Yeah, wired runs lots of stories about stuff that quite simply never happens.
I used to keep a lot of back issues of wired, which I saved because I thought they had some cool stories. Surprisingly, many are packed with examples of very obvious vapor ware, and have aged really poorly.
A small handful, however, still read like notes from an exciting future, and I find myself returning to them, when searching for inspiration.
Yeah, ban cars because cars bad. No people drive cars. People no can think good. People not designed for fast car speed. The car think better for people. Then never bad things happen and all people will be controlled by good cars that think good.
The Google self-driving cars have been well over 500k without an accident in automatic mode (there was one accident with someone driving it in manual). Autonomous vehicles will result in a huge reduction of automotive fatalities and it's not inconceivable that they would eliminate automotive deaths all together.
Even though I thoroughly enjoy driving, as do many people, it's simply dangerous. Yes, car too big, going too fast, lots of energy stored up, and humans are not perfect, so horrible disasters such as this happen.
Would you rather airplanes be fully autonomous or have a human pilot in constant control 100% of the time?
This isn't a matter of choice for me, from what I gather. It's already obvious to me that very powerful faceless people, somewhere out there, have decided that this WILL happen, one way or another, and the dismal tide will creep up around us all.
It doesn't matter much, whether my car or your car is autonomous, so long as the prevailing wind perpetuates a certain concentration of robotic vehicles on the road. Choice, freedom, privacy, become mere platitudes in such an environment. Meaningless words parroted in the same sentence as terrorism, patriotism, job creation and affordable healthcare.
Once the legal framework is in place and the technology finally sorts itself out, I can see a situation where the idea of private car ownership becomes a strange concept in cities. You just have a fleet of "chauffeur" driven cars available that you can call on as you need them.
Of course the fleet can be 'sent out to work' during periods of low demand.
Scientists say that if the signal came from
extraterrestrials, they are likely to be an extremely
advanced civilization, as the signal would have required a
2.2-gigawatt transmitter, vastly more powerful than any on
Earth.
What if we inadvertently witnessed the climactic end of two rival civilizations as they unleashed massive energy weapons upon each other, due to some kind of political unraveling of a dangerous arms race?
That would certainly explain the intensity, brevity and lack of repitition for this particular signal?
One might expect residual evidence of destructive forces at work, such as a debris field or hot gas clouds, but that assumes that the weapons are of a conventional nature we might readily understand.
My theory is that it encoded the uploaded consciousness of their best minds, along with a compelling argument that the only way to escape our gravity well is to upload our minds via a multigigawatt transmitter, along with instructions on how to build one (except those instructions won't work unless we propagate their signal). It might drive our civilization to the brink of our resource capacity to undertake this project, but it's the only way to propagate ourselves and survive, so what choice would we have?
If one created a physical substrate that neurons could transmit to and from, then embedded it in the brain, you could create consciousness in that substrate. A primitive analogue of this has been done where they attach electrodes to the tongue and fired them in a pattern suggestive of a video feed, eventually the brain started to understand it as another 'sense'.
Should one start brain-interacting directly with a substrate, the substrate could be powered independently and persist after separation. If separation occurred after natural death of the host, you could say that it 'uploaded' it's consciousness to the substrate.
That's just a replay attack. The consciousness is still bound to the cells. No new, unique information is generated without the presence of the cells.
The term "uploaded" is being subjected to special semantics in this case. Consciousness is not transferred over to the receiver by the act of transmitting a signal.
If I make a telephone call, and leave a voicemail message, the answering machine does not get up and walk around. Even a sufficiently advanced voicemail recorder would only be an interpretation of artifact left behind by a creature, and not the original being.
But if the substrate had artificial neurons, that could do everything normal neurons could, then it's plausible that consciousness could copy everything over. At that point, the only thing binding consciousness is the 'idea' that it belongs to the cells.
If you separated them before the host dies, then you'd have copied the consciousness into the substrate, and they would exist separately until you reattached it.
Wait until the host dies, then the consciousness would experience that death yet still persist. It would carry on experiencing through whatever senses the substrate offers.
Notice that it's not just a signal being transferred, it's the actual mechanics of consciousness, neurons firing and communicating. When the substrate, connected to the brain, communicates, it's just as if you added brain cells. So it's not just a signal, it's actual thought.
Well, at the very least, if it seems to be a diliberate signal originating from an organized intelligence AND anomalous, then it might be useful to consider the intersection of those two characteristics.
Where do we see intelligence and anomalies converge?
- War, and other forms of political conflict
- Accidents, even if non-destructive, like when the cat sits on the keyboard
- Experimentation, and research into novel discoveries, unfamiliar to a civilization
- Distress, final acts of desperation, where no hope is provided by circumstance, but behavior is engaged in anyway, because there is no consequence
Big ear sits upon the earth. It doesn't move, it just listens to whatever happens to be above it, and relies upon the rotation of the earth to simple multi-directionally. The Earth wobbles somewhat.
Let's assume that somebody else is broadcasting with a transmitter designed exactly like big ear, only in reverse (transmitting instead of receiving). Let's assume that they're very far away. Maybe their own planet wobbles.
What is the likelihood that we're even supposed to have heard the signal again? I mean, the way I'm imagining it is we have two drunk, blindfolded sailors, being randomly spun around as if before a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, and each is holding a laser pointer, with no knowledge of each other. In the expanse of large open field, in the course of 1 year, how likely is it that the two laser beams will intersect? Ignoring the curvature of the earth, how much less likely is it the further apart they are? If they're, say, a light year apart (and have impractically powerful lasers), what is the likelihood then?
I have a different mental model of the nature of the signal. I don't imagine that it was transmitted as a focused beam attenuated by an aperture. My thinking is that it was a sphere shaped pulse generated by an apparatus like a broadcasting tower, or perhaps discharged from a device that targets a specific band of the EM spectrum.
When you think of it as an event similar to an electromagnetic pulse from a hydrogen bomb, and not as a beam from a laser pointer, it changes the rationale for why it might not be a repeatable event. If it was a pulse and not a beam, it might still be prone to occlusion, in terms of whether pulse were generated on the surface of a planet, and on the side that only happened to be facing toward us at the time (not away), while our antenna was pointed at the night sky, but that still increases the probability of reception.
The alternative concept for a pulse, is that it was generated from a small space craft or space probe, and not on a planet capable of eclipsing the signal.
Considering that it lasted 72 seconds, that might fit the profile of a weapon, if you consider the duration of typical video of a mushroom cloud. 72 seconds might also fit the profile of a jamming signal generated while a weapon was en route, to prevent detection while being delivered to a target.
72 seconds is the duration of time that any particular patch of sky is in range for Big Ear to listen to. To offer another imperfect analogy, imagine yourself on a train in a pitch black tunnel. There's a break in the tunnel that lasts for 72 seconds at your current speed. The light signals you noticed for those 72 seconds didn't necessarily last for only 72 seconds, they were simply not visible after you went back into the tunnel.
But with what motive? If you were to create a single high-energy pulse, deliberately, and willfully apply a degree of entropy to scramble the signal, why?
Randomness wouldn't have a motive. In fact, that's my suggestion.
You cited several scenarios wherein intelligence and anomalies converge, and I am suggesting that randomness is another possible (and perhaps likely) one.
I suppose this possibility is not unlike your accident suggestion but, perhaps, less bounded.
Actually, this crops up as a legal/insurance concern for larger valuable companies every so often, where company policy must stipulate in writing that critical numbers and/or groups of employees should not fly on the same airplane at the same time, since airplanes, though statistically safer than cars, are still prone to catastrophic accidents and are opperated by pilots not under direct control of the company.
In order to fulfill certain contracts or receive insurance coverage, written language for company travel policies must ensure the continuity of proprietary trade secrets, and redundancy for mission-critical personnel, in case of disaster, or catastrophic accident.
There was a tech company (during the 80's or 90's?) that was completely destroyed by a single random plane crash that killed a handful of the key people in one fell swoop, but the name escapes me, and my google skills are failing. Maybe someone else will remember. I want to say it was a vintage video game company, but it might've just been some old (now defunct) electronics company...
For this same reason, the president and vice president of the united states don't fly together. I think military command adheres to similar rules.
You would think governments would also avoid such risk, but the top brass of Polish government all got wiped out when a plane crashed in Russia in 2010, including their President. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Polish_Air_Force_TU-154_c... A sad event, but could have been avoided or at least minimised.
I wonder how that squares with tech companies providing shuttle buses in the Bay Area. I found a reasonable looking comparison that said bus travel is more dangerous than flying.
My guess is the company has more control over the bus, or the bus charter company shoulders the insurance burden.
The missing factor is time for recovery. If an employee, even an executive, dies, it may be a problem, but probably not a catastrophe. Others can pick up the slack, a replacement can be hired and trained, etc.. You can kill the entirety of the original team and not be in dire straits, provided they die over the course of several years.
If an entire team dies at once, there's no one to pick up the slack, and no one to train replacements.
It is both unlikely that an entire team will be on a commuter bus at once, and even if they were, it is unlikely that a bus crash would kill all of them.
Plane crashes, in contrast, have a nasty habit of killing everybody on board all at once.
I don't think you understand what he meant. I know there are companies around me that have offices located in not-so-central areas of the city that offer a free bus service to bring you from major public transport hubs to their offices.
It is true there are corporate shuttles covering a variety of distances and particular use cases. It eludes me why that makes you think I didn't understand, or what it has to do with my comment.
Especially considering that human beings can, very easily, become totally divorced from healthy, "normal" human values.
It's not enough to merely keep humans in the picture, but to keep healthy, undamaged humans in the picture.
Let's say, perhaps, that after a particularly costly war, the only humans left are a mixture of mentally unstable, angry, ambitious, victory-driven amputees, with intense biases imbued upon them by surviving particularly horrific and violent combat. These people, in a warped attempt to say "never again", optimize an artificially intelligent, fully automated child-rearing skinner box [1] to mold children into their own image, as the natural and perfect outcome which produces a society averse to violent warfare. The result is that every child that emerges from the skinner box is an angry, warped sociopath, missing limbs, who rationalizes even trivial behavior with an arbitrary moral high ground of extreme polar ideology.
But wait... aren't humans... technically classifiable as self-assembling intelligent constructs, spewed forth from the bald nothingness of space and time by mere coincidence? What if WE are the beast we fear?
Given Facebook's predilection for collaborating with the NSA, perhaps this is a government program to civilianize the image of drones. The military industrial complex really needs someone from the commercial sector to step up and rinse out a the bad aftertaste of all those funeral and wedding attendees that were blasted limb from limb by hellfire missiles.
Jeff Bezos tried his damnedest to make them seem like santa clause just in time for christmas, but we need some real megawatt tech celebrities to work their magic. Bezos is balding, for christ's sake.
I mean Mark Zuckerberg with all his cute, cuddly animal-loving vegetarian tendencies wouldn't harm a fly.
If HE'S okay with drones, then they MUST be okay! (insert obligatory emoticon)
And, oh yeah...
CITIZEN ALERT NOTIFICATION: WITH THE PROCURMENT OF A FLEET
15 PANOPTICOID DRONES MANUFACTUED BY LOCKHEED, YOUR LOCAL
SHERRIF'S DEPARTMENT WILL BE ENFORCING ALL EVICTIONS IN
YOUR COUNTY BY NON-LETHAL PEPPER-STUN DRONE STRIKE. IN THE
EVENT THAT YOUR HOME IS FORECLOSED, YOU WILL BE ORDERED TO
VACATE UNDER THREAT OF NON-LETHAL FORCE.
---
CITIZEN ALERT NOTIFICATION: WITH THE PROCURMENT OF A FLEET
27 PROTOBEDIENT DRONES MANUFACTUED BY NORTHROP/GRUMMAN ALL
TRAFFIC STOPS ON STATE ROAD 902 WILL NOW BE CONDUCTED
AUTONOMOUSLY. DO NOT TAUNT THE PROTOBEDIENT DRONE.
***end citizen alert notification***
