EdEarl

True, computers aren't powerful enough to be trained for more than one complex task at a time. You are a hard sell. No matter, it will happen.

So you think the Jeopardy game won by the program Watson was rigged, and that Watson had all the answers before the game started? No! Watson got the questions at the same time as the other players, sifted through millions of pages of data on the internet (e.g., Wikipedia), decided how to answer, and beat the best human players ever to play. AI isn't programmed to come up with all possible answers, it is programmed to work like a brain, and subsequently taught things necessary to make relevant decisions. Then, they make decisions based on conditions and knowledge, just as a human.

We are the dominant species on Earth. We use sonar, radar, airplanes, and other technology to do things we do not possess inherently. With communication, organization, and technology, we can and are destroying species after species. These things do not make us better, just more powerful; in fact, one can argue that power corrupts, and is therefore bad. Sometimes our actions are inhumane, and can be as ruthless as any predator, like a cat playing with prey before killing it. In my opinion, we are more super animal than non animal.

On this thread you have 18 views, maybe someone will reply. I don't know what you are asking; thus, have nothing to say about it.

Multiple posting the same message is unnecessary.

I think when I wrote, "Bats and chimps aren't as capable as people," it was the result of blended thoughts. The OP is about species dominance/not, which blended with Top of the Pecking Order. In most cases a man is top of the pecking order, when species interact. However, TPO depends on the interaction of individuals, and TPO may change from interaction to interaction. People think they are rational, whether or not they are. Neural nets compare input with stored memories, and similar memories are retrieved by queries, sometimes with data missing. A common error mode is caused by incomplete memories.

My blood vessels are deep, which causes problems with less skilled phlebotomists. I believe an image of the vein on my skin would not always help because the needle must traverse some tissue between the skin surface and vessel; thus, needles would have to be aimed at the right angle to get from skin surface to the vessel successfully. A 25g needle is 0.5mm in diameter, with the point being much finer. Transistors have now been made as small as 1 micron =, 0.001mm. I think it will not be long before a sensor can be put on the end of needles that can sense at least pressure and temperature, to micro control the needle direction (perhaps 2 mm variation from the phlebotomist's attempt. The needle would aim itself at the vessel.

TY. Your correction was correct, and my post would have been better without that statement, either in error or corrected.

Bats and chimps aren't as capable as people, but we haven't learned much about the toothed whales. Dolphins are very smart, but I expect their bigger cousins to be even smarter. The long finned pilot whale has about 1.5 times as many neurons is its cerebral cortex as a human. I cannot imagine how they employ that huge brain.

This old hippie would share some with you anytime.

How many ways can we be elite? Raise our esteem beyond plants and animals, and we are supreme, better than trolls, geeks, dimwits, scientists and people of other colors, creeds and nationalities. Let's cut the crass.

IDK what the Milky Way was like 8B years ago.

@Lo Autism has a broad spectrum of symptoms; some are able to survive without heroic efforts to help them. People have a desire to help others who are injured or disabled, that may have help them survive. Whatever the reasons, it is obvious genes survived that contribute or allow autism. It is a mystery that may one day be unraveled.

In an infant Universe in which ambient energy makes temperature and light ideal for making life, why is it necessary to have a planet. Perhaps a droplet of chemicals of appropriate size, among trillions upon trillions of droplets, dust and gas in space coalesced into life, and subsequently landed on a planet.

@Lo So are scientists, but they tend to have a disproportionately large affect on culture.

Since the flood defenses are too expensive, we will procrastinate until a disaster occurs.

Unfortunately we have not been repairing infrastructure fast enough, dams have broken, and many others are leaking.

This youtube SciShow, Could Life be Older than Earth, gives a tiny bit of evidence that the panspermia seeded life on Earth. Alexi Sharov and Richard Gordon wrote Life Before Earth that is the basis of this youtube video. The paper abstract from arXiv.org (Cornell University Library) follows: Prior to hearing this evidence for panspermia, I thought it to be unlikely, but now it seems most probable. Is it possible the Mars sized body that hit Earth and created the Moon is the rogue planet that originally spawned life, or is a more complex chain of events more likely. Will we ever be able to simulate the chain of events to find the/a Mother planet of life that may no longer exist.

According to this article, homo sapiens sapiens developed these genes about 280,000 years ago, but other homo sapiens do not share it. Temple Grandin said, Temple Grandin's website says, If Temple Grandin is right, then neanderthal smart may not have done much visual thinking, music and math thinking, or verbal logic thinking. This hypothesis may explain why we are artists and scientists and neanderthals were not.

Homo sapiens sapiens are less prone to injury than homo neanderthalensis; thus, I suggested neanderthals may have developed circuit redundancy as an alternative to their large brain indicating superior intelligence. They may have been more intelligent, but artifacts found during digs don't suggest it. I understand brain volume is one of the few indicators of intelligence we have that can be tracked into prehistory. Cave paintings and other art are also indicators of intelligence; they have been found as far back as 40K years. A Cro Magnon skull about 28K years old is supposed to be 15-20% larger than ours. That may be the skull of a giant, or it may represent an average Cro Magnon, IDK; the fossil record is Spartan, and my knowledge is pitifully incomplete. Scientists want to draw reasonable conclusions from the evidence, but I believe the evidence is so sketchy that new finds may overturn current reasonable conclusions. I'm skeptical.

This correlation is for brain sizes of today. Since soft tissue does not survive in fossils, we cannot know if the soft tissue today is the same of different from soft tissue of fossils. Perhaps the larger brain cavity held less capable neurons or poorly organized neural networks, and the larger brains found in fossils held less less capable brains. Neanderthals lived a rough life, fossils often show that bones were broken. This lifestyle suggests they may have also gotten concussions, which often damages brain tissue. A larger brain may have been an adaptation to accommodate frequent brain damage.

I agree with you, imatfaal. Have you seen I don't know how to summarize this letter, except to say it is civil bitching at Trump; both my wife and I enjoyed it.

The PIC microprocessors were 8-16 bit machines; the 1620 was a 4-bit machine made before integrated circuits with germanium transistors about the size of a pencil eraser. Each 6 bit memory word had a parity bit, a flag bit, and 4 bits that contained a decimal digit (0-9) or other stuff. A sequence of 5 digits was a memory address. The RISC PIC was complex compared to the 1620 CPU, but comparison is kind of like apples and oranges.

A long time ago, I played on an IBM 1620 computer, which had a number of odd features, one of which was it loaded the addition and multiplications tables from disk and did decimal arithmetic with a variable number of digits using these two tables. Computers typically operate on binary values using hardware to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Although, an iterative division algorithm such as Newton–Raphson division is commonly used; it can be built entirely with hardware, but is often microcode. AFAIK most people don't care about how computers do arithmetic, except hardware designers and a few geeks like me.

Three quarters of the world's mega cities are by the sea. Climate change and rising sea levels will destroy the homes of billions of people and cause a mass migration, which will result in many deaths. Other effects of climate change, for example crop failures from drought, will increase the migration. All this movement will result in violence that reduces world population significantly; some say by 50%, and a few believe man will become extinct. I think we are not in serious trouble from overpopulation. Our troubles are elsewhere and our efforts to abate climate related deaths is more important than efforts to lessen overpopulation. The UN says we have already lost 100M people from climate change, and I believe the Earth’s population will decrease by 25%, if we work to save as many as possible.