Are we alone ??

[oldenough]

And I wasn't kidding about Turing cops. If an AI network develops self-awareness without any human noticing, it could be too late for all of us

Huh????

Ps. I think it might be too late for some of you

[marems]

Coast to coast am with George Noory, Now he has some interesting people talk about this subject. His web site www.coasttocoastam.com had a link for one of his guest speakers talking about military whistle blowers. They stated that ever since the roswell crash, the government has been in contact with 57 different civilizations from different star constellations. Involving deep secrecy. It was very intriguing. It gets the mind thinking. Now the question are we alone??? I think not, so much life just on the earth for example. The smallest intelligence that can live and survive @ the bottom of the oceans deepest abyss. The circle of life is so amazing!

[mas]

Well, I don't expect to make it, but my kids will. ...

. Unless Moore's Law fails (and we have no reason to believe it will) computers equal to human intelligence will come on line before the end of the next decade. Once that happens, the technological ramp will be nearly straight up. Let's see...Eniac (not remotely as powerful as a 3.00 calculator) to Blue Gene (1/10 human intelligence) in 50 years and you are not seeing this pattern?

I am not going to bang this drum anymore, as to those who've not studied the exponential curves of technology it's simply insane, and for those who have it's sorta "duh."

[*-)]

Its just as well, as you are misapplying Moore's law to human evolution when ALL it was intended to apply to was transistor density! It has absolutely NOTHING to do with human evolution! Nor machine intelligence.

And besides, whatever you do, don't read what Moore himself says about the concept!:[]

And Blue Gene is not a single computer, so transistor density has little if nothing to do with this. It is a series - a network of tightly connected nodes. The key is not CPU density, but rather the ability to provide low latency, non-contentious inter-processor and resource communication.

Here is an excerpt:

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsid=3477

Operating Systems and Servers News

13 April 2005

Moore's Law is dead, says Gordon Moore

Moore's Law is dead, according to Gordon Moore, its inventor.

The extrapolation of a trend that was becoming clear even as long ago
as 1965, and has been the pulse of the IT industry ever since will
eventually end, said Moore, who is now retired from Intel.

Forty years after the publication of his law, which states that
transistor density on integrated circuits doubles about every two
years, Moore said this morning: "It can't continue forever. The nature
of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster
happens.

"In terms of size [of transistor] you can see that we're approaching
the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or
three generations before we get that far - but that's as far out as
we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we
reach a fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips
and have transistor budgets in the billions."

................

[jacksonbart]

Let me ask Ebe and I will get back to you.

[mas]

My money is on Thor....I mean how can you go wrong with a sense of humor like that of the Asgard? []

(Note the family resemblance...)

[oldbuckster]

HEY, Hold On Here ............... How did you get my picture mas ??????? The Cats out of the bag now ................. [li]

[seti]

Coast to coast am with George Noory, Now he has some interesting people talk about this subject. His web site www.coasttocoastam.com had a link for one of his guest speakers talking about military whistle blowers. They stated that ever since the roswell crash, the government has been in contact with 57 different civilizations from different star constellations. Involving deep secrecy. It was very intriguing. It gets the mind thinking. Now the question are we alone??? I think not, so much life just on the earth for example. The smallest intelligence that can live and survive @ the bottom of the oceans deepest abyss. The circle of life is so amazing!

I miss Art Bell's show.

[Mallette]

>...not everyone "in the know" is in complete agreement with it.

Sorry about the royal "we." Bad choice. Look, this is not about "in the know" or superiority or whatever. I respect all opinions. Neither I nor anyone can speak with any authority whatsover about anything but history, and even then we get it wrong from time to time.

No, not everyone is in complete agreement. There is a limit to silicone density. Only a handful of scientists did not think the sound barrier was inviolable...know, we consider that laughable.

Quantum computing, though limited to problems (at least at the moment) that have simple "tests" for each state, is essentially instanteous since half of it is done outside of time as we know it. Successful tests have been done out to about 8 bits and labs are working on it all over the world. An example of a simple state program is factoring large numbers, I mean REALLY large. These bring even our most mighty super computers to their knees testing billions of possibilities. Even a 1 kiloqubit quantum computer (about the size of a Sinclair Z80 of 1979) could handle such a problem basically instantly.

Spin computing - It's been demostrated that individual electrons can be manuputlated to "1" or "0" states.

Light - an Israeli company uses 256 lasers to perform eight trillion calculations per second by performing the same calculation on 256 streams of data.

DNA - Another Israeli group at the Weizman Institute dmomstrated a configuration of DNA consisting of two spoonfuls containing thirty million billion molecular computers was able to perform 660 trillion calcs per second using only fifty millionths of a watt.

Nanotubes - The theoritical limit of nanotube transistors is about a terahertz. Even WIndows couldn't slow that down. IBM has already demonstrated an integrated cirucit with one thousdand nanotube-based transistors.

The best single reference for these matters is Ray Kurzweill's "The Singularity is Near." As a highly successful and prolific inventor best know publicly for his music synthesizers, he's hardly a nut case. He provides over a 100 pages of links, notes, and citations in case you aren't convinced. Lest you think I am easy, I ready almost nothing in there that I'd not arrived at by simple observation over a lifetime. Ray is about 100 times smarter than me and has provided all the support I'd never have had either the comprehension or time to provide. The idea is hardly knew with either of us. It's been kicking around ever since humans first started to think. It is just that now we are just at the dawn of being capable of throughing a bit of a light down the path we've been on in the dark for so long.

Regards,
Dave

[Deang]

"Pessimists all! Meaning mallette and deang."

"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare."

See, I'm not a pessimist.

[oldenough]

"Pessimists all! Meaning mallette and deang."

"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare."

See, I'm not a pessimist.

So now we're bringing Myth and Legend into the discussion ?

[sunburnwilly]

"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare."

Sounds like a comet or asteroid to me ; right ?

[Islander]

"But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare."

Sounds like a comet or asteroid to me ; right ?

No, more like ekpyrotic theory. Everything changes on a universal scale. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekpyrotic

[Islander]

And I wasn't kidding about Turing cops. If an AI network develops self-awareness without any human noticing, it could be too late for all of us

Huh????

Ps. I think it might be too late for some of you

Looks like I'd better clarify these references before people think my grip on reality is even looser than usual. Here are a couple of quotes from Wikipedia.

First, Alan Turing:

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (pronounced /'tj??r??/) (23 June 1912–7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer.

Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. With the Turing test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, although it was never actually built. In 1948 he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers.


Turing Police are a plot device used by William Gibson:

In William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, the sinister body tasked with the regulation and suppression of artificial intelligences is called the "Turing Registry", and its agents are referred to as the "Turing Police".


William Gibson is a Vancouver-based writer known for, among other things, inventing the term "cyberspace" and the writing genre called "cyberpunk", both in the early 1980s. Most of his novels are set in the near future, when the possibility of an artificial intelligence, or AI, achieving self-awareness is seen to be a definite possibility. Such an entity could be extremely powerful, so the Turing Registry was formed to watch for any evidence of that and to put an immediate stop to it, with the full weight of the law.

Back to reality: with the all-pervasive reach of the Internet, if a self-aware AI was able to connect to it, that AI could control many of the systems connected to the Net, so the potential exists for some real sci-fi type problems not that far down the road from here. For all we know, some far-seeing government types (there might be some!) could have already set up a secret agency to monitor developments in this field...

[oldenough]

Back to reality: with the all-pervasive reach of the Internet, if a self-aware AI was able to connect to it, that AI could control many of the systems connected to the Net, so the potential exists for some real sci-fi type problems not that far down the road from here. For all we know, some far-seeing government types (there might be some!) could have already set up a secret agency to monitor developments in this field...

Islander. Why did you start that paragraph with "Back to reality" ?

[Islander]

Back to reality: with the all-pervasive reach of the Internet, if a self-aware AI was able to connect to it, that AI could control many of the systems connected to the Net, so the potential exists for some real sci-fi type problems not that far down the road from here. For all we know, some far-seeing government types (there might be some!) could have already set up a secret agency to monitor developments in this field...

Islander. Why did you start that paragraph with "Back to reality" ?

Because sci-fi is fiction, of course.

[oldenough]

Because sci-fi is fiction, of course.

As was most of that paragraph.[8-)]

[Islander]

That's what they used to say about Jules Verne's work, too.

[Mallette]

Because sci-fi is fiction, of course.

As was most of that paragraph.

It at least appears that you are a skeptic. That would be the opposite of dreamer. Objective lies somewhere in between, IMHO.

Dave

[oldenough]

Yes, just as you, i'm sure, are skeptical of some things. Here i believe a sense of reality should prevail. I am always wary whenever Sci-fi is paraded out into an intelligent discussion, it's very easy to pick out the things that fit. For the record my skeptisism is saved for, Ghost's, Goblins, Green men, G#d, and Perpetual motion machines.[]

ps. i also don't believe that Elvis is alive.

[Mallette]

As you wish, but the moment you say anything is impossible you place yourself in a long line of individuals who were proven wrong by history.

I go with the scifi guys myself. "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, it's queerer than we CAN imagine."

Dave