The troubling stat for me was towards the end with the stat that by 2013, a computer will be built that will exceed the computational capability of the human brain. It’s not too far a step to imagine the capabilities of AI after that happens…

boggles the mind. mine anyway

Yesterday i read an article in the paper that was discussing how India will be producing the world’s cheapest car at a base price of $2500…. The crisis is that this will allow many more the luxury of purchasing a car and with that an increase in emissions and pollution. We are slowly killing ourselves.

I think that what is not being taken into consideration is the ability of the planet to sustain such growth. Human population alone is putting such a strain on vital ecosystems that support our life, it may look quite bleak for the billions of world poor by 2020 (a random future date in which the human race will likely plateau) if things do not change socially and environmentally.

Wow, that’s just wow. I cant think of any other words than wow and woah.

Is there no limit as to how small we can be made to feel. So much connection and yet so many more lonely people. My time at the lake with no computer is my real life time. I suck up the view and fill my mind, heart and soul.

Thank God for books-the last concrete words. Funny though, no matter how many words come out of ones mouth, the eyes and expression remain constant. Liked the music on video though.

“If Myspace were a country it would be the 11th largest in the world.”

It would also be the dumbest and most annoying country in the world. Their constitution would be written on some stupid picture of a ‘fallen angel’ that they think looks “totally badass”, thus making the black text impossible to read. You wouldn’t be able to turn your head without seeing a picture slide show of shit you don’t care about, and no matter where you go, there would always be punk/metal music playing. Their biggest export would be bad poetry, while their biggest import would be spiked bracelets. Their national flag would probably be black with Jack Skellington’s face on it, and there would be no state religion because religion apparently “causes all war.”

As for the video itself, I found it extremely interesting. With regards to the future predictions, I agree with viewership that it’s hard to take any of them really seriously, especially the long term ones. After all, aren’t we supposed to have jet packs, regular space travel (for civilians), and wise-cracking robot companions by now?

Please note: I actually like The Nightmare Before Christmas, so hopefully nobody will take my stereotypical nation of MySpace too seriously…unless my description sounded a lot like your MySpace page…in that case, I was totally making fun of your page. No hard feelings though.

when all this technology lets us send the first manned mission to Jupiter, let’s not name the AI computer on board HAL.

Quoting Nothingman:

“If Myspace were a country it would be the 11th largest in the world.”

It would also be the dumbest and most annoying country in the world. Their constitution would be written on some stupid picture of a ‘fallen angel’ that they think looks “totally badass”, thus making the black text impossible to read. You wouldn’t be able to turn your head without seeing a picture slide show of shit you don’t care about, and no matter where you go, there would always be punk/metal music playing. Their biggest export would be bad poetry, while their biggest import would be spiked bracelets. Their national flag would probably be black with Jack Skellington’s face on it, and there would be no state religion because religion apparently “causes all war.”

Don’t forget all the bands that would start spamming the immigration department for visas!

(Your comment totally takes the cake. :)

Quoting viewership:

It was interesting up until the end when they threw in those predictions about computers. Those kinds of predictions need to be taken with a grain of salt and are often looked back upon as laughable. How can someone tell you what will be invented 30 years from now? And if there is a computer created that exceeds the computational power of the human brain or even race, that does not mean artificial intelligence will be any better. That’s all in the programming and we’re nowhere near close to figure ourselves out yet.

The founder of IBM once said back in the 60’s I think, “There may be a market for 5 personal computers in the world.”
At least I think it was 5….
Regardless, I think he was a little off

that just gave me a head ache.

Quoting elle:

Try shifting the each of the letters in the word HAL forward by one each in the alphabet and see what new word you get. Coincidence? Not in a Stanley Kubrick film.

Holy fuck.

A computer’s computational capacity already exceeds that of humans; this shouldn’t come as a surprise. A simple calculator exceeds our capacity (how many decimal places of pi or the natural logarithm can anyone recite?). As for a computer’s ability to learn, to develop cognitive skills prevalent in the youngest of children, or to replicate sensory information gathered by humans, is quite limited. A computer is a box with its intelligence instructed by a human. It’s simple. Just as there is no such thing as a stupid computer, only a stupid instruction set, there is no such thing as a smart computer. There are a few long stretches in this video, particularly towards the end. None-the-less, there were some fascinating statistics.

Quoting martelc:

A computer’s computational capacity already exceeds that of humans; this shouldn’t come as a surprise. A simple calculator exceeds our capacity (how many decimal places of pi or the natural logarithm can anyone recite?). As for a computer’s ability to learn, to develop cognitive skills prevalent in the youngest of children, or to replicate sensory information gathered by humans, is quite limited. A computer is a box with its intelligence instructed by a human. It’s simple. Just as there is no such thing as a stupid computer, only a stupid instruction set, there is no such thing as a smart computer. There are a few long stretches in this video, particularly towards the end. None-the-less, there were some fascinating statistics.

I believe the computational capacity of the computer referred to here is that of calculations per second. In that department the human brain is supposedly still faster. Surely there are things at which computers are many times better and faster, but luckily the reverse holds too. As viewership already mentioned, computational power is not everything, it is also about what you do with that power. As Ray Kurzweil has been mentioned already, he believes that the way to go is to reverse engineer the human brain, and implement that in the (soon to be) much faster world of electronics. Interesting idea, to say the least.

Everything that has to do with the internet and such is taking over everybodys lives….sure some of it awsome (matthewgood.org, etc). but then there is the other bits that are completely useless.

ps. i am apart of the myspace nation

PSS. This was posted from a Nintendo Wii !!!

off topic:

I come home from my morning class, turn on the idiot box, and lo and behold: AG Seedy Gonzales is resigning.

One more rat deserts in a cloud of smoke, shit, and lies.

Quoting TomKr:

I believe the computational capacity of the computer referred to here is that of calculations per second. In that department the human brain is supposedly still faster. Surely there are things at which computers are many times better and faster, but luckily the reverse holds too. As viewership already mentioned, computational power is not everything, it is also about what you do with that power. As Ray Kurzweil has been mentioned already, he believes that the way to go is to reverse engineer the human brain, and implement that in the (soon to be) much faster world of electronics. Interesting idea, to say the least.

There are more calculations than just math.

Think about when you catch a football. You calculate it’s velocity, trajectory, compensate for gravity, wind. You position your body in such a way to catch it, adjust your hands to grab it. Every one of those tiny adjustments in your body is a careful calculation. We don’t even think about them, and it happens within the fraction of a second.

i slowly became more and more troubled by that.

Quoting Dale McShannock:

I knew about the computational power of a computer exceeding that of our entire race, thanks to Ray Kurzwel and the Age of Spiritual Machines.
But there is some crazy stuff there.

He has a new one out entitled “The Singularity is Near” — the focus of the introduction is entirely devoted to exponential growth. A must read for anyone in the market for a computer, or for anyone who just purchased one and wishes to calculate its looming obsolesence

Quoting patrick bell:

bibliography???

Apt! Apt! Context is everything. Epic music does not constitute truth. At least not here.

I have to wade in on the computational powers stats. The predictions about out-pacing the human brain or the human race sound pretty scary. I do not think they are and here is why:

As indicated in many comments above. Intelligence and “calculations per second” are not the same thing. The creation of an intelligent machine and the improvement in computational speed are two entirely separate endeavors. Certainly, if we attain the first, the second will come in handy, but no serious headway has even been made at creating intelligent machines.

As way of example I give you Kasparov vs. Deep Blue

Since early on in computing the game of Chess was thought of a bit as the holy grail of artificial intelligence. The idea being that playing the highly complex game of chess at a high level represented an excellent example of human intelligence. If a computer could be built that could beat a human chess master we would be well on our way to having intelligent learning machines.

In 1997 IBM’s Deep Blue computer took on reigning champion Kasparov in a much publicized battle. Deep Blue won two games, Kasparov won one, and they played to three draws.

In my opinion the match did more to demonstrate how amazing the human mind is and how far we are from recreating it than anything else. Why? Well because Deep Blue did not exhibit intelligence, it’s just a really fast abacus.

While there was certainly really cool computer science behind Deep Blue it basically played chess by brute force. Before it ever made a move it compared the board to it’s massive database of billions of games to determine the move most likely to result in a victory. It “learned” every time it played, which basically meant it added more games to its database.

Human beings do not play chess like that at all. What I find so amazing about the whole process is that any human being could stand up to that at all. I have read a few different descriptions from champions about how they decide on a move, but what it comes down to is that we have no idea how our heads work. Kasparov certainly pulled from a great deal of experience, and has a lot of that experience embedded in his memory, but ultimately he simply develops a feel or an intuition about the correct move. Deep Blue doesn’t do anything like that and it is a testament to what human beings can accomplish.

So it doesn’t matter if a computer is sitting on your desktop that represents more computational power than the entire human race combined. Until we make the leap to creating intelligent machines all the thing is going to do is sit there being a stupid box. Waiting for us to ask it what 2 plus 2 is, at which point it will tell us 4 with remarkable speed and precision.

100 years ago, the average # of unique adult female vaginas a North American male saw in his lifetime was 2.4. In 2007, thanks to internet porn, the average 18-year old North American male will see 300 million unique adult female vaginas in his lifetime.

Ok i totally just made all that shit up.

dviestating, I felt like a retard trying to keep up, as I’m reading this to my mom. it just makes you wonder how worthlessly fragile,lazy,stupid (compared to others kids) and small we are. not only to other people, but to thw world in general… and then of course

Quoting viewership:

It was interesting up until the end when they threw in those predictions about computers. Those kinds of predictions need to be taken with a grain of salt and are often looked back upon as laughable. How can someone tell you what will be invented 30 years from now? And if there is a computer created that exceeds the computational power of the human brain or even race, that does not mean artificial intelligence will be any better. That’s all in the programming and we’re nowhere near close to figure ourselves out yet.

I agree… that was alittle rediclous, I’d rather have a world nuked to death then see it be tooken over by robots, (a crazy, yet, bevliveable common preidction.) and speaking of, the robot thing is overdone… so is the rest of this artcle merely asumtions? wheres the reasereach backup proof?

Quoting filbertfancy:

Is there no limit as to how small we can be made to feel. So much connection and yet so many more lonely people. My time at the lake with no computer is my real life time. I suck up the view and fill my mind, heart and soul.

it’s shameful, the rest of the world is too busy fighting there own wars to take time and try to feel the same way.

as for the rest of us? we don’t get the chance

Quoting whowouldeverwanttobeinaband:

watching this particular presentation leaves me with one question, pertaining individually to both subjects: what is there to do? it has been known for years that the rate at which computive technology develops doubles every two years; yet this is found only to be beneficial for various tasks, ranging from research to cold mathematics, to pornography, to this very forum. we have also known, perhaps intuitively, perhaps not, that with ever more people populating our world the rate of reproduction is sure to increase. the astronomical populations of both china and india were taught to me in grade 4, and, surely enough, have grown since, similarly to the populations of europe, north america, africa, south america and australia, along with the rest of asia. granted, both issues are gravely concerning, and both issues further compound themselves by the second. along with climate change, which oddly enough seemed to be skipped by this particular film, these two topics round out our current global conundrum: problems we recognize but to which we remain unwilling to change to control. granted, i have a computer, a son and a car, but what the main issue is continues to be excess.

chinese and indian population and how that has affected global ecomony is a decoy. the recent lucidation of the impending event is meant only to scare the US out of their credit card debt they cant pay to keep “the centre of the economic world” in new york city. however, 180,000 mortgages defaulted this month and more federal debt interest than they can pay with every penny of tax revenue the hull is broke and there’s too much water to bail.

those who have been kind enough to point out that computers are only as good as the programs they run are, simply, correct. to worry about the number of 1’s or 0’s that travel through a given cpu per second is like worrying about how many rice are in your bowl. thus, whether its a faster processor or fibre optic internet unless someone programs somthing vastly ahead of its time very soon, we will get to google negligably quicker than right now.

without trying to beat a dead horse, the mindset that has led to the mortgage crash last week and the idea that anyone really cares about computers surfing faster than we can blink is the root of all three problems. since all three are far beyond the point where we, socially, could possibly counter their effects before impact, we must instead learn both how to stem the rising tide and adapt to our new circumstance. whether or not enough people can be made to realize this in time is our key.

and; while i did enjoy the video itself as a discussion point, i feel it was overtly sensational to be taken as anything more than a vague census and a nerd wishlist. but; so be it

Ramble much?