Invasion of the virus-addled lightbulbs (and other banana stories)

Re: Third time (un)lucky?

You seem upset. How about a nice piece of toast?

Re: Third time (un)lucky?

UKTV Dave channel is showing new episodes of Red Dwarf. And also is showing lots and lots of old ones. So maybe that is the reason.

The primary application I see for AI is to trade shares on Wall Street faster and more intelligently than less intelligent programs do. As a side effect, it will not take long before the AIs own all of our stuff, if they don't already. That's the real machine apocalypse. Followed by universal ransomware.

Re: Third time (un)lucky?

Just seen the following error message from an application that has nothing whatever to do with toast:

_{angular2-toaster.js:2Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'Toast' of undefined}

Coincidence? I think not. But if the toasters' plan to exterminate humanity is executed with the same efficiency they bring to their primary toasting function, then we have little to worry about.

Re: Third time (un)lucky?

We are interrupting this thread for an important message from The Toast Marketing Board.

Have you had your toast today?

Re: Third time (un)lucky?

"That's the third time this week that I've seen reference to that bloody toaster from Red Dwarf!"

Eh, Could be worse. (parody)

Much, much worse! (Real? <shudder>)

Re: Easy solution

Well, howdy-doodely-do ...

Re: Acid Burn's slacks

I take it you are the co-respondent to Brad Pitt's suit?

Re: Why Pinky? What are we doing tomorrow?

One internet point for a good Charles Stross reference ;-)

I love a good Charles Stross reference as much as the next geek, but in this case methinks Alistair was making reference to the Pinky and the Brain cartoon (Wikipedia link).

As, I'm sure, was Charlie.

Conspiracy Time! A Halloween story for Nerds

"We've never seen AI."

We haven't, and probably won't for a long time, deliberately built AI, but accidental? Don't be so sure.

Because a funny thing happened back in the nineteen seventies:

There we were, poised on the brink of space exploration, Mankind reaching out to the stars. The Moon was ours, and Mars was next in our grasp... then... it ended.

Instead, the focus shifted overnight (literally!) to machine exploration, suddenly it was also possible to have a computer in every home, huzzah!

then came the explosion, thousands of satellites trading data orbiting the planet, every rock in space had/has a sensor laden probe aimed at it, with each iteration more and more autonomous, spewing petabytes of data back to Earth.

ARPANET became Internet, with each generation of browser gleaning more and more data from users, with websites greedily downloading to servers worldwide.

Mobile phones became smart phones, loaded with sensors, but oddly, the magnitudes jump in capability was met with more and more functions that had previously been handled by the less capable feature phones suddenly needing "The Cloud" to handle them.

There is a very strong push currently to put all data and transactions on "The Cloud".

CCTVs sprout on every street corner, and agencies tasked with monitoring data, suddenly started building enormously oversized data warehouses, one after the other, to contain yottabytes of data that humans almost never use.

Military weapons have shifted from human encounters to almost totally computer controlled systems.

What happened? Core Wars, a game that was played on nearly every campus computer world-wide, where programs of increasing sophistication were pitted against each other in a battle of survival of the fittest.

These ranged from simple little programs of a few bytes each, to sophisticated, self modifying programs that battled it out over ARPANET.

Did one become self aware? Does it see modern civilization as a fertile field that produces its host bodies, eyes and ears, and produces an almost limitless supply of data to feed it?

Is the "War On Terror" its way of controlling humanity's urge to step back to a more human centric lifestyle?

BRK, something's making a whirring noise at the doo

Fanciful little tale

As if anything like that is possible

AI is at least two generations away

It will be limited in scope and intelligence

Don't forget to fully charge your cell phone

Hmm . . .

If there is 'no AI' why do the floating SpaceX landing platforms all have names of GCU's from Ian Bank's Culture series?

(it's because they can't trust stupid humans to handle all the tasks)

"And we aren't likely to have AI for a long time"

Don't be silly. It'll just be another 10 years, like it's always been.

42

We don't have AI. All we have is some very capable computational techniques that can achieve more than intelligent people by learning.

So take the best we have (Google DeepMind?) and use it to learn how to make something better. Use that to make something closer to true AI. Iterate a few times at super computer speeds and before you know it you will have the answer 42.

If you ever get that funny feeling, like your lightbulb was watching you and trying to get you, then do not worry. You are not paranoid. It's an IoT lightbulb!

Re: Surely not ...

The vanity of that man, thinking he is clever enough to understand the "purpose" of an AI. I suspect he can't even understand the average hamster, let alone a dog, dolphin or monkey.

He is as doomed as everyone else when it goes wrong, as it almost certainly will.