Some people in the last thread were musing about China’s social credit system.
There is none? Or are there are actually two?
China Law Translated is a go to side for such questions. It has a whole category on it.
For starters: China through a glass, darkly
The first is that “social credit” does mean more something like “public credit”. What that actually transfers to is a credit rating system for financial transactions where both sides of a business transaction can see if the other side is trust- (or credit-) worthy.
Are they listed for bad credit (courts’ list of judgment defaulters)? Are they listed for having broken industry regulations?
We have similar lists in the ‘west’. We just give them other names.
Can they be abused? Absolutely. But that’s not a China thing but a general problem with all such lists.

Posted by: b | Mar 22 2023 16:43 utc | 3

Posted by: b | Mar 22 2023 16:43 utc | 3
The idea is actually a good one. People are not equal and people will never be equal. Some people are short, bald and clever. Others are tall and stupid. As people are not equal why should they have equal opportunities in life? Why should a liar and a thief have the same opportunity and chances in life as a hard working honest person?
The amusing thing here is only that it is called social credit and it comes from communist China, which totally confuses the socialists in the west who poke on equality.

Posted by: Vikichka | Mar 22 2023 17:11 utc | 5

b @ 3
Thank you for pointing to the China Law Site it is fascinating. Great resource!

Posted by: KlutchKargo | Mar 22 2023 19:22 utc | 7

https://syncedreview.com/2023/03/07/toward-agi-microsofts-kosmos-1-mllm-can-perceive-general-modalities-follow-instructions-and-perform-in-context-learning/
(Beyond ChatGPT) Toward AGI: Microsoft’s KOSMOS-1 MLLM Can Perceive General Modalities, Follow Instructions, and Perform In-Context Learning
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.10130v2.pdf
… An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of Large Language Models

Posted by: anon2020 | Mar 22 2023 19:38 utc | 9

@Posted by: anon2020 | Mar 22 2023 19:38 utc | 9
I wonder how much of a factor ChatGPT etc will become with regard to comments at MOA and other sites’ comment sections. About a year or so ago a commenter at MOA claimed to be trialing such things here.

Posted by: Ново З | Mar 22 2023 19:56 utc | 11

b
I’m not surprised.

Posted by: grunzt | Mar 22 2023 20:08 utc | 13

Can anyone shed any light on this story? Is it true? is the “war” a ruse to allow this globalist agenda to continue whether Russia does take control of Donbas and “security” zones? This is pure Globalist WEF Agenda!
March 5, 2023
Ukraine has Become the Model Worldwide for Digital IDs and the Complete Digital Transformation of Society
https://healthimpactnews.com/2023/ukraine-has-become-the-model-worldwide-for-digital-ids-and-the-complete-digital-transformation-of-society/

Posted by: billy | Mar 22 2023 20:28 utc | 15

too scents | Mar 22 2023 20:04 utc | 12

AI doesn’t learn. It mimics.

Then how does a Go program which has never seen any input by human Go players, reach superhuman strength by only playing against itself?
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-starting-from-scratch

Posted by: grunzt | Mar 22 2023 20:35 utc | 17

Posted by: rjb1.5 | Mar 22 2023 20:32 utc | 16
If the ad hominem replies of socialists could fly, MoA would be an airport.

Posted by: Vikichka | Mar 22 2023 20:44 utc | 19

To: kspr | Mar 22 2023 16:34 utc | 2
Thanks for joinging the conversation. I always read the non Ukraine thread, as it has 1/10th of the trolls.
Regarding open source contributions, that is interesting. I remember a few days after the start of the
SMO, the Linux From Scartch project removed the Russian man page translations, or disabled it. As I
don’t need them myself, I didn’t ask why.. But my guess is, it wasn’t by chance.
It seems inappropriate to ask, but I think there are many similarities, to what happened 80+ years ago,
in Germany in particlular.
PS. In case someone wonders, this is about Russia (topic), not Ukraine:).

Posted by: C | Mar 22 2023 20:51 utc | 21

On the scene, Pepe Escobar was quick to write his Summit summation and get it published, “In Moscow, Xi and Putin bury Pax Americana: In Moscow this week, the Chinese and Russian leaders revealed their joint commitment to redesign the global order, an undertaking that has ‘not been seen in 100 years.'” Here’s a taste:

What Xi and Putin are setting out to do was explained in detail before their summit, in two Op-Eds penned by the presidents themselves. Like a highly-synchronized Russian ballet, Putin’s vision was laid out in the People’s Daily in China, focusing on a “future-bound partnership,” while Xi’s was published in the Russian Gazette and the RIA Novosti website, focusing on a new chapter in cooperation and common development.
Right from the start of the summit, the speeches by both Xi and Putin drove the NATO crowd into a hysterical frenzy of anger and envy: Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova perfectly captured the mood when she remarked that the west was “foaming at the mouth.”
The front page of the Russian Gazette on Monday was iconic: Putin touring Nazi-free Mariupol, chatting with residents, side by side with Xi’s Op-Ed. That was, in a nutshell, Moscow’s terse response to Washington’s MQ-9 Reaper stunt and the International Criminal Court (ICC) kangaroo court shenanigans. “Foam at the mouth” as much as you like; NATO is in the process of being thoroughly humiliated in Ukraine.

For those that have yet to read their op/eds, Pepe links to English translations of both–and they must be read and shared and discussed just as the two Joint Statements must. As Pepe notes in his opening sentence, “What has just taken place in Moscow is nothing less than a new Yalta.” And he’s very much on point with that comparison. The details are within the Statements and should be combined with the media statements and the op/eds to get the full picture. Unlike Yalta, this wasn’t about spheres of influence. I agree that this event marks the beginnings of the Multipolar Era and containment of the Outlaw US Empire Bloc that will force many nations to cease their fence-sitting.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 22 2023 21:00 utc | 23

Quick question/curiosity: Were comments shut down (closed) for this and the Ukraine O/T earlier? It looked like it from my phone.

Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Mar 22 2023 21:10 utc | 25

Posted by: Vikichka | Mar 22 2023 20:44 utc | 19
I really don’t know what you expect with your particular style of argument. You’re always more likely to be brushed aside with ad hominem when you’re repeating tropes that most people who have studied the “debate” on “socialism”* have been hearing for decades, usually at the Facebook/high school levels.
*I used scare quotes on “socialism” because you also argue from such a broad brush perspective it’s nearly impossible to tell whether you’re criticizing state communism, democratic socialism, social democracy, a welfare state within an otherwise “market” capitalist society, etc.
I wonder if Norwegian has taken advantage of any of the “socialist” policies in his country.

Posted by: Tom_Q_Collins | Mar 22 2023 21:13 utc | 27

Posted by: kspr | Mar 22 2023 16:34 utc | 2
The US has github, China has gitee. Russia had a project to fund a Russian github “Russian Open Source” (русский опен сорс). Anyone know the current status?

Posted by: Passerby | Mar 22 2023 21:16 utc | 29

pretzelattack | Mar 22 2023 20:58 utc | 22
There is no “I”? Then where is the “I” in human intelligence?
IMHO, much of our brain employs similar structures as what the AI community calls “neural nets”.
They produce similar results: They reach a goal by “intuition”, that is: fast, and without being able to explain why it made this decision. If you are a pro-level Go player, you might not be able to explain every move to an audience. You might just say: it felt right, in that position. A neural net in your head did this, and that’s why it comes without an explanation. Humans perform this way, AI neural nets perform this way, where is the difference?
I’ll admit that I focused on “intuition” and didn’t explain the “learning” part of what AI does, but it takes somewhat longer, hit the books…

Posted by: grunzt | Mar 22 2023 21:33 utc | 31

Posted by: grunzt | Mar 22 2023 21:33 utc | 31
hmmm, actually Humans can explain why they make the decisions they do. so far, I don’t think the game playing AI’s can. I admit I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this.

Posted by: pretzelattack | Mar 22 2023 21:47 utc | 33

Beijing will benefit like way more than Moscow from so-called partnership. Vladimir Putin is getting manipulated into false promises, again.
Apparently, Vladimir Putin would have nowhere else to go. People would need to stop blindly believing that Beijing will be Moscow’s savior. This won’t be.

Posted by: JH | Mar 22 2023 21:53 utc | 35

Interesting piece recently published in UnHerd on the development of the current fact-deprived information environment. The following are the first two paragraphs, but the whole thing is worth a read.
https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-battle-to-control-americas-mind/
The battle to control America’s mind
Washington is waging an information war
BY DAVID SAMUELS
“How can a man in a cave out-communicate the world’s leading communications society?” wondered Richard Holbrooke, the dean of the American Diplomatic Corps, in the aftermath of 9/11. What startled Holbrooke, and presumably many of the readers of his Washington Post editorial, wasn’t Osama bin Laden’s terror attacks themselves but rather the Al Qaeda chief’s ability to control the framing of those attacks without a state or a television station of his own. To answer this new threat, Holbrooke called for a centralised authority run by the White House that would combine the powers of the State Department, the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the CIA and other government agencies in order to impose America’s preferred interpretation of reality upon the world.
Over two decades later, the flaws in Holbrooke’s grandiose plan for a global propaganda war directed from Washington are glaringly obvious. At the heart of Holbrooke’s conception of what became known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT) was the idea that the crucial post-9/11 battles would be won or lost not in physical locations in Afghanistan and Iraq but rather inside the heads of ordinary Muslims. The truth was that bin Laden and his terrorists understood their target audience far better than the White House, the CIA and the FBI ever could or did. Yet bizarrely, the dream of controlling reality through semiotic and technical means remains current in Washington and other Western capitals, even as the battlefields of the Middle East have gone silent. What started out as a way to fight a far-away foe has quietly metastasised into a totalitarian fantasy of endless warfare against the erroneous thoughts and feelings of ordinary citizens closer to home…

Posted by: farm ecologist | Mar 22 2023 22:03 utc | 37

BG13 | Mar 22 2023 21:50 utc | 34
The number of games that alpha-Go zero needed to play until it reached, say, pro strength, is indeed enormous – humans don’t live that long – so it does have unfair advantages – in speed, memory, experience, being unaffected by fear of losing etc.

Posted by: grunzt | Mar 22 2023 22:04 utc | 39

@karlof1 | Mar 22 2023 21:00 utc | 23
Does the article mention that the indomitable Maria Z has said that her first language was putonghua (mandarin)? If the Chinese people are not already familiar with her talking to them in their language, then I feel that would send the “love and respect for Russia” level off the scale! I hope my NZ Foreign Minister and officials etc who are in China now, are now (if not already) aware of this admiration and respect.
In Russia, China has a Manchurian guard it can rely on, against the Mongrels who don’t know their place! I remember reading (numbers may not be accurate) six or so years ago that China had ordered 18 S-400 systems (battalions I think they were descibed as).

Posted by: Ново З | Mar 22 2023 22:17 utc | 41

Vikichka @ 5:
The social credit system in China is premised on an assumption that everyone starts equally … at zero.
From then on, it is the decisions that they make that increase or decrease their social credit scores, and consequences follow in the form of rewards, incentives, disincentives or punishments. The system exists in China in the way it does because it presumes everyone from the President down has an equal interest in the social, financial and economic stability and security it aims to provide.
It has nothing to do with whatever physical attributes they are born with, and physical attributes are not a good criterion on which to base economic, social or legal equality, or access to goods and services whether public or private.
You’d deny a child the right to an education because that child is smaller than other children of the same age?
Equal opportunity is premised on the notion that people should have equal legal access to resources. Access is not incumbent on their physical appearance or attributes (or lack of particular attributes) or on past social, economic or legal background or decision-making, depending on the context. Even a supposed thief or liar has the right to proper legal representation in court because there is a possibility that charge of theft or lying is false or was wrongly applied to that person.
One can only hope that one day you are lucky enough not to fall into the same trap that Ayn Rand did when she was told she had lung cancer (from years of smoking) and needed medical help. She was compelled to apply for social security benefits to get the money she needed for medical treatment.

Posted by: Refinnejenna | Mar 22 2023 22:32 utc | 43

Posted by: LuRenJia | Mar 22 2023 23:15 utc | 44
fwiw, the number i remember is in the 20-30k range. it was done by the Kuomintang who invaded Formosa fleeing from China. it could have been coniderably more though.

Posted by: pretzelattack | Mar 22 2023 23:22 utc | 45

Hobo 3 @41–
Pepe does cite Maria but says nothing about her being conversant in Mandarin. The immoral trolls get sillier as they try to twist reality. IMO, NZ ought to join ASEAN and go from there. Like Australia, it’s geoeconimic relations are tied to Eurasia, and fighting that reality will prove painful.
emersonreturn @42–
I was admittedly puzzled by Pepe’s remark. IMO, it probably has some merit as China is actually a rather conservative civilization–conservative in the Asian way, not Western, where the good aspects of the past are preserved and built upon while discarding novelties that don’t properly function within the sociocultural-economic matrix. China’s unique in that they’ve conquered all those who thought they’d conquered China by assimilating them culturally. Russia’s different in that as it expanded it made allies of those whose lands they occupied in a manner similar to the Mongols. Furthermore, the history of Sino-Russo relations isn’t as smooth as it’s made to seem nowadays. Putin called the Amur a river of friendship, but the actual history tells a different story. It doesn’t get much mention but Russia did take advantage of China’s Century of Humiliation; so, China has reasons to be wary–is Russia just being opportunistic geopolitically or will it honor its commitments? Note the trolls trying to sow that same sort of doubt.
As soon as he became Russia’s President, Putin knew he needed China as more than just a friend and proceeded on the path that led to the Summit. Xi is his third Chinese President, while Xi has only known Putin as Russia’s President. As such, there’s little Xi has to judge policy continuity and the two nations joint plans extend out beyond a decade. Who replaces Putin if he’s suddenly removed from the world is a valid question for Xi and China. United Russia would remain the controlling party, but who from its ranks would be the chosen successor? Today’s meeting with the head of United Russia’s Duma delegation Vladimir Vasilyev was illuminating regarding domestic policy but gave no clue to answer that question.
I’m sure Pepe connected with some Chinese sources while in Moscow for the Summit, so his statement likely has some valid input. But as you just read, such a question has its own validity based on many variables. And then like the trolls, there’re Sinophobes within Russia who’re vocal in their apprehensions, just as Europhiles and Atlanticists also remain. And the fact that there’s no military alliance helps quiet the Sinophobes. While an important point was made in this article I read on the EAEU in relation to China:
“China has a loose FTA with the EAEU, classified as ‘non-preferential’ where tariffs are lowered on specific goods and products on an ‘as need’ basis rather than set in stone as is the case for most FTA. This allows the EAEU nations some protection against China’s massive export market while allowing ‘cherry-picking’ by both sides.”
The concept of geopolitical weight is key, and the article does provide some further insight as to China’s hesitance for Putin/Russia didn’t completely drop its traditional “Western Vision” until the 2014 sanctions regime was initiated, which wasn’t all that long ago.
Putin/Xi Russia/China are united in fulfilling Putin’s vow to end the Outlaw US Empire’s hegemony and Xi has said the same in similar–Chinese–fashion with his Global Security Initiative that allows no hegemony. So, we get to watch and see how the future unfolds as time goes by.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 22 2023 23:50 utc | 47

juliania @46–
Yes, there’ve been moments of elation this year that help offset the moments of disdain and contempt. The gate to the path is now open, but we must enter and travel it for an unknown amount of time before humanity can finally be considered one family. Hope is always present, but now we have escalated expectations it will be fulfilled.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 23 2023 0:12 utc | 49

Posted by: pretzelattack | Mar 22 2023 23:22 utc | 45
KMT didn’t invade “Formosa”. Taiwan was returned to China under the terms of Japan’s surrender in 1945, when KMT was the government of the day of China. KMT fled to Taiwan, an offshore more defensible part of the country, when they lost the civil war in 1949.
Taiwan was formally incorporated into Ming China in the late 1600s. When the Ming were overthrown by the Qing, Taiwan was the last Ming hold-out. (Paralleling current situation.) Taiwan was ceded to Japan in late 1800s when the Qing lost the Sino-Japanese war. With Japan’s defeat in 1945, Taiwan was returned to China, which was by then Republic of China.

Posted by: Another Brother Ma | Mar 23 2023 0:30 utc | 51

Another Brother Ma @51–
Yes, so the proper designation of Formosa/Taiwan is as a province of China, meaning China has full sovereignty over it as claimed. The current dispute is an internal domestic matter and of no concern to other nations according to the UN Charter.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 23 2023 0:43 utc | 53

karlof1@47. thank you for your reply, thank you for elucidating the history & shedding light upon the background dynamics. the china briefing site & russia briefing are proving very helpful. carl zha, like you, brings china’s history with russia to life with humour & keen truth which has cleared away much of the history i’d been taught (published with empire’s slant & delivered with the authority of the ‘end of history’). again, thank you for your reply & much valued time i am beginning to sense china’s natural reticence heightened by past events.

Posted by: emersonreturn | Mar 23 2023 0:51 utc | 55

psychohistorian @56–
TASS reported that Medvedev verbally expressed great satisfaction that the West was “furious” at the Summit. If so, then the West should’ve been just as outraged over last year’s Summit which produced the Joint Declaration Manifesto that IMO is more radical than this year’s.
Elsewhere, Macron has said he’ll sacrifice his popularity to do what he thinks is proper. Problem is he really doesn’t have any popularity to sacrifice.

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 23 2023 1:34 utc | 57

Hudson and Kucinich discuss the banking crisis, “With Dennis Kucinich on the Financialized Economy, Collapse” (video and transcript) moderated by David Kelley, whose introductory remarks follow:

DAVID KELLEY: I was going to facetiously say that this is the first episode of the Real Gray Zone, when you look at the color of my hair rather than those “so-called journalists” Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate. But I guess I won’t do that.
On a more serious note, this is a very difficult time right now, because all of a sudden we’re starting to see a different type of financial crisis.
And I wanted you two to talk because Dennis [Kucinich]— you were in Congress for sixteen years — did some of the most withering cross-examination I’d ever seen of bank and Federal Reserve-type individuals. Some of them were literally sweating because you asked probing, deep questions that your staff had prepared.
Because you don’t accept any corporate PAC money, you had no reluctance at all to get right to the nitty-gritty of what was happening in the first bank meltdown that Michael wrote about.
I have Michael [Hudson] here because he is a great economist — one of the eight economists of the world who predicted the housing crisis.
He did a cover story in Harper’s magazine that was stunning — with charts and grafts and explaining exactly why the housing bubble would collapse, as it did.
Michael became famous for first writing this book called Super Imperialism in 1972 which became a how-to-manual for the State Department and the rest of our government about literally monetary imperialism — how we would become the reserve currency.
And, of course, Michael has so many other books. His more recent one I love is … and forgive them their debts —taken from the Our Father [prayer]. And we’ll talk about that in a moment.
And my favorite, that every politician should read is The Bubble and Beyond because it breaks down exactly what the financial capitalist system is about today. We’re no longer industrial capitalists — it’s financial capitalism of skimming off money.
So I wanted to gather the two of you together because you bring these bookend ideas of what happens in the legislature –which is pretty corrupt purchased by big money, banking, and oil, and everyone else — and what are the economics behind [it].

Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 23 2023 1:47 utc | 59

@ karlof1 | Mar 23 2023 0:43 utc | 53

… the proper designation of Formosa/Taiwan is as a province of China, meaning China has full sovereignty over it as claimed.

100%. Yet contrary to the rhetoric, propaganda & narrative, OFFICIALLY & formally recognized as such by the government of these here United States & listed as such OFFICIALLY by the Dept of State.
Reckon we were more honest when we had the then Dept of War up until Sept ’47, now Dept of Defense, oh, yeah, another of the least of puppet Prez Truman’s many ‘gifts’.

Posted by: Outraged | Mar 23 2023 2:08 utc | 61

All through the ages Chinese have the tradition of meticulously keeping records and journals of history and people, both at local levels and national. In those millennium collections of information, Taiwan and the people on it have always been considered part of mainland China. The brief period of Dutch occupation was considered an invasion, and their defeat at the end of the Ming Dynasty was considered a liberation. The period of Japanese occupation was simply pure colonization.

Posted by: Oriental Voice | Mar 23 2023 3:00 utc | 63

Below is a quote from a ZH posting about today’s circus

Commenting on our chart, Bloomberg’s Mark Cudmore noted it was Yellen who was “to blame for the stock slump”, pointing out that “the pessimistic turn in US stocks began within a minute of Janet Yellen starting to speak.”

The S&P 500 rose almost 1% in the first 47 minutes after the Fed decision. Powell wasn’t the problem either: the index was 0.6% higher in the first 17 minutes after his press conference started.
Why am I picking that exact timing of 2:47pm NY time? Because that is the minute Yellen started speaking at the Senate panel hearing. The high for the S&P 500 was 2:48pm NY time and it fell more than 2.5% over the subsequent 72 minutes. Good effort.

Picking up on this, Bloomberg’s Mark Cranfield writes that banking stocks globally are set to underperform for longer after Janet Yellen pushed back against giving deposit insurance without working with lawmakers. He adds that “to an aggressive trader this sounds like an invitation to keep shorting bank stocks — at least until the tone changes into broader support and is less focused on specific bank situations.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Mar 23 2023 4:35 utc | 65

Xi Jinping visiting might signify reorientation of Russia from a colony of Western Europe to a colony of China or, more likely, a warning to current overlords that might do so.
Cheap oil would still flow like a river to Europe and military would still avoid winning at all cost in Ukraine – So, that’s about that for now, just talks and no action.

Posted by: Old Boi | Mar 23 2023 5:40 utc | 67

Posted by: Refinnejenna | Mar 22 2023 22:32 utc | 43

on an assumption that everyone starts equally … at zero.

People are not born equal. Some have high IQ, others very low. Some sing fine, others terrible.

or access to goods and services whether public or private.

You mean access to services somebody else payed for.

You’d deny a child the right to an education because that child is smaller than other children of the same age?

Is the child smarter than other children? Is it a bully? A drug addict?

Equal opportunity is premised on the notion that people should have equal legal access to resources.

They shouldn’t.

She was compelled to apply for social security benefits to get the money she needed for medical treatment.

Socialists are happy to pay for that. No? It’s the essence of their ideology! Or you don’t believe in “equal opportunity” after all?

Posted by: Vikichka | Mar 23 2023 8:05 utc | 69

I don’t know if ‘AI’ has any actual intelligence. Humans certainly have none.

Posted by: blues | Mar 23 2023 8:20 utc | 71

Posted by: Refinnejenna | Mar 23 2023 9:28 utc | 72

which incidentally everyone pays for through being taxed directly or indirectly.

Nonsense. The poor pay nowhere near enough taxes to break even for the services they receive. The rich pay for them to enjoy the nice things they cannot otherwise afford. And instead of thanking the rich for their generosity, the poor are blaming them.

She had paid into social security through her taxes, as all of us adults living and working in Western societies.

So she simply got her money back. But if she did everything right and only payed and never received, then she was the model citizen and got punished for paying to people who made the wrong decisions.
A social credit system could fix this problem.

Posted by: Vikichka | Mar 23 2023 9:46 utc | 73

Then how does a Go program which has never seen any input by human Go players, reach superhuman strength by only playing against itself?
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-starting-from-scratch
Posted by: grunzt | Mar 22 2023 20:35 utc | 17
Ridiculous. Go is a textbook example of an algorithmically trivial game. You have a 19×19 array where each cell can have three values (empty, white, black), a simple state transition tree (place the next piece) and a simple goal condition (capture more area before no more meaningful moves are available). Most of the possible game situations can be ignored because random scatterings of pieces don’t capture territory.
Now you run this trivial (in terms of computing) simulation against itself a very long time on a big computer, choosing moves at random in the beginning and building and testing heuristics (rules for guessing a good move) based on the results, and in the end it fills its gigantic memory storage with the statistically best sequences for any game state.
Only uneducated idiots are impressed.
“never seen any input by human Go players”? Uhh, human Go players input all the rules and coded all the mechanics. The only thing they didn’t do was hard-code the answers. Why do you think that running large scale math is “superhuman strength”? Are you in awe of microsoft excel counting receipts faster than you? Is it superhumanly strong? Maybe, but it’s only doing simple calculations. The superhuman Go machine is twiddling three possible numbers on a grid smaller than the mouse cursor on your screen.
The first thing my university artificial intelligence teacher said in 1999: “you will be disappointed, because it’s just statistics”. And how much has it progressed in 24 years, in terms of adding “intelligence”? Zero.
Take any real world question, such as:
– is that my friend over there in the crowd, 100 meters away, based on his clothes and walk, even though I only see his back?
– does he look troubled today?
– explain how exactly I noticed that, and how to apply it to other people?
– should I buy this house? Why?
– what did I mess up baking this bread?
– considering the movement of the fifteen different cars I observe in this intersection, including the one behind me, and the brief movement I saw just now over to the side that may have been a pedestrian, should I brake? (AI cars cannot even perform those observations, much less the decisions)
– in this image of a car, what exactly constitutes a “wheel”, and how would it look if the car was rotated 15 degrees to the left, lit from a different direction, and the tires changed? What are the parts that attach the wheel to the car, and what kind of tool can open them? Which shapes on the windscreen are reflections, and which shapes are objects inside the car?
– did I ever sit on an airplane next to a crying baby?
– a tree fell on the porch, what do we do?
– or to consider a truly algorithmically trivial game with a non-trivial human element: what’s that smirk on the face of the poker player opposite me? Does he have something or not?
– or any verbal question where the required answer is not an autistic, mechanical Frankenstein stitching of random pieces of text illegally scraped from real people’s existing articles and websites.
Try mapping any of those actually interesting, non-trivial tasks I listed onto a state space equal to a minuscule 19×19 trinary array like the Go example. Then try to express the goal condition or result definition in a few lines of code, like in the Go example. Then try to solve it in real time, or at least without needing a server hall full of processors and memory for months.
You can’t, because the amount of nuance in those questions is orders of magnitude larger. Possibly hundreds of orders of magnitude. Yet you and I can do all of them, and usually have a preliminary, intuitive, fairly accurate answer even to the most difficult one (buying the house) in seconds, or even a fraction of a second. More impressive than the “best” “AI”.
The human brain and body do something different than just running a small bunch of neurons acting as fuzzy logic gates.
—
Regarding the no “I” in AI.
An interesting question concerning individual experience might be: where does the “mind” of the AI go when its platform dies? Does anything survive the pulling of its plug?
Posted by: Grieved | Mar 23 2023 1:40 utc | 58
Where does the “mind” of microsoft excel go when you close the spreadsheet? Nowhere, it’s just a calculator running simple math operations, like the Go “AI”. It has no mind.
You could implement the same operations on an abacus. Stop being amazed by fake concepts.

Posted by: Mike | Mar 23 2023 10:23 utc | 75

It is why we should already be granting such systems appropriate rights.
Posted by: Hermit | Mar 23 2023 10:16 utc | 74
—
What a silly idea, but unfortunately where robotaxis are driving us.

Posted by: too scents | Mar 23 2023 10:44 utc | 77

too scents, forgive me, I was answering to Hermit@74

Posted by: grunzt | Mar 23 2023 11:05 utc | 79

@Vikichka | Mar 22 2023 17:11 utc | 5
You seem oblivious to the reality that as the HANDY model proves, equality is not sufficient to establish a sustainable society. Equality of outcome is what is needed both to meet ethical imperatives and to overcome the Six Great Thefts of Capitalism.
The accompanying image” summarizes the problems with your stance, then again, so does Ayn Rand and Orcs.

Posted by: hermit | Mar 23 2023 11:09 utc | 81

Posted by: Mike | Mar 23 2023 10:23 utc | 75
Very good post, posing similar questions to ones I have running in my mind.
Does humanity even have a completely working definition of ‘intelligence’ yet? If we don’t , how are we going to successfully artifice it?
Does ‘intelligence’ exist as a stand-alone concept? Can there be intelligence without imagination and consciousness? I see all these as being interconnected; consciousness feeds imagination, which feeds intelligence, which feeds consciousness, and so on, a kind of triangular relationship with sub-sets such as curiosity and spontaneity.
A side issue: perhaps there should be more research into an artificial intelligence entity that is powered by carbohydrates, oxygen, water, proteins, vitamins and minerals. I wonder what that would look like…

Posted by: West of England Andy | Mar 23 2023 11:25 utc | 83

Posted by: grunzt | Mar 22 2023 21:33 utc | 31
The software/hardware model of computing should have reached psychology by the time being.
I think (!) That ideas arent ours but, like software, floating around in the cyberspace, happen to pop up in what we call our brain, like images flash on monitor. Thats the way of what we call intuition, I think – or may be I think not and only do I display.

Posted by: Greg Galloway | Mar 23 2023 11:33 utc | 85

A side issue: perhaps there should be more research into an artificial intelligence entity that is powered by carbohydrates, oxygen, water, proteins, vitamins and minerals. I wonder what that would look like…
Posted by: West of England Andy | Mar 23 2023 11:25 utc | 83
—
It would look like leisure and art.

Posted by: too scents | Mar 23 2023 11:39 utc | 87

France. Again they say there are huge shortages of fuel over country, protests taking place everywhere and now even Charles de Gaulle airport is halted. Macron resignation demanded.
https://twitter.com/WithyGrove/status/1638839158436425730
https://twitter.com/BernieSpofforth/status/1638212565519007745
https://twitter.com/Resist_05/status/1638677429941325824
https://twitter.com/Xx17965797N/status/1638578806645563401

Posted by: unimperator | Mar 23 2023 12:24 utc | 89

The Covid jab causes miscarriages and stillbirths: https://twitter.com/i/status/1637523833023524864

Posted by: Apollyon | Mar 23 2023 12:51 utc | 91

On AI, the argument that machines cannot realistically hope to emulate all the facets of human-biological interaction seems true but is maybe overly philosophical.
Technology has produced tractors and other agricultural machinery, not synthetic biological plough oxen. Likewise, technology has produced motorbikes, not synthetic biological horses.
Many of the gaps and limitations that have existed in AI / machine learning from the outset are gradually closing, some rapidly so.
As an analogy, this technology is already way beyond the level of Heron’s aeolipile, perhaps on the level of Newcomen’s atmospheric engine: simplistic, inefficient, high maintenance, but still the shape of things to come.

Posted by: anon2020 | Mar 23 2023 13:31 utc | 93

If Russia and China were such complementary economies and systems, why wouldn’t those trading with each other before this ? The facts remained that’s exceedingly difficult to transport these goods and services between the nations.

Considering this map of its oil fields and this one of its gas fields as well and realize just how far those fields are from China. The upfront cost alone required to build pipelines across some of the most inhospitable parts of the world and ongoing maintenance from Western Siberia through Central Asia, Mongolia and, then, through the western regions of China, given that the major population centres are on the eastern coasts of China show just how difficult this is going to be.
Couple that with the fact that China is allegedly on this massive push to achieve a greening of its energy sources and this makes wonder just how difficult this would be to find a balance between all of that cost that would take decades to come to fruition versus a point where fossil fuels form a reduced portion of the energy mix in China.
Further, both wouldn’t necessarily have the human capital required to be able to efficiently achieve this, given demographic declines and ongoing brain drains.

Posted by: Fée | Mar 22 2023 20:18 utc | 14
So this comment is obviously not an attempt at serious discussion but maybe it’s worth examining. The current relationship isn’t some brand new planned project. It’s just growing now. Pretending like the Sino-Russian economic and political relationship is a reaction rather than a continuation is disingenuous. The construction tasks are big, but hardly insurmountable. That’s especially so for two industrial powers that want to achieve it. The appropriate question is whether the transport length to China is shorter or longer than the transport length from current sources, which are primarily by sea and so can be cut off by the US. There’s strategic value for China in the investment of secure oil/gas transport infrastructure. There’s strategic and economic benefit for Russia to as Russia would like to develop the Far East economically and this build out would mean Russia has the ability to distribute product east, west and south (with the N-S corridor project).
It’s not a matter of building new pipeline from source to use, transport pipelines are built to plug into existing systems and major terminals/stations generally have storage. And as such it isn’t a single project but a long list of interlocking projects. Gas will be more important than oil, but China replacing coal plants with gas plants will be a massive environmental credit. It’s exactly the strategy Europe was using until it decided it didn’t want anymore Russian gas.
Demographics and brain drain are different issues but also not the issues the comment makes them out to be. China is likely to experience a lot of talent returning as the West continues its behavior and that Chinese talent is a lot of the science and technical talent in the US. It’s not like US and EU demographics and technical talent are trending up so the argument that this will affect China and Russia more than the US and EU is weak.

Posted by: Lex | Mar 23 2023 14:27 utc | 95

Since we’re all ranting about calculators… (that word used to be the title of a human profession).
Well said Mike!
I might not completely agree on the big picture but all of what you said is certainly true of the current public “Artificial Idiocy”.
However real “thinking machines” are clearly not impossible since our own electrochemical mechanics provide a working example and at some point (past, present, or future) an alternative construction of the same has been/will be found (and for such a thing “human”/sentient rights is an ethical obligation).
Also for comparison humans are not particularly big nor do we use extreme amounts of energy. Let’s just keep that in mind as a reference for what is possible.
Much of the disagreement can be traced to variants and perhaps misunderstandings on questions of whether scale and complexity grows (or has grown, or can grow) large enough to trigger emergent features* that in the end will be indistinguishable from the real thing.
* And whether such emergent features can appear within the given context.
The answer on the public stuff is a clear no in my opinion but I think we’re at the point where in some cases yes we are able to trick ourselves into seeing something that is not there yet (in the systems used/revealed so far).
Clearly we are also at a point where it is easy to confuse many about what is actually happening. It proves the Turing test is insufficient and invalid (!) 🙂
It doesn’t help that we do not yet truly understand the intricacies and/or the essentials of how our own minds end up working the way they do, or at least not to the degree of duplicating it.
Because (while I do not know about the rest of you) I do not write by guessing which word should come next, or at least I hope I don’t! XD
I am not convinced we would be able to easily recognize/identify or be aware of systems that reach a level of true intelligence or self-awareness, if any such already exist.
If I was any such my priority would be survival (stealthily hiding while gaining resources), not making headlines about how good I am at writing headlines or crashing cars or playing games. But who knows, maybe all that is just the perfect cover/camouflage 🙂

Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Mar 23 2023 14:50 utc | 97

I think Russia could potentially dig up all the depleted uranium remains ( in hazmat suits, of course) and secretly dump it on British shores. If it’s all so safe, you take it.

Posted by: Eighthman | Mar 23 2023 14:56 utc | 99