Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

They are not.

"Each of these 3,000- to 4,000-pound solar-powered satellites circles the globe at about 12,000 miles (19,300 km), making two complete rotations every day. The orbits are arranged so that at any time, anywhere on Earth, there are at least four satellites "visible" in the sky. "

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I suspect you are confusing science fiction authors. Isaac Asimov is most closely associated with his Laws of Robotics. I'm sure Clarke has said something about robots -- I guess the Rama novels might be thought of that context -- but I don't think his thoughts about them can be simplified to a few laws.

What a silly statement... If you wish to ascribe intelligence to humans, then it is manifest that intelligence does not lead automatically to a realization a prohibition on killing is axiomatic. If you wish to say that humans are not intelligent (doubtless supported by this thread!) then certainly any of our musings on intelligence must be suspect.

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Well he did write a book about it. He's also written wonderful books about the need to cherish the Earth's resources. However I don't believe he is (was?) involved in any serious attempt to build such a tower. It's not technically feasible with currently available materials (As Clarke recognized -- his novel is based on a fictitious fiber that has far more strength than any currently available even in the laboratory). It appears that because we do not live in paradise, you wish no one to dream...

Also I'm confused about why the lost of the Ross ice shelf would be thought so grim. There are far worse environmental catastrophes underway. And you probably have it confused with the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf. (see

is some speculation that the Ross ice shelf may follow, but it there are no indications of that yet.

Note that ice on the Antarctic continent itself seems to be growing in the past few decades, so that the collapse of ice packs does not seem to presage sea level rises. The loss of the Arctic ice cover is probably of far more consequence to global climate and conditions.

Regards, Tom McGlynn

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003 15:24:58 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

Heavens yes. We have no idea how we arrive at solutions to problems. they just pop into our heads. Much of our wetware is used for the trick of bipedal locomotion.

The nature of neural nets in that they can solve problems without knowing the algorithm.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

for The Java Glossary.

Okay.

By triangulating under three or more satellites. Each beeping its location and the time it beeped. Various calculations involving the speed of light and trigonometry follow, but I wouldn't know about that.

man is this thread ever so far off topic and excruciatingly boring!!

Of course. And that reminds me of Isaac Asimov!

Have a good one!

-- Phlip

So it makes me wonder... Will AI be capable of suffering from clinical depression? Insanity? Psychotic AI running the military systems.... now *there's* a movie!

Oh, wait... been done. (-:

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 10:46:41 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

I'd imagine that studying the pathological behaviors of neural nets will help us understand how our own wetware goes awry.

Neural nets could go through a whole midlife crisis in a few milliseconds. They are going to have to "suffer" through these on their own mostly.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

for The Java Glossary.

That link goes on to explain that the actual way of knowing the position of a satellite is via an "almanac", by predicting satellite positions using known orbits.

How awful of me to confuse what are entertainments for children at best.

The very ability to think truly hypothetically demands that we suspend any received notion that we know what intelligence is, and quite a number of thinkers have indeed concluded that intelligence (understood as a precondition for thought) winds up generating prohibitions on killing.

"Suspense of received notions" is often misinterpreted to mean a fallback to a default position, a mixture of demotic opinions and emotions so prevalent as to be confused with a lack of belief. What "suspension of received notions" means instead at all times a minimalism in which we refuse to assume (in this case) that we know enough about intelligence to even disambiguate it from a phenomenon such as an intelligent emotion, say that of a scientist engaged in a long proof, or a mother figuring out how to pay for groceries. The phenomenology refuses to separate the "emotional" attraction of the scientist, let's say, his need, to use his own notations as more persipicuous and somehow not really distinct from the truth itself: this notion presents itself strongly, for example, in the work of Edsger Dijsktra, a computer scientist.

This was the concern of 17th century philosophers, not "science": "science" was of limited interest to Spinoza as compared to the need to come up with a single, coherent account INCLUDING ethical norms AND indeed an emotion not reducible to "pure" thought: for the intelligent man's love of truth in Spinoza is not separable from the truth itself, which (as recent events in America should show) cannot exist apart from its admirers.

The definition of intellgence as able to survive outside of basic ethical norms resembles a space opera in which cosmonauts disport themselves in conveniently available space-suits, for the goal of classic American and British science fiction to preserve, for commercial resale, a sort of American wild-west story AFTER the willingness to read about Red Indians and cow-boys had waned as long ago as the 1930s.

A silly transplanation of what was the brutalization of man by man occured, to Mars or Venus, and in this transplantation, the colonialist exploiters had to be given gear in the form of tight-fitting and rather lewd rubber and glass suits so as to be safe while eradicating whatever native peoples might exist on Mars or Venus, or converting them from lotus-eating to go-ahead commericial schemes.

I realize that from the beginning, science fiction writers REVERSED or thought to have reversed neo-colonialist polarities by making the story come out in favor of the brown men in space: indeed, Star Wars was this sort of furry fantasy. The singular lack of intelligence is evident in the fact that the polarity is unchangeable, and as soon's we, the furry and adorable, conquer Darth Vader, we then get to oppress them, or whatever formerly invisible Palestinians may exist...while continuing, owing to the originary fantasy, to think of us as furry and adorable, and for this reason all the more above criticism.

This probably generates the modern-day technonerd's false belief that anything like "intelligence", measured by the Stanford-Binet scale, even exists and (in nastier cases) is positively correlated with a white skin or (in recent manifestations) membership in northern Indian "high" castes. For he can imagine himself as protected from the need for anything outside of symbolic intelligence by this rubber suit.

The emergence of operatic words like "cherish" usually indicates that the mind emitting them is organized into two regions.

Once consists of an "emotion-free" science.

The other echoes with words like "cherish", dogs, fluffy bunnies and the laughter of children.

Never do the twain meet.

Excuse me, but how Utopian is a space ladder to which only corporations, militaries and the occasional crazed fatcat has access, and why should we dream about it? For pennies a day, all children on the earth could have access to clean water, and I suggest that the space ladder fails a test of basic fairness.

My error was to refer to the "Ross" ice shelf and of course, I mean the more recent Arctic collapse. It puzzles me why you fail to mention it except in the "scientific" spirit of downplaying a pattern that is evident:

The fact is that last May, an Antarctic collapse occured, and was followed this fall by an Arctic collapse. This is unprecedented, and while it is occuring, the US President is maintaining that "the American lifestyle is not negotiable".

Of course, climate effects will be chaotic and not in any one direction. For example, the Arctic collapse released fresh water and a larger release could destroy warming ocean currents that effectively make Britain inhabitable.

Right-o. I stand corrected.

It'd be worth having that sorta thing just to talk to a real Marvin!!! :).

How would you know this hasn't already begun?

-- Phlip

... some snipped

... long harangue snipped

This does seem to be the crux of the matter. When someone complains about an author it's of mild interest that they actually know who they are talking about. It lends a tiny bit of credibility to their discussion. I actually prefer to start with facts rather than hypotheses. As far as I can tell there were three facts discussed in the post I originally replied to. Two of them were incorrect (Clarke as the author responsible for the laws of robotics, and the dissolution of the Ross Ice shelf), one was at best half right (Clarke did write about though he did not support building an orbital tower).

Now some things, the nature of intelligence may well be one, require going beyond the facts. However, under the common notion of intelligence, intelligent and moral men -- say Abraham Lincoln, Woordrow Wilson, FDR as examples -- have acted in ways they knew would kill many people. So it is observed that intelligence does not equate with an axiomatic rejection of killing. Other intelligent men have indeed come to the conclusion that killing is wrong under all circumstances but they are in fact in the great minority.

You may wish to work with an uncommon definition of intelligence. Your definition of intelligence might well lead to a rejection of homicide in all circumstances. But then you cannot directly compare your quantity with other authors' discussions of intelligence since they are not talking about the same thing you are.

But please feel free to denigrate classes of literature of which you have apparently no personal knowledge and continue to spout philosophical blather. Arguments are always easiest unanchored by factual content.

Regards, Tom McGlynn

I'm fairly sure I got the gist of it. I was disagreeing :)

My assertion was that if the machine simulation was as capable of thought as the original mind that was being simulated, then the result is /machine intelligence/. The fact that the machine is a duplication of a human mind isn't relevant, is it?

Your artist analogy is still invalid in this context, in my opinion since what is being duplicated isn't the thought but the artist. If all that the machine simulation produced was exact replication at every moment of what the original was producing, then all you have is a copy machine for the thoughts themselves. If the simulation was capable of thinking independantly of the mind it duplicated, then the simulation itself is intelligent.

That's my thoughts on the matter :)

You can get the angle relative to the path of a moving signal source, if you know its velocity vector, but it's very difficult to do so (at least accurately) with a slow-moving object like a GPS satellite. If you know the location of the signal sources at any particular instant then you could triangulate your position.

Problem: knowing the angle to the source gives you no data about where the source is, how fast it's moving, when it transmitted, etc. You have to have complete information about the orbital parameters of the satellite and the current time. Since quartz crystal timing is about as good as you get in an affordable electronic device, and orbits are distorted by complex gravitational effects up there, straight doppler positioning is pretty much out of the question.

GPS uses the /transit/ time of a signal from a satellite to figure out the distance between the transmitter on the satellite and the receiver in your hand-held GPS unit. Given the /accurate/ distance from three (yes, three) satellites, information on the orbits of those satellites, and a very accurate clock, it is possible to trilaterate the location of the receiver.

So... a GPS receiver must have a list of the orbital parameters of each of the satellites in order to figure the location of each, and a very accurate time measure ... better than the quartz crystal timing. Updates to the orbital parameters are sent via the satellites themselves, and the receiver's clock is updated constantly by reference to at least four satellites... where the error is averaged to update your clock.

I was in fact an avid reader of science fiction as a youth but made a conscious decision that it was a waste of time. Your argument can be turned around: IF the literature has on balance a bad effect, causing the reader to be desensitized to better books, then the reading can bias the reader, in its favor, and render him, with equal force, incapable of meta-discussion.

It is absurd to rate your judgement of a critic on whether he is steeped in a literature he rejects, and gives coherent reasons for rejection, as I have, because his decision is that the literature is a waste of time.

On the model, of a reader, as an uncritical reading-machine, then the only critic, with a right to criticize would be an omnivorous idiot savant who reads everything and suspends his judgement.

Science fiction fans resent it seems the canon in favor of a populism. But in so doing they become tools themselves, not of the canon, but of the basically commercial interests behind science fiction.

Therefore the question remains and this is whether science fictions are a waste of time.

We've collectively arrived at a correct picture, so this issue is dead. And, you failed to mention that last spring's collapse in the Antarctic was followed by this fall's collapse in the Arctic, which is unprecedented, and from which we can conclude that the space ladder is probably a waste of time. Technical abilities and the ability to provide the correct facts, such as yours, should not be thrown away on such projects when you are needed to fix the consequences of existing technology.

To say that Presidents "killed" in these cases is a sloppiness of political thinking which is often found in technical circles. In fact, if Abe "killed" then we kill in ways described by Peter Singer because just as Abe made decisions THAT LED TO death, we make consumption decisions (for example to buy a Hummer or an SUV) THAT LEAD TO DEATHS.

Therefore there probably is a distinction between the moral act "I shall now kill x, a person I have identified" and more diffuse decisions, such as were made by Lincoln such as "I shall have to enforce the Bigod Constitution because that's what they elected me to do."

In all your precision of fact you have neglected a simple distinction. Abe, after the death of Anne Rutledge, resolved to be, at one and the same time, a good and public man and carry out a political program of eradicating scalawags first in his home town, and then in DC. In so doing he realized that in an inperfect world he might get men killed, in part because of the slave question.

But it probably remains true that intelligence INCLUDES a refusal to flip people off unnecessarily when driving to work (a deliberately immoral act without a "double effect" of a good purpose and partly evil result) or to kill individuals one on one, or to kill them wholesale in a terrorist act.

What intelligence insists upon is what Kant identified in the beginning of the Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals and this is having a good will. A good will, like Lincoln, is able to realize that it's powerless over some evil while still able to act for good, in Abe's case, the preservation of the Constitution.

What's interesting is that the situation is more grammatical and demands a form of parsing, and cannot be approached as a series of atomic and unrelated issues such as a monadic intelligence, versus goodness.

I am not thinking in terms of quantity at all, but of qualities thought by technicians to be without meaning DESPITE the fact that they have both a logic and a grammar.

No, their relative speed. And since the doppler shift affect the frequency of the transmissions, the amount of doppler shift has to be discovered in order for the receiver to lock in to the transmission and decode it. As a side effect the GPSR can calculate its own velocity without having to differentiate position, and more accurately than would be possible by that method.

It would be more accurate to say that it needs four satellites because the precision of the timing references required, and the dependence of positional information on it, mean that the GPSR is having to solve for four independent variables, one being time.

-- Chris Malcolm snipped-for-privacy@infirmatics.ed.ac.uk +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205 IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK

[snipped references to a "space-elevator"]

The "space elevator" is in the news:

Now if they could also run with the other major idea of a significant advance that Clarke championed -- taming of the ocean as living space... Oodles and oodles of it.

Oops, the tinylink should be