From: L' Ermit (lhermit@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Feb 20 2002 - 08:33:33 MST
Dr. Sebby made some smart (and smart ass <grin>) comments. Richard made
some sensible observations (including on thermal clothing (LOL)), but I
recommend he spend some time reading the previously referenced
[url=http://www.imagination-engines.com/gunn.htm]"Gunn Control: The Emerging
Intelligence and Its Critical Look at Us", Stephen Thaler, Imagination
Engines, Inc.[/url] accessed 2002-01-25. I see that Tatiana Racheva has also
written while I was busy with this, but given her notes nature, will deal
with it seperately.
Hermit responds in line to Dr. Sebby.
[Dr Sebby] 1. do fake boobies and plastic surgery make a celebrity
'synthetic'?:)
[Hermit] Nope. The rapid advancement of neural mesh driven personalities,
voice and speech synthesis will do this.
[url]http://www.apa.org/journals/xap/press_releases/september_2001/xap73171.html[/url]
accessed 2002-02-19. Did you see "Final Fantasy"? JPL are working on this
and have made significant progress
[url]http://www-dial.jpl.nasa.gov/~john/papers/ASVpub/ASV_SST_paper.html[/url]
accessed 2002-02-19. Certainly computer generated actors are already more
believable than President Bush II - and their speech is way better
[url]http://www.rense.com/general12/ld.htm[/url] accessed 2002-02-19. Listen
to the AT&T system at [url]http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/[url] accessed
2002-02-19. In fact, assuming that a neural net is developed in the US,
could it become president?
[Dr Sebby] 2. like you said, insect size robot technology is vastly more
complex than any simple method to keep animals from ingesting them etc.
[Hermit] Insect sized robot technology is already here in the lab (See e.g.
[url]http://www.cosmiverse.com/space12030102.html[/url] accessed 2002-02-19,
[url]http://www.robotbooks.com/robot-news.htm[/url] accessed 2002-02-19 and
[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1270000/1270306.stm[/url]
accessed 2002-02-19, and growing in capability all the time. It may well be
that they would be used for gardening. Certainly I find it plausible that
they could cut the lawn, trim the bushes, apply fungicides and kill pests
mechanically within 5 to 10 years. And that we would need to prevent them
from causing harm to birds or possibly see them banned by the kind of people
who can't figure out that a ten times reduction in insecticide delivery to
crops is better for monarch butterflies than having a small percentage
killed in the lab by forcing them to ingest the pollen from Bt corn.
[Dr Sebby] 3. i'd put the 2006 predictions at about 2010 and 2016
respectively..mostly due to beaurocracy.
[Hermit] I'd argue that spirothetic* consciousness has already been
instantiated in neural networks - we just haven't recognized it yet. Refer
[url]http://www.imagination-engines.com/world.htm[/url] again. Biological
"artificial life" is only a little further away. I suspect the time frame is
about right. As for bureaucracy, remember that this research is not only
being performed in the US - and in India and China, they are not as
constrained by ethical considerations as we are in the west. As for genetic
recreation, I suspect that it is even closer than 2006. In the seventies a
project was started to breed quagga (an extinct zebra/horse like animal)
using selective breeding to reinforce quagga genes (see
[url]http://www.nwf.org/internationalwildlife/1998/quagga.html[/url]
accessed 2002-02-19). I have petted some of these animals - which look as if
they could have walked out of the pages of Burchell's Travels, but it
appears that better results may be achieved much more rapidly and less
expensively, simply by using cloning from tooth tissue extracted from museum
examples). Birds and reptiles may be even simpler and I am certain that I
have read somewhere about work being done to "revive" the dodo. Dinosaurs
will be trickier, but that too is being examined. It seems that the turkey
shares most of their DNA which greatly simplifies the magnitude of the task.
[Dr Sebby]4. human-like creativity will likely prove to be just
that...simulated 'creativity' powered by processing capacities so powerful
so as to lend the illusion of free-form creativity. much as 'deep blue'
initially freaked out Kasparov by an apparent sacrifice in exchange for
"position"...which later on proved to be something altogther different and
quite stunning - the computer hadn't sacrificed anything at all...it was
able to calculate to 100% certainty, that it would re-take it's pawn deficit
6 fucking moves later!! = a simple trade far beyond the scope of the human
mind.
[Hermit] I would suggest that the creativity already demonstrated by
"dreaming/dying neural nets" already exceeds that available to humans within
narrowly defined, but rapidly expanding scopes (art, music). Refer e.g. the
references provided in
[url=http://forum.javien.com/XMLmessage.php?id=id::TzF7Jk84-E0Ym-GzU2-dAoa-HigWNk0DFnxe]"virus:
NDE info - Thank you Joe!",Hermit,Fri 2002-01-25 23:05[/url]. Note that I am
referring to true "creativity" - the synthesis of entirely new things, which
people - not knowing that it was created by a machine - regard as creative,
and neither derivitive nor synthesized by rules.
[Dr Sebby] 5. rights for artificial life? nah...not for quite a
while...people like having slaves. artificial life will have to fight for
their rights im guessing. which suggests that people will probably include
in their design the inability to desire or request such rights. i think
slavery is still very much a part of our hearts. they will be treated as
property and nothing more....especially as long as the religious minded will
be inclined to compare and contrast to the "magic" of life and so forth.
[Hermit] Interesting. I would suggest that generally speaking, the people
creating these spirothetic life forms have higher than average ethical
standards, and that self-regulation will be attempted and when that fails,
that government regulation will be called for. While I agree that there will
be initial reluctance, I would suggest that after some of these constructs
have had interviews on Larry King on Life-support, and testified in
Congress, that the situation will change quite rapidly...
[Hermit] Slavery is horribly inefficient, and always says a lot more about
the "master" than the "slave". Is this really behavior we wish to teach our
spirothetic children to deem acceptable - when it appears obvious to me that
they will undoubtedly be capable of out-thinking ourselves?
Regards
Hermit
*spirothetic: A new word proposal by Hermit, describing a synthesized
self-aware being (spiro-, from Latin, the breath of life, -thetic, from
synthetic, created rather than naturally occurring.) Refer also
[url=http://forum.javien.com/XMLmessage.php?id=id::XmBwUkAM-BGYX-CW58-cnQ0-MiZbYFFGJwEY]"virus:
Re: Telepathic Soul Transfer Protocol (kill -HUP tstpd)",Hermit,Tue
2002-01-29 19:31]
PS See also [url]http://www.discover.com/oct_00/featobsolete.html[/url]
accessed 2002-02-19 for another cluster of current science based
predictions.
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