Next stop! Eusociality! (eusocialness? eusociety?)

They are on the path to colonial spiders! Think ants are bad? Wait till there are co-operative nests of millions of social spiders...

So my question is, if they were able to do this in the 90s, what exactly have we achieved since then? I have to imagine that even if the current stuff being done isn’t the first, that it has improved in some way.

Why don't goosebumps count? It's a change in skin texture in response to an environmental change, sounds pretty similar to me. And I bet there are other vertebrates that can do similar things...

“artificial” intelligence is intelligence that we created rather than what evolved naturally. Conciousness is (probably anyways) not something we could create, it’s an emergent property of systems that have general intelligence (again probably, since we don’t actually know entirely what conciousness is). I will admit…

And what point did I prove exactly? You responded to my original post that was solely about the fact that the substrate on which we run our minds doesn’t matter. I think that’s the only point I’ve been trying to make and I think I made it quite well.

We already have artificial intelligence without conciousness. What do you think a Roomba is? or any of the other robots that do things on their own. They are very narrow, limited intelligences. We don’t yet have artificial GENERAL intelligence, which seems like it would probably require conciousness but since we still…

That’s an engineering problem not a philisophical one.

There is no such thing as “artificial conciousness” There is artificial life or intelligence, which might have conciousness, but conciousness is just conciousness. And you are totally right, we haven’t proven that we can do it yet. But that doesn’t change the fact that theoretically if we could run your mind on a…

The physical hard drive doesn’t matter at all. In your real body, it get’s changed slowly over the course of your life time. Your brain cells replace themselves constantly. All that really matters is the pattern of information. You copy that onto a new substrate and that substrate is “you”.

...are really not as complicated as people like to think.

The concept sounds cool but these are exactly the kinds of products that I refuse to buy name brand and instead get generic. If I could get one and program it for specific products instead of having to buy branded items, I might actually get it.

"Good enough" is exactly what human pilots are right now. If you think they are perfect you are fooling yourself. And the statistics I listed are all for flights with 19 or more passengers, so no personal flights. And you are right, you are far more likely to die from a car accident caused by a driver error. So get…

You are right that plane flight is incredibly safe, and that crashes in general are rare. But in the 2000's, over 60% of plane crashes worldwide were caused by some kind of pilot error. Assuming that AI flight is good enough, why wouldn't we choose to reduce even a small number by 60%?

And I don't like the idea of the entity in charge of my plane being prone to falling asleep, not paying attention to what they are doing, getting distracted, or any of the thousand other ways that human pilots can mess up and crash a plane.

I don't know enough about the current state of AI flying to answer for sure, but in principle? I would in a hearbeat. It's possible that right now AI flight isn't good enough (although I doubt it) and if that is the case, then no I wouldn't. But in 5 or 10 years when computers are better pilots than humans? You bet…

The argument that an AI might make mistakes is literally the worst argument against having computers take over a task. He is 100% correct that inevitably a situation will come up that wasn't programmed in or there will be a hardware fault or a software fault or something and a plane will crash in a way that a human…

Would anyone recommend this for relatively large backup uses? I work in a fisheries ecology lab that does video analysis from deep water cameras, right now we have about 30 TB of local hard drive space for all of our videos and various backups. Would something like this make sense as an alternative to our own backups?…

wouldn't this drive the price of a single ad up? Your ad is now more relevent and better targeted, that's a better product that is worth more money. Advertisers might end up spending less since they won't buy ads in places that aren't worth it, but it seems like a targeted ad spot should be more valueable than a…

It wasn't a question I had explicitly asked but when I took my introduction to evolution course in undergrad, the explanation of genetic algorithms was the best, most complete argument I had ever heard for why the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selction is correct. It goes as follows: