Did anyone else subconsciously replace the word "Singularity" with "Instrumentality" whilst reading this paragraph?
If your post is the subtle leg-pull I hope it is, I think you may have overdone the deadpan delivery. If it's not, I think you may need to spend a bit more time getting out and about in the fresh air.

I think he just needs to lay off the smack and transhumanist autofellatio. I realize that he imagines the ability to suck on an extensible robo-penis is in his future and is simply practicing because no one else will let him anywhere near them... but this is too much.

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GALE Force Biological Agent/
BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/
Herpetology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences

There is Grandeur in the View of Life; it fills me with a Deep Wonder, and Intense Cynicism.

It depends on the Muslim society. The Turks produce a lot of engineers as well as the Iranians of all people (though granted, a lot, if not most, of the Iranian engineers end up leaving Iran) and there are a fuckload of Muslim engineers in America. But the same point stands, its the liberal segments of Islam (or Christianity or Hinduism or Judaism) that disproportionately produce the engineers and scientists.

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The Christian fundies don't like Muslim Anti Zionism and the Arab nationalists resent the Israeli presence in the Occupied Territories because no one likes to see someone else beat the living shyte out of one's red headed step sibling.

"I am General Grevious, and I am NOT a sock puppet!"

The "Muslim World" isn't the same as "the set of all Muslims;" it's the dar-al-Islam, the region within which the teachings of Islam play a major role in the structure of the government and the attitudes of popular culture. Turkey is on the fringe of the dar-al-Islam, culturally and politically; American Muslims aren't in it at all.

It's not "being a Muslim makes you a bad engineer." It's "living in the societies that are created when Muslims congregate and establish the laws based on the traditions handed down from Muhammed, you don't get very many engineers."

Turkey is the notable exception; it is also the most secular of the Muslim societies and has been for about a hundred years. In some ways even before that, because the old Ottomans had to rule over large numbers of Christians and Jews, and learned to accept them as citizens.

Who said anything about killing anyone? Atheists and whatnot might be an oppressed minority in such a regime, but only the most hard-line fundamentalists would want them killed, especially when the leadership of them has a science-oriented goal like expanding into space at the top of the agenda. Most likely, there'd just be a bunch of punishments for assorted criminalized sins, and maybe incentives for things like going to church. Well, okay, the doctors and nurses who perform abortions might be executed if they continue to murder babies, as might the women who went to them for their services, but other than that, I doubt anyone would be executed as a result of this scenario.

Besides which, it would be entirely fair to interpret the Bible as giving Christians the duty to perform science; God gave us the stewardship of the world, and since we were a primitive people at the time who did not know of the existance of other planets, let alone other solar systems, it'd be entirely reasonable to assume that God was giving us the stewardship of the physical universe. Additionally, the evidence is that God prefers to avoid breaking the laws of physics He created; the universe is God's greatest and most complex creation, so marvelling at it and exploring it could be thought of as a form of worship of Him. How are we to perform our duties as God's stewards of the physical world, if we lack the science to properly do so, and the technologies to get off the planet and into the greater universe?

kouchpotato: How to convince him to let me do it? Point to how much money it would make (probably on the order of hundreds of millions if not billions, since you want profit to be on the same order of magnitude as costs as a safety margin). Secondly, I'm a Christian, he's a Christian; I'd attempt to approach him at church, or possibly after it. He'd probably be more receptive that way. Finally, I'd stress that it's literally the only way possible to save mankind in time, since chemical rockets lack the lifting ability required.

Also, I'm not anti-intellectual; I just know that the various fields of science can, to some degree, be seperated. Just because one field suffers a bit of a slowdown doesn't mean other, unrelated fields also suffer slowdowns. IT and Biology are not related; the Singularity will most likely proceed on schedule. Also: imitation is the greatest form of flattery. The Tower of Babel was built due to arrogance; if we build the Friendly AI with humility (and we would need to be humble to have a hope of pulling it off successfully), we probably wouldn't suffer the same fate.

And yes, he would need me, or someone like me, since he most likely just sees climate change and peak oil as indicators that the end-time is coming. This means he'd need to build them that much more quickly, since something even worse is right around the corner. I'm not being delusional about being a savior; I'm just taking advantage of the fact he's delusional about humanity needing one (something explicitly stated in the OP). And no, I don't care about him oppressing people; it doesn't affect me, so I don't care. I'm not a very good Christian that way.

aerius: If they're moderately competent engineers, the other, experienced engineers will help them get up to speed. I'm not taking in people off the street; I'm taking in engineers with shiny new Bachelor's Degrees of Engineering. Engineers Australia doesn't allow engineers to start their own companies until they've had five years of experience working as an engineer for a reason, you know.

Simon_Jester: There will be plenty of specialists, and scientists are more than capable of creating a rational way of thinking about their faith. In any case, I really wouldn't care about what my worker's beliefs were, so long as they deliver their work on time, in budget, and without any insidious errors. If a Christian engineer was sloppy enough to allow an error in the design, he'd be shown the door as fast as anyone else. The project's too important to fuck up.

Zaune: No, I'm totally serious. Also, I believe angels are actually AI-controlled robotic fighter planes and helicopters misinterpreted by primitive humans as being supernatural entities, and that both predestination and free will exist because time is nonlinear (it's a tree, with every decision forming a branch of that tree, and God being outside the tree and seeing the whole thing at once). That was totally serious as well.

Which is exactly what this fucker is, a hard-line fundamentalist.



Yet you find nothing wrong with this? Are you fucking kidding me?



Oh, go and sodomize yourself with a bible you twat. A seed isn't a tree. An egg is not a chicken. An embryo is not a baby.



Second point.



The Church didn't see it that way for a while, which is why they fucked over Gallileo and such for trying to disprove their bullshit.



Except everything about the creation myth breaks the laws of physics.



Because being the steward of something doesn't mean you fucking ditch it when it gets dirty. If a friend asked you to house sit would you not look after their house? And if it got messy, what is the reasonable thing to do, dip or stay and clean it up?



Except he's clearly not interested in profits. If he was, he wouldn't support environmental measures and getting us off of oil dependency. Those things make a shitton of money.



If he attended Church where the public could freely talk to him he'd be shot in a heartbeat. Assuming he's smart (smart of a fundie) he'll have his own private church.



Not if he cleans up the planet. Why leave Earth if there isn't an immediate threat to it?



You are anti-intellectual, because you don't give a shit if people suffer for not agreeing with a bunch of stupid made up dogma. And just how the fuck do you expect to make a fake brain if you don't understand the real one? That's what biology is for dickhead.



Well, no we wouldn't because the Tower of Babel was a myth for one. For two, of you tried to make a "God" AI your deity would get jealous and fuck you up. That's sorta what he does. He doesn't like people worshipping anyone other than him. He's so insecure he doesn't even like people using his name! Why do you think tons of fundy sites used "G-d"?



You don't understand. Let me spell it out real clear for you. If we solve Global Warming and Peak Oil there would be less of an incentive than there currently is to colonize other worlds. Who gives a shit about a mars colony when we've got a perfectly fine Earth? You also ignore the fact he's an environmentalist, and those people tend to not be the biggest fans of nuclear energy.



You are a fucking piece of shit. Not giving a shit if people get oppressed, have their rights stripped and such isn't just being a bad Christian (I'd argue it's being a good one) but it's being a fucking awful person. Please, go preach in Iran or something.

I think your definition of hard-line fundamentalist and my definition of hard-line fundamentalist might be different.


The law is the law; so long as it's not applied retroactively, passing and enforcing laws is part of the job of the government. If the government gets too overly tyrannical, it will be overthrown, whether that's at the ballot box or the ammo box.


I think we're going to have to agree to disagree here; an egg is a chicken, and a seed is a tree. It's just that there's nothing morally wrong with killing either of those, as long you don't make them suffer. A fetus is as human as the mother it's growing inside, and claiming otherwise is hypocrisy of the worst sort; a fetus doesn't magically become human once it's exited the vagina.


Gallileo got into trouble because he was a real-life version of an Internet troll who went around insulting everyone who disagreed with him, and when he wrote a book insulting the Pope, they called him on that. He wasn't persecuted because of his science (which, at that stage, couldn't be proven or disproven because of how shitty their telescopes were at that point), he was persecuted because he was an asshole.


Keep in mind who it was given to; it was probably just a parable of some sort, so they'd have a basic understanding of the important bits.


Nope, but we're not just the steward of Earth; we're the stewards of the entire universe. You don't ignore the rest of the house just because one cup is getting dusty.


He's a politician. Even if he personally might not be corrubtable, I'm sure some of his cabinet are.


Google says that the US Presidents have a row of pews reserved in St. John's Episcopal Church. Presumably, they're escorted by Secret Service agents whenever they actually attend.


Because the OP explicitly said he believed he had to, so saying he won't is blatantly ignoring the presented scenario. Also, because we do have a duty to the entire rest of the universe.


That word doesn't mean what you think it means.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ ... tellectual

That says nothing about empathy or caring for other people. Not caring about people suffering is totally unrelated to your intellectual or anti-intellectual beliefs. Besides, I don't want the AI people to make fake brains; I want them to make Friendly AIs. Fake brains would have scattershot goal systems, and God only knows what they might do once they go into recursive self-improvement. The only way to make a Friendly AI that is with logical designs, such as those proposed by Yudkowsky et al.


Humility is neccessary to successfully build a Friendly AI since it'll be vastly more intelligent than you are, and your design will need to compensate for that. Also, God isn't jealous; the reason he blew up the Tower of Babel was because of the arrogance of trying to force our way into Heaven.


And the OP explicitly says that he's going to be building up a space program because he believes the Earth is doomed, and ignoring that is ignoring the scenario presented by the OP.


No, it makes me a normal person. If I was an awful person, Nazi Germany would never have gotten off the ground because people would have stopped it.

So in other words, "Patrick Limbaugh" is Mike Huckabee. Or Pat Buchanan. Or any other of a number of Christian fundamentalists who advocate market-killing protectionist and interventionist measures because "God told them to." Needless to say I would oppose them with everything I have, being that they combine the worst of both worlds, both 'liberal' and 'conservative' statism.

Such populism is what I fear most of all for in the future of this nation, a sort of lowest-common-denominator political philosopher that tells the white trash that it is the inevitable master of the universe and ought to remake reality accordingly. A movement that accrued to those principles should be stopped by any means necessary.

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When the histories are written, I'll bet that the Old Right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy.
- Barry Goldwater

Americans see the Establishment center as an empty, decaying void that commands neither their confidence nor their love. It was not the American worker who designed the war or our military machine. It was the establishment wise men, the academicians of the center.
- George McGovern

Oh, so he will have them imprisoned, oh so much better.





Ah yes, the mass execution, disenfranchisement, and reproductive enslavement of half the population is worth it for your Nerdgasm. You are just like every other dumbfuck selfish fundie out there. No matter what happens to others, it is ok because your Nerdrapture singularity will proceed according to schedule.

You know, I despise transhumanists, but at least most basement dwellers have the decency not to condone the oppression of humanity. Go sodomize yourself with an oxy-acetylene torch.



I have already listed the fields you need to construct an artificial brain. And even so, most computer scientists are atheists.



No. The tower of babel never existed you fundie fuck nutjob.



And that is all the scientists you will have anymore. People with shiny new bachelors in engineering.



No. They are not. Unless you think that people believing that the earth is six thousand years old will somehow make a good geologist.



That is what poison or bioterror is for.

"Here is some weaponized smallpox, courtesy of the biologists you sent to gulags"


I amend. You are not just a basement dwelling fundie fuck nutjob. You are a sociopathic basement dwelling fundie fuck nutjob

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GALE Force Biological Agent/
BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/
Herpetology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences

There is Grandeur in the View of Life; it fills me with a Deep Wonder, and Intense Cynicism.

Indeed. Yours seems an awful lot like saying "there are far worse guards than this guy in our concentration camp. Why, Jochen won't even threaten you unless you get too close to the fence. He's just darling!"



I doubt you'd be as sanguine if you were ever actually on the receiving end of oppression. Because - and this is the amusing part - your interpretation of history is not borne out by history.

To wit, I must have missed the part where the entire British Empire was overthrown, or America, or Sweden during the 17th century for that matter. Because we've all shown massive cruelty from time to time to certain segments of our population, and for the most part it went swimmingly. Though I'm sure the certain fact of their eventual triumph must have brought great comfort to the dead.



Sorry, I wasn't paying attention - I just remembered I got you that great stereo system you wanted. Some refining of alloys, smelting, casting and assembly required. But you're fine with that, right? Claiming otherwise would be, I think, "hypocrisy of the worst sort."



While I don't disagree on the particulars - Galileo indeed does seem to have been an asshole - the problem with this reasoning is that it was perfectly fine to attack him on such grounds. "Heresy" is a label you can give to literally anyone you care to, as long as you carry a bible in your hand and dedicate yourself to basic rabble-rousing. Religion, especially monotheistic theocracy, is rife with that sort of nonsense. Mob-think is antithetical to reason, and as a consequence stifles science.



"Probably" implies some shred of plausibility. You'd have to demonstrate that it was given at all in order to even begin to establish that.



Are these concepts really how you plan to leverage your conception of the universe? By applying bronze-age metaphors? What's next, comparing Global Warming to a macaroni stain on your dish towel? Comparing the universe to a "house" is a weak metaphor, but at least it's a metaphor. What's the dust on the cup supposed to represent? The Milky Way?



While he phrases it poorly, you're still missing the point - there is no logical reason to believe said stupid made up dogma. It is characteristic of the anti-intellectual mindset to defend tyranny solely on the basis of tradition. You do so because this oppression does not affect you personally, which is also imprudent to anyone with a basic sense of perspective.




Intriguing. Please tell me more about the conceptual differences between humility-based and arrogance-based development cycles. Could we get some numbers on efficiency and iteration speed?




Sorry, man. I hate to have to tell you this, but many people in Nazi Germany were in fact highly motivated and, as they saw it, moral people. They might not like what they needed to do, but they knew it had to be done. And why not? God told them so.

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"Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves."
--Chinua Achebe

Smarter and more eloquent people than I have already tackled the really disturbing comments, so...


If you can read that into the Good Book, the business with the Tree of Knowledge and "in sorrow thou shalt forth bring children" being a convoluted metaphor for the transition from tree-dwellers to homo erectus to homo sapiens shouldn't be a great leap. Nor should the possibility that events like the Flood, the Tower of Babel etc grew a bit in the telling, for that matter.
Or do you already know this and just can't be bothered to care that this hypothetical anti-Antichrist is going to cause a staggering amount of human misery because he is simply, honestly and demonstrably wrong?


That's the most intelligent thing I think I've heard you say in the whole thread so far, for all that it depends on the theory of a Supreme Being existing. And don't look at me like that; if we're happy to describe evolution as a theory with the body of evidence we can point to...

And if this was an attempt at satire, you should have quit while you were ahead.

Moderately competent doesn't cut it in rocketry. There's a reason why aerospace engineering programs are usually the hardest engineering programs in a university, and also why the aerospace industry tries to poach the best engineers from other industries. Average or moderately competent isn't good enough.

It's possible. There's no way to tell for sure either way, though, until we can build a time machine and go back and check. It's also just as possible God did exactly what He said He did, and created the world 5-6000 years ago, while simply making it look like it was about twelve billion years old; if He created all the living things as mature adults, there's no reason He couldn't have created the universe itself as a mature adult.

Besides, the angels as robots is fairly well supported by the text; when the angel came down to Mary, what was the first thing he said? "Be not afraid." Then there's the seraph in the Garden of Eden who spun a sword of fire above his head; that sounds a lot like a laser turret (and was actually where I got the idea in the first place). The Ophanim are described as "wheels within wheels", which sounds a lot like a ducted fan helicopter. Additionally, the souls of the cherubim reside within them, so they probably act as a wireless hub, remotely controlling the cherubim.

The description of cherubim sounds a lot like that of a fighter plane; the eagle head is the nose of the plane, the human head is a laser turret, the lion head is the jet intake, and the ox head is a sensor bulb with a couple antennae sweeping out from it. They have four "wings"; two are the tail control surfaces (probably a combination of rudder and elevator), and two are actual wings (probably swept-forward wings).

Seraphim have six wings; two are tail surfaces, two are actual wings, and two are canards. They're described as fiery and too bright to look at, so they might be flying at hypersonic speeds.


Like I said, I don't care about human suffering as long as it doesn't affect me.


It wasn't.

No, it is not "just as possible." If it is, then it's just as possible that I created the universe thirty seconds ago and implanted the memories into your head. WORSHIP ME! Occam's Razor states that the hypothesis which introduces the fewest unnecessary components is probably the correct one, and a magical fairy creating the universe is pretty damn unnecessary. You assume that it's a 50-50 probability, but your idea is massively improbable compared to current scientific theories.


You know what they fit more? Humanoid spirits with flaming swords, etc. I don't remember the exact part, but some guy in the Bible wrestles an angel and wins. How the fuck do you wrestle a helicopter?


So you're a textbook sociopath.

---

My Xbox Live Gamertag is Sergeant Matt

"This cosmic dance of bursting decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively, but if sweetness can win, and it can, then I'll still be here tomorrow to high-five you yesterday, my friend. Peace. " -The Royal Tart Toter

Under this model God is a grand-scale liar, who carefully engineered the universe to look around two million times older than it really is.

How is this consistent with your other beliefs about God?

...And this is evidence how? I mean, aside from the obvious possibility that the whole thing was made up, why is "be not afraid" something that only a robot would say?

So where is this seraph now, anyway? We've mapped the world by satellite; where is this forbidden paradise defended by laser robots?

Why does "wheels within wheels" sound more like a helicopter than it does like an acid trip? Have you adequately considered the "acid trip" possibility? If you're already committed to accepting that the Bible is a mythologized version of events that did not happen as depicted, you've already abandoned your commitment to literal accuracy of the text. Which means there is NO reason for you to commit so much desperate and muddy thinking in an attempt to square it with your Robot Angel concept.

...Why do you believe this to make sense?

I would love to see you draw a fighter plane that someone would describe this way, just to watch the board's people who actually know stuff about the military pick it apart.

So you ignored every ethical teaching of Christianity in favor of your bizarre Robot Angel Jesus fantasy?

Anyway. How do you justify this lack of caring rationally?

Damn. It would have been a lot funnier that way.

Including fossil evidence of extinct organisms, languages older than 5-6 thousand years old, entire civilizations? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you seriously believe in a god who lies on such a grand scale and then makes the punishment for believing the lie of a god Eternal Damnation? What kind of sick fuck is your god, and what kind of sad pathetic piece of human trash are you for worshiping such an evil being?



Or it is... you know, a flaming sword.



Or, alternatively, you can trace the legend back to other civilizations that are older than you think that the universe is.



Then you are a sad and miserable sociopath who does not deserve the oxygen you breath. The best part of you died when your mom flushed the sperm that failed to migrate to her cervical mucous down the drain in the backflow, and by all rights your embryo should have been spontaneously aborted along with all of the other trash that comprises the vast majority of all human conception.

---

GALE Force Biological Agent/
BOTM/Great Dolphin Conspiracy/
Herpetology and Evolutionary Biology Subdirector:SD.net Dept. of Biological Sciences

There is Grandeur in the View of Life; it fills me with a Deep Wonder, and Intense Cynicism.

You're definitely on to something here. Maybe you should submit your Transformers/Judaism crossover theory to JBS for peer review. You could really make a splash in the field of Biblical studies.

I was wondering if you'd be interested in reviewing some of my current theories as well. Based on the latest methods of textual interpretation, literary analsysis, and philology, I've determined that Grendel from Beowulf most likely had an Adamantine skeleton similar to Wolverine. I think this is fairly well supported by the text, which reads:



Clearly, Grendel was some sort of large mutant with an Adamantine skeleton, and he probably had various retractable claws. I'm currently considering publishing my X-men/Grendel theory and submitting it to the Journal of Medieval History for review.

In all fairness to the guy, his theories don't make that much less sense than the literal interpretation of the text.

At least the literal interpretation is supported by the text itself. It blatantly ignores reality, but at least it got that.
This moronic interpretation is supported by absolutely nothing, since it ignores both reality and the text itself.

---

SoS:NBA GALE Force
"Destiny and fate are for those too weak to forge their own futures. Where we are 'supposed' to be is irrelevent." - Sir Nitram
"The world owes you nothing but painful lessons" - CaptainChewbacca
"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." - Wilhelm Stekel
"In 1969 it was easier to send a man to the Moon than to have the public accept a homosexual" - Broomstick

You may want to rethink that. Biology, computer science and information technology are heavily interdependent. See, for example, http://ai.stanford.edu/~serafim/mitComputing.pdf

Even assuming that such people could and would pull of a Singularity scenario, what makes you think the result would be anything but a nightmare? If you lived forever, it would be more likely as a tormented mind in a simulated Hell or as a mind controlled puppet than in the paradise you seem to be imagining. Not only are you assuming that the necessary technology will come out of nowhere after they've crippled themselves scientifically, you are assuming that your magically appearing technology will also magically be used benevolently and tolerantly by people who are neither.

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"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers

Because it either won't be designed by people, or it'll be designed so that it's impossible to abuse by superintelligent Friendly AIs. Duh.

Please. Religious fanatics, or people employed by religious fanatics are NOT going to build friendly AIs or permit them to be built, in any sense of the word "friendly". They'd be more interested in Artificial Fanaticism than in Artificial Intelligence. The primary directives of those AI would be something along the lines of "destroy all unbelievers, then brain-implant and monitor all believers for impermissible thoughts". Or just to exterminate humanity and replace us with their superior, programmed-to-be-sinless selves.

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"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers