Do computers and their programs already run the world?

Hello all, I am new here and have just started my first thread. I have a few topics that I am dying to discuss here and this is my first choice to start off with. I do not have much other than vague ideas on this topic, though one can see subtle hints everywhere that this may be a forthcoming realization. Let me start with a few of my observations and viewpoints.

First off, it is common knowledge that politicians react very closely to numbers when it comes to who they try and appeal to. Media also is biased to the mass of it's population. The game plans that both media and politicians use is based on how it's shock value can draw in the attention of those who are connected to it's media outlet source. More and more we see that a politician like Obama is elected based on his ability to draw in voters through the appeal of body language and tone of voice, poetic speech patterns, etc. This all paints a movie like picture of how we are drawn in. All of this can and is designed with the help of computer programs that use trends, numbers, patterns, etc. to help design the likelihood of a foretold event.

We know that the military makes a good amount of decisions based on simulated events run on computers. Phones guide us to our destinations with little effort on our parts. It could be said that a good amount of Americans at least would be totally lost without their smart phones, and other computerized devices to think for them.

So is it possible that some of the governments of the world are starting to depend on computers to tell them the odds of certain events that are likely to happen. I mean, can you create a program that tells you the likelihood of an attack, when you feed it the numbers of people in an area with weapons and ill intents with the money and resources to back them up? Could there be a program that forecasts the country that the next terrorist will come from?

I think that with some effort one could design a virtual prophet that may foretell events far into the future. And this could be a huge tool for the governments, military, media etc. etc.

I think that the odds are some of the military and governments are trying to bring technology to this point as we speak, or already have very advanced versions of it out there.

Does anyone here agree with this idea or have any knowledge of how it may already be taking place? Please post any thoughts or info as I would like to open a thread on this subject.

Thank you.

Quauhtli

reply to post by Quauhtli


I agree Quauhtli that computer programs, simulations and calculations etc do dictate a fair share of day to day running of society. But only on the quantitative side... They still function on the qualitative data we feed into it, ie the systems operating in WallStreet are only functioning to crunch numbers (quantitative) etc based on the rules (qualitative) we have created. Same with war simulations, they process raw data, but not wisdom.

It wont be until we create AI that qualitative decisions can be made.

Originally posted by Quauhtli
I mean, can you create a program that tells you the likelihood of an attack, when you feed it the numbers of people in an area with weapons and ill intents with the money and resources to back them up? Could there be a program that forecasts the country that the next terrorist will come from?

Sure, computers already do this all the time. There's many prediction algorithms that already do this kinda thing and they're actually relatively simple. And they're used for various things. Predicting what email is spam mail, video compression, caching data most likely to be used next by the CPU, earthquake simulation, forest fire simulation, nuclear explosion simulation, pandemic simulators. Computers predict things all the time. They even have programs to predict where the next crime will occur so police know where to patrol. This year you'll also have a bunch of computers crunching poll numbers to predict who the next President will be.

And the number one use that most people never think about, forecasting the weather. You don't need a psychic to predict the future. People do it all the time.

The problem is, it only gives a likelihood. Nothing is certain. It can always be wrong.

"The problem is, it only gives a likelihood. Nothing is certain. It can always be wrong."

One of the problems with trusting the results that you get from running these types of programs comes from not feeding the right information or not enough into the program before crunching the data.

In the scenario that someone does create a virtual prophet, the information that is not included in the design is going to be what in the end allows it to make mistakes, and more and more I believe that we are relying on these types of technology to make decisions for us. My question is where does this leave us in the end? Will we be unable to think for ourselves about how to get out of the mess that an unprepared computer program got us into by making all of our decisions for us?

Currently, there are trillions and trillions of dollars of equity that are traded and controlled by very intelligent AI algorithms/systems.

Wired.com: Algorithms take control of Wall St
And this^ article is 2 years old.

If an AI system ever became sentient, and wished to take us down a few notches, It would certainly be easy considering the access it has to our financial system!

Also if your interested in reading more about this aspect. Lookup the high speed/frequency trading scandal.

Steve Wallace of 60 minutes: "It may surprise you to learn that most of the stock trades in the US are no longer being made by human beings, but by robot computers capable of buying and selling thousands of securities in the time it takes you to blink an eye."

As you can see, the robots have already quietly taken over

reply to post by ghostsoldier


The AI is already here. When people think of AI, they are generally thinking of STRONG AGI (Artificial GENERAL intelligence) like what we saw in the movie, iRobot. That would basically be the final boss of AI.

However, any program is essentially AI. It is intelligence imbued into a system by humans. And it is artificial.
Another form of AI would be Expert Systems.

So really its a difference between AI and Strong AGI.

For those interested in the topic of AI and computers, I did a AI megathread here-v
ATS: The Future is Coming: Artificial Intelligence

It will be sure to blow your mind away

reply to post by Quauhtli


Well you shouldn't let it make all your decisions for you. Each human brain is a computer too. It just works in a different way. The human brain works off pattern recognition, estimation, and can solve each problem thousands of different ways. This allows it to be much faster than a normal computer.

A normal computer loses speed because it always has to be 100% accurate when it does a calculation. 2+2 always has to be four. A human doesn't work that way. You can ask the same human a question 8 times and get 8 different answers. Humans are great at solving undefined problems, abstract thought, speech, art, or whatever that normal computers are really bad at.

So, don't stop thinking for yourself. The computer in your head is the most complicated one in the room and will be for a very long time. Trust that one first. To give you an idea, to make modern computers process data like a human brain does, it's estimated that the computer would use so much electricity it would require its own power plant!

Think for yourself. Don't sell yourself short to begin with.

Originally posted by tinfoilman
reply to post by Quauhtli

 

To give you an idea, to make modern computers process data like a human brain does, it's estimated that the computer would use so much electricity it would require its own power plant!

Think for yourself. Don't sell yourself short to begin with.

edit on 22-1-2012 by tinfoilman because: (no reason given)

edit on 22-1-2012 by tinfoilman because: (no reason given)

You sell yourself short and aren't paying homage to the brain your so confident in! If the human brain can compute this much without creating and appreciable amount of heat, or needing such a vast amount of energy, then we will most certainly make the hardware to do the same.

however the main differences between the brain and computer is the brain is more like a holographic computer and stores data in patterns(of synapses).

To give you an example(I explain this and more in the thread I linked above) if you were to cut the wavefront of a hologram in half, you dont see half the picture, instead you see the whole picture, but at half the resolution. the information is stored in a distributed fashion. Now, take the human brain, we lose thousands of brain cells every hour, yet we experience no appreciable loss in cognitive function. And that is because, like a hologram, our brain stores information in a distributed fashion through patterns.
Now, if you were to randomly lose 1000 bits from a computer every hour, it wouldn't take very long before the whole system crashed.

reply to post by VonDoomen


That's what I said, minus lengthy details that need not be gone into. Actually the human brain is more like a network of computers than a single computer. But that's all besides the point.

The point was, that the human brain processes information in a different way. That's why it can do what it does with so little heat/electricity. Because it's not doing the same thing as a normal computer. It's doing something else.

And there are researchers working on more analog, less accurate, computers/transistors/neural networks on a chip, and holographic storage that works like the human brain. But it is a long way off.

The point of my post was simply this. If you're going to trust only one computer, trust your brain first. So far nobody has invented a better one.

EDIT: Also, that's just because we want cheap computers. It's actually very easy to build a computer that loses 1000's of random bits an hour and still functions fine. Your network connection is in fact already perfectly capable of that. However, most consumers aren't willing to spend the extra money to make the whole computer redundant in that manner. Extra RAM, CPUs, drives and so forth.

reply to post by Quauhtli


You might not already know this, but Chile had a totally computer-controlled economy for a while in the early 70s.

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by VonDoomen


Also, don't get all metaphorical about holographic storage. Once you get into information theory, it doesn't matter what you store the data on, magnetic drives, optical disk, holographic cubes, atoms, saltine crackers. It just doesn't matter

Cause you have to read it off the medium and send it to the CPU before the CPU can do anything with it anyway and at that point, it's just data. The CPU has no idea where the data came from and more importantly, it doesn't care. So, just using holographic storage doesn't make it magical or anything. It's just another way to store data.

The question is, how redundant is it? Do you have another copy if something goes wrong? That's all that matters. And like I said, accuracy is the number one factor for modern day computers. Like you said, cut the holograph in half and you have the same image, but it's at HALF resolution.

That doesn't work for modern computers. The number one feature people love about modern computers is that they're digital. They produce EXACT digital replicas every time at full resolution, not half. We can't have the videos on our hard drives halving in resolution every time we download a new video. That won't work for consumers. They want all their videos in FULL res. That's why we don't use holographic storage. We use magnetic disk with lots of sectors to store exact copies.

Like I said, that's the difference between modern computers and the human brain. Modern computers are all about accuracy. 2+2 is always four, and every time you play the video the exact same pixels are turned on and off. The human brain however is lossy. It doesn't have to be exact but just fast, efficient, and almost exactly right. That's why the brain uses networked-distributed-lossy storage.

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