Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 13:21:16 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

I am referring to the way war is waged now primarily to terrorise and demoralise the opposition, not just kill them or destroy property. Land mines, nerve gases, hideous diseases, daisy cutters, fuel vapor bombs, nuclear contamination, suicide bombs ... are all the result of man's brightest minds using their cleverness to doubtful ends.

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

for The Java Glossary.

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 13:21:16 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

Conspicuous consumption helps profits. Therefore commercials try the sell this as a moral philosophy. One example is the Murano, (pronounced Morono) a sports utility vehicle targeted to the urban market.

Corporations are the closest thing we have to Frankenstein's monster. They are powerful. They have no morals. They are destroying the planet. We created them. They have all but taken over decision making.

They keep changing the laws more and more in their favour, absolving their workers of criminal responsibility, absolving themselves of financial responsibility, and making governments pay them any time a regulation in the tiniest way interferes with their profit. See

and for outrageous examples.

Whomever orders or commits the crimes of a corporation should be financially and criminally responsible for them. Taken to extreme, if the Mafia incorporated, you could not prosecute any of it members for crimes committed on behalf of the corporation.

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

for The Java Glossary.

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 14:10:06 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

Part of the problem is speech to text is filtering out that 90% emotional information to extract the literal meaning.

IT is fun sometimes to turn down the volume on the TV enough that you can't make out the individual words. You can still pick out the cadences. You know what SORT of things are being said.

Dana Carvey explained that cadences were what makes impressions. He then demonstrated my saying gibberish in different cadences, but which were unmistakably various famous people.

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

for The Java Glossary.

You would do well to study alcoholism and alcohol's effect on the human nervous system

is a simple model for the states of consciousness as recognized by the medical profession (AFAIK) and they can all be mimic'd via consumption of alcohol. Alcoholism has been around almost as long as humans, so they have lots of data and plenty of "subjects" to interview.

As ontogeny reciprocates phylogeny, I would venture that a model layering the different levels of (un)consciousness upon one another (the states reached upon consumption) starting with the lowest (near-death) would yield an accurate primitive model of consciousness which is how this all relates to what you are suggesting. The difficulty with such a model is getting data regarding the lower levels because you can exactly interview a person who is asleep as to their thoughs...only a faint idea when(if) they wake. Also, any effects due to the drug itself will stain the entire study invisibly...but we are talking about topic for which there is essentially no data or recognized format so you take what you can get.

Some would say your post mixes sentience, consciousness, and intelligence in your statements, but without a strict definition for each, it probably isn't important as they are all intertwined concepts. You call it intelligence, some would say sentience. I'm not even talking about sentience, I'm talking about consciousness, as defined by my amateur PERSONAL categorization.

As long as we're talking about consciousness and reaching concensus, I would propose we have to all agree our consciousness originates with our nervous system. Primarily the brain and upper brain stem. We "lose" classic consciousness (the ability to respond to our environment outside of biologically induced reflexes like the patellar tendon reflex) when we fail to recieve oxygen for those organs to functions. Oxygen is the coal the powers the furnace that is our brain, so it's not like you can pin down EXACTLY what chemical process the oxygen feeds (which would be the next step at tracing consciousness), since it just burns up all over inside the brain as a generic energy source for countless chemical processes. The ability to reach awareness would be the next thing I would propose we accept as required element of consciousness. If you cannot become aware (due to the severing of the brain stem, the lack of a brain, etc) that you will never be conscious. However most of society buys into the classic myth-like theme that a brain in suspended animation has the potential to be put into a new body and re-awaken conscious again, which is what has prompted my proposals.

Perhaps everything I think about or have posted (here) about is completely off-base compared to what you are talking about or is completely wrong or kindergarten stuff in comparison to modern research (as shown here -

I am always willing to listen to serious therories about sentience, but with a more firm position on what you define as sentience or intelligence.

Humor and compassion yield from intelligence. It would be hard to consider a creature compassionate if it has no understanding of how it affects the world. Also, stupid people do funny things, but are inherently not very funny. How often did someone seem funny until you saw them demonstrate a serious lack of intelligence? You want to start doing some amateur work, do some studies.

going

Or perhaps, as there has been no other creature with "sentience" before, this is nature's first try at seeing if a species can survive and grow with an inherent violent competetive nature versus a very complex thought process (or higher awareness, or higher level of consciousness, or sentience, whatever is your philosophical liking). I see no reason to affix morality to what I consider human nature. It's served us better than ANY OTHER SEPCIES EVER.

This all being said, I would say this is completely off-topic for this newgroup, but then again, I responded and have strong feelings about it as most programmers probably do. Where is this kind of work being discussed (newsgroup)?

I wonder if a good definition of intelligence might be the ability to recognize yourself? I know that the higher primates share that trait with humans, they recognize themselves in the mirror. To a dog, a pretty smart animal, the other dog in the mirror is another dog.

I don't know if it's a concept of self, or something else, but it does seem to be a trait we share with other animals that we consider to be intelligent. (I haven't heard if Dolphins recognize themselves in mirrors)

chris in napa

Ah, I understand. Yes, modern war theory suggests that it is better to wound than to kill, because that way you tie up the enemy's medical resources as well as take out a combatant.

War == Hell.

Or even less. My dog, as a puppy, was briefly interested in that image in the mirror. But it had no smell! And didn't do anything that interesting, so she quickly discarded her interest.

I have no idea if she thinks it's another dog she can't access, or if she thinks it's even less than that. She's never shown much interest in dogs on tv. On the flip side, she's also come, over the years, to largely disregard dogs behind fences.

Or watch a foreign language channel!

SNIP

SNIP

alt.consciousness alt.philosophy

Perhaps it could be on topic if the question was "can ai be conscious?"

For me it is the most important question that can be asked. It is about the essence of what it means to be alive. But at this stage no one even knows how to frame the question in a way that even suggests how we might solve it.

By the way I am refering to qualia. Look inside the brain you see firing neurons not the pains and pleasures that we experience. It is the problem of why we experience colors but there is no color in the brain or anywhere outside the brain either.

John Casey

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003 21:37:48 GMT, chris burns wrote or quoted :

I was present when two dolphins first got to watch themselves on live video, like a mirror but reversed. The first thing they did was explore the edges peeking in and out all around the edge of the field of vision. Presumably they recognised the images of dolphins they were looking at were at least controlled by their actions.

Later I reversed the feed and let the dolphins peek out over the edge of their pond into man's world. I took them on a video tour of the lab. I showed them program listings. I gathered they liked what I was doing from their "cheering".

On my last day I had my Delphinic Etch a Sketch ready. They could control the cursor with various ultrasonic sounds. Of course I had to way of explaining how to use it. However, they went bananas when I showed it to them. They made noises I had never heard a dolphin make before. I was hoping they would draw something, but they just made the cursor scoot around in circles. That was my last day and the program was not quite finished, so that was the last they ever got to play with it.

I talk about some of these experiences in more detail in

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

for The Java Glossary.

Since i suspect that dolphins are indeed intelligent, I suspect that they would recognize themselves. I just don't know how the optics of it all works for them.

chris in napa

There's no sign that we are creating one, or that if we do it will take us with it.

That's because people are often willing to resolve disputes, but are generally very unwilling to be killed - since killing your enemies is therefore difficult it naturally requires much more research.

We don't know much about management of fish stocks; hopefully we'll get better. Of course some of this may be overblown - it is not well established how fish stocks vary over time. If there are many pilchards at X, humans start fishing at X, and at a later date there are few pilchards at X, the proposition that fishing caused depletion of pilchards is not assured unless there is strong evidence for the proposition that pilchard populations at X would otherwise have remained the same.

The notion of a stable 'optimal' local ecosystem is largely a chimera beloved of environmental campaigners.

- Gerry Quinn

Typical left wing drool. The examples are, essentially, cases in which a large-scale trade agreement imposes certain global standards that are incompatible with standards imposed locally. A polity choosing to engage in such large scale agreements necessarily, therefore, imposes restrictions on local governance within that polity. (This is particularly the case in democracies where local action can easily be used to subvert the aims of global agreements.)

So provisions were made to deal with such cases. You got a better way of framing continental or global trade agreements?

Sure, you can argue the case that a particular agreement should have been negotiated differently, that we shouldn't deal with any country that employs children, kills elephants, impedes corporations, allows music, or whatever other religious or cultural taboos we want to impose. There are plenty of legal avenues open to those with such opinions to express them and vote for leaders who will implement them.

The fact remains: global trade agreements mean restrictions on local laws. Whatever such agreements you make. [I refer only to free or quasi-free trade agreements, obviously a dictator or sultan can trade directly with his peers without any effect on local law.]

If your argument had any merit, they would incorporate.

Again, nobody disputes that ongoing reform in corporate governance is possible and even desirable, just as in other areas of law. In many countries, for example, restrictions on hiring and firing verge on the ridiculous.

- Gerry Quinn

Hmmm... sounds like something off of Star Trek. :-)

If it wasn't programmed with emotion, then it couldn't develop emotion merely as part of being intelligent. IMHO feelings (fear, hate, greed, love, compassion, envy, etc etc) are not functions of intelligence, in so far as they don't stem directly from our ability to problem solve or form ideas relating to matters we have no prior experience of.

Teaching a machine to love or hate is a totally different matter to teaching it how to 'think'. The moment computers start joining religions, or supporting football teams, then I'll agree we have a feeling machine on a par with a human - but not until.

Does a software of a Computer Dating Service understand love, then?

;-)

-FISH- >

[snip again...]

Ahhhhhhhhhhh! MANY MANY thanks for that! :-)

I read that stuff in a book, must be going on 15 years ago. The book was about Human Resource Management (the psychology of motivating people in the workplace) and touched upon these points, together with a simplified pyramid version - along the same lines but relating directly to the workplace.

Whenever I hear on radio or tv, debates about crime or social issues which ask "why is today's society so crime ridden, when previous generations were less well off and yet (supposedly) more law abiding?" I often think back to that book and ponder on how changes in our society (the break-up of community, the increased impact of advert- ising and the consumer society) relate to those principals and that pyramid....

Now at least I have a search term I can throw into Google :-)

-FISH- >

There is a news anchor on ABC who stands in for the main host sometimes, by the name of Elizabeth Vargas. If you mute the volume when she's on screen, it doesn't matter what the story - 10,000 jobs lost in motor industry or cure for Cancer found - she always looks like she's trying to tell you she's just run over your new puppy.

It's true. Try it !!! :-)

(Or perhaps she's just constipated? :-)

-FISH- >

And, of course, it's better to maim than to wound. Moreover, the more you can get the target to scream in agony, the more demoralized his friends will become.

Cheers Bent D

Well, it seems to me that one characteristic of intelligence is the ability to lie. In trying to explain semiotics, Umberto Eco definded a sign as anything that can be used to lie. And speaking of semiotics...

American semiotician, Charles Morris defined a purely behaviorist theory of semiotics within the existing intellectual discourse of that time. Simply (mis-)stated: For signification to occur, language-signs, (either signals or symbols) require a producing agent and an interpreting agent. The producer might not be an organism(e.g. smoke may signal a fire) but the interpreter always is. Without an interpreter, there is no signification and therefore no sign. In order to account for mental states or cognitive processes within this behaviorist framework, he postulated the situation where a single agent acts as both the producer and the interpreter of signs, and a process of signification that no longer relied on an external signal to trigger it. Naturally, this reflects a linguistic bias that equates human-like intelligence with the development of language and I make no claim that any of these theories are TRUE, in any ultimate sense. However, I think that semiotics provides a useful perspective for those of us who are trying to make the language processors we call programs behave more intelligently.

-DavidK

I suggest you re-read the post, and see if your questions admit to anything other than yes/no.

Keeping in mind that it's obvious, would you still write your original post the same way?

Again, you are posing it as a "yes/no" question while claiming a few sentences above that it is "obvious" that it's not "yes/no".

Can you even see that your "the question is" a "yes/no" question?

How would you know, given you think I have no clue as to whether your post is written assuming a "yes/no" vs "continuum"? Do you think is it perhaps possible others can read more from your posts than you can?

"Sentience" is actually defined in dictionaries these days as "consciousness". Historically it has been used with the meanings of "having a soul" or "being self-aware". It has always also been a "yes/no" thing, unlike "intelligence". The basic thrust has always been an attempt to differentiate animals to the point of non-attribution of sympathy, which is the same as your basic thrust.