[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Ryan Lanham]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > I realize that I am goring sacred cows, to mix a metaphor, but only in
> > the sense that evolutionary biologists do the same with respect to
> > Biblical Creationists.
>
> Actually closer to what Creationists are doing to evolutionists, i.e.
> setting up a tenuous theory based on exaggerated readings of dubious or
> incomplete data, and then pretending it is conclusively proven and falsifies
> all the things which serious specialists take as more-or-less definite.  Not
> that there's anything wrong with trying to rebut widely-accepted views, but
> posing as a heroic rebel upsetting other people's dearly-held orthodoxies
> doesn't make your arguments any more accurate.
>
> Also, the idea of a hidden intelligence manipulating and predicting
> everything we do without us knowing it, with a thinking power so far in
> excess of humanity's that it will be able to do things which are absolutely
> incomprehensible to us, would not be entirely foreign to Biblical
> Creationists - though it has more in common with this guy:.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Malebranche#Vision_in_God
>
>
This is the same argument the anti-technology green left uses against global
warming...you don't know everything therefore you know nothing...James Randi
is the latest to fall into this trap.

Trend analysis is the foundation of modern social science.  We evaluate
probabilities of outcomes given current states.  It isn't perfect, but the
paths tend to work...e.g. Moore's Law (the simplest case).  Now it is true
that few trends continue indefinitely.  There are limits.  Those should be
evaluated in probabilistic terms as well.  That's the current field of
futurism in a nutshell.

Given those sorts of analyses, the probabilities set by almost anyone in the
know are quite high that machines surpass humans in virtually all ways
within the next 100 years...probabilities are above 0.7 for most analyses
that it will happen 30 years hence.   It is just reasonable extrapolation
with known feasible boundaries.

To me, these aren't emotional arguments.   My heart rate doesn't even rise 3
beats a minute in thinking through it.  There's no emotion at all...it's
just a probability...like the probability my plane will land safely or the
probability I'll get swine flu.

It is always an amusing topic...has been for 20 years.
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