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erasemuson Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

The bulk of the effort goes into R&D for anti-drone tech (this includes monitoring what the bad guys are up to).

erasemuson Slaughterbots: Stop Autonomous Weapons [video]

I would guess: we ban civilian drones from carrying explosives, nerve-toxins and other weapons; we invest the bulk of research effort in developing anti-drone drones. The anti-drone drones don't carry weapons that can be used against humans. Advanced drone tech would be less like nuclear weapons, against which there is no defence, and more like vaccines or antidotes.

Which is morally very different. Actually morality is an interesting aspect of the video/story. We had the bad guy white male presenter on the stage playing the good guy and claiming that his weapons could distinguish good guys from bad guys (and then of course the targeting of said weapons with a pitifully inadequate and unrealistic set of criteria).

erasemuson Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

But that's a different problem.

erasemuson Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

How about positing a one-to-one correspondence between our subjective experiences and patterns of neuronal firings in our brains?

I remember at my school students were forced to choose between arts (AKA humanities) and sciences at 16. The science students were on the whole brighter than the arts students, through no fault of their own. The arts teachers tried to sweeten the pill by saying things like, "Those scientists don't understand human beings." The implication was that we were insensitive and callous individuals. Comments like this left a mark on me, a science student, and the rest of my life I've been trying to compensate. And I think it's also one of the reasons science writers do what they do.

erasemuson Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm

>What are qualia, exactly?

Sets of associated ideas? For example, a door knob might be associated with (1) wood, (2) black, (3) grasping, (4) turning, (5) my right hand. All these ideas are activated to some degree when I contemplate the door knob, and to a greater degree when I contemplate myself contemplating the door knob.

erasemuson Five decades of majestic failure to explain consciousness

The camera doesn't have (1) an attentional system, (2) a model of the world in memory, (3) a model of itself within that model.

erasemuson The Effect of Cold Showering on Health and Work: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Reading these studies nowadays feels like reading horoscopes. Chatty, interesting topics but strictly meaningless without an associated prediction or set of predictions of what will be found. (Predictions derived from theoretical explanations.) Hopefully predictive coding will correct this as we learn that AGIs literally can't see things without learning how to see them first, and therefore neither can we.