From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sun Apr 07 2002 - 14:13:38 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
>
>
>>On the contrary, even with a good human model in hand, you
>>would be hard-pressed to find the hardware to run it.
>>
>
> Not really. That was the precise point of my posts on Kazaa DC effort.
> You could buy access to sufficient processing capacity ~1 petaflop
> by buying a controlling share of the company (currently ~$3 million).
> It would most likely be a slower-than real time simulation due to
> the fact that many of those computers are probably on dial-ups.
> But as soon as the balance shifts in favor of DSL, cable, optic
> (company or university), or even 3-4G wireless (wouldn't it be
> ironic if the AI emerged from our handhelds and cellphones...)
> you are going to have the bandwidth to ratchet up the simulation
> clock rate.
There are a lot of buried "ifs" in there. At dialup or even
ADSL speeds distributed all over the country (or broader) such a
beast would run so atrociously s-l-o-w as to be useless as far
as I see. It is difficult to do decidely mundane computational
task on such a network with adequate performance. Just adding
more computers does not drastically increase the amount of
useful work accomplished for all types of problems.
> It is going to become necessary to only install software which
> has been vetted by a "reliable" (presumably 3rd party) security
> focused organization and only accept licenses where the software
> distributor accepts liability for any damage the software might do.
>
> We live in very scary times.
Not half so scary as this and certainly not justifying such
draconian methods. Please do not give aid and comfort to the
control freaks at large in position to do considerable damage
today. This is a much greater *immediate* danger to all of us
than the scenario you paint.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:18 MST