GeraldMonroe

Karma: 122

GeraldMonroe 4 Oct 2015 1:26 UTC
1 point
in reply to: OrphanWilde’s comment on: Monty Hall Sleeping Beauty
Care to elaborate?

You just woke up. You don’t know if the coin was head or tails, and you have no further information. You knew it was 50-50 before going to sleep. No new information, no new answer. I don’t see what the “twist” is. Monty Hall, there’s another information input—the door the host opens never has the prize behind it.

Or, another perspective : a perfect erasure of someone’s memories and restoration of their body to the pre-event state is exactly the same as if the event in question never occurred. So delete the 1 million from consideration. It’s just 1 interview post waking. Heads or Tails?

GeraldMonroe 25 Feb 2015 21:11 UTC
7 points
on: Are Cognitive Biases Design Flaws?
The designer had a specific design goal : “thou shalt replicate adequately well under the following environmental conditions”...

Given the complex, intricate mechanisms that humans seem to have that allow for this, the “designer” did a pretty good job.

Cognitive biases boost replication under the environmental conditions they were meant for, and they save on the brainpower required.

So yes, I agree with you. If the human brain system were an engineered product, it clearly meets all of the system requirements the client (mother nature) asked for. It clearly passes the testing. The fact that it internally takes a lot of shortcuts and isn’t capable of optimal performance in some alien environment (cities, virtual spaces, tribes larger than a few hundred people) doesn’t make it a bad solution.

Another key factor you need to understand in order to appreciate nature is the constraints it is operating under. We can imagine a self-replicating system that has intelligence of comparable complexity and flexibility to humans that makes decisions that optimal to a few decimal places. But does such a system exist inside the design space accessible to Earth biology? Probably not.

The simple reason for this is 3 billion years of version lock in. All life on earth uses a particular code-space, where every possible codon in DNA maps to a specific amino acid. With 3 bases per codon, there’s 4^3 possibilities, and all of them map to an existing amino acid. In order for a new amino acid to be added to the code base, existing codons would have to be repurposed, or an organism’s entire architecture would need to be extended to a 4 (or more) codon base system.

We can easily design a state machine that translates XXX → _XXX, remapping an organisms code to a new coding scheme. However, such a machine would be incredibly complicated at the biological level—it would be a huge complex of proteins and various RNA tools, and it would only be needed once in a particular organism’s history. Evolution is under no forces to evolve such a machine, and the probability of it occurring by chance is just too small.

To summarize, everything that can ever be designed by evolution has to be made of amino acids from a particular set, or created as a derivative product by machinery made of these amino acids.

An organism without cognitive biases would probably need a much more powerful brain. Nature cannot build such a brain with the parts available.

GeraldMonroe 25 Feb 2015 20:04 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Izeinwinter’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 111
I agree that Voldemort seems to be holding the idiot ball this chapter. With that said, you’d kind of expect an immortal god-wizard who’s 10 steps ahead to be buffed with poison and magic protections up the wazoo, etc.

GeraldMonroe 25 Feb 2015 19:05 UTC
0 points
in reply to: b_sen’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 111
Why does he need to create a Horcrux immediately? Theory :

Each horcrux, even with Voldemort’s modified ritual, is just a snapshot of Voldemort’s mind-state at the instant the horcrux was made. What Voldemort has somehow managed using magic is to interconnect all these Horcruxes into a network, and build some kind of non-biological system to “run” his personality based on the snapshots.

This explains why he was able to observe the stars and think about his mistakes for 8 years until someone touched one of his horcruxes. Somehow, his network sends only the presentMindState to the body it hijacks.

This is how I assumed, previously, that Harry might defeat him. Since magic thinks he’s got the same identifiers as Voldemort, is Harry is killed a moment after voldemort is, his mind should become the “top” element in the stack of memory states that is Voldemort’s horcrux network. I would assume that he would have access to all of the knowledge in the lower states, but as the top, canonical state, he would have control when Voldemort respawns.

As it is, I’m guessing the respawned Voldemort after he’s killed by magical resonance will lack the mind state changes since his last horcrux.

GeraldMonroe 10 Nov 2013 17:33 UTC
2 points
on: Non-standard cryo ideas
One thing I would like to be mentioned is why these methods might work.

Assume the best possible scanning method is used, such that the future reanimators have a map of where every atom was bonded in your brain.

There’s going to be frost damage, even if cryoprotectant is used—there will be areas it didn’t reach, cracks from low temperature stresses, oxidation damage from time spent in the cryostat, and so on.

Future software could computationally reverse many of these damaging events—but there will be uncertainty in that there would be multiple solutions possible as to the “original” state. A video of the freezing process would allow you to calibrate the model used to computationally reverse the damage better.

Furthermore, this level of technology means it is probable that the reanimators would be able to “read” memories at some level of fidelity. If there are surviving notes about your life, they could potentially resolve ambiguities when there are multiple possible past memory states.

One thing that bothers me about this proposal is that the “reanimators” would have to be beings smarter than you ever were, and they would probably need to use more computational capacity to revive just one person than that person performed in their entire lifetime.

GeraldMonroe 10 Sep 2013 18:25 UTC
12 points
in reply to: hyporational’s comment on: Military Rationalities and Irrationalities
The reason while you had limited instruction in shooting a weapon was probably due to a related problem I observed.

The military spends lavish sums on expensive capital equipment and human resources, but it seems to pinch pennies on the small stuff. For example, I recall being assigned numerous times to various cleanup details, and noticed we would never have any shortage of manpower—often 10+ people, but there would be an acute shortage of mops, cleaning rags, and chemicals.

Similarly, we all had rifles, but live ammunition to train with was in very short supply. I would mentally compute how backwards this was. It costs the government several hundred dollars in pay and benefits to have each one of us standing around for a day, yet they were pinching pennies on ammo that cost maybe 10 cents a round.

I don’t know what causes these backwards situations, where you would be drowning in expensive equipment and people yet critically short of cheap, basic supplies, but I’ve seen many references to the problem.

GeraldMonroe 5 Sep 2013 18:42 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gattsuru’s comment on: Artificial explosion of the Sun: a new x-risk?
Your statement would be a safe bet based on the past 50 years. 50 years ago, or 1963, was 4 years before the Saturn V first launched. Using modern figures of 3.3 billion/launch, including R&D costs, that comes to approximately $28,000 per Kg to low earth orbit. The same math says that the Space Shuttle cost about $61,000 per Kg.

(I’m lumping in the total cost of the entire program in both cases divided by the number of launches. There’s problems with this method, but it means that costs can’t be hidden by accounting tricks as easily)

With that said, there are scads of methods that would lower this cost, at least for unmanned payloads, and there is also the realistic possibility that automated manufacturing could build the rockets for a fraction of what they currently cost. There’s videos taken at the SpaceX plant showing automated lathes, and direct metal 3d printers can apparently make parts that meet spec. It seems at least possible that over the next 50 years the entire end to end process could be automated to take minimal human labor.

GeraldMonroe 14 Aug 2013 18:35 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: New Monthly Thread: Bragging
Why is there a solar wind, then?

GeraldMonroe 2 Jul 2013 23:22 UTC
11 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90
Prediction : Harry has stolen a march on Quirrelmort. I predict that between the time Professor Mcgonagall unlocked his time turner and Quirrelmort entered the room, he already used the device to visit the library’s restricted section.

At least, I hope so : I really want to learn how “spell creation” is done, per EY’s interpretation. That will tell us a lot about what magic actually is and what can be done to achieve Real Ultimate Power.

Furthermore, this would be fully rational. Harry’s analysis of what to do next should have already made it abundantly clear that he needs to obtain more information, and the restricted section obviously has stuff that might be helpful. And why start on a task now when you can start on it 6 hours ago?

GeraldMonroe 30 Jun 2013 7:09 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: leplen’s comment on: How probable is Molecular Nanotech?
Why do we have to solve it? In his latest book, he states that he calculates you can get the thermal noise down to ¹⁄₁₀ the diameter of a carbon atom or less if you use stiff enough components.

Furthermore, you can solve it empirically. Just build a piece of machinery that tries to accomplish a given task, and measure it’s success rate. Systematically tweak the design and measure the performance of each variant. Eventually, you find a design that meets spec. That’s how chemists do it today, actually.

Edit : to the −1, here’s a link where a certain chemist that many know is doing exactly this : http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/06/27/sealed_up_and_ready_to_go.php

GeraldMonroe 30 Jun 2013 6:10 UTC
4 points
on: How probable is Molecular Nanotech?
From reading Radical Abundance :
```
Drexler believes that not only are stable gears possible, but that every component of a modern, macroscale assembly-line can be shrunk to the nanoscale.  He believes this because his calculations, and some experiments show that this works.  
```
He believes that ” Nanomachines made of stiff materials can be engineered to employ familiar kinds of moving parts, using bearings that slide, gears that mesh, and springs that stretch and compress (along with latching mechanisms, planetary gears, constant-speed couplings, four-bar linkages, chain drives, conveyor belts . . .).”

The power to do this comes from 2 sources. First of all, the “feedstock” to a nanoassembly factory always consists of the element in question bonded to other atoms, such that it’s an energetically favorable reaction to bond that element to something else. Specifically, if you were building up a part made of covalently bonded carbon (diamond), the atomic intermediate proposed by Drexler is carbon dimers ( C—C ). See http://e-drexler.com/d/05/00/DC10C-mechanosynthesis.pdf

Carbon dimers are unstable, and the carbon in question would rather bond to “graphene-, nanotube-, and diamond-like solids”

The paper I linked shows a proposed tool.

Second, electrostatic electric motors would be powered by plain old DC current. These would be the driving energy to turn all the mechanical components of an MNT assembly system. Here’s the first example of someone getting one to work I found by googling : http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=19251.php

The control circuitry and sensors for the equipment would be powered the same way.

An actual MNT factory would work like the following. A tool-tip like in the paper I linked would be part of just one machine inside this factory. The factory would have hundreds or thousands of separate “assembly lines” that would each pass molecules from station to station, and at each station a single step is perfomed on the molecule. One the molecules are “finished”, these assembly lines will converge onto assembly stations. These “assembly stations” are dealing with molecules that now have hundreds of atoms in them. Nanoscale robot arms (notice we’ve already gone up 100x in scale, the robot arms are therefore much bigger and thicker than the previous steps, and have are integrated systems that have guidance circuitry, sensors, and everything you see in large industrial robots today) grab parts from assembly lines and place them into larger assemblies. These larger assemblies move down bigger assembly lines, with parts from hundreds of smaller sub-lines being added to them.

There’s several more increases in scale, with the parts growing larger and larger. Some of these steps are programmable. The robots will follow a pattern that can be changed, so what they produce varies. However, the base assembly lines will not be programmable.

In principle, this kind of “assembly line” could produce entire sub-assemblies that are identical to the sub assemblies in this nanoscale factory. Microscale robot arms would grab these sub-assemblies and slot them into place to produce “expansion wings” of the same nanoscale factory, or produce a whole new one.

This is also how the technology would be able to produce things that it cannot already make. When the technology is mature, if someone loads a blueprint into a working MNT replication system, and that blueprint requires parts that the current system cannot manufacture, the system would be able to look up in a library the blueprints for the assembly line that does produce those parts, and automatically translate library instructions to instructions the robots in the factory will follow. Basically, before it could produce the product someone ordered, it would have to build another small factory that can produce the product. A mature, fully developed system is only a “universal replicator” because it can produce the machinery to produce the machinery to make anything.

Please note that this is many, many, many generations of technology away. I’m describing a factory the size and complexity of the biggest factories in the world today, and the “tool tip” that is described in the paper I linked is just one teensy part that might theoretically go onto the tip of one of the smallest and simplest machines in that factory.

Also note that this kind of factory must be in a perfect vacuum. The tiniest contaminant will gum it up and it will seize up.

Another constraint to note is this. In Nanosystems, Drexler computes that the speed of motion for a system that is 10 million times smaller is in fact 10 million times faster. There’s a bunch of math to justify this, but basically, scale matters, and for a mechanical system, the operating rate would scale accordingly. Biological enzymes are about this quick.

This means that an MNT factory, if it used convergent assembly, could produce large, macroscale products at 10 million times the rate that a current factory can produce them. Or it could, if every single bonding step that forms a stable bond from unstable intermediates didn’t release heat. That heat product is what Drexler thinks will act to “throttle” MNT factories, such that the rate you can get heat out will determine how fast the factory will run. Yes, water cooling was proposed :)

One final note : biological proteins are only being investigated as a boostrap. The eventual goal will use no biological components at all, and will not resemble biology in any way. You can mentally compare it to how silk and wood was used to make the first airplanes.

GeraldMonroe 26 Jun 2013 7:17 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: For FAI: Is “Molecular Nanotechnology” putting our best foot forward?
This problem is very easy to solve using induction. Base step : the minimum “replicative subunit”. For life, that is usually a single cell. For nano-machinery, it is somewhat larger. For the sake of penciling in numbers, suppose you need a robot with a scoop and basic mining tools, a vacuum chamber, a 3d printer able to melt metal powder, a nanomachinery production system that is itself composed of nanomachinery, a plasma furnace, a set of pipes and tubes and storage tanks for producing the feedstock the nanomachinery needs, and a power source.

All in all, you could probably fit a single subunit into the size and mass of a greyhound bus. One notable problem is that there’s enough complexity here that current software could probably not keep a factory like this running forever because eventually something would break that it doesn’t know how to fix.

Anyways, you set down this subunit on a planet. It goes to work. In an hour, the nanomachinery subunit has made a complete copy of itself. In somewhat more time, it has to manufacture a second copy of everything else. The nanomachinery subunit makes all the high end stuff—the sensors, the circuitry, the bearings—everything complex, while the 3d printer makes all the big parts.

Pessimistically, this takes a week. A greyhound bus is 9x45 feet, and there are 5.5e15 square feet on the earth’s surface. To cover the whole planet’s surface would therefore take 44 weeks.

Now you need to do something with all the enormous piles of waste material (stuff you cannot make more subunits with) and un-needed materials. So you reallocate some of the 1.3e13 robotic systems to build electromagnetic launchers to fling the material into orbit. You also need to dispose of the atmosphere at some point, since all that air causes each electromagnetic launch to lose energy as friction, and waste heat is a huge problem. (my example isn’t entirely fair, I suspect that waste heat would cook everything before 44 weeks passed). So you build a huge number of stations that either compress the atmosphere or chemically bond the gasses to form solids.

With the vast resources in orbit, you build a sun-shade to stop all solar input to reduce the heat problem, and perhaps you build giant heat radiators in space and fling cold heat sinks to the planet or something. (with no atmospheric friction and superconductive launchers, this might work). You can also build giant solar arrays and beam microwave power down to the planet to supply the equipment so that each subunit no longer needs a nuclear reactor.

Once the earth’s crust is gone, what do you do about the rest of the planet’s mass? Knock molten globules into orbit by bombarding the planet with high energy projectiles? Build some kind of heat resistant containers that you launch into space full of lava? I don’t know. But at this point you have converted the entire earth’s crust into machines or waste piles to work with.

This is also yet another reason that AI is part of the puzzle. Even if failures were rare, there probably are not enough humans available to keep 1e13 robotic systems functioning, if each system occasionally needed a remote worker to log in and repair some fault. There’s also the engineering part of the challenge : these later steps require very complex systems to be designed and operated. If you have human grade AI, and the hardware to run a single human grade entity is just a few kilograms of nano-circuitry (like the actual hardware in your skull), you can create more intelligence to run the system as fast as you replicate everything else.

GeraldMonroe 25 Jun 2013 21:07 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: For FAI: Is “Molecular Nanotechnology” putting our best foot forward?
Bacteria, as well as all life, are stuck at a local maximum because evolution cannot find optimal solutions. Part of Drexler’s work is to estimate what the theoretical optimum solutions can do.

My statement “tear apart planets” assumed too much knowledge on the part of the reader. I thought it was frankly pretty obvious. If you have a controllable piece of industrial machinery that uses electricity and can process common elements into copies of itself, but runs no faster than bacteria, tearing apart a planet is a straightforward engineering excercise. I did NOT mean the machinery looked like bacteria in any way, merely that it could copy itself no faster than bacteria.

And by “copy itself”, what I really meant is that given supplies of feedstock (bacteria need sugar, water, and a few trace elements...our “nanomachinery” would need electricity, and a supply of intermediates for every element you are working with in a pure form) it can arrange that feedstock into thousands of complex machine parts, such that the machinery that is doing this process can make it’s own mass in atomically perfect products in an hour.

I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how you could use this tech to take a planet apart in a few decades. I don’t mean a sci-fi swarm of goo, I mean an organized effort resembling a modern mine or construction site.

GeraldMonroe 23 Jun 2013 6:11 UTC
1 point
in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: After critical event W happens, they still won’t believe you
Alas, cryonics may be screwed with regards to this. It simply may not be physically possible to freeze something as large and delicate as a brain without enough damage to prevent you from thawing it and have it still work. This is of course is no big deal if you just want the brain for the pattern it contains. You can computationally reverse the cracks and to a lesser extent some of the more severe damage the same way we can computationally reconstruct a shredded document.

The point is, I think in terms of relative difficulty, the order is :
1. Whole brain emulation
2. Artificial biological brain/body
3. Brain/body repaired via MNT
4. Brain revivable with no repairs.
Note that even the “easiest” item on this list is extremely difficult.

GeraldMonroe 23 Jun 2013 6:01 UTC
1 point
in reply to: leplen’s comment on: For FAI: Is “Molecular Nanotechnology” putting our best foot forward?
This is also wrong. The actual proposals for MNT involve creating a system that is very stable, so you can measure it safely. The actual machinery is a bunch of parts that are as strong as they can possibly be made (this is why the usual proposals involve covalent bonded carbon aka diamond) so they are stable and you can poke them with a probe. You keep the box as cold as practical.

It’s true that even if you set everything up perfectly, there are some events that can’t be observed directly, such as bonding and rearrangements that could destroy the machine. In addition, practical MNT systems would be 3d mazes of machinery stacked on top of each other, so it would be very difficult to diagnose failures. To summarize : in a world with working MNT, there’s still lots of work that has to be done.

GeraldMonroe 23 Jun 2013 5:39 UTC
3 points
in reply to: leplen’s comment on: For FAI: Is “Molecular Nanotechnology” putting our best foot forward?
The way biological nanotechnology (aka the body you are using to read this) solves this problem is it bonds the molecule being “worked on” to a larger, more stable molecule. This means instead of whole box of legos shaking around everywhere, as you put it, it’s a single lego shaking around bonded to a tool (the tool is composed of more legos, true, but it’s made of a LOT of legos connected in a way that makes it fairly stable). The tool is able to grab the other lego you want to stick to the first one, and is able to press the two together in a way that makes the bonding reaction have a low energetic barrier. The tool is shaped such that other side-reactions won’t “fit” very easily.

Anyways, a series of these reactions, and eventually you have the final product, a nice finished assembly that is glued together pretty strongly. In the final step you break the final product loose from the tool, analagous to ejecting a cast product from a mold. Check it out : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyruvate_dehydrogenase

Note a key difference here between biological nanotech (life) and the way you described it in the OP. You need a specific toolset to create a specific final product. You CANNOT make any old molecule. However, you can build these tools from peptide chains, so if you did want another molecule you might be able to code up a new set of tools to make it. (and possibly build those tools using the tools you already have)

Another key factor here is that the machine that does this would operate inside an alien environment compared to existing life—it would operate in a clean vacuum, possibly at low temperatures, and would use extremely stiff subunits made of covalently bonded silicon or carbon. The idea here is to make your “lego” analogy manageable. All the “legos” in the box are glued tightly to one another (low temperature, strong covalent bonds) except for the ones you are actually playing with. No extraneous legos are allowed to enter the box (vacuum chamber)

If you want to bond a blue lego to a red lego, you force the two together in a way that controls which way they are oriented during the bonding. Check it out : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY5192g1gQg

Current organic chemical synthesis DOES operate as a box of shaking legos, and this is exactly why it is very difficult to get lego models that come out without the pieces mis-bonded. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide

As for your “Shroedinger Equations are impractical to compute” : what this means is that the Lego Engineers (sorry, nanotech engineers) of the future will not be able to solve any problem in a computer alone, they’ll have to build prototypes and test them the hard way, just as it is today.

Also, this is one place where AI comes in. The universe doesn’t have any trouble modeling the energetics of a large network of atoms. If we have trouble doing the same, even using gigantic computers made of many many of these same atoms, then maybe the problem is we are doing it a hugely inefficient way. An entity smarter that humans might find a way to re-formulate the math for many orders of magnitude more efficient calculations, or it might find a way to build a computer that more efficiently uses the atoms it is composed of.

GeraldMonroe 23 Jun 2013 5:06 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: For FAI: Is “Molecular Nanotechnology” putting our best foot forward?
Nanosystems discusses theoretical maximums. However, even if you make the assumption that living cells are as good as it gets, an e-coli, which we know from extensive analysis uses around 25,000 moving parts, can double itself in 20 minutes.

So in theory, you have some kind of nano-robotic system that is able to build stuff. Probably not any old stuff—but it could produce tiny subunits that can be assembled to make other nano-robotic systems, and other similar things.

And if it ran as fast as an e-coli, it could build itself every 20 minutes.

That’s still pretty much a revolution, a technology that could be used to tear apart planets. It just might take a bit longer than it takes in pulp sci-fi.

GeraldMonroe 17 Jun 2013 18:25 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Epiphany’s comment on: Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy
I wanted to make a concrete proposal. Why does it have to be autonomous? Because in urban combat, the combatants will usually choose a firing position that has cover. They “pop up” from the cover, take a few shots, then position themselves behind cover again. An autonomous system could presumably accurately return fire much faster than human reflexes. (it wouldn’t be instant, there’s a delay for the servos of the automated gun to aim at the target, and delays related to signals—you have to wait for the sound to reach all the acoustic sensors in the drone swarm, then there’s processing delays, then time for the projectiles from the return fire to reach the target)

Also, the autonomous mode would hopefully be chosen only as a last resort, with a human normally in the loop somewhere to authorize each decision to fire.

As for a threat to democracy? Defined how? You mean a system of governance where a large number of people, who are easily manipulated via media, on the average know fuck-all about a particular issue, are almost universally not using rational thought, and the votes give everyone a theoretically equal say regardless of knowledge or intelligence?

I don’t think that democracy is something that should be used as an ideal nor a terminal value on this website. It has too many obvious faults.

As for humans needing to be employed : autonomous return fire drones are going to be very expensive to build and maintain. That “expense” means that the labor of thousands is needed somewhere in the process.

However, in the long run, obviously it’s possibly to build factories to churn them out faster than replacing soldiers. Numerous examples of this happened during ww2, where even high technology items such as aircraft were easier to replace than the pilots to fly them.

GeraldMonroe 16 Jun 2013 15:13 UTC
5 points
on: Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy
Let’s talk actual hardware.

Here’s a practical, autonomous kill system that is possibly feasible with current technology. A network of drone helicopters armed with rifles and sensors that can detect the muzzle flashes, sound, and in some cases projectiles of an AK-47 being fired.

Sort of this aircraft : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Rotorcraft_Sniper_System

Combined with sensors based on this patent : http://www.google.com/patents/US5686889

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator

and this one http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1396471&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F9608%2F30354%2F01396471

The hardware and software would be optimized for detecting AK-47 fire, though it would be able to detect most firearms. Some of these sensors work best if multiple platforms armed with the same sensor are spread out in space, so there would need to be several of these drones hovering overhead for maximum effectiveness.

How would this system be used? Whenever a group of soldiers leaves the post, they would all have to wear blue force trackers that clearly mark them as friendly. When they are at risk for attack, a swarm of drones follows them overhead. If someone fires at them, the following autonomous kill decision is made

if( SystemIsArmed && EventSmallArmsFire && NearestBlueForceTracker > X meters && ProbableError < Y meters) ShootBack();

Sure, a system like this might make mistakes. However, here’s the state of the art method used today :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL75DEC9EEB25A0DF0&feature=player_detailpage&v=uZ2SWWDt8Wg

This same youtube channel has dozens of similar combat videos. An autonomous killing drone system would save soldier’s lives and kill fewer civilians. (drawbacks include high cost to develop and maintain)

Other, more advanced systems are also at least conceivable. Ground robots that could storm a building, killing anyone carrying a weapon or matching specific faces? The current method is to blow the entire building to pieces. Even if the robots made frequent errors, they might be more effective than bombing the building.

GeraldMonroe 29 May 2013 13:40 UTC
−2 points
in reply to: nigerweiss’s comment on: Who thinks quantum computing will be necessary for AI?
An optimal de novo AI, sure. Keep in mind that human beings have to design this thing, and so the first version will be very far from optimal. I think it’s a plausible guess to say that it will need on the order of the same hardware requirements as an efficient whole brain emulator.

And this assumption shows why all the promises made by past AI researchers have so far failed : we are still a factor of 10,000 or so away from having the hardware requirements, even using supercomputers.