RobGR

"Clique" is a small close group of people, "cliché" is an oft-repeated observation.

A school teacher at a small charter school, teaching various levels of math and a few foreign languages. This person was pretty technically proficient - they used a linux to access the web, but it was set up to boot a browser in to full-screen kiosk mode, and they pretty much just searched webpages and printed things out sometimes, no email really.

The DOS was DRDOS 7.22, and it was very elaborately set up -- it boots from a CDROM or USB flash disk as a live disk. On the disk is every assignment, homework, or test for any of the various courses he taught, carefully organized. They are in WordPerfect 5.1 with a few graphics in another program, and a graphing ( as in X-Y cartesian plots ) program also, all ancient freeware DOS. The three programs come up instantly on boot in different terminate-and-stay-resident screens, that you switch to with a control-alt combo, very like switching terminals in text mode linux.

This meant he could take a CDROM to school, pop it in the horibly slow and ad-laden windows computer some government program had given the school for free, boot, disconnect the printer from the network to the constarnation of other teachers and plug in a USB cable, and print his assignments, and never bring back viruses. The students when they learned of this situation would search out old viruses on the web and try to infect everything.

But using windows and mac was pretty limited to a little bit of browsing, and occasionally going to a dedicated machine with the right program already set up, to enter grades and time sheets and etc.

They were familar with a mouse from DOS based drawing and diagram programs. Most of those did not have keyboard and mouse input active at once, you were using the mouse, or you were in a different mode to enter text. Some of them had one pointer, so you could be typing, bump the mouse, and put characters in the wrong place.

The tabs in question covered modern Firedox, xfce4-notes-plugin, and I think gedit. It was the concept of tabs, not the appearance. None of them looked that much like the tab on a manilla file folder.

This is a really interesting and complete writeup.

I have been helping someone who has little experience with Windows or Mac, but used DOS for years ( until pretty recently ) and I've set them up with a simple Debian Linux running XFCE4 as the desktop. I've found that I have to teach them and also document a lot of basic computer idioms -- Control-C / X / A / V to copy, cut, select all, paste; but also more basic things, like the fact there are two pointers on the screen -- one for the mouse and one for the keyboard -- if you slide the mouse pointer to a specific point and press a keyboard key, the new key will not appear where the arrow is, it will appear where the text cursor is.

A big one was tabs. I had to get a couple of manilla folders and show them the actual tabs, and hold it up next to the browser with several tabs, and suddenly it snapped with them what the interface was trying to represent.

Control-A will select all of a web page, unless you are in the text entry box of a form, then it selects just the things in that text entry box.

I started writing this up in a little manual, it got to a dozen pages fast, and I haven't put very much in it.

If anyone knows of a place where some portion of all of this is written down, post a link !

I live near the Dell's Favorite olive oil farm, was happy to see them in this article.

If I go directly to the URL it wants me to agree to some stuff before I even know what the service is. I had to come to these comments to figure that out (without agreeing to anything first).

Yes, both sides are working on a presumption, with no evidence except playing out a thought experiment that is heavily biased by our own outlook.

However, when proposing that someone be stopped from doing something, the burden of proof is on the proposer.

Exactly, it will have the goals of the humans who control it, just as the first pointed stick we made pokes what we jam it into.

That's just applying Pascal's wager, and you can argue for or against any action that way if some fanciful extreme hypothesis of infinite harm is treated as serious.

There is no reason to presume a superintelligence we build will want pets, feel antipathy to humans, or be god-like in any way, or even have any goals other than what we give it. If you jump to this conclusion, regardless of how many big words on less-wrong you attach to it, this speaks only about you and not about AI. If you think the super-AI will hate humans, it's because deep inside you hate humans. I also hate humans, but I know that humans are making the AI, it probably will not hate them, in addition to surpassing me in other abilities.

In general, the smarter a person is, the nicer and more helpful they are. There is no reason to presume differently of AI, especially if we are building it to be helpful to ourselves.

Because they still have stock in the companies, and in a larger sense, are very personally invested in AI being big and important as possible.