[FRIAM] death

[Roger Critchlow]

There's a funny post on Bunnie's blog today (
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5018) about learning to use LiteX in
place of Vivado for FPGA design.  It's because Vivado wastes FPGA footprint
by rolling in circuits you don't need, because Vivado is given away for
free by Xilinx who would love you to step up to the next larger FPGA
anytime, so they have no incentive to optimize the footprint for you.  So
Bunnie is using LiteX which is a python high level design tool that outputs
low level designs for Vivado to assemble, so you can skip the Xilinx IP
with the non-optional bloat.

It seems that this sort of dead code, undead code, zombie code problem is
fairly ubiquitous in information processing systems.  No matter whose
system, there are always things around that don't go away because nobody
cared to do anything about them.  They always need a clean reboot
eventually, or a clean reinstall, or some kind of purge to clear the
inevitable cruft of just running too long.

So maybe AIs will have molting stages?  Or maybe dreaming is the way we
purge the cruft in our heads?

-- rec --

On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 4:32 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
wrote:

> My actual question is more like:   Is death universal or is a finite
> lifetime just a sufficient solution found by evolution (and carbon-based
> life)?   Must memories be purged for progress, or is it just that that they
> _can_ be without particular harm to the species?
>
> There was a piece on 60 minutes last night about Adolfo Kaminsky who
> forged thousands of official documents to protect Jews in France.   His
> colleagues reflected on their accomplishments and didn't reflect on danger
> in what they were doing at the time, perhaps because they were so young.
>
> It could be that the high-order aspects of wisdom are cognitively too
> costly (operationally) at some point.   Diminishing returns on complexity..
> Delays on action are as dangerous as imprudent actions.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of g??? ?
> Sent: Monday, October 30, 2017 2:18 PM
> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] death
>
> Good question.  But I tend to think the problem is less about plasticity
> and more about specialization.  As we've seen, specialized (artificial)
> intelligence is relatively easy, compare termites to humans.  So-called
> general intelligence (or universal constructors) is much harder.  The
> distance between any old TM and a UTM seems quite large.
>
> Whether, once specialized, an AI can generalize is an open question.  Will
> we *grow* general AI?  Or will we construct it from scratch to be general?
>
> On 10/30/2017 01:12 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > But will this be true of AIs as well?   Assuming that this fossilization
> occurs, is that a human idiosyncrasy that plasticity reduces?   Perhaps it
> could be treated with drugs, electroshock therapy, stem cells, PTSD
> medication, etc.?
>
> --
> ☣ gⅼеɳ
>
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