Comments on: facebook & predicting behaviour

By: Christopher Hughes

Christopher Hughes — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 21:57:13 +0000

Well, given the law of gravity vs billions of advertsing dollars, government propagandists, and, oh, say the war in iraq, gravity would still win.

You can’t buck physics. And in physics, Penrose is the genuine article. He and Hawking proved the existence of Black Holes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose

It’s a long book (Emperor’s New Mind), with two more books by him on the same subject. I can’t pretend to understand all it says, but I doubt anyone without a nobel prize would find it a simple matter to refute, hammer or no hammer :)

I recommend it. His is a contrary voice in a world that agrees that AI is just a matter of time. Perhaps it’s not. Perhaps we do not yet fully understand our own intelligence. We would not be the first to think we did, only to find ourselves mistaken.

By: Hugh

Hugh — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:08:30 +0000

oh and does it hurt when you hit your thumb with a hammer? do you say: “ouch” (or some such derivation?). i’d say that’s nice and algorithmic, and pretty newtonian in it’s likelihood. that doesn’t mean that all brain activity *is*, but some of it is.

By: Hugh

Hugh — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 19:06:09 +0000

penrose vs. billions of advertsing dollars, government propagandists, and, oh, say the war in iraq.

“Penrose states that his ideas on the nature of consciousness are speculative.” mine too.

By: Chris Hughes

Chris Hughes — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:11:00 +0000

Not according to Penrose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind

By: Hugh

Hugh — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:29:53 +0000

That’s short term thinking…these predictors will get better and better. they need more contextualized data, more time, and more processing power. all of which is on the way.

By: Chris Hughes

Chris Hughes — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:27:03 +0000

People could make use of the data – certainly. But I am sceptical about how good computers are at making sense of all this data – based on the hilarious ‘suggestions’ I get from amazon, and a more general scepticism concerning artificial intelligence, which was additionally fuelled by reading Roger Penrose’s ‘The Emperor’s New Mind’.