We're DOOMED

[Shea]

I, for one, welcome our new silicon based overlords...

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/newtonai.html

Pretty neat.

[Devaclis]

The questions is do you trust a program, a brain written for a machine, to give you answers to questions you as a human cannot comprehend?

It is a scary and wonderful new age we are awakening here. When you get to the point where you can collect more data than you can ever compile. Where you need to develop a high "intelligence" to filter that data, draw conclusions, perform tests against it, and deliver a theory all without any prior knowledge of want any of it meant. You either get absolute truth or you get an answer you believe because you do not understand it.

[Snowman]

And then it’s at that point the machines put us humans into zoos and begin to treat us like house pets…

[Shea]

Any scientist worth his salt (aka NOT Dirk :)) would just use it as a tool to "point in the right direction", I would think.

It's crazy the amount of data that is coughed out of our observation devices. Just think how much kittah porn and Neil Diamond songs you have and compare it to the storage capacity of your first computer... Interesting times indeed.

[Shea]

And then it’s at that point the machines put us humans into zoos and begin to treat us like house pets…

Or see us as the threat we are and wipe us out "for our own good" :)

[= Buckeye Jess =]

It's crazy the amount of data that is coughed out of our observation devices. Just think how much kittah porn and Neil Diamond songs you have and compare it to the storage capacity of your first computer... Interesting times indeed.
That's the mind boggling part to me... the leaps and bounds we've come along in such a short time. How we look at the next step and think we'll never need/use all of that and before we even realize that we did - we're on to the next big thing.

I remember hearing it all of the time when we bought our old 486 computer. I catch myself now wondering why the hell I just bought a 1TB hard drive or a laptop with 4GB RAM and what in the world I will EVER need that much for...surely just a matter of time before I'll scrap it for the next level.

EDIT: Even more amusing to me is the stuff that I just bought already belongs to yesterday and there is no keeping up with the Jones's. Where does it stop and what is it going to take for us to really sit back and think..."wow!"?

[Devaclis]

mind bottling

[= Buckeye Jess =]

yep, that too! lol

[Shea]

mind bottling

In about 2 hours, yeah

[Snowman]

mind bottling

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/59/153604782_38d24c1be8.jpg

[rforsythe]

Any scientist worth his salt (aka NOT Dirk :)) would just use it as a tool to "point in the right direction", I would think.

The problem is you don't even know what the right direction is; the data sets are so large we can't even comprehend what a reasonable response would be as humans. So we're either going to get amazing new things, or a computer is going to spit out some answer that results in a brain-eating virus and we'll blindly make it, thinking that it must be "the way". Or it will figure out how to comprehend self-awareness (another thing that we as humans just can't grasp fully) and put us all in zoos as pets.

The amount of data out there is obscene. Assuming a computer will analyze it and that we'll be able to validate the response as both useful and safe is arrogant. I think the tech is amazing and cool, but am very cautious about trusting it to decide absolute truth.

[dirkterrell]

Yeah, we have always had a tendency to spend lots of money collecting data sets and only a little on analyzing them, at least on the space side of things that I'm familiar with. We have decades old data sets that have barely been looked at, not because there isn't interest but because little money is budgeted for the analysis.

This might make an efficient way of getting started but I believe you still need the creativity of the human mind to complete the process. Science is much more than crunching numbers with a computer.

Dirk

[Captain Obvious]

Science is much more than crunching numbers with a computer.

Dirk

Well, science needs to spend a little more time building anatomically correct fem-bots. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWA6uSutpF8

[Shea]

Well, science needs to spend a little more time building anatomically correct fem-bots. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWA6uSutpF8

No doubt