Talk-Polywell.org

From Ted:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/juan ... ience.html

The first five minutes are important. The rest is just mindblowing.

A lot of erroneous status quo needs uprooting. It's nice to see some of these ideas starting to reach the mainstream.

First you build the infrastructure and then you build the cars?

That is not the way the real world works.

Think of the automobile. First the automobile proliferates then come the gas stations.

And then there are all the batteries. Suppose you have 1 million long distance auto trips a day. Requiring 4 battery changes per trip. At $1,000 per battery that is $4 bn in battery inventory or more. And what happens if too many trips are one way in a given direction? You have to truck batteries around.

The equivalent infrastructure for gasoline is cheaper. A lot cheaper.

The guy in the video is ignorant of technology, infrastructure evolution, and logistics. Not to mention human behavior.

And what happens when you get a battery pack from your energy station good for 60 miles and you want to go 100?

It is a lot better to let things evolve. Start with hybrids and move slowly to electrics. Even all electrics might profit from a 50 cc engine/generator for limp home capability.

This guy wants a big system with all the decisions on how that system should work figured out in advance. No one or collection of ones is that good. There are always emergent properties. Better to let them emerge slowly.

What do you mean? What I remember from that talk is the bio and genetic engineering.

Betruger wrote:What do you mean? What I remember from that talk is the bio and genetic engineering.

In the beginning he says that first you build the infrastructure for battery exchange and then you build the cars.

I believe he said that within the first 5 minutes. The guy was so obviously ignorant I couldn't stand to watch the rest.

Who is going to pay for all that idle capital while they wait for the customers to come?

What I took away from the opening was that here was a liberal arts major trying to do industrial design. I prefer my men of vision to have an engineering background at the project management level with 10 years of experience - minimum.

I think I'd zapped the intro because it was boring. I don't recall what it was about exactly. The latter half (or so) that made the audience ponder what being human meant, and the implications of the increasingly synthetic portion of people's bodies was what got my attention. What it meant for sports, for human identity, etc.

Betruger wrote:I think I'd zapped the intro because it was boring. I don't recall what it was about exactly. The latter half (or so) that made the audience ponder what being human meant, and the implications of the increasingly synthetic portion of people's bodies was what got my attention. What it meant for sports, for human identity, etc.

Meaning depends on context.

The context being people mostly oblivious to those implications?

Betruger wrote:The context being people mostly oblivious to those implications?

I doubt if there are any implications that are serious. People will get upset that it is "unnatural" and then a couple of generations go by and they are used to it.

I remember when duck tail haircuts, comic books, and rock 'n roll were the menaces of the day with serious philosophical implications. Now we have Jesus Rock, comic books are collectors items and nobody cares how you wear your hair.

That's what I meant.. I do think this is the first step to (barring some extraordinary discoveries) recognizing life as nothing special.. As no different from any other permutation of matter. Leaving only the "mystery" of consciousness to decypher. If there really is anything to decypher. Maybe consciousness appears special only because it's a perceived fluke inherent to our imperfect means of perception and abstraction.

An intermediate step that most people don't have the guts for is, IMO, that the brain is what makes us human, that being humane is more important than being an unaltered vanilla human. That a (just running with this sort of exagerated example) human brain acting in a flawlessly humane way, from within a body entirely synthetic (or except for its nervous system) ought to be no different from the regular humans.
From there I can't see any way to differentiate a "genuine" human from a machine that was merely programmed to appear human. What's the difference?

But as far as the intermediate steps.. Surely you don't think a brain in a jar like e.g. that robot in Robocop is an esthetic today's public could stomach? That's a pretty different paradigm shift than that from duck tail cuts, comics, and rock.

Sorry for rambling.. been a long day and week, and I'm primed for bed with a couple of drinks

Betruger wrote:That's what I meant.. I do think this is the first step to (barring some extraordinary discoveries) recognizing life as nothing special.. As no different from any other permutation of matter. Leaving only the "mystery" of consciousness to decypher. If there really is anything to decypher. Maybe consciousness appears special only because it's a perceived fluke inherent to our imperfect means of perception and abstraction.

An intermediate step that most people don't have the guts for is, IMO, that the brain is what makes us human, that being humane is more important than being an unaltered vanilla human. That a (just running with this sort of exagerated example) human brain acting in a flawlessly humane way, from within a body entirely synthetic (or except for its nervous system) ought to be no different from the regular humans.
From there I can't see any way to differentiate a "genuine" human from a machine that was merely programmed to appear human. What's the difference?

But as far as the intermediate steps.. Surely you don't think a brain in a jar like e.g. that robot in Robocop is an esthetic today's public could stomach? That's a pretty different paradigm shift than that from duck tail cuts, comics, and rock.

Sorry for rambling.. been a long day and week, and I'm primed for bed with a couple of drinks

Of course if the brain in a jar looked more like major Kusanagi it might be a different story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoko_Kusanagi :