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Turing Universal Machine Threat to All Mankind
Posted by Ernest Miller on Monday, October 14 @ 12:23:40 EDT Oddities
If Prof. Edward Felten's source (The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer) is correct in assessing Washington, D.C.'s conventional wisdom, things are worse than LawMeme has imagined:
The political dialog today is that the general purpose computer is a threat, not only to copyright but to our entire future.
 
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Turing Universal Machine Threat to All Mankind

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"User's Login" | Login/Create an Account | 6 comments
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Re: Turing Universal Machine Threat to All Mankind (Score: 2, Insighful)
by MurphysLaw on Monday, October 14 @ 14:50:05 EDT
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A quote from the blog:
If you're designing a computer, you have two choices. Either you make a general-purpose computer that can do everything that every other computer can do; or you make a special-purpose device that can do only an infinitesimally small fraction of all the interesting computations one might want to do. There's no in-between.


I can tell you that this is true. And I can assure you that every well-educated computer scientist knows why it is true. But what I don't know how to do -- at least not yet -- is to give a simple, non-technical explanation for it. If anybody has a hint about how to do this, please, please let me know.


I can't find a way to leave comments on the site.

The way to illustrate these things is with an analogy.

A single purpose computer ist to a gerneral purpose computer as an instrument which can play only one note is to an orchestra. With a limited instrument, you can't play much in the way of music. There are some rhythmic avenues to explore, but the creativity of the player is severely limited by the device.

In order to be able to play simple tunes, you need a handful of devices each of which can play a different note. In order to play a symphony, with different tonal colors for different passages and complex harmonies, you need literally thousands of single note devices.

Early on in the development of modern electronic devices, there were specialized, single purpose computers. Lots of people made dedicated word processing machines which did one thing -- replace a typewriter -- but were useless at anything else. General purpose computers replaced dedicated devides because, for the same cost, you could have a device which did as many things as the programmers could think of. Software that was written after the unit was designed could be loaded to make the device do things which hadn't even been imagined when it was built. This is the value to the economy of general purpose computers. Cripple them and you cripple all of the advances made in office productivity since the 70s. Surely policymakers can be made to see the value of general purposes devices.


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Re: Turing Universal Machine Threat to All Mankind (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Tuesday, October 15 @ 10:33:59 EDT
I'm not so sure an orchestra is really a good analogy here -- you can take the cellos out of an orchestra and it still can play music. You need something whose utility is dependent on all of its basic constituent parts. I've expanded on this idea here.


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Re: Turing Universal Machine Threat to All Mankind (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Tuesday, October 15 @ 22:40:21 EDT
Unfortunately, the writer doesn't understand the profundity of what he's heard.

The general purpose computer IS a threat to the powers to be, no less so in the US than in China (where they are taking steps to muzzle its functionality).

It represents not just freedom of speech, but also the other side of free speech, the point of free speech, i.e., freedom of information. The ability to know far more than we currently know, in minute detail, instantaneously, and to be able to process and rebroadcast that information as we please, this is the real threat. Instant information from multiple points of view prevents the powers that be from manipulating us by presenting only filtered information.

The writer doesn't understand, what gov's around the world would love to see are computerized appliances without the features our super powerful communications devices, our computers, have become.





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