Tag: logic

When information technology even scares me

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So I’m sure you all know about IBM’s Watson project and how the first iteration took a room full of servers where now it fits in a server approximately the size of a pizza box. But all Watson did was relate information – it had basic algorithms to make decisions upon but not so advanced. 

And now there’s The Debater. I joking said this computer better have a big red off switch and/or a large axe next to it in case they needed to reprogram the beast. That latter is a reference to something Zaphod Beeblebrox said to the ship board computer in the book the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. 

Now I can sort of prognosticate here and show you what The Debater as they call it will be capable of doing. Kiss attorneys and judges goodbye. Kiss doctors goodbye. Kiss pretty much all knowledge workers goodbye. It’s scary as hell. Something approximately the size of a pizza box will be more capable than a human.

You have to wonder what is going to happen to humanity when whole swaths of the economy get wiped out in a single pass. But then it reminds me of yet another movie – Colossus: The Forbin Project. An intelligent and self aware super computer decides that humanity is the problem in that one. Gets control of the nuclear arsenal and well at the end is the stunning phrase “Never!”

So it could go either way – an intelligent and logical debater could use it’s capacity for the betterment of mankind or threaten to wipe US off the planet a la Terminators and SkyNet. Only time will tell.  

Some ideas to curtail gun violence

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Earlier I had posted a comment on Facebook and I thought it would bear a post to WP too.

So here are three things we should require of gun purchasers:

1) Liability insurance – if it’s required to drive a car, it most certainly should be required to keep guns.

2) Psychological evaluations for at a minimum the purchaser of the gun(s) if not members of the family too.

3) Require proof of purchase of a gun safe. Prices can get steep for a long barrel gun but lock boxes for handguns all hover in the $100 to $150 range. You can see a whole bunch of options here.

I might add, just that last part – requiring a gun safe may well have saved the mothers life in the Newtown tragedy as well as the lives of 26 other people.

In essence what I’m suggesting is requiring a level of responsibility on gun owners that wouldn’t necessarily ban weaponry, but make you think a little harder before you bought one.

Put it this way , a .45 ACP pistol will cost about $1,000. A gun safe about $150, and a psych eval probably in the $500 to $600 range. Insurance will cost $960 per year. So fixed costs are $1,750, with first year being $2,710 and subsequent years being the $960 insurance cost.

Make it not cheap to buy and own a gun.

Getting another bigot to turn off comments on YouTube

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So I get sent all sorts of YouTube videos. The latest was this one:

Granted I think fundamentalist Islam is as ridiculous as fundamentalist Christians.

Anyhow there was a bit of a comment war going on. I love comment wars.

Go look at the comments here. I note he’s now disabled all comments. I suppose it was getting to the point where he was approaching psychosis because he felt responsible to respond to every comment. If you’re interested, in that above link, just search on kd1s. That’s me. I like to think I had this religious bigot foaming at the mouth.

By the way, when I look at warningsinners profile I see SoutherPreachers is one of his ‘friends’. I should have known.

So this is standard tactic of religious bigots. Refute them with hard data, ridicule them and their god, and they shut off comments instead of engaging in debate.

Such fun!