Phil Osborn

Reply to The coming AI apocalypse in Life, the Universe and Everything JoeUser Forums

Actually, frogboy, thanks for your focused, intelligent blog. Sorry I mangled my response. One of those days. I should have made the connections more clear - between putting a floor on poverty and defeating the robot takeover. I'm sure you understand this, but I screwed up. For anyone just on the scene, the logic is that robots are just like other similar scenarios that can thoughtlessly cut people out of opportunities to prosper in any meaningful sense

Reply to The coming AI apocalypse in Life, the Universe and Everything JoeUser Forums

See Comment #58, which somehow got mangled - no doubt an evil AI.. Ahem. I've written two major blogs that got into this issue: One recently on a general solution to poverty worldwide, in which I proposed a fairly small global dividend, an equal amount to every human on the planet, just to equalize the books on social justice and to keep a billion people from starving and give them some basic working capital to start producing. $500~$1000 annual

Reply to The coming AI apocalypse in Life, the Universe and Everything JoeUser Forums

I've discussed this in several of my blogs here. Try the one on a general solution to poverty (33K hits and 204 mostly intelligent and serious responses). Or look back a few years to the blog I did on a guaranteed fixed dividend here in the U.S., closely paralleling the Swiss proposal. (The Only Real Solution - November, 2008) http://philosborn.joeuser.com/article/329574/The_Only_Real_Solution </p

Scientific American Reviews in Science & Tech JoeUser Forums

I'm going to try to supplement my aging bioram with a record of whatever brilliant - or not - spin-offs from material in "Scientific American" that I'm able to generate. 1> The article "Eggshell Education" in the June 2016 issue dovetails nicely with some thinking I've been doing about mockingbirds. The OC went through a major decline in the Mockingbird population when the crows moved in en masse about 20 years ago. Every evening brough

Breakthrough in Evolutionary Theory in Science & Tech JoeUser Forums

See http://www.kurzweilai.net/why-evolution-may-be-intelligent-based-on-deep-learning My comment there: "I recall coming to essentially the same conclusion in the late '60's after reading Koestler's "The Act of Creation," or perhaps it was "Janus." I think it was referred to me by the Nathaniel Brandon Institute. As I recall, Koestler did not believe in junk DNA, for

New AI breakthru in Internet JoeUser Forums

New AI breakthrough: <div class="_1mf _1mj" d

The Rise of the Sociopath in Philosophy JoeUser Forums

This blog is intended to be derivative of my blog "On Morals." Suppose you have the misfortune to be born to wealth, but with no apparent talent for greatness. If you have good examples to emulate, you may still do ok. However, as I demonstrated in "On Morals," the crucial impetus for consciousness - what drives it - is feedback of the form of reaffirmation of reality. It is seeing the abstract made concrete - "the Word made flesh" - that fuels our pas

Space Funding or Not in Science & Tech JoeUser Forums

Update 05-02-2016 One interesting note was the focus by the NASA reps on gender balance. (My estimate is that overall, of the ~60 participants, probably at least a third were women.) The large team immediately behind me that was working on an emergency person locator APP aimed at alerting first responders as to immediate emergencies was ~gender neutral, slightly less than half women. Their top coder, by universal acclaim, was a black woman. The NASA rep

Hand-Coded vs CMS in Internet JoeUser Forums

10/09/16 More of the same. Tedious correction of product data with endless errors. Still no manual for the CMS stuff. I know how to do three or four basic operations - and my instructor on those operations got a good deal wrong. As I expected, the old website disappeared and/or was blocked from my access. This directly contradicted my own instructions as well as the job requirements, so I was finally given a new address to access what amounts to the verified

Morality, Responsibility, Pride, Guilt in Philosophy JoeUser Forums

I find myself thinking in terms of Les Miserables a lot recently. Odd the twists and turns of the mind. Imagine, if you will, the following scenario: Our protagonist suddenly recalls committing a string of unrelated crimes of whim

LOSCON Be There in Life, the Universe and Everything JoeUser Forums

The Programming Grid is on fb: https://www.facebook.com/Loscon/ Or, go here: www.LOSCON.org My schedule as a panelist: FRI 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, Marquis 2: Virtual Reality: Making an Unreal Life Occulus Rift, etc, challenges, personalizing VR, ethics and morality of VR Panelists: Keith Henson, Trina Phillips, Gene Turnbow, Willard (Phil) Osborn My comments p

The Choices We Make in Politics JoeUser Forums

Note: 12/12/2015 This blog was written shortly before the San Bernardino terror. Dylan Watkins, the founder (?), ramrod of OCVR kept telling me over the past year that my ideas were SOOOO close to this other writer that I HAD to check his book, Daemon. Finally I remembered to Google and the first thing that shows up is " Daemon and Freedomᵀᴹ comprise a two-part novel by the author Daniel Suarez about a distributed, persistent computer application, known as T

Attractors for Evil in Everything Else JoeUser Forums

So, everything appeared to be normal today at the library's public computer section. For once, even the perpetually Screaming Baby was quiet. (Perhaps GOD finally took pity on the rest of humanity and gave the kid a strep throat - or diverted a truck. Or perhaps it was some one's idea of a phone prank all along. I never actually saw the kid, but you couldn't escape the sound, every few minutes, full operatic volume. Maybe he or she matured?)

Elections for Sale in Current Events JoeUser Forums

12/03/2016: So... WHO spent the most $ (2 to 1)? WHO was elected anyway? Do I have to say it? ITYS And, to be fair, I figured that the election was probably in the bag for Clinton, anyway, regardless of funding, but the funding issue clearly did not make a difference. Trump could probably have spent a lot less and Hillary a lot more without changing the results. So, will all the experts who rake in the big bucks to help poor hapless p

Reply to Peeple watching in Internet Elemental Forums

(Phil) I'd just like to pass along that I forwarded this blog to a couple dozen of my personal contacts, with a small but strongly positive response in support of Peeple. What other synergies and plots can we add to the mix?

Peeple watching in Internet JoeUser Forums

Remember "Firefly." That should be in the back of every programmer's personal perspective, like "Remember the Alamo," "Never again!," or the "Fermi Paradox," cosmic tweets conveying the essence of a haunting question or a meta-wrong still not set right, or, ... if you will, a battle cry! Look up "Firefly." Here's a reasonable source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(website) No d

Systemic Failures Peaking? in Current Events JoeUser Forums

12/19/2015 (This is where our medical coverage dollars are eaten by the system) See also my earlier blog on errors in billing as well as major screw-ups at Social Security regarding Medicare... http://philosborn.joeuser.com/article/464456/Medicare_FRAUD_-_1-800-633-4227 <div id="yiv0287521077y

The Right to not be vaccinated in Current Events JoeUser Forums

The Morals and Rights Issues Regarding Vaccines Phil Osborn August 9, 2015 See also: http://www.sb277.org/ http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160S

On Time in Everything Else JoeUser Forums

Has anyone seen a good explanation or even just a decent discussion about "time?" I have read that the current popular scientific view of time is that the past has no more "existence" than the future. Is time like the pages of a book, that we could potentially re-read, as in "time travel?" Are there some huge number of quantized pasts? Or is it something altogether different in kind? I've read or heard about as much on this foundational sub

Secret Spies at Home in Everything Else JoeUser Forums

I loved the movie, despite its disjointedness, and it was only today, over a week later, that I realized why the scenes were set up that way. The entire movie was IMHO shot to match up with a planned theme park. Too many mis-mixed pure fantasies with hard science. Way too many scenes clearly shot with something other than the plot in mind. But the thing that really caught my attention was when I typed "to" into Google and got back a whole set of "Tom

The Strategy Room in The Media JoeUser Forums

11/14/2015 As a reward for all my good work - I have to assume - I now have 2 (TWO) separately numbered ballots for the KPFK election of the Local Station Board. Or, it could be a test of my honesty, so I better play it straight. Or, it might be entrapment, as this election cycle resulted from some intense legal action, I've heard, involving, I think, Federal Judges, WHO are not likely to be amused at seeing all their work to provide a fair election subve

Timely Links in The Media JoeUser Forums

http://www.kurzweilai.net/move-over-autonomous-ai-weapons-theres-a-new-risk-in-town-gene-drives#comments http://www.meetup.com/The-Orange-County-Libertarian-Meetup/messages/boards/ 06/28/2015 David Brin [email protected]</

Free Thinking or Else in US Domestic JoeUser Forums

I feel as though I've suddenly been dropped into Orwell's 1984, where actions are masked by words whose meanings have been carefully contorted to match a hidden PC standard. Any subject matter that does not fit the purposes of the puppet masters is excluded via marginalization. My central thesis, part A: There are ways and means to get at the truth in nearly every situatio

Hypnosis Plus in Life, the Universe and Everything JoeUser Forums

A used paperback book from 1970 - http://www.amazon.com/Explorations-hypnosis-Dave-Elman/dp/0840211430 - selling for $160 should convey something. I bought my copy way back when from either Ayn Rand's organization or from the related organization of her former lover, the recently deceased Nathaniel Branden, whose unique contribution to moral theory is re

Medicare – FRAUD - 1-800-633-4227 in Health & Medicine JoeUser Forums

Not for enjoyable reading: About a year ago, I was approached one of my supervisors at work with a proposal. I had had full-coverage insurance from ABC (Anthem/Blue Cross) and was signed up with what used to be Talbert Medical and now was reborn as Health Care Partners.</span