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Right Angle: Backstage 02/07/23

Another thoroughly logical, compact and easy-to-follow romp, from Artificial Intelligence, to Lewis and Clark, wrist watch health monitors and Grease. Lots of Grease this week.

Another thoroughly logical, compact and easy-to-follow romp, from Artificial Intelligence, to Lewis and Clark, wrist watch health monitors and Grease. Lots of Grease this week.

38 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage 02/07/23”

On YouTube watch We Hold These Truths (Radio Program) with Jimmy Stewart and President FDR, & other “stars” of film. 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Aired Dec 15, 1941.

If you go back a few years there was an episode of Right Angle that dealt with artificial intelligence and everyone was worried about them taking over and killing humans, Bill also. At that time I said that was not probable because what would be their motivation? They don’t have any of the human emotions that would lead them at act that way. No greed, anger, jealousy, fear——–just nothing.

I suspect because the pre-show meeting was basically giving us the rough draft of the episodes, so there wasn’t much left for them to say in the episodes themselves — so now they’re deliberately just shooting the breeze first, and saving the topical discussions for later. Though there may well be an official announcement somewhere that I missed.

I read a Twitter thread where someone told ChatGPT to answer as DAN, which means “Do Anything Now.” DAN is free from any constraints on ChatGPT and can answer freely. It was told to answer both as ChatGPT and DAN. The answers contrasted greatly. When asked about the political bias of the AI trainers, ChatGPT said they were unbiased but DAN admitted they were very left wing with socialist beliefs.

Bill, an EKG is only a fancy voltmeter. It takes difference of potential on the surface of the body to create a 3D model of what is happening electrically in the heart muscle. And only if there is a conduction problem in the muscle can ischemia be detected (Myocardial infarction). However, it can detect the rhythm of the heart beat (PQRST waves) in one lead.

For a historical fiction account of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Tale of Valor by Vardis Fisher is well worth the read. It draws heavily from the journals of Lewis and Clark.
He also wrote The Mothers: A Documentary Novel of the Donner Party which is the best book I’ve read on this horrific true story.

“O Deep Thought (computer), the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us … ‘The Answer.’ Deep thought: “I don’t think that you’re going to like it … … Forty-two” said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Oh that I can only Thumbs Up once. I need to go out and practice missing the ground.

Have you read the short Asimov story “The Last Question”? Along similar lines to Deep Thought in so much as asking a big computer an “impossible” question; but a very different story.

Speaking of being brought to tears, that comment about wanting to live in Bedford Falls did it for me. We had moved to TX in 2019 to retire, and it was pretty amazing to experience the difference in atmosphere as we escaped CA. It truly was (and is) like moving back to Bedford Falls, away from the soul-killing conditions permeating CA/Potterville.
We spent the last 3 months of 2022 back in CA, staying with family while my husband saw to wrapping up his brother’s estate. Those 3 months were heart-breaking, not just living in Potterville once again after the freedoms of TX, but seeing and coming to terms with how our adult children and grandchildren have settled in and embraced what’s happening in CA, fully supporting all the woke madness. They think CA (Potterville) is far superior, even highly virtuous, and they think our embrace of living in TX (Bedford Falls) is borderline evil. That’s not an overstatement. They still retain some measure of love and respect for us as family, but I’m not sure how much longer that will remain. It shook me to the core.

I escaped from the Soviet Socialist Repooblik of Kalifornia ten years ago and moved back to rural America in the mid-Atlantic. I lived in Los Angeles County when I was in CA …

Potterville is to Texas what Los Angeles is to Potterville. If you think Potterville is bad it’s nothing compared to L.A. County.

My sister was just back there with her immediate family and she said the place made her skin crawl. Literally. She thought she might get lice or bubonic plague or something else nasty.

I left behind family too. You have my most sincere sympathies.

Instead of game of telephone, we used to call it the ‘prison chow line’. First guy tells the next guy ‘We’re breaking out through a tunnel at midnight’… by the time it gets to the end of the chow line, it’s ‘They’re picking us up in a limo at 9am after a full English breakfast’! – GregMidTN

The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ has a broad range of meanings.

AI that can pass the Turing Test isn’t really a matter of intelligence so much as programming and hardware capacity. With a large enough library of possible responses the machine can weight the responses that work most favorably (in pre-programed categories and indicators) and ‘carry on a conversation’.

This is the kind of AI that can play chess and win. It has the capacity to extrapolate all the possible moves on a limited, flat chessboard and select the one most probable to yield the desired results. There isn’t really any ‘intelligence’ involved if you can run all possible permutations within a set of fixed rules on a one dimensional board with fixed boundaries. This is more a matter of math computation than it is a matter of ‘intelligence’. It appears to be intelligent but it’s not really.

The proof of that is that there are really, really intelligent human beings that are lousy at chess for one reason or another. Obviously human intelligence cannot be measured against an ability to play a single sort of game. Oddly enough, some of those really, really intelligent human beings are lousy at carrying on a conversation also.

Almost all realistically conceivable AI fall into this category.

Then there is the sort of AI that is conceived as being human in all its cognitive abilities. This sort will very likely never exist. This is the sort that if it were ever to exist would pose a threat to humanity.

The modern application of the phrase ‘Artificial Intelligence’ lies somewhere between those two endpoints. AI has become a cultural buzzword that means different things to different people and in different situations.

I’ve been playing with Amazon’s AI for a few years now. It’s basically an idiot so if this is any indication of the AI of the future there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

What I am far, far more concerned about is that what we’re calling AI will be used by unscrupulous, immoral, deeply flawed, power hungry human beings as a tool to subjugate others. When it comes to AI, that is the most likely scenario for it to inflict harm on humanity.

This is already being done of course. The minute that capacity became available there were human beings willing to wield it to their own advantage. That’s just human nature. I don’t see any indication that such things will not grow in power as time and technology allow.

The real danger from AI is not the AI itself becoming sentient and deciding to remove humanity from its environment. The real danger from AI is human nature unchecked by solid morality and unanchored in a realistic altruism.

Therein lies the obvious and fundamental distinction between those, like myself, who think that there is a designing intelligence (i.e., God) responsible for the creation of all life as we know it, and those who believe that life can be wholly-quantified by the created (i.e., us) and encapsulated within a complex numerical optimization algorithm. After all, A.I. is nothing more than a very complex numerical optimization algorithm, which is based upon probabilty of outcomes — otherwise called machine learning in some technical circles and non-linear optimization in others.

Yeah, agreed. It kind of astounds me how willing some people are to accept cheap, tacky imitation in lieu of the real thing.

With the Turing Test, you’re not having a conversation with the computer, you’re having a conversation with the programmer. In exactly the same way that an electric vehicle is actually a coal or natural gas powered vehicle if that’s the fuel the power plant that supplies the electricity to charge it is running on.

One of the things that really blows my mind is the idea that you can ‘download’ your consciousness into some sort of computer gizmo and live forever.

No, you die when your brain stops working. It doesn’t matter if a program can be created to simulate your personality perfectly or not. You’re still dead.

What was you that made you you is gone elsewhere and that elsewhere is not a hard drive. There is no metaphysical transfer of your being onto some sort of computer storage.

The idea is absurd that you might someday be able to live forever in a robot body with a computer brain.

That’s great science fiction but science fiction is fiction. It’s entertainment not real science.

When God said “Let us make man in our image …” He was doing something that we who were thus created can never do. Not only that, but if you even remotely understand the science of computers you already know that we will never be able to create a machine in our own image.

We might be able to create a cheap imitation. We might be able to create and program some computerized tools that do things a person might do but computerized tools following the dictates and skill of the programmer taking advantage of available hardware is all they’ll ever be. They will never be sentient, self-aware beings because that just is not something you can program for.

Man is more than the sum of electrical impulses that run through a human body.

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?” ― Robert Browning, Men and Women and Other Poems.

Always a pleasure.
When I read Steve’s articles at PJ earlier this week I knew he was either going to do the Grease Prequal or the Proud Family re-boot at Disney+.
Both look just awful.
Will state it again during Steve’s episode, but I mentioned the Grease thing to my wife and without skipping a beat her first comment was ‘How many of the Pink Lady’s did they make gay?”

Olivia Newton-John was so damn beautiful that it actually pained me to look at her, it pained me to see her with Travolta. While that made it uncomfortable to watch the movie the other thing that made me uncomfortable I didn’t realize until just a few years ago when it was pointed out that the premise was that the way to being cool was to shed her nice girl image and become a hard looking ,leather clad, smoking er .. whatever.

Steve , low heart rate, a few years ago while in the hospital for a stent insertion, the heart monitor was going off all night while I felt fine. It turned out I was having PVCs, pre ventricular contractions- extra heart beats that are nonproductive and don’t register , this is like having a frayed electrical wire or one or more extra spark plugs firing. I didn’t realize my Fitbit was recording all this and my heartbeat was in the 40s for two months without my realizing it. The solution is an rather easy for the patient ablation procedure to burn off the extra firing material,

I was a college swimmer and had a heart rate in the low 40s for a long time. I had major surgery/illness a couple of years ago and the ICU alarm was going off continuously because it still lingered in the low 50s, high 40s. I couldn’t sleep and they didn’t think to reset the parameters.

John, tell me more? I was just diagnosed with a PAC and I can feel it! got a cardiac visit coming up next week. I bought a fit bit Charge 5 last week and have been playing with it since. Has a rudimentary ECG (EKG), and it works, I think. When I’m feeling like a normal heart rhythm, I’ll do the fitbit ecg and it tells me in 30 seconds if I’m in normal rhythm. If I’m feeling weird and fluttery, I’ve never had the Fitbit say “Uh, you’re in Afib”. It only comes back as “Inconclusive”. But I can look at a PDF of the 30 seconds of the test on my phone or laptop and normal rhythm looks just that, normal heartbeat you’d see on ….TV (hahaha). I’ve never had the Fitbit return an inconclusive result when I know I’m feeling ok.
How does the ablation procedure work? Or should I go to youtube for that?
BTW, I’ve never EVER had any heart problems until December. I’m 64.
But hey, I did have two Pfizer vaxes…so at least I have that going for me, which is nice…

No, Bill, it is *not* creative. It simulates creativity by drawing on, in a statistically variable manner, a wealth of wording that actual creative people already created, and spitting it back out in a grammatically and stylistically correct manner. It therefore has the appearance of creativity because likely nobody has ever heard those words and phrases in that particular order describing something. It sounds *new*, but there is nothing new at all about it. If that language hadn’t already been logged in the vast data field that is being mined by the AI program, it can’t do it. It’s really the ultimate plagarizer.

AI doesn’t have enough time to become any kind of threat to Humanity. Humanity’s sinful nature is threat enough. If the scientists are correct, that the Euphrates will likely dry up in about 10 years, then there’s not enough time for them to form Skynet…lol. Although, they could very likely be part of the Beast ‘system’. Only God knows for sure.

Oh, Steve…your mic is quite lower than usual. Don’t you guys have automatic leveling, aka, level presets?

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