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bigtom-what a dick
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I've seen it, and it could choke a donkey. Not that he would ever harm a donkey, of course. I once saw him wrestle an alligator, but they were only messing.
Anyway. There are some things about the use of electronics in warfare that he wishes to vent about, and he has dressed up as me in order to do so.
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-- fleur
16/08/12 at 16:32
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 From :
nerchist
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Posted : 27/11/12 at 21:34 |
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We're singing from the same hymn sheet, but I'm reading it over your shoulder and you keep tugging it away from me.
I really believe that democracy operates from the bottom up like its supposed to. We can't really be surprised at the politicians we get. If people accept corruption in their day to day, that will filter up to the top. Ever been to a rural pub where someone pops in late at night and says "Lads, the white squad's parked out the main road"? So if you're pissed and plan to drive home, make sure you take the back road. That's fine. Just don't complain about deaths on the roads and don't believe the tiresome news reports that follow. "The entire community is in shock and mourning at the tragic loss...". Blah, blah, blah. We're limited in our ability to empathise with those in own our communities, let alone in some godawful place in Asia or Africa, to the point where we'll actually do something about it.
We vote with our feet, wallets and lifestyle choices as well as at the ballot box (in fact, judging by the turnout at the recent referendum we're doing it less and less at the ballot box) so we're getting the world the majority wants.
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 30/11/12 at 18:00 |
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fleur, as a man of science, at what point would you accept the advice of a computer over a human?
Vasili Arkhipov, a Soviet naval officer on board a nuclear armed submarine during the Cuban missile crisis probably saved the world from nuclear war. Bombarded by depth charges from U.S. ships, on a submarine too deep to monitor radio messages from Moscow, he was the only one of 3 officers on board the submarine to object to a nuclear strike. A unanimous decision of all 3 officers would have resulted in a launch. Given that the processing power of computers at the time was equivalent to a modern scientific calculator, a computer could have advised an attack. Arkhipov's human intuition saved us all.
For years, computer programmers believed they had computers that had superior processing power to humans, but were continually beaten by chess masters, seemingly because of unquantifiable "human intuition". Eventually, Deep Blue settled the issue by defeating Gary Kasparov.
Now, take William Boykin, the General that was in charge of the search for Bin Laden, who was quoted as saying, "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol" and on George Bush: "He's in the White House because God put him there". Would you trust him or say "Siri, should we go to war'?
Little Britain had an ongoing sketch of a travel agent saying "the computer says no". I remember arguing with my insurance company over a a 100 euro hike, even though my circumstances hadn't changed. When asked for the reason, all I got was "I don't know. The computer says it's 100 euro more. I eventually negotiated a discount with a manager. The insurance company was Quinn Direct. Maybe if I had been able to talk to the computer in charge, as I requested, it wouldn't have been able to get my discount on the basis that I got tearful, that I'd just lost my job and the world in general was treating me badly. Maybe the manager was an alcoholic who didn't really give a crap about his job. Maybe his wife had just left him and his kid was in hospital and his mind was on those things.
At what point can we have more confidence in a computer? I'm a man of science too but I really don't the answer.
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 05/12/12 at 13:58 |
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Firstly...
Everything ever written in the English language, from a simple text message that says "CU B4 skool" to the complete works of William Shakespeare, can be reduced to 26 letters.
Every piece of music written in the Western world in the last 1,000 years, from a radio jingle to Mozart's Magic Flute,can be reduced to 12 notes of music.
The entire contents of the internet can be reduced to 1's and 0's.
That doesn't mean any of it is simple. Still, a computer can analyse all this information faster, and better, than any human can.
Secondly...
The concept of Fuzzy Logic, which proposes "truth values" between 1 and 0, has been used in the development of artificial intelligence since the 1920's. This attempts to explain why one human brain sees Tracy Amin's "My Bed" as a work of art and others see it as a pile of dirty sheets, a pair of knickers and a used condom. To say that computers are "dumb", and capable of "doing sums" is well off the mark now. Who know just how off the mark it will be in 100, 1000 or 10,000 years. So... at what point do we trust them more than humans?
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 05/12/12 at 14:41 |
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"machine intelligence is never going to exist in the same way that ours does"
This is a bold statement.
In the early part of the last century some scientists pointed out that space was a vaccum, that you can't have combustion in a vacuum and that therefore, space travel was impossible. If you told someone in 1900 that in the future you could shine an invisible light through a chicken and cook the chicken and eat it while watching a football game on a plastic box as it was happening in Tokyo... they'd say you were crazy. But not all Chelsea fans are crazy
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From :
number10
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Posted : 05/12/12 at 14:56 |
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| I can't wait to see how things are in 10,000 years time!
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 05/12/12 at 15:45 |
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Having said all that, I still think we agree on some basic points. "to use God or science to justify war is a lie". Or to justify anything.
Christians, Muslims, Jews etc. can use their sacred texts to justify war, homophobia, slavery, racism... Looking coldly at nature you could use it to justify murder, rape, paedophilia, infanticide, cannibalism, greed, polygamy and a lot of other phenomenon humans consider to be wrong.
You quoted Niels Bohr in an earlier post "I don't think we should tell Him (God) what to do". Well, I think we have every right to tell Him what to do. Whether it's the God of Christianity, Judaism or Islam, or to the scientist, the natural order of things that exists in the universe, we have every right to determine the future democratically in as much as we can. Sadly, the world of science is not democratic. Most scientists seem to believe that we have an obligation to do whatever it's possible to do. A lot of research and experimentation is being carried out that hasn't been sanctioned by any democratically elected government and which isn't subject to regulation. Ask Enda Kenny, Obama, Putin and Merkl what they know about nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, cloning and genetic engineering and I doubt any of them are up to speed on what is going on. These could have a far greater impact on the future of the human race than any Arab-Israeli conflict, international banking regulation or fishing quotas and they're often led by profit-driven private corporations.
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 05/12/12 at 16:15 |
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"You can't program for emotion". Do we want to program for emotion? A computer isn't susceptible to the effects of testosterone, adrenaline, endorphins, alcohol and other drugs that might cloud its judgement.
A human reaction to a frail 90 year-old man in the dock might be "sure he's just an old man, leave him be". A computer might look coldly at the evidence and see the young, brutal concentration camp guard and judge him accordingly.
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 05/12/12 at 16:27 |
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Ultimately it comes down to whether you believe there is something in the human brain, "a soul" or a "ghost in the machine", whatever you want to call it, whether immortal or not, that will never be replicated by a computer.
I don't believe there is.
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 05/12/12 at 16:37 |
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Also, there are already programs that can create and solve cryptic crossword clues.
Similarly, there are programs that can learn and create rules that weren't set by the original programmer.
I imagine it's still pretty basic, but it's early days yet. Again, what will happen in the next 10,000 years and more importantly, do we want it to happen?
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 06/12/12 at 16:37 |
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| When you ask people to choose a number between 1 and 10, a disproportionate number of people say 7. Try it and see.
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 06/12/12 at 16:44 |
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| Confidence tricksters, mind readers, messiahs, fortune tellers, insurance salesmen, bookies, dictators and advertisers have used basic knowledge of human thinking to successfully manipulate unimaginative people for centuries
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 06/12/12 at 17:15 |
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All that talk about randomness reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons, where Homer tries to improvise a melody, jazz style...
Homer: Jazz, pfft. They just make it up as they go along. I could do that: dee dee-dee dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee …
Marge: That's "Mary Had a Little Lamb".
Homer: OK, then, this: doo doo-doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo …
Marge: That's the same thing; you just replaced "dee"s with "doo"s.
Improvisation. You have to work hard at to do it right.
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From :
number10
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Posted : 06/12/12 at 17:36 |
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| I love short posts!
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From :
nerchist
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Posted : 07/12/12 at 17:21 |
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Good to know that someone else is taking it seriously...
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121206-mor al-machines-killer-questions
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/te chnology-20501091
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From :
fleur
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Posted : 21/12/12 at 15:50 |
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| If you look through the eyes of the people whose job is to make weapons, the advances happening in technology mean this century could be made into one very long, very nasty piece of shit. It would be cool if what the "end" the boys are talking about is of using violence to solve disputes. Wouldn't that be just cool? Violence empowers the violent, that stands to reason. Well done to Paddy for not losing his shit and rioting, is what I'm saying. Political violence is political violence, it can't have any place in a democracy. That would be to admit defeat.
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From :
ttemme
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Posted : 24/12/12 at 14:20 |
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| i'm with ya on this one, nerchrist. there is no soul, though the mind is capable of amazing feckin' things.
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From :
fleur
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Posted : 03/01/13 at 19:39 |
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| I am visualising a distraught-looking man in a fish-mongers'
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From :
fleur
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Posted : 10/01/13 at 16:12 |
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I'm a bit pissed off I deleted everything from here... Granted it was a bit mental but I thought I had some decent points along the way. I've most of it saved, if I can ever make it make sense I will. But, a couple of points that I think are important...
On computers... Everything you have ever seen a computer do has been the result of it doing sums with Boolean algebra... that really is about all they can do, fundamentally. When a computer does something that appears complex, what it has actually done is a lot of sums, very fast. Machine code is 1s and 0s, that's all. Nothing makes "sense" to a machine, if it appears to know what something is in relation to something else, that's either because we've given that something a label, or we've told it to start assigning things labels for itself. I'm sure there will continue to be advances, one thing that is happening now is that sensors are becoming cheaper, so there will be more machines that seem to know things about their surroundings, like for instance the sensor in a smart-phone that knows which way is up. On a fundamental level though, the concept of "up" (no more than the concept of "life") makes no sense to a computer. It takes data from the sensor, does some sums using that data, produces an output based on the results, and uses that output to orient the screen. It doesn't actually "know" what it has done though, in the way that we do. It doesn't think "Ooh, I'm upside down", it just carries on doing the 1 and 0 sums it has been told to do and producing outputs based on the results. Certainly, that's how things are now and for the foreseeable future, so the idea of building a machine that would make decisions about life or death is bonkers, for the foreseeable future at least.
In other news... a spokesman for the Continuity IRA can stand on a public street and proclaim that an Irish citizen who joins the British Army is a "legitimate target" for them?! What strange hell is this?!
For them to have a legitimate target, they would first need to be a legitimate organisation. There is an Irish Army, their head-quarters are in Newbridge, I've never been there but I'm fairly confident that on the wall outside there's a big sign that says "Headquarters of The Irish Army", or something to that effect. They have a publicly stated chain of command, we know who is in charge, and they're answerable to the Minister of Defence, who is answerable to Dáil Éireann. The idea that somebody who is answerable only to his friends, presumably, who are not known to the citizenry of this country at large, or who can be held accountable by anybody, feels entitled to call a citizen of this Republic "a legitimate target" just makes me feel sick to the stomach. Similarly, PSNI officers can never be a "legitimate target" of what is an illegitimate organisation. This is sick, what these people want to try and do.
If you think about it, their actions could never be about equality, or democracy, or anything like that. Fuck the past, another country as it has been pointed out. What about today, where are we? The people of Northern Ireland can vote to become part of the Republic, if they so wish. They are in control of their destiny, on the basis that all are equal before the law, and before the ballot box. Anybody who wants to keep this going while that is the situation could never be about equality or democracy, they are completely opposed to those concepts. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité... know your enemy.
Yeh, now I remember why I deleted the other stuff. The oul brain box is still not 100% and I'm ranting. My apologies, you seem like a nice bunch of people who are just trying to enjoy a quiet drink, and I keep puking on your table. Fuck it though, the above is the way I see it; if you have equality and you're still fighting, you are not fighting for equality. If you can achieve your aims democratically and you're still fighting, you are not fighting for democracy. I keep repeating this, but I don't see that there's anything that people can't achieve by politics on this island. One problem is that, like the argument of the gun lobby in the U.S., maybe you can never say never. But we have to be able to know when to say "not now". I'm going to get Duan to turn off this handle and let you people get back to your conversation, but Gen. Stanley McChrystal was on Charlie Rose last night, and I don't know if he quoted or para-phrased von Clausewitz, but he said "war is an extension of politics, and to politics it must return". This is one of the problems with this guerilla warfare, which turned to terrorism, that we helped to spread around the world; at some stage you have to be able to say "the war is over". We don't seem to have quite managed it, not 100%, but there may never be a better time to do so than now.
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From :
tricky
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Posted : 11/01/13 at 12:15 |
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| well i've enjoyed your output & discourse in relation to how the world is a totally fucked up place.
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From :
number10
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Posted : 11/01/13 at 13:01 |
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I thought that there was good stuff in there, fleur.
By the way, what's your position on fleur-ide in the water? Sorry, fluoride...
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