nu23

There seem to be a lot of defensive comments, which I guess, seem to be coming from the focus on individual guilt. Focussing too much on individual choice is examining a particular solution approach and not the problem itself which needs to be solved. Lack of awareness is not a valid excuse, because even when some people speak out on the harmful consequences of technology(people have long talked about the surveillance state), they are ignored since we dont have systems in place to do a cost-benefit analysis and coordinate around a solution. Sure, there are many problems with the individual approach(what if somebody else is hired?, what if opponents develop a weapon technology?). But this only highlights the difficulty of the problem. This is why the 'we' becomes appropriate, because individuals are weak(unless they are at some critical stage).

There are potentially many developments in areas like nanotech, bioengineering, ai with which humanity might face big troubles. For this, there needs to be some strategy identifying such potential problems, and putting precautionary measures on r&d. Something like this happened with nuclear scientists hiding their research before WW2. This is harder to replicate now, with the science and engineering community distributed more widely between competing nations. So, a first step could be to acheive a shared understanding of common interests and ways to coordinate with each other.

Alternatively, energy can be poured into defensive measures for defeating harmful technologies. We already have many engineers developing counter-technologies. Also, Snowden himself was an example of exposing something which he considered harmful.

One important thing to note is that cyclone hit Orissa at low tide. Floods, more than wind speed, seem to be the the important factor. There was flooding some time after Phailin in Andhra Pradesh due to heavy rains and the casualty count was much higher than the cyclone itself. That said, the Orissa government did a good job. There was a terrible cyclone ten years ago with huge devastation, and this time they organized mass evacuations. Hope the disaster relief is strong and the Filipinos get all the help that they will be needing.

Interesting. This is a very detailed effort, with encyclopaedic ambitions across different languages. The question is if there is a lightweight version of this - someway of chosing a reasonably small set of phonemes which can represent, most English words accurately. The second part is to represent the phonemes by either using a small number of new letters and diacritics (which is what the IPA already does), or to map the phonemes directly to single letters or a string of two or three letters. With the second option, there would still be ambiguity in reading a spelling (where are the phoneme breaks?). But, the accent situation would improve and one can get used to the phoneme boundaries by looking it up for each new word.

Maybe, we should have an international language reform to introduce a phonetic spelling system (WYSIWYHear) which would also lead to a somewhat standardized accent. The local ways of pronouncing words, can still continue in each region. There are probably many aesthetic considerations for this. But when two people across different regions speak, they can use this system.

This would require linguists to document the phonemes, and to find a minimal set of alterations of either the spelling or the pronounciation of a word so that you have a phonetic system. There are already variations in spelling (American/British English). This would be another variation which is phonetic.

Of course, even if this this work is done, it would still be yet another standard needing popular adoption. The phonemes would also be more in number than the current letters which means either using diacritic symbols (requiring change in keyboards, slower typing) or mapping a phoneme to multiple letters (longer spellings and possibly some ambiguity in detecting phoneme boundaries in spellings).

To me, 'hack' and 'unintuitive' carry different meanings. 'Hack' indicates some kind of ad-hoc patch to fix the model. Even if it fits the data, there could be a theoretical irregularity. I suspect that programmers experience this quite often when making a change that keeps the program working. Sure, it is possible that ultimately the hack is indeed how nature works, but its still worth exploring and making precise the nature of the irregularity.

Reasoning from basic principles is a valuable tool to evaluate conclusions. Sure, it has strong weaknesses (hidden assumptions which are wrong, insufficient imagination about what could happen, rationalizing one's biases). But it is useful, when you dont have complete trust in the quality or the scope of the experiment. For instance, claims about quantum computing solving NP complete problems are legitimately held in doubt because of theoretical reasons. Also, whenever there are short term positives hiding a long term negative, like say unsustainable financial or ecological behavior, the negatives might be only seen by a chain of reasoning and not by direct experiments.

I agree in the sense that we see so many cases in the other direction - reasoning full of holes being trusted over empirics. The interesting thing is in any given situation, how much trust to give to the different tools that we have to evaluate a claim.

We need a higher resolution in our vocabulary when talking about technological risks. Someone can be in favour of most forms of technology, and yet even when dealing with technologies with extinction risk, the word that comes up to describe the opposition is 'Luddite'. Which is not to say that I am opposed to AI research.

Well, I'd love to be wrong about this and hope that you are right. What worries me is that key parts of the technology, like the processor, sensors and software might be available cheaply due to their civilian uses. Manufacturing ability could well be scarce, but these weapons could pass through illicit distribution networks which today distribute machine guns and rocket launchers. I didn't fully understand your postscript, but regarding visibilty, I admit I dont know much here - for instance, how small of drone would be realistically possible for a non-state producer. But I dont see a clear knockdown argument, given that drones are used effectively today. Again, I hope you are right and that there are more technical obstacles out there.

In twenty years or so, this could easily be widely available, just like machine guns today. Even if there was an explicit ban on the endproduct itself, the basic technology could be understood well enough to allow underground manufacturing. If true, this would allow anonymous murders and a complete breakdown of law and order. The more advanced miniature variants with face recognition software, might elude detection and jamming technologies. Popular officials might find it too dangerous just to go outside. This would provoke even more intrusive surveillance systems.

There seems to be a broader trend where our offensive technologies are moving much faster than our protective systems. At a state level, this has been handled by deterrence. Fortunately, for nuclear weapons, the necessary materials were rare enough for regulation to be possible. But deterrence wont work when these technologies become popularly available. Hopefully, there is some non-brutal solution that we can find for this problem.

In your metamorphosis example, is the finished project essentially be a robot? Would you have the same problem when a software agent is transferred from one computer to another?

Assume a negative answer. Then, the interesting implicit belief, is that there is something special about body composition. Whereas in physical law, there is nothing unique in principle about the body. So, the laws would have to be wrong or incomplete(fail to include consciousness) in an important way.