This link has been bookmarked by 26 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Joel Liu.
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13 Jan 09
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24 Sep 08
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Whether
we're talking about John Cage's idea of "the mind we all share"
or H.G. Well's "World Brain", Google has its act together
and are at the precipice of astonishing changes in human communication...and
ultimately, in our sense of who or what we are. -
Still, others believe there are reasons for legitimate
fear of a (very near) future world in which the world's knowledge is
privatized by one corporation. This could be a problem, a very big problem. - 7 more annotations...
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TURING'S
CATHEDRAL [10.24.05]
A visit to Google on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of
John von Neumann's proposal for a digital computer
by George Dyson -
As organisms,
we possess two outstanding repositories of information: the information
conveyed by our genes, and the information stored in our brains. -
it will
inevitably be colonized by codes that will start doing things
with the results. -
We can
divide the computational universe into three sectors: computable problems;
non-computable problems (that can be given a finite, exact description
but have no effective procedure to deliver a definite result); and,
finally, questions whose answers are, in principle, computable, but
that, in practice, we are unable to ask in unambiguous language that
computers can understand. -
"An argument
in favor of building a machine with initial randomness is that, if it
is large enough, it will contain every network that will ever be required,"
advised Turing's former assistant and cryptanalyst Irving J. Good, speaking
at IBM in 1958. -
A network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or
ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that
need not be explicitly defined. It is much easier to find explicit answers
than to ask explicit questions. And some will be answers to questions
that programmers will never have to ask. -
I found myself recollecting the words of Alan
Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence,
a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct
such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating
souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing
had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will
providing mansions for the souls that He creates."
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30 Jul 08
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By breaking
the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers
that do things, von Neumann unleashed the power of the stored-program
computer -
In the
early 1950s, when mean time between memory failure was measured in minutes,
no one imagined that a system depending on every bit being in exactly
the right place at exactly the right time could be scaled up by a factor
of 10^13 in size, and down by a factor of 10^6 in time. - 6 more annotations...
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Whatever
language the central nervous system is using, it is characterized by
less logical and arithmetical depth than what we are normally used to
[and] must structurally be essentially different from those languages
to which our common experience refers." -
This ability to take general, organized advantage of
local, haphazard processes is exactly the ability that (so far) has
distinguished information processing in living organisms from information
processing by digital computers. -
However,
once the digital universe is thoroughly mapped, and initialized by us
searching for meaningful things and following meaningful paths, it will
inevitably be colonized by codes that will start doing things
with the results. -
We can
divide the computational universe into three sectors: computable problems;
non-computable problems (that can be given a finite, exact description
but have no effective procedure to deliver a definite result); and,
finally, questions whose answers are, in principle, computable, but
that, in practice, we are unable to ask in unambiguous language that
computers can understand. -
We do
most of our computing in the first sector, but we do most of our living
(and thinking) in the third. In the real world, most of the time, finding
an answer is easier than defining the question. -
the real sign, I suspect,
would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically
well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need
for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister
like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial
contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable
hypothesis, for now.
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21 Mar 08
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25 Apr 07
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07 Mar 07
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What
is Google doing at the Frankfurt Book Fair? And why has a consortium
of publishers filed a lawsuit against them? On the other hand, why do
the "digerati" love Google Print and Google Print Library?
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04 Mar 07
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24 Oct 06
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27 Aug 06
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31 Jul 06
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07 Jun 06
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09 Jan 06
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30 Nov 05
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20 Nov 05
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14 Nov 05
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08 Nov 05
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01 Nov 05
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TURING'S CATHEDRAL
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30 Oct 05
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29 Oct 05
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My
visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt
I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th
century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone
was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible
architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there
was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those
books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk.
"We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
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28 Oct 05
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