The Back Room

[Icuownage]

My personal view is, to really take everyones opinion, which is difficult to do a lot cause it's very easy for me to get biased and just out right reject something.

[Alg]

Seems like we've moved on from souls to AI. It's the same boogeyman under a different name, to suit the times.

[archimage_a]

So from Ico we have:

Things nowadays seem to work by themselves, so we can easily believe that they are doing things we don't know about.

 

From Nex:

Things do things. (FEAR THE ARMY OF DIVEBOMBER BRICKS ABOVE YOUR HEAD)

 

From Mask:

Humans naturally fear things.

 

 

 

 

Personally more in favour of Mask's view. The fear of the unknown is imprinted on us at a young age...We know, or at least think we know, about bricks, so we don't fear them...where as the man in the cave may fear this strangely straight rock...in the same way a heartshaped rock is mysterious.

 

On the subject of religion...Its wrong, but that doesn't make believers bad people (Any more than non-believers are instantly good people).

What I will say is this...people who are religious tend to be more zealous and more moral...for good or bad.

[Alg]

I was looking at it more as 'People don't change because society does'. :razz:

It makes sense though, the unknown might be dangerous, and it's safer not to risk it.

 

On a completely different note, I just finished A Game of Thrones and am about to start A Clash of Kings. Considering my previous fantasy novel experience was Lord of the Rings and Inheritance, my mind's a bit blown.

[The_Mather1]

Arch, I think it it'd actually be possible to create a large enough microship to store a human mind, or at least his full knowledge. After all, we have managed to create Micro SDs (phone memory chips) that can hold up to a terrabyte.

[Icuownage]

A terrabyte is no where near the required space for a humans mind, I'm not sure if even scientists know it anyway.

 

Anyway

 

 

Dutch > Any other langugae.

[archimage_a]

While some of the predictions he discusses are (with modern-day hindsight) wacky, Milo approaches his subject from a historical and scientific point of view, explaining how, at the time, some of these ideas didnt sound so weird. Knowledge pills, for example, were proposed in the 1960s; they sound silly now, but, the author points out, the idea was based on research that indicated memories may be stored in specific proteins. Cars that drive themselves may seem like science fiction today, but in the 1930s, when car ownership was expanding exponentially, and many drivers were hopelessly incompetent, it seemed like a fine idea (and in the 1950s General Motors even floated the notion of a self-driving vehicle).

 

We have all(maybe) seen those old films where the big machine with tape coils spinning actually holds a human mind...

We always assume we are on the cusp of the revolution, and until the breakthrough actually happens we will always think we are.

 

 

As for 1 Terabyte SD cards.

For high reliability data storage, however, it is not advisable to use flash memory that would have to go through a large number of programming cycles.

If you were gonna use an SD card you would either limit yourself to about 1,000,000 write cycles. So unless this computer is going to be incapable of thinking for more than a few minutes, its not really applicable.

 

Doubtlessly we could argue this out, but I see no real reason. There is not enough information to produce a concrete arguement, or even a cohesive argument...like saying X is less than 3 based X being a number between 0 and 6.

[The_Mather1]

Yeah, but I used Micro SD because I know what the current max capacity is and because they are the smallest memory storage units that I know of. A USB stick stripped of its plastic shielding can be called a micro chip too, and going by the fact that they're around 50 times larger than Micro SDs that adds up to some serious maximum storage capacity.

 

We may not be at the point where it is possible to store a human mind on a microchip yet, but we're close and only a miniscule breakthrough away (probably high-temperature superconductors) from getting the chips.

 

Also, I just recently found out that I've got µ (Mu or Micro for those that didn't know) at Alt-Gr+M.

[archimage_a]

Errr...USB drives are flash based :mellow:

 

 

 

 

Also high temperature superconductors were just a 'stones throw' away back in the 1930s.

Also even if a chip was made of a material with 0 resistance there is still the celing value of the speed of the switches (or other read/write devices) within the chip.

Additionally you would need a converter. You can't just plug a 3.5 mil jack into someones ear and have their mind transfer to the chip.

 

Personally, it seems rather unlikely high temperature superconductors will ever work. I say that with no real scientific backing, but they seem unlikely to ever work, simply because it looks like wishful thinking.

Yes we have made amazing discoveries in that field, but take airplane propellers. Invented some 112 years ago, are only 5% less efficent than the best developed ones today...no matter how much we stare at a propeller, no matter how much effort we apply to it, no matter how much research we do into it, we will never make it that much more efficent...if at all.

Yes there MAY be a breakthrough tommorrow that makes them hundreds of times more efficent, but I don't believe that there will.

Hence my belief that High Temperature Superconductors (as in ones that operate near/at/above room temperature/achievable temperatures usable in a commercial viable microchip) will never exist.

[The_Mather1]

Arch, what about jet engines? They are the result of further developing propellers, and they're more than twice as efficient. You could say something will barely improve, that's because the real improvement is done by taking the initial technology and creating something based on the same principle instead of continuing work on the old technology. Another example would be the cutting torch and the plasma cutter, or taking it further, fire and the plasma cutter.

And using USBs was a response to Icu.

 

Also Icu, the collective data of the internet is a few petabytes, a few thousand terabytes, going by the fact that a lot of that is videos, something the human mind, to my knowledge, cannot store, only generate using other information. Saying the human mind is about 1 terabyte would actually be a pretty generous estimate. If I were to guess, I'd say the personality and the human mind itself only takes up 10-20 gigabytes, the long-term memory takes about 200-600 gigabytes (depending on age and knowledge) and the short-term memory takes up no more than 1-5 gigabytes at most.

 

 

[bleep], now I want to upload myself onto a computer... I think I would fit on my D drive...

Thinking over it a second time makes me even more sure, goodbye concerns about my non-existent lovelife.

[Icuownage]

Ummm.

 

From what you have said your mind might take that much up [/arrogance]

 

Eh, it's definately more or we would have uploaded by now.

[archimage_a]

Thinking over it a second time makes me even more sure, goodbye concerns about my non-existent lovelife.

This is one of the oddities about people-computer uploads, as it is essentially saying 'Labotomise me'...something easily achievable without the need for complicated computers.

 

 

Arch, what about jet engines?

What about them? Jet Engines and Propellers are entirely different beings. Same way that superconducting wire and wire are two totally different beings.

 

And using USBs was a response to Icu.

Often USB flash drives can be assembled using memory cards and a card reader.

 

Saying the human mind is about 1 terabyte would actually be a pretty generous estimate

Theoretically, yes. If a human life was displayed at 40 megabits per second (BLU ray quality) then it would only amount to 1,261,440,000 megabits per year, or 157,680,000 Megabytes per year, or 1.6 Petabytes per year. Assume you lived 70 years then that is only 110 Petabytes.

Now, humans don't record life at 40 megabits per second...we would probably be lucky to record it at 16 kilobits per second (Video phone quality).

And even then we are talking about the most expert photographic memory.

So at 16kb/s it only amounts to 504,576 megabytes, per year.

 

 

What isn't accounted for is white matter or any of the other unknowns.

[Seraphi]

If it were that easy we would already be able to do it.

 

We cannot.

 

This is because we are still a long way away from really understanding how our brain works on a fundamental level. It's all well and good to say that your brain cannot store a .avi file, but can a computer store your personality? It cannot, because we do not have the knowledge to convert information from the human brain into something recognisable by a machine and vice versa. Due to this fact, any estimate you give on the amount of converted data in a human mind is going to be extremely dubious at best, flat out stupid at worst, simply because we cannot actually convert directly between the two yet.

 

Those technology examples do very little to convince me of your point, because those are fairly simple in terms of the science behind it, and it wasn't merely theory; You could perform actual tests with different designs to gather data. Superconductors, thus far, have been lackluster in terms of efficiency. Room temperature superconductors remain a pipe dream in the eyes of the world scientific community, because there is so little evidence that it is possible. The best superconductor we have found thus far is an incredibly poisonous material... Interestingly, there seems to be a correlation between toxicity and ability to superconduct, but that is for another time. Even this deadly material only superconducted in the negative 100s... Which is far too cold to be commercially or practically viable in any way. To sum up my point here, we are nowhere near to gaining the knowledge to create room temperature superconductors, or even reasonable temperature superconductors anytime soon.

[Nexaduro]

Toxicity and conductivity are connected, you say? Why, break out the plutonium and cyanide! Bitter almonds and free cancer for everyone! Power, too!

[The_Mather1]

Ross, the toxicity-superconductivity connection might be due to the chemical instability which causes the extreme behavioral difference depending on the temperature. We know that materials that combust in high temperatures do so because of chemical instability, we also know that in most materials, instability is what causes toxicity.

 

I wonder which kind of animal mind will be uploaded first, because obviously someone of political importance will deem it morally wrong to do to humans for one reason or another.

[Nexaduro]

You'll probably never going to find out, because I doubt it will happen in the next hundred years.

[Icuownage]

Well according to Wikipedia, there is currently a prize fund for the person who can successfully preserve a mouse brain.

[archimage_a]

"Wet" specimen collections are stored in 70% ethanol (EtOH) with various additives after fixing with 10% formalin.

~Wikipedia

 

That money is mine!

[The_Mather1]

And suddenly I'm feeling extremely geeky. It's a good think I'm free from 01:00 tomorrow until 06:00 on Thursday, though there's 17th of May on Tuesday so I'll probably be somewhat busy then.

 

Anyone else feeling up for some hardcore research here?

[archimage_a]

As long as I don't have to plug anything into my temple...

[Grim_]

Well, that's one bleeding huge research project down, two more to go (Just finished up an eight paragraph essay on the distribution of wealth in the world, now it's time to start working on the French essay. English gets lowest priority.).

[archimage_a]

Mwhahah, found something for everyone:

 

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To most people the bible is like a software licence, they don't read it, just scroll to the bottom and click 'I agree'.

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[Jehosaphat]

Mwhahah, found something for everyone:

 

hide tags everywhere

Are certain things supposed to be for certain people?

[The_Mather1]

I don't think so.

[archimage_a]

Yeah, like the bone rings were for Ross, the Europe one was for Dusty...Dog one was for Ico.

 

But when you start assigning names people get upset and its just not cricket.