And what, exactly, is wrong with cheering for China? They have never invaded a foreign sovereign nation in their entire 400 year history. They have been invaded by a lot of other countries, however.

The Americans are panicking over China, they have no idea what to do and are just making knee-jerk responses pretending they are doing something and looking ‘tough’ in the eyes of Americans. Yet what exactly can they do to a country that has 3 trillion US dollars in ‘spare change’ of your currency and holds US$759 billion in your treasury bills?

The fact is, just like the financial meltdown a while back, China will just use this opportunity to buy up even MORE of American manufacturing, invest in building more US manufacturing plants (using American slave labor wage workers) and soon the US will be nothing more than a branch plant country for Chinese corporations, all profits returning back to China.

By some definitions of AI, a light switch IS AI. That is my point. AI is so broadly defined, and applied, that it is a useless term.

Deep Blue, Alpha, matters not. These systems play chess, because they were set up to play chess by humans. They can not of their own volition suddenly decide to not play chess, but to play something else they were not designed for. The neural nets are trained on a specific task. They make decisions based on that training, and that task, and the task inputs. It is still basically algorithmic, where the algorithms have built-in modifiable parameters that can be real-time adjusted within their limits. It is a long way from mimicking neurons. It mimics what some human theorist THOUGHT neurons performed like. But it is still a programed algorithm that comes from a human mind, just that it is on a different technological platform than a binary computing device. It is an example of a machine being able to fine-tune a system output in real time based on feedback inputs.

The intelligence has not evolved, the human capacity to create algorithms and devices to apply those algorithms in more novel and complex ways has evolved. It is human thinking that has evolved, not the ‘artificial intelligence’ per say.

You are very, very wrong about the ‘no one knows how these neural networks work’. This statement is a perfect example of the hype behind AI. They are not hard to understand, and their functionality is not hard to grasp, as long as one can get around the bug-a-boo that they are not digital or Boolean devices. They do not follow truth tables or traditional truth table logic. But it is perfectly understood how they make decisions. We are, however, in the very rudimentary state when it comes to graphically or diagrammatically or schematically or even mathematically depicting how they work - the iconography, symbology, terminology has not yet developed comprehensively.

The ‘nets’ have absolutely no idea what is ‘winning’ or ‘losing’. or ‘reward’ or ‘punishment’. Those are human concepts that have been anthropomorphically applied to inanimate devices. What it is in reality is some form of feedback circuit (human intervention or automated) that drives the system closer or further away from the desired state -‘desired’ as determined by the human operator. We did this many decades ago, even before digital computers, using analog potentiometers and electrical meters. Musicians do this all the time when they ‘fine tune’ their instruments. We have just gotten better and better at automating it and applying it to more complex situations. Some chess moves result in a better melody, others result in a more noisy sound. The instrument - the chess playing device - is simply fine tuned by repeated performances to produce the best sound, as we humans have determined ‘best sound’ to be.

Living neurons, on the other hand, are still not completely understood, nor do we understand exactly how neurons make decisions. The best guess is that they use quantum effects, but that is only based on the fact that we are discovering more and more that life itself is based on quantum effects - photosynthesis for example, or the methods birds use for navigation across continents. But living neurons have nothing in common with these ‘neural nets’ except that a picture of one was used as some conceptual pattern or intellectual starting point that triggered some ideas in the mind of a very creative person. Like seeing a bird fly triggered the idea that maybe humans can fly. But neural networks have as much in common with living neurons as airplanes have in common with how birds fly.

But in general, what we call AI is still nothing more than humans setting up machines to automate the application of the algorithms our human minds think of in the first place. Just a more complex, complicated, light switch - some device that allows us to automate the process of connecting the light to a power source, without having to connect the wires every time we want to use it.

I don’t need to ‘look up the history’. I was there from the beginning. ARPA and DARPA. Unix based. No WWW, no HTTP, no HTML. . No ‘MarkUp Language’ at all, because there were no web pages. No browsers. Everything text based TCP/IP. Pin-up ‘Pictures’ sent as very elaborate constructs made from different typed ASCII characters providing the different shades of grey, depending on the density of the characters. I still have one. tucked away somewhere in my file drawer, I think. Since it was mostly used by grad student tech nerds in the beginning, discipline was strictly enforced by ‘flaming’. It was only when the WWW became well established that corporations realize there was money to be made from it. Before that, it was indeed ‘free’. Well, the lines paid for by the Government and Universities.

399 responses and counting. I got bore going through them. The train, apparently is VERY long and indeed will take a VERY long time to pass.

Rumor has it that a certain super-rich tech mogul has am AI bidet/toilette in his house, that has to be connected to the Internet before it will work. When the Internet glitched (the site went off-line) and lost Internet connectivity, he could not flush the toilette manually.

AI itself is not getting better. Humans are getting better at writing the algorithms that will better be able to discern, classify, categorize, identify, direct the information flow, and predict based on more improved standardized inputs.

But the ‘tech bros’ never really jumped on it until Mark went through his ‘existential crisis’ thing.

AI is now a catch-all acronym that is becoming meaningless. The old, conventional light switch on the wall of the house I first lived in some 70 years ago could be classified as 'AI. The switch makes a decision, based on what position I put it in. I turn the light on, it remembers that decision and stays on. The thing is, the decision was first made by me and the switch carried out that decision, based on criteria that was designed into it.

That is, AI still does not make any decision that humans have not designed it to make in the first place.

What is needed, is a more appropriate terminology, describing the actual process of what we call AI. And really, the more appropriate descriptor would not be Artificial Intelligence, but Human-made Intelligent devices. All of these so-called AI devices and applications are, after all, completely human designed and human made. The originating Intelligence still comes from the minds of humans.

Most of the applications which we call Artificial Intelligence are actually Algorithmic Intelligence - decisions made based on algorithms designed by humans in the first place. The devices just follow these algorithms. Since humans have written these algorithms, it should really be no surprise that these devices are making decisions very similar to the decisions humans would make. Duhhh. We made them in our own image, no wonder they ‘think’ like us.

Really, these AI devices do not make decisions, they merely follow the decisions humans first designed into them.

Big Blue, the IBM chess playing computer, plays excellent chess because humans designed it to play chess, and to make chess decisions, based on how humans first designed the chess game.

What would be really scarry would be if Big Blue decided of its own volition that it no longer wanted to play chess, but it wanted to play a game it designed.

What turns a Canadian into a Terrorist? A terrorist organization, plan and simple.

I know this for a fact, having watched a Canadian youth turned into a terrorist right before my eyes.

If you are in a car, and the tires are going flat, is it a deterministic, nihilistic, view that inevitably, no matter who the driver is, the car will soon have to come to a stop? The choice, of course, is how catastrophic the stop will be - a controlled stop or a calamitous stop?

The trouble with America is that, even if Harris won, the entire American system is still based on an adversarial, winner-take-all system. In that regard, as Obama found out, the system is inherently unstable and unsteerable. Every move Harris tried to make, would be opposed and every attempt made by the opposition to undermine it. Under such conditions, progress is impossible. But even a controlled landing is impossible. No matter how much time America had, the fundamental problem was unfixable without a complete reset. The American governance system is basically unworkable and dysfunctional. The Civil War proved it, and the Civil War never really did end.

America has to split up in order for the parts to function properly again. The two sides are basically incompatible, and divorce is the only viable solution, apart from continuing the fighting, hating, and constant battling. Prolonging the situation will only lead to both sides destroying each other.

In point of fact, when Trump is deposed by Vance, the inevitable split will accelerate. Half of America will never live under the 2025 Manifesto, and the other half will never allow it to be undone once Vance puts it in place.

Something the Americans do not want the world, and especially other Americans, to know about Canada. Canada is at the forefront of developing the next stage of clean, harmless, safe nuclear power that actually uses existing nuclear waste as the fuel.

https://smractionplan.ca/content/moltex-energy-canada

The irony is that Canadian physicists were instrumental in developing the technology 50 years ago. It is the same technology that the Americans used in their nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers. But because of ‘security concerns’, the Americans prevented the Canadians from even mentioning the technology, under fear of lifetime incarceration. It was ‘Avro Arrow’ silencing on steroids. However, these reactors were so small, that development on them could be confined to the basement of a University physics building, or even under a greenhouse. Yet not only did Canadian universities, engineers, and scientists have to deny they existed, they could not even say they do not exist, because that would acknowledge they even recognized the possibility of the technology. Yet there they were, in American submarines, clear as day evidence that they existed.

And yet the most effective and less harmful drug proven to work against inflammation and inflammatory post-op pain - CBD oil - was not only banned, but any research into its usefulness was made illegal as well.

It is credible to say that the Opioid crisis was actually a .made-in-Vietnam’ crisis, in the sense that it gained a lot of traction from the returning American Vets from Vietnam, who were horribly injured (both mentally and physically) but ignored by the American system. They had no alternative but to seek solace from their emotional as well as physical pain in opioids.

Vietnam was the worst defeat of America in their entre history, It completely destroyed America. and for absolutely no good reason. Under the same system that America tried to quash, Vietnam is now an economic and industrial powerhouse, a major exporter to America… A complete and senseless waste of American lives and resources. Moreso in that the bottomless pit for money became so all-encompassing to the American economy that funding for the entire space endeavor completely dried up, along with funding for physics research. America hasn’t won a serious Nobel prize in Physics in decades.

The problem is, Boost for Lemmy should be built in, not an add on. have a thing about apps riding on other apps riding on other apps. Eventually, security is compromised.

Almost. it is 'selling America’s future to the top 20%. It would take at least 10% to actually form a viable economy. The Roman Empire and the British Aristocracy in antiquity realized that. So has Putin, North Korea., and Saudi Arabia. The system needs a critical mass to ensure survivability and continuity

Absolutely, You have the concept down pat. They are like a ‘condom’ economy - they give you a sense of comfort, security, and safety while you are being screwed. Except for the ‘crowd funded health care’ - that is an American hangup.

Matters not, the BQ is still the most proficient at protecting sovereignty. Canada could benefit from using a lot of their tricks and techniques, including their bluster.

The problem with this software as it exists now, is that I see your message in isolation in ‘messages’, and if I want to see the context I link to the overall thread, then I would have had to scroll down through the entire thread until I found the actual post, which I just did now, but a prolific poster is just not going to do that with every response. It is a glitch in Lenny itself that leads to these confusing return replies.

No, it is not happening now because of Trump. Trump s happening now because of the way America works. No matter who was in charge, the panic and outcome would be the same. America was at the breaking point, and nothing could have prevented it. Even Obama made that clear. Individually, yes you are correct about ‘If I shot’‘’'. The reality is 'EVERYONE collectively in America is doing the shooting, because ‘shooting’ has become culturally acceptable. So holding the individual accountable for herd action is just insanity. You stop the herd action at the herd level. Changing the action of an individual just does not make a difference in herd action. When Trump is deposed, Vance will be far worse than Trump could ever be. Vance is focused. Blaming Trump just makes it easier for Vance.