Evolution :)

It seems that humans have evolved a new skill lately (and a strange evolution, since it's cropped up spontaneously in many people, not just a newly born generation).

They can tell exactly, and unconsciously, how to stand in a hallway/stairwell/foyer such that they can block the entire thing for everyone else, even if it's 10 feet wide.

It's an amazing new skill, that will be of significant use to the human race.

Quit yer b!tchin'. At least you HAVE a job. Plenty of people would love to have it if you don't want it.

Deep Thought.

you're no Jack Handy

Nor am I Douglas Adams

Common sense tells us that the very pursuit of automated killing machines that can dominate the best manned weapons of war will result in automated killing machines designed to dominate the best manned weapons of war. The US military is pursuing such unmanned/automated weapons systems right now.

Of all the things i see as the most likely cause of the destruction of mankind, our own machines are #1 at the top of the list.

http://www.darpa.mil/j-ucas/X-47/gal...res/ucav_n.jpg

Magpies are self aware, how man neurons are in their brain?

In the strict sense of the term, machines do not evolve.

They do not produce copies of themselve; they cannot mutate.

In their current form, machines do only exactly what we tell them to. Sometimes we fail to understand our own instructions.

Machines are good at mimicing human behavior that requires discreet rules: performing calculations, remembering things. They are pretty bad at doing things that require learning or judgement: walking with two legs, driving vehicles in traffic, carrying on a believable conversation.

Deciding who to bomb, with what munitions, and when.

The US military is working diligently at teaching them.

1) I was talking about stupid people...
2) Machines can make copies of themselves, and they can mutate. Whether those mutations will move towards a higher level of complexity, who knows.
3) I was talking about stupid people ;)

A little trick for the oblivious hallway blockers:

Get uncomfortably close and start to read what they are texting/typing. They'll start paying attention to their surroundings.

Really?

I've got several computers and I've never seen little ones running around the house...

Things written in binary seem to be even more sensitive than DNA. A single misplaced byte general causes everything to stop working. I've never seen a group of corrupted bytes ever produce results that don't also end in failure, let alone produce some useful adaptation.

You give them too much credit! Sometimes, they just seem to stop (on that exact magical point) and shutdown for a bit...just long enough to mess up everyone else.

I think they're downloading instructions from the Mother Computer.

Programing not teaching.

Building and programing a robot to find and pick up dog poo in the yard or vacuum your living room is no different than building a flying robot programed to deliver a payload.

The warhead doesn't care if it explodes on the launchpad destroying it's maker or lands on target.

Science fiction is fun... but it is still fiction.

Are we talking about computers now, or machines? Obviously a computer cannot replicate, but it can control a machine, which can. Robots building robots building robots. You will get glitches, and some of them might be environmentally stronger.

The problem is that you'd need a massive amount of energy and resources, and TIME to run through enough iterations to get any changes.

I mean, it's not a complexity issue, virii and RNA replicate, and they are simpler than your calculator (fewer parts, fewer interactions, fewer instructions).

They're teaching them to decide when it is appropriate to attack, with what tactics, and with what weapons. These "UCAV's" (and other military programs being developed) are fully automated autonomous hunter killers. Once unleashed they no longer need any human input to perform their mission from start to finish(or at least, that's the plan)

A hell of a lot of things that were once science fiction are now very much science fact.

all the thing needs is some piece of code to understand the concept of "self", combined with enough room and encouragement to improve itself...

As cpu's are now moving more and more from serial processing to parallel, it could be there anytime. or not..

why do I have a feeling that this question will not be resolved on this bbs?

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