Buffy

Nothing without clicking. And forcing people to click is obnoxious and isn't tolerated here. Summarize the main points and describe your issue. AFTER that you might put in a link for reference. Thank you for your cooperation.

Moderator's note: If you don't back up these claims pretty darn quick, it will be demoted from even Strange Claims.... Welcome to Hypography! But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are, :phones: Buffy

This reminds me of the story about the guy who was disturbed about the fact that telegraphs delivered news so quickly. "Think of the disruption to commerce and mental disturbance caused by so many learning of the assassination of President Lincoln!" he proclaimed. "We should force telegraph offices to be placed only far outside of cities so that such catastrophic news is disseminated gradually." Seriously, the described cell phone does nothing about it's main problem: that the boss thinks you're available 24x7 and also on vacation. I've also noticed that families or couples who spend dinner staring at their phones is the symptom, not the cause, of relationship and discipline problems, but people who are not good at dealing with each other love this as an excuse for why. So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run. :phones: Buffy

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For the first half, a bunch of us were sure that Croatia was throwing the match to Russia, and we were all wondering how big Putin's bribe was. Guess they got a guilty conscience or really couldn't abide losing to their former overlords. Yay! :cheer: Ding dong the witch is dead, :phones: Buffy

That's what the quote in my previous post is aaaaaalllllll about... ;) Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical, :phones: Buffy

Only ex-pats, world travelers (e.g. me), and the Latino community are watching much here, but at least every game is on teevee (although those of us on the West Coast have to get up at 3AM for the early rounds). Futbol is actually very big here across all cultural and ethnic groups except for the rural midwest, but it makes for lousy teevee, so it's not a popular *spectator* sport. The pro teams here can barely survive in urban areas (again, where the Latino community making it happen), but "youth soccer" is huge in the white suburbs: it's virtually a rite of passage for both boys and girls. But by high school, most kids go off to the traditional "American" sports of football, basketball, baseball, etc. I find that my enjoyment of it only occurred once I realized it's like auto racing: unless you really know the details of what is going on, it's *incredibly* boring. As much as I like it, I'm fine just watching the 2 minute highlights of a match because there's only 2 minutes out of 90 where anything actually happens that affects the outcome. The rest is just style. Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own, :phones: Buffy

Well, many of them will "learn" so if you correct "he'll" back to "hell" enough, it will leave it as "hell" all the time, and you'll have to be sure to put that apostrophe in manually when you *do* want it. Note that it's embedded in iOS, whereas on your Windows or Mac system, it's usually the app/browser that's doing the correcting. I've gotten my iPhone pretty well trained into letting me swear all the time. Do what I mean, not what I say, :phones: Buffy

Administrator's Note: The other copies of this post have been deleted. Reminder: Please do not cross-post the same item to multiple forums.

For a guy who's so wrapped up in insisting that all the assumptions about Special Relativity are wrong, it's pretty amazing that you have no clue as to the fact that what Dick is talking about here (and has discussed in detail in several dozen other threads in this forum), is precisely about disempowering assumptions, thus giving you the methodology to question the most persistent ones (an issue that Dick isn't concerned with, and I don't blame him: it's the theory itself that's interesting). If you'd bother to listen--and drop your assumptions--you might learn something from his work, and find it useful in your own crusade. To crooked eyes truth may wear a wry face, :phones: Buffy

Only if you don't allow feedback after training, and almost no one does this anymore. That means these systems are inherently NON-deterministic, because each run through a neural network path may cause a change in connections, and those changes are driven by insertion of a random number to pick the changes. Now the goal of using AI is to produce "generally convergent" behavior, but the problems that most people are trying to solve with AI include far more permutations of cases than initial training. That means that any particular input may throw the current state of the network into a state it hasn't seen before and force it to "try something new" no matter how small. This is a gross oversimplification of what actually happens, but it's pretty accurate. Even VonNeumann architectures can mimic this with full non-determinism, but we're starting to move the "hardware neural nets" and rediscovering the joys of analog architectures, with quantum mechanics thrown in not only for parallelism but for "true-random" non-deterministic sources. It's all pretty incredible, and if you haven't been watching it carefully, you'd be amazed at how different AI is than just 5 or 10 years ago. So, by removing your premise that it's all completely deterministic, that makes the question of "generating consciousness" not at all clear. The whole point in AI of using neural nets is that neurons are the fundamental building block of brains, and while those nets don't exactly work the same way--yet, watch this space!--they do provide a structure for dynamic self modification that we can see wetware brains doing. We don't understand either very well, but there's no justification for saying that what's being worked on cannot, under any circumstances produce what some people mean by "consciousness." And of course the fact that we can't really define "consciousness" in any precise way, means that "replicating it" is more a matter of artistic interpretation than analysis of facts. So.... Ay, there's the rub, :phones: Buffy

"AI" does not have any generally accepted definition, in fact much work in "AI" is going on where the participants are actually actively avoiding using the term, most notably autonomous weapons systems. People are scared to death of that (given our popular culture/movies), so the projects avoid anything that sounds like "AI Killer Robot." I mention that, because there is some "AI" that does just "follow its program," but this is getting rarer as those of us who work with the technology realize that learning systems utilizing feedback loops are far more effective in practice. With a neural network, I can tell you the methodology of the basic software, and how to go about training it, but it's virtually impossible to describe why it ends up doing what it does. This drives theoretical computer scientists nuts, because they can't come up with a proof for the software. This has many implications for reliability in the normal "mechanical" sense, but also in the cybernetic notion of the behavior going completely non-linear: that is, there ends up being no way of knowing how the system will behave. This gets even dicier when you not only have a feedback loop while in "training mode" but where the feedback loop is part of "operating mode." Siri and Alexa and other such service bots do exactly this, not only insofar as learning your voice better over time, but keeping track of what you ask for and knowing what you like, and then using that knowledge in conjunction with what it can access on the net to guess at things you *might* like. This just scratches the surface, but once you get very sophisticated feedback/learning systems, there's no telling what "AI" will do, or even if it's going to get to a point where it becomes "self-aware" or "has a "consciousness." The problem with those words is that yes, most people will say "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it," which means that it may be very difficult to perceive things that are just like "consciousness" but aren't the kind you recognize. I'd even make an argument that "consciousness" isn't a very useful term if we can't define it's attributes and behavior strictly. When you're close to the development, the magic that is appearing at the superficial level is somewhat disappointing, and predictions that "AI" will be just like Fusion--forever 20 years in the future--are pretty common. But we still work on it, because even the incremental improvements are pretty interesting and useful. Will it ever be "conscious?" Heck, I don't know, but my guess is actually "sure, why not?" Good luck kids! Your parents are playing with high explosives... There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact, :phones: Buffy

Your link was removed. Whether it was spam or a phishing link or a legitimate scientific paper, you aren't allowed to post links without relevant discussion. Quite frankly, no one will ever click on them because they'll assume you're trying to infect them. Thank you for your cooperation. Dark is dark in the darkness, :phones: Buffy

We do! :cheer: It's called "Feedback to Hypography" and it's the very last thing in the Forums list: Ask and ye shall find, :phones: Buffy

As i noted in the thread that prompted this, the forum software enforces "Title Case" in topic titles. Spaces, periods, dots, dashes, will all work. Why, then I will do what your grace commands, :phones: Buffy