

The Internet is made out of meat - keyist
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/its-made-out-of-meat.html

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wuputah
The 'made out of meat' is definitely a reference to a short story (
<http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html> ) which was also made into a
short film ( <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFZTAOb7IE> ). Great stuff.

(Of course, SPAM® is also a meat product. Supposedly.)

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swombat
So some day in the not-too-distant future, the Singularity will emerge in the
form of an exceptionally advanced spam-bot network (its "intelligence"
distributed amongst millions of zombie computers) that becomes self-aware,
identifies the key obstacles to delivering its spam (humans), resolves that
issue (develops and releases the right kind of biological virus, or whatever),
then achieves its life purpose by sitting there for the rest of time sending
monstrous amounts of spam to now-unread inboxes.

~~~
sorbus
So spambots should take into account the response rate (in the form of the
number of people clicking on links, or the percentage of people merely reading
the message) and optimize for that, instead of merely trying to deliver
content to inboxes? It would avoid the problem of spambot-AIs trying to
destroy humanity, as well as increasing the quality of spam.

~~~
swombat
Right. And as time passes, they'll evolve closer and closer to sending
interesting, entertaining, well-written, informative spam that points people
to products they actually want to buy.

Mission Fucking Accomplished. <http://xkcd.com/810/>

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iwwr
The internet(s) are made of meat in the sense that it takes constant human
attention from millions of people to keep the networks and its services
running. If Google's "meatware" were to stop maintaining it, the hardware and
services would fail quickly (hours at the most).

~~~
pmiller2
I've recently finished watching almost the entire run of _Life Without People_
from the History Channel. One thing that amazed me at first was how quickly
the power grid would fail; generally, the estimate is 1-2 days. With emergency
generators and enough fuel, a data center might be able to manage a few hours
beyond that (say, a day at most). So, even if absolutely nothing went wrong
with the software or the actual computing hardware, power considerations put
an upper bound of about 3 days on how long the internet could continue without
us.

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ars
"....cracking a problem that's basically tractable by human intelligence, if
human intelligence could work on it for a few centuries."

This is a _very_ common fallacy: assuming you can trade time for quality. i.e.
every hard problem is solvable assuming you spend enough time on it (even
infinite).

This is not true. Some problems are not solvable by some people no matter how
long they spend on it.

That's the difference between genius and non genius, a genius can solve
problems that others simply can't.

Just because you make an AI faster does not mean it can solve the problem.
Some problems will be beyond the ability of the AI no matter how long it works
on it.

~~~
gjm11
I think you need to go back and read what he actually wrote, because he very
explicitly _doesn't make_ the mistake you're talking about. (You might have
guessed that from the fact that he bothers to say "a problem that's basically
tractable by human intelligence ..." rather than, say, "any problem".)

For instance, just a paragraph or two later than the bit you quoted: "If such
higher types of intelligence can exist, and if a human-equivalent intelligence
can build an AI that runs one of them — which is an open question".

~~~
ars
I was speaking in more general terms, (and that was an excellent quote to
use). My post was about the singularity in general not this article
specifically.

BTW: The idea of a Spamularity is hilarious! Especially since I don't believe
in the singularity.

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noibl
'There is another theory which states that this has already happened' -- DNA

Stross says: 'I have a gut feeling that the reason we're so communicative is
that we are, at a very fundamental level, a communication phenomenon'

If spamming can be described very broadly as being an attempt to get other
people to do something beneficial to yourself without guaranteeing a benefit
to them equal to their expenditure, you could also use this as one functional
description of human communication _in general_. (If you look at the
transactions involved instead of the information, this applies to everything
from hunting antelope to building the LHC.) In other words, there are already
meat-based spambots whose susceptibility to spam (we have needs) helps them
develop their own spamming techniques.

And later: 'there are other routes to a Vingean Singularity. Augmented
intelligence, as opposed to artificial intelligence, is one such route'

The classic sci-fi question that emerges from this is 'Which (meat or silicon)
is augmenting which?' And if augmentation is such an obvious idea to humans,
why would software-based spam systems simply accept _their_ natural handicap
in Turing tests rather than integrate meat-based features (e.g. Mechanical
Turk, social networking)?

Probably the clearest example of this is in SEO, in which 'predator' software
is designed to produce large quantities of pseudo-human communication: both
'content' and activity traces such as hyperlinking, all in order to manipulate
'prey' software (SEs) into doing favours, in the form of high rankings. Humans
are involved in the chain as article writers, captcha solvers, comment
spammers, retweeters, blogger-reviewers etc. but the start and end of the
chain, from keyword discovery to conversion analysis, are highly machine-
centric.

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tejaswiy
Really great stuff. Especially like the idea about intelligent AI finally
evolving from the arms race between developing a good spam bot vs making an
intelligent spam filter. Software that pretends to be meat. Nicely done.

~~~
javanix
Charles Stross is a very intelligent individual.

If anyone here hasn't read _Accelerando_ I highly recommend it.

~~~
burgerbrain
The ebook of Accelerando is even free. Now all of you with ebook readers have
no reason to go read it right now! :)

Furthermore, his unpublished but freely available novel _Scratch Monkey_ is
also a very good read. If you've read Accelerando it is interesting to see the
formation of many of his ideas.

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Fargren
From the article: "Just as a quicksort algorithm that sorts in O(n log n)
comparisons is fundamentally better (except in very small sets) than a bubble
sort that typically takes O(n^2) comparisons."

Small nitpick: while average time of the quicksort algorithm is O(n log n),
the worst case is O(n^2).

~~~
Jach
Another nitpick, several good quicksorts use insertion sorts for small sets
which absolutely trounce the bubble sort. (I really think the bubble sort
should never be mentioned; it's unintuitive and _slow as tar_. Teach the
insertion sort!)

~~~
burgerbrain
Bubble sort is the fastest sort for sets of size two.

Now, arguably there isn't really much functional difference between sorts on
sets of size two, but the simplicity of bubble sort gives it an advantage for
this extreme case.

~~~
lukeschlather
That generally applies to anywhere you're coding in something raw like C or
assembly on very small datasets and don't want to deal with the mental
overhead of picking and writing an efficient sorting algorithm. For sets of
less than 100 items, it's not worth the bother.

I actually did that in a programming contest once, having solved the hard part
of the problem and being left with nothing but sorting the results.

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joe_the_user
"One hypothesis (which I'm partial to) is that language is a substitute for
the physical grooming that maintains social hierarchy in primate groups."

Lately, I've noticed the need to attribute a fixed purpose to any given
evolutionary innovation. But if a given innovation happens to have rather
general utility, such attribution seems unnecessary.

Why not say language evolved and it was useful for and replaced quite a few
earlier, "clunkier" adaptations, from lice-picking-as-social-lubricant upward?

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unicornporn
<http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/meatspace>

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InclinedPlane
The internet is not a thing, it's long past time for people to stop thinking
of it that way. It's a medium, like radio, television, or books.

~~~
SerpentJoe
What's the difference between a medium and a thing?

~~~
InclinedPlane
A thing is limited in extent, it's finite, a single creation. I can talk about
_a_ book and I can discuss its content, nature, and quality, but I can't talk
about _books_ or literature in the same way. Literature is a medium, it's
unclosed, and non-finite. It's greater in extent than a single human mind can
fully comprehend. And it's continuously growing and changing in a way that a
single book is not.

Far too many people still model the internet mentally as a "thing", and they
tack on exceptions to the basic thing model, when they should be mentally
transitioning completely to the medium model. Books, movies, television,
music, painting, the internet.

