Post-Scarcity Economics

[IntLibber]

Igor Aleksander was using randomly connected memory chips to recognize Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

That's given us football crowd face recognition, but not intelligence.

As researchers have known for some time, human intelligence is not one unitary skill or circuit. It is a host of intelligences, capabilities, that feed each other data: face recognition, speech recognition, musical recognition, creating music and speech and images, mathematical processing, smell recognition, touch recognition, and a very complex distributed neural network method of processing all that data, distilling it, storing it, and associating it all with many relationships (smells to feels to tastes to sights and sounds, etc).

To date I don't know of any AI effort that has sought to combine all these capabilities in one machine and program them all to work together, with the same database, building relationships and hardening them by repetition, and enabling a chat bot to use this database as source of information, with the ability to create output on its own initiative.

You're right, of course, but you're also missing the point.

There's a fundamental aspect of intelligence, that even single-celled organisms display, that scales up with numbers and networking. It may be a result of memristance or even perhaps borderline quantum effects, but it's missing from the research we've done so far.

The ability to scale up intelligence allows all the different techniques to be integrated.

I'd have to dispute that, we have mouse /cat level intelligence achieved. You'dhave to explain what this missing fundamental aspect is as you see it, cause I don't.

[alexjrgreen]

There's a fundamental aspect of intelligence, that even single-celled organisms display, that scales up with numbers and networking. It may be a result of memristance or even perhaps borderline quantum effects, but it's missing from the research we've done so far.

The ability to scale up intelligence allows all the different techniques to be integrated.

I'd have to dispute that, we have mouse /cat level intelligence achieved. You'dhave to explain what this missing fundamental aspect is as you see it, cause I don't.

Can you provide a link for what you're describing?

[Josh Cryer]

And yet there are people making money selling water. In North America. Right next to some of the largest fresh water lakes on the planet.

People are finally getting over the bottled water phase at least: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34451973/ns ... oing_green

Worst marketing gimmick ever (as in evil, coercing people to buy tap water).

edit: could someone explain this post-scarcity luddite argument type thing? I see post-scarcity as in Iain Banks' Culture series. You can work, you can do stuff, but you don't have to as a prerequisite for existing. You could just play games all day long and become a vegetable.

[MirariNefas]

Not meaning uploading right now. I just mean the capability of a human brain to shunt some calculations over to a chip, and to access data stored in electronic hardware or on a network. The idea is just brain plasticity - we all have a little of it, children have more, some of it may be genetically/chemically inducible. So you may be able to tell a brain to start decoding new signals that arrive through a special sort of chip/cell package, and hopefully you could build software to figure out what to do with signals that come back.

That's one possibility. IIRC some of the blind have been able to "see" via electrode arrays taped to their tongues. Linking that to the new "psychic" controllers opens a lot of possibilities.

Yes, there's been some work on using this for military purposes as well. I forget the context, something like seeing the battlespace from overhead satellite or drone view for future combat systems. They can do the same thing on a patch of skin, but the tongue has better resolution.

I'd like to move to a more direct neural interface primarily for resolution purposes. We could probably knock out some microstructures so we've got electrodes smaller than cells, terminating directly into one (highly engineered) cell each. Each cell switches on some genes to produce tropic fractors and whatnot to recruit connections from whatever bit of brain you drop the thing in.

[IntLibber]

There's a fundamental aspect of intelligence, that even single-celled organisms display, that scales up with numbers and networking. It may be a result of memristance or even perhaps borderline quantum effects, but it's missing from the research we've done so far.

The ability to scale up intelligence allows all the different techniques to be integrated.

I'd have to dispute that, we have mouse /cat level intelligence achieved. You'dhave to explain what this missing fundamental aspect is as you see it, cause I don't.

Can you provide a link for what you're describing?

You claimed we are missing some fundamental aspect. What is it? Quantify it.

[alexjrgreen]

I'd have to dispute that, we have mouse /cat level intelligence achieved. You'dhave to explain what this missing fundamental aspect is as you see it, cause I don't.

Can you provide a link for what you're describing?

You claimed we are missing some fundamental aspect. What is it? Quantify it.

I did that already: Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence.

Simply put, it's the ability to "self-emerge" or "grow".

Now, you were going to provide a link for where we achieved mouse /cat level intelligence...

[Luzr]

Can you provide a link for what you're describing?

You claimed we are missing some fundamental aspect. What is it? Quantify it.

I did that already: Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence.

Have you read the link yourself? I find nothing there that would change my mind about neural networks and connectionistic aproaches.

What the link basically says w.r.t. AI is that single-cell entities can have some memory functions. Does not mean much IMO. You still need networks for any higher-level functions.

[alexjrgreen]

I find nothing there that would change my mind about neural networks and connectionistic aproaches.

What the link basically says w.r.t. AI is that single-cell entities can have some memory functions. Does not mean much IMO. You still need networks for any higher-level functions.

I don't dispute that networks are necessary. It's just that our networks don't scale intelligence. Artificial neural networks mostly have just three layers because little benefit is added beyond that.

The cerebral cortex of a human brain makes good use of six layers.

[TallDave]

Heron's steam engines were probably just as good as Savery's, possibly better, but they were only used as religious gadgets to impress visitors to the temple.

Without a secular market there was no equivalent of Newcomen or Watt, even though it was easily within the Greeks' abilities.

With all due respect to Heron's considerable genius, it's unlikely the aeolipile was capable of useful work.

Possibly different economics might have made a different outcome, but the ancient Greeks just didn't have Late Renaissance Europe's resources in material, knowledge or philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

[TallDave]

As researchers have known for some time, human intelligence is not one unitary skill or circuit. It is a host of intelligences, capabilities, that feed each other data: face recognition, speech recognition, musical recognition, creating music and speech and images, mathematical processing, smell recognition, touch recognition, and a very complex distributed neural network method of processing all that data, distilling it, storing it, and associating it all with many relationships (smells to feels to tastes to sights and sounds, etc).

To date I don't know of any AI effort that has sought to combine all these capabilities in one machine and program them all to work together, with the same database, building relationships and hardening them by repetition, and enabling a chat bot to use this database as source of information, with the ability to create output on its own initiative.

That's the easy part. What's harder is programming the trillions of chemical receptors and our programmed responses that give rise to the background urges of consciousness.

For instance, when we see something that has various attributes of a human child, most of us are compelled to seek solutions for its safety and comfort and communicate the desirability of such solutions to others. There is a lot of very complex signalling implicit in the statement "Awwww, she's so cute!"

[alexjrgreen]

Heron's steam engines were probably just as good as Savery's, possibly better, but they were only used as religious gadgets to impress visitors to the temple.

Without a secular market there was no equivalent of Newcomen or Watt, even though it was easily within the Greeks' abilities.

With all due respect to Heron's considerable genius, it's unlikely the aeolipile was capable of useful work.

See a practical hero

Or, how an obscure New York mechanic got a steam-powered toy to drive sawmills.

[TallDave]

Avery's example suggests it's extremely unlikely ancient Greeks could have gotten the thing to do useful work.

The Avery engine probably had other problems: noise, vibration, the difficulty in sealing the rotary coupling, and the problem of speed regulation. These problems would have been difficult to solve with 1830s technology.

To say nothing of Hellenistic technology.

I'm as big a fan of the Greeks as anyone, but they were severely limited by even Early Modern standards.

[alexjrgreen]

I'm as big a fan of the Greeks as anyone, but they were severely limited by even Early Modern standards.

We probably passed them in about 1700, perhaps a few years later.

Not so long ago, and after reading quite a lot of what they wrote...

[Luzr]

I'm as big a fan of the Greeks as anyone, but they were severely limited by even Early Modern standards.

We probably passed them in about 1700, perhaps a few years later.

In what aspect?

Human rights? Technology? Economy? Military? Science? Arts?

See, I agree that medieval times are sort of boring and depressing, but I do not really see many areas where Greeks would be really better than westerners in say 1500 (more likely much earlier).

[djolds1]

We probably passed them in about 1700, perhaps a few years later.

In what aspect?

Human rights? Technology? Economy? Military? Science? Arts?

See, I agree that medieval times are sort of boring and depressing, but I do not really see many areas where Greeks would be really better than westerners in say 1500 (more likely much earlier).

There was relatively advanced use of machines by the late medieval period, equal to anything achieved in Antiquity albeit made from more disposable materials (primarily wood). The West absorbed the theory of Antiquity during the Renaissance (1300-1500), and surpassed them during the Scientific Revolution and Age of Reason/Age of Newton (1550-1700, largely coterminous with the Wars of Religion). After 1700 we have the early Industrial Revolution, and the doubling time on societal wealth begins to drop enormously versus the earlier agrarian period. The Age of Enlightenment phases out support of the heritage faith via Newton's Deism in favor of outright atheism, but we also see doctrines of human rights emerge in recognizable forms.