causus

I used to work in a sushi restaurant and learned to roll them to help my boss out. If you can get good quality sushi, it tastes really good. And they have non-raw options. In fact my two favorite sushis aren't strictly Japanese hardcore traditional: Avocado Sushi (introduced I think in California, which also gave it's name to California Rolls) and Unagi Sushi (which is smoked eel in this sweet brown marinade).

***

Yes, I do think water will become an issue. A very big one. It sounds like you are only considering the water issue in the First World nations? Of course richer countries have the resources and engineers to create more water purification plants if they need it.

To clarify, water alone won't be the key issue, but it will be a combination of factors. Things like collapsing fish populations and quality of fish stock (ever noticed how Fish Fingers and Filet-O-Fish used to taste so good 15 years ago, but now they not only taste strange they LOOK strange under the breaded batter), tons of topsoil washed into the sea and replaced by hard chemicals from chemical companies counting their profits. It'll all add up eventually, and there is eventually going to be a nation that gets sick of it's situation. They'll probably be called 'terrorists' and blown to kingdom come by Bush III or IV.

***

Singapore has built two different plants because of it's situation as a city-nation with NO natural potable water resources.
One creates 'NEWater' which is essentially recycled from human sewage. They've been trying to get the public to accept it. I don'
t know if I've already drunk it. The other takes it from Salt Water. Both in an effort to be self-sufficient and not need to purchase water from Malaysia to the north.

I'm well aware of the technology. What I wouldn't be sure of is how reliable it is. I think salt water purification is one of those tasks that looks good and looks easy on paper, but is difficult to pull off. Salt water is very corrosive and harsh on man-made materials.

***

We have the technology now for AI. We just lack the know how and the volume of resources. A physical neural network of a size large enough to do some experiments on would take up a huge building and suck up enough power to run a small country. Most neural network research now uses simulated software neural nets. Only limit is RAM.

IMHO, no human will ever directly program an AI. If we want something based on the human brain, that would be asking for something on the order of a billion neurons all connected to each other, something like a trillion connections. That's more connections than there are atoms that make up the Planet Earth. If a group of scientists were to spend every waking hour implementing one neuron a second, our Sun would turn into a Red Giant and swallow the Earth before it was finished.

What I believe will happen, is that we will program as close to an AI to the best of the combined abilities of the best scientists around, and that pseudo-AI will have one job: Design it's own child AI to be better than itself. And that child-AI, will have it's own child....and so on and so forth. That's the only way I believe it could be done.

***

Cloning and the technology around it so far has one sure success already: Weapons of Mass Destruction.

If they can just figure out how to tell a stem cell what it should be, that sci-fi dream of simply growing a replacement liver or heart in a vat could come true. No more rejection problems because it's your own stuff. There is one problem though. If the problem is genetic or hereditary, e.g. cancer, then there is a time-bomb in the replacement part too. New body part, same old flawed genes...

Hahaha...book. No problem. Take care.

Meanwhile, accept my friendship.

have fun, dude.

It didn't hurt him because it was only the top few layers, I don't even know how it was holding on.
I actually kind of like being strange, it gives me a uniqueness. And if nothing else, it provides people with a laugh now and then.

Actually, because I AM in AI, I can see first hand, that statistically, the odds are very much greater that the human race annihilates itself in either a huge military or - more likely - environmental disaster.

We will run out of sources of fresh water and fight over them long before someone in my field could create a SkyNet a la Terminator.

It's just not going to happen. And this is coming from someone who DOES believe that we can develop AI. This makes a believer in what the field calls 'Strong' AI.
My ambitions with just AI are pretty humble. At most I'd like to perhaps, create 'weak' AI for games or applications.

I have other dreams of course.


[Edited on Mar 05, 2004 8:11AM]

causus said onFebruary 29, 2004 06:08 PM I love your pictures. You are so beautiful. Why are you not a SG?!

whipcreamfein said onMarch 01, 2004 07:26 PM
thank you thank you!!! honestly...i submitted, was accepted...but wasnt willing to show enough of my goods, so after careful consideration(hehehhe...) i decided that was all i wanna show....for now.....well see....then as soon as i did it seemed like everyone i knew was talkin about the site...some people didnt need to see me that nekid!! i didnt need all the fame and fortune...so i guess u could say i chickened out ...kinna!

yeah, art related project - it was a sculpture piece i'd been working on for a while (Isis, Egyptian goddess, part of a series i'm working on...blah, blah..) and yeah, I'm hoping to be an SG, that would be so cool

Awww! Thanks sweetie!

Only a few more days to go and then you'll be back!!!

hey thanks for the email how are you doing are u new here??

its cos i wasn't near my computer.
sure if you'd like.