Robotics, AI, and Ethics
chuck....@gmail.com
been interested in the the technical aspects of artificial
intelligence and robotics. However, as technology becomes more
advanced some are starting to examine a concept that is typically
restricted to the realm of human interactions - ethical behavior.
http://www.syntheticthought.com/st/robotics/59-general/48-robotics-ai-and-ethics
Ian Parker
wrote:
See my comment in Creating AI.
One such example is the Three Laws of Robotics first penned by author
Isaac Asimov over sixty years ago. The laws state:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a
human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where
such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection
does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
A lot of the effort in robotics is military.
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/creatingAI/browse_frm/thread/cf68ca9b956a91a9?hl=en
http://www.foster-miller.com/lemming.htm
http://news.cnet.com/military-tech/?keyword=Modular+Advanced+Armed+Robotic+System
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,509684,00.html "Big dog" looks
rather like something out of Star Wars
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/04/22/killer-robots-and-a-revolution-in-warfare/comment-page-4/#comment-13586
Bang go all of Asimov's laws. Should we be saying that MAARS is
protecting us against terrorists and other sorts of malefactor. In
sort are our wars just. MAARS represents an enormous force
multiplication. This force multiplication is AT LEAST comparable with
machine guns in the latter part of the 19th century.
Stanley of "Dr. Livingstone I presume" fame talked about us having the
Maxim gun anf they have not.
http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/11-15-2004-61664.asp
http://www.bwefirearms.com/gatling.pdf
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Maxim_gun
The Maxim gun was instrumental in the subjugation of the Belgian Congo
and the scramble for Africa.
The just war has been a subject of debate among theologians.
http://catholicism.about.com/od/beliefsteachings/p/Just_War_Theory.htm
This reference gives Catholic teaching in general terms. Pope Benedict
both as Pope and as Cardinal Ratzinger has made some very specific
remarks about Iraq.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/j/justwar.htm
This is a much more philosophical article. In talks about Jus ante
bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum. Latin BTW is not as dead as
all that!
While I agree in principle with Asimov I think a lot more
philosophical analysis is needed. I do not believe that we can discuss
robotic ethics in the absence of a general "just war" discussion.
Quite clearly if we use MAARS to support a war that is not just then
we would simply be behaving like bullies - just like Stanley and the
Belgians.
is an article of total futility. The first question to be decided is
"Is the war just?" Now a distinction between autonomous robotic
weapons and those with a human controller is false. Both are force
multipliers. At the moment a very limited autonomy is proposed. The
autonomy to strike at infra red sources. A 250Kg bomb flattens
everything in its vicinity, soldiers and civilians. If a robot does
sometimes fire at civilians what's the difference?
The military are a bit cagey at MAARS. They say it is purely
controlled. If that were true though why are they going to such great
pains to give it knowledge of the disposition of friendly forces.
Iraq was unjust from beginning to end, yet the AI build up is taking
place in Afghanistan. Robots are increasing there at an exponential
rate. Obama is shortly to have a "surge". Yet the real surge is the
robotic surge. Because of this the US is going to be able to withdraw
a considerable number of troops prior to his re-election in 4 years
time. He will spin it that the political situation has improved, but
he will be able to make that withdrawal even if it has not.
Will AI mean more war? Yes, I think it undoubtedly will. It will mean
that you can go to war with zero casualties I don't think Obama is
going to sanction new wars, but an incoming Republican administration
could well.
How just is Afghanistan? Hard to say. At the present time Obama finds
himself trapped. In the 1980s the CIA supported jihad against the
USSR. It set up the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) in Pakistan.
This ISI is now reported as being "out of control" and a "Frankenstein
monster".
Justice viewed from an Afghan/Pakistani perspective is quite non
existent. First the US forces out Najibullah who while not being
perfect was better than anything subsequent. It connived at an
extremist takeover. After 9/11 it tried to do a U turn and support
democracy.
Hamid Karzai was put into power. Now not only is Mr. Karzai totally
corrupt, his brother is a leading drug lord, but he is a bit of an
extremist himself. Not only did he pass a law on marital rape (in fact
the law went further than this and denied women the right to inherit)
only revising it after an international outcry. He also jailed the
translators of a Pathan version of the Qur'an approved by American
scholars. Obama tried to get rid of him but found he could not.
This brings be on to yet another point. AI must be looked at
holistically. Translation is in fact becoming a major part of AI and
suppose we let AI loose on the Qur'an. Well even the software I have
written myself is capable of instantly dispelling dictation by the
Archangel Gabriel. I have set up the Buckwalter dictionary using hash
tables and it finds prefixes and suffixes by repeated look up. It will
thus tell you whether a word is plural, dual or singular. Two women
with plural husbands spring to mind.
Professor Luxembourg has done research on the origins of the Qur'an.
Luxembourg is a pseudonym.
I consider it quite disgraceful that the life of an academic should be
threatened in this way.
There is an irony here we look towards AI to aid this type of
scholarly research.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/AI-Machine-Identifies-4-000-Year-Old-Language-Code-110044.shtml
Computer analysis of the grammar of the Indus valley text. The script
cannot yet be read. The computer indicates that the text was a spoken
language. The writing is like Chinese, that is to say there is one
pictogram per word. The computer using statistical techniques was able
to work out a grammar and the way of writing words. We now know what
the parts of speech of each word was, but not the meaning.
Karzai and his theologians are perfectly correct in saying that Arabic
should always be available. What is in fact wanted is a translator
which will enable you to delve into Syriac roots.
This is a bit of a digression I know. Not completely though. Just war
involves ante bellum, in bello and post bellum. All that roboticists
have ever considered is a very limited version of "in bello".
Ante bellum to me involves a proper analysis of policy, done with the
help of AI. Ante bellum involves, in particular, not supporting jihad
against Najibullah and not allow jihardists to become strong in the
first place. This should be perfectly possible.
Obama has never promised any post bellum justice. Provided that
extremists do not attack the US he is perfectly happy, for example, to
have women's rights trampled underfoot. Of course when we have MAARS
and they do not, does this matter?
- Ian Parker
zzbu...@netscape.net
wrote:
> Over the past half century, researchers and engineers have primarily
> been interested in the the technical aspects of artificial
> intelligence and robotics. However, as technology becomes more
> advanced some are starting to examine a concept that is typically
> restricted to the realm of human interactions - ethical behavior.
Well, many of the more intelligent engineering people have already
given
up on the uneducable, laser-controlled, and syncopated, robotic
idiots already though.
Which is why mostly they even built the AUVs, Cruise Missiles,
Drones, Phalanx,
GPS, Digital-Terrain Mapping, Atomic Clock Wristwatches, Optical
Computers,
MP3, MPEG, CD-rom, DVD-rom, XML, C++, Flat-Screen HDTV Debuggers,
Spam Blocking,
Distributed Processing, Pv Cell Energy Arrays, Self-Assembling
Robots.
Self-Replicating Machines, Holographic Systems, USB, Broadband
Fiber Optics,
Cell Phones, Thermo-Electric Cooling, Microwave Cooling, Compact
Flourescent Lighting,
Light Sticks, On-Line Banking, On-Line Shopping, and On-Line
Publishing.
>
> http://www.syntheticthought.com/st/robotics/59-general/48-robotics-ai...
Mok-Kong Shen
Morals, ethics (and also goals of most religions) may be very fine
and most people are good. The problem is that there is a very small
but unfortunately non-zero percentage of bad guys, who never "care"
morals and ethics. Thus crimes, wars etc. cannot be eradicated from
this world through preaching morals and ethics, which seems to be
defacto a waste of time and effort, sadly. I read that killing and
warfare also occur in chimpanzees. Man's higer intelligence
apparently doesn't help him to fare better than lower species.
M. K. Shen
Mok-Kong Shen
> chuck....@gmail.com wrote:
[snip]
I like to reproduce a quote concerning peace from R. Biegelow,
The dawn warriors: Man's evolution toward peace, London, 1969, p.216:
Only an even mightier juggernaut of even more complex and
all-pervading social organization can establish and maintain
global law and order.
M. K. Shen
Don Stockbauer
> Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
Hmmmmmmmm....... I wonder what that could be???????????????????????
Ian Parker
>
> [snip]
>
> I like to reproduce a quote concerning peace from R. Biegelow,
> The dawn warriors: Man's evolution toward peace, London, 1969, p.216:
>
> Only an even mightier juggernaut of even more complex and
> all-pervading social organization can establish and maintain
> global law and order.
>
Asimov put forward his "laws" without any reference to theories of a
just war. If he were publishing a paper, as opposed to writing science
fiction, the referees would have picked up on it.
If we are to follow Asimov in any way we have to build on "just war"
philosophy, and ask ourselves whether it is possible to translate
these definitions into AI terms. This I think is the fundamental
academic point.
All the wars fought by the US in the Middle East and Central Asia were
fundamentally unjust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein
Read the section on his rise to power. Christian jurists have pitched
their discussions in purely abstract terms. Of course justice and
injustice is a matter of political judgement. If you put a bad guy in
power in the first place then any subsequent war has to be unjust.
Afghanistan is unjust for precisely the same reason. Marital rape,
imprisonment for blasphemy etc. underlines unjustness.
I do not believe that Karzai (or Obama) has any sort of "Mandate from
Heaven" in the Chinese sense. In fact the very advance of AI and its
application to scholarship could well mean that that the settlement
produced by AI in the shape of MAARS could well be unravelled by the
AI implicit in Arabic scholarship! If a complete audit trail of the
Qur'an is available on the Web, Karzai is going to look just a bit
silly.
- Ian Parker
Mok-Kong Shen
> On May 10, 6:38 am, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@t-online.de> wrote:
>> Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
>>> chuck.ril...@gmail.com wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>> I like to reproduce a quote concerning peace from R. Biegelow,
>> The dawn warriors: Man's evolution toward peace, London, 1969, p.216:
>>
>> Only an even mightier juggernaut of even more complex and
>> all-pervading social organization can establish and maintain
>> global law and order.
>
In my understanding, the author meant that it is utopic, i.e.
entierly unrealistic, to expect that mankind would ever live
permanently in peace. The lesson of the second world war is
practically null in my humble view.
M. K. Shen
Ian Parker
> Hmmmmmmmm....... I wonder what that could be???????????????????????
>
> In my understanding, the author meant that it is utopic, i.e.
> entierly unrealistic, to expect that mankind would ever live
> permanently in peace. The lesson of the second world war is
> practically null in my humble view.
>
wear would be a total disaster where the losses would completely
outweigh any gains. In war between fairly equal nation states this
rubric holds true. Peace CAN be negotiated through mutual interest.
The moral questions arise when a strong nation is fighting a very much
weaker one. This is the real point about the morality of robotic
war.People talk about wars being fought between robots. This will
never be the case. Robots will be fighting on one side. Flesh and
blood will be on the other side. Science fiction stories talk about
the human race being invaded from space and fighting robots. Science
fact is that the technological nations of Earth are developing robots
in order to fight Third World countries. They are not being developed
to fight each other.
- Ian Parker
zzbu...@netscape.net
Well, but most of the idiots understand so little about technology-
in-general,
computers, communications, positioning, logistics, technology-
transfer,
and expense, it's also why the people with the non-zero technology
brains build GPS, Cruise Missiles, Drones, Holographics, On-Line
Publishing,
and Self-Replicating Machines.
>
> - Ian Parker
Don Stockbauer
That's what's so nice about the Global Brain. It brings about Eternal
Peace automatically and, oddly enough, unavoidably. Hmmmmmm.......
That sounds a bit like a religion, doesn't it? But it's science
(cybernetics). See the Principia Cybernetica for more optimism.
Ian Parker
> That's what's so nice about the Global Brain. It brings about Eternal
> Peace automatically and, oddly enough, unavoidably. Hmmmmmm.......
> That sounds a bit like a religion, doesn't it? But it's science
> (cybernetics). See the Principia Cybernetica for more optimism.
There is a whole lot here which I think needs picking over. There is
an extremely important point about the Internet and it is this. All
our TV, entertainment and news id going to come via tailored feeds. It
will because this is what we prefer. We want to look at programs we
are interested in. A global brain would make sure that we got the
appropriate feeds and did not engage in terrorism, war etc. etc. We
would all have a common experience and the nation state would be a
thing of the past.
This machine would be clever. It would constantly be giving us what we
wanted, or what we appeared to want, down to the best plot of "adult"
movie to titillate us. There is nothing way out in this. In fact it is
already happening in a limited way with Google.
There are a number of points. The first of these is what would happen
if someone malevolent hijacked the system for their own ends? Suppose
malevolence WANTED war, terrorism etc. for their own ends. Suppose
terrorism was "glorified" and presented as noble self sacrifice. This
is, in effect, what happened in Wilhelmite and then in Nazi Germany.
The real question to ask is could a code of ethics be imprinted on
Google which governments would find difficulty in circumventing?
The second point is that in certain countries, not the major ones,
there is censorship and organized unreason. Our brain will probably
find a way of dealing with this. I have mentioned Arabic scholarship
and the Afghan Qur'an. Disambiguation in translation is closely
related to the ability to perform textual criticism. This may be a
trivial point but -
1) For this discussion group it is extremely interesting even if a
sideline.
2) Obama is going to look a bit silly if the settlement that he
"imposes" on Afghanistan is totally undermined by "the Brain", as it
surely must be.
This leads me on to a third point which is this. "How will politicians
react if the World is being governed by a Brain and not by them?" No
doubt the Brain will attempt to give politicians the illusion of
control. That will be part of its technique. Of course, in a
"democratic" country the Brain will decide who is elected.
- Ian Parker
Curt Welch
> On 11 May, 09:53, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@t-online.de> wrote:
> > Hmmmmmmmm....... I wonder what that could be???????????????????????
> >
> > In my understanding, the author meant that it is utopic, i.e.
> > entierly unrealistic, to expect that mankind would ever live
> > permanently in peace. The lesson of the second world war is
> > practically null in my humble view.
> >
> I think this is unduly pessimistic. All countries realize that nuclear
> wear would be a total disaster where the losses would completely
> outweigh any gains. In war between fairly equal nation states this
> rubric holds true. Peace CAN be negotiated through mutual interest.
>
> The moral questions arise when a strong nation is fighting a very much
> weaker one. This is the real point about the morality of robotic
> war.People talk about wars being fought between robots. This will
> never be the case. Robots will be fighting on one side. Flesh and
> blood will be on the other side.
That's just nonsense.
Robots are just more tools of war. They have been fighting on both sides
ever since the first time some pre-man picked up a stick and used it in a
fight.
Robots are just better sticks. But so are tanks, and guided missiles, and
bullets.
What do you think a spear is? It's a knife on the end of a stick? Why was
the knife put on the end of the stick? To get the human further away from
the other guy with a knife so as to limit potential harm to himself.
All weapons of war are developed as a way of increasing the harm to the
enemy while minimizing harm to one's self. Robots in all forms are just
more of the same.
As long as there is war, they will be fighting on both sides.
> Science fiction stories talk about
> the human race being invaded from space and fighting robots. Science
> fact is that the technological nations of Earth are developing robots
> in order to fight Third World countries. They are not being developed
> to fight each other.
>
> - Ian Parker
Robots are just one more weapon of war being developed. The reason we see
robots being developed for war has nothing to do with who's fighting. It's
just because robots happen to be on the cutting edge of war technology at
this point in history. If we had advanced nations fighting each other
(like Europe against the US), you would actually see a HUGE surge in robot
development. The fact that the current battles are so one sided reduces
the pressure to invest in new war technology and as such, it's far slower
right now than it would be if there were some real battles going on. This
stuff isn't war from the side of the west. It's a police action.
The world is coming together into a stronger, united "global brain" as Don
likes to talk about. However, becuase the world is still populated with
diverse cultures that have fundamentally different views about what's
important in life, and about how a culture should be structured, we have
friction to deal with. The stronger cultures are, as they always have in
history, are forcing their culture onto the weaker cultures, and the result
is exactly what is expected - the weaker cultures don't like it and are
fight back. They are using terrorist techniques to defend their culture
becuase that's all you can use when a weak force fights overweeningly
stronger force.
The reason the strong is going against the weak, is becuase the strong is
made up of cultures that have already had their battles in the past, worked
out most their differences, and agreed on what form of culture to move
forward with. The middle east, has fallen behind in the race of advancing
strength something like 800 years ago and have been mostly ignored since
then. But their control over oil, the single most valuable limited resource
on the planet, forces the combined cultures of the west to have to deal
with the middle east. If the middle east had a culture that worked, and
allowed the west to continue to get oil, and didn't in the process make
them so rich that they would be able to force their culture on the west,
then all would be fine. But the culture of the middle east hasn't worked
well enough to keep them out of trouble with the west.
The bottom line, is that none of this conflict will be over until 1) we run
out of oil making the deserts of the middle east of no significant interest
to the developed nations (like much of Africa currently is), or 2) our
cultures merge well enough that we can coexist as one large functioning
culture.
In the end, the whole earth will merge together as one large culture, with
one large system of government, at which point there will be great peace
for an extended time. But there will continue to be more disagreements
until that day, and some of those disagreements will rise up to the level
war as people try to defend their cultures.
None of this has anything to do with robots, which are just one more weapon
of war. And if you think atomic bombs were nasty weapons of war, just wait
to see what's coming with AI. A weapon with human like intelligence or
greater built for war would not just wipe out a few cities, they could kill
(at a relatively low price) every human on a continent without hurting the
countryside or the natural resources of the land. It wouldn't be like the
bombed out buildings and destruction of past wars. It would just be a wave
of millions and millions of smart machines swarming over the land and
killing everything that got in their way. They might not even use
explosives or guns. A simple blade might be the best weapon for such a
swarm of AIs. The best form of these AIs might be bird like creatures that
would simply swarm on humans and slice them up. The humans go into hiding,
and the AI birds just wait for them to die because you can't survive as a
race underground for long.
The real point is not that such a thing will happen like that, but that as
technology develops, we are forced to operate as one large culture instead
of as many smaller cultures. That's becuase advancing technology causes our
desires to impinge on each other, and that leads to disagreements, which,
if there's not a functioning culture to settle these little disagreements,
they will always build into large disagreements which will then turn into
war. AI is just one more technology that will force the world to merge
into one large culture and that merging will always come with some pain,
and sadly, the smaller weaker cultures will always have to receive more of
that pain in the process.
--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
cu...@kcwc.com http://NewsReader.Com/
Curt Welch
> On 11 May, 13:33, Don Stockbauer <donstockba...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Eternal Peace automatically and, oddly enough, unavoidably.
> > =A0But it's science (cybernetics). =A0See the Principia Cybernetica for
> > more optimism.
>
> There is a whole lot here which I think needs picking over. There is
> an extremely important point about the Internet and it is this. All
> our TV, entertainment and news id going to come via tailored feeds. It
> will because this is what we prefer. We want to look at programs we
> are interested in. A global brain would make sure that we got the
> appropriate feeds and did not engage in terrorism, war etc. etc. We
> would all have a common experience and the nation state would be a
> thing of the past.
>
> This machine would be clever. It would constantly be giving us what we
> wanted, or what we appeared to want, down to the best plot of "adult"
> movie to titillate us. There is nothing way out in this. In fact it is
> already happening in a limited way with Google.
The "global brain" that Don talks about is already here. It's just what
results when you link the needs and desires of people into a functioning
unit. We build those links with our economy, our governments, our
communication systems, and all our social organizations. It's just called
culture, or society. And, BTW, it's already conscious (but that's a debate
for another thread).
What's happening over time is that the links are becoming stronger, and
wider reaching. As we develop the technologies to allow it to happen, we
are being more closely linked into a larger, and stronger, and smarter,
global brain.
> There are a number of points. The first of these is what would happen
> if someone malevolent hijacked the system for their own ends? Suppose
> malevolence WANTED war, terrorism etc. for their own ends. Suppose
> terrorism was "glorified" and presented as noble self sacrifice. This
> is, in effect, what happened in Wilhelmite and then in Nazi Germany.
> The real question to ask is could a code of ethics be imprinted on
> Google which governments would find difficulty in circumventing?
That's happened many times. It's what happens when a strong dictator comes
into power. They do it by finding a way to hijack the system to meet their
own desires.
We have developed "global brain" systems that minimize the odds of that
happening. It's what a democracy is all about. It's a system where every
person is given equal power to control the system (one person, one vote).
And we structure our society to that control, is the supreme control of
power in the land so that some other power, like Google, can't take it away
from us.
The odds of one bad guy subverting the power of the US government (for
example) is very small. But it's something we always have to be very
vigilant about, which is why someone like Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, or
Kim Jong-il can scare us so much.
> The second point is that in certain countries, not the major ones,
> there is censorship and organized unreason.
Well, the US has lots of organized unreason as well. We elected an idiot
to run the country for 8 years in one of the most unreasoned moves I've
seen in my life. But that's the price you pay for living in a democracy.
The power is held by the people as a group, so you live and die by their
reasoned, and unreasoned view. The net win is that most people, get things
"there way", most the time, even if it's not the smartest way. The goal is
to maximize the happiness of the group by minimizing the disagreement in
the mob. If most people want to let the idiot run the country, we let the
idiot run the country becuase to do anything else would make more people
less happy.
> Our brain will probably
> find a way of dealing with this. I have mentioned Arabic scholarship
> and the Afghan Qur'an. Disambiguation in translation is closely
> related to the ability to perform textual criticism. This may be a
> trivial point but -
>
> 1) For this discussion group it is extremely interesting even if a
> sideline.
>
> 2) Obama is going to look a bit silly if the settlement that he
> "imposes" on Afghanistan is totally undermined by "the Brain", as it
> surely must be.
I don't understand your points about the Qur'an.
However, I do understand that some large percentage of the middle east
believes that very old and out of date book tells them what they should do
as a culture.
Though the US has been a mostly Christian nation and has strong Christian
beliefs flowing though our culture, the culture is not ruled by the bible.
It's ruled by our constitution - a far smaller, but far more important,
document. It's the highest authority in our land in terms of binding us
together as a culture - as a functioning "Global Brain". Next in power,
are the state constitutions, and some where way down the line, are the
religious beliefs like the bibles and the Qur'ans. There's a strict
pecking order on what authority binds our culture together, and the
religious doctrines have always been way down the ladder.
This came about in the US becuase we were founded from such a wide mix of
different religions at a time where many were looking to escape from the
religious based cultures - which are just another form of dictatorship.
Though religion still plays an important role in what the US is (sadly in
my view), it's not the ultimate power. And though it got a born again
idiot elected to run the US for 8 years, the real power of the land, the
constitution, got him removed, without anyone having to be killed.
The middle east, (the little I understand it), is till mostly a religious
based culture. It's what most the west rejected as a bad way to organize a
society hundreds of years ago. It's what's creating the most friction
between our cultures as history and fate forces us to figure out a way to
coexist and ultimately, to merge.
A fundamental tenet of western culture is that we do not respect religion
as the corner stone of our society. A constitution is. But if you are
raised in a culture that puts the religions beliefs as the ultimate
foundation of "right" in the land, it's not easy to accept, or even
understand, a culture that is organized around a constitution. Sure, they
can understand how a government might be important, and how it needs a
constitution to operate if it's not going to be a dictatorship, but what
they won't understand, is this idea that this stupid little paper that
tells the government what to do, is to be treated as the highest authority
in the land - higher than any religious belief.
Though I understand very little about the middle east and the cultures
there, I do get the strong impression they, as a culture, can't grasp, or
understand this, and certainly will not accept it any time soon.
But until they accept a constitutional based democracy as the ruling force
in the land, their culture won't be compatible with the west. And as long
as they aren't compatible with the west, we can't merge as a strong united
"global brain" culture. And until we find a way to merge, the west is not
going to fully trust what happens there, and as long as the region is
important to us, becuase of oil, or because of general world stability, the
west will keep their "boot" on them. They will be held slaves to the
desire of our "global brain culture" until they convert, or until we get
too weak to hold them. And our desire is not have them as slaves, or to
hold them hostage, but to have them another healthy functioning part of the
global brain. But for that to happen, they have to learn how to create a
democracy, and learn how to create a culture run by voting citizens, and
not run by clerics, and dictators.
I'm not sure how far away they are from that, but it seems like they are
still very far away from - maybe 1 or 2 generations of family members away
from it still.
I wrote all that because your comments about the Qur'an sound like you
believe the Qur'an and what it says is important in that society (which I
believe it is too). My point with this long drawn out reply, is that until
they learn to stop looking at the wording of some religious document to
lead them, and instead, write their own constitution to form a democratic
government, and let that lead them, they won't have a chance of being
compatible with the west. The conflict between the middle east and the
west won't end, until either they change, or the west changes. We will
operate as two separate sub-global-brains fighting with each other, until
we become more compatible and are able to merge into one larger and
stronger global brain.
Where as Bush was an old school little brain trying to fight the other
brains just becuase they were different and he couldn't understand someone
if they are different, Obama understands that the solution to our
disagreements and war is to do whatever we can to help the merging of our
societies to occur.
> This leads me on to a third point which is this. "How will politicians
> react if the World is being governed by a Brain and not by them?"
The US has been ruled by a "global brain" for over 200 years now. It's the
global brain formed by the voting population of the US. The politicians do
not rule the US, the people do. That's why one was kicked out, and another
was put in place regardless of what they might have wanted (or the other 20
that didn't get picked might have wanted).
The combined desires of the world population is what we want to rule the
world (in order to create maximize global happiness and minimize global
wars and other problems). Currently, the desires of US citizens have far
too much power over what happens to the rest of the world. The rest of the
world deserves to have voting rights so we in the US don't stomp all over
them with our opinions and desires. But that's not going to happen until
they first learn to be part of a democracy in their own land. When they
learn to do that, then later, we can look at merging them in with fair
rights to the "global brain" which is still trying to form.
> No
> doubt the Brain will attempt to give politicians the illusion of
> control. That will be part of its technique. Of course, in a
> "democratic" country the Brain will decide who is elected.
>
> - Ian Parker
--
som...@somewhere.net
>
> Well, the US has lots of organized unreason as well. We elected an idiot
> to run the country for 8 years in one of the most unreasoned moves I've
> seen in my life. But that's the price you pay for living in a democracy.
> The power is held by the people as a group, so you live and die by their
> reasoned, and unreasoned view. The net win is that most people, get
> things
> "there way", most the time, even if it's not the smartest way. The goal
> is to maximize the happiness of the group by minimizing the disagreement
> in the mob. If most people want to let the idiot run the country, we let
> the idiot run the country becuase to do anything else would make more
> people less happy.
I wonder if things would be improved if we had some type of minimum
standards for voting. It seems the current voting block tends to vote
emotionally, not rationally. Bush/Cheney were able to use good old
ignorant fear to their own ends. Right now it seems we're ruled by people
who get their worldview from Entertainment Tonight.
Mike Ross
Mok-Kong Shen
> Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
>> Hmmmmmmmm....... I wonder what that could be???????????????????????
>>
>> In my understanding, the author meant that it is utopic, i.e.
>> entierly unrealistic, to expect that mankind would ever live
>> permanently in peace. The lesson of the second world war is
>> practically null in my humble view.
>>
> I think this is unduly pessimistic. All countries realize that nuclear
> wear would be a total disaster where the losses would completely
> outweigh any gains. In war between fairly equal nation states this
> rubric holds true. Peace CAN be negotiated through mutual interest.
The time that only nations are players in wars is bygone. Today
there are terrorists who are ready to sacrifice their own lives.
They wouldn't be able to make atomic bombs. They might even have
some difficulties with chemical weapons. But how about biological
weapons, that could be cheaply built once one has the knowhow?
One knows e.g. that sophisticated labs can today rebuild the
notorious virus of the spanish flu of 1918. Is there a really
sure way of avoiding terroists acquiring such techniques sometime
somehow??
M. K. Shen
Ian Parker
> > The moral questions arise when a strong nation is fighting a very much
> > weaker one. This is the real point about the morality of robotic
> > war.People talk about wars being fought between robots. This will
> > never be the case. Robots will be fighting on one side. Flesh and
> > blood will be on the other side.
>
> That's just nonsense.
>
> Robots are just more tools of war. They have been fighting on both sides
> ever since the first time some pre-man picked up a stick and used it in a
> fight.
>
> Robots are just better sticks. But so are tanks, and guided missiles, and
> bullets.
At the moment this is true. There is no chance of a "takeover" in
terms of the robots employed in Afghanistan. It is however making war
a lot more one sided. It is rather depressing to see a man like Karzai
backed up by US technology.
>
> What do you think a spear is? It's a knife on the end of a stick? Why was
> the knife put on the end of the stick? To get the human further away from
> the other guy with a knife so as to limit potential harm to himself.
>
> All weapons of war are developed as a way of increasing the harm to the
> enemy while minimizing harm to one's self. Robots in all forms are just
> more of the same.
>
> As long as there is war, they will be fighting on both sides.
>
> > Science fiction stories talk about
> > the human race being invaded from space and fighting robots. Science
> > fact is that the technological nations of Earth are developing robots
> > in order to fight Third World countries. They are not being developed
> > to fight each other.
>
> > - Ian Parker
>
> Robots are just one more weapon of war being developed. The reason we see
> robots being developed for war has nothing to do with who's fighting. It's
> just because robots happen to be on the cutting edge of war technology at
> this point in history. If we had advanced nations fighting each other
> (like Europe against the US), you would actually see a HUGE surge in robot
> development. The fact that the current battles are so one sided reduces
> the pressure to invest in new war technology and as such, it's far slower
> right now than it would be if there were some real battles going on. This
> stuff isn't war from the side of the west. It's a police action.
>
It is a rather brutal and biased Police action. It cannot be
considered a police action. A Police force is there to enforce the
law. I am concerned as well about the laws that are being enforced.
Marital rape, blasphemy to name just two. The United Nations charter
tells us that people should have the freedom of who they wish to marry
and wjhether to marry at all. The fact of the matter is that Afghans
are being denied that freedom.
Up to 9/11 the Police (so called) were enforcing jihadism. The CIA and
OBL were also instrumental in setting up the KLA and destabilizing
Yugoslavia.
> The world is coming together into a stronger, united "global brain" as Don
> likes to talk about. However, because the world is still populated with
> diverse cultures that have fundamentally different views about what's
> important in life, and about how a culture should be structured, we have
> friction to deal with. The stronger cultures are, as they always have in
> history, are forcing their culture onto the weaker cultures, and the result
> is exactly what is expected - the weaker cultures don't like it and are
> fight back. They are using terrorist techniques to defend their culture
> becuase that's all you can use when a weak force fights overweeningly
> stronger force.
I think this is oversimplified. I think it is true but it ignores the
fact that the CIA supported, at least for a time, the values of the
"weaker culture".
It is also oversimplified because the Arab world does not speak with
one voice. There are Arabs who want secular scientific government.
This was typified by the Ba'ath parties in Iraq and Syria and by Gamal
Nasser in Egypt. The US fought consistently against this movement. The
US put its weight instead behind the Saudi Monarchy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein
Arif and Al-Bakr were progressive Ba'athists and were removed by
Saddam Hussein with US connivance
>
> The reason the strong is going against the weak, is becuase the strong is
> made up of cultures that have already had their battles in the past, worked
> out most their differences, and agreed on what form of culture to move
> forward with. The middle east, has fallen behind in the race of advancing
> strength something like 800 years ago and have been mostly ignored since
> then. But their control over oil, the single most valuable limited resource
> on the planet, forces the combined cultures of the west to have to deal
> with the middle east. If the middle east had a culture that worked, and
> allowed the west to continue to get oil, and didn't in the process make
> them so rich that they would be able to force their culture on the west,
> then all would be fine. But the culture of the middle east hasn't worked
> well enough to keep them out of trouble with the west.
>
There is NO Arab culture as I have said. The US wanted compliant
régimes who would pump the oil. The Al-Saud family fitted the bill
perfectly.
The tragedy of the Middle East is that, unlike Europe, it did not have
institutions strong enough to resist the CIA.
> The bottom line, is that none of this conflict will be over until 1) we run
> out of oil making the deserts of the middle east of no significant interest
> to the developed nations (like much of Africa currently is), or 2) our
> cultures merge well enough that we can coexist as one large functioning
> culture.
>
> In the end, the whole earth will merge together as one large culture, with
> one large system of government, at which point there will be great peace
> for an extended time. But there will continue to be more disagreements
> until that day, and some of those disagreements will rise up to the level
> war as people try to defend their cultures.
>
The basic truth of Afghanistan is that the 1980s were jihad, jihad,
jihad. After the fall of the Berlin wall the Taliban became rather an
embarrassment and were abandoned. The KLA were however useful in terms
of destabalizing Yugoslavia.
> None of this has anything to do with robots, which are just one more weapon
> of war. And if you think atomic bombs were nasty weapons of war, just wait
> to see what's coming with AI. A weapon with human like intelligence or
> greater built for war would not just wipe out a few cities, they could kill
> (at a relatively low price) every human on a continent without hurting the
> countryside or the natural resources of the land. It wouldn't be like the
> bombed out buildings and destruction of past wars. It would just be a wave
> of millions and millions of smart machines swarming over the land and
> killing everything that got in their way. They might not even use
> explosives or guns. A simple blade might be the best weapon for such a
> swarm of AIs. The best form of these AIs might be bird like creatures that
> would simply swarm on humans and slice them up. The humans go into hiding,
> and the AI birds just wait for them to die because you can't survive as a
> race underground for long.
MAARS, the Reaper and other robots are basically web based weapons.
Their "intelligence" is basically that of the Web. The point is that
Afghanistan can be fought now entirely from within the borders of the
US.Each robot (now) has a human controller. The only exception to this
being MAARS firing at the warm barrels of sniper's rifles.
You are right in that long term nanotechnology will be developed. Nano
bots COULD act exactly as you describe. A nano swarm will be self
communicating. They will have an "intelligence" that basically
consists of an array of 8 (or even 4) bit pico processors. Thousands
of pico processors will constitute an intelligence.
Views on this should I think be mixed. Academically it will be a
tremendous challenge, it will also be quite a significant development
in the art of computing. Let us look at an FPGA (Field Programmable
Gate Array). You can by burning fuses produce some quite complex
devices. If we were to put pico processors on a chip, with fuses
controlled by the pico processors, think of what we could do, the
architectures that could be supported. It would in fact have quite a
few similarities with the brain itself.
On the other hand military use will produce the ultimate nightmare.
The military is extremely sensitive to the whole issue of AI. Some
posters in sci.space.policy are intent on ridiculing the whole idea.
Mind you I can't see there being much of a future in manned space
flight without the presence of AI! I think the top brass is probably
aware, however dimly of these facts.
One thing I feel I should add to what you have said and it is this.
You have totally disproved flying saucers as alien spacecraft. You see
if aliens really HAD visited Earth the technology you describe would
be what they would in prasctice be using - if not something totally
unimaginable to us.
>
> The real point is not that such a thing will happen like that, but that as
> technology develops, we are forced to operate as one large culture instead
> of as many smaller cultures. That's becuase advancing technology causes our
> desires to impinge on each other, and that leads to disagreements, which,
> if there's not a functioning culture to settle these little disagreements,
> they will always build into large disagreements which will then turn into
> war. AI is just one more technology that will force the world to merge
> into one large culture and that merging will always come with some pain,
> and sadly, the smaller weaker cultures will always have to receive more of
> that pain in the process.
>
They are going to receive more pain that they need have done because
of their exploitation by the stronger cultures.
> --
There are some points from other contributions which I will discuss
here. First and foremost is how did "the Shrub" manage to get elected
for 2 terms? He manipulated the information system, he smeared his
opponents, and managed to a favourable spin on things.
Hitler got into power in 1933 because he was supported by powerful
industrialists. Bush was elected, at least in part because the CIA was
on his side.
Google is American but not affiliated to the government. Should the
CIA ever attempt to take Google over WATCH OUT.
- Ian Parker
Curt Welch
> It is a rather brutal and biased Police action.
Yes it is. But I was talking more about big picture ideas of how it fits
in to what's happening in the history of the world.
> It cannot be
> considered a police action. A Police force is there to enforce the
> law. I am concerned as well about the laws that are being enforced.
> Marital rape, blasphemy to name just two. The United Nations charter
> tells us that people should have the freedom of who they wish to marry
> and wjhether to marry at all. The fact of the matter is that Afghans
> are being denied that freedom.
>
> Up to 9/11 the Police (so called) were enforcing jihadism. The CIA and
> OBL were also instrumental in setting up the KLA and destabilizing
> Yugoslavia.
>
> > The world is coming together into a stronger, united "global brain" as
> > Do=
> n
> > likes to talk about. However, because the world is still populated
> > with diverse cultures that have fundamentally different views about
> > what's important in life, and about how a culture should be structured,
> > we have friction to deal with. The stronger cultures are, as they
> > always have in history, are forcing their culture onto the weaker
> > cultures, and the resu=
> lt
> > is exactly what is expected - the weaker cultures don't like it and are
> > fight back. They are using terrorist techniques to defend their
> > culture becuase that's all you can use when a weak force fights
> > overweeningly stronger force.
>
> I think this is oversimplified. I think it is true but it ignores the
> fact that the CIA supported, at least for a time, the values of the
> "weaker culture".
>
> It is also oversimplified because the Arab world does not speak with
> one voice. There are Arabs who want secular scientific government.
> This was typified by the Ba'ath parties in Iraq and Syria and by Gamal
> Nasser in Egypt. The US fought consistently against this movement. The
> US put its weight instead behind the Saudi Monarchy.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein
>
> Arif and Al-Bakr were progressive Ba'athists and were removed by
> Saddam Hussein with US connivance
> >
> > The reason the strong is going against the weak, is becuase the strong
> > is made up of cultures that have already had their battles in the past,
> > work=
> ed
> > out most their differences, and agreed on what form of culture to move
> > forward with. The middle east, has fallen behind in the race of
> > advancin=
> g
> > strength something like 800 years ago and have been mostly ignored
> > since then. But their control over oil, the single most valuable
> > limited resour=
> ce
> > on the planet, forces the combined cultures of the west to have to deal
> > with the middle east. If the middle east had a culture that worked,
> > and allowed the west to continue to get oil, and didn't in the process
> > make them so rich that they would be able to force their culture on the
> > west, then all would be fine. But the culture of the middle east
> > hasn't worked well enough to keep them out of trouble with the west.
> >
> There is NO Arab culture as I have said. The US wanted compliant
> r=E9gimes who would pump the oil. The Al-Saud family fitted the bill
> perfectly.
>
> The tragedy of the Middle East is that, unlike Europe, it did not have
> institutions strong enough to resist the CIA.
>
> > The bottom line, is that none of this conflict will be over until 1) we
> > r=
> un
> > out of oil making the deserts of the middle east of no significant
> > intere=
> st
> > to the developed nations (like much of Africa currently is), or 2) our
> > cultures merge well enough that we can coexist as one large functioning
> > culture.
> >
> > In the end, the whole earth will merge together as one large culture,
> > wit=
> h
> > one large system of government, at which point there will be great
> > peace for an extended time. But there will continue to be more
> > disagreements until that day, and some of those disagreements will rise
> > up to the level war as people try to defend their cultures.
> >
> The basic truth of Afghanistan is that the 1980s were jihad, jihad,
> jihad. After the fall of the Berlin wall the Taliban became rather an
> embarrassment and were abandoned. The KLA were however useful in terms
> of destabalizing Yugoslavia.
>
> > None of this has anything to do with robots, which are just one more
> > weap=
> on
> > of war. And if you think atomic bombs were nasty weapons of war, just
> > wa=
> it
> > to see what's coming with AI. A weapon with human like intelligence or
> > greater built for war would not just wipe out a few cities, they could
> > ki=
> ll
> > (at a relatively low price) every human on a continent without hurting
> > th=
> e
> > countryside or the natural resources of the land. It wouldn't be like
> > th=
> e
> > bombed out buildings and destruction of past wars. It would just be a
> > wa=
> ve
> > of millions and millions of smart machines swarming over the land and
> > killing everything that got in their way. They might not even use
> > explosives or guns. A simple blade might be the best weapon for such a
> > swarm of AIs. The best form of these AIs might be bird like creatures
> > th=
> at
> > would simply swarm on humans and slice them up. The humans go into
> > hidin=
> g,
> > and the AI birds just wait for them to die because you can't survive as
> > a race underground for long.
>
> MAARS, the Reaper and other robots are basically web based weapons.
> Their "intelligence" is basically that of the Web. The point is that
> Afghanistan can be fought now entirely from within the borders of the
> US.Each robot (now) has a human controller. The only exception to this
> being MAARS firing at the warm barrels of sniper's rifles.
Yeah, they aren't very much AI yet. They are just very long sticks with
spears on them for the most part still. But more of the AI stuff is coming
soon enough.
> You are right in that long term nanotechnology will be developed.
Well, I was thinking about shorter term small robots vs nano tech, but that
too is probably coming in time.
> Nano
> bots COULD act exactly as you describe. A nano swarm will be self
> communicating. They will have an "intelligence" that basically
> consists of an array of 8 (or even 4) bit pico processors. Thousands
> of pico processors will constitute an intelligence.
>
> Views on this should I think be mixed. Academically it will be a
> tremendous challenge, it will also be quite a significant development
> in the art of computing.
I think effective AI is not as compute intensive as it's believed to be.
It's far more of a software problem than a compute power problem. People
like to believe lack of progress in AI is at least partially do to a lack
of computing power but I think that's the far less significant part of the
equation. Progress is slow becuase AI is just a tricky problem and
requires breakthroughs in software an in understanding that just takes
time.
> Let us look at an FPGA (Field Programmable
> Gate Array). You can by burning fuses produce some quite complex
> devices. If we were to put pico processors on a chip, with fuses
> controlled by the pico processors, think of what we could do, the
> architectures that could be supported. It would in fact have quite a
> few similarities with the brain itself.
>
> On the other hand military use will produce the ultimate nightmare.
> The military is extremely sensitive to the whole issue of AI. Some
> posters in sci.space.policy are intent on ridiculing the whole idea.
> Mind you I can't see there being much of a future in manned space
> flight without the presence of AI! I think the top brass is probably
> aware, however dimly of these facts.
Well, AI is already in space so I'm not sure what your point is. As AI
gets better, we will send less and less humans out to space. Humans
weren't built to live in space so it costs a lot of money to send a human
along with all the required support systems. As AI gets better, we will
stop sending humans all together simple becuase it would be a total waste
of money to do so - not to mention the danger to the life of the
astronauts.
> One thing I feel I should add to what you have said and it is this.
> You have totally disproved flying saucers as alien spacecraft. You see
> if aliens really HAD visited Earth the technology you describe would
> be what they would in prasctice be using - if not something totally
> unimaginable to us.
That's only if they had a reason to kill us right? Any advanced
civilization would not see us as a threat, they would see us like we see a
family of chimps living in the trees. We don't send our best tools of war
to wipe out the chimps. Why would the aliens waste their best tools of
destruction on us?
Personally, my bet on alien robots is that they are nano bots and there
could be billions of them here monitoring this "zoo" planet and we would
never know it. The best tool for finding UFOs might turn out to be the
scanning electron microscope.
> > The real point is not that such a thing will happen like that, but that
> > a=
> s
> > technology develops, we are forced to operate as one large culture
> > instea=
> d
> > of as many smaller cultures. That's becuase advancing technology causes
> > o=
> ur
> > desires to impinge on each other, and that leads to disagreements,
> > which, if there's not a functioning culture to settle these little
> > disagreements=
> ,
> > they will always build into large disagreements which will then turn
> > into war. AI is just one more technology that will force the world to
> > merge into one large culture and that merging will always come with
> > some pain, and sadly, the smaller weaker cultures will always have to
> > receive more o=
> f
> > that pain in the process.
> >
> They are going to receive more pain that they need have done because
> of their exploitation by the stronger cultures.
> > --
> There are some points from other contributions which I will discuss
> here. First and foremost is how did "the Shrub" manage to get elected
> for 2 terms? He manipulated the information system, he smeared his
> opponents, and managed to a favourable spin on things.
He manged it because there were a lot of people that actually liked him. I
didn't happen to be one of them, but I know a lot who did. No amount of
cheap underhanded information manipulation tricks can get you elected if
the people weren't basically wanting to hear what you fed them to start
with. The majority of Americans wanted to hear what Bush was selling them.
> Hitler got into power in 1933 because he was supported by powerful
> industrialists. Bush was elected, at least in part because the CIA was
> on his side.
>
> Google is American but not affiliated to the government. Should the
> CIA ever attempt to take Google over WATCH OUT.
>
> - Ian Parker
There seems to be this odd belief in the world outside the US that the CIA
is some huge nasty power on its own to be feared. It's not. It's just one
of the many instruments the American PEOPLE are using to get their way with
the rest of the world. Presidents don't get elected because they have the
CIA "on their side". That's absurd. They get elected becuase they manage
to get the PEOPLE on their side.
The CIA gets it's power (budget) from Congress, and Congress gets their
power, and money from the people. If the CIA is fucking someone over in
the world (as they have done), it's becuase it's the will of the American
people making it happen. Even when we aren't directly aware of what's
being done (and might not approve if we knew about it), it's our collective
desires, and needs, and fears, that is causing it to happen.
CIA taking over Google? Nothing could be more absurd.
Ian Parker
to amplify a few of them.
1) AI is not simply a matter of getting processor power.
No, AI is at least in part a matter of communications. Google exists
through bringing together all the World's information. I think we have
in fact emphasised things like Chess whereas what we should have been
talking about a lot more is memory and reasoning from memory. I
personally believe that the understanding of language is an absolutely
vital part of AI. Crack language and you have AI. Language is after
all what will enable you to organize your data base.
If you look at the Web you will find that most algorithms that are
needed have already been written. Question is finding them and
ensuring that they are compatible with other algorithms. I do not see
computers actually wring their own code, what I can see though is a
data base of code and the use of a coordination language like Manifold
for writing further applications.
http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw35/arbab.html
This being a coordination language is fully parallel.
2) Space - You are absolutely right. The scientific value of manned
space flight is zilch. It has been so for some time now. However there
are humanistic reasons for manned space flight. Everest was climbed
because it was there. Mars and the Moon are there in the same way.
Mind Mallory did not command a $100 billion budget. The ISS is very
much a political entity and it can be defended on political grounds -
NOT, emphatically, NOT scientific.
As far as the history of the World is concerned I think you have to be
right. It is very much the conclusion I have come to independently.
Wait a moment, if the Singularity is confidently predicted to be
around 2045 and if the history of the World is going to turn long
before that date, how would this affect West Point? This may seem a
trivial point, but WP cadets are not going to stand any chance at all
of becoming generals. The Military will have to accept that it will be
a decling industry.
In fact World History moves in fits and starts. I see a crisis coming
in 2-3 years time. The US will be out of recession, the banks will be
operating reasonably normally. Obama will have to produce a budget of
"rectitude". Rectitude meaning that debt does not increase any faster
(2-3%) than the overall growth of the economy. Obama will be forced to
present "rectitude" to a Democratic Congress who won't like it one
little bit. Obama has :-
1) Promised an expansion in Medicaid. He simply cannot retreat on
that.
2) Promised no rise in taxation for middle income earners. He still
has the option for large increases in taxation > $250,000. He might
put middle income taxes up a little bit by steath, not much though.
3) A green stimulus. He cannot really retreat on that.
The only source of "rectitude" is savage cuts in military expenditure.
These savage cuts are going to terminate careers and make West Point
and Annapolis singularly unattractive propositions. What's more if
young people twig this they simply won't want to go into the military.
World History does indeed have a flow. The Republicans when they
(eventually) win are not likely to reverse cuts in military spending.
Last point the CIA - One thing I want you to consider and that is
this. "The top military brass and the CIA are just as much a trade
union as the Auto Workers." Congress approves CIA funds. You are
right. However Congress frequently does not know the facts. Congress
should make it its business to find out. The "Union" talks about a
dangerous world. People often don't have the facts.
Lets get students to write essays on that topic - see what they come
up with.
- Ian Parker
J.A. Legris
Hi Curt,
I've just discovered the "summarize" function on my computer and,
although I'd never use it for an important document, it seems like
just the thing we need to get your replies down to reasonable size.
Here we go:
The bottom line, is that none of this conflict will be over until 1)
we run out of oil making the deserts of the middle east of no
significant interest to the developed nations (like much of Africa
currently is), or 2) our cultures merge well enough that we can
coexist as one large functioning culture.... The humans go into
J.A. Legris
Curt Welch
> On May 11, 4:49=A0pm, c...@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
> Summary:
>
> My point with this long drawn out reply, is that until they learn to
> stop looking at the wording of some religious document to lead them,
> and instead, write their own constitution to form a democratic
> government, and let that lead them, they won't have a chance of being
> compatible with the west.
Gee, I wish my newsreader had that function built in!
--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
Don Stockbauer
Gee, what could ever form this one large culture? I have no idea. I
wonder if it would involve peer-peer global telecommunication? Will
that eventually overcome the Babel we have now? Who knows?
Mok-Kong Shen
[snip]
> ......... as technology develops,
> we are forced to operate as one large culture instead of as many
> smaller cultures.
In fact. We have globalization and currently the worldwide financial
collapse. Whether there is a causal relation between the two, is, of
course, a matter of individual personal speculation.
BTW, I like to quote something from a German newspaper. In order to
avoid errors of translation, it is given in original.
M. K. Shen
-----------------------------------------------------
Quoted from an article in S�ddeutsche Zeitung, 24. April, 2009, p.8,
written by Ernst-Wolfgang B�ckenf�rde, former judge of the Federal
Court of Constitution of Germany, entitled "Woran der Kapitalismus
krankt":
In diesem System gilt es, alle Regulative abzubauen,
regulatives Prinzip soll der Markt sein.
Man kann sich der Aktuatlit�t der Prognose vom Marx
nicht entziehen.
Ein Umbau erfordert eine entscheidungsf�hige Staatsgewalt.
Rein koordinativ, auf dem Wege allseitiger Konsensbildung,
l�sst sich ein solcher Umbau nicht bewirken.
oki2...@gmail.com
mail on google groups. Please open your mail!
Ian Parker！Ian Parker！Ian Parker！Ian Parker！Ian Parker！Ian Parker！Ian
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Don Stockbauer
> J.A. Legris wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > ......... as technology develops,
> > we are forced to operate as one large culture instead of as many
> > smaller cultures.
>
> In fact. We have globalization and currently the worldwide financial
> collapse. Whether there is a causal relation between the two, is, of
> course, a matter of individual personal speculation.
>
> BTW, I like to quote something from a German newspaper. In order to
> avoid errors of translation, it is given in original.
>
> M. K. Shen
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> written by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, former judge of the Federal
> Court of Constitution of Germany, entitled "Woran der Kapitalismus
> krankt":
>
> In diesem System gilt es, alle Regulative abzubauen,
> regulatives Prinzip soll der Markt sein.
>
> nicht entziehen.
>
> Ein Umbau erfordert eine entscheidungsfähige Staatsgewalt.
>
> Rein koordinativ, auf dem Wege allseitiger Konsensbildung,
God, at least have the decency to run it through Babel Fish, that
bastion of cutting-edge machine-translation AI technology:
In this system it is valid to reduce all regulations, regulation
principle should be the market. One can itself the Aktuatlität of the
prognosis of Marx do not withdraw. A change requires a government
authority capable of making decisions. Purely coordinatively, on the
way of all-round consent finding, such a change cannot be caused.
J.A. Legris
You see Curt? Don and Mok-Kong had not read your last post, but they
responded to the summary. I suppose that's a good thing.
--
Joe
Ian Parker
You are making one very big assumption here that Middle East wars are
over oil. There are many motives. Suppose I were top say that Iraq and
to some extent Afghanistan were wars over West Point and Annapolis. By
this I mean that the military is just as much a commercial
organization as GM and they want to sell their product just like
anyone else.
I mentioned West Point and Annapolis for this reason. If there were to
be cut backs cadets would be graduating without commissions. That
would never do. We now know that Iraq was entered into through cock
and bull stories. Evidence about Al-Qaida links were obtained by
torture. People ask the question "Is it moral to torture if there is a
ticking bomb?" This is, of course, a hypothetical question. Torture is
performed to get the answer you want. Torture is performed on behalf
of West Point and Annapolis.
Oil is frequently mentioned in left wing circles. I believe it is
wrong. If you are an oil producer you have to sell it. It is no use to
you, it is a sticky black substance which needs refining etc. etc. The
spot market for oil is in Rotterdam. To obtain or sell oil you go to
Rotterdam. Can you get it cheaper with war? NO WAY. Iraq in fact
pushed the price UP not down. $140 was obtained BECAUSE OF Iraq.
The way to control the Rotterdam price is by competition. Nuclear
power (peaceful), Solar power even coal. Electrolysis of water using
solar power and coal gasification. At the moment the price is down
because of recession. This is an excellent example of supply and
demand. If you were looking at oil and oil only you would get the
military to build solar power stations in the desert.
The West Point/Annapolis theory, which I believe to be correct, is in
many ways more frightening than oil. At least with oil some sort of
national interest was involved. With West Point/Annapolis the military
have in effect defrauded the public. They have indeed have been caught
telling lie after lie.
The whole torture scenario raises serious questions about the
integrity of court martial proceedings. To be sure "superior orders"
is not a defence. However when you are being judged by the very people
who are giving "superior orders" you have got a legitimate grievance.
Furthermore the courts martial that have taken place raise serious
questions in my mind about the integrity of the whole organization.
Who would want to go to West Point or Annapolis anyway when your
bosses are prepared to hand you up to dry?
- Ian Parker
Curt Welch
> On May 13, 8:00=A0am, Don Stockbauer <donstockba...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > On May 13, 1:04=A0am, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@t-online.de> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > > J.A. Legris wrote:
> >
> > > [snip]
> >
> > > =A0> we are forced to operate as one large culture instead of as many
> > > =A0> smaller cultures.
> >
> > > In fact. We have globalization and currently the worldwide financial
> > > collapse. Whether there is a causal relation between the two, is, of
> > > course, a matter of individual personal speculation.
> >
> > > BTW, I like to quote something from a German newspaper. In order to
> > > avoid errors of translation, it is given in original.
> >
> > > M. K. Shen
> >
> > > -----------------------------------------------------
> >
> > > p.8, written by Ernst-Wolfgang B=F6ckenf=F6rde, former judge of the
> > > Federal Court of Constitution of Germany, entitled "Woran der
> > > Kapitalismus krankt":
> >
> > > =A0 =A0 regulatives Prinzip soll der Markt sein.
> >
> > > =A0 =A0 Man kann sich der Aktuatlit=E4t der Prognose vom Marx
> > > =A0 =A0 nicht entziehen.
> >
> > > =A0 =A0 Ein Umbau erfordert eine entscheidungsf=E4hige Staatsgewalt.
> >
> > > =A0 =A0 Rein koordinativ, auf dem Wege allseitiger Konsensbildung,
> > > =A0 =A0 l=E4sst sich ein solcher Umbau nicht bewirken.
> >
> > God, at least have the decency to run it through Babel Fish, that
> > bastion of cutting-edge machine-translation AI technology:
> >
> > In this system it is valid to reduce all regulations, regulation
> > prognosis of Marx do not withdraw. A change requires a government
> > authority capable of making decisions. Purely coordinatively, on the
> > way of all-round consent finding, such a change cannot be caused.
>
> You see Curt? Don and Mok-Kong had not read your last post, but they
> responded to the summary. I suppose that's a good thing.
I noticed that very fact and it made my snicker to myself! :)
--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
Don Stockbauer
Don Stockbauer
Well, at least I'm good for something - making people snicker.