From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Tue Jun 1 15:58:12 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA00502; Tue, 1 Jun 93 15:57:49 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 AB03873; Tue, 1 Jun 93 15:57:46 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 18:51:52 -0400 Message-Id: <9306012251.AA16526@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: ExI-Daily@gnu.ai.mit.edu Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 18:51:13 -0400 X-Original-Message-Id: <9306012251.AA16512@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu> X-Original-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu From: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Extropians Digest V93 #0293 X-Extropian-Date: Remailed on June 1, 373 P.N.O. [22:51:51 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 0293 Today's Topics: Chaitin, Holland, & AI [7 msgs] Contrapositive Crows [1 msgs] ECON/SPACE: Monopolizing the Universe [1 msgs] ECON/SPACE: Sell the Universe Whole [1 msgs] Extropy [1 msgs] Failed mail [1 msgs] Longevity [1 msgs] MEDIA: ExI: BBC Radio 4, 0905 2 June 93 [1 msgs] META: Appropriate Subject tag lines [1 msgs] Meta-Brainstorm [1 msgs] PLEASE READ [1 msgs] PRESS: Space Colonies etc unlikely according to AP [2 msgs] SPACE: Fermi paradox, etc. -- probably dumb question [2 msgs] SPACE: Fermi paradox-Steent's objection [1 msgs] Verifying Privacy as an Upload/AI? [2 msgs] fetishism? [1 msgs] my unsub requests [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: 50215 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 01 Jun 93 06:19:45 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI The List Idiot speaketh: > 100% of people will agree that a photo of a human face is a > photo of a human face. [loads of other rubbish deleted] Wrong. Neural nets are better than humans at recognition. People make more mistakes than a network. > This is not some radical new idea Also not the truth. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Jun 93 07:02:43 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI I apologise to James Donald for my previous post on this thread, which was uncivil and unnecessarily cryptic. The experiments I was thinking where humans are inferior to ANNs are where ANNs have a better hit rate at identifying the sex of humans from cut-down photos of faces and noisy, low definition pictures of letters and numbers. These experiments show that: 1) humans do not achieve 100% recognition of pictures 2) neural networks can achieve better scores than humans Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk AS member (21/3/93) ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 31 May 1993 20:43:17 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI In <9306010030.AA04358@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, davisd@pierce.ee.washington.edu wrote: > > > > 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? Certainly. For example 100% of people will agree that a photo of five people is a photo of five people. 100% of people will agree that a photo of a human face is a photo of a human face. 100% of people will agree that a limp cat is a limp cat. The problem in visual perception is how do we aggregate pixels into objects. They will not agree on what the objects mean - are the two of the five people father and daughter, or are they husband and young wife - they may not agree on the state of the cat, whether the cat is dead or asleep - but they will know perfectly well which pixels are cat and which pixels are background, and that it is a cat, not a teacup. - but they will agree 100% on how to order the data. "This is a person, that is background, that is a quadrupedal animal." By contrast a computer is likely to mistake a human face for a landscape or for several overlapping airplanes, plus a teacup. This is a typical "approximate solution to the perception problem". That is why "approximate solutions" do not work. This is not some radical new idea, this is old stuff. People keep bringing up the same old fallacies year after year, again and again looking for the keys under the same goddamn streetlight and it is really time to quit. The keys are positively definitely not under the streetlight. People had that thought quite some time ago. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 02:26:51 -0500 (EDT) From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI Michael Clive Price writes: > > I apologise to James Donald for my previous post on this thread, which > was uncivil and unnecessarily cryptic. > > The experiments I was thinking where humans are inferior to ANNs are > where ANNs have a better hit rate at identifying the sex of humans from > cut-down photos of faces and noisy, low definition pictures of letters > and numbers. > > These experiments show that: > 1) humans do not achieve 100% recognition of pictures > 2) neural networks can achieve better scores than humans Aren't you talking about perceptrons? I remember experiments that were done in the 60's on face recognition with perceptrons. Perceptrons are a really poor example of a neural net. Marvin Minsky proved that they have definition limitations and aren't acceptable for normal vision recognition. This reminds me: The army experimented with NNs trying to get them to recognize tanks that were hidden in landscapes. They ran hundreds if not thousands of pictures through an NN with tanks, without tanks, with shrubbery, without, tanks hidden, tanks not. In all different seasons and settings. It seemed to work like a miracle, the NN recognized the hidden tanks 100% of the time! Upon further study, they found a fatal flaw. All the pictures they showed the NN with tanks were daytime/noonish pictures, and the other pictures without tanks were usually taken at dusk. The NN was not recognizing hidden tanks but the different between day and night! The message is, be careful about what you think a neural net is "recognizing", it may not be what you think. > Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk > AS member (21/3/93) > -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- EE/Math Student | politics is the implementation of faith. -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | - Zetetic Commentaries -- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 09:28:59 +0200 (MET DST) From: ggoebel@sun1.ruf.uni-freiburg.de (Garrett Goebel) Subject: PLEASE READ Krzys', Craig, Mark M. } In <9305281550.AA04213@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, "Mark W. McFadden" writes: } |> A very perceptive fella writes: } |> } |> >I must say that I absolutely love: } |> >"There are many decafs that taste just as good" } |> >by Mark McFadden. May I use it (with appropriate credit given)? } |> > } |> >Krzys' } |> } |> I'd love to take credit for it, but I heard it in a movie. Val Kilmer's } |> character said it in "Real Genius." Kinda grows on you, doesn't it? Loved the movie too... but I think that Val Kilmer and the writers of "Real Genius" will have to credit those Taster's Choice commercials as the original source of "There are many decafs that taste just as good". Or was it Folger's Flakes? :) I love the line about the Pyramid and naked women waving pickles! Garrett -- C. Garrett Goebel ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 04:22:15 -0500 (EDT) From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Longevity By accident, I just caught some show called "infatuation" which is sort of like the love-connection. Anyway, what interested me was that a 74 year old woman wanted to date a 90-year old man (the woman said she was very sexually active). The woman was an aerobics instructor and I swear, she did not look 74. She had the legs of a 30-40 year old woman, and her face didn't have many wrinkles. The 90-year old man was a marathon runner; he runs marathons every year. He too was in great shape. When asked the secret to his longevity, he replied that he was a vegetarian. This really struck a cord because in the past I was a little skeptical about vegetarianism. I assumed that vegetarians who lived longer were already predisposed to living long (because I've never seen a study of them, and I know some vegets who aren't in much better shape them some smokers/burger eaters I know). e.g. I am probably predisposed to getting heart disease because everyone in my family who has died, died of heart disease, so a veget diet may not prevent heart disease. However, after seeing this show, and the shape that those people were in, my interests are aroused again. Does anyone have a pointer to a serious study of vegetarians and longevity which is conclusive? (controlling for genetic factors, exercise, profession, etc) -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- EE/Math Student | politics is the implementation of faith. -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | - Zetetic Commentaries -- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 06:01:58 -0700 (PDT) From: szabo@techbook.com (Nick Szabo) Subject: Meta-Brainstorm > extropian entreprenuer = extroprenuer > Don't know if it's original or not... Ah, independent parallel invention...often this stuff seems startingly original, but it's just a short cognitive editing distance out there on the bleeding edge of k-space. Better luck next time. Happens to me often; about 3/4 the stuff I think up indepedently is already being worked on in some obscure backwater of the globe (or not so obscure, if I haven't done my homework :-) This is the first invention I've seen, since I've started looking for such things, that involves _literal_ crossover. If we had a way for a computer to know whether some given combination is an interesting, cool, neologism ("extropreneur") or junk (extropian + impatience -> extropatience) we could generate thousands of these automagically. :-) This reminds me a brainstorming game I made up, dubbed "Hungarian Brainstorming" for no particularly good reason. Normal brainstorming sessions only go so far, because they start accumulating lots of silly garbage which must be waded through after the session is over. The rules of Hungarian brainstorming are along the lines of (1) you get points for coming up with an *original* idea for solving the problem, meaning no player has heard of that idea before, and (2) you get points by "calling bullshit": making a good argument which destroys the other guy's idea. Merely pointing out that the idea seems silly, outrageous, nonsense, etc. does not constitute a good argument. The purpose of the game is to come up with ideas as fast as possible, and destroy the other players' ideas quickly. The points allocated depend on the environment (on-line, at party, in a bar, etc.) and the goal of the game (to generate useful ideas, outrageous ideas, etc.) There are usually penalty points for unoriginal ideas, destroyed ideas, and bogus arguments. There is often a referee to keep score and avoid meta-arguments. Good players, who understand the explicit rules and the reasons for them, can make things go more smoothly by keeping implicit score and just having fun. With most players and subject matters, the game starts out well; many fun and/or useful ideas are quickly generated. Unfortuneately, as the game progresses it gets bogged down in trivial originalities. For example "how to decorate a Christmas tree" generated some whacky and perhaps even artistically interesting proposals, but it ended up bogging down into a recitation of all things in the universe that nobody had ever put on a Christmas tree (usually for good reasons, but if the reasons aren't immediately accepted by the players or can't be articulated on the fly, it pays to play the idea). One solution I tried was having a referee "call exhaustion", that is declare an entire category off-limits when it had become bogged down. Right now I'm thinking of how I might incorporate the concept of cognitive editing distance into the game; ie ideas that can be trivially generated by combining two other ideas get fewer points. Drawbacks include the vagueness of "editing distance" in many domains, and the fact that many good ideas are generated by such trivial combinations. Ideas on how to fix this game bug? Meta-brainstorm, anyone? Nick Szabo szabo@techbook.com ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 1 June 1993 06:48:42 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI In <9306010536.AA05988@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) wrote: > > The List Idiot speaketh: > > > 100% of people will agree that a photo of a human face is a > > photo of a human face. > [loads of other rubbish deleted] > Wrong. Neural nets are better than humans at recognition. > People make more mistakes than a network. Great: Where is this amazing neural network that can recognize a human face in arbitrary angle to the camera, lighting, etc. Somehow I missed publication of this amazing breakthrough. All the neural nets that I heard of were overwhelmed by small variations in the tilt of the face, looking slightly down or looking slightly up, looking slightly right or looking slightly left, and small variations in the angle of the light, plus they were apt to categorize as human faces things that look absolutely nothing whatever like a human face. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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: Tue, 1 Jun 93 9:55:55 CDT From: derek@cs.wisc.edu (Derek Zahn) Subject: fetishism? Hey, thanks for all the comments on my neonatal extropreneurship, even if they were mostly pessimism and naysaying :-) Pardon this rather long reply; I'm in a mood to type. First, a note: it is not part of my embryonic 'business plan' to try for a billion dollars in Speech Recognition. I do this because I can't see myself going off and being a cog in a corporate or academic machine somewhere. But, if I'm going to be an extropreneur, I have a LOT to learn -- while I'm not planning for failure, it wouldn't surprise me if this effort doesn't result in much profit. I know nothing about running a business, marketing, etc etc -- part of the reason I'm so psyched about it is the opportunity for personal growth in those areas. If it doesn't work, I'll have that much better a chance on the second try. For such a second try, maybe I'll have a truly original and perfect product idea... those are, of course, rare. Anyway, to the specific points: Dan Davis (and similar points by Ray and Clay): > I wish you luck, but a lot of folks are spending oodles of time and > money to do this, and my understanding of the state of the art is that a lot > of it is painstakingly handcrafted. Probably too big a project for a small > startup to be successfull in. True; I believe this to be a HUGE pie (eight years from now I bet that there will be tens of millions of S.R. products sold for PCs, either bundled with operating systems or as separate products) and I fully expect the largest slices to go to Microsoft or Apple or the existing firms (like Dragon Systems). Also, I'm good. Big names and big budgets don't frighten me -- perhaps the need to be frightened by such things is a lesson I will learn. Ray Cromwell: > Apple intends to market a system for incorporating voice recognition into > consumer devices (TV, VCR, Microwave, etc). Could be, but that's a completely different market. The system I'm designing (actually a suite of systems with different processing requirements and recognition capabilities) is all software on top of a bare sound input device. This means that it can be as cheap as optimal pricing strategy requires. Clay: > ... very serious high powered research with lots of > funding, other researchers, grad students, etc...I would be very hesitant > to start a bootstrapped (i.e. not supported by venture capital) business > in that sort of environment. Well, admitting that I don't know (yet) how 'business' works, it seems to me that there are always niches in an area as big as this. If it turns out that by the time I could market anything, there's already oodles of really good stuff really cheap, that will require a niche strategy -- which is probably appropriate for a small company anyway. In fact, the existence of so many potential niches was one of the important factors involved in my choosing S.R. over alternative products. The system could be specialized for particular professions -- whichever ones the dominant S.R. system can't be easily adapted to. It could be adapted to other languages, as obscure as necessary: Though a lojban version is probably silly, perhaps a Catalan version isn't -- and I have friends in Barcelona... With more effort, it could be adapted to recognize non-speech sounds for a variety of applications (much of the low-level software infrastructure would apply in other areas). Perhaps I can incorporate pitch tracking and phoneme-level mappings to allow interesting interfaces to Cad software, more sophisticated than word-based commands. Or imagine a music-entry system where the composer sings the lines, with different "words" for different instruments ('bum' for bass, 'dee' for clarinet...) or different phonetic combinations controlling subtler instrument parameters. Or imagine software designed to detect regional accents in speech, for actors or speakers or newspeople. I could go on all day with strange niche applications; the possibilities seem endless. Also, an important design goal is portability to other hardware/OS. OK, so maybe microsoft and apple will be dominant already on their platforms by the time I finish -- maybe the Amiga won't be so crowded; maybe NextStep won't be so crowded; maybe other unixes won't be so crowded; etc. Maybe the next generation of PDAs will have the processing muscle to do simple recognition. Besides, maybe I'll have the best mousetrap! I have some ideas that I haven't seen in the literature (though there's lots of good stuff there too) that could be pretty nifty. A reason for picking S.R. is greatest comparative advantage: I've spent the last few years studying in-depth relevant topics like learning (including lots of neural net stuff), dynamic programming, hidden markov models, search techniques, knlj representation, ... My first thought was to develop stuff for PDAs, specialty stuff for the computing-person-on-the-go: small, tight, CGA software like project management, brainstorming tools, inventory mgmt, whatever... but then I thought that my study has made me exceptionally well-trained in a particular area and it would be folly not to use that training. Any programmer is qualified to do inventory management. Doesn't that make sense? Does any of this make sense? Doesn't it seem reasonable that there will be many niches in this market? Dan Davis: > What are the general outlines of your business plan? 1. Find out what a business plan is. 2. Develop one. Seriously, right now I need to start looking into all of that stuff (fortunately, my SO wants to help), while at the same time engaging in massive coding sessions, since I have relatively complete designs for big chunks of the low-level stuff, and I will be doing it all myself (by necessity, not choice). derek A.S. member 3/15 ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 1 June 1993 06:54:03 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: Chaitin, Holland, & AI In <9306010604.AA06156@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) wrote: > > I apologise to James Donald for my previous post on this thread, which > was uncivil and unnecessarily cryptic. > > The experiments I was thinking where humans are inferior to ANNs are > where ANNs have a better hit rate at identifying the sex of humans from > cut-down photos of faces and noisy, low definition pictures of letters > and numbers. > > These experiments show that: > 1) humans do not achieve 100% recognition of pictures > 2) neural networks can achieve better scores than humans 2: I am familiar with the numbers experiment. The first experiments (perceptrons) represented genuine error. Their later replications are fraud, in that the error has long been exposed. Simple template recognition, functionally equivalent to that used in the original mechanical OCR recognizers. 1: I am unfamiliar with a face experiment that produced anything like that which Price describes, and in view of the well proven inability of neural nets to discern the difference between a human face and the side of a barn, I find this alleged experiment rather hard to believe. It is likely that the experimenter intentionally or unintentionally gave the neural net some cue that neural nets are capable of detecting, for example the photos of males may have come from one source, and the photos of females from a different source. The problem is that funding committees want steady and predictable progress, preferably with basic discoveries planned three years ahead of the actual discovery, and you are not going to be able to deliver "progress" unless you search under the streetlight. Problem is not so much that NN researchers are villains, but that the funding system forces them to commit villainy in order to get funded. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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: Tue, 01 Jun 1993 13:02:27 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: PRESS: Space Colonies etc unlikely according to AP X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission "Phil G. Fraering" says: > > The following is reprinted without permission to for the benefit > of the private e-mail list "extropians" so that they may know > that they live in an age of abominable propaganda that would put > Pravda to shame. > > Anyone want to "list the fallacies"? > > --------- > > >From the Baton Rouge State Times/Morning Advocate, Thur. May 27, 1993. > > COLONIZATION OF GALAXY UNLIKELY, STUDY SHOWS > A version of the same material appeared in to day's New York Times. J. Richard Gott appears to be very very thick, and the people who published his paper appear thicker still. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1993 13:28:59 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: ECON/SPACE: Sell the Universe Whole X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Robin Hanson says: > Hal Finney writes: > >First, it seems wiser to auction off things a bit at a time than all at > >once. First do near-earth orbital space. Then do the moon when we are > >ready. Then mars or the asteroids. The experience gained at earlier levels > >will make the value estimates more accurate for alter auctions. > > Yes, my latest proposal allows exactly this scenario. Pardon... I realize that this topic is likely dead by now (I've been away for the long weekend), but would everyone please answer this question? So, the UN has auctioned everything off. Ten years later, I go to the moon with my cronies and ignore them on the basis that they have no way to enforce their claims. What happens now? So far as I can tell, unowned land/space becomes owned when someone strong enough to claim it brings in big enough guns and says "this is mine". The discussions on the UN auctioning off space are reminiscent of the Pope's declaration that half the world belonged to Spain and half to Portugal. The Spanish and Portuguese considered this important. The rest of the world ignored it, which is why we speak English in North America, and not Spanish. Perry ------------------------------ Date: 01 Jun 1993 12:50:21 -0500 (CDT) From: MARYJO@vx.cis.umn.edu Subject: Extropy Can you mail/e-mail an issue of your zine and a method of subscripting? If not, say so. Thanks. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1993 13:52:59 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: MEDIA: ExI: BBC Radio 4, 0905 2 June 93 X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Richard Kennaway says: > Russell Whitaker writes: > >I've been asked to fill 15 minutes of a popular London radio > >talk show this Wednesday, 2nd June 1993. Listen for me on BBC > >Radio 4, from 0905-1000, on *Midweek*. > > Just a small correction: Radio 4 is a national network, and on longwave it > even reaches into Benelux and northern France. > > Now why don't they make programmable radio/tape recorders like they do VCRs? VCRs hooked up to radios make perfectly good time-delay audio recorders... Perry ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1993 13:55:24 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: ECON/SPACE: Monopolizing the Universe X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Hal Finney says: > One example I have thought of where lack of property rights led to over- > rapid homesteading was the exploration of the New World by Spanish and > Portuguese explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries. My knowledge of > this is limited to elementary school lessons, but as I understand it > both parties were engaged in aggressive exploration/colonization efforts > in order to allocate as much as possible of the Americas to themselves > under a homesteading-like system. This was expensive and dangerous. > > They got the Pope to solve the problem by dividing the territory along > a particular meridian, Spain to the west and Portugal to the east. Although > this was not done by an auction, the point is that the allocation of the > resources solved the ownership problem and enabled a more efficient and > practical rate of development of the new land. It's not always true that > faster exploitation is better. > > As I said, my knowledge of this situation is pretty superficial so I > would welcome a more thorough analysis. The allocation was not of South America -- it was of the whole world. It was also largely ignored, as would be a U.N. allocation of the universe. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 11:15:12 PDT From: Robin Hanson Subject: Contrapositive Crows davisd@pierce.ee.washington.edu writes: >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. ... In the absence of other evidence, I take it as a >good rule to construct a knowledge base by. OK, but taken as a weak heuristic, there is no "paradox". A => B is the same as saying Not ( A & Not B), so knowing nothing else about the situation, anything that doesn't violate this rule is equally confirming of it. Our complex intuitions about the black crow case, however, say that one kind of evidence is relevant and the other not. The example I gave suggests that we could indeed have specific knowledge making our intuitions consistent with probability theory. Robin Hanson ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1993 14:13:53 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: SPACE: Fermi paradox, etc. -- probably dumb question X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission Stanton McCandlish says: > What'd I'd like to know, is what are the answers to the following questions: > > 1) Why the hell would they want to come here? If they are going everywhere, and exploiting everything, why not here? > 2) Has anyone really given much thought to the SIZE of the universe, and the > odds against actually FINDING us? Yes. Using Von Neuman machines, your exploration can expand in all directions at nearly the speed of light. Size doesn't matter that much. > 3) Even after the alpha centaurians or whoever DO find us, who's to say they > can afford to come? With nanotechnology, it would be easy to afford. > Who's to say they have the tech to come? We've gone from nonexistance to near nanotechnology in a blink of an eye cosmically speaking. If another civilization exists in our light cone, unless it evolved astonishingly close to us in time (almost insanely close, in fact) it would be hard to imagine how they could avoid running into nanotechnology. > Maybe they > haven't figured out FTL yet No one is assuming FTL. > Maybe they have short lifespans, maybe they depend upon some > resource they can not synthesize or otherwise produce in space? If we think that with nanotechnology we can live arbitrarily long, its hard to imagine how other creatures would not be able to do the same. > 4) If there are lots of civilizations, some many times as "advanced" as we > are who's to say that earth is anything unusual at all? Perhaps we are > the space equivalent of an anthill: lots of us, all the same, all boring > unless anthills are your specialty. Our SuperAliens might consider us to > be nothing but bugs, and hardly worth stopping to look at. Its hard to believe, though, that we wouldn't notice the sorts of structures that they would construct in the act of passing through. Anyway, the rest is all answerable in the same vein. .pm ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 12:35:35 MDT From: bangell@cs.utah.edu (bob angell) Subject: META: Appropriate Subject tag lines Everyone; I sent this to extropians-request earlier this am (by mistake ... thats what happens when you go away for a couple of days) ... I waded through a couple of hundred email messages this morning where the subject: line was appropriate only about 25% of the time. When one thread blends into another, please change your subject: line so that it is easier to follow specific threads, waste less time and be more thoughtful for others on this list. Thank you. -Bob- -- Bob Angell | Data Integration (multi-platform) Principal | AWK, C/C++, RDBMS langs, Paradox Management Systems Engineering | Health Systems Engineering Applied Information & Management Systems | Database design/development 1238 Fenway Avenue - SLC, UT 84102-3212 | Simulation/Modeling/Neural Nets bangell@cs.utah.edu; Voice: 801-583-8544 | Freelance writer, major publications IBMLINK:DEV4534, TEAMOS/2 | OS/2 2.x Application Developer [Disclaimer: I don't speak for IBM or the University of Utah!] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1993 15:27:15 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: SPACE: Fermi paradox-Steent's objection X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission paul whitmore says: > 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. We can assume, though, that given billions of individual some members of some intelligent society might develop the mutant tendancy to be averse to such stimulation -- an evolutionary trait that would let them fill the unfilled niche of "universe filling species". In other words, its very hard to believe that EVERY member of a species will go navel-staring. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Jun 1993 15:23:33 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: SPACE: Fermi paradox, etc. -- probably dumb question X-Reposting-Policy: redistribute only with permission "James A. Donald" says: > 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. Evidence for your contention, please, as on the surface it seems wholely absurd. Given nanotechnology and von Neuman machines, one would expect the manifestations of complex life to become ubiquitous very very fast. (By the way, Humans are among the least fragile creatures on the planet. We outperform the bulk of creatures in many PHYSICAL respects -- the plains indians used to catch wild horses by running them down, which isn't hard given relative endurances of humans and horses.) Perry ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Jun 93 19:58:01 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: PRESS: Space Colonies etc unlikely according to AP >> COLONIZATION OF GALAXY UNLIKELY, STUDY SHOWS > > A version of the same material appeared in to day's New York Times. > J. Richard Gott appears to be very very thick, and the people who > published his paper appear thicker still. His Nature article is better reasoned than some of the popular reports suggest. Although still incorrect. > Perry Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk AS member (21/3/93) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 15:03:04 CDT From: jhughes@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu (James J Hughes) Subject: my unsub requests sorry, my mail is being forwarded from dsa@sam.spc.uchicago.edu which is the address that needs to be unsubbed. J. Hughes University of Chicago ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 01 Jun 93 20:30:29 GMT From: Michael Clive Price Subject: Failed mail Subject: Re: Chaitin, Holland, & AI Ray Cromwell asks: >> The experiments I was thinking where humans are inferior to ANNs are >> where ANNs have a better hit rate at identifying the sex of humans >> from cut-down photos of faces [...] >> >> These experiments show that: >> 1) humans do not achieve 100% recognition of pictures >> 2) neural networks can achieve better scores than humans > > Aren't you talking about perceptrons [back in the '60s]? No, this is a recent experiment with neural nets. In the sex identification test the neural net is shown a cut-down photo of just the eyes, eyebrows and upper nose of the test subjects. The subjects were co-colleagues, and the neural net got a significantly better hit rate than the experimenters. The experimenter I saw reporting the results was staggered by the results. > Perceptrons are a really poor example of a neural net. Agreed. You need the hidden layers for complexity. > Marvin Minsky proved that they have definition limitations and aren't > acceptable for normal vision recognition. Agreed. This is well known. XOR and all that. [tank spotter example deleted] > The NN was not recognizing hidden tanks but the differen[ce] between > day and night! Darn clever of it! Why do more than necessary? :-) > -- Ray Cromwell Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk AS member (21/3/93) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 15:36:57 EDT From: fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham) Subject: Verifying Privacy as an Upload/AI? (Posted to both extropians and cypherpunks.) Is there any way for a process running in a computer to verify that it has privacy? How could an AI, for instance, ever know that it had privacy? How could a person preparing to be uploaded provide for their continuing privacy? Assume these things, for the sake of argument: Strong public key crypto. Truly tamper-proof computers. Capability-based operating systems with proven protection between processes. We might ask Norm Hardy for a rundown on some of the wonderful things that are possible in these types of systems. You might even assume that... Humans can memorize things, and these things can't be decoded from their uploads' memory dumps. (See note on torture below). The process/person seeking assurance of privacy is capable of being downloaded into a humanoid robot with enough compute power. Can you prevent the bad guys from copying you and torturing information out of the copy? Can you be secure even if they can do that? Even with the best assumptions, I find this question tough. But then I'm dense sometimes. -fnerd ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 Jun 93 15:09:53 PDT From: peb@PROCASE.COM Subject: Verifying Privacy as an Upload/AI? I think you are headed in the right direction wrt a capability system, however, they are predicated on tamper proof hardware. Since you stipulate human being copying and torturing (sounds like tampering to me), I think this is not ultimate privacy. Hmm, perhaps you should set up a key escrow system (!) so that you need to call your most trusted friends to assemble your session key. The session key works only once, assuming a tamper proof, capability system. When you call them, they can quiz you on your mental and physical health to determine whether they should give you the keys...thus limiting the ability of a torturer. Paul E. Baclace peb@procase.com ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 Issue #0293 ****************************************