From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Mon May 31 23:14:10 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA02418; Mon, 31 May 93 23:14:09 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA00759; Mon, 31 May 93 23:14:05 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu (5.65/4.0) id ; Tue, 1 Jun 93 02:07:02 -0400 Message-Id: <9306010607.AA06176@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: ExI-Daily@gnu.ai.mit.edu Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 02:06:30 -0400 X-Original-Message-Id: <9306010606.AA06169@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu> X-Original-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu From: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Extropians Digest V93 #0292 X-Extropian-Date: Remailed on June 1, 373 P.N.O. [06:07:00 UTC] Reply-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: OR Extropians Digest Tue, 1 Jun 93 Volume 93 : Issue 0292 Today's Topics: 1993 ISDC report [1 msgs] Chaitin, Holland, & AI [4 msgs] Contrapositive Crows [2 msgs] Extropian Death Rituals [1 msgs] MEDIA: UK R4 [1 msgs] Neologism(?): extroprenuer [2 msgs] Neural Nets and AI [1 msgs] New Brain Test: "Einstein einstein.... Penrose!" [1 msgs] OORT: Belt or Sea? [1 msgs] Only Tibet left after war [1 msgs] PGP: A paranoid scenario [1 msgs] Plaintive Request [1 msgs] Rejected by Custodian [1 msgs] SPACE: Fermi paradox, etc. -- probably dumb question [3 msgs] SPACE: Fermi paradox-Steent's objection [1 msgs] fetishism? [1 msgs] Administrivia: This is the digested version of the Extropian mailing list. Please remember that this list is private; messages must not be forwarded without their author's permission. 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Approximate Size: 51202 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 31 May 93 11:40:16 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: SPACE: Fermi paradox, etc. -- probably dumb question Stanton (thanks for the VPL stuff, BTW), you ask some good questions about aliens, but we rehashed them so many times most people (including me) are too exhausted to respond directly to the first round of questions. I've collected together a couple of posts I sent to a non-extropian, who was asking much the same questions which I feel answer most of your immediate concerns. I've added comments in []s. My current views are more in line with message 2 (the later one), where there is a conflict with message 1 ********** message 1 ****************** > I have thought for a while about the possibilities of intelligent > life elsewhere. Since I haven't seen any, I like to speculate > about what is going on. Here are my speculations; can you fill in > some more possibilities? There's a very good case made against the existence of alien intelligences in the Cosmological Anthropic Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler. Have you read it? The book's about 10 times as long as it need be, but still well worth reading. Much of my reasoning below is lifted straight from there. > There is no life elsewhere. The emergence of life on earth was a > once-per- universe event. Possibly, perhaps even probably. [now I would say, "possibly, but improbably" - see message 2] > > There is life elsewhere, but not intelligent life. Life can evolve > in many ways without producing intelligence. The emergence of > intelligence was a once-per-universe event. I've seen this argued, and I'm not sure. Best argument in favour would be something like: plants have not any made any serious attempts to evolve nervous systems. Perhaps the emergence in animals was a one-off fluke. But there again, perhaps animals filled the niche and blocked off plants. Maybe if animals hadn't evolved intelligence plants would have started thinking. Against all of this (and in favour of intelligence evolving) is the seeming fact that intelligence levels (in animals) seem to have fairly steady increased over the passage of aeons. > There is intelligent life elsewhere, but it is not interested in > trying to contact us. Curiosity or technology are not universal > aspects of intelligent life. This seems unlikely, to me. Most young mammals exhibit curiosity, therefore it must have survival value. As for technology, this seems like an unfilled niche with intelligence around. I'm sure any intelligent species would eventually radiate, culturally or biologically (eg whales grow tentacles), and fill the niche. > Intelligent life elsewhere is trying to contact us, but the distances > involved are too vast. But we should still see the associated environmental disruption (eg switching off stars, dyson spheres etc). See space probes bit at the end of post. > Perhaps all intelligent life evolved at pretty > much the same time, so we are on the universal forefront of SETI. This seems unlikely. We have evolved biologically over (say) 4 billion years, and emerged technologically over (say) the last million. I reckon we should have seriously disrupted the natural order of the galaxy (ie be visible to extragalactic observers) within a couple of million years via von Neumann space probes. Looking at the way stars and galaxies form we know of no reason why we could not have been say a couple of billion years older. If civilisations emerge fairly naturally this requires such a chronological coincidence as to be almost impossible. > Perhaps we evolved first. A distinct possibility. Tipler and Barrow argue that there is no dimensional link between the stellar and biological evolution timescales, originally proposed by Brandon Carter. Yet we are faced with the strange fact that we have evolved over a time scale comparable with the lifetime of the sun. This is a very strange coincidence. We would expect, prima facia, that they would have no connection and therefore differ by many orders of magnitude. ie that we would evolve on a planet with a sun with an expected life time many orders of magnitude longer than the time period we evolved over. The stellar timescales we can be fairly sure about, by observation of other stars. Biological timescales we only have one candidate for observation - so this is probably what's wrong. This argument is quite subtle, deep and powerful and took a while before I caught their drift. Their argument is that we can't make inferences about 'typical' biological evolution rates from our own past, because we may be very untypical, by virtue of being first. Perhaps we are the result of a long chain of lucky breaks that would 'normally' take much longer. Some suggestions (that I found interesting) they offer for past 'lucky breaks' are: photosynthesis & mitochondria, pro=>eukaryotic transition, vertebrates. But check the book for a whole host more. Another possibility is that life evolves fairly often but usually (ie 0.99999999... of the time) gets wiped out: eg - solar flares - asteroid strikes - unstable ecosystems. eg runaway oxygen concentration, permanent ice-age (the albedo goes into positive feedback), desert (the Mars scenario), pressure cooker (the Venus scenario). One idea I've heard mentioned in passing and would like to see fleshed out is that the moon has played a crucial role in maintaining the stability (and hence if the ecosystem) of the earth-moon system's orbit around the sun. After all, is it just a coincidence that we are the only bi-planetary set-up in the solar system? > Intelligent life elsewhere has contacted us, only we don't recognize > it. This might be because it is very small, or very large, or very > slow, or very fast, or very strange. very-small =/=> low biomass. There would just be more of them, by Malthus. very-large => why can't we see them? No, no, let me guess, their eggs are stars.. ? Nice idea, but I don't think so :-) very-slow => they won't have evolved yet. very-fast => how come we're still here? very-strange => who knows? > Intelligent life elsewhere has contacted us, but not all of us. > Maybe it has a "prime directive" not to interfere. Maybe it only > contacts certain people. Maybe the contact is very subtle > (unconscious thought implants ... uh oh, getting weird here). > > The universe is rotten with intelligent life, and has been for > billions of years. We are too stupid to recognize the signs. > > We are an experiment in how long it will take us to figure out that > it is not possible that there is no intelligent life elsewhere, and > that we are an experiment The last three paragraphs imply a degree of social homogeneity I find improbable in any intelligent, technologically mature culture. Looking at past trends humanity is diversifying as we grow wealthier and more powerful. This will continue as machine intelligences evolve. Frank Tipler's point about the self-replicating, intelligent space probe is that a civilisation (any civilisation) only has to create one of these once in its history and the future of the universe is changed irreversibly, as it diffuses from star to star, galaxy to galaxy at (say) .01 c, multiplying a billion-fold at each 'feeding' site. And that's ignoring 'planned' colonisation which would probably average at nearer .1c (I reckon). The geometric growth rates implied soon leads to a substantial fraction of the mass of the stellar environment ending up incorporated in space-probe 'bio'mass. As hydrogen fuel becomes scarce they might have to start switching off stars to conserve power. 10 million years, at most, and the galaxy will be unrecognisable. Carl Sagan has attempted to salvage the situation by proposing that police self-replicating probes could keep the numbers of rogue probes down, but they would be at such a competitive disadvantage that this is really silly. Darwinian selection, and all that. ********************* end of message 1 ******** ********************* message 2 ************ A short while back I thought, and argued, that the apparent absence of aliens in the universe indicated the occurrence of intelligent life must be a cosmological rarity. Recently I've come across a statistical argument [from Dani Eder on the extropians!] that's impressed me greatly and changed my views on ETs (although not SETI). The argument runs thus: The occurrence of space-faring civilisations is dependent on many, many factors. Thus the occurrence of such civilisations, across time, will be distributed on an approximately normal curve. Considering just our galaxy pick an arbitrary number for the number of civilisation we expect our galaxy to support (if they stayed at home). Say a million. As good as any other number. Now we need to guess a standard deviation for the galactic timescales involved. Say z = A billion years. Probably an underestimate, but what the hell. Next we have to find some stats tables that quote z for 1/1,000,000 rarity. [...] According to the z tables the first civilisation is expected to occur about 150 million years (.15z) before the second. More than enough time to expand through the galaxy and fill any niches before most life gets out of the sea. Apply the stats to a 100 million lightyear radius volume: My back-of- an-envelope calculation says this volume contains about a million galaxies, a trillion potential civilisations. Stats says the first civilisation precedes the second by 110 million years (.11z). Assuming Number 1 expands and colonises at speeds approaching light (via a combination of Bussard ramscoops and von Neumann probes [and rampant nanotechnology] ) then Number 1 gets the whole volume before encountering aliens [from a neighbouring 100-mil-lyr radius volume]. So, at a rough guess expect the nearest aliens be over a 100 million lightyears away from Number 1 when they start expansion. Obviously I've made some drastic assumptions above. Sigma for extra- galactic time scales is probably greater than for intra-galactic time scales. And the number of potential civilisations for a galaxy could be nearer a billion. But the argument is still valid. What do you think? -MCP ************************** > Stanton McCandlish Hope that's of some help. Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk AS member (21/3/93) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 1993 09:06:32 -0500 From: extr@jido.b30.ingr.com (Craig Presson) Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI In <9305310448.AA26859@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, "James A. Donald" writes: [...]|> |> Perception involves finding a description of sensory data in terms of objects |> and entities. You do not want a *good* interpretation - one with *few* |> absurdities and impossibilities. You want the *right* interpretation - the |> one with *no* absurdities and impossibilities. So, you're looking to do _better_ than humans, not just as well, hm? Actually, the fact that it's relatively easy to fool human visual perception is not encouraging to the would-be developers of machine vision systems, rather the opposite. I have no good way to dig up my old references on this[1], but they were pretty amazing. You can set up all kinds of 3D _trompe l'oeil_ with very simple objects. Of course these would constitute a very high-level test for a machine system. ^ / ------/---- extropy@jido.b30.ingr.com (Freeman Craig Presson) /AS 5/20/373 P.N.O. /ExI 4/373 P.N.O. ** E' and E-choice spoken here [1] I'm tired of having to say this -- see my next message. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 1993 09:19:08 -0500 From: extr@jido.b30.ingr.com (Craig Presson) Subject: Plaintive Request I'd like to start a Database of Everything on my PC. Well, that's an exaggeration, but after the last few frustrating trips to my bookshelves, or worse yet, my memory, in search of Supporting Facts and Cites for something, I have decided to get serious about secondary memory. I used to keep a deck of index cards, cataloged with the ACM classification scheme, for all of my CS reading. I would like to do something similar on my home PC, only more general, with links (conceptual graphs) and dynamic indexing. It sounds like I need either a hypertext system or an OODB, or something with aspects of both. Does anyone do this, or have suggestions for support software that would get me close? I don't object to a small amount of hackery, but I don't have time to build the whole thing. ^ / ------/---- extropy@jido.b30.ingr.com (Freeman Craig Presson) /AS 5/20/373 P.N.O. /ExI 4/373 P.N.O. ** E' and E-choice spoken here ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 31 May 1993 09:39:11 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: SPACE: Fermi paradox, etc. -- probably dumb question Price lists various explanations for the Fermi paradox. He misses out one important possibility The possibility that I would consider the second most likely possibility is that as life forms evolve, they become more complex, more fragile - more easily destroyed, and also more capable of destruction. Consequently population density becomes lower and lower, and life spans become longer and longer. It is possible that the dominant form of life in this galaxy has spaced itself to one individual or one small family per star system, as the maximum socially tolerable density, higher densities being likely to lead to destructive violence, and we are the equivalent of a beetle infestation in someone's backyard. In that case, when we start taking planets apart, the owner will respond with bug spray. The most likely possibility is extremely boring but more optimistic - that our planetary system is chemically abnormal (which it seems to be), that solar systems like it are rare (unknown) and in consequence planets with oxygen atmospheres are extremely rare. Obviously intelligence will be slow to evolve on a non oxygen planet, because there is little need to attack or defend. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves and our James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we | are. True law derives from this right, not from jamesdon@infoserv.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 31 May 1993 09:12:32 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI > > From: "James A. Donald" > > > > Perception involves finding a description of sensory data in > > terms of objects and entities. You do not want a *good* > > interpretation - one with *few* absurdities and impossibilities. > > You want the *right* interpretation - the one with *no* > > absurdities and impossibilities. In <9305310559.AA27117@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, davisd@pierce.ee.washington.edu wrote: > Phooey. You can have lots of absurdities, as long as they don't > prevent you from completing whatever task you have. Can you say > perceptual illusions? You also might wish to consider that there may > be more than one interpretatiowithout absurdidtes and ambiguities. In real scenes there is only one right interpretation. All others are not just a little bit wrong, they are totally off the wall. For simple microworlds computers have generated exhaustive lists of *good* interpretations, most of which a human would never imagine. All of the *good* interpretations were radically and fundamentally wrong, except for the one interpretation that was correct. That is the way sensory perception works. That is why it is hard for computers. There were no "almost right" interpretations except that in complex scenes with independent areas one area might be right and one area might be wrong. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves and our James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we | are. True law derives from this right, not from jamesdon@infoserv.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 31 May 1993 09:31:40 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: New Brain Test: "Einstein einstein.... Penrose!" In <9305310814.AA15797@albert.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu wrote: > With high speed hardware you can train/run NNs faster. Therefore > the hypothesis->result->refinement cycle works faster. Conclusion: > faster hardware will greatly help the research effort. Agreed. We are making progress - not progress in artificial intelligence, artificial awareness, or artificial perception, but progress in the tools and understanding that we will need to make real progress in those fields. I am not a pessimist, I am just anti bullshit. You do not escape from a prison by pretending there is a hole in the wall. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves and our James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we | are. True law derives from this right, not from jamesdon@infoserv.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 16:12:17 GMT From: bgrahame@eris.demon.co.uk (Robert D Grahame) Subject: MEDIA: UK R4 In article <9305311047.AA29878@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu> you write: >Date: Sun, 30 May 93 20:51:35 MDT >From: Stanton McCandlish >Subject: MEDIA: ExI: BBC Radio 4, 0905 2 June 93 >> Now why don't they make programmable radio/tape recorders like they do VCRs? >Perhaps some of the more entrepreneurial among you could find a niche >making programmable boomboxes? >Stanton McCandlish, SysOp: Noise in the Void DataCenter Library BBS Some of the new(ish) cheap 'psuedo-stack-system' stereos have this feature, luckily for me this includes my girlfriend's one. I do listen to R4 quite a bit in the mornings on the way to the office, but not after 09:00 unless the wondrous British Rail are attempting a new world record in chaotic scheduling that day. Privatising BR is about the only worthwhile policy our government has left, and I'm sure they'll find a way to screw even that up. :-( Last time I heard Midweek they were discussing personal finances with Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd! (He blew all his and the bands money on an offshore tax-free fund that turned out to be a scam a few years ago.) Russell: I do keep meaning to come along to the UKCPA meets, but I've been too lazy as usual. Main problem is getting hold of a laptop, our office pool got stolen a few months back and I don't feel like lugging my desktop up town by bus/rail (and I'm not about to put my secret key on someone elses machine). -- Bob Grahame, Streatham, London. LAN Consultant -- Voice :- +(44)71 406 7795 : PGP 2.2 Key available ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 13:10:27 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: OORT: Belt or Sea? Freeman Craig Presson: > Apparently the main mechanism for comets from the Oort cloud to > deorbit and come close to the sun is perturbations from the nearer > stars. (Talk about your n-body problem!) The distances you quoted sounds like the Oort cloud is the norm and stars clear out a breathing space of about a light year around themselves. So most of the galaxy is Oort cloud? >|> does it lie with respect to the Oort belt? Is this the Voyager >|> craft(s) with the infamous 'Sounds of Earth' on? > That was Pioneer 10, wasn't it? I think the Voyagers just had a simple > plaque. Pioneer 10 had plaque (I have a picture of it in front of me). Perhaps some Voyagers did as well? > I'll have to check up on this and post on it later; Do, please. Finding out about the Oort cloud would be more interesting than listening to the self-appointed List Idiot rant on about NNs. Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk AS member (21/3/93) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 15:00:58 PDT From: Robin Hanson Subject: Contrapositive Crows ddfr@midway.uchicago.edu writes: >one of my favorite puzzle/paradoxes ... >Claim: A sheet of white paper is evidence that all crows are black. >Proof: 1. If you observe an A and it is B, that is evidence for the >proposition "All A's are B." ... 2. ... 5. [QED] E.T. Jaynes' text "Probability Theory" refers on page 111 to I.J. Good's 1967 article in the British Journal of Philosophy of Science (17,322) titled "The White Shoe is a Red Herring". Jaynes says Good "demonstrated the error in the premise by a simple counterexample: In World 1 there are one million birds, of which 100 are crows, all black. In World 2 there are two million birds, of which 200,000 are black crows and 1,800,000 are white crows. We observe one bird, which proves to be a black crow. Which world are we in? ... observation ... gives evidence .. against the hypothesis that all cows are black." One can have information such that assumption 1 is not a good inference. Premise not always true, so conclusion not always true. Robin Hanson ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 16:05:01 EST From: wit@MIT.EDU (paul whitmore) Subject: SPACE: Fermi paradox-Steent's objection an agrument i saw ten years ago, formulated in the eco- and drug- obsessed 70's, runs like this, from Gunther Steent (biologist, UCBerkeley?) The curve for technological innovation required to explore space is (probably) closely correlated with increased understanding of the nervous system. by the time any civilization reaches the ability to explore space, they will have also realized the ability to self-stimulate their own nervous systems to simulate all possible experiences. instead of leaving home, they will just "trip" their own neurons to simulate the experience. i always had a weakness for this glib argument, although it fails to establish any reason for sending out non-returning probes and self-replicators. ------------------------------ Date: 30 May 93 10:20:08 U From: "QMAIL2" Subject: Rejected by Custodian GatorMail-Q Only Tibet left after war >Book in which Tibet is a refuge from World War Final: Elizabeth Ann >Scarborough, _Nothing Sacred_. The sequel, after that war: _Last >Refuge_. (This one just came out in paperback.) The first book in the >trilogy, set in the Vietnam War days and a bit after: _The Healer's War_. > >This information came from Scott Imes at Uncle Hugo's Bookstore in >Minneapolis. Thanks much! I'll check my local bookstore this w/end! -- Lefty (lefty@apple.com) C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:. ------------------ RFC822 Header Follows ------------------ Received: by qmail2.aero.org (2.01/GatorMail-Q); 28 May 93 17:40:30 U Received: from aerospace.aero.org by MVE.AERO.ORG ; 28 May 93 17:37:38 PST Received: from wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu by aerospace.aero.org with SMTP (5.65c/6.0.GT) id AA09273 for kent_hastings@qmail2.aero.org; Fri, 28 May 1993 17:37:52 -0700 Posted-Date: Fri, 28 May 1993 16:59:01 -0800 Received: by wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu (5.65/4.0) id ; Fri, 28 May 93 20:02:22 -0400 Message-Id: <9305290002.AA08852@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu X-Original-Message-Id: <9305282359.AA08414@internal.apple.com> Date: Fri, 28 May 1993 16:59:01 -0800 X-Original-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu From: lefty@apple.com (Lefty) Subject: Only Tibet left after war X-Extropian-Date: Remailed on May 29, 373 P.N.O. [00:02:21 UTC] X-Message-Number: #0213 Reply-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 17:30:24 -0700 From: davisd@pierce.ee.washington.edu Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI > From: "James A. Donald" > > In <9305310559.AA27117@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, davisd@pierce.ee.washington.edu wrote: > > Phooey. You can have lots of absurdities, as long as they don't > > prevent you from completing whatever task you have. Can you say > > perceptual illusions? You also might wish to consider that there may > > be more than one interpretatiowithout absurdidtes and ambiguities. > > In real scenes there is only one right interpretation. All others are > not just a little bit wrong, they are totally off the wall. So if a million people look at a scene, all those who are "right" will have exactly the same interpretation? Buy Buy -- Dan Davis ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 12:22:33 EDT From: clayb@cellar.org Subject: fetishism? rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu writes: > Derek Zahn writes: > > > > After LONG and careful thought, I've decided that my first area of > > product development would be Speech Recognition. [...] > > I don't know if there's much of a market there for small time players, > unless you can beat the stuff that Apple and AT&T is working on. [...] I'm also a little skeptical. The main guy at Apple is Kai-Fu Lee, formerly of CMU. He's been working on speaker-independent speech recognition for something like 10 years -- very serious high powered research with lots of funding, other researchers, grad students, etc. And I'm imagining this all *increased* a couple of years ago when he went to Apple. There's a lot of very smart people doing research in this field, and a lot of big companies throwing mega-dollars at the problem. I would be very hesitant to start a bootstrapped (i.e. not supported by venture capital) business in that sort of environment. Cheers Clay ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 12:08:32 EDT From: clayb@cellar.org Subject: PGP: A paranoid scenario twb3@midway.uchicago.edu (Tom Morrow) writes: > It would be interesting to see some guesstimates on how much memory the > spooks would have to have to store all the PGP-encoded messages currently > sent on the net, and on how quickly they will be able to decipher them. > True paranoids will really only care about the second figure, however, > since if the spooks are storing anyone's PGP-encoded messages paranoid > folks will figure that it's *their* messages that the spooks are saving. Hey, maybe I'm extra paranoid, but I assume that everything I send through the internet is stored by the NSA or their fellow travelers. I *am* interested to see estimates on how long it would take to decrypt PGP-encrypted messages with present/future technology. Cheers Clay ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 1993 17:44:13 -0600 From: twb3@midway.uchicago.edu (Tom Morrow) Subject: Neologism(?): extroprenuer >extropian entreprenuer = extroprenuer > >Don't know if it's original or not... >Clay I first saw this in one of Doug Platt's posts, and plausibly claims to have coined it. T.O. Morrow -- twb3@midway.uchicago.edu Vice President: ExI -- The Extropy Institute Law & Politics Editor: EXTROPY -- Journal of Transhumanist Thought ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 17:45:23 -0700 From: davisd@pierce.ee.washington.edu Subject: Contrapositive Crows > From: Robin Hanson > > E.T. Jaynes' text "Probability Theory" refers on page 111 to I.J. > Good's 1967 article in the British Journal of Philosophy of Science > (17,322) titled "The White Shoe is a Red Herring". Jaynes says Good > "demonstrated the error in the premise by a simple counterexample: In > World 1 there are one million birds, of which 100 are crows, all > black. In World 2 there are two million birds, of which 200,000 are > black crows and 1,800,000 are white crows. We observe one bird, which > proves to be a black crow. Which world are we in? ... observation > ... gives evidence .. against the hypothesis that all cows are black." If the existence of World 1 and World 2 are assumed, then one already knows that all crows are not black. On world 2, you know there are 1800000 white crows. If we are only talking about "possible worlds", then I would just note the strange nature of this knowledge. How, in a "possible world" scenario, could one know what the two possible worlds are like? I suppose I could make up a scenario about genetic engineering and such, but we would be talking about very specific and complex domain knowledge. David's "law" is more of a heuristic of generalizing, and should be taken as such. If you actually had such specific prior knowledge of world 1 and world 2, then it would override the heuristic. That does not invalidate the usefulness of the heuristic. In the absence of other evidence, I take it as a good rule to construct a knowledge base by. Buy Buy -- Dan Davis ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 31 May 1993 15:17:56 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI In <9305311407.AA00681@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, extr@jido.b30.ingr.com (Craig Presson) wrote: > > In <9305310448.AA26859@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, "James A. Donald" writes: > [...]|> > |> Perception involves finding a description of sensory data in terms of > |> objects and entities. You do not want a *good* interpretation - one > |> with *few* absurdities and impossibilities. You want the *right* > |> interpretation - the one with *no* absurdities and impossibilities. > > So, you're looking to do _better_ than humans, not just as well, hm? > Actually, the fact that it's relatively easy to fool human visual > perception is not encouraging to the would-be developers of machine > vision systems, rather the opposite. > > I have no good way to dig up my old references on this[1], but they were > pretty amazing. You can set up all kinds of 3D _trompe l'oeil_ with > very simple objects. Of course these would constitute a very > high-level test for a machine system. This is not a problem with real scenes. On scenes specifically created to fool vision systems adapted to real scenes, true machine perception should of course make the same errors as natural perception. Again, I refer you to T Kanade Artificial Intelligence 13 279-311 (80) T Kanade Artificial Intelligence 17 409-460 (81) for examples of the sort of inanities created by "good approximations" to correct perception. For natural scenes there is one right answer and all the others are totally wrong answers. They are not "almost right" answers. This the reason why approximation methods to solving the problem of the minimum of a many variable function just do not cut it in real life. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves and our James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we | are. True law derives from this right, not from jamesdon@infoserv.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 12:00:32 EDT From: clayb@cellar.org Subject: Neologism(?): extroprenuer Derek asked about an extropian businessman's forum. I thought this would be a good time to throw out a term I came up with: extropian entreprenuer = extroprenuer Don't know if it's original or not... Cheers Clay ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 1993 21:40:24 -0400 (EDT) From: Edward J OConnell Subject: SPACE: Fermi paradox, etc. -- probably dumb question > Intelligent life elsewhere has contacted us, but not all of us. > Maybe it has a "prime directive" not to interfere. Maybe it only > contacts certain people. Maybe the contact is very subtle > (unconscious thought implants ... uh oh, getting weird here). > > The universe is rotten with intelligent life, and has been for > billions of years. We are too stupid to recognize the signs. > > We are an experiment in how long it will take us to figure out that > it is not possible that there is no intelligent life elsewhere, and > that we are an experiment The last three paragraphs imply a degree of social homogeneity I find improbable in any intelligent, technologically mature culture. Looking at past trends humanity is diversifying as we grow wealthier and more powerful. This will continue as machine intelligences evolve. Jay says... I disagree. I dislike the reasoning of the anthropic cosmological principal intensly. Reading it actually made me feel a bit queasy. It felt a little religious to me. Precontact civilizations may be preserved for reasons of diversity. It is possible that the universe is not run in an anarchocapitalist fashion, no? Heresy, I know. ;-) Even given anarchocapitalist social structure, I can imagine reasons to keep us in the dark. Perhaps precontact civilizations occasionally come up with radically new ways of doing things, provided they're not swamped by an older and more developed galactic culture. This reminds me of an article I read on SETI that spoke of promising areas of the sky, that shut up as soon as they were more closely examined. I realize these thoughts are somewhat kooky and paranoid. They dovetail with my reading in the pseudoscience of ufology. (I'd suggest Jacque Vallee and Hynek, if anyones interested in UFOs.) And other non extropian beliefs, such as my environmental chicken littlism... Still. Its possible this spiral arm is being run by Vast, Powerful Bunny Lovers... Jay ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 1993 21:02:34 -0500 From: extr@jido.b30.ingr.com (Craig Presson) Subject: 1993 ISDC report 12th Annual International Space Development Conference National Space Society and Huntsville Area L5 Huntsville, Alabama May 25 - 31, 1993 Seven hundred fifty space enthusiasts of all ages packed into the Huntsville Hilton, with some overflow into the von Braun Civic Center, for a long weekend that had everything. Space celebrities appeared everywhere, from members of the von Braun team like Karl Dannenburg and Georg von Tiesenhausen to astronauts and X-plane jockeys like Buzz Aldrin (second man on the Moon) and Scott Crossfield (first man to Mach 2 and Mach 3), down to those upstarts who flew STS missions, like C.R. Walker, Owen Garriott and Byron Lichtenberg. K. Eric Drexler gave an afternoon talk on molecular nanotechnology and put in some time at Sunday's Molecular Manufacturing Shortcut Group workshop answering questions. There was a parallel event for children 6 - 16, which was cosponsored by North Alabama Mensa with technical assistance from the Academy for Science and Foreign Language faculty and the Huntsville Computer Club. It was a huge success. C. R. Walker and Buzz Aldrin spent an afternoon with the kids. Some sample session titles: How We Used to Make Them Work Power Beaming Technology Space Medicine Launching a Space Enterprise Biospherics -- Natural and Man Made (including Biosphere II) Cheap Access to Space National Aerospace Planes Power Satellites Hubble Space Telescope Property Rights Russian Space Delta Clipper and SSTO Concepts Lunar & Planetary Development Private Initiatives Nanotechnology Molecular Manufacturing Shortcut Group Tethered Satellites (with Dani Eder) Plus a whole lot of NSS organizational, educational, and "lobbying" workshops. There were vendors, a space art exhibit, a VR demo by Computer Explorations, Inc. of Huntsville, and literature tables from all of the space advocacy outfits like the Space Frontier Foundation and Spacecause. Based on net.rumors, I worried that the NSS had become too much a NASA cheerleader, but this conference was very heavily slanted toward private space initiatives and planning for the "post-NASA" future. I had one whale of a time; it was a long weekend in Nerd Heaven. And I got two great T-shirts -- a "Mission to Mars" print by McCall and a conference shirt in black and silver (my heraldic colors). ^ / ------/---- extropy@jido.b30.ingr.com (Freeman Craig Presson) /AS 5/20/373 P.N.O. /ExI 4/373 P.N.O. ** E' and E-choice spoken here ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 1993 19:34:30 -0500 From: extr@jido.b30.ingr.com (Craig Presson) Subject: Extropian Death Rituals In <9305310727.AA28779@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, Richard Kennaway writes: [...] |> Apparently, at the end of each year, some electronics companies hold a |> Buddhist ritual to make peace with the spirits of all the chips they |> sacrificed [...] |> Everyone *sounded* like they were keeping a straight face. |> Why, of course. Zen Master Dogen used to return part of each dipper of water to the river for the same reason. ^ / ------/---- extropy@jido.b30.ingr.com (Freeman Craig Presson) /AS 5/20/373 P.N.O. /ExI 4/373 P.N.O. ** E' and E-choice spoken here ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 31 May 93 22:33:44 PDT From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Subject: Neural Nets and AI I, for one, have enjoyed newcomer James Donald's discussions of neural nets and the (possible/probable) limitations of the current approaches to AI. (Needless to say, I find it quite unhelpful to the discussion that one Extropian who disagrees with Mr. Donald has characterized him as a "List Idiot.") Neural nets seem to be a useful tool...I thought so in the early 1980s when my old relativity postdoc Terry Sejnowksi was publishing on the Boltzman Machine (I took "Large Scale Structure of the Universe" from Sejnowski and Hartle, circa 1973). In fact, I urge Gordon Moore of Intel to pursue this, circa 1985-6, and a friend of mine (Mark Holler) later led Intel's Neural Net project, resulting in some of the most successful of the current neural net chips. (On a totally tangential note, I was a Science Talent Search "Honors Group" person in 1970 for a science fair project titled "Design of an Associative Net Exhibiting Spatial and Temporal Integration." This may have been one of the first such Westinghouse STS projects based on Rosenblatt's "Perceptron" work--despite the limitations being pointed out then by Minksky.) But it's fairly clear, as James Donald has pointed out, that what we are calling neural nets bear only passing resemblance to biological neural hardware. Like "AI," the name is unfortunate, as it misleads people into thinking more progress is being made (or soon will be made) than is actually the case. It's probably best to think of them just as research tools which may be more efficient at solving some problems than other tools are currently. And I support Nick Szabo's call for shifting the emphasis to what I have always called "alien intelligence." A supersmart program in some areas (like abstract math) combined with rudimentary intellgence in other areas is much more interesting to me than simulacrums of human intelligence (though I think I understand the main points of understanding human intelligence...better basic understanding plus "speedups" with faster hardware). In any case, I expect we'll see "AI savants" (think of "Rain Man" on neural steroids) long before we'll seen general human-type intelligences. Cheers, -Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it. ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 Issue #0292 ****************************************