Philo Sofee wrote:James Gardner, The Intelligent Universe, New Page Books, 2007, has a lot to say of how vastly advanced AI has become and it is not in the news. His discussions of ET and SETI are fascinating as he presents both pro and con arguments. The speed with which we are approaching the Singularity is startling! Within our lifetimes!
I'm really skeptical there. Certainly particular AI routines have become more sophisticated. There's worlds of difference between say Google's Tensor Flow code and say doing inner space distance calculations on multidimensional space, which was state of the art before. That said, the AI hype is vastly overblown. While there's improvement in pattern matching that's all it is. There were tons of useful code that's still very useful from things like latent semantic mapping to the afore mentioned simple inner product approaches using linear algebra. Throwing out pure rule based routines was an important development. However as someone who works in the field somewhat, what's interesting to me is just how little progress we've actually made from the 90's. (Even neural nets were around then - a lot of the advancements are fine tuning things to particular datasets)
Now having lots of memory and computational power was useful. But we also hit the end of Moore's Law some years ago. Even when you get pedantic and not the law was about transistors not single thread speed. Parallel computing only gets one so far and we've hit a lot of walls there too.
So honestly as someone who's worked in the field what's interesting is how the big breakthrough is always 20 years away. It reminds me of fusion research honestly. (Although at least with AI there's been far more practical uses found for development)
Gadianton wrote:You can't get an "ought" from an "is" no matter how powerful the alien God, and so they're no better off than atheists in terms of morality and finding meaning in life.
Although, for all practical purposes, whatever other arguments they may make, I think we all recognize that if a Mopologist can somehow become immortal and eat like it's Thanksgiving four days a week, he doesn't really care if there's morality or gold plates or anything else.
Well at the risk of an other backlash claiming I'm distracting with philosophy, I will say that not everyone agrees with Kant on "is" and "ought." I do for the record, but then I also think Mormon ontology ends up largely being akin to atheistic ontologies. So I agree with you. The usual approach (both for many Mormons but also many atheists) is the existential approach towards meaning. The more calculative types like Kant don't like that. In many ways existentialism is an extended reaction against Kant's more calculative approaches.
You could even argue that the purpose of this life is to show people what they value and what they find meaningful. One persons heaven might be a ward where everyone does their home teaching (nee Ministering) while for others that may well be hell. (South Park's funny treatment of Mormons in heaven is actually quite apt there)
ClarkGoble wrote: I'm really skeptical there. Certainly particular AI routines have become more sophisticated. There's worlds of difference between say Google's Tensor Flow code and say doing inner space distance calculations on multidimensional space, which was state of the art before. That said, the AI hype is vastly overblown. While there's improvement in pattern matching that's all it is. There were tons of useful code that's still very useful from things like latent semantic mapping to the afore mentioned simple inner product approaches using linear algebra. Throwing out pure rule based routines was an important development. However as someone who works in the field somewhat, what's interesting to me is just how little progress we've actually made from the 90's. (Even neural nets were around then - a lot of the advancements are fine tuning things to particular datasets)
Do you have the same skepticism for Mormonism? Do you believe Jesus is going to give you everlasting life?
ClarkGoble wrote: Now having lots of memory and computational power was useful. But we also hit the end of Moore's Law some years ago. Even when you get pedantic and not the law was about transistors not single thread speed. Parallel computing only gets one so far and we've hit a lot of walls there too.
So honestly as someone who's worked in the field what's interesting is how the big breakthrough is always 20 years away. It reminds me of fusion research honestly. (Although at least with AI there's been far more practical uses found for development)
Some theorists predict that if the field of AI continues to develop at its current rate, the singularity could come by 2050. Ray Kurzweil predicts the singularity by 2025. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/4258 ... ngularity/
Have some optimism. AI can be much more useful for our lives than Mormonism.
Clark wrote:Well at the risk of an other backlash claiming I'm distracting with philosophy, I will say that not everyone agrees with Kant on "is" and "ought." I do for the record, but then I also think Mormon ontology ends up largely
I can understand your confusion, the problem is, your friend DCP does agree with "Kant" (though I'm thinking Hume) and trumpets the need for something "beyond" the "is" to ground morality, on the one hand, and then fully contradicts himself by making claims in debates like the one that sparked this thread.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.