From http://www.public-domain-photos.com/ John Sullivan
I am more a cat person than a dog person. Not that I dislike dogs but I just find cats easier to care for and better adapted to a suburban environment. Our three cats come and go as they please through cat doors and, apart from waking us if we oversleep, seldom demand anything more regular feeding and occasional attention, which provides us with pleasure too.
Dogs, however, have a long history with humans. Continue reading
This article is a few years old but I just came upon it. It gives a couple of good reasons why strong AI might not be so easy after all.
In a new study Life Before Earth, Alexei A. Sharov and, Richard Gordon argue that the complexity of life grows exponentially over time in a manner similar to Moore’s Law. They “measure genetic complexity by the length of functional and non-redundant DNA sequence rather than by total DNA length.” When they plot this measure on a graph with representative types of organisms they find the greatest complexity found in life on Earth at any point in time doubles every 376 million years. If the line on the graph is extended backward, the beginning point of the line, the hypothetical beginning of life, is about 9.7 billion years ago. This is before Earth existed. From that, they conclude that life must not have originated not on Earth.
While I am not totally convinced of their argument, the authors certainly raise some provocative questions.
Broad Speculations 