At best, it's a relationship with strong benefit to both sides (mutualism), and at worst commensalism (one side gets a free meal, the other side is not significantly affected).
Historically speaking in Europe, the cat is the primary agent responsible for the suppression of mice and rats. This meant that firstly much more food could successfully be stored, allowing humans to survive the winter months, and secondly that plagues occurred less often.
As pure pets, they're probably commensal. But even today, there are lots of farm cats doing what they've always done. Taken across the entirety of the cats and humans, it's probably still mutualism.
(Though it should be noted that in some other regions of the world, cats are an actual ecological problem, as are dogs.)
]]>It looks like the precedent is against you.
]]>Beyond that, populations that don't interbreed because of separation (lions/tigers) or differential sexual selection (animals that are interfertile and co-located, but that are far enough down different reproductive strategy pathways that they don't go for each other) are different species as far as statistical considerations are concerned — i.e. they are in general different gene pools. However, all of these are spectrums, and there's probably never a point where you can say 'yesterday, same species, today, different'.
I can certainly understand Dawkins on occasion not getting into the whole of the species problem.
In the case of H.s.s and H.n., we're probably in a grey area: my guess is that for a time their territories overlapped somewhat both geographically and behaviourally, and that there was some interbreeding (if only because humans will eventually try to shag anything), but that it was rare and statistically of little importance regarding the separation of gene pools.
]]>OT: I'm looking for a little help here, guys. Over on Jame's livejournal, someone was asking for a simple explanation for a) why you can't get to the speed of light from rest, and b) why can't you ever get to absolute zero?
The relativity thing has been done to death as far as good, short, simple explanations go (imho), but what about the second one? I replied that it had to do with the fact that (if you equate temperature with molecular motion) you can't stop molecules from jiggling around because of "zero point energy", or if you like, a handwavy appeal to the uncertainty principle.
Matt McIrvin objected, saying that not only is this wrong (and it is), but that as far as lying to the children goes, it's a move away from the truth. A wrong picture that will have to erased later - at some other teacher's expense :-)
Now, his point was that saying temperature equals molecular motion isn't true is certainly a valid one, but how does one give a simple explanation as to why absolute zero can never be reached, while keeping in mind that temperature is really the rate of change of heat wrt the rate of change of entropy?
I gave another explanation, which Matt promptly shot down as implying that refrigerators were impossible (he's right, curse him, I was trying to sweep too much under the rug wrt how things can change temperature.) So my question is, is there a simple, intuitive - though "wrong" - explanation for this one? Or is this one of those questions you are reduced to telling the interlocutor to go take some physics classes and then come back in a year or two?
My interest is simply this: I'm a believer in the notion that if you can't explain certain phenomena to the layman with pictures and words, then perhaps you don't understand them well enough to teach them. That's not true for everything, obviously, see Feynmann's explanation for how magnetism works. But does a simple, not-totally wrong explanation for why you can never get to absolute zero fall into this category?
Would anyone care to unleash their powers of exposition on this one? Off-Off-topic: I wonder how well Charlie would do in the category writing popular science books for the layman? I tend to think of Asimov as the master on this one (where his weaknesses as a writer of fiction became strengths when it came to non-fictional lucid expositions on everything from Bible commentary to how slide rules work). Obviously not everyone's cup of tea, though again Asimov as the Great Explainer quite evidently played the part with immense satisfaction.
]]>While I think you're clearly right to criticize the SF idea of an Asimov style robot (a sentient, servile and happy slave), I don't really see how this translates into sentient AI in general.
An AI construct that is otherwise just like us (conscious, needy, driven, social etc.) automatically gets a number of attributes that make it very appealing to someone who needs some work done (and perhaps has questionable ethics):
A) It doesn't get sick. B) It doesn't die (just revert from backup). C) It probably has a higher bandwidth link to data. and: D) You can make copies of.
The last is the really important one. Say only one in a hundred AI constructs amounts to much of anything: the rest just want to play WoW all day. So what? One of them goes to college and decides to join the military. Once she finishes her training, ask her if it would be all right to make a million copies. It's the patriotic thing to do, right?
Mass production of trained personnel is what makes human-equivalent AI interesting. It doesn't matter if a single AI is no better at following orders or learning abstract algebra than a human is, because it doesn't have to be.
It just has to be easy to copy. You duplicate the successes.
]]>No, the sun -> grass -> beef -> humans energy transformation chain is ridiculously inefficient compared with photovoltaic panels and electrically powered machines. Beef-fed humans need thousands of times as much land as solar-powered machines to get equivalent energy. Even rice-fed humans need at least 50 times as much land. Plus the land for cattle or cereals needs at least some water and soil, while PV panels can sit on salt flats, waste sites, or roofs of existing structures.
It would hardly need be "almost medieval" to run on renewable energy alone. According to the US National Renewable Energy Lab, rooftop PV systems could produce more energy than all the USA's existing nuclear reactors. That's using only existing rooftop space, no extra land or long-distance transmission required, and using mainstream commercial silicon PV. Using 15% efficient cells you could produce 910 terawatt hours this way, about 23% of total American electrical consumption. Using the most efficient commercial silicon cells you could go up to 34%. American wind resources are great enough to replace all existing electrical consumption*, if you're willing to build new transmission lines. There's also quite a lot of use to trim before you reach "almost medieval" levels of civilization: Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Italy all make do on less than 1/2 the per-capita electrical consumption of the United States.
In short, if a computer can replace a human worker, the energy cost to run that machine, even using the most expensive renewable energy, is less than the food cost to produce equivalent output through human labor. The machine's advantage is greater if the human needs to be paid more than minimal-food-need wages. There are tasks that humans can do much better than machines, and tasks that machines can do much better than humans, but fairly little in the gray area of "fully automated processes are basically as good as humans, but human labor remains cheaper for now." Bangladesh doesn't have a big garment industry because their laborers are cheaper than fully automatic garment production systems, but because fully automatic garment production systems don't exist. If/when the machines are invented even the pathetic wages of Bangladeshi garment workers will be squeezed down and then the jobs will be eliminated.
*This of course ignores intermittency and storage issues that bedevil wind and solar. I don't want to try to run through all the point-counterpoint discussion around it because this post is already too long. But the joules are there for the taking, and even if you have nothing but current expensive storage tech it's still a cheaper form of energy than food.
]]>With respect, none of the first three countries listed uses much in the way of A/C, which is a pretty large electricity user in the US. How many states south of the Mason-Dixon line would be almost uninhabited without A/C, at least compared to current population levels?
Come to it, I might prefer be in parts of Italy in high summer than Montreal, if A/C was forbidden.
]]>A) The energy requirements can be substantially reduced just by improved insulation, or far more dramatically (for new buildings) by more substantial design revisions: structural or earth-based heat sinks, passive cooling, orientation to smooth temperature fluctuations, etc.
B) Climate control can be carried out using mostly thermal energy, relatively little electrical input needed. Even air conditioning can be run on purely thermal input (absorption cycle refrigeration). This is good news because collecting low-grade thermal energy from the sun for an absorption refrigerator or heating water/air is much cheaper than providing equivalent joules via electricity.
And as a final note, even if neither A nor B were true, I think that the American South was hardly "almost medieval" even before air conditioning became widespread. There is an astonishing gulf between "almost medieval" (Polish serfs circa 1700?) and "customary comforts in 21st century America." You can fall a long, long way before getting within striking distance of medieval standards of material prosperity.
]]>The thing about relatively simple devices like calculators, personal computers, tablets, and such is that even if Moore's Law pukes out in a couple of design generations, their use of power will be pretty low both because of transistor size and because of more efficient designs which are coming in to help out with the high current leakage of the last few generations, and solar power might be enough. That makes a human with a calculating tool a lot more energy efficient than a trillion transistor AI.
]]>This might well be true if you imagine an AI execution framework as akin to the current generation of distributed supercomputers, with tens of thousands of cores and AC requirements measured in tons of ice.
But even in that sort of environment, being able to duplicate a hundred experts would likely be viable in certain situations. For example, if you have highly periodic need for a crack team to work on something, then you could simply power up the workers when needed and sleep them when not.
By this virtue, a team of AIs could probably perform better than a human team of similar underlying abilities, since you could in principle save the AIs when they're at the peak of their abilities and keep them there. This sort of thing has serious ethical problems, of course, but that doesn't mean someone won't be interested.
More long-term, why should we expect an AI to use a tremendous amount of power? Human brains don't.
]]>What task are you trying to solve?
Future shock is only a problem if you're employing these AIs to interact with the world at large. So, sure, despite the obvious appeal, powering up your Lyndon Johnson Bot every time you need to pass national health care legislation is probably not going to work.
But so what? There are jobs that aren't like that at all. And even if there is some future shock, catching up on the news may still be easier than learning a complex skill.
Dumb examples:
Expert team to operate a weapons system you don't expect to use much. Why keep a constant rotation of human operators ready to go? Recruit some AIs, and make a copy when they're fully trained. They only need to be awake to train on upgrades. If you need more, you can probably go find some hardware for another datacenter faster than you could train new people, too.
Spaceship operator. Wake up for certain course corrections, and when you get to your destination.
This is all assuming AIs that are prohibitively expensive to run, of course. If that's not true, we don't need to look too hard to find a suitable job.
]]>(Noted: not all those NA ancestors wanted to migrate. Or be migrated.)
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