ET report just released

  On 5/1/2010 at 6:19 AM, GORDO said:

maybe it will just become aware of itself, put 2+2 together and realize how the world works and what it need to do to ensure survival, I imagine this could manifest itself as giving exposure to some information and obscuring other.

 

i dunno really, i just find the idea fascinating. i mean why not? it has eyes, ears, systems for ranking relevance of information, software designed to achieve tasks, people feeding it information every second, and its structure is similar to a brain. how could it not happen?

it just seems like wishful thinking to me. like a modern myth or something... but whatever. some interesting things to think about in this thread tho.

Watch as we merge with tech. If you take note when seemingly small developments occur and keep your mind on the big picture it'll all make sense. It's very, very similar to how evolution is supposed to work. Lots and lots of tiny steps that add up to something that initially would seem very improbable.

An interesting thing i saw the other day was someone had hooked their emotiv headset with their iphone and if they concentrated on a certain action a certain one of their contacts would come up and it'd start calling them. I don't think it will be too long before people can search google on their phones by thought. But you see how the first step of thinking up a contact on your phone makes the next step seem more ordinary?

  On 5/1/2010 at 6:45 AM, Rambo said:

 

 

An interesting thing i saw the other day was someone had hooked their emotiv headset with their iphone and if they concentrated on a certain action a certain one of their contacts would come up and it'd start calling them. I don't think it will be too long before people can search google on their phones by thought. But you see how the first step of thinking up a contact on your phone makes the next step seem more ordinary?

whats an emotiv headset? how does it work? this sounds pretty damn cool

  On 5/1/2010 at 5:51 AM, Rambo said:

  On 5/1/2010 at 5:48 AM, GORDO said:

 

yeah well... just zoom out a lil bit.

 

what makes you think we can't be part of a system in the same way our neurons are part of us?

 

A good little post i read the other day

 

  Quote

Collective intelligence is definitely one strategy to create an intelligence greater than what one single intelligent person can accomplish. In fact, all of society is one large intelligence that has accomplished a great deal - much more than one person. In fact, one could argue that the most intelligent thing that we are aware of is human society. Each of us is just a small subset of all the neurons at work, our brains networked via the low bandwidth connections of speech, writing, publication, the Internet, and so on.

 

One could argue that synapses are where the intelligence is. The synapses are the connections. Therefore, it stands to reason that building new synapses increases intelligence or increases specialized functionality of the intelligence. The Internet effectively increased human society's intelligence by adding a new class of synapses that operate fast and allow the growth of new specialized synapses.

 

Augmenting collective intelligence with new mechanisms which channel the flow of information in a productive manner are where real productivity can occur.

I think the financial markets are a limited, yet great example of this dynamic. The bid/ask of instruments are arrived at by a VERY complex interplay of sentient beings. You could consider those prices to be the consciousness of the market and the traders to be the neurons.

im on the run...

being chased...

in a library now...not long till i have to go again...

back to the streets...

oh god i think they know im here...

send help!

*salutes*

fight the good fight ET! don't give in!

  On 5/1/2010 at 6:52 AM, Z_B_Z said:

  On 5/1/2010 at 6:45 AM, Rambo said:

 

 

An interesting thing i saw the other day was someone had hooked their emotiv headset with their iphone and if they concentrated on a certain action a certain one of their contacts would come up and it'd start calling them. I don't think it will be too long before people can search google on their phones by thought. But you see how the first step of thinking up a contact on your phone makes the next step seem more ordinary?

 

whats an emotiv headset? how does it work? this sounds pretty damn cool

It's a headset called EPOC made by a company called Emotiv. It reads EEG signals using a bunch of electrodes. People are buying the software developers kit and doing some cool things with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc82Z_yfEwc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Cq35VbRpTY

  On 5/1/2010 at 4:38 AM, acidphakist said:

I'm a registered pessimist. I see darkness in everything. But I hold the belief that if a civilization is advanced enough to make it here, they will be enlightened and not warfaring.

 

Like someone above me said...if they can travel here across the void, they aren't looking for a free cup of water.

unless there's no water on their planet

and their ship runs on water

ABATAP

yeah i'm sure the aliens have steam powered ships.

you can do nuclear fusion with the deuterium and tritium in sea water, fool.

1 bucket of sea water contains about 30 tons worth of coal in energy terms if you can do fusion.

30 tons worth of coal sounds like nothing.

it is, when your sooper dooper spaceship is like the size of the earth and like almost completely filled with water. ...hmmm...a comet perhaps?

  On 5/1/2010 at 6:30 PM, GORDO said:

30 tons worth of coal sounds like nothing.

that's because there's only a very tiny amount of deuterium and tritium in seawater.

but if you were to distil it...

humans may face a similar problem with helium-3 on the moon if we get our shit together

still, hydrogen is the most abundant thing in the universe, and there's a lot of oxygen too.

  On 5/1/2010 at 4:44 AM, Rambo said:

  On 5/1/2010 at 4:15 AM, GORDO said:

 

a few years ago he warned us about technology improving faster than humans, and that we should watch out for a robot takeover.

 

Well he's not far wrong. It's not so much about robotics though, it's AI and that's a genuine concern. The people working on it don't know what would happen if we created greater-than-human level intelligence and they shouldn't know either. The ideal outcome is that we merge with AI very gradually. I actually think that is going to happen. In fact you could argue the process began when someone first wore a pair of glasses or a hearing aid or something.

no. AI is pretty stupid. It's certainly worth exploring, but the notion of a self-aware software is really far from reality.

i think the one thing that gets over our heads is consumerism. it's hard to get out of it innit

  On 5/1/2010 at 6:53 PM, phling said:

 

no. AI is pretty stupid. It's certainly worth exploring, but the notion of a self-aware software is really far from reality.

Yes AGI (G for general) is far from reality but no-one said otherwise. I know of people working at it right now. So i don't know what your point is. Of course it's a concern because if it were to ever be achieved the implications are huge.

  On 5/1/2010 at 4:44 AM, Rambo said:

The ideal outcome is that we merge with AI very gradually. I actually think that is going to happen. In fact you could argue the process began when someone first wore a pair of glasses or a hearing aid or something.

Actually that's worded in a really shitty way. When i say merge with AI very gradually, i really meant merging with technology in general. The lines are pretty fuzzy: smartphone - smartphone controlled by voice, then controlled by thought, then smartphone hooked up to pair of AR glasses with eye tracking (brings up info in your field of vision on objects you're looking at).

So i didn't mean create an intelligence and then merge with it or anything like that, it's more that you will have a biological side as usual and an ever expanding non-biological side of you that's becoming more and more sophisticated but also more seemless.

whether ai is possible or not depends entirely on what definition you use for consciousness/self-awareness/etc. if you define them as being epiphenomena of the mechanistic workings of the brain, it is only a matter of time before ai will exist. otherwise, it'll probably never be good enough, even though in terms of functionality, machines can do everything we can.