The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 2. Note: This is Part 2 of a two- part series on AI. Part 1 is here. PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. We then examined why it was such a huge challenge to get from ANI to Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI (AI that’s at least as intellectually capable as a human, across the board), and we discussed why the exponential rate of technological advancement we’ve seen in the past suggests that AGI might not be as far away as it seems.
Free Sex, Free Porn, Free Direct Download. Dakota Skye - Just A Friendly Jog Seth Gamble is out for a jog, and canÄ Part 2: "Our Immortality or Our Extinction". When Artificial Intelligence gets superintelligent, it's either going to be a dream or a nightmare for us. Part 1 ended with me assaulting you with the fact that once our machines reach human- level intelligence, they might immediately do this: This left us staring at the screen, confronting the intense concept of potentially- in- our- lifetime Artificial Superintelligence, or ASI (AI that’s way smarter than any human, across the board), and trying to figure out which emotion we were supposed to have on as we thought about that. Often, someone’s first thought when they imagine a super- smart computer is one that’s as intelligent as a human but can think much, much faster. That sounds impressive, and ASI would think much faster than any human could—but the true separator would be its advantage in intelligence quality, which is something completely different. What makes humans so much more intellectually capable than chimps isn’t a difference in thinking speed—it’s that human brains contain a number of sophisticated cognitive modules that enable things like complex linguistic representations or longterm planning or abstract reasoning, that chimps’ brains do not. Speeding up a chimp’s brain by thousands of times wouldn’t bring him to our level—even with a decade’s time, he wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use a set of custom tools to assemble an intricate model, something a human could knock out in a few hours. There are worlds of human cognitive function a chimp will simply never be capable of, no matter how much time he spends trying. But it’s not just that a chimp can’t do what we do, it’s that his brain is unable to grasp that those worlds even exist—a chimp can become familiar with what a human is and what a skyscraper is, but he’ll never be able to understand that the skyscraper was builtby humans. The past few issues of Archie have been gripped by “Over the Edge,” an event that has brought Archie and Reggie’s bitter rivalry to a crisis point, but leave a. In his world, anything that huge is part of nature, period, and not only is it beyond him to build a skyscraper, it’s beyond him to realize thatanyone can build a skyscraper. That’s the result of a small difference in intelligence quality. And in the scheme of the intelligence range we’re talking about today, or even the much smaller range among biological creatures, the chimp- to- human quality intelligence gap is tiny. In an earlier post, I depicted the range of biological cognitive capacity using a staircase: 3. To absorb how big a deal a superintelligent machine would be, imagine one on the dark green step two steps above humans on that staircase. This machine would be only slightly superintelligent, but its increased cognitive ability over us would be as vast as the chimp- human gap we just described. And like the chimp’s incapacity to ever absorb that skyscrapers can be built, we will never be able to even comprehend the things a machine on the dark green step can do, even if the machine tried to explain it to us—let alone do it ourselves. And that’s only two steps above us. A machine on the second- to- highest step on that staircase would be to us as we are to ants—it could try for years to teach us the simplest inkling of what it knows and the endeavor would be hopeless. But the kind of superintelligence we’re talking about today is something far beyond anything on this staircase. In an intelligence explosion—where the smarter a machine gets, the quicker it’s able to increase its own intelligence, until it begins to soar upwards—a machine might take years to rise from the chimp step to the one above it, but perhaps only hours to jump up a step once it’s on the dark green step two above us, and by the time it’s ten steps above us, it might be jumping up in four- step leaps every second that goes by. Which is why we need to realize that it’s distinctly possible that very shortly after the big news story about the first machine reaching human- level AGI, we might be facing the reality of coexisting on the Earth with something that’s here on the staircase (or maybe a million times higher): And since we just established that it’s a hopeless activity to try to understand the power of a machine only two steps above us, let’s very concretely state once and for all that there is no way to know what ASI will do or what the consequences will be for us. Anyone who pretends otherwise doesn’t understand what superintelligence means. Evolution has advanced the biological brain slowly and gradually over hundreds of millions of years, and in that sense, if humans birth an ASI machine, we’ll be dramatically stomping on evolution. Or maybe this is part of evolution—maybe the way evolution works is that intelligence creeps up more and more until it hits the level where it’s capable of creating machine superintelligence, and that level is like a tripwire that triggers a worldwide game- changing explosion that determines a new future for all living things: And for reasons we’ll discuss later, a huge part of the scientific community believes that it’s not a matter of whether we’ll hit that tripwire, but when. Kind of a crazy piece of information. So where does that leave us? Well no one in the world, especially not I, can tell you what will happen when we hit the tripwire. But Oxford philosopher and lead AI thinker Nick Bostrom believes we can boil down all potential outcomes into two broad categories. First, looking at history, we can see that life works like this: species pop up, exist for a while, and after some time, inevitably, they fall off the existence balance beam and land on extinction—“All species eventually go extinct” has been almost as reliable a rule through history as “All humans eventually die” has been. So far, 9. 9. 9% of species have fallen off the balance beam, and it seems pretty clear that if a species keeps wobbling along down the beam, it’s only a matter of time before some other species, some gust of nature’s wind, or a sudden beam- shaking asteroid knocks it off. Bostrom calls extinction an attractor state—a place species are all teetering on falling into and from which no species ever returns. And while most scientists I’ve come across acknowledge that ASI would have the ability to send humans to extinction, many also believe that used beneficially, ASI’s abilities could be used to bring individual humans, and the species as a whole, to a second attractor state—species immortality. Bostrom believes species immortality is just as much of an attractor state as species extinction, i. So even though all species so far have fallen off the balance beam and landed on extinction, Bostrom believes there are two sides to the beam and it’s just that nothing on Earth has been intelligent enough yet to figure out how to fall off on the other side. If Bostrom and others are right, and from everything I’ve read, it seems like they really might be, we have two pretty shocking facts to absorb: 1) The advent of ASI will, for the first time, open up the possibility for a species to land on the immortality side of the balance beam. The advent of ASI will make such an unimaginably dramatic impact that it’s likely to knock the human race off the beam, in one direction or the other. It may very well be that when evolution hits the tripwire, it permanently ends humans’ relationship with the beam and creates a new world, with or without humans. Kind of seems like the only question any human should currently be asking is: When are we going to hit the tripwire and which side of the beam will we land on when that happens? No one in the world knows the answer to either part of that question, but a lot of the very smartest people have put decades of thought into it. We’ll spend the rest of this post exploring what they’ve come up with. How long until the first machine reaches superintelligence? Not shockingly, opinions vary wildly and this is a heated debate among scientists and thinkers. Many, like professor Vernor Vinge, scientist Ben Goertzel, Sun Microsystems co- founder Bill Joy, or, most famously, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, agree with machine learning expert Jeremy Howard when he puts up this graph during a TED Talk: Those people subscribe to the belief that this is happening soon—that exponential growth is at work and machine learning, though only slowly creeping up on us now, will blow right past us within the next few decades. Others, like Microsoft co- founder Paul Allen, research psychologist Gary Marcus, NYU computer scientist Ernest Davis, and tech entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, believe that thinkers like Kurzweil are vastly underestimating the magnitude of the challenge and believe that we’re not actually that close to the tripwire. The Kurzweil camp would counter that the only underestimating that’s happening is the underappreciation of exponential growth, and they’d compare the doubters to those who looked at the slow- growing seedling of the internet in 1. The doubters might argue back that the progress needed to make advancements in intelligence also grows exponentially harder with each subsequent step, which will cancel out the typical exponential nature of technological progress. And so on. A third camp, which includes Nick Bostrom, believes neither group has any ground to feel certain about the timeline and acknowledges both A) that this could absolutely happen in the near future and B) that there’s no guarantee about that; it could also take a much longer time. Still others, like philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, believe all three of these groups are naive for believing that there even is a tripwire, arguing that it’s more likely that ASI won’t actually ever be achieved. So what do you get when you put all of these opinions together? Year by year with the Police Academy movies. Club. In 1. 98. 4, respected TV writer/producer/director Hugh Wilson helmed a sketchy Stripes rip- off that he co- wrote with Neal Israel and Pat Proft for producer Paul Maslansky (not, as many a hasty IMDB- skimmer has briefly thought, Paul Mazursky). The premise of the first Police Academy movie was simple: A progressive lady mayor loosens the requirements to become a police officer, and suddenly the training program is overrun with misfits, who, when put to the test, prove more resourceful than their stuffy superiors expected. The 1. 98. 4 Police Academy was such a huge hit that it spawned six sequels (plus an animated series that ran from 1. The first film was a typical R- rated ’8. T- shirt jiggle (though the series never lost its faith in the comic possibilities of excrement and gay panic). Each Police Academy movie is more a series of slapstick sketches and short bursts of farce than a proper story, but the franchise is replete with memorable characters and moments, some of which recur from film to film, and some of which are fleeting. What follows is a handy guide to what the seven Police Academy movies have in common, what sets the individual movies apart, and how each reflects—to at least some degree—the era in which it was made. And remember: When we say, “Hey, dirtbags,” that means you. Police Academy (1. Director: Hugh Wilson, creator of WKRP In Cincinnati and Frank’s Place. Writers: Wilson, Neal Israel, and frequent Zucker- Abrahams- Zucker collaborator Pat Proft. The plot: Steve Guttenberg plays Carey Mahoney, an anti- authoritarian troublemaker forced by one of his father’s old cop buddies to go through the 1. At the academy, Mahoney meets a motley assortment of fellow cadets: the weird “human sound- effects machine” Larvell Jones (Michael Winslow), gentle giant Moses Hightower (Bubba Jones), squeaky- voiced Laverne Hooks (Marion Ramsey), gung- ho militarist Eugene Tackleberry (David Graf), accident- prone married man Douglas Fackler (Bruce Mahler), chubby wimp Leslie Barbara (Donovan Scott), faux- Latin ladies’ man George Martin (Andrew Rubin), and foxy rich girl Karen Thompson (Kim Cattrall), who becomes Mahoney’s love interest, if only for one movie. The cadets are whipped into shape by Lt. Thaddeus Harris (G. W. Bailey)—who secretly roots for them to fail so that the academy will go back to the less- dirtbag- infested way it used to be—and statuesque disciplinarian Sgt. Debbie Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook), who wins the affection of Cadet Martin by dominating him sexually. The new recruits make a mess of everything, naturally, but they rally in the end to save Harris from a crazed kidnapper in a riot- torn neighborhood, thus earning their stripes. The cast: In addition to the above, the first Police Academy introduces George Gaynes as sweet- but- dim academy commandant Eric Lassard, and George R. Robertson as skeptical police chief Henry J. Hurst. Series motifs: The first film launches several recurring gags and bits of style, from Robert Folk’s cheerfully martial score to the way Mahoney and company trick a huffy authoritarian (Harris, in this case) into getting sticky crap all over his face and body. Police Academy also has Sgt. Callahan sitting on a recruit’s chest for the first time, the meek Hooks erupting with her signature line, “Don’t move, dirtbag,” and the series’ first visit to The Blue Oyster, a leather bar where rough- looking guys hold tango competitions. Best Larvell Jones sound effect: Sitting alone in his dorm room at night, Jones plays an imaginary videogame, mimicking every beep and blast. Best line: Chief Hurst reflects on the glory days when only men were allowed into the academy: “They all had johnsons? This is the one where Sgt. Harris gets propelled from a motorcycle and flies headfirst into a horse’s rectum. It’s also the one where a prostitute hiding in Commandant Lassard’s podium gives him a blowjob in the middle of one of his speeches. A pre- teen boy wears a M*A*S*H T- shirt; Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” plays on an enormous boombox; and when Thompson’s mother complains about her wanting to be a policeman, she huffily corrects her mom, saying, “a policewoman, mother.” Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1. Director: Jerry Paris, who played dentist Jerry Helper on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Writers: Saturday Night Live writers Barry Blaustein and David Sheffield. The plot: Now out of the academy, Mahoney and his wacky pals find themselves working in a rough precinct under Commandant Lassard’s kindly brother Pete (played by Howard Hesseman), though their efforts are undermined by the sneakily ambitious Lt. Mauser (Art Metrano) and his goofy sidekick Sgt. Proctor (Lance Kinsey). When a gang of toughs threatens to destroy the precinct, a sleeveless- shirted Mahoney rallies the troops—half- sarcastically saying, “If caring is a crime, and trying is a felony. Kathleen Kirkland, a by- the- book gun nut who becomes Tackleberry’s love interest. And the new neighborhood brings two significant new characters: sensitive but deranged street punk Zed, played by Bobcat Goldthwait, and nebbishy businessman Carl Sweetchuck, played by Saturday Night Live nerd Tim Kazurinsky. Series motifs: The Blue Oyster Bar and “Don’t move, dirtbag!” make their requisite appearances, while Mahoney comes up with ever more creative ways to get Mauser covered in goo. New motifs include Commandant Lassard accidentally torturing his pet goldfish, and Zed spraying toxic chemicals on himself for pleasure. Best Larvell Jones sound effect: While two preppies eat lunch, Jones makes disgusting chewing and gulping sounds, tricking each half of the couple into thinking that the other is gauche. Best line: Capt. Pete Lassard tells his brother, “I need to get my hands on some healthy young men.”Wait, which one was this one again? This is the one where Mahoney goes undercover with Zed’s gang and gets wired up with a Mr. Microphone, which picks up and broadcasts radio signals in the middle of the operation. It’s also the one where Tackleberry loses his virginity with Kirkland, after they strip off their respective arsenals. Mauser puts a lot of faith in his loudly beeping digital watch, and when Zed’s gang trashes a supermarket, a box of Pac- Man cereal can be seen on one of the shelves. Also, future The Wonder Years teen actor Jason Hervey pops up in a bit part. Police Academy 3: Back In Training (1. Director: Jerry Paris. Writer: Gene Quintano. The plot: If the first Police Academy was just “Stripes with cops,” then Police Academy 3: Back In Training is “pig Meatballs,” as Lassard’s increasingly madcap academy has to compete with Mauser’s much more efficient crosstown academy to see which one will retain its state funding. Mauser seems to be well in the lead, until Lassard’s crew saves the governor’s life when he’s ambushed by a gang at a charity event. Back In Training is also noteworthy as the first Police Academy movie to be shot largely in Toronto, which the filmmakers barely try to conceal. The background is full of Canadian soft- drink machines, Canadian restaurants, and Toronto Sun newspaper boxes. The cast: Zed and Sweetchuck return, now as cadets, joined by Miss USA/Miss Universe Shawn Weatherly as Cadet Karen Adams (another one- off love- interest for Mahoney), Brian Tochi as Cadet Tomoko Nogata, and Match Game wise- ass Debralee Scott as Fackler’s wife, who appeared briefly in the first film and now joins her husband on the force. Tackleberry’s new wife Sgt. Kirkland takes this movie off, though she returns for the fourth film (which will be her last appearance in the series). Series motifs: Another scene of Zed getting happily gassed, more goldfish- abuse, and a hearty Hooks “Don’t move, dirtbag!” Back In Training also represents the first (but far from the last) time that Jones does kung fu while pretending to be in a badly dubbed Hong Kong movie, the first time that a citizen is blasted for smoking in public, and the first time that Lieutenant Callahan (now back in the series for good) belts out a musical number. And poor Mauser gets a sticky substance on his face, which rips out his eyebrows. Best Larvell Jones sound effect: Though in the past Jones has used his abilities to trick criminals into thinking they were under assault, here he makes fake crook- detector noises to himself while in pursuit of the bad guys, which raises serious questions about whether Jones is really all that useful in a crisis. Best line: From the moment that Commandant Lassard says, “I’m going to accompany the governor to the charity regatta,” veterans of raunchy comedies know that mayhem is a- comin’. Never have the words “governor,” “charity” and “regatta” led to anything non- wacky. Wait, which one was this one again? This is the one where the prostitute from the first movie returns, seduces Proctor, and leaves him wandering naked through the street, until he inevitably stumbles into The Blue Oyster Bar. When Tackleberry rises out of the water at the regatta, he’s dressed like Rambo. Before he can implement his plan, however, Lassard has to go away to a conference in England, leaving Capt. Harris (now back in the series for good, replacing Mauser) in charge. Harris, naturally, does all he can to get the citizens to fail, but Mahoney’s bunch helps the citizens prove their mettle when a prison break sees the city overrun with punks, thugs, and ninjas. The film ends with a battle royale, culminating in genuinely thrilling aerial stunts involving biplanes and hot- air balloons. The cast: Mrs. Fackler is gone, as is Mr. Fackler (for now, anyway), but otherwise this is easily the most crowded Police Academy, supplementing the usual cast of crazies with a sizable band of citizen cops: Billie Bird as arms- loving old lady Lois Feldman; Tab Thacker as hefty Tommy “House” Conklin; Derek Mc. Grath (a. k. a. Zed nearly eats Commandant Lassard’s goldfish. Callahan sits on Nogata. Happy Birthday, Mr Hefner: Pamela Anderson goes back to her Playboy roots as she strips totally naked to deliver cake. By. Daily Mail Reporter. Updated. 0. 7: 4. EDT, 6 October 2. Pamela Anderson gave Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner a birthday treat he'll never forget when she presented him with his cake in the nude. The 4. 1- year- old pin- up performed a lap dance for the millionaire after arriving at his 8. Pamela, who has posed for Hugh's racy publication 1. Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson at the party in Las Vegas. Arresting entrance: Pamela Anderson's womanly charms distract Hugh Hefner from his birthday cake. Pamela's censored nude show was finally broadcast on U. S. I can't end on number 1. Yes I have got to do one more.'Pamela, who was Playmate of the Month for the February 1. Playboy, is a close friend of Hugh and regularly brings her two sons Dylan, 1. Brandon, 1. 2, to visit 'Uncle Hef'. She explained: 'My sons have been to the Mansion plenty of times, and when I take them there I get completely ignored and the girls just fawn over my boys.'They call him Uncle Hef, but they realised he wasn’t their real uncle because I appeared naked in his magazine. They know their mum’s a bit wild.'Hef’s always sending me letters and leaving me messages, and he’s a lovely man, although he seems a little lonely to me. It’s a lonely business, though. You don’t meet an awful lot of genuine people out in Hollywood.'.
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