Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

3 Tory MP climate sceptics get the Greenpeace treatment – politicalbetting.com

12346

Comments

  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,226

    If I had to guess I'd say we're on course for 2-2.5C of warming at its highest point.

    That won't be fun and will cause a lot of extreme weather, migration and political disruption (remember: we are already at 1.2C of warming now) and the loss of quite a few marginal species but we won't become "extinct".

    Far from it.

    That would probably be enough warming to trigger a complete melt of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which would have state-ending consequences for many nations - how does Egypt survive without the Nile Delta?

    I'm beginning to doubt whether democracy will survive the expense, hardship and dislocations of the resulting adjustments. Food security in particular should be a major concern for the British government.

    Disruption to agriculture will increase and, as we've seen with Covid, the first instinct of many countries will be to hoard supplies and ban exports.
    Yes!! Anyone with the ear of government get this message across to those thickos please. Tell them to go and watch an old video of Jason Donovan in his technicoloured coat. 7 fat cows and 7 skinny cows.

    It should not be necessary for citizens with foresight to consider how best to stockpile nutrition. The government should be building a national strategic nutrition reserve. I don’t care whether it’s a fully nationalised endeavour or one outsourced to the big supermarkets. And they should be considering how we might close our nutrition import gap. And they should of course be doing the same thing for energy.

    It’s the national equivalent of income protection or critical illness insurance. It’s depressing how poor our strategic resilience has become.
  • Best James Bond actor. The BBC is plugging this analysis from 2015.
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p02sx893/premium-bond-with-mark-gatiss-and-matthew-sweet
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,254
    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Omnium said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    This is possibly the biggest story of the week. Or indeed the century. Completely unnoticed

    ‘US has already lost AI fight to China, says ex-Pentagon software chief’

    https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0

    A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.

    If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it

    You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.

    We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.

    People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.

    Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
    Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now

    Existentially, it frightens him
    Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.

    I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?

    The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...

    Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.

    You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...

    (*) However you define that.
    Yawwwwwwn

    See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)

    That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
    I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
    This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM

    But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:

    "There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."


    https://towardsdatascience.com/did-google-duplex-beat-the-turing-test-yes-and-no-a2b87d1c9f58
    With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.

    But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.

    The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.

    Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
    But that is how you pass the Turing Test. The computer can only pass the tests given to it. You're shifting the goalposts

    And you're also missing the point. If a computer can persuade us it is intelligent - even human - in its interactions with us, then it is, to all intents and purposes, intelligent. That's the point of the Turing Test. Is it ACTUALLY intelligent? Conscious? Thinking? Probably not, but who knows, and Immanuel Kant would struggle to give a definitive answer. And we can no more delve into its wires to seek the answer than we can open up a human brain and locate the place of consciousness

    And of course once AI reaches the stage of being indistinguishable from "true" intelligence the answer to all this is, in some senses, immaterial. There will be beings walking or talking amongst us and we will not know if they are human, or not

    This is going to have momentous effects, especially online



    Up until last year there was a wonderful thing called the Loebner Prize, which was basically the Turing test. And it awarded a prize for the chat bot best able to fool a human they were human.

    If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?

    That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.

    If you want to try the serial winner (Kuki), it's here: https://www.kuki.ai/

    But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.

    Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
    I know what they fucking do. They autocomplete. That's it
    But you seem to think that constitutes intelligence.

    It doesn't.
    Who the fuck knows what truly constitutes intelligence, let alone "self awareness". It is a mystery that has perplexed philosophers for thousands of years, I have a feeling Texas car park software salesman Bobby Smithson has not personally cracked the conundrum which has confounded the greatest human minds since Aristotle
    That's the point I've been making for years: 'intelligence' is exceptionally hard to define, and therefore an artificial intelligence is incredibly hard to define. I've heard experts from Cambridge argue over the definition of intelligence, and they're probably still at it.

    However, it is possible to say what *isn't* intelligence. A machine putting a square peg into holes in a box at random until it fits in one isn't intelligence. And the ML stuff that you're raving about isn't intelligence either.
    Head::Desk

    Which is why, of course, Alan Turing invented his test, to sidestep the impossibly complex and contentious arguments around intelligence, consciousness, Theory of Mind, and all that.

    Instead of trying to define intelligence and locate consciousness, you admit that it's indefinable "but you know it when you see it". Like pornography

    The Turing Test is the "know it when you see it" approach: to intelligence. If the computer can convince humans it is human and intelligent, it is intelligent. This is the whole fucking point of it, tho that seems to have escaped quite a few PB-ers, probably because they are as about as smart as a ZX Spectrum
    I disagree. The test sidesteps a central issue of whether the machine knows anything or whether it is a clever way of reducing the contents of libraries to smaller and more versatile format.

    The Bodleian library's contents passes, mutatis mutandis, the Turing test. But when I go to it and read the The Critique of Pure Reason, the machine, which is the Bodleian's total contents, is merely the conveyor belt of the thoughts of Kant, not the machine. Is AI radically different in kind? or just quicker, smaller and more convenient and an infinite source of quotations.

    Indeed. But Turing devised the test explicitly and knowingly to "side-step" these eternal philosophical debates. It's in his original paper, which I quoted below

    "I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it. But I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned in this paper"

    Basically: we're never going to get an answer to What is intelligence, or What is consciousness, but that should not stop us assessing whether we have arrived at machine intelligence, so here's a practical way of doing it

    You can criticise the Turing Test for being simplistic, or a dead end, or outdated, or plain wrong-headed, but at least he had a go and no one has come up with an obviously better approach, as far as I know
  • CatManCatMan Posts: 2,722
    rcs1000 said:

    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Wait.

    You have Live and Let Die on there, but no Goldfinger?

    And where's On Her Majesty's Secret Service?!
    That's a really good Bond - but top five? Tricky.
    I haven't seen NTTD, but of the rest, I'd argue it's the best bond film (with Casino Royale a close 2nd).
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    I think No Time To Die started well but steadily deteriorated as the film went on - and it did go on.

    I won't go into spoilers on here but though it had potential there are several things I really didn't like about it.
    Yeah the length was the one major drawback. They could have edited down a fair chunk of it, especially the bits in London. Despite the length the baddie felt seriously undercooked and underused as well.
  • CatMan said:

    MaxPB said:

    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Wait.

    You have Live and Let Die on there, but no Goldfinger?

    And where's On Her Majesty's Secret Service?!
    Supplanted by NTTD.
    Wow, it must really be good then!
    It was. Long but good.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Wait.

    You have Live and Let Die on there, but no Goldfinger?

    That's probably within the next few tbf, I really enjoyed Live and Let Die. I know a lot of people didn't.
    I really enjoyed it as a kid, but now think it's among the weaker Bond offerings (although I like the theme tune).

    I would have

    1. Casino Royale
    2. Goldfinger
    3. Thunderball
    4. Goldeneye
    5. The Living Daylights (which I think is a much underrated movie)

    I'm hoping that NTTD gets into the top five.
    That's a good list, and one I'd be happy with too.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    CatMan said:

    MaxPB said:

    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Wait.

    You have Live and Let Die on there, but no Goldfinger?

    And where's On Her Majesty's Secret Service?!
    Supplanted by NTTD.
    Wow, it must really be good then!
    It really isn't.
  • I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,343

    pm215 said:

    stodge said:


    The truth is hundreds of millions of people live in coastal cities vulnerable to sea level rise and enhanced storms - will the current Thames Barrier adequately protect London in 20 years?

    I remember seeing a video of a talk by Francis Pryor (archaeologist, prehistoric fens specialist) where he predicted in passing that we'll end up allowing the fens to be reflooded within the next 50 years, because the alternative will be allowing full strength North Sea storm surges to carry on round the coast and flood London. He could be completely wrong, of course, but it it ever happens it would be a pretty dramatic change to the landscape around here...
    Why not flood London to protect the Fens?
    Flood Algarkirk, Sutterton, Gosberton, Fosdyke and Surfleet to save London? Never. We must have priorities.

  • Sussex tonked in University Challenge 245-10.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772
    rcs1000 said:

    MattW said:

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    Overegged, TSE. Not "on their side".

    Think he hasn't really had a proper look at them either. "Young people", he says. Most of them seem to me to be middle-aged middle-class pillocks.

    The one I know about a few miles from me is a retiree millionaire in a horrible-to-heat stone farmhouse, who rents out not-very-green holiday barn conversions for up to £2.5k a week.

    Prince of Wales has said world leaders gathering at the Cop26 summit should take ambitious action on climate change rather than “just talk”, and take notice of how “despairing” many young people are about the issue.

    Charles said he understood why climate campaign groups such as Extinction Rebellion stage protests and block roads, but suggested they should take a less disruptive approach.

    “I totally understand the frustration,” he said in an interview with the BBC.

    “But it isn’t helpful, I don’t think, to do it in a way that alienates people … The difficulty is, how do you direct that frustration in a way that is more constructive rather than destructive?”

    He added: “The point is, people should really notice how despairing so many young are.”


    Like crooked company directors, the only thing that will make them take notice is time in a prison cell.

    Wow. I'm a bit of a closet Republican myself, but I'm not sure I'd actually have the Royal family arrested and imprisoned. (With the possible exception of Harry, for being an enormous arse.)
    I find the idea that you could be arrested and imprisoned for being an enormous arse....discomforting.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
  • Five best Bonds:

    Brooke Bond
    Basildon Bond
    Premium Bond
    Chemical Bond
    Stretcher Bond

    Sorry, James Bond just doesn't make the list.

    Samantha Bond
    Jenny Bond
    Michael Bond
  • CatManCatMan Posts: 2,722
    rcs1000 said:

    Taz said:

    I appreciate neither are well regarded but I absolutely love Moonraker and Spy Who Loved Me and gladly watch them over most other Bond Movies.

    The first three quarters of Moonraker is really good.

    Unfortunately, they then go to space, and it all falls apart.
    The novel is great. They should have made that. The film has nothing in common with it (apart from the name of the villain)
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited October 2021
    Second part of 'Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution' on BBC2 now
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,254
    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
  • HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
  • DavidL said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MattW said:

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    Overegged, TSE. Not "on their side".

    Think he hasn't really had a proper look at them either. "Young people", he says. Most of them seem to me to be middle-aged middle-class pillocks.

    The one I know about a few miles from me is a retiree millionaire in a horrible-to-heat stone farmhouse, who rents out not-very-green holiday barn conversions for up to £2.5k a week.

    Prince of Wales has said world leaders gathering at the Cop26 summit should take ambitious action on climate change rather than “just talk”, and take notice of how “despairing” many young people are about the issue.

    Charles said he understood why climate campaign groups such as Extinction Rebellion stage protests and block roads, but suggested they should take a less disruptive approach.

    “I totally understand the frustration,” he said in an interview with the BBC.

    “But it isn’t helpful, I don’t think, to do it in a way that alienates people … The difficulty is, how do you direct that frustration in a way that is more constructive rather than destructive?”

    He added: “The point is, people should really notice how despairing so many young are.”


    Like crooked company directors, the only thing that will make them take notice is time in a prison cell.

    Wow. I'm a bit of a closet Republican myself, but I'm not sure I'd actually have the Royal family arrested and imprisoned. (With the possible exception of Harry, for being an enormous arse.)
    I find the idea that you could be arrested and imprisoned for being an enormous arse....discomforting.
    For having an enormous arse?
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,704

    I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    Michael Billington, who was the guy who says ‘now’ was once considered for the role as Bond.

    He’s best known for playing Paul Foster in UFO, badly.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,884
    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Anecdotally Charles is thick as shit. From a friend of a friend who used to try to ‘tutor’ him. Limited attention span, and just really thick.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,407
    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Parliament would immediately make refusing royal assent impossible. In theory people might support that kind of thing, but in practice they'd see we don't want kings with that ability, it only still exists because it won't be used.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    It's really just so cheesy and awful. So glad that the producers took Bond back into the serious direction with Craig. They tried to with Brosnan and GoldenEye was a brilliant start but he wasn't a very good actor.
  • Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    Prince Charles attended the University of Cambridge whereas his mother, in the words of David Starkey is a poorly educated Philistine.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/22/monarchy.topstories3
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    edited October 2021
    Leon said:

    Alistair said:

    Leon said:

    Alistair said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Omnium said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    This is possibly the biggest story of the week. Or indeed the century. Completely unnoticed

    ‘US has already lost AI fight to China, says ex-Pentagon software chief’

    https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0

    A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.

    If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it

    You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.

    We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.

    People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.

    Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
    Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now

    Existentially, it frightens him
    Or alternativelby drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...

    (*) However you define that.
    Yawwwwwwn

    See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)

    That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
    I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
    This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM

    But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:

    "There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."


    https://towardsdatascience.com/did-google-duplex-beat-the-turing-test-yes-and-no-a2b87d1c9f58
    With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.

    But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.

    The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.

    Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
    But that is hopecially online



    Up until last year there was a wonderful thing called the Loebner Prize, which was basically the Turing test. And it awarded a prize for the chat bot best able to fool a human they were human.

    If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?

    That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.

    If you want to try the serial winner (Kuki), it's here: https://www.kuki.ai/

    But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.

    Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
    I know what they fucking do. They autocomplete. That's it
    But you seem to think that constitutes intelligence.

    It doesn't.
    Who the fuck knows what truly constitutes intelligence, let alone "self awareness". It is a mystery that has perplexed philosophers for thousands of years, I have a feeling Texas car park software salesman Bobby Smithson has not personally cracked the conundrum which has confounded the greatest human minds since Aristotle
    That's the point I've been making for years: 'intelligence' is exceptionally hard to define, and therefore an artificial intelligence is incredibly hard to define. I've heard experts from Cambridge argue over the definition of intelligence, and they're probably still at it.

    However, it is possible to say what *isn't* intelligence. A machine putting a square peg into holes in a box at random until it fits in one isn't intelligence. And the ML stuff that you're raving about isn't intelligence either.
    Head::Desk

    Which is why, of course, Alan Turing invented his test, to sidestep the impossibly complex and contentious arguments around intelligence, consciousness, Theory of Mind, and all that.

    Instead of trying to define intelligence and locate consciousness, you admit that it's indefinable "but you know it when you see it". Like pornography

    The Turing Test is the "know it when you see it" approach: to intelligence. If the computer can convince humans it is human and intelligent, it is intelligent. This is the whole fucking point of it, tho that seems to have escaped quite a few PB-ers, probably because they are as about as smart as a ZX Spectrum
    The philosophy of the Turing Test is fascinating.

    However you basically don't seem to be aware of it at all.

    If you have a tightly defined specification people can optimise the program they write to meet the specification that otherwise would not in any way be seen to be intelligent.

    This is where the Chinese Room wankers actually have a point.

    Imagine a computer program that is simply a list of all plausible things a human might say in a general conversation that is attempting to determine if the agent is human or not. For every entry in that list there is an output sentence to be repeated in response.

    Boom. The list is unimaginably huge, completely rote and obviously in no way intelligent. Yet would pass the vast majority of converstations as human,
    The Turing r the question with which we are concerned in this paper."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
    But you haven't engaged with my example.
    Because the example is not helpful. Of course such a machine would not be "intelligent", inasmuch as we understand the term, but that is priced in to your description

    Now let me give a counter example. Imagine if I could build a complete human body from scratch with water, salt, iron, minerals, calcium, yada yada, then I put a soft squidgy computer in its skull, made out of blood and fat and grey stuff, and this brain-like computer enabled it to talk and act exactly like a human, with the same emotions and desires: totally indistinguishable

    Is that human-like entity "intelligent"? We would surely treat it as such, wouldn't we? Could anyone kill it? So it has become intelligent in our eyes

    And yet I have just made it out of water, salt, iron, etc, so it can't be intelligent. Can it? Yet all I have done is skipped 3 billion years of evolution, or accelerated them into a day, so maybe it IS intelligent

    I see no reason why silicon and steel cannot do what iron and calcium do. Embody intelligence, or something that looks so exactly like it, the debate becomes otiose

    You aren't going to get any argument from me there. I do not believe there is any special magic "consciousness" that makes humans distinct from any other physical system. I am not a Dualist. I think the Chinese Room thought experiment is a load of tosh.

    The point of my example is that the Turing Test isn't a good test for general intelligence. It beguillingly looks like a good test but in actuality it is as tightly constrained as a chess board. In fact we had computers scoring highly on the Turing Test before we had a computer defeating a Grand Master at chess!

    I mean isn't that amazing? It was easier to program a computer to have a believable conversation than to virtually move some pieces around a 64 square board. The computer didn't even have to move the pieces itself - it got a human to do the heavy lifting!
  • squareroot2squareroot2 Posts: 6,287
    edited October 2021
    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Wait.

    You have Live and Let Die on there, but no Goldfinger?

    And where's On Her Majesty's Secret Service?!
    Its in the garbage bin where it belongs...
  • MaxPB said:

    I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    It's really just so cheesy and awful. So glad that the producers took Bond back into the serious direction with Craig. They tried to with Brosnan and GoldenEye was a brilliant start but he wasn't a very good actor.
    Die Another Day was an enjoyable film, just not a Bond film.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    I appreciate neither are well regarded but I absolutely love Moonraker and Spy Who Loved Me and gladly watch them over most other Bond Movies.

    The Moore Bond movies are good fun. A guilty pleasure - like admitting you like a James Blunt album.

    The Spy Who Loved Me has a very comforting Britishness to it.
    Other than Live and Let Die I struggle with his other movies. It was just such a huge tonal shift from serious British spy movie to sometimes slapstick British almost comedy movie, especially the latter ones where Roger Moore is ancient and very clearly out of shape. Brosnan era suffered from that too, GoldenEye was brilliant but then it quickly descended into farce with his other movies. The Craig era movies are definitely overall the second best after Sean Connery. It's a shame that we've had to wait so long for NTTD, but I'm really glad they didn't stick it onto Netflix. It deserves a big screen watch.
    Ok, confession: I really like the Moore Bonds. I probably watch them more than most others.

    The really corny stuff is embarrassing, sure, but I love Lewis Gilbert's big pieces, John Glen sweeping panning shots, John Barry's soundtracks and some of the villians - like Christopher Lee, Michael Lonsdale and Christopher Walken - are just great. Most of them have a reassuring Union Jack pop up somewhere, and Roger Moore's got an exquisite Englishness I just love. It just all works.

    Live and Let Die is a fresh and different start, Spy and Moonraker are good epics and For Your Eyes Only is massively underrated. Octopussy has a great cold war drama to it and amazing shots of India, and A View To A Kill is psychotic - you want Zorin dead.

    Moore a great actor? No. But he provided lots of fun and enjoyable films I'll be forever grateful for.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    edited October 2021
    Leon said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Omnium said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    This is possibly the biggest story of the week. Or indeed the century. Completely unnoticed

    ‘US has already lost AI fight to China, says ex-Pentagon software chief’

    https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0

    A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.

    If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it

    You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.

    We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.

    People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.

    Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
    Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now

    Existentially, it frightens him
    Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.

    I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?

    The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...

    Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.

    You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...

    (*) However you define that.
    Yawwwwwwn

    See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)

    That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
    I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
    This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM

    But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:

    "There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."


    https://towardsdatascience.com/did-google-duplex-beat-the-turing-test-yes-and-no-a2b87d1c9f58
    With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.

    But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.

    The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.

    Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
    But that is how you pass the Turing Test. The computer can only pass the tests given to it. You're shifting the goalposts

    And you're also missing the point. If a computer can persuade us it is intelligent - even human - in its interactions with us, then it is, to all intents and purposes, intelligent. That's the point of the Turing Test. Is it ACTUALLY intelligent? Conscious? Thinking? Probably not, but who knows, and Immanuel Kant would struggle to give a definitive answer. And we can no more delve into its wires to seek the answer than we can open up a human brain and locate the place of consciousness

    And of course once AI reaches the stage of being indistinguishable from "true" intelligence the answer to all this is, in some senses, immaterial. There will be beings walking or talking amongst us and we will not know if they are human, or not

    This is going to have momentous effects, especially online



    Up until last year there was a wonderful thing called the Loebner Prize, which was basically the Turing test. And it awarded a prize for the chat bot best able to fool a human they were human.

    If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?

    That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.

    If you want to try the serial winner (Kuki), it's here: https://www.kuki.ai/

    But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.

    Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
    I know what they fucking do. They autocomplete. That's it
    But you seem to think that constitutes intelligence.

    It doesn't.
    Who the fuck knows what truly constitutes intelligence, let alone "self awareness". It is a mystery that has perplexed philosophers for thousands of years, I have a feeling Texas car park software salesman Bobby Smithson has not personally cracked the conundrum which has confounded the greatest human minds since Aristotle
    That's the point I've been making for years: 'intelligence' is exceptionally hard to define, and therefore an artificial intelligence is incredibly hard to define. I've heard experts from Cambridge argue over the definition of intelligence, and they're probably still at it.

    However, it is possible to say what *isn't* intelligence. A machine putting a square peg into holes in a box at random until it fits in one isn't intelligence. And the ML stuff that you're raving about isn't intelligence either.
    Head::Desk

    Which is why, of course, Alan Turing invented his test, to sidestep the impossibly complex and contentious arguments around intelligence, consciousness, Theory of Mind, and all that.

    Instead of trying to define intelligence and locate consciousness, you admit that it's indefinable "but you know it when you see it". Like pornography

    The Turing Test is the "know it when you see it" approach: to intelligence. If the computer can convince humans it is human and intelligent, it is intelligent. This is the whole fucking point of it, tho that seems to have escaped quite a few PB-ers, probably because they are as about as smart as a ZX Spectrum
    I disagree. The test sidesteps a central issue of whether the machine knows anything or whether it is a clever way of reducing the contents of libraries to smaller and more versatile format.

    The Bodleian library's contents passes, mutatis mutandis, the Turing test. But when I go to it and read the The Critique of Pure Reason, the machine, which is the Bodleian's total contents, is merely the conveyor belt of the thoughts of Kant, not the machine. Is AI radically different in kind? or just quicker, smaller and more convenient and an infinite source of quotations.

    Indeed. But Turing devised the test explicitly and knowingly to "side-step" these eternal philosophical debates. It's in his original paper, which I quoted below

    "I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it. But I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned in this paper"

    Basically: we're never going to get an answer to What is intelligence, or What is consciousness, but that should not stop us assessing whether we have arrived at machine intelligence, so here's a practical way of doing it

    You can criticise the Turing Test for being simplistic, or a dead end, or outdated, or plain wrong-headed, but at least he had a go and no one has come up with an obviously better approach, as far as I know
    Never mind the Turing Test...

    I will be impressed with AI when it can clear the dirty dishes from the table; load them into the dishwasher in the best way to maximise the space but not so that they won't get clean; TOP-UP THE F*CKING RINSE AID IF THE WARNING LIGHT'S ON!; select the appropriate wash cycle and start the machine... then unload the crockery, glasses and cutlery and put them away in the correct cupboards once the wash cycle is complete.

    Now, that would be impressive; that's the Benpointer Test.

    Sadly, I and everyone else posting on here today will be long dead before that test is met.
  • Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    Prince Charles attended the University of Cambridge whereas his mother, in the words of David Starkey is a poorly educated Philistine.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/22/monarchy.topstories3
    Prince Charles had an affair with Camilla whilst he was married to arguably the most popular Royal ever.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772
    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    That footage that was linked on here recently of the Queen with Heath and the American Secretary of State Baker alone showed an intelligence, sense of humour and judgement that Charles has never shown in his entire life.
  • CatManCatMan Posts: 2,722
    edited October 2021

    I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    It's better with Alan Partidge commentary

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrp0wJsXNEA&t=4s
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    HYUFD said:

    Second part of 'Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution' on BBC2 now

    Redording it - first part was good.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    Leon said:

    algarkirk said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    This is possibly the biggest story of the week. Or indeed the century. Completely unnoticed

    ‘US has already lost AI fight to China, says ex-Pentagon software chief’

    https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0

    A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.

    If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it

    You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.

    We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.

    People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.

    Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
    Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now

    Existentially, it frightens him
    Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.

    I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?

    The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...

    Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.

    You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...

    (*) However you define that.
    Yawwwwwwn

    See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)

    That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
    Actually, we won't.

    We'll be able to have a computer that appears - conversationally - to be human. But if you start trying to teach it a new skill, or ask it a puzzle or a riddle, or to explain why a joke is funny, it will fall comically flat.

    What we mean by AI is pretty important. Once you can programme a machine to make the first few moves in chess sensibly then it is merely a progression in quantity for it to be able to discuss the works of Boethius in Icelandic.

    But is it at any level saying it because it thinks it, intuits it, believes it, knows it, has chosen between equally decent alternatives, or alternatively because it has been given enough data to be able to act as if it thinks it? The first is existentially important. The second less so.

    The suggestion above that the Turing Test 'sidesteps philosophy', if true, is merely another way of saying it dispenses with the question of whether AI knows anything. Sidestepping reality would be a better term.



    Does a virus know anything? Is it conscious on any level? Surely not. Yet it seems alive, and acts with apparent intent, to further its aims

    Perhaps a computer intelligence will be something like a virus' "intelligence", which is ominous enough

    But let's go up the ladder of creation. Is an amoeba "intelligent"? I'm not sure. I'm even less sure if it is "conscious"

    How about a fungus? A primitive mollusc? A tiny insect? An earthworm? A wasp? A cat? A chimp? A human?

    Yes of course humans are intelligent and "conscious"; so at some point on that spectrum, between virus and human, consciousness and intelligence emerge, but pinpointing where is extremely hard, and maybe impossible. And I suggest we will have the same problem pinpointing when "intelligence" emerges in machines, or if it ever does.

    But they will definitely seem very very intelligent, and that in the end is all that will matter, for most of humanity
    I think there is a big difference between organisms and biological processes that follow simple biophysical rules (even if the results look like intentional action) and intelligence. The latter, to me, requires a neural network, no matter how primitive, which permits problem-solving, rather than following physical and chemical processes.

    FWIW, sentience probably requires a certain degree of complexity in the neural network. The human brain has about 86 billion neurons. Cats around 250 million, while crows are around 1.5 billion.

    Not sure what this presages for AI, as a feature of living brains is neuroplasticity - a rewriting of the connections between neurons.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,343
    Leon said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Omnium said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    This is possibly the biggest story of the week. Or indeed the century. Completely unnoticed

    ‘US has already lost AI fight to China, says ex-Pentagon software chief’

    https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0

    A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.

    If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it

    You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.

    We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.

    People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.

    Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
    Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now

    Existentially, it frightens him
    Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.

    I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?

    The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...

    Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.

    You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...

    (*) However you define that.
    Yawwwwwwn

    See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)

    That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
    I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
    This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM

    But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:

    "There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."


    https://towardsdatascience.com/did-google-duplex-beat-the-turing-test-yes-and-no-a2b87d1c9f58
    With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.

    But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.

    The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.

    Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
    But that is how you pass the Turing Test. The computer can only pass the tests given to it. You're shifting the goalposts

    And you're also missing the point. If a computer can persuade us it is intelligent - even human - in its interactions with us, then it is, to all intents and purposes, intelligent. That's the point of the Turing Test. Is it ACTUALLY intelligent? Conscious? Thinking? Probably not, but who knows, and Immanuel Kant would struggle to give a definitive answer. And we can no more delve into its wires to seek the answer than we can open up a human brain and locate the place of consciousness

    And of course once AI reaches the stage of being indistinguishable from "true" intelligence the answer to all this is, in some senses, immaterial. There will be beings walking or talking amongst us and we will not know if they are human, or not

    This is going to have momentous effects, especially online



    Up until last year there was a wonderful thing called the Loebner Prize, which was basically the Turing test. And it awarded a prize for the chat bot best able to fool a human they were human.

    If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?

    That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.

    If you want to try the serial winner (Kuki), it's here: https://www.kuki.ai/

    But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.

    Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
    I know what they fucking do. They autocomplete. That's it
    But you seem to think that constitutes intelligence.

    It doesn't.
    Who the fuck knows what truly constitutes intelligence, let alone "self awareness". It is a mystery that has perplexed philosophers for thousands of years, I have a feeling Texas car park software salesman Bobby Smithson has not personally cracked the conundrum which has confounded the greatest human minds since Aristotle
    That's the point I've been making for years: 'intelligence' is exceptionally hard to define, and therefore an artificial intelligence is incredibly hard to define. I've heard experts from Cambridge argue over the definition of intelligence, and they're probably still at it.

    However, it is possible to say what *isn't* intelligence. A machine putting a square peg into holes in a box at random until it fits in one isn't intelligence. And the ML stuff that you're raving about isn't intelligence either.
    Head::Desk

    Which is why, of course, Alan Turing invented his test, to sidestep the impossibly complex and contentious arguments around intelligence, consciousness, Theory of Mind, and all that.

    Instead of trying to define intelligence and locate consciousness, you admit that it's indefinable "but you know it when you see it". Like pornography

    The Turing Test is the "know it when you see it" approach: to intelligence. If the computer can convince humans it is human and intelligent, it is intelligent. This is the whole fucking point of it, tho that seems to have escaped quite a few PB-ers, probably because they are as about as smart as a ZX Spectrum
    I disagree. The test sidesteps a central issue of whether the machine knows anything or whether it is a clever way of reducing the contents of libraries to smaller and more versatile format.

    The Bodleian library's contents passes, mutatis mutandis, the Turing test. But when I go to it and read the The Critique of Pure Reason, the machine, which is the Bodleian's total contents, is merely the conveyor belt of the thoughts of Kant, not the machine. Is AI radically different in kind? or just quicker, smaller and more convenient and an infinite source of quotations.

    Indeed. But Turing devised the test explicitly and knowingly to "side-step" these eternal philosophical debates. It's in his original paper, which I quoted below

    "I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it. But I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned in this paper"

    Basically: we're never going to get an answer to What is intelligence, or What is consciousness, but that should not stop us assessing whether we have arrived at machine intelligence, so here's a practical way of doing it

    You can criticise the Turing Test for being simplistic, or a dead end, or outdated, or plain wrong-headed, but at least he had a go and no one has come up with an obviously better approach, as far as I know
    Thanks. I think the Turing test is in these ways wrong headed. In all manner of these ways my copy of 'Thomas the Tank Engine' is intelligent, if I take it that the item itself is responsible for and knows about its excellent prose and outstanding artwork. If I label a book "AI" people laugh. If I label computing power "AI" they wonder in admiration. They are wrong. The machine has no more knowledge than the book.


  • I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    Watched this during its premier. The jump got a standing ovation, and I've heard of similar reactions around the country. Looking at it more critically, it is surprising they did not get a few shots of Roger Moore actually skiing.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,407

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    Prince Charles attended the University of Cambridge whereas his mother, in the words of David Starkey is a poorly educated Philistine.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/22/monarchy.topstories3
    Prince Charles had an affair with Camilla whilst he was married to arguably the most popular Royal ever.
    I don't think brains prevents people from having affairs.
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,704
    CatMan said:

    I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    It's better with Alan Partidge commentary

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrp0wJsXNEA&t=4s
    Stop getting Bond wrong.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Wait.

    You have Live and Let Die on there, but no Goldfinger?

    And where's On Her Majesty's Secret Service?!
    That's a really good Bond - but top five? Tricky.
    I haven't seen NTTD, but of the rest, I'd argue it's the best bond film (with Casino Royale a close 2nd).
    My issue with OHMSS is that while the movie is well plotted, has great action scenes, and has some fantastic performances from people like Telly Sevalas, it unfortunately has a hole at its core.

    George Lazenby can't act.

    And that's why, despite being a thoroughly enjoyable romp, it's not a top five Bond.
  • kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    Prince Charles attended the University of Cambridge whereas his mother, in the words of David Starkey is a poorly educated Philistine.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/22/monarchy.topstories3
    Prince Charles had an affair with Camilla whilst he was married to arguably the most popular Royal ever.
    I don't think brains prevents people from having affairs.
    Yup.

    More a case that men have a brain and a penis and only enough blood for one to work at a time.
  • JohnLilburneJohnLilburne Posts: 5,997
    CatMan said:

    MaxPB said:

    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Wait.

    You have Live and Let Die on there, but no Goldfinger?

    And where's On Her Majesty's Secret Service?!
    Supplanted by NTTD.
    Wow, it must really be good then!
    It dragged. Over-long, padded, too much emotional shit. Bond is a psychopath, right? Not in this movie.

    Having said that, it entertained from time to time.
  • HYUFD said:

    Second part of 'Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution' on BBC2 now

    Redording it - first part was good.
    All five episodes are available on iplayer now. I watched the whole series last week.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670

    Leon said:

    algarkirk said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Omnium said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    This is possibly the biggest story of the week. Or indeed the century. Completely unnoticed

    ‘US has already lost AI fight to China, says ex-Pentagon software chief’

    https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0

    A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.

    If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it

    You should have learnt by now that most people aren’t interested in the really big stories.

    We’ve been directly told in the last year that there is definitely ultra tech in our skies and oceans, which either belongs to adversaries of the West or non human intelligence / life forms. And everyone shrugged.

    People aren’t going to listen too hard to a senior Pentagon official if he says the US has surrendered technological dominance to China and that a point will be reached (or may already have been reached) when their lead will be insurmountable. Forever.

    Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
    Some people are INCREDIBLY resistant to the idea of artificial general intelligence. I have an extremely smart brother who is always open to new ideas but he just won't accept that this - machine intelligence - can ever happen, let alone that it is actually happening right now

    Existentially, it frightens him
    Or alternatively: your extremely smart brother is actually smarter than you, and realises that everything you rave about is actually fairly sh*t smoke 'n mirrors. and nowhere near 'intelligence' (*). You are staring open-mouthed, dribbling in amazement, as someone performs the three-cup trick.

    I remember an august and much-missed member of this board saying that lorry drivers would not be needed due to autonomous driving. That must have been seven or eight years ago now, and we're nowhere near. In fact, we're now suffering from a shortage of drivers. Can you recall him?

    The big problem with AI is the money being swilled into the trough. Billions are being spewed at it, and they need to show results. Hence smoke 'n mirrors. Just ask Musky baby where his coast-to-cast drive in a Tesla is - promised five years ago for four years ago. Yet his current tech cannot even detect emergency vehicles...

    Machine learning has many uses. But they are limited in scope, and nowhere near a general intelligence. IMO that will require a massive breakthrough in tech, not the stuff we're doing atm.

    You'd be amazed at an Eliza produced by drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...

    (*) However you define that.
    Yawwwwwwn

    See below. In the next ten years we will create a computer that sails through the Turing Test, at that point everything you say here will be rendered irrelevant, whether it is true or not. That *will* be AI, because we will not be able to distinguish it from human intelligence (except that it might be much cleverer and faster)

    That's why the Turing Test is such a stroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
    I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
    This is amazing. Arguably, this is a computer passing a *kind* of Turing Test. This is Google Duplex booking a haircut, the lady at the salon believes she is talking to a human, the appointment is made, the call ends. Turing Test "passed".

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5VN56jQMWM

    But is it really passed? This guy thinks "no, not really" and I agree with him. However, I also agree with his conclusion:

    "There is no way possible that we will not have a general conversational AI in the next 10 years that can speak to any human in any language about every possible topic."


    https://towardsdatascience.com/did-google-duplex-beat-the-turing-test-yes-and-no-a2b87d1c9f58
    With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.

    But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.

    The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.

    Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
    But that is how you pass the Turing Test. The computer can only pass the tests given to it. You're shifting the goalposts

    And you're also missing the point. If a computer can persuade us it is intelligent - even human - in its interactions with us, then it is, to all intents and purposes, intelligent. That's the point of the Turing Test. Is it ACTUALLY intelligent? Conscious? Thinking? Probably not, but who knows, and Immanuel Kant would struggle to give a definitive answer. And we can no more delve into its wires to seek the answer than we can open up a human brain and locate the place of consciousness

    And of course once AI reaches the stage of being indistinguishable from "true" intelligence the answer to all this is, in some senses, immaterial. There will be beings walking or talking amongst us and we will not know if they are human, or not

    This is going to have momentous effects, especially online



    Up until last year there was a wonderful thing called the Loebner Prize, which was basically the Turing test. And it awarded a prize for the chat bot best able to fool a human they were human.

    If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?

    That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.

    If you want to try the serial winner (Kuki), it's here: https://www.kuki.ai/

    But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.

    Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
    I know what they fucking do. They autocomplete. That's it
    But you seem to think that constitutes intelligence.

    It doesn't.
    Who the fuck knows what truly constitutes intelligence, let alone "self awareness". It is a mystery that has perplexed philosophers for thousands of years, I have a feeling Texas car park software salesman Bobby Smithson has not personally cracked the conundrum which has confounded the greatest human minds since Aristotle
    That's the point I've been making for years: 'intelligence' is exceptionally hard to define, and therefore an artificial intelligence is incredibly hard to define. I've heard experts from Cambridge argue over the definition of intelligence, and they're probably still at it.

    However, it is possible to say what *isn't* intelligence. A machine putting a square peg into holes in a box at random until it fits in one isn't intelligence. And the ML stuff that you're raving about isn't intelligence either.
    Head::Desk

    Which is why, of course, Alan Turing invented his test, to sidestep the impossibly complex and contentious arguments around intelligence, consciousness, Theory of Mind, and all that.

    Instead of trying to define intelligence and locate consciousness, you admit that it's indefinable "but you know it when you see it". Like pornography

    The Turing Test is the "know it when you see it" approach: to intelligence. If the computer can convince humans it is human and intelligent, it is intelligent. This is the whole fucking point of it, tho that seems to have escaped quite a few PB-ers, probably because they are as about as smart as a ZX Spectrum
    I disagree. The test sidesteps a central issue of whether the machine knows anything or whether it is a clever way of reducing the contents of libraries to smaller and more versatile format.

    The Bodleian library's contents passes, mutatis mutandis, the Turing test. But when I go to it and read the The Critique of Pure Reason, the machine, which is the Bodleian's total contents, is merely the conveyor belt of the thoughts of Kant, not the machine. Is AI radically different in kind? or just quicker, smaller and more convenient and an infinite source of quotations.

    Indeed. But Turing devised the test explicitly and knowingly to "side-step" these eternal philosophical debates. It's in his original paper, which I quoted below

    "I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localise it. But I do not think these mysteries necessarily need to be solved before we can answer the question with which we are concerned in this paper"

    Basically: we're never going to get an answer to What is intelligence, or What is consciousness, but that should not stop us assessing whether we have arrived at machine intelligence, so here's a practical way of doing it

    You can criticise the Turing Test for being simplistic, or a dead end, or outdated, or plain wrong-headed, but at least he had a go and no one has come up with an obviously better approach, as far as I know
    Never mind the Turing Test...

    I will be impressed with AI when it can clear the dirty dishes from the table; load them into the dishwasher in the best way to maximise the space but not so that they won't get clean; TOP-UP THE F*CKING RINSE AID IF THE WARNING LIGHT'S ON!; select the appropriate wash cycle and start the machine... then unload the crockery, glasses and cutlery and put them away in the correct cupboards once the wash cycle is complete.

    Now, that would be impressive; that's the Benpointer Test.

    Sadly, I and everyone else posting on here today will be long dead before that test is met.
    There's a test along those lines that i will try and find the Twitter thread for which is the "Setup the chess board" challenge.

    A robot has to (non destructively) get the board and pieces out from their box and set them up on the table ready to play a game of chess against a human.

    This challenge is so far beyond current systems it would be at least a decade of research to get in the vicinity.
  • I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    Watched this during its premier. The jump got a standing ovation, and I've heard of similar reactions around the country. Looking at it more critically, it is surprising they did not get a few shots of Roger Moore actually skiing.
    I must have been five or six when I first saw that scene and was utterly mesmerised by it.

    Still am.
  • HYUFD said:

    Second part of 'Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution' on BBC2 now

    Redording it - first part was good.
    I gave up halfway through tbh. I lived through it so can remember what happened but have never been a party member so do not really care about the minutiae.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,618
    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Good enough for me! All solid choices.

    Although I rate Time as number one. I thought Lea was fantastic in the new picture, indeed the film is about her in many ways.

    1. Time
    2. Casino
    3. Finger
    4. Spy
    5. Majesty
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    edited October 2021
    DavidL said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MattW said:

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    Overegged, TSE. Not "on their side".

    Think he hasn't really had a proper look at them either. "Young people", he says. Most of them seem to me to be middle-aged middle-class pillocks.

    The one I know about a few miles from me is a retiree millionaire in a horrible-to-heat stone farmhouse, who rents out not-very-green holiday barn conversions for up to £2.5k a week.

    Prince of Wales has said world leaders gathering at the Cop26 summit should take ambitious action on climate change rather than “just talk”, and take notice of how “despairing” many young people are about the issue.

    Charles said he understood why climate campaign groups such as Extinction Rebellion stage protests and block roads, but suggested they should take a less disruptive approach.

    “I totally understand the frustration,” he said in an interview with the BBC.

    “But it isn’t helpful, I don’t think, to do it in a way that alienates people … The difficulty is, how do you direct that frustration in a way that is more constructive rather than destructive?”

    He added: “The point is, people should really notice how despairing so many young are.”


    Like crooked company directors, the only thing that will make them take notice is time in a prison cell.

    Wow. I'm a bit of a closet Republican myself, but I'm not sure I'd actually have the Royal family arrested and imprisoned. (With the possible exception of Harry, for being an enormous arse.)
    I find the idea that you could be arrested and imprisoned for being an enormous arse....discomforting.
    We'll do it via an ASBO.

    Bish bosh. Job done.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    Prince Charles attended the University of Cambridge whereas his mother, in the words of David Starkey is a poorly educated Philistine.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/22/monarchy.topstories3
    And got in entirely on merit, do you hear me?

    The Cambridge "educated" Starkey's complaint is apparently that HMQ finds gin and dubonnet more interesting than he is. Easy to sympathise.
  • kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    Prince Charles attended the University of Cambridge whereas his mother, in the words of David Starkey is a poorly educated Philistine.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/22/monarchy.topstories3
    Prince Charles had an affair with Camilla whilst he was married to arguably the most popular Royal ever.
    I don't think brains prevents people from having affairs.
    That he cheated on Diana proves that he LACKS brains, surely!
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    MaxPB said:

    I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    It's really just so cheesy and awful. So glad that the producers took Bond back into the serious direction with Craig. They tried to with Brosnan and GoldenEye was a brilliant start but he wasn't a very good actor.
    Goldeneye was Brosnan's best and that was because of Martin Campbell *and* the fact he was dining off Timothy Dalton's legacy.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,407
    edited October 2021

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    Prince Charles attended the University of Cambridge whereas his mother, in the words of David Starkey is a poorly educated Philistine.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/22/monarchy.topstories3
    Prince Charles had an affair with Camilla whilst he was married to arguably the most popular Royal ever.
    I don't think brains prevents people from having affairs.
    That he cheated on Diana proves that he LACKS brains, surely!
    No.

    Certainly don't condone infidelity, but he seems much happier now, which seems smart. If Diana hadn't been assassinated by Phillip I'm sure she would have been happier too.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,618

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    I think No Time To Die started well but steadily deteriorated as the film went on - and it did go on.

    I won't go into spoilers on here but though it had potential there are several things I really didn't like about it.
    It’s a shame it’s impossible to discuss on here because of spoilers. I dare say we can reconvene the debate after Christmas, when everyone has seen it.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458
    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Son not sons? Are you trying to tell us something about Harry by any chance,?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited October 2021
    kle4 said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Parliament would immediately make refusing royal assent impossible. In theory people might support that kind of thing, but in practice they'd see we don't want kings with that ability, it only still exists because it won't be used.
    It couldn't, unless it had royal assent for it.

    Remember the Government are still the Monarch's ministers. Both Parliament and the Monarch's approval is needed to make statute laws
  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,401
    Charles said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    LOL! I know the feeling. Can’t watch anything with Jennifer Paige without wondering what my wife is doing!
    Whenever I see an Asian woman on TV I think it is my wife since, as we know, they all look the same.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    edited October 2021

    MaxPB said:

    I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    It's really just so cheesy and awful. So glad that the producers took Bond back into the serious direction with Craig. They tried to with Brosnan and GoldenEye was a brilliant start but he wasn't a very good actor.
    Die Another Day was an enjoyable film, just not a Bond film.
    Die Another Day was terrible. Probably 25th out of 25 Bond movies and worse than Never Say Never Again. It has no redeeming qualities as a movie. The best thing about it was introducing Rosamund Pike as an actress.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    Five best Bonds:

    Brooke Bond
    Basildon Bond
    Premium Bond
    Chemical Bond
    Stretcher Bond

    Sorry, James Bond just doesn't make the list.

    Index-linked Bond moving rapidly up the charts just now.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Anecdotally Charles is thick as shit. From a friend of a friend who used to try to ‘tutor’ him. Limited attention span, and just really thick.
    He isn't thick, certainly he is more of an intellectual than most royals and the average member of the population
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,226
    rcs1000 said:

    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Wait.

    You have Live and Let Die on there, but no Goldfinger?

    And where's On Her Majesty's Secret Service?!
    That's a really good Bond - but top five? Tricky.
    I haven't seen NTTD, but of the rest, I'd argue it's the best bond film (with Casino Royale a close 2nd).
    My issue with OHMSS is that while the movie is well plotted, has great action scenes, and has some fantastic performances from people like Telly Sevalas, it unfortunately has a hole at its core.

    George Lazenby can't act.

    And that's why, despite being a thoroughly enjoyable romp, it's not a top five Bond.
    “It's all right. It's quite all right, really. She's having a rest. We'll be going on soon.”

    By a mile the most moving and powerfully understated delivery of a line of dialogue in the whole franchise. Lazenby is the best of them all.
  • rcs1000 said:

    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    CatMan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    Wait.

    You have Live and Let Die on there, but no Goldfinger?

    And where's On Her Majesty's Secret Service?!
    That's a really good Bond - but top five? Tricky.
    I haven't seen NTTD, but of the rest, I'd argue it's the best bond film (with Casino Royale a close 2nd).
    My issue with OHMSS is that while the movie is well plotted, has great action scenes, and has some fantastic performances from people like Telly Sevalas, it unfortunately has a hole at its core.

    George Lazenby can't act.

    And that's why, despite being a thoroughly enjoyable romp, it's not a top five Bond.
    OHMSS is arguably the best Bond film if it had a different actor.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
    It would not. If it was an unpopular bill he would get his way anyway.

    If it was a popular bill he would be unlikely to refuse to sign it and if he tried would likely have to abdicate in favour of William.

    There can be no election held without the Monarch agreeing to dissolve Parliament either, the Monarch could simply create a new government from existing MPs
  • MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    It's really just so cheesy and awful. So glad that the producers took Bond back into the serious direction with Craig. They tried to with Brosnan and GoldenEye was a brilliant start but he wasn't a very good actor.
    Die Another Day was an enjoyable film, just not a Bond film.
    Die Another Day was terrible. Probably 25th out of 25 Bond movies and worse than Never Say Never Again. It has no redeeming qualities as a movie. The best thing about it was introducing Rosamund Pike as an actress.
    She was also in Johnny English Reborn!
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    HYUFD said:


    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
    It would not. If it was an unpopular bill he would get his way anyway.

    If it was a popular bill he would be unlikely to refuse to sign it and if he tried would likely have to abdicate in favour of William.

    There can be no election held without the Monarch agreeing to dissolve Parliament either, the Monarch could simply create a new government from existing MPs
    Elections are automatic after five years. A Parliament cannot sit longer, unless the law is changed.
  • HYUFD said:


    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
    It would not. If it was an unpopular bill he would get his way anyway.

    If it was a popular bill he would be unlikely to refuse to sign it and if he tried would likely have to abdicate in favour of William.

    There can be no election held without the Monarch agreeing to dissolve Parliament either, the Monarch could simply create a new government from existing MPs
    Let us say the governing party had say 350+ plus seats, where would that new government come from?
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    I appreciate neither are well regarded but I absolutely love Moonraker and Spy Who Loved Me and gladly watch them over most other Bond Movies.

    The Moore Bond movies are good fun. A guilty pleasure - like admitting you like a James Blunt album.

    The Spy Who Loved Me has a very comforting Britishness to it.
    Other than Live and Let Die I struggle with his other movies. It was just such a huge tonal shift from serious British spy movie to sometimes slapstick British almost comedy movie, especially the latter ones where Roger Moore is ancient and very clearly out of shape. Brosnan era suffered from that too, GoldenEye was brilliant but then it quickly descended into farce with his other movies. The Craig era movies are definitely overall the second best after Sean Connery. It's a shame that we've had to wait so long for NTTD, but I'm really glad they didn't stick it onto Netflix. It deserves a big screen watch.
    Ok, confession: I really like the Moore Bonds. I probably watch them more than most others.

    The really corny stuff is embarrassing, sure, but I love Lewis Gilbert's big pieces, John Glen sweeping panning shots, John Barry's soundtracks and some of the villians - like Christopher Lee, Michael Lonsdale and Christopher Walken - are just great. Most of them have a reassuring Union Jack pop up somewhere, and Roger Moore's got an exquisite Englishness I just love. It just all works.

    Live and Let Die is a fresh and different start, Spy and Moonraker are good epics and For Your Eyes Only is massively underrated. Octopussy has a great cold war drama to it and amazing shots of India, and A View To A Kill is psychotic - you want Zorin dead.

    Moore a great actor? No. But he provided lots of fun and enjoyable films I'll be forever grateful for.
    I get where you're coming from and even though they are terribly cringey I do still love sitting down and watching them. I think I'll probably get the 25 movie set on physical media before Amazon stop making them.

    As I said, for me the issue was the step change in tone from the Connery era to Moore. It was just so different and I watched them in release order over a few months rather than on TV in random order so that probably made it worse.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739

    OHMSS is arguably the best Bond film if it had a different actor.

    There is no argument
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    RobD said:

    HYUFD said:


    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
    It would not. If it was an unpopular bill he would get his way anyway.

    If it was a popular bill he would be unlikely to refuse to sign it and if he tried would likely have to abdicate in favour of William.

    There can be no election held without the Monarch agreeing to dissolve Parliament either, the Monarch could simply create a new government from existing MPs
    Elections are automatic after five years. A Parliament cannot sit longer, unless the law is changed.
    Until that 5 years is up however the Monarch can appoint whatever government they want made up of MPs and Lords
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,254
    Alistair said:

    Leon said:

    Alistair said:

    Leon said:

    Alistair said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Omnium said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    This is possibly the biggest story of the week. Or indeed the century. Completely unnoticed

    ‘US has already lost AI fight to China, says ex-Pentagon software chief’

    https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0

    A combination of complacency, lethargy and Woke crap - ‘omg GPT3 might be racist’ - means the west has handed the race to AI to China, and it may already be too late to catch up.

    If China dominates AI it dominates the world like no power before it

    You sh

    Cognitive dissonance innit. Much more comfortable to talk about IDS’s majority instead.
    Some peons him
    Or alternativelby drunken first-year undergrads at the West of Scotland Uni...

    (*) However you define that.
    Yawstroke of genius. It sidesteps all the philosophy and gives you a practical threshold
    I don't think that this will happen. The Turing test isn't that interesting anyway. It's when a computer claims itself to be sentient that the fun starts.
    Thpic."


    https://towardsdatascience.com/did-google-duplex-beat-the-turing-test-yes-and-no-a2b87d1c9f58
    With all due respect, conversation AI is not that hard, it's just giving plausible responses to inputs.

    But try explaining set theory to a computer, and then get it to give you examples back.

    The difference between *learning plausible responses from a giant corpus* and *learning concepts from conversation* is as wide as the Atlantc.

    Now, will we get there? Of course we will. Will it happen in the next ten years? Highly, highly unlikely. Indeed, even assuming exponential intelligence growth, it may well be fifty years away.
    But that is hopecially online



    Up until last year there was a wonderful thing called the Loebner Prize, which was basically the Turing test. And it awarded a prize for the chat bot best able to fool a human they were human.

    If you read the conversations, even the ones from 2006/2007, you'll be amazed how good the responses were. Why? Because they were basically doing the same thing as GPT3 - based on the previous five words, what is the most likely sixth word?

    That's not a hard problem to solve. Given billions of gigabytes of searchable text, people can easily create systems that give plausible responses. Because all they are really doing is trying to work out what the next word (or sentence) is likely to be.

    If you want to try the serial winner (Kuki), it's here: https://www.kuki.ai/

    But even though this is generally considered to be the best (most Turing winning) bot out there, it's still very little better than the bots from 2006/7.

    Because the next stage is really hard. GPT3 is not generalised intelligence. Deep Mind is not generalised intelligence. They are really exciting, to be sure, but they don't do what you think they do.
    I know what they fucking do. They autocomplete. That's it
    But you seem to think that constitutes intelligence.

    It doesn't.
    Who the fuck knows what truly constitutes intelligence, let alone "self awareness". It is a mystery that has perplexed philosophers for thousands of years, I have a feeling Texas car park software salesman Bobby Smithson has not personally cracked the conundrum which has confounded the greatest human minds since Aristotle
    That's the point I've been making for years: 'intelligence' is exceptionally hard to define, and therefore an artificial intelligence is incredibly hard to define. I've heard experts from Cambridge argue over the definition of intelligence, and they're probably still at it.

    However, it is possible to say what *isn't* intelligence. A machine putting a square peg into holes in a box at random until it fits in one isn't intelligence. And the ML stuff that you're raving about isn't intelligence either.
    Head::Desk

    Which is why, of course, Alan Turing invented his test, to sidestep the impossibly complex and contentious arguments around intelligence, consciousness, Theory of Mind, and all that.

    Instead of trying to define intelligence and locate consciousness, you admit that it's indefinable "but you know it when you see it". Like pornography

    The Turing Test is the "know it when you see it" approach: to intelligence. If the computer can convince humans it is human and intelligent, it is intelligent. This is the whole fucking point of it, tho that seems to have escaped quite a few PB-ers, probably because they are as about as smart as a ZX Spectrum
    The philosophy of the Turing Test is fascinating.

    However you basically don't seem to be aware of it at all.

    If you have a tightly defined specification people can optimise the program they write to meet the specification that otherwise would not in any way be seen to be intelligent.

    This is where the Chinese Room wankers actually have a point.

    Imagine a computer program that is simply a list of all plausible things a human might say in a general conversation that is attempting to determine if the agent is human or not. For every entry in that list there is an output sentence to be repeated in response.

    Boom. The list is unimaginably huge, completely rote and obviously in no way intelligent. Yet would pass the vast majority of converstations as human,
    The Turing r the question with which we are concerned in this paper."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
    But you haven't engaged with my example.
    Because the example is not helpful. Of course such a machine would not be "intelligent", inasmuch as we understand the term, but that is priced in to your description

    Now let me give a counter example. Imagine if I could build a complete human body from scratch with water, salt, iron, minerals, calcium, yada yada, then I put a soft squidgy computer in its skull, made out of blood and fat and grey stuff, and this brain-like computer enabled it to talk and act exactly like a human, with the same emotions and desires: totally indistinguishable

    Is that human-like entity "intelligent"? We would surely treat it as such, wouldn't we? Could anyone kill it? So it has become intelligent in our eyes

    And yet I have just made it out of water, salt, iron, etc, so it can't be intelligent. Can it? Yet all I have done is skipped 3 billion years of evolution, or accelerated them into a day, so maybe it IS intelligent

    I see no reason why silicon and steel cannot do what iron and calcium do. Embody intelligence, or something that looks so exactly like it, the debate becomes otiose

    You aren't going to get any argument from me there. I do not believe there is any special magic "consciousness" that makes humans distinct from any other physical system. I am not a Dualist. I think the Chinese Room thought experiment is a load of tosh.

    The point of my example is that the Turing Test isn't a good test for general intelligence. It beguillingly looks like a good test but in actuality it is as tightly constrained as a chess board. In fact we had computers scoring highly on the Turing Test before we had a computer defeating a Grand Master at chess!

    I mean isn't that amazing? It was easier to program a computer to have a believable conversation than to virtually move some pieces around a 64 square board. The computer didn't even have to move the pieces itself - it got a human to do the heavy lifting!
    I go back to my first argument, made several hours ago

    What if intelligence is just exceptionally advanced autocomplete? Algorithms in our head that react in certain ways to stimuli. We think we have free will and creativity, yet we do not. We just have really refined autocompletion

    That might explain why a massive autocomplete machine - which is what GPT3 is - begins to seem intelligent, in a way that many observers (and this is not just me) find uncanny

    "GPT-3, explained: This new language AI is uncanny, funny — and a big deal"

    https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21355768/gpt-3-ai-openai-turing-test-language


    It's not that this dumb machine is intelligent as such, it's more that we have wrongly defined intelligence, all this time
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited October 2021

    HYUFD said:


    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
    It would not. If it was an unpopular bill he would get his way anyway.

    If it was a popular bill he would be unlikely to refuse to sign it and if he tried would likely have to abdicate in favour of William.

    There can be no election held without the Monarch agreeing to dissolve Parliament either, the Monarch could simply create a new government from existing MPs
    Let us say the governing party had say 350+ plus seats, where would that new government come from?
    Some government and opposition Ministers ie a coalition government
  • squareroot2squareroot2 Posts: 6,287

    kle4 said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    Prince Charles attended the University of Cambridge whereas his mother, in the words of David Starkey is a poorly educated Philistine.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/22/monarchy.topstories3
    Prince Charles had an affair with Camilla whilst he was married to arguably the most popular Royal ever.
    I don't think brains prevents people from having affairs.
    That he cheated on Diana proves that he LACKS brains, surely!
    Not at all. She was a bit challenged...
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,407
    edited October 2021
    HYUFD said:

    kle4 said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Parliament would immediately make refusing royal assent impossible. In theory people might support that kind of thing, but in practice they'd see we don't want kings with that ability, it only still exists because it won't be used.
    It couldn't, unless it had royal assent for it.

    Remember the Government are still the Monarch's ministers. Both Parliament and the Monarch's approval is needed to make statute laws
    Yeah, they would change that.

    Parts of our system are legal fictions, and if people tried to make the fictions real, something explicit would be put in place instead. I'm a monarchist, but it's monarchism on the basis the monarch does as they are told.

    Parliament couldn't legally put Charles I on trial either, or make laws, but it didn't stop them doing so for 11 years in various guises. Was the Convention Parliament acting 'legally' by saying James II had abdicated in 1689?

    People decide what is legal afterwards.

    But in fact if Charles did try something like that I bet he would then sign an Act that he could not do it again in future - as Parliament would make it very clear where the power lies.

    I don't think you appreciate how much the power of our system is on the basis of people not abusing theoretical powers. Consent for that system would collapse if they were subject to personal whims of a king.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281

    HYUFD said:

    Second part of 'Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution' on BBC2 now

    Redording it - first part was good.
    All five episodes are available on iplayer now. I watched the whole series last week.
    For some reason iPlayer is rather shite streaming to our TV.

    Netflix, Amazon Prime, Google Play all work fine but iPlayer often sits there buffering - even if I've downloaded the programme. We have a non-smart TV with a Chromcast google but iPlayer doesn't seem to like it.

    Should get a new TV really...
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,226
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Anecdotally Charles is thick as shit. From a friend of a friend who used to try to ‘tutor’ him. Limited attention span, and just really thick.
    He isn't thick, certainly he is more of an intellectual than most royals and the average member of the population
    Charles may not be an academic or the world’s best empath. But he does have an uncanny knack for big picture thinking and the courage to say things well ahead of them becoming fashionable perspectives. I think he’ll do just fine and I say that as someone who’s reached the point where I’d shrug if the whole lot of them were P45’d.
  • MikeLMikeL Posts: 7,281
    edited October 2021
    Charles won't refuse Royal Assent because he knows that wouldn't be tenable.

    It's much more likely he stops a Bill being introduced in Parliament in the first place by refusing consent (currently known as Queen's Consent).

    And he would do this in secret - whereas refusing Royal Assent would be public.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen's_Consent
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Anecdotally Charles is thick as shit. From a friend of a friend who used to try to ‘tutor’ him. Limited attention span, and just really thick.
    He isn't thick, certainly he is more of an intellectual than most royals and the average member of the population
    Thinking of oneself as an intellectual does not necessarily make you one.
  • IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Chuck is brighter than the Queen?

    What gives you that idea? She shows every sign of being extremely shrewd, perceptive and far-sighted. Charles, to be charitable, does not do this
    Prince Charles attended the University of Cambridge whereas his mother, in the words of David Starkey is a poorly educated Philistine.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/dec/22/monarchy.topstories3
    And got in entirely on merit, do you hear me?

    The Cambridge "educated" Starkey's complaint is apparently that HMQ finds gin and dubonnet more interesting than he is. Easy to sympathise.
    I'm assuming there's a challenge between Oxford and Cambridge on letting in the dumbest candidate each year.

    I see your Prince Charles and raise you a Jeffrey Archer, I see your Jeffrey Archer and raise you a Richard Burgon, so on and so forth.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,407
    Didn't House of Cards show us what happens when a monarch tries to take on a PM?
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,407
    MikeL said:

    Charles won't refuse Royal Assent because he knows that wouldn't be tenable.

    It's much more likely he stops a Bill being introduced in Parliament in the first place by refusing consent (currently known as Queen's Consent).

    And he would do this in secret - whereas refusing Royal Assent would be public.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen's_Consent

    And turn whichever party was trying to do something instantly into republicans.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    What I really liked about NTTD was that nothing in the movie broke the 4th wall, I didn't feel like the director or producers or writers were preaching at me as you get with so many movies at the moment. The most egregious recent example being the random assortment of women superheroes during that cringe scene in Avengers Endgame.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,184
    TimT said:

    kinabalu said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style

    It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.

    Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"

    That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?

    If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent

    Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming

    https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/essays/babel-4/

    The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.

    Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
    Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:

    (1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."

    (2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."

    (3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."

    (4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."

    (5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."

    (6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."

    (7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."

    (8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."

    (9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."

    (10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."

    (11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."

    (12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."

    Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more. :smile:
    Are these actual quotes, or your impersonations of PB folk? Either way, hope you'll provide the key at some stage after we've all had fun guessing.
    Ha - this is fun. I'll go for:
    1) HYUFD?
    2) Definitely Morris Dancer.
    3) Dura Ace?
    4) Or is this Dura Ace?
    5) Rochdale
    6) MaxPB
    7) Leon
    8) Malcolmg
    9) MrEd?
    10) Casino Royale
    11) Big G
    12) Or is this HYUFD?
  • MikeL said:

    Charles won't refuse Royal Assent because he knows that wouldn't be tenable.

    It's much more likely he stops a Bill being introduced in Parliament in the first place by refusing consent (currently known as Queen's Consent).

    And he would do this in secret - whereas refusing Royal Assent would be public.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen's_Consent

    It wouldn't remain secret for long.
  • HYUFD said:


    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
    It would not. If it was an unpopular bill he would get his way anyway.

    If it was a popular bill he would be unlikely to refuse to sign it and if he tried would likely have to abdicate in favour of William.

    There can be no election held without the Monarch agreeing to dissolve Parliament either, the Monarch could simply create a new government from existing MPs
    You are now making a case for the monarch to overrule parliament

    You never cease to amaze

    And recruit thousands to the Republican movement
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    kle4 said:

    Didn't House of Cards show us what happens when a monarch tries to take on a PM?

    I thought that was the Crown (the Maggie episodes)
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,969
    edited October 2021
    kle4 said:

    Didn't House of Cards show us what happens when a monarch tries to take on a PM?

    The second series/book did, To Play The King.

    Michael Kitchin played a Prince Charles type of charachter.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    edited October 2021
    RobD said:

    HYUFD said:


    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
    It would not. If it was an unpopular bill he would get his way anyway.

    If it was a popular bill he would be unlikely to refuse to sign it and if he tried would likely have to abdicate in favour of William.

    There can be no election held without the Monarch agreeing to dissolve Parliament either, the Monarch could simply create a new government from existing MPs
    Elections are automatic after five years. A Parliament cannot sit longer, unless the law is changed.
    Is the FTPA still in place ?

    The cleanest way to obviate it would be to reintroduce the Septennial act (as amended) to repeal the FTPA. One thing about our parliament, I don't see a reason other than basic convention that the septennial act couldn't be made into a say... centennial act if a majority could be found for it. I mean I doubt that would ever happen, but the basic protection against dictatorship from this aspect (Ridiculously spaced elections) isn't as strong as the USA where it's constitutional and thus has a very very high bar to change.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    TimT said:

    kle4 said:

    Didn't House of Cards show us what happens when a monarch tries to take on a PM?

    I thought that was the Crown (the Maggie episodes)
    It was shown in the play King Charles III and led to William becoming King and Charles abdicating.

    However it depends on the Bill, if a Bill is unpopular Charles would have the public on his side, not Parliament
  • I wonder how people would have reacted in January 2020 if King Charles III refused to give assent to the Brexit bill.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    edited October 2021

    HYUFD said:


    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
    It would not. If it was an unpopular bill he would get his way anyway.

    If it was a popular bill he would be unlikely to refuse to sign it and if he tried would likely have to abdicate in favour of William.

    There can be no election held without the Monarch agreeing to dissolve Parliament either, the Monarch could simply create a new government from existing MPs
    You are now making a case for the monarch to overrule parliament

    You never cease to amaze

    And recruit thousands to the Republican movement
    I am not making a case, merely saying constitutionally the Monarch can still refuse to consent to legislation and if a Bill is unpopular would get away with it
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,407
    HYUFD said:

    TimT said:

    kle4 said:

    Didn't House of Cards show us what happens when a monarch tries to take on a PM?

    I thought that was the Crown (the Maggie episodes)
    It was shown in the play King Charles III and led to William becoming King and Charles abdicating.

    However it depends on the Bill, if a Bill is unpopular Charles would have the public on his side, not Parliament
    Until the public think about it for 5 seconds, and ponder what he will refuse next time.
  • CatManCatMan Posts: 2,722
    edited October 2021
    rcs1000 said:


    My issue with OHMSS is that while the movie is well plotted, has great action scenes, and has some fantastic performances from people like Telly Sevalas, it unfortunately has a hole at its core.

    George Lazenby can't act.

    And that's why, despite being a thoroughly enjoyable romp, it's not a top five Bond.

    I have to disagree. I think Lazenby was great. He was offered a *7* movie contract during the filming, but turned it down because his agent convinced him that Bond movies were going out of fashion. (Lol!)

    In an alternative universe I think we'd be taking about him as the best Bond.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    Cookie said:

    TimT said:

    kinabalu said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    When I am bored I sometimes play a game with PB. I go to a longer comment (avoiding the name at the top) and I read the first 2 or 3 sentences. And then I test myself: I see if I can guess the identity of the commenter from the opinion, syntax, vocabulary, style

    It is surprisingly easy, we all have a style. What is more surprising is how robotic and repetitive some commenters are, such that you can not only guess the identity of the commenter, but you can predict what they will say next, after those first 2 sentences, sometimes down to the precise word.

    Two extreme examples are Kinabalu on the left, and HYUFD on the right. No offence guys, but I suggest you are actually bots on Russia's SputnikGPT-3 in Chelyabinsk, autocompleting your comments following the prompt of a prior comment - as that is how GPT3 works. It is basically "autocomplete on crack"

    That raises a further question, one I have mentioned before. What if ALL intelligence is just autocomplete? We think we have original thoughts, ideas, concepts, but maybe all of us - not just the twin droids kinabalu and HYUFD - are just a bunch of algorithms, responding as we must?

    If all intelligence is just autocomplete, then AI is already here, and it is called GPT3, and it only going to get more intelligent

    Here's a fascinating essay exploring that exact same idea that I had last year. Or, I should say, that idea I thought i had, in reality it was just me autocompleting the new reality of Natural Language Programming

    https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/essays/babel-4/

    The most fun posters are those whose views on a subject are unpredictable.

    Hat tip to @IshmaelZ, who is reasonably inscrutable.
    Bit of fun, see how many people can get of these:

    (1) "100% disagreed. If the price of human body parts goes down demand for them will rise until equilibrium is found. Do you deny this? Yes/No."

    (2) "Mr kinabalu, there’s a reason why Usain Bolt’s entrance into the 4th form girls’ egg and spoon race would be deemed by most to be inappropriate."

    (3) "High intensity burns, preferably at the gym and in close proximity to a “htg” doing unfeasible contortions on a mat, that’s my ying to the yang of an otherwise indulgent lifestyle. When I’ve accomplished 30 secs of that, and got my breath back, I feel splendid."

    (4) "Afternoon team, good debating from everyone today, anybody know where I can buy a new bike, mine’s crocked. TIA."

    (5) "PB Tories might be able to articulate something borderline intelligible every so often if they weren’t always gagging on Johnson’s cock."

    (6) "Had it with men in dresses and wanker scientists who talk wank the whole time. I’m going to Switzerland."

    (7) "I was at a dinner in Islington the other evening and had terrific fun demonstrating to the people there how the green belt is an example of the Payroll being kept at the gates of the castle by their lords and masters."

    (8) "You must think I button up the back you half-witted cretin. Jog on."

    (9) "I know this won’t be popular on here but my feeling is that the more the Dems bang on about the Capitol “riots” and the attempted “coup” (lol) the more people will notice their risible double standards and look forward to voting for Trump next time."

    (10) "Can't see why woke is sapping the moral fibre of the West? Cognitive bias, pure and simple."

    (11) "Sky News. Boris says everything is coming up roses. Nothing from Labour."

    (12) "Crumpets for tea is possible if Starmer is PM in a hung parliament being propped up by Sturgeon and the SNP otherwise no chance because Boris has said it can’t be for another 40 years."

    Apols to those missing. Could have done loads more. :smile:
    Are these actual quotes, or your impersonations of PB folk? Either way, hope you'll provide the key at some stage after we've all had fun guessing.
    Ha - this is fun. I'll go for:
    1) HYUFD?
    2) Definitely Morris Dancer.
    3) Dura Ace?
    4) Or is this Dura Ace?
    5) Rochdale
    6) MaxPB
    7) Leon
    8) Malcolmg
    9) MrEd?
    10) Casino Royale
    11) Big G
    12) Or is this HYUFD?
    I had 1) as someone responding to PT. 3) as Leon. But then 7) is so Leon. I also had Malcolm and Mr Ed. I had 12) as TSE mocking HYUFD.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,407
    edited October 2021

    I wonder how people would have reacted in January 2020 if King Charles III refused to give assent to the Brexit bill.

    Like those people who pretended to think the Queen should have refused Boris's prorogation?

    Though I recall some pretty silly arguments around the government possibly trying to advise the Queen to deny consent to bills passed against their wishes.
  • kle4 said:

    I wonder how people would have reacted in January 2020 if King Charles III refused to give assent to the Brexit bill.

    Like those people who pretended to think the Queen should have refused Boris's prorogation?
    The Queen did not save us.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771

    MaxPB said:

    No time to die - great movie. Second best of the Craig run after Casino Royale. Really enjoyed it, my wife did as well and she's not a huge fan of the series. Lea Seydoux looks and talks uncannily like my wife which was a bit jarring for me personally.

    I'd rate it as 5th best Bond movie.

    1. GoldenEye
    2. Casino Royale
    3. Thunderball
    4. Live and Let Die
    5. No Time to Die

    Would be my list.

    I think No Time To Die started well but steadily deteriorated as the film went on - and it did go on.

    I won't go into spoilers on here but though it had potential there are several things I really didn't like about it.
    It’s a shame it’s impossible to discuss on here because of spoilers. I dare say we can reconvene the debate after Christmas, when everyone has seen it.
    I haven't seen it yet (Weds for me), but I know how it ends.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    I love The Spy Who Loved Me for this alone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaEU_A405zA

    It's really just so cheesy and awful. So glad that the producers took Bond back into the serious direction with Craig. They tried to with Brosnan and GoldenEye was a brilliant start but he wasn't a very good actor.
    Die Another Day was an enjoyable film, just not a Bond film.
    Die Another Day was terrible. Probably 25th out of 25 Bond movies and worse than Never Say Never Again. It has no redeeming qualities as a movie. The best thing about it was introducing Rosamund Pike as an actress.
    Whoah.

    Diamonds are Forever is worse.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,407

    kle4 said:

    I wonder how people would have reacted in January 2020 if King Charles III refused to give assent to the Brexit bill.

    Like those people who pretended to think the Queen should have refused Boris's prorogation?
    The Queen did not save us.
    Yeah, that was the silliness, spot on.
  • HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:


    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    It would be the end of the monarchy, particularly if it is a popular bill.

    The government resigns and we have an election, they'll win on a manifesto on reducing the power of the monarchy, if not outright abolition.

    Taking back control from unelected rulers is popular I'm told.
    It would not. If it was an unpopular bill he would get his way anyway.

    If it was a popular bill he would be unlikely to refuse to sign it and if he tried would likely have to abdicate in favour of William.

    There can be no election held without the Monarch agreeing to dissolve Parliament either, the Monarch could simply create a new government from existing MPs
    You are now making a case for the monarch to overrule parliament

    You never cease to amaze

    And recruit thousands to the Republican movement
    I am not making a case, merely saying constitutionally the Monarch can still refuse to consent to legislation and if a Bill is unpopular would get away with it
    No she or he would not

    It would be an outrage to democracy and rightly see demands for the abolition the monarchy
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    kle4 said:

    HYUFD said:

    kle4 said:

    HYUFD said:

    .

    Sort of on topic.

    Prince Charles is on the side of insulate Britain.

    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/prince-charles-understands-extinction-rebellion-and-insulate-britain-protests/139455

    Can't wait for him to become Monarch.

    He'll probably send for Caroline Lucas for PM.
    Can't wait.

    I'm really looking forward to when he inevitably refuses to give royal assent to some bill he doesn't look.
    Charles is more intelligent than both his mother and his son but less politically astute than they are.

    However if a bill was unpopular according to polls he would probably get away with refusing to give royal assent if he tried to do so
    Parliament would immediately make refusing royal assent impossible. In theory people might support that kind of thing, but in practice they'd see we don't want kings with that ability, it only still exists because it won't be used.
    It couldn't, unless it had royal assent for it.

    Remember the Government are still the Monarch's ministers. Both Parliament and the Monarch's approval is needed to make statute laws
    Yeah, they would change that.

    Parts of our system are legal fictions, and if people tried to make the fictions real, something explicit would be put in place instead. I'm a monarchist, but it's monarchism on the basis the monarch does as they are told.

    Parliament couldn't legally put Charles I on trial either, or make laws, but it didn't stop them doing so for 11 years in various guises. Was the Convention Parliament acting 'legally' by saying James II had abdicated in 1689?

    People decide what is legal afterwards.

    But in fact if Charles did try something like that I bet he would then sign an Act that he could not do it again in future - as Parliament would make it very clear where the power lies.

    I don't think you appreciate how much the power of our system is on the basis of people not abusing theoretical powers. Consent for that system would collapse if they were subject to personal whims of a king.
    They can't change that.

    Charles 1st was executed as he tried to rule without Parliament and raise his own armies.

    A Monarch vetoing a Bill which was unpopular would be ruling with Parliament but just having more Crown input.
    Charles would be perfectly entitled to do so and nothing Parliament could do about it, if he exercised such powers he would obviously not try and restrict his royal prerogative
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,618
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    Taz said:

    I appreciate neither are well regarded but I absolutely love Moonraker and Spy Who Loved Me and gladly watch them over most other Bond Movies.

    The Moore Bond movies are good fun. A guilty pleasure - like admitting you like a James Blunt album.

    The Spy Who Loved Me has a very comforting Britishness to it.
    Other than Live and Let Die I struggle with his other movies. It was just such a huge tonal shift from serious British spy movie to sometimes slapstick British almost comedy movie, especially the latter ones where Roger Moore is ancient and very clearly out of shape. Brosnan era suffered from that too, GoldenEye was brilliant but then it quickly descended into farce with his other movies. The Craig era movies are definitely overall the second best after Sean Connery. It's a shame that we've had to wait so long for NTTD, but I'm really glad they didn't stick it onto Netflix. It deserves a big screen watch.
    Ok, confession: I really like the Moore Bonds. I probably watch them more than most others.

    The really corny stuff is embarrassing, sure, but I love Lewis Gilbert's big pieces, John Glen sweeping panning shots, John Barry's soundtracks and some of the villians - like Christopher Lee, Michael Lonsdale and Christopher Walken - are just great. Most of them have a reassuring Union Jack pop up somewhere, and Roger Moore's got an exquisite Englishness I just love. It just all works.

    Live and Let Die is a fresh and different start, Spy and Moonraker are good epics and For Your Eyes Only is massively underrated. Octopussy has a great cold war drama to it and amazing shots of India, and A View To A Kill is psychotic - you want Zorin dead.

    Moore a great actor? No. But he provided lots of fun and enjoyable films I'll be forever grateful for.
    I get where you're coming from and even though they are terribly cringey I do still love sitting down and watching them. I think I'll probably get the 25 movie set on physical media before Amazon stop making them.

    As I said, for me the issue was the step change in tone from the Connery era to Moore. It was just so different and I watched them in release order over a few months rather than on TV in random order so that probably made it worse.
    It’s well worth getting the collection on Blu-ray. Some of the masters are impressive.
This discussion has been closed.