Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)
jheartney:
--- Quote from: anahata on 10 Jun 2016, 23:37 ---
--- Quote from: jheartney on 10 Jun 2016, 08:08 ---Today's experimental driverless cars, for example, use a kind of cheat in that they have access to massive map databases which allow them to avoid having to process the large majority of their input data, and instead focus only on whatever is novel in whatever they are getting from their sensor arrays. Humans (and mobile animals) don't do this, at least not as a primary strategy.
--- End quote ---
I'm not buying that. Humans rely on either knowing where they are going because they've gone there before and remember the route, or they use maps, or somebody gives them verbal directions (and GPS is a combination of the last two). Self driving cars have a map because it's their only means of navigation; all the logic for avoiding obstacles and staying on the road is based on immediate sensory input. It couldn't be any other way.
--- End quote ---
The maps give the driverless cars sign and signal placement, lane placement, lane direction, and placement of all durable landmarks. It's far more than navigation. Put a driverless car in an unfamiliar urban location and give it only basic navigational information (a simple street map), and the car will be unable to move.
Akima:
--- Quote from: Scarblac on 10 Jun 2016, 02:54 ---Marvin Minsky pointed out that people in the 60s said that computers would never beat humans at chess, because that requires intelligence and computers aren't capable of intelligent thought. When they eventually did, it was claimed that playing chess wasn't a test of real intelligence because computers could do it.
--- End quote ---
Essentially, we have no explicit definition of intelligence or thought, so it's hardly surprising this confusion arises. Generally, definitions boil down to little more than "thinking is what humans do". This is implicit in the Turing Test, in which a computer, in order to pass the test, simply has to be indistinguishable from a human being. It is probably no more than egotism that leads people to declare as "not real intelligence" any cognitive performance that can be explicitly defined, turned into algorithms, and programmed into a computer. It is rather like declaring a hole dug by a machine, rather than by a man with a spade, as not being a real hole.
As for the suggestion that a computer is "cheating" by being provided with pre-prepared information, that is rather like saying that doctors are not intelligent, because they go to medical school, and have access to Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the medical soap-opera).
BenRG:
Purely FWIW, my definition of intelligence is 'being able to create new behaviours that are not automatically based on current or recent sensory input from the environment'. In other words, the ability to transcend instinct and try something totally new.
Azaph:
Noone seems to have explicitly noted this yet, and it's driving me nuts:
That's not what a philosophical zombie is. Like, it's amost the exact opposite, actually, the whole point of a P-zombie is that it acts exactly like a person in every way, but has no internal experiences. The argument made using them explicitly rests on the fact that it is in principle impossible to tell that another person isn't a P-zombie - literally everyone else in the world might be a P-zombie, for all you know, because you can't tell what other people's internal experiences are like. Behavioural markers like lack of empathy and concern with one's own advancement cannot possibly distinguish a P-zombie, both because that would be an external difference (which P-zombies don't have) and because something can be inhuman and have experiences. Nor could one make a P-zombie, actually, since there's no way to really know that something isn't conscious either.
(For the record, the major argment using P-zombies is, simplified: 'P-zombies are not in principle a logical impossibility, therefore it is logically possible to have a being physically identical to a human without internal experience, therefore our experiences are not identical to anything physical, therefore physicalism is false.')
Morituri:
--- Quote from: Gyrre on 09 Jun 2016, 05:53 ---t turns out that Sam Adams (the man not the company his father founded) was quite the bastard. The mob that caused the Boston Tea Party was pretty liquored up thanks to him. And the historical record shows that's far from the first time he got a mob liquored up and started a riot.
--- End quote ---
Of course he did! He ran a brewery! Liquored up mobs are good for business! That whole revolution thing was an accident, really.
To John Adams we owe the founding principle of our democracy. "Money Talks."
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