A tribute: http://waronterror.videosift.com/talk/Quantum-Mushroom-Bootstraps-His-Way-To-Gold

>> ^blankfist:
I really think those who have never done without or who have never worked a hard blue collar job really side with pro-labor, pro-union movements while those of us who have suffered through difficult jobs and learned to exceed in spite of adversity tend to side on the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" free market mentality.


You are quite simply, nuts.

I come from the rust belt, and most of my family works in auto assembly plants. My dad was a schlep for residential gas services for over 55 years. I worked in fast food, in hospitals, and on assembly lines. One brother is a cop, two others work for Ford. One sister for GM. One sister has five kids, her husband lays drywall.

My entire family are pro-labor, pro-union. So is everyone that I know from back home.

Your theory is total fail.

I really think those who have never done without or who have never worked a hard blue collar job really side with pro-labor, pro-union movements while those of us who have suffered through difficult jobs and learned to exceed in spite of adversity tend to side on the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" free market mentality.

Tell that cat to pull itself up by its bootstraps and pay for his place in that Post Office. This ain't a free country, dammit!

Within the structure of complex dynamic systems, such as the biosphere, there is an underlying process. Do not think linearly. We are seeking high energy attractor fields, and high energy attractors sometimes must struggle to explain experiences with words. The semantic map is not the territory. Everything is possible within the unfolding implicit invisible reality of entelechy. After all, we can not see the radio magnetic waves that operate our cell phones, gravity, the wind, and/or the morphogenetic pattern contained in a seed that makes possible the manifestation of a plant that gives us fruit that we can eat.
Let's bootstrap ourselves, we are an epistemic system, we must acknowledge our interdependence and interconnected nature as the hadrons we are.
LOVE AND COMPASSION. MIND AND MATTER ARE TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN.
THANK YOU FOR SHARING YOUR SPACE/TIME WITH US.

Pretty damn silly to compare the computational power of computers to humans as they process information in completely different ways.

It isn't silly at all, but there are a number of reasons why one might think so.

One reason is that computers are too simple in comparison to human brains- so far. It is possible, in principle, to simulate the massive parallelism of the human brain using digital technology. The problem is that it takes an absolutely enormously powerful computer for this kind of simulation to be even remotly useful.

A simple pocket calculator can find square roots WAY easier than you, and that is incredibly useful. Is there any wonder computers that function essentially like calculators have become ubiquitous?

My point is that just because all the computers that you've ever seen function like that, doesn't mean that all computers will always nessesarily be like that.

Computers are very VERY good at number crunching. Straight forward, step-by-step rule following. Human brains, on the other hand, have computers beat six ways to sunday at pattern recognition. This is because our brains are HUGELY parallel. Lots and lots and lots of neurons, each connected to dozens or even hundreds of others.

It IS possible to calculate (within a few orders of magnitude) just what sort of computing power might theoretically be nessesary to simulate the human brain. Because of the exponential growth of computing power, even if we are off by 5 orders of magnitude, the timetable for a human equivalent computer would only be off by a few years.

Personally I think that this video is very pessimistic, for a number of reasons. Some of which are relavent to this comment:

yeah. the human brain is an amazing creation. given the fact that humans only use 10% of there brain power a comuter will never come close to the same amount of computing power. and anyways, humans can't create something smarter than the human race. that's just sounds like ludicrous lol.

The 10% figure that is often quoted represents a severe misunderstanding of neural biology. While there are documented cases of people losing HUGE portions of their brains and yet being able to rehabilite most of their functionality, the truth is that we use all of our brains- just not all at the same time.

As for humanity creating our successors, this is almost certainly what is going to happen. There have already been quite a few instances of processes yielding progressively more "intelligent" processes.

Lets start with Physics. In the beginning, (13 billion years) there was the big bang- in a few microfractions of a second, the laws of physics were born, and then it tooks billions upon billions of years for stars to birth and die and elements to be made, etc etc etc- until finally at some point chemestry became possible.

Life on earth formed about 4 billion years ago, but it took 3.5 billion years to get to animals like fish and lizards.

From that point on, it becomes millions of years. 70 million years ago mammals turned up. 65 million- dinosaurs died out. 5 million years ago, humans showed up, but we were just another animal for the vast majority of our heritage. Mere thousands of years ago, we learned to talk, and then it was like a flash and all of civilisation happened. Only hundreds of years ago did we harness electricity, and computers were only dozens of years.

What does this all mean? Well, the point I was trying to make is that Chemistry is dumber than evolution, but it created it. Evolution is dumber than Humans but it created us. I say that we are smarter than evolution because while it does create progressivly better species, and come up with solutions to problems, it is VERY VERY SLOW and inefficient at it. I bet you can name a dozen things that you would improve about the human body just off the top of your head.

So not only do dumb processes beget smarter processes, but the speed at which this is happening has increased exponentially. We are right on the cusp of the transition to a machine based existence.

As I mentioned, I think that their estimates for machine human equivalence is pessimistic. They say human equivalence in 2013, that may be correct, but no way will it take 10 years from that until a $1000 human equivalent. Why? Because the rate of change is changing. The curve is hyperbolic, not just exponential.

What's more, I don't think that a human equivalent computer is even nessesary! I think that it is possible that computers already posses enough computing power to begin a process of self-improvment that will ultimately end in their surpassing us in leaps and bounds. The problem, I believe, is currently software. We just don't know how to do it yet. If somebody figures it out, it may only be a matter of months or even weeks for "skynet" to wake up, if you will. We can only hope that the somebody who programmed the computer to bootstrap itself also figured out how to make our new computer overlord sysopmind friendly.

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(my god, i think that is the longest comment i've made in YEARS)