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Mitchell Howe has a short article called “What are the Odds?” which discusses the bet between Ray Kurzweil and Mitchell Kapor. I love Kurzweil’s books so this caught my attention.

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a topic that always seems to drop on and off the radar of public interest in synch with Hollywood portrayals and celebrity prognostications. Indeed, the most recent spat of attention has followed a much-publicized $10,000 wager made by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil against corporate trailblazer Mitchell Kapor. The bet, solemnized at www.longbets.org (where all winnings go to charity), is that a computer, or “machine intelligence,” will pass the so-called Turing test by 2029. The Turing test, a challenge to see if a computer can fool a human judge into thinking it is human, is a traditional benchmark for the point when true Artificial Intelligence can be said to have been achieved - a historic moment, by any measure.

But with recent discussion of AI taking place in the context of a wager, debates have tended to focus on the difficulty of the problem rather than the implications - as though the arrival of true Artificial Intelligence would only mean the difference between a robot making your coffee and brewing it yourself.

What are the stakes, really? Why should this wager matter to you personally? And what, exactly, are the odds?”

Mitchell then delves in at a high level explaining the two sides of the bet. This is a great little read if you’re at all interested in AI. For further reading you should check out The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. This book is so fascinating that I read it from front to back in just a few days.

Click on over and check out Mitchell’s article “What are the Odds?”

Raging neo-cons all over the country don’t care for Ron Paul and his assertion that American interventionism in the Middle East is one important factor contributing to the radicalization of an ever-growing number of Muslims into suicidal, anti-American terrorists. But what does the leading expert on Osama bin Laden say?

Michael Scheuer is a 22 year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). From 1996 to 1999, he was the Chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station (aka Alec Station), the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorist Center. From September 2001 to November 2004, he served again as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit. His insider perspective and expertise led him to write a book, anonymously, titled Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America, Revised Edition. We now know that he is also the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.

So, if anyone would seem a natural to line up with Giuliani - who has gained his “conservative” following through his tough guy reputation - following his now-famous exchange with Dr. Paul at the South Carolina debate, it would be this guy. But that is precisely the opposite of what has happened.

This day found Scheuer standing beside the castigated Ron Paul, rather than next to the would-be defender of American Empire around the world, Rudy Giuliani. And this is what Scheuer had to say at Dr. Paul’s press conference in the nation’s capital on Thursday: “Foreign policy is about protecting America. Our foreign policy is doing the opposite.”

“Our foreign policy is doing the opposite,” he said. This is exactly what Dr. Paul has been contending - but being ridiculed as being naïve over. But if that quote isn’t clear enough, here is what Scheuer wrote in the book, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes:
“[T]he crux of my argument is simply that America is in a war with militant Islamists that it cannot avoid; one that it cannot talk or appease its way out of; one in which our irreconcilable Islamist foes will have to be killed, an act which unavoidably will lead to innocent deaths; and one that is motivated in large measure by the impact of U.S. foreign policies in the Islamic world…”

The neo-cons need to start reading some books starting with Scheuer’s own works and The 9/11 Commission Report, they also recommend other expert analyses of terrorism and interventionism, such as Chalmer Johnson’s Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.

Perhaps Dr. Paul’s “conservative” critics could do some reading, as well. If these contemporary works don’t suit them, maybe a few from the conservative canon will suffice - you know, works with authors like Edmund Burke, George Washington, and Russell Kirk, for example. Of course the neo-cons probably consider books as part of the left wing media bias as well. �