Anyone watching the emerging markets?

[touchring]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

To your edit regarding the (national GDP?) growth differential, with the possible exception of Brazil, China's first derivative of growth has fallen faster than anywhere else in the world in the past two years. With so much mis-allocated and wasted capital, I truly wonder if China can avoid a deflationary bust analogous to the 1930s Depression when the USA was the up-and-coming global economy.

They have to avoid it otherwise Xi will certainly be ousted because the loss of face is not acceptable to the Chinese.

I think as long as Americans and the rest of the world constantly import plastic/electronic crap, throw them out after 1 year and, with the help of obor, and build a dozen more aircraft carriers, China may somehow be able to engineer a slow landing.

This is why I think Trump has an upper hand if he drives a hard bargain with China.

However, in a worst case scenario, Xi may go rogue, following the example of Putin and Erdogan. I believe he is planning to do so henceforth the move to conquer the South China sea.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...military-might

[GRG55]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

They have to avoid it otherwise Xi will certainly be ousted because the loss of face is not acceptable to the Chinese.

I think as long as Americans and the rest of the world constantly import plastic/electronic crap, throw them out after 1 year and, with the help of obor, and build a dozen more aircraft carriers, China may somehow be able to engineer a slow landing.

This is why I think Trump has an upper hand if he drives a hard bargain with China.

However, in a worst case scenario, Xi may go rogue, following the example of Putin and Erdogan. I believe he is planning to do so henceforth the move to conquer the South China sea.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...military-might

Ramping up military spending and starting a war is the age old guaranteed inflation program, so certainly bears watching.

I certainly don't see the USA getting into a dust-up with China over a bunch of Asian rocks, or even Taiwan. But if China goes as far as the latter, the USA won't have to deal with it. China will be sanctioned, and become a pariah. Too much risk for them.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

we have to keep in mind triffin's dilemma: reducing the american trade deficit ultimately means giving up the dollar's unique reserve status. that's a big deal, a big change in the global political-economy.

I think that idea deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Current account deficits are the inevitable result of issuing the world's reserve currency.

[touchring]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

I certainly don't see the USA getting into a dust-up with China over a bunch of Asian rocks, or even Taiwan. But if China goes as far as the latter, the USA won't have to deal with it. China will be sanctioned, and become a pariah. Too much risk for them.

I don't think Xi will be so stupid to go to war over Taiwan within the short term, but in the longer term, they are definitely planning for it. Economic growth, abor, building the aircraft carrier, conquering the South China Sea, all these are part of a 15-20 year plan to this ultimate goal.

Of course, they would prefer a peaceful take over, just like HK and Macau. Perhaps North and South Korea is to set an example.

In 2009, there was a TV drama series on Zheng He, the Chinese conquerer cum explorer from the Ming Dynasty. When I saw the series, I knew it was propaganda, but at that time it didn't occur to me what was the objective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_...ng_(TV_series)

There was another 2005 drama on the emperor wu of the han dynasty. Emperor wu was a military leader and the China at that time is very different from the China today. Newly united after hundreds of civil war, China had the best troops and calvary during that period if not the best in the ancient world - they were so good they defeated the powerful huns (predecessors of the mongols). They could definitely defeat the Roman legions easily had they met.

2000 years ago, South China (Guangdong, Hong Kong and Fujian provinces are part of South China for those who don't know) were not part of China. They were inhabited by Hmong and Viet like states. Emperor wu conquered them and they remained as part of China till today. Emperor wu also occupied the modern northern vietnam and interestingly, north korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Em...in_Han_Dynasty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Wu_of_Han

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

... Decades of the Washington Consensus and letting the Davos crowd have the run of the place, we're left with slower growth overall, very little if anything by the way in real wage or compensation gains for most people, and rampant inequality, not just in income and wealth, but in the application of rule of law. In power.,,

Bingo. Here's an interesting article about a certain deceased economist and his ideas that helped create this.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/05/mee...eover-america/

Meet the economist behind the One Percent’s stealth takeover of America

[dcarrigg]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

of course it's a hack that's hence the name Artificial, we did not need a theory of how birds fly to make flight a possibility bernoulli's theorem and some technological advances was what it took. We have the theory of perceptrons and deep neural driving many recent advances, however this is just a part of machine learning, no doubt we will go way past the turing test, a bit like how jets can fly a bit faster then birds.

Your wrong on data, the stuff that is collected from users needs their explicit approval in the EU, there is nothing to stop a company springing up and offering to clean up many data sources and sell it on to the big boys with a cut for the people I think this has been made more inevitable with the Facebook fiasco.

My pessimism is in AI safety, like malware writing any motivated person(s) can get into Artificial Intelligence and run models that were start of the Art a Couple of years ago. Also it's such a fast evolving field mistakes by the big boys could easily be made with very bad consequences.

Should be fairly easy to defeat by just turning it off and unplugging things. Not that there aren't stupid implementations of software out there. I consider any car getting "over the air updates" a stupid implementation of software. I remember about a decade ago, some key infrastructure around here was way too open to zigbee--zigbee's like a bluetooth type of thing for industrial purposes and other low-power 'internet of things' type networks in case anyone's unfamiliar. Anyways, some pretty simple downloadable tools made it so anyone in not-so-close physical proximity with a laptop, one easy-to-get piece of hardware, and one free-to-download program could snatch the signal up, take it over, and do some pretty incredible things--like open dams during floods or other bad/worse attacks on physical infrastructure. Lots of home solar panels and other things ran on the implementation and could be turned off or otherwise messed with pretty easily too. Thankfully, commercial/industrial users seem to have learned their lesson from that, and a ton of old stimulus money went to infotech security. But the military has been smarter than that basically all along. Things generally aren't connected to the massive network. Where you can use closed systems or simpler systems to get the job done, you do. Lots of vacuum tube and RF and other analogue tech still powers things. Easy to rip out and replace a vacuum tube that breaks. No way to replace a micro-circuit-board.

I mean, really, when you think about it, for most daily users of PCs, computing tech has not improved at all in 10 years. In many ways, it has gotten worse. The performance benefits of a modern laptop vs a 9 or 10 year old laptop with a core 2 duo running say Windows 7 or Ubuntu 8 or OSX 10.6 or whatever with a decent chunk of ram and an SSD are almost imperceptible. Only big difference is SSDs came down quite a bit in price and got better. But nothing else changed all that much. And for 90% of users, there's no noticeable difference. Gamers will care. Video editors will care. Occasionally some big data / stats / programmer types will care. But that's it.

I mean, now go back to say 2009 and give someone a 9-10 year old computer running Windows 98 or ME or Mac OS9 or Debian 1.2 or whatever, and just about every user is going to know and feel a big difference right away. Just in weight and feel alone before you hit the on button. And the internet of 1999-2000 was very different than the internet of 2008-9. But the internet of 2008-9 was not so different from the internet of 2018. In fact, in many ways it was better and easier to use 10 years ago. News articles were often free--even newspaper archives were free often times. Sites didn't track you or advertise to you anywhere near as hard. Things like gmail still grew with you instead of capping the storage size and just getting creepier about reading your mail. It seemed like most of the major tech companies still cared about providing new and quality services that people wanted instead of finding new and annoying ways to monetize things they already hooked people on, or to make it more expensive and difficult to migrate away. I mean, who isn't much more impressed with what Google accomplished between 1999 and 2009 than between 2009 and now? Or Facebook--getting college kids jealous of other college kids whose schools were 'in' in 2004 to being all edu in 2005 to taking over the world by 2008. But what big innovations have happened since then? And did any of them make the user experience better in a way that's almost impossible to argue against?

Seobook and others know this stuff better than I do. It's not my area of expertise. Tech is just something I dabble in. I can play around with a few lines of code in python or r or something. I can keep up a website and use packages to run hard math problems that I don't want to wait to do out by hand. But I'm not a software engineer or programmer and I've never done tech work professionally. I'm just saying, from a user's perspective, there really has not been a hell of a lot of innovation. From an investor's perspective, Software as a Service is brilliant--make them pay monthly subscription fees for something they used to just be able to buy in a box and own forever. Even better if you do it like gaming companies and release the product hampered and broken on purpose and make them pay an extra $5 every 2 weeks for a year to patch it to the point where it's any fun at all. But this is the type of 'innovation' I see in the tech world now. Python 3 was a huge jump. Some of the big data stuff made a huge jump around the same time. But no big jumps now. Nothing practical for the end user. Just goofy trends that nobody wants.

Here's an example: a friend of mine is a software engineer with a major firm. They got it in their head they wanted to replace all the lights in the office with 'smartlights.' Now they can change brightness or color dynamically with the day or whatever. So what does that mean? Everything's pink in the morning, and the lights don't work when the wifi goes out. Why would I want my dryer to talk to the internet? Or my fridge? I mean, I realize the technology exists so you can do it, but why should you? It doesn't make the devices cheaper or better or more reliable. Just more expensive, more prone to break, and more complicated.

And I really do think you're seeing all these tech companies branch out of computing and into appliances and automobiles and construction and all the rest because they are out of ideas and not really making any headway on the PC front any more, so they are slapping their existing software/hardware onto anything else that sells in hopes it will catch on. It reeks more of desperation than innovation--not something a company whose core business was doing well would be wasting so much effort on--maybe a side-project at best. Shifting Google under Alphabet was a similar move, I think.

I mean, has anyone really bothered to look and see what's under Alphabet? Well, there's:

1. Google - (this is the core business, the one thing they were good at, but now it's not central any more and just one piece of a larger rube goldberg machine)
2. Calico - (this is a biotech firm run by silicon valley software guys instead of doctors and biologists whose mission is to stop the aging process...Ponce de Leon is giggling in his grave)
3. Google Ventures - (because we all need to be rentiers--although at least they were smart enough not to invest in Theranos unlike most of the big venture firms)
4. Capital G - (more venture capital, this time late-stage, the biggest investor in things you know like AirBnB, Stripe, Lyft, etc)
5. Verily - (this is a life-sciences firm that's actually doing some pretty standard medical device type stuff like glucose monitoring contact lenses and whatnot)
6. Waymo - (this is yet another self-driving-car company. and yes, they went so far as to build a car themselves, and it would be small and dorky and ugly even for Europe)
7. Access - (aka google fiber, this was actually promising to some extent and making a difference, but it was more of a gut-check to comcast and verizon than a real monopoly plan. Nice if you're in Kansas City).
8. X - (this is the R&D company, it's working on project loon and google glass still for some reason and wing which is supposedly for aircraft goods to home delivery)
9. Chronicle - (this is a cybersecurity services b2b firm)
10. DeepMind - (this is a British-based AI firm that's good at games)
11. Dandelion - (this is a residential geothermal heat pump installation company--no, seriously, they're into this now too)
12. Jigsaw - (this is a foreign relations think-tank that also does some national security stuff, but more state department than defense contractor)
13. Sidewalk Labs (this is an urban design consulting firm--they're doing some weird stuff in Toronto)
14. Intersection (this is something similar, but on smaller scales I guess? they're turning old payphones in NYC into wifi hot spots or something--tablets on them predictably were vandalized or used by less savory characters to view pornography in public despite the content filters, etc)
15. Nest (this is a residential/commercial thermostat company, which builds thermostats that actually do seem to sell well, but they've jettisoned the old CEO and rebranded as total home automation, so we'll see if they kill the golden goose that feathered this one or not)
16. ATAP (this is just like X, but for shorter-term projects, and I think more defense-oriented than commercial)

And what did 15 of these 16 (the ones not named Google) do last year combined? Lose about $5 billion. Google brought in about $25B in profit. So they had the money to lose. But break it up further and Nest, Access, and Verily actually make money. Probably the venture firms too, because they pretty much cannot lose in this environment. Which means that the truth of the matter is that 10 of these units are probably losing closer to an average of a billion per year each while the few of them that earn money prop up this stuff.

Now, I have no basic problem with this--think of all the incredible stuff that came out of Bell Labs--except to say that instead of hiring smart people and letting them work on what they want, they're just picking trendy things that everyone else is doing like self-driving cars and drone delivery and fountains of youth, and telling people that that's what they have to work on. Which is probably never going to be profitable or really go anywhere near as far as the hype leads people to believe.

[touchring]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

Ramping up military spending and starting a war is the age old guaranteed inflation program, so certainly bears watching.

I certainly don't see the USA getting into a dust-up with China over a bunch of Asian rocks, or even Taiwan. But if China goes as far as the latter, the USA won't have to deal with it. China will be sanctioned, and become a pariah. Too much risk for them.

I found something interesting.

http://www.zuljan.info/articles/0302wwiigdp.html

When Pearl Harbor happned, the US economy is 7 times the size of Japan.

In fact, the US economy (industrial economy I suppose) was nearly twice of all the Axis countries combined.

[jk]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

re ai, i strongly recommend this article. both parts i and ii. one conclusion from that article dcarrigg: it might not be so easy to turn it off or unplug it once it achieved sufficient intelligence.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

I found something interesting.

http://www.zuljan.info/articles/0302wwiigdp.html

When Pearl Harbor happned, the US economy is 7 times the size of Japan.

In fact, the US economy (industrial economy I suppose) was nearly twice of all the Axis countries combined.

It can play a role, but I think comparing GDP for the sake of comparing militaries is emblematic of the economy-fetish of the modern age. If GDP equates to military victory, somebody sure forgot to get that memo to Ho Chi Minh or Ahmad Shah Massoud, etc...

A full 5 to 10% of US GDP right now is just meaningless healthcare cost overruns. It's an accounting gimmick. The lives of most people would be better tomorrow if it were scratched off the books.

How many other components of GDP are just like that, especially in a service economy?

And how much force did the Soviets manage to project despite their relatively small economy?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

re ai, i strongly recommend this article. both parts i and ii. one conclusion from that article dcarrigg: it might not be so easy to turn it off or unplug it once it achieved sufficient intelligence.

Don't forget, Kurzweil is using this 'singularity' of AI in the here-and-now to hawk magic age-defying pills to scared old people who want to live to see "it." So does he really believe this nonsese? Or is this a marketing scheme just so he can sell over-the-counter crushed up chinese newspaper in in capsules without FDA approval? Maybe a little of column A and a little of column B? Because "The Singularity" sounds exactly like Heaven's Gate to me.

Put another way, I smell snake oil.

Big time.

Been saying it for a while.

Actually met the guy and got to talk to him for a good chunk of time a few years before that. Not impressive. At least not to me. And I agree that project nematode is promising and a path forward. But it's a total fabrication that it has been successfully done--or anything close to that. It lives on as project open worm. And some progress has been made. But cpu emulation of even something as simple as a nematode where we can map out all the nerves exactly and replicate them perfectly one for one still not working. Turns out the 'mind' here is not something that you can bootstrap in isolation. It needs muscles and environments and all sorts of other 'stuff' too before it can even function wrong, if at all. A lot of AI is predicated on mind-body dualism. If that turns out not to be the case--and increasingly its looking that way to me--then there is no need to worry about anything becoming at all sentient, never mind sapient, never mind something with "an IQ of 12,952" whatever the hell that means (guessing the author never took stats).

Put another way, jk, all the work is done in these two sentences:

An AI system at a certain level—let’s say human village idiot—is programmed with the goal of improving its own intelligence. Once it does, it’s smarter—maybe at this point it’s at Einstein’s level—so now when it works to improve its intelligence, with an Einstein-level intellect, it has an easier time and it can make bigger leaps.

But there's a better chance my Dog will single-handedly build a DeLorean from scratch with a Flux Capacitor in the backyard and drive it 88 miles back in time to kill Jefferson Davis while whistling Yankee Doddle Dandy.

Let's count the inferential leaps:

1. An AI system at a certain level—let’s say human village idiot—

What does that even mean? How does one measure that? There are tasks computers are very good at. And tasks they are very bad at. They can work out calculus problems much faster than me. But they can't tie my shoes worth a damn. And even if you go through the trouble to make one that can, it will be super expensive and complicated and prone to failure and incapable of doing it on the fly outside of fairly controlled conditions. Does that mean it's "village idiot level" already? Who knows. All I know is it's not thinking. There's no "there" there. It's just a pile of code executing a deductive sequence of orders from first principles. Boring stuff. But it's damn good at it.

Regardless, we don't have universally accepted metrics even for human intelligence. IQ is known to obviously fail. One of the smartest people I know is dyslexic and comes up a bit south of Forrest Gump on an IQ test, but after a night's conversation you'd probably be convinced he's smarter than either of us. Then there are all the other 'emotional IQs' and 'social IQs' and everything else. But really it's that Michael Polanyi tacit dimension stuff that computers suck at.

And computers are particularly great at games, right? I mean, that's their bread and butter. Closed systems, complete rulesets, no unknowns, just deduce and win. But we're still a long, long way away from a computer that can beat LeBron at 1 on 1 or play center field better than a toddler, never mind better than Willie Mays. And that's in a closed-system, pre-defined space with a finite and complete ruleset. The type of thing computers are actually good at.

So without a good theory of mind, and without being able to prove that even the simplest organisms with nervous systems can be simulated by cpu, we're just jumping to the conclusion that if you get enough FLOPs happening in a processor you'll hit some undefined thing called "human village idiot level?" I doubt it. But let's move on.

2. is programmed with the goal of improving its own intelligence.

Again, you have to do at least three things for me to even care to begin to think about entertaining the idea of worrying about this. First, you have to define intelligence for me in a universal and uncontroversial/contestable way that can be completely translated into code and run by software on existing hardware. Second, that definition has to allow for some sort of universal quantification or means to identify qualitative improvements--and they have to be in intelligence generally, not just figuring out how to more efficiently run up a score or win a game with a closed rule-set. Thirdly, that definition must allow for some kind of changes in the software implementation that would lead to such a qualitative or quantitative "increase in intelligence." Fourth, a program would have to be written that searches for and implements such increases. And finally, there has to be no or nearly no mathematical 'cap' on those increases. It needs to reach absurd IQ scores thousands of standard deviations away from the human population, and we have to agree that IQ is real intelligence and not a closed-system-game at which a program can run-up the score.

There's a lot of real, major, fundamental problems there I do not see being solved any time soon. I mean, very fundamental problems in physiology, biology, biochemistry, psychology, sociology, physics, and several other fields have to be solved before this is even within the realm of possibility.

3. Once it does, it’s smarter—maybe at this point it’s at Einstein’s level

What the hell does this mean? How does one define smarter? I'm sure Einstein didn't have the highest IQ in the world. He did read Parmenides and imagine a monist world where space and time are the same thing--and through that developed a theory that has held up incredibly well to empirical scrutiny. That's some brilliant stuff. But he was also a mediocre violinist and never learned to drive. So exactly how far is "Einstein level" above "Village Idiot Level," and why? Again, they seem to want to conceptualize human intelligence like a points system in a video game, but all my worldly experience tells me that's wrong.


4. so now when it works to improve its intelligence, with an Einstein-level intellect, it has an easier time and it can make bigger leaps.

Again, nothing in my empirical experience leads me to believe that this makes any sense. Einstein might have been better at violin at 20 than at 50, even if he was better at physics at 50 than 20. Or visa-versa. As he discovered more in one field, it doesn't mean that learning new things in other fields became easier. That's almost never the case. You can study Russian for 10 years and become fluent, but if I drop you in Japan, will that mean you learn Japanese any faster? Maybe a bit. But probably very little. And that's literally repeating the same skill. Now switch the skill. Say you study Russian for 10 years and become fluent, but now I hand you a snap-on toolbox and ask you to disassemble and reassemble a Toyota Corolla. Or I hand you a piano and ask you to play me Chopin's Nocturne in E Minor, Op. 71 No. 1. Or I hand you a notebook and ask you to draw me a perfect pencil sketch of the Grand Canyon, or I hand you a puppy and ask you to train it, or I hand you patient with congestive heart faillure and ask you to operate. How much does any one of these skills really overlap with the other? Does "being more intelligent" at one thing matter for another thing?

If there is a fetish for the modern age it is for intelligence, for efficiency, and for economy. We mistake these things for virtues. In some situations, they may be. But they are not universally good. Nor are they easy to pin down and quantify.

Here's another statement from that article that I consider just plain wrong:

Here’s something we know. Building a computer as powerful as the brain is possible—our own brain’s evolution is proof.

No. What the hell does "powerful" even mean here? How the hell do you measure it? By FLOPs? Why? Who says that's the right measurement? How does the fact that a brain evolved "prove" that you can use rational-deductive software code through a central processing unit to emulate a brain? I mean, this is either the height of hubris or totally foolish--maybe both.

Here's some more:

The brain is locked into its size by the shape of our skulls, and it couldn’t get much bigger anyway,

And what evidence from biology do we have that brain size correlates with intelligence? Even within a species, are Great Danes two orders of magnitude more intelligent than Chihuahuas? Size really isn't everything here...

The brain’s neurons max out at around 200 Hz, while today’s microprocessors (which are much slower than they will be when we reach AGI) run at 2 GHz, or 10 million times faster than our neurons.

Who cares? You know what else runs at around 200 Hz? The piano string vibration from hitting the G two to the left of Middle C on the piano. That's 196 and the A next to it is 220. And guess what? The G that's two in the other direction runs at about 740 Hz, or nearly 4 times faster than the human brain's neurons! But I'm not worried about my piano coming to life either.

It’s not only the memories of a computer that would be more precise. Computer transistors are more accurate than biological neurons, and they’re less likely to deteriorate (and can be repaired or replaced if they do). Human brains also get fatigued easily, while computers can run nonstop, at peak performance, 24/7.

This assumes that the biological memory is in any way analogous to computer memory (remember we named the later after the former only by chance, we may as well have called it "carving" because it carved the data into a hard-drive like the babylonians carved cuneiform into stone, there's nothing inherently at all like actual "memory" about it, save for its name. If we had named it computer carvings and random access carvings and hard drive carvings instead, maybe this would not be so confusing to people).

And why in the living hell would you compare neurons to transistors like that? Why not compare apples and oranges? Or stars and bananas? Or cats and spoons?

Humans crush all other species at building a vast collective intelligence. Beginning with the development of language and the forming of large, dense communities, advancing through the inventions of writing and printing, and now intensified through tools like the internet, humanity’s collective intelligence is one of the major reasons we’ve been able to get so far ahead of all other species. And computers will be way better at it than we are. A worldwide network of AI running a particular program could regularly sync with itself so that anything any one computer learned would be instantly uploaded to all other computers. The group could also take on one goal as a unit, because there wouldn’t necessarily be dissenting opinions and motivations and self-interest, like we have within the human population.

Are "we" really getting "ahead" of all other species? I mean, I've done enough of this, but you can see probably 100 things I'd find wrong with this paragraph...

a chimp can become familiar with what a human is and what a skyscraper is, but he’ll never be able to understand that the skyscraper was built by humans. In his world, anything that huge is part of nature, period

Prove it. Pretty sure if you let a chimp watch a skyscraper being constructed, it'll know pretty well who built it. Don't think it's going to mistake cold 90 degree steel for a tree. I built a new wooden chair and put it in my back yard. I also planted a new tree back there. Dog knew without me telling him which one was fair game to pee on. And he's no chimp...

I depicted the range of biological cognitive capacity using a staircase

And I could depict a range of behaviors of a hydrogen atom using a ballerina's tutu. I also wouldn't have any theoretical or empirical justification for doing so. But it might look cool...

An ant is more conscious than a bacterium, a chicken more than an ant, a monkey more than a chicken, and a human more than a monkey. But what’s above us?

A) Definitely something, and B) Nothing we can understand better than a monkey can understand our world and how we think.

How the hell do I know if a chicken is "more conscious" than an ant?

As far as "definitely something; nothing we can understand" goes, I preferred it the old fashioned way:

Per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso
est tibi Deo Patri omnipotenti,
in unitate Spritus Sancti,
omnis honor et gloria,
per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
Amen.

a machine might take years to rise from the chimp step to the one above it, but perhaps only hours to jump up a step once it’s on the dark green step two above us, and by the time it’s ten steps above us, it might be jumping up in four-step leaps every second that goes by. Which is why we need to realize that it’s distinctly possible that very shortly after the big news story about the first machine reaching human-level AGI, we might be facing the reality of coexisting on the Earth with something that’s here on the staircase (or maybe a million times higher)

Just let me illustrate how silly the example is if you take the premise of the "staircase of consciousness" to be as silly as the premise of the "tutu of hydrogen atoms:"

A hydrogen atom might take years to rise from the skirt to the tacking of the tutu, but perhaps only hours to jump up to the basque once's it's on the torso, a step or two above us, and by the time it's 10 steps above us, it might be jumping up in four-step leaps every second that goes by. Which is why we need to realize that it's distinctly possible that very shortly after the big news story about the first hydrogen atom reaching the skirt-level of the tutu, we might be facing the reality of coexisting on the Earth with something that's here on the tutu (or maybe a million times higher)

And since we just established that it’s a hopeless activity to try to understand the power of a machine only two steps above us, let’s very concretely state once and for all that there is no way to know what ASI will do or what the consequences will be for us. Anyone who pretends otherwise doesn’t understand what superintelligence means.

I prefer the old way again, maybe Romans 11:33: "O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!"

maybe the way evolution works is that intelligence creeps up more and more until it hits the level where it’s capable of creating machine superintelligence, and that level is like a tripwire that triggers a worldwide game-changing explosion that determines a new future for all living things

And maybe if I put a hotdog on a stick and hold it out my window a fire-breathing dragon will fly by and roast it for me. But I wouldn't count on it.

A separate study, conducted recently by author James Barrat at Ben Goertzel’s annual AGI Conference, did away with percentages and simply asked when participants thought AGI would be achieved—by 2030, by 2050, by 2100, after 2100, or never.

This is like performing a poll at a fundamentalist millenarian conference about the date of the second coming of Christ. And I bet you the results would look almost identical. And, what's more, I bet in the 1990s it was by 2020, and in the 1980s it was by 2000 or 2010, so on and so forth, just always a little bit over the horizon, like all millenarian promises.

By 2030: 42% of respondents

By 2050: 25%

By 2100: 20%

After 2100: 10%

Never: 2%

I mean, from here on out the article ceases to make any new claims really and just speculates on what life will be like after the rapture. So as a non-believer, I'm totally uninterested in that. I'm way more interested in the evidence that's meant to convince me that the rapture cometh.

Because maybe you are right. Maybe the center cannot hold.

But I bet you this much:

The rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, when his hour comes round at last, won't look anything like this.

[jk]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

lol, loved your reply.

i think there's a lot of misdirection when people even talk about ai. searle's chinese room, for example, is like a magic trick- you watch over HERE but the action's over (there).. because there is a human in that scenario, we focus on the human. but all the intelligence, and even consciousness under some definition, resides in the code book.

for me it is clear that a chicken is at a higher level of intelligence than a single ant. [bigger behavioral repertoire, more varied responses to environmental stimuli, etc] a more interesting question is whether a chicken is at a higher level of intelligence than an ant colony. doug hofstadter had an ant colony character in one of the sketches in godel, escher, bach. a storm came and disrupted the colony and it re-organized into a different character.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

lol, loved your reply.

i think there's a lot of misdirection when people even talk about ai. searle's chinese room, for example, is like a magic trick- you watch over HERE but the action's over (there).. because there is a human in that scenario, we focus on the human. but all the intelligence, and even consciousness under some definition, resides in the code book.

for me it is clear that a chicken is at a higher level of intelligence than a single ant. [bigger behavioral repertoire, more varied responses to environmental stimuli, etc] a more interesting question is whether a chicken is at a higher level of intelligence than an ant colony. doug hofstadter had an ant colony character in one of the sketches in godel, escher, bach. a storm came and disrupted the colony and it re-organized into a different character.

Hehe yeah, easy to get me going with this stuff. Way too flavor of the month--too often run into problems basically discussed and solved by ancient greeks repackaged and rephrased now with computers.

But there was a bit of sleight of hand even in that article. The ant/chicken stuff was about levels of consciousness--which I presume to be something different from levels of intelligence--but I'm not sure why or whether we should be conceptualizing consciousness in 'levels,' outside of some narrow application like the clinical use of the Glasgow Coma Scale. Nor am I sure what 'more consciousness' means precisely. So I'm really not sure whether a chicken is 'more conscious' than an ant. Maybe by some definition/metric combo, but I'm not sure which.

Seems like maybe cognition was the word the author was grasping for? I'm not certain.

And I have no clue how ants conceptualize the world around them. But I did see this a couple years ago when it came out [pdf]. And so maybe they're at a "higher level" of consciousness than we'd think. Who knows?

[Techdread]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

dcarrigg You are so way out of your depth here.

One invention popularised by Apple released in late 2007 has revolutionised how we humans interface with the computers, one of my kids under two can operate computer she cant read but if you say to hear open the night garden she knows were to swipe and launch the app.

I have seen youngsters aged four operate computers by touch and voice and learn how to build things, from watching kids youtube.

Older adults whom computers were hard to operate I notice easily search for information they need after minutes of training this has only been achieved in the last decade if even couple of years with smartphones on contract, three of my baby boomer relatives have fitbits which they interface with their phones to manage their sleep and make sure they get enough exercise, I do the same with food apps so I can keep my weight in check, this is the biometric data when we have better sensors that drug companies will be paying for.

Google's ChromeBook has been a boon for me for as i know longer have to service malware ridden Windows laptops for the less tech savvy of my relatives.

Everyone I know has good contact sending photo's and messages through Whatsapp, when a baby is born or an important event through friends whom live in other countries this invaluable.

Just Deepmind which is part of Google is worth losing $10 billion dollars a year, their goal is a bigger moonshot then the Atom bomb & Space race combined, they made China sit up and notice and take action. I read most of their papers,
They want to be first to achieve strong AGI and have been actively building the team of researcher's, publishing papers and giving their parent company titbits of their research WaveNet is an example.

I can't say it enough people are underestimating what these new technologies are going to bring, these prediction machines will change are economy more than all the previous revolutions combined, there might be times when they look like they have hit a brick wall but from the mountains of papers I have looked at there is too rich of search space for their not to be some progress in the same way as silicon has compute power has been increasing for 40 years. AI research which Turing started has become self reinforcing.

As a software engineers Microsoft's VS Code has been one of the biggest software release of the last 3 Years, it's free by the way.

Software as a service is the right way to go for the user, upgrades should be seamless and the compute power/storage should be distributed through the cloud and client. I store things that I may lose in a house fire or equipment failure in the with two cloud providers, because I came to realisation that data is more important than the equipment or shrink wrapped software.

I mean if you a company why not let Amazon, Google or Microsoft take the risk of keeping your data safe, hell Amazon with its cloud database will tick some drug companies certification, let them do the hard work. Consumers/Businesses should not be worrying about data storage in a connected world & application upgrades should be seamless.

IOT is also underrated, I have seen drones combined with AI (the image classification kind) drastically reduce pesticide use on crops. Smart meters are being rolled out nationwide to reduce water and energy use in the UK.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

dcarrigg You are so way out of your depth here.

One invention popularised by Apple released in late 2007 has revolutionised how we humans interface with the computers, one of my kids under two can operate computer she cant read but if you say to hear open the night garden she knows were to swipe and launch the app.

I have seen youngsters aged four operate computers by touch and voice and learn how to build things, from watching kids youtube.

Older adults whom computers were hard to operate I notice easily search for information they need after minutes of training this has only been achieved in the last decade if even couple of years with smartphones on contract, three of my baby boomer relatives have fitbits which they interface with their phones to manage their sleep and make sure they get enough exercise, I do the same with food apps so I can keep my weight in check, this is the biometric data when we have better sensors that drug companies will be paying for.

Google's ChromeBook has been a boon for me for as i know longer have to service malware ridden Windows laptops for the less tech savvy of my relatives.

Everyone I know has good contact sending photo's and messages through Whatsapp, when a baby is born or an important event through friends whom live in other countries this invaluable.

Just Deepmind which is part of Google is worth losing $10 billion dollars a year, their goal is a bigger moonshot then the Atom bomb & Space race combined, they made China sit up and notice and take action. I read most of their papers,
They want to be first to achieve strong AGI and have been actively building the team of researcher's, publishing papers and giving their parent company titbits of their research WaveNet is an example.

I can't say it enough people are underestimating what these new technologies are going to bring, these prediction machines will change are economy more than all the previous revolutions combined, there might be times when they look like they have hit a brick wall but from the mountains of papers I have looked at there is too rich of search space for their not to be some progress in the same way as silicon has compute power has been increasing for 40 years. AI research which Turing started has become self reinforcing.

As a software engineers Microsoft's VS Code has been one of the biggest software release of the last 3 Years, it's free by the way.

Software as a service is the right way to go for the user, upgrades should be seamless and the compute power/storage should be distributed through the cloud and client. I store things that I may lose in a house fire or equipment failure in the with two cloud providers, because I came to realisation that data is more important than the equipment or shrink wrapped software.

I mean if you a company why not let Amazon, Google or Microsoft take the risk of keeping your data safe, hell Amazon with its cloud database will tick some drug companies certification, let them do the hard work. Consumers/Businesses should not be worrying about data storage in a connected world & application upgrades should be seamless.

IOT is also underrated, I have seen drones combined with AI (the image classification kind) drastically reduce pesticide use on crops. Smart meters are being rolled out nationwide to reduce water and energy use in the UK.

I don't know. Maybe you're right. Time will tell. But I'm not impressed. We were rolling out smartmeters before the great recession. They're no better now than they were then. Lots of tech has improved. LEDs have gotten better. Solar panels have made big strides in the past couple years--a lot more watts per panel, much better inverter technology, real improvements. But I don't see the leaps in personal computing that you do. The iphone of 2018 does not seem leaps and leaps above the iphone of 2008 or 09 to me. It really doesn't.


Whatsapp is 9 years old now. Things moved fast for a while. Now they crawl. For 10 years they've been promising all these things are coming by 2020...now it's 2030...soon it will be 2040. But from my end, I'm just not seeing much improvement. At all. If anything, this is the slowest 10 years I've seen in tech and computing since I've been alive. Every other decade showed me more in-home commercial advances than this one, which just seems to be about monetizing and making user experience worse, not better.

Maybe SaaS makes sense for businesses who can write off the operating costs. But for a consumer, it feels like just more ways to screw you over with nickel-and-dime BS and auto-renewing subscriptions and petty monthly fees for $0.99 and $1.99 all over the place that nobody wants to remember to pay. I mean, Google used to grow with me. When it first came out with gmail and 1gb of free storage, I hopped on board gladly. Told everyone I knew how great it was. And the next year they upped it to 2gb. Then 4 and 5. Until they stopped two years ago at 15gb. It doesn't grow with you any more. Now you have to delete all your stuff or pay $1.99/mo. So for the first time in a decade, I started looking for alternatives. I didn't mind trading all my data and dealing with the obnoxious advertising in exchange for the service. But now you're going to make me have to remember to pay $1.99 every month? Forget it. Not worth my time or money to also give them all my data and advertise to me. That's like paying for premium channels and still having to watch commercials. If I'm going to pay, I'd rather get privacy and an ad-free experience with it too.

But really, I would have much rather that they just said, "Give us $100 or $150 one time, and we'll keep growing with you for another decade." At least that's a one-time payment I can make once and not have to worry about it anymore. I don't need 1,000 different programs I use to each be charging me micro-transaction monthly fees that I have to all keep track of. It's totally obnoxious--the whole SaaS experience is like driving down the Garden State Parkway back in the day where you couldn't go three miles without having to throw a couple dimes in the toll. Super annoying. Not better. Worse.

[touchring]

Re: Anyone watching the emerging markets?

I mean if you a company why not let Amazon, Google or Microsoft take the risk of keeping your data safe, hell Amazon with its cloud database will tick some drug companies certification, let them do the hard work. Consumers/Businesses should not be worrying about data storage in a connected world & application upgrades should be seamless.

I don't trust cloud service completely. It's simple, the hack will be from within. A high position engineer or even VP working in Amazon or Microsoft with high level access rights maybe involved. Or the malware may even be hidden in the chipset.