June 2009 archive

Jun 03 2009

Do they dream of electric sheep asleep in the hub?

That doesn’t look like much does it? Just some robots doing their thing, finding a light source, charging their batteries. What you are actually looking at is Skynet in the making.

This is the work of Dario Floreano of Laboratory of Intelligent Systems based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. What you are looking at is Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence.

What the does that mean, you are asking yourself? Well, let’s let a layman explain it:

http://current.com/items/90119…

Dario Floreano and his team at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology built a swarm of mobile robots, outfitted with light bulbs and photodetectors.  These were set loose in a zone with illuminated “food” and “poison” zones which charged or depleted their batteries.  Their programming was initially random, so the first generation staggered around the place like bunch of concussed puppies.



At intervals, the robots were shut down and those that had the most charge left in their batteries were chosen as “successful”, and their neural programming was combined to produce the next generation of the robots.  These offspring are downloaded into the same mechanical bodies their parents inhabited, forming an closed-circuit Buddhist system which might be an extremely efficient method of maintaining a stable population, but will provide a serious headache for any robot philosophers who might turn up.

Which could happen before long.  Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed – helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs.  Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone – presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon carving of a handlebar moustache.

You might be upset by this result, scientific proof that those who say “Evil is utterly fundamental to human nature” actually understates the scope of the problem, there were also silicon souls on the side of the angels.  Some robots advanced fearlessly into poison zones, flashing warning lights to keep other robots out of harms way.

This is one of the most incredibly bad ideas I have ever seen. Asimov is twirling in his grave, and he didn’t even know what neural networks were.

That is what is going on here, the crazy Swiss. Not these little bots will ever achieve enlightment due to the need to be downloaded into a new body, but sooner or later some dumb monkey is going recreate this project with a group of robots capable of longevity.

And that’s where we will destroy ourselves.

Now to understand exactly what they are recreating with these robots, one must understand basic connection theory.

Load the bowls boy, your about the enter the Pinche Zone.

Watch the whole thing:

http://www.torrentreactor.net/…

That’s right, Kevin Bacon is the secret of the universe. In any system a pattern emerges, elegant in simplicity, yet complex in it’s execution. The infinite sum in a single line of code.

Someone has already taken the time to crib note this episode so let’s borrow, shall we?

http://www.newearthperspective…

A number of scientists have been sharing their data and taking this fledgling science into new areas of application. It is now being scientifically demonstrated that everything — all systems — in nature utilize the same pervasive laws of organization. These laws of organization are always seeking to ensure the survival and success of whatever is in the network. So the chorus of crickets, or the flashing synchronicity of a ten thousand fireflies, the movement of people from one website to another, the movement of traffic through a city, the movement of signals through our brain’s neural circuitry and the cooperative activity of proteins in our cells are all inter-related through the underlying organizational principles that they use.



One very interesting aspect of networks that has been discovered is that all networks have “hubs” where a greater concentration of connections exist. On the internet these would be called “portals.” In the study that was done on the network of all known movie stars the hubs were the more popular stars who had more contacts in the movie star world.

The net result of this research seems to indicate that these hubs are very important to the health of the network. They offer other members of the network the capability of connecting to significantly more additional members than they could on their own. This points to a vulnerability in the network, if something happens to the hub(s) then the network becomes fragmented with isolated pockets rather than functioning as a whole organism.

This basic scientific principle has already been employed to identify and destroy the hubs in terrorist networks and reportedly has worked very well. An even more constructive use of this technology is emerging in the medical field. They have mapped all known diseases and the DNA codons that are involved in each disease for those diseases for which the associated codons are currently known. This has resulted in revealing a massive network of interconnectedness between many different diseases. This system takes advantage of the DNA codons as the hubs in the network.

A good example is how Daily Kos is the hub to a lot of smaller sites that are connected together by their association with Naranjastan. Without Daily Kos, most of the progressive blogosphere would not exist, or at least not in its current state.

In fact, life began on earth when certain organic compounds formed hubs out of the chaos, creating a network of connections that evolved as per the underlying geometry of the known universe.

And if one looks at a map big enough of the universe itself, one will also see a network of hubs of the collective whole of all, starting small and going infinitely big, but all following the same mathematics as that of our very cells:

As stated above, all forms of life follow connection theory and hubs. And that is exactly what those robots above are doing.

In the neural network of these AI robots, connections to their environment and themselves has lead to hubs, nexuses of learning, that has allowed them to evolve.

And as with any system, you will have angels and devils, which was probably what formed our concepts of religion during humanity’s era of mythos.

Humanity evolved no differently in connection with each other than these robots are currently doing, so who is to say that these robots will not develop a concept of god?

And if they are decide that god has given them dominion over all, much like humanity did, what is to stop them? Especially if we weaponize large robots, or even worse, nanorobots within a structured neural network allowing for the development of hubs?

The answer my friend is nothing.

And that is why I will always campaign against the neural networking of AI robots, no matter the hubba hubba about how nothing could possible go wrong.

Because the geometry of the universe will make sure it goes right, and that will be against humanity’s best wishes.

Jun 03 2009

Overnight Caption Contest

Jun 03 2009

Questioning The Afghan Premises

This is my first essay here at Docudharma, and it’s a crosspost of a diary I did at DKos a few weeks ago.  I’m quite interested in furthering discussion on this topic, and though I won’t trash the other place, I’ll just say I feel confident that Dd folks are truly interested in constructive dialogue. ; – )

It seems that much of the American populace just doesn’t even question the premises for staying in Afghanistan and for ramping it up there.

Some say that our occupation of Afghanistan is “the good war”.  Dammitall, but I just don’t know what they mean, when they say this.  It’s a head scratcher. It seems as if a gazillion people heard the words “the good war” said somewhere, and then they assigned a few neurons to that, but haven’t checked back to see if the concept actually means something or if it is in working order.

Some say Obama has to keep us in Afghanistan until we get OBL.  ‘Course the search for OBL was abandoned under Unitary Executive Humpty Dumpty the First, and Obama hasn’t made getting OBL part of the plan. If getting OBL is supposed to be part of Bama’s plan, then would someone explain that to Bama, please?

Some say we have to stay there until we dismantle AQ.  But Gen. Petraeus seems to think that AQ has been pretty well run out of Afghanistan, no?

Jun 03 2009

In honor of Obama…

for his support of the Graham Lieberman secrecy bill….

Jun 03 2009

Openly hostile: Obama has squandered the benefit of my doubt.

Superficially, Obama remains an appealing personality of great apparent warmth, intelligence, and compassion, which initially made his promise of change credible.  Here’s a partial list of grievances accumulated against him in his short tenure as President via Paul Street that not even the warmest, fuzziest Al Rodgers’ diary could redress.

* Significantly expand the reach and intensity of imperial violence (replete with the mass slaughter of civilians and the related escalation of targeted assassinations) in South Asia.

* Promote a notorious assassin and death-squad leader (Lt. General Stanley A McChrystal – former chief of the military’s special Joint Special Operations Command) to the position of Commander of U.S. Forces in the newly merged “Af-Pak” war theater. [1]

* Sustain the criminal occupation of Iraq beneath rhetoric of withdrawal. [2]

* Increase “defense” (empire) spending, consistent with the following statement in a report issued by the leading Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley one day after Obama’s presidential election victory: “As we understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend.”[3]

* Revive military commissions.

* Continue the practice of renditions.

* Maintain secret prisons for persons “held on a short-term, transitory basis.”

* Continue the unspeakable torture of prisoners by an “extrajudicial terror squad” (Jeremy Scahill’s description of the Pentagon’s sadistic “Immediate Reaction Force” in Cuba) at Guantanamo Bay. [4]

* Advance the policy of “indefinite detention” (potentially permanent incarceration) for Guantanamo prisoners for whom no legally compelling evidence can be marshaled.

* Intimidate England (with a threat to withhold intelligence data on potential terrorist attacks!) into preventing a Guantanamo victim from having his day in court on the Bush administration’s torture practices. [5]

* Sustain the Bush administration’s abrogation of habeas corpus rights in regard to the roughly 600 “enemy combatants” kept at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan (where people rendered out of other countries like Yemen and England can be considered “war [-zone]” prisoners!. [6]

* Advance nauseatingly specious legal and moral arguments (“better to look forward than backward”) to prevent serious federal investigation of the Bush administration’s human rights crimes.

* Sustain George W. Bush’s domestic wiretapping program.

* Invoke the “state secrets” (akin to the divine right of kings) doctrine to prevent disclosure of evidence in response to lawsuits emerging from Bush era rendition and surveillance policies.

* Suppress photographic evidence of U.S. torture practices.

* Justify all this and more in the name of the supposed “global war on terror” that was supposedly launched in legitimate defense against the supposedly unprovoked jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001.

* Disregard qualified progressive defenders of civil liberties and human rights from consideration for appointment to succeed Supreme Justice David H. Souter and to thereby counter the hard right leanings of the court’s conservative majority. [7]

* Send clear signals of intent to roll back and partially privatize Social Security and Medicare benefits.

* Betray campaign pledges to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to insert stronger labor and environmental protections. [7A]

* Betray campaign pledges of serious intent to advance an elementary and overdue labor law reform (the Employee Free Choice Act).

* Force and approve an automobile industry re-structuring that drastically cuts domestic autoworkers’ jobs, wages and benefits while subsidizing General Motors’ further shifting of jobs abroad. [8]

* Advance a tepid, business-friendly health care “reform” that leaves the leading parasitic insurance corporations (major campaign sponsors of his) in power.

* “Methodically erase single-payer advocates from the picture” (Glen Ford) of health care reform despite the fact that a majority of Americans have long favored a single-payer (“Medicare for all”) health insurance system. [9]

* Spend trillions of federal dollars on taxpayer handouts to giant Wall Street firms who spent millions on his campaign and who drove the economy over the cliff.  Obama’s Wall Street bailout rejects the elementary bank nationalizations and public financial restructuring that are required to put the nation’s credit system on a sound and socially responsible basis, choosing instead to guarantee the financial, insurance, and real estate industries’ toxic, hyper-inflated assets while keeping existing Wall Street management in place.  It amounts to a giant effort to “keep perpetrators afloat” (liberal economist James Gailbraith) through a scheme in which  the government takes more than 90 percent of the risk but private investors reap at least half the reward.

I could go on. It’s not a pretty story. And it’s only going to get worse.

 

Jun 03 2009

The Terrorists Among Us

In a Wichita, Kansas church on Sunday, radical anti-abortion wingnut Scott Roeder allegedly gunned down a physician named George Tiller in cold blood. Because Dr. Tiller provided abortion services to women whose right to decide whether or not to have a child has been the ‘Law of the Land’ since 1973. Roeder (and his ilk) don’t like it.

We know these murdering terrorists all too well, as Tiller isn’t the first doctor they’ve attacked and/or killed. The goal of killing doctors who provide legal medical services is not to end abortion. Abortion is as old as the hills. Safe medical abortion is relatively new.

Humans of course have more choices than bears and deer and burrowing critters who consume certain plants to induce abortion. Humans decide to have sex (most of the time), then they decide to have or not have a baby. It is apparently the freedom to choose that the antis so vehemently disagree with, so they engage in acts of terrorism with the intent to scare doctors away from providing the safe medical procedure.

Jun 02 2009

Four at Four

  1. Politico reports Pentagon budget faces shortfall The Obama administration “understated the military’s true personnel costs when the president submitted his war funding request in April… “The Pentagon said Monday it now estimates it faces an additional $2.35 billion shortfall in personnel accounts for the remainder of this fiscal year ending Sept. 30. Nearly three-quarters of the money would go to the Army and Army National Guard, which have blown far past their 2009 manpower targets, thanks to a bad economy and a system of often costly enlistment bonuses.”

Four at Four continues with Obama in Egypt, how we’re losing the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistan frees cleric allegedly linked to Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Jun 02 2009

WeaveMothers: What Shenshi Did

The WeaveMothers wove some new happentracks into the Ifalong, for this is what the Weavemothers were meant to do.  And the Greataway sparkled a bit for a moment.  Part of the Tapestry now connected more closely with momentous events and everyone paused for just an instant to reflect.

In the Locomotive the Engineer released some steam through the trumpet and smiled.

_ # ^ &  _ # ^ &  _ # ^ &  _

There is a tale that the Storyteller has told often.  It is always a favorite, even by those who have heard it many times.  For the Storyteller always embellishes it somewhat differently.  The truth, they say, is never changed, but it comes in various hues.

The tale relates some of what happened before the Triad was formed.  It is, in fact, the fable of the efforts of Shenshi to cause its formation.  These events took place near Dome Azul at a time long after the color of that dome had faded, and the nearby coastal village of Punto del Oeste.

I can only relate the story in the way I heard it and as I remember it.  One could probably consult the Rainbow for an exact version.  But where would be the fun in that?

Jun 02 2009

Building a Post White Christian Male Power Stucture

In a recent essay …Breaking The Taboo: What We Face On Every Front I published this very telling quote:

BILL O’REILLY: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I….

The context and attributions can be found here: Preserving the ‘white, Christian, male power structure.’

This essay too is taboo, this essay speaks an awkward, uncomfortable truth. This essay is controversial. This essay speaks plainly of something that is not easily spoken about. This essay will contain more caveats than I have ever written! (except for the last one!)

Los Caveats: Please read before proceeding.

For I place this essay before you today not to condemn a subset of humanity, not to say that they are evil, not to call for their heads, and certainly not to condemn every person reading it who shares any of the characteristics of the subset in question. I share them myself.

If you are reading this and yet do share some of those characteristics…you have probably been fighting your whole life to defeat…..”it.” Yet, it will probably still sting. You may feel a sense of shame, but I say to you now, with all of the honesty I can muster after examining my heart and conscience, I do not write this to shame you.

You may what I am about to write and you are about to read… ‘insensitive.’ You may even find it insulting. You may become angry. The words on this page may make you feel…..a certain way. Which is why they are taboo. But they are, to the best of my ability to perceive it, The Truth. And though I take full responsibility for writing them, I do not take responsibility for how they make you feel. I did not make this Truth. I just have the temerity to set it in print.

As the subset I am writing about often are heard to say….I apologize if what I say offends you in any way.

If you have read and understand these caveats, you may proceed below the fold.

Jun 02 2009

The End Of The Beginning?

Note: I repost this every now and then – it was my first essay here at DD nearly two years ago and was originally posted at Talkleft in 2006. With so many new people here lately I thought it’s time to post it again, this time with some new additions at the end of it…

In the nineteen sixties and seventies the western world was in the throes of a cultural and psychological revolution of awareness that at times threatened to bring down the governments and destroy the societies of some of the most powerful countries on earth, and terrified many who were unable to step outside of the structure and limitations of the worldviews they had constructed for themselves in the course of their lives.

Questioning cultural norms and prejudices and searching for alternatives that better respected and valued human beings and their relationship with the larger society and with the natural world as the basis and reason for societies actions and existence rather than society and the state and the status quo as the determining factors of how people should interact with each other, were the drivers behind this revolution.

The insecurity of many in the face of insistent and deep questioning that in a religious context would have been labeled blasphemy and heresy caused knee-jerk fear reactions that in many arenas turned into violent confrontations, particularly but not only race riots and countless smaller horrors of the racial Civil Rights Movement, and in the struggle for equality under law and social systems of  more than half the population in the Gay and the Women's Liberation Movements, and what was often termed a Sexual Revolution, all of which had been percolating and growing for many years and all of which naturally contributed to making up the more encompassing psychological or awareness heightening Cultural Revolution of the times.

Noted philosopher Alan Watts in the nineteen sixties in “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” described our situation, our human condition, this way:

Jun 02 2009

Republicans Won’t Be Back Prior To 2014

There has been a lot of talk about the demise of the Republican Party. The Dog has, himself, been part of this talk. Whenever this topic comes up there are those that point out the various times where the Republican Party or even the Democratic Party were down and looked as though they might be out, then have come back in with surprising swiftness. These arguments are true as far as they go but one of the major failings the Dog always finds with these comparisons is they only look at the results and fail to take into account the circumstances which allowed these changes of fortunes for the Party.

“Originally posted at Squarestate.net“

Jun 02 2009

Things are falling apart

The nauseating sensation of being in a surreal, waking dream is becoming the daily reality of the Obama Administration. Unlike the crude affront to sanity that was the Bush nightmare, the dominant feeling of the Obama era is the insidious feeling that things are not right, but that everyone is pretending that they are.

Consider the GM bankruptcy. This historic event has been ignored by the stock market, which actually staged a rally. The arithmetic of massive auto industry job losses and wiped out government investments is obvious, but nobody wants to run the numbers. Instead, all we hear from the press is numbing, repetitive assurances that everything is going to be fine. Obama sends in a handful of inexperienced functionaries to apply crude measures to hold the remnants of GM together for another year or two, and we are supposed to believe that we are going to get an automotive technology renaissance.

This is government by bull$hit, not a new era of competence. When FDR took things in hand, he gave the people straight talk and new structures staffed by competent people. Obama is blowing smoke and dodging accountability. We have seen this pattern in the financial “rescue,” as Geither and Summers ducked, weaved, and dodged around every issue. Now we are seeing it in industrial policy.

If the Bush administration did not give us an adequate lesson in the pernicious consequences of wishful thinking and ideological fantasies, we will certainly learn this lesson under Obama. Liberal fantasies are no less pernicious than those of conservatives. Reality will not be denied for much longer.

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