Monthly Archives: January 2009

The Internet

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been thinking about the internet recently, mostly because people are always asking me since I’m online more than usual. I’m not online endlessly refreshing my Facebook or watching videos on YouTube of people crashing into fences or anything like that. The internet is like the revolution that personal computing was. A few of these ideas are taken from Meatball Sundae, which I happened to be reading at the time.

Information At Your Fingertips

Originally this was applied to computers individually, but really it’s more applicable to networks. There is really no other medium that has such an incredible amount of information with so much variety.

No Physical Limitations

It’s all digital. Stores can be infinite in size and distance does not exist. The ways you can now stay connected with people across the world are just amazing, with videos, audio, text, etc. Whatever you create can be as big and wild as you imagine it.

Ease of Publishing

No other form of media makes it so easy to publish content. You pay to publish everywhere else, but on the internet, it’s all free. Setup an account on Windows Live Spaces, and instantly you have a presence on the internet.

Power Of Voice

There is no other medium where everybody has equal power and has equal opportunity to reach the masses. You don’t need to be on a fancy TV channel or get prime spots on a magazine. If you have something new, people will come, the word will spread. Even better ideas go viral.

Scale

All other media is mostly regional, and you can only capture so many eyeballs. The internet has no boundaries, and its scale is enormous. Just recently total world internet users passed 1 billion, and that’s only 15%.

Money To Be Made

Basically, there’s a massive opportunity here, and everybody has a shot at it. Just like personal computing was back then. Some people took advantage of the opportunity, because it was the perfect time. There’s a reason Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born in the same year. Now is the perfect time to get involved. Ideally, being born in 1985 would be perfect for somebody to latch on to the internet revolution. While I can’t say what the trend to latch onto would be, but I have a couple ideas. In fact, if you get started now, it’s a tad late. So get to it.

Returning To The Random Conjecture

Posted on by
Reply

I’m currently taking AP Psychology, and I remembered a random conjecture a while back. Although I’ve only read a chapter in the book, I’ve gotten a bit more perspective on psychology and consciousness. Surprisingly my idea happens to be pretty much the same as Skinner’s idea that people are not actually in control of their actions and that there is no free will. All actions are determined by a combination of nature and nurture.

Some of these topics merge with philosophy however and start becoming confusing, as does the term consciousness itself.

But the most important part I forgot to mention about the idea is that because conscious functioning and learning of animals is just based on simple input output like machines, which is what determinism (or at least my previous idea) is, artificial intelligence could easily programmed with any type of code, since all code supports if then statements. All you would need to program any animal is to know every single variable involved, and then provide every variable a certain significance value to determine how important the variable is to the overall equation. For example, if you gave the “hunger” variable a 1/10, the algorithm would not consider than an important factor in making decisions. These default values would be your genes. However, because biological determinism simply cannot be possible, the default values can be overpowered by nurture. At this point it’s too complicated without some crazy diagram or something.

Once you can successfully mimic all the variables on a human level in a machine, all the work is pretty much done. Animals are kind of like OSs, but they are programmed to learn. So once you’ve got the “OS” ready, it’ll just start programming itself as long as you teach it.

Very disorganized idea overall, because there were too many things I wanted to cover. But at least I will remember it.

This is just an idea for now which I will come back to once I’ve mastered a few other things.