It needn’t be a “free lunch” at all. An O(n^1000) algorithm for an NP-complete problem would constructively prove that P=NP yet be completely useless for solving any NP problems in practice
It was still there up to Windows XP, although by XP it had become a legacy component lacking support for newer clipboard formats. Vista removed it. The NT/2000/XP version supported sharing clipboard data across your local network using NetDDE
Office also used to come with its own clipboard viewer app, with history support. It is still there in recent versions, as an option within the Word/Excel/etc UIs, but if you go back far enough (97? 2000?) it was a separate EXE you could use without having any of the main Office apps open.
> A new "math" might be needed, but an answer (affirming or not) will be found.
What if there exists a proof that P!=NP, but the shortest possible proof of that proposition is a googolplex symbols that long? Then P!=NP would be true, and provable and knowable in theory, yet eternally unprovable and unknowable in practice
That's exactly the kind of situation I had in mind when I wrote that.
Goodstein’s theory would take more symbols than there are atoms in the observable universe to write down in "classic" maths. To "fix" this, mathematicians had to use a "new" way of thinking about infinity known as transfinite induction.
I think if we're smart enough to detect(?) a proof, we'll find a way to express it in a finite manner.
Couldn’t you equally say “The fact that thousands of people have failed to prove that P!=NP indication that it is probably not true”?
My completely unscientific hunch is someone will eventually prove that P=?=NP is independent of ZF(C). Maybe the universe just really wants to mess with complexity theorists
My philosophy of math muscles tingle at both sentences at about the same rate.
P=NP and P=!NP are both proven nor disproven. (There is redundant information in this sentence.)
History shows us that the historical / ‘effort’ argument is not applicable to mathematics. All proofs were unproven once until proven successfully for the first time. Harder problems need bigger shoulders to stand on. Sometimes this is due to new tools, sometimes it is a magically gifted individual focusing on the problem, usually some mix of both. All we know is that all before have failed. It’s one of the beauties in math.
Maybe I should have written: "Many have tried to find algorithms in P to solve NP problems and failed to find them." Even now, many people are working on algorithms to find solutions for NP problems. I understand that it has been proven that it is not possible to proof P=NP? using 'algorithms'. That might mean that even when a proof is found that P=NP that there still will be no P algorithm to solve NP problems.
Someone might eventually provide a non-constructive proof that P=NP - a proof that such an algorithm must exist but which fails to actually produce one.
Or even a galactic algorithm-an algorithm for solving an NP-complete problem that is technically in P, but completely useless for anything in practice, e.g. O(n^10000000)
> ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it?
When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness soon resulting in accidental death. Finally, for all we know there is a long tail of obscure disease processes that only kick in after lifespans no one has as yet ever reached-and even though that too might eventually be solved, if it takes you a thousand years to find the first case of such a disease, how many will die from it before you find a cure?
> it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play
Cory Doctorow's wonderful sci-fi book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" explored exactly this in interesting ways. In the book people in the future can live essentially forever by transferring their consciousness into new bodies. They can also back up the contents of their consciousness, something most people do nightly but certainly before doing some dangerous extreme sport. Doing dangerous things without backing yourself up is considered tantamount to suicide since you lose all the memories and personal growth, essentially the person you became since your last backup.
People do get bored and will sometimes choose to "deadhead" for hundreds of years at a time, which is putting yourself into stasis and skipping those centuries. The book is full of provocative ideas about how practical immortality might actually work on a personal and societal level.
Life extension to make people live several times longer? Seems plausible we’ll get there eventually, simply by extrapolating current trends in science and biotechnology, and observing what is possible in other species.
Mind uploading? That’s a whole other level of sci-fi. It isn’t extrapolating what we already have, it is waving your hand and declaring “as far as we know it isn’t physically impossible so why wouldn’t we get there eventually?”
Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?
> Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?
You don’t need sci-fi mind backups for that. How certain are you that when you go to sleep tonight, the person who wakes up tomorrow will be „actually you”? How certain are you that all your memories were lived by „actually you”?
The answer, I suppose, is that we don’t know what „actually you” even means, how consciousness works, or why you’ve even got a (seemingly) continuous internal experience.
I think there's no "you", just an illusion that there's this uninterrupted "you"-ness from birth to death. It's a very useful illusion for the most part.
I view life (in the philosophical sense; consciousness) as the stream of subjective experiences (qualia) that arise out of life (in the biological sense; neurons and such). Right now my life consists of a collection of sustained interest in this discussion, a little hunger, the qualia of seeing the screen and the realization that I'm sitting a bit uncomfortably. In a few moments "I" will be a collection of other ephemeral qualia.
There's no "real" continuation between one experience and then next, just like there's no real continuation between my past "self" and my future "self", but they're both extremely useful illusions. I'll eat to subside that hunger that was registered a moment ago or change my position to get comfortable. I'll be responsible for "my" previous actions, as well. I'll basically be able to function as a temporally continuous being.
On the topic of immortality, I'd like to be virtually immortal so I can pursue my goals indefinitely. If I stop having goals or feel like I've had enough, I could always kill myself. My goals arise from my ethics, my biological needs and probably many other things. Why would I be OK with biology and death preventing me from achieving my goals at some arbitrary age?
So for me "immortality" is both being able to continue the illusions of self indefinitely (which I admit, feels good intrinsically), and being to continue the pursuit of my goals indefinitely. The goals seem to actually have more "real" continuity than "I" do.
The most troubling thing with immortality is the biological imperative to live that makes suicide so hard. But I think after a few centuries many people will reach that point. It's not a bad thing, it's just a personal choice.
We can't even tell for certain the we have existence in time beyond just this moment - our only source of that is a memory of time passing, which we can't validate.
We know other species have different maximum lifespans-some shorter, some longer. Obviously this is determined by genetics-as our knowledge of that subject continues to improve, why wouldn’t we eventually work out how to alter it?
We can already change the maximum lifespan of some other species. Why shouldn’t we expect to gradually be able to do it for more species? And then what makes humans special that we couldn’t eventually do the same for humans?
You're making a huge leap there based on zero scientific evidence. No one has ever demonstrated maximum lifespan extension for mammals living in the wild. Experiments have been limited to animals living in nice safe, sterile cages. There's no free lunch in genetics and modifications that increase maximum lifespan are likely to result in other undesirable changes. Like suppression of immune response can be helpful but that comes with a huge obvious downside if you're ever exposed to random pathogens. Outside of some very limited genetic defects it's usually impossible to alter a single trait in isolation.
No one has ever done it is not in itself evidence it can’t be done, only that it is hard.
And my point was-no matter how hard human life extension is, mind uploading is many orders of magnitude harder. The first, it seems likely in principle that we could achieve it if only we knew the right genetic changes to make-now, you may be right that in a thousand years we still won’t work out in practice exactly what they are-but human life extension has a certain kind of theoretical in principle feasibility which could well coexist with practical infeasibility; mind uploading lacks even that level of theoretical in principle feasibility.
To even consider "immortal" as possible suggests someone hasn't had a lot of formal math training. Infinity is rather large. In an infinite amount of time, any possible conjunction of circumstances that could cause an immortality system to fail will happen. Talking in thousands, millions or even billions of years doesn't even need to be rounded to be basically zero when compared to eternity.
Death is a certainty. No amount of technology can change that even theoretically. We don't even have reason to be confident that the universe itself is eternal, let alone any component of it.
I don't think I am. What would the path be to thinking it is possible? In the best case scenario where everything we know about physics turns out to be wrong and the universe miraculously allows complex eternal patterns to form it'd still eventually end up as some entity that thought a completely different way, had a completely different form, and has a very limited understanding of the concept of "what I am" because it'd have to keep changing parts of itself due to unexpected circumstances. It'd be a ship of Thesius to the point where there wasn't even a memory of what a ship was any more. A severe Alzheimers patient would be the same person they always have been compared to what an eternity of change would bring.
If that is immortality then we may as well call it a tautology and say we're already immortal. None of the things that make people who they are need to be preserved to achieve it so we're realistically already there.
Living an absurdly long time I can get behind. Billions of years, trillions of years, unimaginable numbers of years, sure. That could happen. But immortality isn't an option, everything eventually dies off unless we play semantic games where there aren't any properties of the thing that need to be preserved. And maybe even reality has an expiration date for all we know, which would render the whole project moot.
If we look at afterlife beliefs-and their secular substitutes such as life extension, cryonics, mind uploading, simulationism, quantum immortality-I don’t think they all have the same motivation-two people may adopt the same belief with different psychological motivations.
For some people, the idea that their present conscious moment might eventually be left permanently without any future extension is terrifying-but provided that doesn’t happen, they might be neutral (or even positive) about the prospect of the contents of that consciousness eventually becoming so radically transformed that it becomes a completely different person, or even something which transcends human notions of personhood, albeit ultimately still continuous with the person they are now. For other people, that prospect is terrifying. It really depends on what one is most attached to - the mere continuation of one’s own consciousness, or its distinctive contents that makes you you.
Maybe. There's plenty of science fiction that addresses this. For example the "meths" (short for Methuselah) in altered carbon, who achieve immortality by making backups of their brains that can be spawned to cloned bodies. You could recover from accidents, or roll back to before the obscure disease kicked in
It might look like immortality to outside observers, but I don't see how it is the same thing
Any process that could theoretically allow me to exist at the same time as my future self must clearly not be me anymore
So any kind if "mind backup" is a copy. A clone with a copy of my memories absolutely cannot be me. We would somehow need to be able to transfer my consciousness into a clone body
It seems very likely to me that consciousness is actually a side effect of a physical network in the brain and cannot actually be separated from the biological brain to move to an artificial brain
In the Altered Carbon world there are strict laws against “double sleeving”, but it happens whenever the plot benefits.
One character has an entire island of populated exclusively by herself.
They never go into why it’s illegal. I think it’s implied they know a copy isn’t the original, but they don’t want to think about it. Too unpleasant an idea.
> One problem that I have with trying to understand "time" is that we can't measure how quickly it "flows" or at least how quickly we travel through it.
Our experience of time passing is heavily influenced by the temporal granuality of our subjective experience-at the upper end, “now” lasts 2-3 seconds; at the lower end, our temporal discrimination goes down to tens of milliseconds for visual and tactile stimuli, and reaches down to microseconds for certain types of auditory stimuli. But, one supposes other species with different neurology would have these durations be shorter or longer, which would make time pass more slowly or faster for them, in subjective terms.
> Existing for zero time would imply it never existed.
In the mathematics of infinity, something can have exactly zero probability yet still happen, and exactly one probability yet nonetheless fail to happen (hence the standard term “almost surely”).
If something can have literally zero probability of existing yet still exist, why can’t it exist for literally zero time yet still exist?
B2C businesses need consumers. If AIs take all the jobs, then most of the population-minus the small minority who are independently wealthy and can live off their investments-go broke, and can’t afford to buy anything any more. Then all the B2C businesses go broke. Then all the B2B businesses lose all their B2C business customers and go broke. Then the stock market crashes and the independently wealthy lose all their investments and go broke. Then nobody can afford to pay the AI power bills any more, so the AIs get turned off.
And that’s why across-the-board AI-induced job losses aren’t going to happen-nobody wants the economic house of cards to collapse. Corporate leaders aren’t stupid enough to blow everything up because they don’t want to be blown up in the process. And if they actually are stupid enough, politicians will intervene with human protectionism measures like regulations mandating humans in the loop of major business processes.
The horse comparison ultimately doesn’t work because horses don’t vote.
Businesses need consumers when those consumers are necessary to provide something in return (e.g. labor). If I want beef and only have grass, my grass business needs people with cattle wanting my grass so that we can trade grass for beef, certainly. But if technology can provide me beef (and anything else I desire) without involving any other people, I don't need a business anymore. Businesses is just a tool to facilitate trade. No need for trade, no need for business.
Can the process be similar to a sudden collapse of USSR's economic system? The leaders weren't stupid and tried to keep it afloat but with underlying systemic issues everything just cratered.
Can the process be modelled using game theory where the actors are greedy corporate leaders and hungry populace?
This is the optimistic take, too. There are plenty of countries which don’t care about votes, indeed there are dictators that don’t care about their subjects, they only care about outcomes for themselves. The economic argument only works in capitalism and rule of law - and that’s assuming money is worth anything anymore.
The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with social stability. Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process? Or will they enact human protectionism regulations? What Would Xi Jinping Do?
Look at what China does to protect its citizens against social media. You see China enacting many of the social media protections that many HN enthusiasts demand, yet Sinophobia makes them reframe it as a negative. "Children shouldn't have access to social media, except when China does it then it's bad!"
> Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process?
If AI can take all the jobs (IMO at least a decade away for the robotics, and that's a minimum not a best-guess), the economy hasn't been destroyed, it's just doing whatever mega-projects the owners (presumably in this case the Chinese government) want it to do.
That can be all the social stability stuff they want. Which may be anything from "none at all" to whatever the Chinese equivalent is of the American traditional family in a big detached house with a white picket fence, everyone going to the local church every Sunday, people supporting whichever sports teams they prefer, etc.
I don't know Chinese culture at all (well, not beyond OSP and their e.g. retelling of Journey to the West), so I don't know what their equivalents to any of those things would be.
> The idea in the article would refute the inductive step.
No it doesn't. The article describes a proof that it is impossible for a computer to simulate this physical universe with perfect accuracy; but, that's not actually a problem for Nick Bostrom's simulation argument. For the simulation argument to work, you don't need to simulate the universe with perfect accuracy – just with sufficient accuracy that your simulated people can't distinguish it from a real one. And this proof isn't about "ability to simulate a universe to the point the simulated people can't tell that it is a simulation", it is about "ability to simulate a universe with perfect accuracy". So the proof isn't actually relevant to that argument at all.
Please explain how to simulate a universe which is indistinguishable from a simulation but which is not accurate according to the rules of the article.
Does the article propose anything empirically testable?
I mean, suppose we are actually in a computer simulation-what observations could we perform, which according to the rules of this article, would show that we were in one, and not the “real” world?
Addendum: from what I understand, the article’s proof relies on computational quantum gravity having a Gödel sentence. Now, quantum gravity is in practice, as far as we know, experimentally untestable-the distinctive phenomena it predicts only occur at scales far beyond our present technological ability to explore-and who can say if that will ever change. So, is it possible for a computer to simulate humanity as it currently exists, such that the simulated humans couldn’t detect they were simulated? I don’t know; but what I can confidently say, is this research has nothing useful to say about that question, because this is theoretical quantum gravity research, and I’m not aware of any good reason to believe quantum gravity has any relevance to answering that specific question. This research claims to show computers are incapable of simulating aspects of reality which are empirically unavailable to us; even if the research is right, it makes zero difference to the question of whether the actual empirical experiences we do have are simulated or not.
The article claims to prove no computer could accurately simulate quantum gravity. Suppose they are right, and as a result our simulators are forced to make quantum gravity experiments (if that were a thing) give “incorrect” answers, because the real ones are uncomputable. Would that be proof we live in a simulation? Or would it be taken as proof that quantum gravity (whether loop quantum gravity or M theory or whatever) had finally been empirically refuted?
That said, if they really wanted to give us the “correct” answer-why would they bother when we could never know that a wrong answer were wrong?-why couldn’t they just suspend the simulation, run the experiment themselves, then resume it simulating the result?
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