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It's Time To Ignore Petty Politics and Focus On 'Transformative' Tech: Eric Schmidt (techcrunch.com)
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman at Alphabet in an interview said that we need to focus more on the possibilities of advances in biology and medicine as well as AI. But he feels people are spending "all our time arguing about political issues that are ultimately not that important." He urges people to stop doing that and work on things that are transformative. He added: "We've gone from an era where we thought about solving problems that were very, very big," he said. "We now define them as problems of special interests. Everyone's guilty. I'm not making a particular political point here." Schmidt seemed excited enough about the possibility of medical breakthroughs that Rose asked him: If he was starting over today, would he be more likely to go into computer science or biology? "Both are having a renaissance," Schmidt said.
It's all really lovely and swell that we're on the verge of making incredible medical and scientific progress and certainly we, as a species, should put our minds to such ideas.
It's just hard to argue that to people whose most pressing problem isn't curing cancer but finding a place to park the car they live in 'cause they got evicted. They might have a different idea of "important".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't see a whole lot of substance in the comments. Political issues might matter a lot because they affect the types of problems we face and the climate and resources for scientific research. I don't see a whole lot of examples and the comments seem vague enough to almost be meaningless. Also, most research isn't transformational, but is often very useful. Science advances frequently through incremental progress in which a problem can't really be solved until a lot of prior work is completed to make it possible. A lot of transformational ideas aren't immediately ready for mainstream use, either. The internet is a really transformational achievement but it occurred as a result of many incremental projects along the way that weren't done for the long term vision of the internet.
... They might have a different idea of "important".
And if we listen to them, we'll find them parking spots and new apartments. If we listen to Eric, maybe we'll cure cancer. Let's listen to the guy in the ivory tower.
One can learn to navigate the minefield that is politics, but one can't ignore it. That is petty for the most part now is a reflection of the people involved. It's something for people like Schmitt to acknowledge and work towards given his influence, not ignore with this finger wagging statement.
It's not an either/or situation - we can argue about EVERYTHING.
If your point is that some people are bad at arguing and making no sense, that's one thing.
But claiming that an argument isn't important enough to fight about just makes you look stupid.
Because the people that are getting screwed over by X definitely want to fight it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If we don't pay attention to politics (and oftentimes, even if we do), thundering idiots who don't have the slightest understanding of science, technology and so forth get elected. And proceed to use that lack of understanding like it was something to be proud of when they pass laws.
You get idiots in Congress who don't know the difference between weather and climate, or claim that we don't have to worry about rising sea levels in coastal areas because "God promised he would never flood the earth again".
We get politicians who want "small government", unless it involves regulations on your genitals, which they seem inordinately fond of passing.
We get ones who can't even understand email regulating the Internet, ones who aren't doctors regulating medical procedures, and so on. People passing laws based on their religious beliefs and then getting a case of chapped ass if anyone dares compare it to Sharia law.
If we don't pay attention to it, it just gets worse.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
People getting evicted or not does not affect Schmidt's bottom line.
Refocusing people on profitable technologies, which he will benefit disproportionally from, does.
Same mindset as "the taxpayers should pay for teaching kids coding from the fourth grade".
Somehow, in his mind, that his "ideals" for others are synonymous with his profits, is not politics.
He is Dr Evil. His "transformative tech" has basically destroyed privacy. Don't let him near anything medical please.
Please stop trying to out my candidate for the lying, cheating, felonious hack that they are and work on tech ideas that I deem important as a distraction.
Man rich enough to transcend politics tells those who aren't to stop worrying about it.
Things that are transformative usually involve transforming things for the worse as well as the better. Politics should protect people from that.
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
And increase the population that has x% of it currently living in their cars?
put aside your politics first
Right, because the income disparity between the wealthy and everyone else worldwide is getting smaller everyday! Soon we'll all be living in mansions!
Computer science != software.
He's likely talking about advances in machine learning (which is Google's focus).
Life is definitely a lot simpler if you just pretend all the poor, desperate slobs don't exist. Well ay least until you let your guard down in the wrong place for just a minute and one of them shanks you in the kidneys.
The existing and proposed cures for cancer are pricey, so who is going to pay for it? See how everything is political?
I translate this into "Stop all this privacy-nonsense and focus on something else".
Let's see now. At a big tech company, or anywhere for that matter, if you want to get anything technologically important done you first have to win the politics game to even get your chance up to bat. I'm sure he doesn't have this problem as chairman, but his employees do. Now he's a small fish in a big pond, and he's essentially whining that he can't just have his way. Whaa crybaby, whaa.
Only proper politics can facilitate technology reach lowest strata of society, not a seemingly philanthropic board decision. Technology has been shaping politics over last few centuries and more of that in the last two decades. Both are equally important because sooner than we expect, both will be indistinguishable.
"Your political issues are not that important." Right. Anyone's concerns over an impossible national debt, never-ending war, loss of privacy, job insecurity, the disappearing middle class -- this is meaningless drivel for the little people; the proles; the rubes; according to Eric Schmidt. Spoken like a true one-percenter. I'm not surprised he thinks that way. None of these problems affect him. So perhaps what needs to happen, is that he needs to be directly affected by it. It's time for Eric Schmidt to have a boot party. Does anyone else agree?
Transformative is making sure everyone
- has a place to live
- has food on the table
- has access to health care
- is safe from violence
- is treated with respect regardless of whatever
Those are big problems.
...Eric, ALL problems that affect more than a single small group are ultimately political.
To think anything else is staggeringly naive.
Look at climate change; many people misunderstand that it's a question of science. Not really. Ultimately, it's a question of focus, resources, and priorities which are POLITICAL questions. To deny that people are politically collectively vested in the results is fundamentally misunderstanding the very nature of the question.
It doesn't help that (in the US at least) that politics as a field has come to be populated by some of the most despicable characters in our society. We keep electing them mainly because it matters so little: firstly, we have no ability to draft 'our best citizens' for the roles of leadership, and they're staying the hell away from the grubby business. Second, the US is (at least perceived to be) eternal; there's no existential crisis and thus little perceived need to really give a shit about who's running things - vote for one party, and one bunch of people & their friends get rich. Vote for the other, and a different group and their friends get rich instead.
-Styopa
Eric sounds like a fucking cult leader.
Good luck getting anything real done with how important social issues like abortion, gay rights, gun control and religion/prayer in schools exist. Regardless of your opinion on these subjects they dominate most of the world's politics. They're great wedge issues. See, a substantial number of people in this world have a vested interest in preventing humanities problems from being solved. After all, what good is being rich if nobody's poor.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Translation from Schmidt-ese to English:
“all our time arguing about political issues that are ultimately not that important," = "why are people worried about losing their jobs? I don't care about that! I only care about myself! "
“not doing enough things that are transformative.” = "We want to create technology designed to make sure people can't earn a living anymore, but we are getting huge push back from ordinary people! The horror!!"
"Schmidt dismissed concerns that AIs could eventually become smart enough to be a threat to humans. "
Because he makes money off of it, and only cares about himself.
Brought to you by the Committee to Keep Eric in the Ivory Tower
“If you want something you want to keep private, the best place to keep it is in Gmail,” he (Eric Schmidt) said.
Sorry Eric but in my world the best place to keep something private is at foremost not on the internet and definitely not on a third-party server over which I have no control. Any government can knock at your door and pull your plug. You can spin your CEO logic all day but I am still not buying in.
Unfortunately, most of what that troll says is accurate. His big mistake is in thinking that everywhere else on the planet is any different, conveniently ignoring similar problems and atrocities in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and just about anywhere else on the globe. One could, by replacing the proper nouns in the rant above, make it a rant about any continent or even country in the world. Anyone want to play ad-libs below?
The last movie was TERRIBLE. Why would... wait what? Never mind.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
A novel Idea I know but... why do we need to choose between transformative tech and politics? We have billions of people who can do billions of things at any given moment. It's not like politics is just going to go away.
advancing science and technology is all well and good, but the reason we fixate on those pesky "political issues" is because the plutocratic class of which mr Schmidt is most certainly a member have structured modern society in such a means that it is no longer possible to casually ignore the state of affairs in which we the lowly mankind live. Outside the gilded fencing, normal americans have to work multiple jobs to earn subsistance or poverty wages. They have health insurance thats not only unaffordable but now mandatory in its coverage of almost nothing. Americans since the decline of manufacturing and labor sectors may not have a terrible unemployment rate, but the labour partitipation rate is still barely 60%.
We live in a constant state of federally mandated terror in which our every move and utterance is recorded in some clandestine bunker for future analysis. our government still runs a secret torture prison in cuba, fights secret wars in the middle east, runs an entire secret court system with secret warrants, and once killed a US citizen with a drone because they didnt like his opinion. Yet despite all this wartime money our government fails to fund even basic veterans healthcare. We spend more than 2 hours in checkpoints just for simple travel, ostensibly to protect us from the terrorists that each year kill hundreds of times fewer of us than the heroin epidemic ravaging the nation that receives no attention.
And what is this political process we're so encumbered by? that we could just ignore and move on to developing the next phone? Its represented by an entire wing that shut the government down twice with impunity. The other half lies pathologically about its intent and governs through--surprise--a direct line from the monied elite. Its not got a solution for our broken immigration system or our rotting school system, but fear not because its just passed another trade deal that will spirit away american prosperity and jobs in favour of sweatshop labour and jackbooted copyright law.
so yeah, if we've inconvenienced the advance of civilization at your behest we're truly sorry. Its just between our uncle returning with untreated PTSD from 3 wars, our sister who spends the day high under a bridge, and the payday lending place thats slowly waterboarding us out of a home, we've been a little busy. but im sure you can find an H1B to fill in for now.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Whole countries have been taken down because of political decisions, so I don't consider it "Petty."
Germany essentially does not have long term debt or unfunded liabilities of consequence because they know the effect from their post WW1 collapse. Nicaragua is seeing the result of petty politics today. Argentina arguably has been held down for a century by bad politics. Brazil has its problems today because of politics. China had it.
Schmidt looks at himself as omniscient now.
You mean the labor force that stably holds around 58% of population, but has experienced a labor force bubble to 69%, and is now coming down as the population ages and retires?
Do you mean the labor force people complained about in the early-2000s because housewives started working to get a second income, claiming it was impossible to survive on a single income anymore?
Do you mean the labor force which continues to grow year after year, even as it shrinks as a proportion of the total population, and reduces itself by 2% marginal population while increasing its rate of employment 5%?
More new jobs have appeared than new Americans. America has become prosperous, and its population has expanded as the wage slave society has broken away, allowing desperate two-income families to become one-income families with more economic freedom. People have painted the change as the destruction of the American economy as the labor force participation rate grew ("We're getting poorer! Housewives must work alongside their husbands or their families starve!") and as it shrinks ("We're losing jobs! Well, not actual jobs, we've got more of those as a percentage of population... but less of the population is expressing a NEED to work! They must have just given up on living!").
I can't tell which of you are liars and which of you are fools.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
It's just hard to argue that to people whose most pressing problem isn't curing cancer but finding a place to park the car they live in
You're mixing two things that shouldn't be mixed. People working on transformative technologies versus arguing politics should follow Schmidt's advice.
And yes, there is also a social problem with a segment of the population who can't or won't work to support themselves.
Different problems for different people to solve, neither should be ignored.
.
I would rather end homelessness and hunger because I already have the solution to that *and* I'm genetically immune to cancer. It helps my argument that ending homelessness and hunger saves more lives and improves quality-of-life for more Americans than finding a cancer cure, although I'm not sure it helps my argument enough to cover for the fact that I personally benefit a hell of a lot from the change, too.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Argentina could have basically been further developed than most European countries by now if they would have had saner politics.
I can't even say I really grasp the political divisions there -- it doesn't even seem to follow the basic left-right axis, it's like its following some z-axis of its own making.
In this economy, you're better off without a job than you would be with a lot of the jobs that are offered...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only computer science that matters is applied computer science. What's applied computer science? It's computer science knowledge put to work using hardware and/or software.
Advances in machine learning described in some obscure academic journal getting dusty on some obscure shelf in the basement of some college library are useless. These advances implemented using software are much more relevant.
Besides, your example of machine learning fits into what the GP wrote:
Machine learning is shaping up to be all about advertising to us, and collecting our personal information so we can be advertised to more "effectively".
That's maybe fine for you, but how do you explain to them the difference between not having a cure for cancer and having one but not being able to afford it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Europe is far more racist than the United States, and that's despite strong prohibitions against hate speech."
And so we confront the problem - hate-thought. Good luck making that illegal.
All politics is someone's morality.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
And ensuring, in America, that 22% of children conceived will never, ever get cancer. Or anything else.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
What color is the sky on your planet? On our planet, the sky is blue.
Bill Clinton doesn't agree with you:
But the problem is, 80 percent of the American people are still living on what they were living on the day before the [2008 financial] crash," Clinton told a crowd. "And about half the American people, after you adjust for inflation, are living on what they were living on the last day I was president 15 years ago. So that's what's the matter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. It's BOOOOSH!!!!'s fault.
I hope that it includes the Muslims as well as the good folk of britain
I mean, he's asking us to toss aside billions of years of evolution, natural primal instinct, conditioned reflex, etc... In the grand scheme, we are acting little different than the dogs pissing on fire hydrants marking their territory and the moneys flinging their poo. In theory, as humans, we do have the power to *flip the switch* and stop acting like animals. Like everything else the choice is personal.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The issue is that I haven't heard anything new out of politics for a while.
Party A: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.
Party B: Wants less government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.
Now the special interests groups swap around over time.
So politics will go to normal progress if they like it they will give it money if they don't they will not.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Agreed. There's no bright and shining future for everyone if we ignore the present civil unrest, particularly if things ever escalate beyond being "civil". We don't live in a vacuum, so while he may be right about what our long-term priorities should be, the amount of attention we can dedicate to them is dictated in large part by how things are operating in the short-term.
Eric Schmidt bloviated:
"all our time arguing about political issues that are ultimately not that important."
Politics is what drives famines, for example, you fucking tool, not lack of food. We have plenty of food and medicine to go around. It's the politics of /getting it there/ to where it's needed, like drought and war zones. Politics is what kills people, or spares them, depending on a lot of things (but mostly greed, ultimately), none of which are the global capability of technology, shelter, medicine, or food, because we have a lot of all of that (artificial scarcity is artificial).
Politics aren't important? Fuck you.
"I got rich, therefore my opinion counts" - said the "Great Man" of Thomas Carlyle (and Robert Heinlein and Ayn Rand, and a whole lot of other people who are dead wrong).
No it doesn't. Not more than anyone else who is also as badly informed as you.
--
BMO
Would that be communist style "collective ascension" or Nazi-style "collective ascension"? What is your preferred method for dealing with people who disagree with you? Lobotomies, psychiatric drugs, Siberian camps, or gas chambers?
not for non tech-savy users
Robber baron inequality levels, some romping good fun via foreign military and financial adventurism, not a little biosphere damage, and how's the middle class doing? A good exercise might be to take a walk by the Interstate and see how many homeless are living there.
A renaissance? What long dead culture are we copying from in computing and biology? Or is this some new use of the term renaissance? If so, what does this use of renaissance mean? Feel-good technobabble? Other?
Yes, they are. Yes, you are.
Explain why Americans pay that big fat medical bill and yet only have life expectancies on par with Costa Rica? How exactly will throwing yet more tech at that wallet to see what sticks help (anything but Google's bottom line)?
Special Interest groups found a way around the majority rule : Courts and media.
Rich people and Corporations found a way around majority rule: Brib... errr.... lobbyists.
And the original voter qualifications are being diluted ( landowner or business man, professional, tradesman... : ie, a productive member of society ).
And now Eric pretends to be Jack Handy - "Deep Thoughts"... LOL!
getting caught up in political garbage rather than focusing on the collective ascension of the species
The problem with "getting rid of petty politics" is that the only way to get rid of it is to impose one viewpoint. So how do we fix the transgender toilet issue? Do we tell the TG people to just shut up and use the toilet matching their birth gender? Or do we override the democratic rights of the people of North Carolina? To most people, one or the other of those is "obviously" the right solution, but we don't agree on which one. So who gets to decide? And how do we force the "losers" to accept the decision (especially if they turn out to be the majority)?
People don't even agree that "transformative technology" is a good thing. There is strong opposition to GMO. Many people fear AI. Workers don't like robots "stealing" their jobs.
Anyway, I don't really see "petty politics" as impeding tech. If anything, it is the other way around. If the politicians are busy arguing about toilets, they have less time to interfere with the economy, regulate innovators, and "pick winners". The last time the economy was truly "booming" was when the politicians were focused on Bill Clinton's blowjobs.
One of the 2 candidates proudly declared a large fraction of our fellow Americans "enemies". How can we ignore politics when the political leaders who are supposed to represent us and serve the entire population are "proud" to call every third or fourth American an enemy?
You already have yours.
This is very obvious and I am sure I could go on for days ...
You already get the same salary as the person doing the same job beside you.
You have full dominion over your body and your insurance covers the full range of processes and maintenance of said body.
You have the choice to marry the person you want.
You are free to pursue your Religion on your own time or lack thereof without persecution.
You can use the bathroom.
You have stable or can reliably and easily obtain legal, useful work commensurate to your ability and are compensated appropriately for your efforts.
You are safe from authority and police considering you have done nothing wrong or indeed have "done the country a public service".
Personally I think the politicians keep arguing about toilets because the solutions to all the *real* issues will not be liked by their rich friends. Politics have become too dependent on money, so politicians are not likely to make decisions that will get them less money. The elephant in the room is that something needs to be done with companies who have become too large and drain too much from the economy but that will never happen under current system.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Machine learning is also responsible for speech recognition and translation. The XBox Kinect is powered by machine learning algorithms to properly identify your body, airports have used machine learning to optimize flight takeoff patterns. It has done, and will do, far more than advertise to us.
They are not going to shank you in the kidney... they'll shank you in the throat and take the kidney.
the solutions to all the *real* issues will not be liked by their rich friends.
Rich people invest in transformative tech innovation. Poor people don't. They spend their money on food, rent, etc. By saying the law should be more progressive and less favorable to the rich, you are engaging in petty politics and impeding transformative technology. Petty concerns like jobs, livable wages, and clean drinking water are exactly what Eric Schmidt (personal net worth: $9B) is complaining about.
How about "just leave them behind"?
WHY is it necessary to be so intolerant of people with differing opinions?
You do realize that the point Schmidt was making was that we spend too much effort obsessing over "isms" and not enough over actually doing constructive things?
The big data will revolutionize medicine meme has been going strong for over two decades and counting.
I often hear this rhetoric about high technology and innovative companies like 'Google' and 'Facebook' .. in many cases the same biological breakthrough meme is inevitably invoked in some way.
Just last week CNN's Fareed Zakaria ran a promotional interview with a toll from Linked In of all places with the very same nonsense about technological innovation, medical breakthroughs and all almost verbatim.
Actual worth in terms of "positive" contributions to society of these advertising firms seems to me to be completely overblown and divorced from reality.
That's short sighted. Technology is democratizing and breaks down more barriers than political bickering ever will.
Books and literacy were the province of the wealthy and the high priests who could afford scribes to duplicate texts. Modern literacy rates would not be possible without movable type and the printing press.
Even once those technologies existed the spread of information was limited by gatekeepers who had the ability to publish using expensive machinery until things like Xerox machines and later the internet made publishing cheap or even free.
Even in your own example, isn't one of the largest reasons that people go bankrupt is because of medical issues? Instead of arguing about Obamacare, how about we just cure cancer and then we don't have to worry about going bankrupt and lose your home because you got cancer.
For a technology focused site, this place really has some myopic contributors.
The petty politics of the day are designed by the rich upper class to keep the plebs like us in check. We can't get anything done as a society because people are screaming and injuring people over labels such as race, sexual orientation, and gender. Worse still, they have pumped money to teach young impressionable and uncritical minds that there are millions of variations of sex and gender.
And until every one of those have proper representation, we are not allowed to focus on advancements and can only focus at diversity. These same people attack meritocracy, the idea that if you do good work it you will succeed regardless of what your person labels are, because despite it being the clear answer they want people who have non stem field degrees to get into stem field jobs.
I feel I will only be taken seriously by these same people if I add the following: if you disagree with me, it's misogyny.
F#ck whatever this guy says. He's a rich asshole who gets to do whatever he wants and to f#ck whoever he wants.
Consider: a country is quietly supporting an insurgent group whom is allies with another group whom wants to kill as many of your countrymen as possible. The other group has already killed thousands and want to kill more of your countrymen. This is in spite of tens of billions of dollars in 'aid' to said country. How do you deal with this country? Important govt question, no tech involved. Ron Paul's bounty idea didn't work in this case.
.There's no bright and shining future for everyone if we ignore the present civil unrest,
Yes there is. To be very blunt, the people involved in the unrest really do not matter to technical advance. Only a small percentage of them would be of any use even if they could be interested in technical advancement, so frankly it is better for technical people to ignore civil unrest - beyond finding somewhere to work that is more isolated from the practical effects of same, which is what they have done with Silicon Valley.
Civil unrest will always come and go in waves, I would argue it is basically utterly irrelevant compared to advancing technology which drags forward all of humanity, willing or not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Taking us back to the original post. Jobs for people with training in computer science and biology usually pay pretty well. The problem is that they require extensive training and society has a hard time prioritizing education to provide the training people need.
I wouldn't go to computer science or biology today. Both are oversaturated with people thinking they are the ticket to a great career. I would look at applied physics and some of the science based engineering disciplines. A new science and computation based approach to mechanical, aerospace, civil, and chemical engineering is changing the world. Bioengineering and environmental engineering are growing rapidly. If you can build the math and computer skills to make it, those are the big growth areas of the 21st century. Molecular biology is really really complicated. Messing with it usually does more harm than good. So I suspect the pharmaceutical industry is not a growth area for the next century. And the phalanxes of post-docs sorting out the pathways regulating each gene are going to soon find that the details they unearth are usually not relevant. Sure that gene is involved in cancer risk...but what are you going to do about it if the network is so complicated that external modification messes up too many other parts of cell function. (Just like everything is made of quarks and electrons, but we don't use quantum chromodynamics for engineering, everything in biology depends on molecular biology but molecular biology isn't that useful.) While everyone focuses on biology with dreams of improving health, science based tools for materials science and fabrication are changing the world. Now if only we could solve some political problems so we could train a few billion people to join the effort...
You do realize that most of the people that want Tech to focus on political issues are actually a cult, right?
He's come a long way from do no evil.
In this economy, you're better off without a job than you would be with a lot of the jobs that are offered...
I know a few unemployed people who will be happy to tell you that you are just talking out of your ass. Seriously, who the hell could possibly believe such a blatant falsehood?
Hey, I thought you might be interested in this
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A far greater number of people are currently dealing with or will eventually deal with cancer than are living in their cars.
Also, to get extreme, it's possible to live in a mud hut and eat berries without dying. Cancer is terminal without treatment.
from the article: "The best place to keep your information is Google". Even if that's true at this very moment, what happens when a new pharaoh comes (who did not know Joseph)? Without a committed legal regime which makes it dangerous for public officials to spy on private citizens without a cause, this promise is as meaningful as a politician's election promises. It's backed by nothing.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Why would anyone enter computer science when people like Schmidt are plotting to flood the market or form non-compete agreements to reduce wages?
Most the current tech leaderships plans are to make money for themselves and their investors, but not society as a whole. Rather than employee a single person, they'll "job share" it for a fraction of the price.
The truth is flooding a market with workers will worsen the livelihoods for everyone. It's true with Uber, H-1B visas, and illegal immigrants.
I think we're actually in a computing dark age
As someone who grew up in the era of 8bit home computers and have followed the industry very closely since, I have been saying this for a decade and the reason left the industry. In a way, it has run its course, exhausting everything it is capable of. The only thing left is change for change sake.
People still listen to this Ashkenazi Zionist piece of shit who infiltrated google ?
This is a website for nerds, not tech-savy users. I've come to the realization that nerd means minimum wage earner who can't find a job.
So why aren't they working at fast food, doing phone support, or stocking shelves at Walmart? Anyone who wants a job can get any of those.
All our computers and phones are spying on us. We haven't even got enough enlightenment and wisdom to use agriculture, banking systems and gun powder to make the world anything but a worse place to live. As soon as pervasive automation takes hold we'll probably mothball most of our population and just give them enough to get by through some minimum income situation.
Germany is doing well because it's the strongest economy in the Euro which is set up so that wealth flows there from everyone else. Whether that was the plan all along or just the result of economic fundamentalism I can't say, but it's taking the whole EU towards disintegration, at which point Europe will return to being the warzone it used to be - and that means Germany, as the strongest nation here, is going to end up making another error of judgement and subsequently burned to the ground again sooner or later.
In other words, Germany is just as dumb as the rest of them, it just manifests in different ways.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It isn't that politics needs to go away, but rather that politics needs to focus on providing direction (translation: funding) for technological solutions to the problems. For example, I've been saying for about the last fifteen years that we need to stop wasting time arguing about abortion, for two reasons:
More significantly, the only reason our country isn't spending money to actually solve the underlying false dependency is that politicians have kept us so focused on the bogus debate that we haven't even noticed that the debate is moot. Right now, several teams of scientists (mostly outside the U.S.) are steadily working on developing artificial womb technology. When they get it fully working, it will be possible to quite literally transfer a placenta and embryo from the mother into an artificial incubator and grow it to term. That means no more contradiction, and no more need for this pointless and completely inefficacious debate.
Think about it. With science, we can be in favor of allowing a woman to choose to not have a baby while still being in favor of protecting the child's right to life. Technology can eliminate the entire reason for all that useless bickering that won't ever change anything anyway, all while opening up new possibilities for people who for whatever reason are unable to have children naturally. And once we have that technology, a ban on abortion won't even raise eyebrows, because there won't be any rational reason to kill a child when you can just as easily give it up for adoption in the first trimester.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Good post. Slashdot feels more like political site than tech site nowadays.
Not enough people vote, pay attention to or understand the politics of this country.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Different problems for different people to solve, neither should be ignored.
What if the "transformative technology" you're working on is captive to "petty politics"?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
First red flag:
I think that a UBI is our only hope to deal with a coming labor market unlike any in human history and that it represents our best hope to revitalize American civil society.
This makes me expect an "Automation is going to permanently eliminate jobs and we are entering an age of the end of work" argument. Automation is more of the same technical progress that's continued since man learned to sharpen spears to hunt more effectively; it has some attributes in common with the Industrial Revolution, which means we should look for and control the particular danger of sudden rapid transition--that is, sudden loss of lots of employment all at once; high-unemployment markets have difficulty recovering.
We are approaching a labor market in which entire trades and professions will be mere shadows of what they once were. I’m familiar with the retort: People have been worried about technology destroying jobs since the Luddites, and they have always been wrong. But the case for “this time is different” has a lot going for it.
And there it is.
Failure is here:
When cars and trucks started to displace horse-drawn vehicles, it didn’t take much imagination to see that jobs for drivers would replace jobs lost for teamsters, and that car mechanics would be in demand even as jobs for stable boys vanished. It takes a better imagination than mine to come up with new blue-collar occupations that will replace more than a fraction of the jobs (now numbering 4 million) that taxi drivers and truck drivers will lose when driverless vehicles take over.
Answer: Anything which requires any amount of human labor to produce--including the human labor required to produce and maintain the machines, to operate the machines, to manage the logistics, to supply fuel and electricity, to market, to maintain those self-driving cars, and to sell at retail outlets--will have a non-zero price. Our ability to buy those things will lead to buying more things and more-complex things, with the amount we spend increasing as more human labor is required in total to make those things. That means jobs.
Which jobs? What jobs? I don't know. All I know is if I'm buying something, somebody is involved in making it. Until we fully-automate the production of energy--including every activity involved in building, powering, and operating the factories, right down to mining, to painting the ships, all of it--electricity (and oil, solar panels, or whatever power source we're using) will have a cost. Everything that moves will have a cost. Everything that we use will have a cost. Those costs are jobs.
To envision that there won't be jobs, I have to envision that the average consumer has piled up more money than they can spend, ever.
Advances in 3-D printing and “contour craft” technology will put at risk the jobs of many of the 14 million people now employed in production and construction.
Buildings and 3D-printed objects will become cheaper than alternatives; we'll build more of these, and we'll build more-complex versions, invoking additional labor. Some of the labor displaced will go on to producing other products--some of those may even be 3D-printed products that didn't exist before, or which were rich-people luxuries and now are common goods (cell phones made by the technological processes used in 1983 would cost $9,000 today, for example, which should tell you why none of your friends had a cell phone in 1989).
The UBI is to be financed by getting rid of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare.
Unnecessary risk. Medicare and medicaid are left alone in my plan because covering old people
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To also be very blunt, technical advance doesn't create a bright future
Yes, it does. Hard to argue with progress that has been made on all fronts. It's also hard to untwine one technical advancement from all others...
unless you can get its fruits into the hands of people.
Since people make them, they are inherently in the hands of people. But it does not even matter if no-one ends up using it because of the tangental benefits of advancement and new ideas spreading to other fields.
To continue being blunt, Silicon Valley is neither self-sufficient nor a fortress.
That's not blunt, that's being obvious. Of course they are not - but they are CLOSE ENOGUH for the moment, and if that changed technical work would simply shift location. And it's only one location...
Should civil order break down, it's not going to be Galt's Gulch, it's going to be a tomb
I fully agree with what you are saying about what happens to those places in the event of real civil downfall.
But I disagree it matters by and large to the technical elite, which will have been long gone before it gets truly disastrous (even for the EMP over SF scenario). It's also not a danger Not for the ideas and technical work, which is highly distributed.
Sometimes it goes because people get what they wanted, and sometimes because the entire society crumbles and results in another Dark Age.
Each Dark Age is progressively less dark because of advancements in technology, and there are LOTS of technical people prepared for such a thing to come to pass.
Just look at places like Venezuela - totally disintegrating, yet because of advances in technology people can still live there in vastly more comfort than places like Botswana when IT disintegrated.
In the end, people are just the expendable rocket fuel consumed by the advancement of technology and that is OK. As an individual it might be wise to prepare for the waves though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
because as 15$/hr wages become the norm, those kinds of jobs are drying up?
Did he in German speak? Or perhaps he Yoda impersonated?
At the bottom of the
Party A: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.
Party B: Wants more government control except for what conflicts with their special interests group.
FTFY.
Both major parties want more government control, it's just what they want control of and what they could care less about that differs.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
You seem to be extrapolating from the past into the future. Isn't that what caused the bubble that caused the crash?
At the bottom of the
"Stop bitching you brainless slaves, when you're not working for me you better keep your stupid fucking head in the sand"
Yeah and what will that likely be used for? To predict human behavior in order to preempt behavior of individual humans. This will make it easier to cajole them back onto the treadmill.
if they're earning min wage, they have jobs.
All politics is someone's morality.
I would counter that most politics, and most morality, is actually someone's economics. People seem to rarely follow a policy or a morality that they think will not somehow make them money.
Rich people invest in transformative tech innovation. Poor people don't.
Rich people invest in rent-seeking. Poor people figure out new ways to do stuff. Like Elon Musk, who turned $30k into a $300M internet-Fodor's, then turned that into an internet prepaid credit-card. Or like Eric Schmidt, who worked his way from public high school to chief of Alphabet.
OK, maybe not poor poor, but technical revolutions are not started by some rich dude looking for something interesting to do with his money. Once you're rich, your main concern becomes staying rich. Technical revolutions are started by relatively ordinary people doing something interesting, then going out and borrowing money from some rich dude.
People living in their cars don't effect that problem.
Lots of unemployed lawyers, unless you can get into an ivy league law school, or daddy's a lawyer. Last year the lawyer unemployment rate was 15.5 % according to the National Association for Law Placement. Unemployment in STEM fields, particularly engineering fields is at 6.2% according to the NSF, provided you have an advanced degree. Its only a little higher among engineers holding a B.S., provided you are in the right engineering field. Certainly don't be a STEM student in aeronautics. Petroleum engineers however are making out big time.
If so, then their economics are really really irrational, if not totally dysfunctional.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Personally I think the politicians keep arguing about toilets
What they do is *avoid* talking about it, quite skilfully, while creating the illusion that they are very passionate about whatever the voters are passionate about.
Probably because as soon as anyone actually started a rational dialogue they'd resolve the conflicts in a matter of minutes, and then they'd have to go back to things that are real problems. You know - their jobs.
politics needs to focus on providing direction (translation: funding) for technological solutions to the problems
How about if politics focused on not stopping innovation. For example, letting us freely import the best person for the job regardless of the accidental location of that person's birth. How about letting people build more houses in the Bay Area so that more people can afford to work for Silicon Valley companies? How about Europe not suing Google just because they are the best search engine on the planet?
You do realize that it's the result of tech that WE MUST continue to be involved in politics, in fact, we must dramatically increase our involvement.
That is unless you consider the imminent loss of millions of jobs to robots, self driving vehicles, and countless other ai ventures to be a fallacy. In which case listening to Eric isn't going to be something you would want to do.
Needless to say , the worldly perspective of someone with billions isn't going to be the same as someone actually having to support themselves. We can only hope that he understands that cures for whatever might have lose some significance when your desire to live has been quashed by relentless poverty.
Indeed under those circumstances saying "I have nothing left to live for" has an entirely different meaning than the one Eric would relate to.
I'm thinking it's the part known as the middle and lower class. You know, the ones who've had wage stagnation for the last thirty years. And who got to standby and watch their largest asset(house) lose half its value overnight.
Of course there's plenty of jobs. We all know that if people weren't so lazy, they could get one. I personally don't know of one time when the local Walmart hasn't been hiring. We didn't really lose our manufacturing base to China. There's plenty of work. Sure.
Well said. The German path leads to more corporatism and disintegration of the EU and everything else they have actually achieved over the last 50 years to 70 years.
Would THIS be the guy that made Google hyper political and untrustworthy by injecting it firmly into the most left-wing White House in US History and forming a revolving door between the ranks of high-level Google employees and the Obama administration?
yup. THAT Eric Schmidt. The only question about Google/Eric and the administration/Obama is: "who's the dominant one and who's the submissive?" (which is giving the orders and which is obeying?)
I suppose he's now starting to worry that if the control of the White House changes parties, and particularly to somebody like Trump whose not playing by the rules that apply to the bought-and-paid-for crowd, he might lose access/control. It's the continual dilemma for the crony capitalist: Once you get into government to make it work for you and against your competitors, you then have to worry about who's in government and what to do with the bit and bridle, crop, and saddle if the horse changes.
If the man was truly serious/honest about any of this he'd have pulled all his tentacles out of the government and then made his company fiercely a-political long ago and would have a management team that was well-balanced politically with liberals, conservatives, moderates, Libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, etc all well-represented.
Sadly too many modern businessmen have abandoned the traditional American model of businessmen wanting small government with few regulations and low taxes and therefore feeling no need to get involved in politicians and buying politicians and paying for lobbyists. Most businessmen used to not care about the politics of their customers, they just wanted to sell stuff to everyone. Customers did not care about the politics of businessmen, they just wanted good products and services. Most people did not care much about government, they just wanted to be left alone. The modern drive to use government to foist your political desires onto everyone else, force others to pay for your stuff, force others to shut up when they disagree with you, etc is just toxic and Eric did not seem to mind at all for the 7+ years he has been in bed with Obama.
You'll never find someone who agrees with you completely on an issue like UBI because different people have different goals, which will lead them to different conclusions. :)
And I think I was right you enjoyed the article.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Extrapolating from the past into the future is called "planning", and it can be done horribly wrong. Eating can be done horribly wrong, too, by eating too much, eating poisonous things, or shoving the fork through your eye.
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It's more that I disagree with them in the same way you might disagree that drinking juiced hemlock and belladonna would be good for your health.
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googel adds? many search out there droid is probably less good than ubuntu phone iphone sucks