EDIT: Re: energy efficiency: the problem is that humans are too energy efficient. Your brain can keep functioning after 3 days of running across the Savanna without food, which is (a) awesome, and (b) not really helpful nowadays. The cost of this is that you can only usefully use a little energy each day, say 4 or 5 burgers at most. AGI prototypes will usefully slurp in power measured in number of reactors.
On the first article, if you believe that a human is smarter than a chimp, and a chimp is smarter than a snail, then it raises the question of whether entities smarter than humans are possible. I suppose it might be difficult to precisely define a concept of intelligence that matches our intuition that humans are smarter than chimps, who in turn are smarter than snails. But such difficulty just says something about how facile you are with defining concepts. It doesn't have any bearing on how things play out in the real world.
On the second point, who cares? If the first AGI draws gigawatts, it will still be an AGI.
> The chairman and co-founder of Palantir is Peter Thiel — the same man who more recently funded the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker, a media outlet that had angered him, and who served as the final speaker at the Republican National Convention. His firm continues to work closely with the U.S. intelligence community.
To be clear, I think supporting political candidates is a fine thing for anyone to do. I am not disagreeing with Thiel's choice to support a candidate, but rather his choice to support an ignorant, totalitarian bigot under any circumstances.
We are post nuclear war. Cyber is the new nuclear. This nuclear saber rattling is a way for leaders to show their mettle to people in a way that they understand well.
I strongly disagree. There are still thousands of nuclear weapons pointing from the US to Russia and vice-versa, along with many others in hot spots like India and Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea.
A lot of the weapons and warning systems in Russia are antiquated, and could result in false alarms. False alarms have drawn the world close to nuclear war before.
Now that either Hillary or Trump will get elected, the US is very likely to get in to another war, and it's quite possible that it will turn nuclear if one of the other nuclear powers get involved in a big way.
The nuclear threat is just not considered much any more, except in the case of North Korea, because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, but this is a false sense of security. The proverbial Doomsday Clock might not be quite as close to midnight as it was at the hight of the Cold War, but it's still way too close for comfort.
If those countries had the gall to launch a nuke, they would have to be willing to live with the consequences when their compromised system levels their missile silo or other installation.
Edit: That is to say, the NSA might have probably compromised this ICBM and it will detonate before moving an inch.
Never mind. This isn't the issue. But this is amusing to see Gawker - a garbage tabloid with a pseudo-progressive agenda and highly questionable ethics - be referred using a very neutral term ("media outlet"). And to see any attempts at neutrality vanish next sentence when it comes to describing Peter Thiel. As if Thiel was not famous for Paypal, Facebook, Palantir or 0->1 but rather for being the guy who "destroyed" Gawker (an innocent media outlet that is.). Or I guess for being the guy who helped Hulk Hogan get justice, but that's if you are not a rancid journalist.
A few thoughts anyway: 1/ Interestingly, it is a few months after Thiel publicly endorsed DT that Palantir faces an obviously bogus lawsuit from a US agency that is directly supervised by the Executive branch.
2/ The article fails to mention that if Thiel was "angered at Gawker", it is because he was outed as a homosexual without his consent by those very people pretending to be progressives.
3/ Thiel funded the Hogan lawsuit. The tone the article takes make it seem like he fabricated evidence or used his power to take away the jobs of those honest and hard-working investigative journalists. That is not the case. He helped someone (Hulk Hogan) get reparations for the harm Gawker and their greed had caused him, ruining part of his life.
4/ There is a trend here. An ever increasing amount of vicious attacks towards Thiel since he started to create some harsh cognitive dissonance between media/liberal narratives ("Trump supporters are ignorant idiots, rednecks who don't know any better") and reality ("There is a broad spectrum of people who support Trump, each for different reasons. You can be a V legend, a successful tech entrepreneur and Stanford-educated lawyer and think Trump is the best choice all things considered").
Gawker's case has absolutely nothing to do with freedom of speech, as much as they were styling themselves, instead it has a lot to do with ruining people's lives, breaking the law and paying the consequences of such behaviour.
Just to be clear, "ruining people's lives" by reporting true things, at least in the case of Thiel and Hogan.
I mean, reasonable people can disagree about the bounds of journalism. It is not crazy to say that outing someone or publishing a sex tape is scummy. But it is not true that this had "nothing to do with freedom of speech," and your rhetoric seems awfully overblown. Is Thiel's life ruined? Hogan's?
I would just like to note, that the gist of the problem with Hogan is that Gawker has been ordered to remove the said tape by a court and they refused to comply.
That is the real reason why they got obliterated in the end.
That may be true. But my parent poster said that it was because they ruined people's lives. I don't think that refusing to comply with a court order, however dumb that may have been, was ruining anyone's life.
Without knowing the details of the people's private lives, their relationships, and the impact this has had, it's impossible to say. From the outside, you don't know what's happening in someone else's life except for what they publish / gets published about them.
This could have had a very real impact on personal relationships in both of their lives, which they've chosen to not publicise precisely because it's personal and none of our business.
No, parent comment said they went down because they ruined people's lives AND broke the law.
Trying to argue whether or not someone's life was actually ruined is irrelevant. That's not for you to decide. It clearly damaged someone enough for them to dump millions of dollars into a totally legal retaliation effort.
Gawker had no right to do what they did, as determined by a court. This is the crucial point. They tried to screw someone by financially strong arming them out of justice, so Thiel did that to them instead.
It's absolutely tone deaf to say that outing someone as gay or posting a sex tape couldn't have devastating effects.
What an excellent strategy to move conversation forward. Just take the peripheral argument, attack it, then act like that was the only argument ever presented.
Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't aware that you had blessed the general concept under discussion as having truthiness, making it inappropriate to discuss the parts of it that weren't true.
Gawker certainly were judged to have broken the law, and certainly did pursue a legal strategy that was at best unwise.
HN regularly anoints as justified activities that break the law if we find the law unjust or unwise, and typically looks pretty badly on legal authorities who impose massive disproportionate penalties on people who disrespect the legal authority.
The person who kicked off this thread asserted that this issue had "absolutely nothing to do with free speech", and that Gawker had ruined lives as a way to argue that this was not appropriate, hacker-like lawbreaking, but inappropriate, opprobrium-worthy lawbreaking.
The idea that this case had "nothing to do with free speech" is farcical in a "black is white" kind of way. It was about whether it was okay for reporters for a news organization to print a story.
The idea that it "ruined lives" runs up pretty hard against the evidence that pretty self-evidently, neither Thiel's nor Hogan's lives were ruined. Now, could we argue that perhaps they did suffer in some way for the story? Sure! Which is why I noted that the "ruined lives" thing was overheated rhetoric, rather than saying that it contains no truth of any kind.
That's a slippery slope argument. The same could easily be said of WikiLeaks. Or Edward Snowden. So why are you making it here? Are you suggesting that Thiel should maybe bankroll the rendition of Assange or Snowden as well?
I don't think you need to bankroll those. It is not much of a slippery slope than an indication how much certain media outlets can fuck with people who does not have money to fight back.
The court ruled in their favor. They were correct and unless Thiel had bankrolled then Gawker would have gotten away with breaking the law. That is not a good thing.
Right...I'm not suggesting they'd need to be bankrolled, just pointing out that it's not too difficult to make the same sort of argument about Wikileaks or Edward Snowden: that laws were broken.
For the record:
I think Gawker acted like a bunch of thugs, and society didn't need a protector to rise up against them. I didn't; I just stopped reading their sites.
I think Wikileaks ... well, I don't know what I think about them. They've caused harm, but they've also enlightened, and they've performed a public service that contributes to the electorate's available information. I wish they had more to contribute for other candidates, and I have no judgment on why that is other than that it appears politically motivated to not participate in opposition disclosure for all candidates (yes, I know, it may simply be that they have no data). It's difficult for me to stake an unequivocal position on them, and I think that's okay, because I have no convincing evidence to support one.
Snowden? I believe he behaved in as responsible a manner he could to support his ethical beliefs, and I believe justice for him includes being allowed to live a normal life in whatever country he chooses without fear of prosecution. He profoundly affected me and my beliefs, and I have immense respect for him.
Inteligence is not one dimensional as is evolution => https://backchannel.com/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai-59282b68...
Silicon based intelligent machines might not energy efficient => https://aeon.co/essays/intelligent-machines-might-want-to-be...