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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (142364)	8/3/2004 9:39:17 AM
From: spiral3	Respond to of 281500

It's 6 billion of us versus nature, whereas 100 years ago it was 1 billion of us versus nature and each other, with most of us living in agricultural subsistence lifestyles. this is what they say about Tibet in the day, that it was even rougher in the night. The location was so remote and the environment was so phenomenally brutal and the conditions so hard, that the peoples had to turn somewhere for solace. Even today these are some very tough people. Bin Laden thinks that the US is soft, and the lifestyle is, and this is true, but this is his fatal flaw, for as it is written "the soft shall overcome the hard". They call this dependant arising, or the non existence of independant origination. Phew ! Finally ! I got some foreign affairs in there !

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (142364)	8/3/2004 11:33:42 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Whatever changed, seems to have changed about 40K years ago. Most of what we know about that we have found out over the past few decades. It's hard to know what happened when we can't translate what they wrote, and we can't share what's been translated, because it's mostly still on paper in brick-and-stone libraries. Even today, most scholarly journals are not available online. And we destroy what they made, even though we don't mean to. Take, for example, the cave paintings in France. Gaping at them in wonder released gases and vapors from our mouths and lungs that etched them away, washed them away. Pompeii is being destroyed again, this time by acids in the rain. And 40,000 years from now, your descendents will look in vain to see what you thought, because the paper, the tape, the wires, the plastics, will have all turned to dust long before then, and the buildings crumbled away. He will conclude that you were a primitive brute. I do genealogy, and am astonished at how quickly people vanish. I've tried to find out about my grandmother, but the only things that are left to me are a few photographs, a piece or two of glassware and furniture, and some deeds and whatnot that are preserved in courthouses, and a census or two, some tax forms in archives. To find out about her mother, there are even fewer things, and to find out about her mother, not a single thing I've been able to find even though I've been lookng for years. We vanish when we die, except for some paper records, maybe an inscription on a stone or two that will be eaten away by the rain. You will vanish, too.

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (142364)	8/6/2004 4:53:20 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Al Qaeda and other Luddite fascists don't understand what's happening. They don't have a chance. It's like the opening scene of 2001 A Space Odyssey with Chimpoids versus Hal. They don't have a chance. Nature has passed them by. Ted Kaczynski understood what's happening, but the chimpoids put him in gaol. No, Mq., nature will win over machines for the next few centuries; machines may never process better than humans. DenBeste, a former QCOM engineer, says it well but, for crying out loud, he defines prolix: denbeste.nu ....no amount of digital hardware, no matter how fast, parallel or well connected, can ever really be intelligent in the way that we are, with the degree of capability and versatility we have. I cannot say for certain that's the case, but I have a strong suspicion that it is. There will eventually be a computer system which can beat any human at chess. It could be built now, except that no one cares to spend the money. But that system won't also be able to drive a car, write poetry, laugh at a joke, watch a movie and then summarize it later, or do all the other kinds of things that human chess grandmasters can do in addition to playing chess. Our brains are parallel computers; machines are not yet parallel in any significant sense, and they must be if they are to reach beyond several immutable physical constants towards artificial intelligence. A scary thought. Ergo, unsophisticated terrorists can learn how to do terror much like a baby learns how to talk, etc. Motivation and commitment not to mention zeal are the keys, in my view. Oh, s**t.