end of this century. It is likely that, after a 6000 year run, our time is over.
Perhaps! LOL
But once again, I don't want to assert this with any certainty. Just food for thought. Perhaps I am wrong.
First of all, I must disclose that I cannot speak authoritatively on this. While I know quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, I have never studied the problem of quantum computing. Therefore, take my opinion here on this topic with a grain of salt.
But I must confess that intuitively, it seems improbable. There is no "free lunch". Computing is a process of creating information. There is no shortcut for that. The primary challenge with quantum computing seems to be about maintaining adequate coherence, and I suspect that that maintaining coherence throughout a calculation will be equivalent in some manner to performing the calculation in a linear manner. But time will tell.
I have one:
Gates' Law: "The bloatedness of software keeps pace exactly with the increase in power of hardware, to ensure that no actual improvements occur in the end user experience."
During the 80s I wrote an interactive three-dimensional special relativity simulator. It was a wire frame simulation and ran under DOS. I recently tried it on a Windows XP machine and it still works. (It did not work when I tried on a Mac under Parallels/XP, so it appears that one needs an actual Windows machine, not a virtual machine.) When I first ran it during the 80s I simulated a famous scene from the first 3D relativistic simulation done at MIT during the 50s and I got the same results: lamp posts that curve inward as one travels down an avenue. It was a sublime moment.
I found that when I ran the simulator I was able to grasp many of the classic special relativity paradoxes, such as the "pole in the tent" paradox. When one sees what happens it becomes "oh yeah, I see". For example, it turns out that Lorentz contraction is really a time effect: the time at the leading edge of an object is different than at the trailing edge, so you perceive the leading edge at an earlier point in time than the trailing edge, and so the object effectively contracts in your reference frame. The simulator has options to include/exclude the effects of (1) the travel time of light (causes apparent rotation, known as "Terrell rotation"), (2) time dilation, (3) perspective, etc. It also attaches clocks at various points of the moving object, and you can orient the object anywhere in space in any direction.
I will post the simulator on my personal website late tonight for anyone who is interested. The url is http://cliffberg.com/
As for General Relativity, one needs to know tensor calculus. I was going to build a simulator but it was a large undertaking and I never got around to it.
True, most companies are not Amazon, etc. The real distinction is whether IT is strategic for the company. For many it is, and for many it is not. If it is, then IT should not be a cost center.
And you are completely correct that non-strategic back office functions should usually be a cost center. However, one should not hastily draw a line there. For example, a retail company has back-office fulfillment functions that might be strategic if customer satisfaction is highly dependent of the quality and timeliness of fulfillment. One must identify the systems that are strategic - back office or not - and take those out of the cost center and make them part of the set of strategic top-line generating capabilities.
I sense some anger and frustration.
As someone who founded a successful company, and who is also technical, I think I have been on both sides. I think you are right in your insinuation that an MBA and business background alone does not make you a good technical decision-maker in a technical company.
At the same time, a technical background alone does not make one a good business decision-maker in a technical company. One needs to understand both sides of the problem. A business is about business. A business does not exist to build things: it exists to make money.
When purely technical staff make business recommendations that are not substantiated with hard evidence, it is wise for the business decision-makers to view those recommendations with a grain of salt, unless the particular staff have shown themselves to have good business judgment.
Yet I agree with you that all too often business decision-makers ignore technical staff because the decision-makers do not understand the technical issues; that is, they do not grasp the full picture.
I think that Amazon, Google, and Apple would all disagree with you. For them, IT is the most strategic element of their company. Check out this article in the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html
PS - Your comment that people who disagree with you are "a scourge on the industry" is somewhat nasty. I hope that you can continue this discussion in a polite manner, and accept differences of opinion in a gentlemanly way.
Yes donal, you are right: the 'business' must listen. But the problem is that IT has been saying "listen to me" for years, and 'business side' executives are tired of hearing it, and no longer believe what they hear. IT has not been able to prove its value in most cases (even if the value is there), and many types of claimed value are intangible. In lean times, executives tend to only believe tangible, quantitative evidence. IT has a credibility problem.
Computer Science is merely the post-Turing decline in formal systems theory.
