Niall McAuley

Comment Threads

• Ludvig Holberg commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  Brains and computers: Well, my ten cents is that the computer metaphor makes too much of a passive awaiting of data to process, which is not at all how humans work. Conclusions first, then data. Brains are for justifying action already willed, and leading others up the garden path....
• Bill Arnold commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  Re the accidental skynet in Elite, I ate lunch today with a friend who has worked 30 years in AI (neural nets), and he mentioned offhand that one of his contacts at the U.S. DoD told him that they are building Terminator robots. Friend is reliable, don't know about the contact, so I'd put it at p==80% true. We shared stories about recent surprises in AI and he opined that the Deepmind AlphaGo result was a surprise that was unlike any he had ever seen in AI. More surprises seem likely - it's AI summer as Dirk likes to say....
• Bill Arnold commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  Well, my ten cents is that the computer metaphor makes too much of a passive awaiting of data to process, which is not at all how humans work. There is a camp that has been arguing that humans (and many (most) animals) are predictive, at many scales. Ably argued by Lisa Feldman Barrett at edge.org Many predictions are at a micro level, predicting the meaning of bits of light, sound, and other information from your senses. Every time you hear speech, your brain breaks up the continuous stream of sound into phonemes, syllables, words, and ideas by prediction. Other predictions...
• ezra abrams commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  surely you know, that if the universe is infinite Then, in any volume of space, the energy and matter can rearragned in a finite number of ways (finite is a big number) Therefore, if the universe is truly infinite, then somewhere there must exist a volume of space identical to our solar system as i type this and a volume of space identical to our solar system 5 seconds ago and a VoS identical to our solar system, except I have red hair not only that, there exists an infinite number of VoSs that are identical to our solar system,...
• RDSouth commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
  Oh, is this the wrong place to post this? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/edward-snowden-life-as-a-robot.html...