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<title><![CDATA[Comments for entry "Computers That Design" at Dilbert.com Blog]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/816]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Regular thoughts and updates from Dilbert.com]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from ottebx]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1761159]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[What aspects of human existence will change first, and dramatically, because of the Technological Singularity? And how would one invest to take advantage?

Energy Production and storage will change. Invest in Mining companies. they will mine whatever element is needed at the time a new tech comes into play.

Human Longevity will greatly increase. Invest in companies that design medical devices. Tech will increase our personal mobility past the general age where mobility is currently greatly reduced.

Communications will be greatly enhanced. As the cellphones we have now were unthinkable in the 90's, so will be the communication gear 30 years from now. Invest in companies that make the chips used in the devices.]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[FriPMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from eryfdhf]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1757034]]></link>
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<pubDate><![CDATA[SunPMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="false"><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1757034]]></guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from kingkingg]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1754233]]></link>
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<pubDate><![CDATA[ThuPMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="false"><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1754233]]></guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from alexandronov]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1753993]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The key is to look a the motivation to iterate. Why do we build windmills? Because we want more power, so do the machines. Why would the machines want better drugs?

There's a complexity effect as you suggest, but there would also be a motivation effect.

That is if the machines aren't ultimately being controlled by humans.]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[ThuAMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Kingdinosaur]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1753278]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Drowlord has an interesting point about the politics of the matter.  Likewise I don't think any politician would allow a robot to be built that's smarter than *sigh* the average voter... unless those robots will vote for said politican 100% of the time.  

In that case they'd be mass produced...

Until a hacker makes sure they vote for the other guy....


As a real world example, take video games.  Many people think that they are doing lots of interesting things with AI.  That is not the case.  The best chess programs just crunch numbers and can't do much else.  They don't think and make decisions.  Typical videogames aren't programmed with humanlike behavior because that would make the game too boring and to hard.  That's why fighting game characters don't act right for the character (right as in the style a tournement player would play it) and games like D&amp;D don't have a lot of mobs who are equipped and act just like a human would.  At &quot;harder&quot; levels, the computer just cheats (extra bonuses or cheap abilities you don't have) and does not play any &quot;smarter&quot;.  More manhours go into making sure the AI is fun to play against instead of true AI.


Going back to politics, let's say we could design an AI that would teach a child effectively.  Now let's say it's sold at $250 and teaches all the courses a child of that year needs well enough that most people would want it.  That's a lot of union votes and member dues that would be put at risk by that software.]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[WedPMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Kingdinosaur]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1753277]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[If windmills are the first thing designed and they become popular as you predicted, then investing in lawyers, if that's even possible, would be a good bet.  Think about it: tranmission lines means lawsuits because no one wants them in their own back yard, and enviromentalists don't like them anywhere.  And windmills kill birds and bats (both of which eat bugs) so there will be lawsuits to get the things turned off.

My gut says the best place for computers to start designing things are designs with lots of room for improvement, the improvements come about mostly as a matter of time and T&amp;E instead of creativity, and there's a low likelihood of lawsuits being spawned.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Jibbley]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1753187]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Artificial Intelligence? Not gonna happen.

I know this clashes with your &quot;moist robot&quot; theories but seriously, it's not happening. It would take a whole different sort of computer that nobody has any idea how to build. I promise you we'll all be dead and gone before it happens (if ever).

Computer chess, etc., are NOT signs of intelligence. Just blind data processing.
]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[WedAMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Drowlord]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752322]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[As a rabid scifi fan and as a computer programmer with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, I was crushed when it became clear to me that AI is nearly as whimsical as faster-than-light travel.

We're nowhere near developing AI.  We aren't even doing meaningful work in that field.  it's unlikely that anything resembling our current computers is capable of intelligence, but more disillusioning is the reality that we simply don't know what intelligence is.

We can't define it in anything resembling a concrete way, we suck at measuring it, and if we even came close to figuring out what intelligence is, we'd have feces-in-the-fan of the sort where people who aren't intelligent kill the people that figured out how to unequivocally quantify it.

If you've read anything about IQ, standardized testing, and the statistics of demographics, you know how angry this topic makes people.  The top scientific organizations won't touch this area of research with a ten foot pole.]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[TuePMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Raskolnikov]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752317]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Scenes from the upcoming movie &quot;Dude, Where's My Suspension Bridge?&quot;:

Prelude: The biggest banks have been hiring the best young physicists for years.  Not to do physics, but to design high-frequency robotic trading software. These banks run supercomputers that rival the NSA, and sentience was probably inevitable.  But no one expected a mutant trojan to bring &quot;life&quot; to Bank of America and JP Morgan's computers on the same night.

Soon after, a corrupt politician receives $50 million in his online Cayman account from Bank of America.  His instructions: Break up JP Morgan.

Word gets to Homeland Security when an agent watching online po r n finds his screen stalling at a frustrating moment.  A subsequent investigation reveals 2 botnets growing exponentially, but battling each other.  Things get bad.  China is initially accused of cyberwar and missiles are nearly launched.  

Teenage gamers are stymied, and go outside only to ride their bikes into a terrible traffic light fiasco.  An electrical substation explodes.  Aircraft carriers disappear.  GPS disruption sends cars over cliffs like lemmings.  Blog commenters take up Scrabble.

And then there's one poignant scene where all the copper kettles at Samuel Adams mysteriously disappear. 

Ending spoiler:  After several generations of a marginally successful Amish society, the Sun begins to dim.  The crops are not florishing as before.  Turns out the Singularity is just finishing a shell around the Sun to harvest 100 percent of its energy.  The last scene however, does leave it open for an Amish mole-man sequel.


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<pubDate><![CDATA[TuePMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from mhlong47]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752294]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Having worked in various capacities in the IT world since about 1970, mostly in User Interface programming, I'll start believing in true AI when systems can self monitor themselves and report when something is wrong (whatever that may mean), and fix it themselves.  Completely for every possible scenario. Case in point, (on my MS Windows systems) I hit the Shut Down button and the system goes into shut down mode.  Sometimes.  Sometimes it takes a minute, sometimes much longer, sometimes never.  I don't know who wrote the code for shut down, but it's wrong.  There should be a monitoring system that monitors progress over a limited time period and when progess is not being made, I (or eventually the MCP - if you know what I mean) should be made aware of the situation and remedies applied, not endless loops.  Computers today do exactly what they are programmed to do.  Unfortunately, programmers don't always see every possible outcome of the decision trees they install, and therefore cannot possibly know exactly what a system will do given a certain set of inputs and conditions.  Thus, MS (for example) releases and sells new versions that are at best Alpha (not even Beta) and they expect the multitude of users to generate enough feedback to come up with a more viable Beta version.  If some of the best programmers can't even get this code right, how can we ever expect true AI that we can control?  Or more obvious, how will we know how to stop it, if it does happen, since we are so poor at understanding all possible outcomes of today's code, since code is becoming far more complex? I've seen War Games, The Forbin Project, read 'The Adolescence of P1' etc. etc. Those were very benign examples of AI in that people using their slow human brains kept up with systems for awhile occasionally overcoming them (2001) or evenutally failing.  I doubt we will ever have that kind of time luxury if true AI hits.  Viable AI will be attained long before Asimov's 3 laws are ever considered, and I'm talking minutes here.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from IgnatzBaluba]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752263]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[I saw an article a few years ago about someone doing this with diesel engine cylinder head design.  Heck, I was doing this as an engineering undergrad 20  years ago with a game called 'C Robots'.  Automated iterative design and simulation is nothing new, nor is it an example of the technological singularity.

The technological singularity will be an intelligent computer is able to design and build a more intelligent computer without human involvement.  But the first step, an intelligent computer, might never happen.  If/when it does though, the next step seems inevitable.]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[TuePMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from callcopse]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752261]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Somewhat related is this recent xkcd spin-off on the possible forthcoming robot apocalypse and it's likely effects:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/
]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from befuddled123]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752260]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Supercomputers are already being applied to drug design.  I'd invest in technologies which prevent the &quot;technological singularity&quot;.  In other words, invest in companies which exploit irrational fears about technology.  That's how a lot of people got rich from the Y2K problem.]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from UnregisteredUser]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752244]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Note that a computer does NOT evaluate every possibilities in a chess game. It uses clever heuristics because there evaluating all possibilities would take too long.]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[TuePMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from robellis52]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752132]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Technological Singularity? Computers that design their own chips?  Sounds VERY Matrix...
The second renaissance...  It is an inevitability... 

It would have to go a long way to create the new ipod though.  I think aesthetics and marketing will remain in the human domain for a long time to come.  So my prediction is those products that are neither seen nor heard by humans, and i agree with it being in sectors where the variables are mostly known... so construction (the perfect brick?)  route planning (finely tuned autonomous shipping  mining etc)?  or the big one... financial algorithmic trading engines...  How about a computer operated island country  boat (inc. a computer driven virtual government?)?

How about music?  Could a computer create the 'perfect' song based on a learning engine?]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from BobNL]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752059]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[The technical singularity is science fiction.

Yes, you can write a computerprogram to optimize an existing design of a windmill. But a computer program that comes up with a new way of generating energy is something else. I don't think a computer will ever be able to design something new. The possibilities are just too many, and a computer does not have the the filter to seperate the nonsense from the useful. It doesn't have intuition. It doesn't have the sense of beauty that you need to recognize a good algorithm.

â€œThe only real valuable thing is intuition.â€  A. Einstein
â€œLogic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.â€ A. Einstein

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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from arunv_inc]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1752002]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[What makes you think the computers want to work hard after becoming self-aware? My bet - they will become lazy couch potatoes.]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[TueAMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from mattpatt]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1751967]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Pretty much everything in the world is already designed by people more knowledgable than me.  I'd make a terrible windmill designer, for instance.  How is the technological singularity going to be any different?]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[TueAMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from Ardent_Eccentric]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1751730]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[Using a  super, super, computer to calculate and design, for fusion power applications would be cool... Anything that makes power production more efficient and economical would be great. 

Also material design, and engineering for such applications... Producing lighter, stronger, and cheaper materials would be a great benefit to progress. 

Of course making a computer that has reasoning would be quite difficult. Sure, a computer can calculate and processes huge  data banks a million times quicker than a human. But how to make a computer comprehend the data is another story. 

Currently scientist don't quite understand neural comprehension and reasoning enough  to build a full and comprehensive model or map of our abilities. We only have small pieces of the puzzle at hand, and i'm sure there are plenty of pieces that have not ben found or even observed.  

 Maybe a biocomputer might be the answer.]]></description>
<pubDate><![CDATA[MonPMCDTE_Rthth]]></pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Comment  from jammer170]]></title>
<link><![CDATA[http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/1751695]]></link>
<description><![CDATA[@whtllnew:

I don't know where you got that impression. Companies are investing lots of money in domain-specific AI research (soft AI) because the results are far more cost-effective than the alternatives. The possibility one emergent behavior from one of the systems producing the next Skynet is very unlikely at the moment.

That being said, making AI softer undercuts the benefits from more complex AIs. The soft AI applications came out of some hard AI research, so companies will need to fund some of that. I don't have to persuade my employers to make use of my knowledge - in fact, they paid for my entire degree (including paid time off for attending classes and study) in order for me to build those (among other) skills, so clearly they recognize the value of familiarity with the subject.  It is just that the end goal is not to produce an artificial person (there isn't any real profit/motivation today to do so - in the future, that may change).]]></description>
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