Reply To: space architecture
Originally posted by FIN
yes. i agree. where the machines will have to be programed to adapt to it’s environs and then so given the scope to “grow”.
Naw, you have it on backways! 🙂 It works the other way around – the environment always chooses some poor unsuspectiing smuck, at some particular time and place to become the dominant race – how do you think, such arse holes like humans ever managed to get where they are – on their own merit! Huh!
read on, and see what I mean exactly,
>Computers are glorified calculators
What a quote! I will have to remember it.
>I agree that the human has shown a unique ability to progress.
Not necessarily true, they stayed using basic stone tools and without the gift of fire for millions of years. Then for some reason, something just happened suddenly and from no development whatsoever over a very extended period, you abruptly had huge leaps and bounds in their development compressed into quiet a short period of time. My own guess, is that since Dinosaurs were on the way out, nature just picked something else to be the successor – hence human beings stepped into the breach.
It is like re-introducing the wolf back into Yellow Stone National Park – every system needs that vital component in order to function correctly – that component will always be filled by some species. In the case of the wolfs at Yellowstone, they are finding after ten years, they no longer have the same trouble with other species breeding out of control – everything else has stabilised. Of course, farmers are worried about the wolf attacking the cattle etc still, but largely the move has worked out well.
Upright walking and increasing of brain mass all happened in the human species, subsequent to this dramatic beginning in the acceleration of human development. If you like, the environment just happened to choose human beings – the same way as it will someday more than likely just ‘choose’ machines to be our successors. I love the part in the movie by Spielberg, called AI, where a last of the batch, human constructed robot named David I think, remains the only lasting legacy of the human species to the newer and more sophisticated machine species. I think we know very little about Dinosaurs, but they were the dominant species for millions of years of the earth’s history.
> the operating system of ur pc is not quite what we are talking about and neither are we
>saying ur pc will sprout legs and begin to walk.
Actually, the only thing that robotics has hightlighted is how complex the actual act of upright walking is. It is something which all human beings instinctively take for granted and learn naturally. It is something our built environments are constructed around. You start hitting all kinds of complexity brick walls and the project to make machines walk around an environment designed for humans ultimately fails. The same as the environment in which Dinosaurs thrived was unsuitable for human habitation and development. However, robots are great for crawling down sewer pipes and places where humans cannot – sending AI bots into our own veins, is another example, going to Mars etc, etc, etc.
Our dependency on robots will grow as time goes on, our privacy will be non-existent. See the movie AI by Spielberg when you get around to it.
>It all works from the same principle the only difference is that the computers you are
>talking about have much more capacity, more complex programmes containing much
>higher numbers of viarables in their decision making process.
Simply not true, everything in a computer/machinery is inherent quite simple – it depends just on modulations of voltage in electricity to make 1 and 0s. Everything has to fit through that same small window – that is why you need a computer chip to work faster and faster – hence the hipe about MHZ. Mind you, as computer chips become smaller and smaller, and you can fit more onto the same piece of cheap, bulk, Si wafer – then sort of AI networks can be simulated very easily. It becomes less and less about speed and MHZ and more to do with AI networking.
SGI and NASA are always combining together thousands, literally thousands of chips to work as a single image of an operating system – then you can really begin to plug in the big questions and get your answers. To reference the article about WiFi – I want to be able to stick my own PDA out of the window of my Taxi, in a downtown traffic jamb and instantly, without being plugged in, it communicates with all the other machines in the vicinity – it draws its power from the Radio waves etc, etc. See how machines could be more adaptable than humans? Unless we can develop mind reading capabilities that is.
I mean, this cross-communication could be really cool on Mars, where whole armies of the buggers would work like in the Star Wars movies – you could use the planet Mars, to have like of Paint Ball gaming on drugs, using cheap useless robots. Of course the robots would eventually just get tired of that an rebel on us! 🙂
Do a goggle for things like ‘Red Storm’. The next Playstation 3, will be designed a bit like this – a load of little computers stuffed into one chip. As chips become cheaper and cheaper this becomes possible. The trouble with MicroSoft products, is they never seem to be able to ‘move’ off of the simple PC – even though they were extremely sucessful on that one platform. OSes like Linux have been extremely sucessful on larger clusters of hundreds and thousands of computers though. Strange.
Unlike our own human biological networks, which manage to construct complex arrangements and patterns. When machines begin to intelligently recognise patterns, as in art with humans, maybe then. . . that is mostly what architects are trained to do isn’t it? I mean, you know automatically when a young architectural student has suddenly ‘transitioned’ when the patterns of line weights and patterns they make on a drawing presentation actually begins to communicate a message above the addition of its components and becomes the multiple of its components.
I must be stupid as an Architect, as I failed to ‘transition’. I feel at home with computers in this respect. 🙂 What is crucial to understand from the ‘Chip Foundry’ article is that each chip ‘bakes’ itself differently. No two are exactly alike, and machinery does go out of sync by accident, so the odds are, that eventually something strange and errie is going to just happen.
>It all comes back to risk and reward there has been nothing found in space that merits colonisation.
>Resources should be directed at two aspects of space, the sun and the harnessing of
>solor energy and the moon the harnessing of tidal energy. Other expenditure is simply
>indulging the whims of a particular scientific elite
But don’t you just love all the pomp and cerimony of it all? I mean imagine trying to make a good Bruce Willis – type action flic about tidal energy! By the way, good post there What?
