Re: Surveilance was: Transhuman fascists?

From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 29 2000 - 19:06:10 MST


'What is your name?' 'Zero Powers.' 'Do you deny having written the
following?':

> >This might not seem like a lot of work, but we don't have a computer today
> >that's capable of detecting anything you list in (2) without a human
> >pre-analyzing the data.
>
> I never said the system should or could be implemented "today." AI could
> very well solve this problem. Even so, I don't think it would really be
> that difficult to solve even with today's technology. My list of sworn
> enemies would be finite (quite small actually). You could do it with sets
> of software agents. One agent assigned to follow each of the enemies on my
> list. When any one enemy did one of the trigger events, the agent merely
> reports back. Would that really be so difficult to engineer? I don't think
> so.

<sigh> YES. REALLY. Take my word for it for chrissake. :) A list of
enemies will not suffice: you have to figure out how to write down the
function that takes grids of numbers and spits out a 1 if it's a picture
of one of the enemies on your list and a 0 otherwise. This is a very
complicated function which nobody can write down today.

Using AIs here is the application of a magic genie that will solve all
your computational problems. A genie like that might not WANT to solve
all our problems; it might just decide to do its own thing or figure out
the meaning of life or what have you.

> I think the problem is that you are thinking of the system as "the
> computer." Sure it would have to be one *massively* parallel box to handle
> all those requests and all that data. But guess what? Coming soon to a
> planet under you will be a distributed network of intelligent devices of all
> kinds. Think intelligent, networked, and communicating observation and
> reporting hardware devices, think innumerable software agents all reporting
> back to you according to your instructions, think distributed networked
> computing, think "system" as opposed to "the computer" and it should be
> easier to grasp.

Doesn't matter. Put emphasis on the "massive" and you see what I'm
getting at.

-Dan

      -unless you love someone-
    -nothing else makes any sense-
           e.e. cummings



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