Random Thought Thread

SwarthyGnome said:
Had to lie down and get some water when they were doing the final stitch. Got faint and throw-upy feeling.
All good now.
Back home.
Took the day off.
Click to expand...
well? what did you fucking find out? 😃

On a completely unrelated note. There are children today that have never had the joy of watching this.


I BLAME MYSELF

Feel better Dude. Heal quick
 
the-office.gif
 
Nate's random thought for today:


I have read that humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of our DNA. And chimpanzees are one of the most intelligent creatures living on the earth. I have heard they have the intellect of a 4-year-old child. Wild chimpanzees are at risk of extinction.

The difference in intelligence between a chimpanzee and a human is staggering. Which leads me to believe that the difference between human intellect and some other higher intelligence might also be very staggering. Kind of like the difference between us and an ant.

Right now humans are designing artificial intelligence. But at a certain point artificial intelligence will be designing artificial intelligence, and it stands to reason that the intelligence will potentially exceed our ability to even grasp it.

My twin brother (the less evil genius) graduated with a degree in computer science and recently got his Masters in machine learning. We were visiting last weekend. We were all having a conversation about AI and it was pointed out that the upcoming revolution in artificial intelligence will be as significant as the development of human agriculture.

Humans have done very well with the little bit of meat-based computational power we have in our heads. But it has been constrained by the evolutionary pressures of energy conservation and survival of the fittest. The development of silicon-based neural networks whose transistors are smaller than the wavelength of visible light have no such constraints.
 
The Wright brothers first took flight 120 years ago.

The oldest person to have ever lived was 122 years old

My grandfather was born in 1899 and died in 2001.

We went from barely being able to fly and black and white photography to sending people to the moon and pocket computers all within the span of one long human life

100 years ago there were people that thought that pretty much everything that could be invented basically had already been done.

There was a time that people thought sustained human flight was impossible

There was a time that people thought supersonic human flight was impossible

We currently understand that faster than light travel is impossible. Although some have theorized that the key to faster than light travel would involve moving your local spacetime through space-time faster than light while remaining perfectly still. In my opinion, there's a pretty good chance that no human is ever going to figure this out and implement it with our meager meat based computational tools, but it is entirely possible that humans may succeed in this endeavor by utilizing artificial intelligence.
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
The development of silicon-based neural networks whose transistors are smaller than the wavelength of visible light have no such constraints.
Click to expand...

> 200x smaller than visible light today.

To put it in perspective, a football field has around half a billion blades of grass.

A modern microprocessor has > 100 Billion transistors, i.e., the number of blades of grass of more than 200 football fields.

Now, get >> thousands of these talking with each other, and that's what AI can run on :)

Manufacturing and machining matter ....
 
I remember when Jonathan wanted to pursue a degree in computer science. He had started out as an electrical engineering major. I didn't think it was a good idea because "computer programming can be outsourced". This was back in the '90s when outsourcing was really becoming a big thing.

We didn't have many Asian and Indian people in my schools when I was growing up. But there were plenty of Asian and Indian people at university. And they were awfully damn smart. And they came from countries where very smart people could be employed to do "smart people" things at a very low cost.

I was sure he was making a bad choice getting into the computer field because there wasn't going to be any money in it.

Lol

His current annual income is similar to what my house cost. In retrospect, I think it worked out just fine.

I make knives in my garage...
 
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