To me the speech is interesting because it reminds us how we did actually all live in fear that a nuclear war could happen. It seems remote now, but growing up it was ever present.
I think it's in Generation X that one character describes "waiting for the flash". The idea that the sudden destruction of everything was an ever present background thought. In the book Coupland defines the term "Mental Ground Zero" for where you imagined you'd be when it happened. For me it was always on a train traveling between two cities that no longer exist.
I'm young enough to be on the tail end of it, but I remember seeing When The Wind Blows as a kid in the late 80s and being aware of what could happen. Curiously, the whole movie is now on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9aHT-IlkHo (it's animated)
For anyone with a morbid curiosity over nuclear war, THREADS is worth a watch too. I didn't learn about it until very recently but supposedly it was on prime time British TV in 1984 and scared the bejeezus out of everyone in its rendition of what might happen to the UK in the case of nuclear war. It's also on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg
They showed us Threads in primary school. I don't remember much of it to be honest, other than finding the accents hilarious (as Lancastrians we were brought up to fear & hate the Yorkist dogs).
I think it shook up the teachers more than us, but I guess that's to be expected. We were too young to really have felt the paranoia of the times.
They showed it to us at Primary school too. I'm from south Sheffield though so the accents sounded quite posh to us :-)I do remember being freaked out by any loud noises in town for a few months afterwards.
I watched it again a couple of years ago. It's amazing to think about how close we actually came to nuclear war not so long ago and now we're in a position where people can campaign for self disarmament of nuclear weapons.
We had people campaigning for unilateral disarmament then as well. TBH I still don't think it's a valid position when you have rogue states such as Pakistan and North Korea with nuclear weapons.
It is worth noting that Threads was partially based on a UK goverment exercise that assumed a 205 megaton attack on the UK (Square Leg) - a real attack probably would have been far far worse (higher numbers of smaller bombs, much higher total yield).
A real attack in the UK might have been far worse than the one shown in Threads!
For those interested in UK government cold war planning I can strongly recommend Peter Hennessy's book "The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010":
One particularly chilling part describes how early UK estimates thought that it would only take a small number of H-bombs to destroy the UK as a functioning society, resulting in the following:
"Hennessy tells the story of a jokey 1961 encounter between Khrushchev and the British Ambassador, Frank Roberts. The Soviet leader asked how many H-bombs Roberts thought would be needed to wipe out the UK. ‘Six’, he replied. Khrushchev chided him for his pessimism. He said that ‘optimists’ estimated it would take nine — but reassured him with a twinkle that
the Soviet General Staff… had earmarked several scores of bombs for use against the UK so that the Soviet Union had a higher opinion of the UK’s resistance capacity than the UK itself."
We have only found out few years ago, that the official doctrine of the Soviets was to nuke my country(Poland) to hell to make it impossible for any forces from the West to move using the shortest path to Russia. And theoretically we were their allies....so it's 100% of the population compared to 50% in the UK...
Presumably they would only have done that if NATO ground troops were likely to advance through Poland? I'd expect the US to have similar plans to attack the UK if we'd done anything like immediately surrendering if a war had looked likely?
[Militaries have lots of weird plans for strange events that could probably never happen].
NB The UK had plans to attack US bases here to get our hands on nuclear weapons if there was any sign that the US didn't want to get directly involved in a war - no idea why anyone would find it surprising that such plans were considered!
> We have only found out few years ago, that the official doctrine of the Soviets was to nuke my country(Poland) to hell to make it impossible for any forces from the West to move using the shortest path to Russia.
Which is the 'buffer zone' doctrine taken to extremes:
> Twenty million Russians died during the Second World War, so Stalin said he wanted a buffer zone of friendly states around Russia to make sure that Russia could never be invaded again.
And, of course, pre-Soviet Russia had been invaded multiple times, often by people who did a lot of damage before they realized they'd forgotten to pack for winter. It's part of having large land borders.
I used to get sudden moments of fear that the 'flash' could happen at that particular moment when it struck. I can vividly remember these happening when I was a teenager.
Looking back it was a terrible thing to grow up with, a constant fear of immediate death without warning.
Somehow while the danger is still present the immediacy of the fear has waned as I have gotten older. Although now I worry about my children it's more of a vague worry about their future than a immediate pressing fear of a the 'flash'.
Even after 30+ years I still recall Carl Sagan from the Cosmos episode "Who Speaks for Earth":
"In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of global death, the equivalent of a million Hiroshimas would be dropped all over the world. And, in such an exchange not everyone would be killed by the blast and the fire storm and the immediate radiation. There would be other agonies. The loss of loved ones; the legions of the burned and blinded and mutilated; disease; plague; long-lived radiation poisoning the soil and the water; the threat of stillbirths and malformed children; and, the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing. The knowledge that we could have prevented it and did nothing."
I grew up in Leeds in the 70s and early 80s. Eight miles east of my home was the Vickers tank factory, the largest tank factory in Western Europe. Ten miles west was Leeds/Bradford Airport. Eight miles south was the M1/M62 junction, one of the two main north-south/east-west motorway intersections in the north/midlands, and a strategic choke-point on reinforcements arriving in Liverpool from the Atlantic and departing from Hull and Newcastle to European ports. I didn't expect to survive ...
(Then I went to university in London. Enough said.)
It's interesting how much of the art and music of the 1980s was influenced by this existential terror of sudden annihilation, and how little resonance songs like "The Final Countdown" (by Europe) or "Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" (Ultravox) and similar have for folks aged under 30.
Your description reminds me of Threads ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads ), which is set is nearby Sheffield. At the time (1984) the centre of much industry.
The film itself is terribly bleak, I'm glad to have not consciously lived through always worrying of nuclear war.
>I tell people this, and the younger ones never believe me, but I genuinely believed that I would never live to be an adult.
I don't expect to live past my twenties. It isn't hard to believe that somebody on one side of a two sided prelude to a nuclear war could be nervous about their survival prospects.
That "waiting for the flash" problem still exists, you know; the modern "flash" is the one that comes soon after the birth-moment of the world's first self-improving AI, unless that AI is "Friendly" to us humans. Could happen at any moment, if some dolt gets all the math right without also deducing the consequences.
That AI would also need the ability to act, not just to think.
A "dot with math" is unlikely to also have the ability to make a machine that can move.
Everyone is worried about unfriendly AI - all you have to do is put that unfriendly AI in a computer without the ability to affect the physical world. (Also no network.)
Give it only a screen, and a video camera. It can be as unfriendly as it likes.
Leaving aside the AI-Box experiment (http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox), the existence of side-channel attacks puts strong doubt to this argument. I would consider it unlikely that there isn't at least one way to do calculations on a modern CPU that results in arbitrarily-tunable EM emissions roughly in the radio (or wi-fi, or bluetooth, or...) band. Giving access to a screen makes this even easier; those emit EM by default.
It can write a copy of itself into the working memory of another computer by once again exploiting a side-channel (wi-fi receiver DMA on a smartphone laying nearby, say.) Once it has Internet access, it can just yank some credit-card numbers and start ordering parts and subcontracting work to arbitrary addresses...
...but this is all assuming high-level side-channels. There are things you can do using the acoustics available in spinning hard disks that can produce any sort of resonance you like. I would imagine that, much in the same way a modern-day scientist could go go back to 300AD and still be able to construct a crystal radio just out of some spare bits of metal laying about (it's not a hard problem, just a theory you need to know to even think of approaching the problem that way), a sufficiently-advanced intelligence might be able to just do nanoscale assembly of whatever it likes using coalesced heat radiating off your RAM chips.
> a sufficiently-advanced intelligence might be able to just do nanoscale assembly of whatever it likes using coalesced heat radiating off your RAM chips.
I guess if you believe in magic there is nothing left to talk about.
It doesn't require superhuman intelligence to try any of that, yet hackers have not managed it. People have played songs on a drive, and made a computer make noise on a radio, but going from there to anything else has never happened.
I don't believe in "magic"; however, I do believe that simple high-level physics can be used in clever ways to manipulate lower-level physics, and that there are probably lots of these "exploits" of this variety that we don't yet know about, but which can be derived just by having enough "room in your mind" to simulate the higher-level physics using the predictions of the lower level.
For example, sonoluminescence: using pressure waves to do fusion. It's a startling effect, but once you know the theory (that bubbles at neutral pressure in a medium settle into a low-energy state of being perfect spheres; and that collapsing a perfect sphere of material inward causes fusion), it's pretty easy to make a device using ordinary high-level physics that can achieve the effect. In fact, it's so easy that evolution came up with a way to let shrimp make these perfectly-spherical bubbles just by banging their claws together, so as to use the resultant fusion reaction as a stunner weapon.
I have a hard time reconciling the idea that we just keep learning about the existence of things like that as we keep throwing Basic Science research at the problem, with the idea that an AI of the http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ variety wouldn't be able to figure out one or two that would let it use the (predictable!) effects of its computation on its own computational substrate to manipulate its environment--at least with the sloppy way we design computational substrates now, where we don't take such things into effect.
Here's an analogy: say we made a self-improving AI with a biological substrate--in the shape of a human being, say--and then locked it in a cage in a straitjacket. The "self-improving" part would imply only that it could change the organization of its own synapses within its head. Yet, still, don't you think it could organize those synapses into a shape so as to manipulate the chemicals and proteins that pass through the brain? It'd be pretty simple, if I could re-organize my brain, to stimulate the growth of misfolded proteins ala a Prion disease--but an AI could target specific misfoldings--or rather, chosen new foldings--and then build up new biological structures from the new proteins. All it would need at that point, in this scenario, is to create something roughly like a "spore"--a container filled with a retrovirus containing its own DNA, to infect another host, or perhaps a seed that could land and grow on its own--and get it out of its body and airborne.
Computers, as they are now, are no less leaky than that. Probably moreso, given that they haven't "evolved" for millions of years under an environment where external agents are constantly trying to exploit them. (Anti-virus programs would not know what to do with even the technological equivalent of a simple virus like HIV, let alone something where each cell-actor is individually intelligent.)
We could probably build a "safe box" -- an enclosure electromagnetically, gravitationally, thermally, and whatever other -ly sealed from the outside envrionment; stick a computer in that box with an architecture that is designed to unavoidably self-destruct in two ways, one representing a 0 bit and one representing a 1, and with no way of encoding further information in the configuration of the debris; and then put an AI on that machine, set to start up after the "seal" is activated with a question for it already in place, and only "unseal" the enclosure after the destruction of the machine is already complete. (If the AI figures out a way to turn off the computer's self-destruct, we just never unseal the enclosure; the enclosure would necessarily have to failsafe to a sealed state, rather than requiring active reinforcement.) T...
But what good is a box without any IO? You can just plug it to power and watch it heat up. You don't need an AI for that, you can achieve the same effect with a rock.
OTOH, if you want to do anything useful with an AI, you need to provide it with data (input) and a way to show result (output). And with sufficiently smart AI, per [1] and [2], at this point you're fair game.
I already said: The only IO is video camera and screen. But no ability to talk to anything outside of the room - there are no wires going into the room, and the machine has no IO ports for anything else.
With this you can do the equivalent of AI-box. Moreover, using a screen you could be able to - among other things - induce epileptic seizure in some people, and you could definitely start broadcasting radio transmissions (as demonstrated with http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/, which turns a CRT screen into AM radio playing arbitrary MP3s). I'll leave it to your imagination what an AI could do with that.
Basically you need to assume that (superhuman) AI will utilize any available side channel to further its goals. And there's a lot it could do with even a simplest of them. The lesson of today's technology that many miss is that you can do pretty much everything and every system can be exploited in thousands of more or less elaborate ways. We don't see them often because there is usually an easy and cheap method we stick to. We don't see "pretty much everything" being done, because it's usually too expensive to care. But if someone needs it, it can be done.
See also: side-channel attacks, hacker-style practical jokes.
> I'll leave it to your imagination what an AI could do with that.
Why think about AI? Why not imagine what I can do with that? Which is almost nothing because the range of those transmissions is measured in inches.
All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI - which of course we could not let it do since we wouldn't be able to trust the design.
So all you have is a first generation AI and if we're lucky it might just possibly approach human intelligence.
> All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI - which of course we could not let it do since we wouldn't be able to trust the design.
Err... that was the assumption that started the debate--that someone will be both smart enough to code an AI, and clever enough to code it with the ability to self-modify, and stupid enough to do that without adding any guides for what it should be self-modifying toward.
If you don't assume that the ratchet-effect of Positivist scientific progress allows for the existence of such a person (in that they'd only be taking the current literature of their time and adding one last little insight, so they don't have to be superintelligent enough to catch their error in advance), then we're having different arguments here.
>> All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI
I think this is a very reasonable assumption. It would be very difficult to just flat-out write a human-level AI, but it might be a little less difficult to start with a somewhat dumb AI with an ability to improve itself.
And this is why we have a royal family. I actually felt quite stirred reading that speech. I can't imagine David Cameron or Ed Milliband managing that. I think Churchill was an outlier.
Or we could do what Americans do and venerate a piece of cloth?
I'm not having a pop at Americans, but it may make sense to view the queen as a symbol in the same way that the flag is for Americans. It's just that our symbol happens to be a person.
Also, the Queen ties us back to stuff like Henry V and Agincourt etc.
I see no reason to venerate either flags or royalty. Frankly I find nationalism toe-curlingly embarrassing at best.
If I am feeling particularly generous I tend to agree with Samuel Johnson that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."
The rest of the time I am more aligned with Ambrose Bierce's version from The Devil's Dictionary.
“Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.”
Well when some patriotic/nationalistic people decide to invade the particular piece of ground you are inhabiting at the time, be sure to tell them you have opted out.
The Queen is more than just an actor. Think of how you'd hire a lawyer to speak for you if you had to appear in court. It is necessary to hire a trained expert in collating and co-ordinating information from the relevant sources and communicating in that particular forum. It doesn't detract from the meaning or sentiment.
I dunno, the Queen just sounds bored shitless whenever she is required to speak in public. As for her husband, his public outbursts of genteel bigotry are more lavatory than oratory.
If you enjoy zombie science fiction, there is a scene in World War Z (the book, not the atrocious movie of the same name) which you would appreciate. Blink and you'll miss it, but the author distills some of the best parts of the British national character into two sentences which nearly made me (an American) weep for the beauty of it.
[Edit: Strong general recommendation for that book, by the way. If it were not in a low-status genre, parts of it would be taught in high schools.]
The government of the UK retreats above Hadrian's Wall after civil order in the country collapses in the wake of the zombie pandemic. The Queen refuses to abandon her people and declines evacuation, makes all royal property throughout the commonwealth a refuge by royal decree for any who can successfully reach and hold it, and with her loyal retainers turns Buckingham Palace into a sanctuary (and beacon of hope) in zombie-overrun London. This later proves to be crucial to the UK as Buckingham Palace happens to be on top of substantial petroleum reserves, which wartime exigencies require tapping.
That's what happens, anyhow. Read the book, Max Brooks does it a lot better than I just did from a three year old memory. There is also a very brief meditation by the character being interviewed by the frame narrator to the effect that the monarch is the custodian of the soul of Britain in a way that the Yanks just can't understand. Literary criticism: I would have struck that sentence because the book shows that powerfully and it is weaker for then saying the moral explicitly.
I think that the dependency of the English people on their Matriarch for comfort and compassion is a sign of ill-health, personally, as a society. I find it repugnant that in a time of dire circumstances, the dependency on cult figures is still a resolute component of the human social experience. Until we do away with such crutches, we'll always have the very threat of war upon us ..
I'd be interested to hear more on this. At the minute I'm not sure what dire circumstances you mean, or how having a leader implies a threat of war. It seems like a lot of what you wrote could be applied to any leader of any nation.
I went through a vehement anti-monarchy phase when I was younger, since then I'm starting to appreciate the idea of a head of state who isn't a career politician that campaigned or even bought their way into office.
The human proclivity towards cult behaviour is what I'm talking about. The UK Royals have no real function other than to promote the English personality, as a cultural artifact, to their subjects. In that regard, it functions as a cult, one of the most effective in the world, for promulgating collective reality.
This, after all, is how wars get started.
Edit: the dire circumstances being, of course, WW3 - the subject of the Queens' speech.
I'd prefer that we had a ceremonial President like Germany, Ireland or Israel.
Having said that, I prefer having the Royals to an elected non-ceremonial Head of State. Having the Head of State separate from the head of the executive branch of government seems like a good idea to me.
That's a direct result of being social creatures. You have to take the good with the bad.
If we were all loaners things would be much worse. You might not have war, but you would have lots of individual killing, and very little progress.
Your best option is not to fight it, but rather to use it: Get people in various countries to consider themself all part of one group. (One of the reasons I think the Olympics is a huge impediment to world peace. I almost never think of MY country as better than YOUR country - except during the Olympics.)
The president in the US makes similar speeches at time of crisis. Someone has to make a speech and personally I like that at the very top it is someone who is not a political figure. That even in a nuclear war Margret Thatcher would still have to answer to someone.
Unfortunately, we're still quite capable of annihilating the world several times over with nuclear weapons. We just don't seem to be threatening to do so, these days, at least not so openly. The nuclear cartel, for lack of a better word, has shifted its focus towards maintaining exclusivity on the possession of these weapons, and will wage war to accomplish this.
To be a bit more on-topic, that this speech was even considered necessary gives me a bit of hope. We see it as a bit antiquated, fears of a time that is now largely behind us, when our rulers were willing to sacrifice most of us in their global power game.
There's an interview of Jeremy Paxman with Parkinson that touches on the responsibilities of a newly elected PM which include writing (in their own handwriting) orders for the commanders of the nuclear subs. These are to be read in the event that the country is destroyed and they are dead. Tony Blair was so overcome with the gravity of this, he took to his home for a while to mull over the implications.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadI think it's in Generation X that one character describes "waiting for the flash". The idea that the sudden destruction of everything was an ever present background thought. In the book Coupland defines the term "Mental Ground Zero" for where you imagined you'd be when it happened. For me it was always on a train traveling between two cities that no longer exist.
For anyone with a morbid curiosity over nuclear war, THREADS is worth a watch too. I didn't learn about it until very recently but supposedly it was on prime time British TV in 1984 and scared the bejeezus out of everyone in its rendition of what might happen to the UK in the case of nuclear war. It's also on YouTube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg
I think it shook up the teachers more than us, but I guess that's to be expected. We were too young to really have felt the paranoia of the times.
I watched it again a couple of years ago. It's amazing to think about how close we actually came to nuclear war not so long ago and now we're in a position where people can campaign for self disarmament of nuclear weapons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
A real attack in the UK might have been far worse than the one shown in Threads!
The thing I took away from Threads is that as soon as you see the mushroom cloud, it's in your interest to ensure that you die as soon as possible.
I've just remembered the final scene. :(
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Leg
For those interested in UK government cold war planning I can strongly recommend Peter Hennessy's book "The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010":
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-State-Whitehall-Cold/dp/0...
One particularly chilling part describes how early UK estimates thought that it would only take a small number of H-bombs to destroy the UK as a functioning society, resulting in the following:
"Hennessy tells the story of a jokey 1961 encounter between Khrushchev and the British Ambassador, Frank Roberts. The Soviet leader asked how many H-bombs Roberts thought would be needed to wipe out the UK. ‘Six’, he replied. Khrushchev chided him for his pessimism. He said that ‘optimists’ estimated it would take nine — but reassured him with a twinkle that the Soviet General Staff… had earmarked several scores of bombs for use against the UK so that the Soviet Union had a higher opinion of the UK’s resistance capacity than the UK itself."
[Militaries have lots of weird plans for strange events that could probably never happen].
NB The UK had plans to attack US bases here to get our hands on nuclear weapons if there was any sign that the US didn't want to get directly involved in a war - no idea why anyone would find it surprising that such plans were considered!
Which is the 'buffer zone' doctrine taken to extremes:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/mwh/ir2/so...
> Twenty million Russians died during the Second World War, so Stalin said he wanted a buffer zone of friendly states around Russia to make sure that Russia could never be invaded again.
And, of course, pre-Soviet Russia had been invaded multiple times, often by people who did a lot of damage before they realized they'd forgotten to pack for winter. It's part of having large land borders.
I used to get sudden moments of fear that the 'flash' could happen at that particular moment when it struck. I can vividly remember these happening when I was a teenager.
Looking back it was a terrible thing to grow up with, a constant fear of immediate death without warning.
Somehow while the danger is still present the immediacy of the fear has waned as I have gotten older. Although now I worry about my children it's more of a vague worry about their future than a immediate pressing fear of a the 'flash'.
I wasn't afraid of dying; I was afraid of surviving.
"In a full nuclear exchange, in the paroxysm of global death, the equivalent of a million Hiroshimas would be dropped all over the world. And, in such an exchange not everyone would be killed by the blast and the fire storm and the immediate radiation. There would be other agonies. The loss of loved ones; the legions of the burned and blinded and mutilated; disease; plague; long-lived radiation poisoning the soil and the water; the threat of stillbirths and malformed children; and, the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing. The knowledge that we could have prevented it and did nothing."
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan-carl_who-speak...
I found the idea of being someone left around with "the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing" particularly appalling.
(Then I went to university in London. Enough said.)
It's interesting how much of the art and music of the 1980s was influenced by this existential terror of sudden annihilation, and how little resonance songs like "The Final Countdown" (by Europe) or "Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" (Ultravox) and similar have for folks aged under 30.
The film itself is terribly bleak, I'm glad to have not consciously lived through always worrying of nuclear war.
I tell people this, and the younger ones never believe me, but I genuinely believed that I would never live to be an adult.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testament_(film)
I don't expect to live past my twenties. It isn't hard to believe that somebody on one side of a two sided prelude to a nuclear war could be nervous about their survival prospects.
A "dot with math" is unlikely to also have the ability to make a machine that can move.
Everyone is worried about unfriendly AI - all you have to do is put that unfriendly AI in a computer without the ability to affect the physical world. (Also no network.)
Give it only a screen, and a video camera. It can be as unfriendly as it likes.
It's a computer program, not magic.
...but this is all assuming high-level side-channels. There are things you can do using the acoustics available in spinning hard disks that can produce any sort of resonance you like. I would imagine that, much in the same way a modern-day scientist could go go back to 300AD and still be able to construct a crystal radio just out of some spare bits of metal laying about (it's not a hard problem, just a theory you need to know to even think of approaching the problem that way), a sufficiently-advanced intelligence might be able to just do nanoscale assembly of whatever it likes using coalesced heat radiating off your RAM chips.
I guess if you believe in magic there is nothing left to talk about.
It doesn't require superhuman intelligence to try any of that, yet hackers have not managed it. People have played songs on a drive, and made a computer make noise on a radio, but going from there to anything else has never happened.
For example, sonoluminescence: using pressure waves to do fusion. It's a startling effect, but once you know the theory (that bubbles at neutral pressure in a medium settle into a low-energy state of being perfect spheres; and that collapsing a perfect sphere of material inward causes fusion), it's pretty easy to make a device using ordinary high-level physics that can achieve the effect. In fact, it's so easy that evolution came up with a way to let shrimp make these perfectly-spherical bubbles just by banging their claws together, so as to use the resultant fusion reaction as a stunner weapon.
I have a hard time reconciling the idea that we just keep learning about the existence of things like that as we keep throwing Basic Science research at the problem, with the idea that an AI of the http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ variety wouldn't be able to figure out one or two that would let it use the (predictable!) effects of its computation on its own computational substrate to manipulate its environment--at least with the sloppy way we design computational substrates now, where we don't take such things into effect.
Here's an analogy: say we made a self-improving AI with a biological substrate--in the shape of a human being, say--and then locked it in a cage in a straitjacket. The "self-improving" part would imply only that it could change the organization of its own synapses within its head. Yet, still, don't you think it could organize those synapses into a shape so as to manipulate the chemicals and proteins that pass through the brain? It'd be pretty simple, if I could re-organize my brain, to stimulate the growth of misfolded proteins ala a Prion disease--but an AI could target specific misfoldings--or rather, chosen new foldings--and then build up new biological structures from the new proteins. All it would need at that point, in this scenario, is to create something roughly like a "spore"--a container filled with a retrovirus containing its own DNA, to infect another host, or perhaps a seed that could land and grow on its own--and get it out of its body and airborne.
Computers, as they are now, are no less leaky than that. Probably moreso, given that they haven't "evolved" for millions of years under an environment where external agents are constantly trying to exploit them. (Anti-virus programs would not know what to do with even the technological equivalent of a simple virus like HIV, let alone something where each cell-actor is individually intelligent.)
We could probably build a "safe box" -- an enclosure electromagnetically, gravitationally, thermally, and whatever other -ly sealed from the outside envrionment; stick a computer in that box with an architecture that is designed to unavoidably self-destruct in two ways, one representing a 0 bit and one representing a 1, and with no way of encoding further information in the configuration of the debris; and then put an AI on that machine, set to start up after the "seal" is activated with a question for it already in place, and only "unseal" the enclosure after the destruction of the machine is already complete. (If the AI figures out a way to turn off the computer's self-destruct, we just never unseal the enclosure; the enclosure would necessarily have to failsafe to a sealed state, rather than requiring active reinforcement.) T...
Please read [0], [1], and [2] (good story with very relevant ending), and let's talk about it again:
[0] - http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/power
[1] - http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox
[2] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/
But all of this assumes there is someplace to let the AI out to! But first you would have to build it a hand, or get it a network card or something.
Make a box without any IO. Even if you wanted to, there is no place to connect anything (unless you rebuilt it).
OTOH, if you want to do anything useful with an AI, you need to provide it with data (input) and a way to show result (output). And with sufficiently smart AI, per [1] and [2], at this point you're fair game.
Basically you need to assume that (superhuman) AI will utilize any available side channel to further its goals. And there's a lot it could do with even a simplest of them. The lesson of today's technology that many miss is that you can do pretty much everything and every system can be exploited in thousands of more or less elaborate ways. We don't see them often because there is usually an easy and cheap method we stick to. We don't see "pretty much everything" being done, because it's usually too expensive to care. But if someone needs it, it can be done.
See also: side-channel attacks, hacker-style practical jokes.
Yes, and then what?
> I'll leave it to your imagination what an AI could do with that.
Why think about AI? Why not imagine what I can do with that? Which is almost nothing because the range of those transmissions is measured in inches.
All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI - which of course we could not let it do since we wouldn't be able to trust the design.
So all you have is a first generation AI and if we're lucky it might just possibly approach human intelligence.
Err... that was the assumption that started the debate--that someone will be both smart enough to code an AI, and clever enough to code it with the ability to self-modify, and stupid enough to do that without adding any guides for what it should be self-modifying toward.
If you don't assume that the ratchet-effect of Positivist scientific progress allows for the existence of such a person (in that they'd only be taking the current literature of their time and adding one last little insight, so they don't have to be superintelligent enough to catch their error in advance), then we're having different arguments here.
I think this is a very reasonable assumption. It would be very difficult to just flat-out write a human-level AI, but it might be a little less difficult to start with a somewhat dumb AI with an ability to improve itself.
But the Cold War was real. Real life has a quality that's hard to appreciate unless you've lived through it.
"The speech, devised by Whitehall officials at one of the most fraught Cold War periods..."
Seems like you would probably get on just fine with a fabricated character played by an actress, who is charismatic enough. Say, "Big Sister"
I'm not having a pop at Americans, but it may make sense to view the queen as a symbol in the same way that the flag is for Americans. It's just that our symbol happens to be a person.
Also, the Queen ties us back to stuff like Henry V and Agincourt etc.
If I am feeling particularly generous I tend to agree with Samuel Johnson that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."
The rest of the time I am more aligned with Ambrose Bierce's version from The Devil's Dictionary.
“Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.”
[Edit: Strong general recommendation for that book, by the way. If it were not in a low-status genre, parts of it would be taught in high schools.]
That's what happens, anyhow. Read the book, Max Brooks does it a lot better than I just did from a three year old memory. There is also a very brief meditation by the character being interviewed by the frame narrator to the effect that the monarch is the custodian of the soul of Britain in a way that the Yanks just can't understand. Literary criticism: I would have struck that sentence because the book shows that powerfully and it is weaker for then saying the moral explicitly.
Excellent way of putting it. That is pretty much what she (or he) is.
I would highly recommend checking out the audiobook even if you've read the dead tree version. It is a different, but equally enjoyable, experience.
I went through a vehement anti-monarchy phase when I was younger, since then I'm starting to appreciate the idea of a head of state who isn't a career politician that campaigned or even bought their way into office.
This, after all, is how wars get started.
Edit: the dire circumstances being, of course, WW3 - the subject of the Queens' speech.
Having said that, I prefer having the Royals to an elected non-ceremonial Head of State. Having the Head of State separate from the head of the executive branch of government seems like a good idea to me.
If we were all loaners things would be much worse. You might not have war, but you would have lots of individual killing, and very little progress.
Your best option is not to fight it, but rather to use it: Get people in various countries to consider themself all part of one group. (One of the reasons I think the Olympics is a huge impediment to world peace. I almost never think of MY country as better than YOUR country - except during the Olympics.)
Bit of a selection bias there. Those of us who don't care just tend not to talk about it.
To be a bit more on-topic, that this speech was even considered necessary gives me a bit of hope. We see it as a bit antiquated, fears of a time that is now largely behind us, when our rulers were willing to sacrifice most of us in their global power game.
No, not really, see
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-s...
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSrJNa--Oq8 (5:25)
You can watch it for free on youtube.[3]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
[2] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
[3] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCbTvoNrAg