...Overall, this is a huge problem, but it's not actually a counterargument to the first post. Both game violence and military violence can be real problems simultaneously.
Uh, not really.
We've been arguing for literally decades that video game violence could or might cause real problems.
There is no longer ANY doubt as to the real problems caused by those who have engaged in bloody warfare. The suicide rate among veterans is considerable. PTSD and its proven association with war is not some maybe theory. And the term Shell Shock (a.k.a. the original PTSD) has been around since World War I.
The latter is a uncontested factual reality. The former is still mired in theory, fighting against correlation/causation and crushing statistics. Big difference.
People have been arguing that issue for thousands of years.
Putting religion aside for a moment, we generally use these things called "facts" to discern truth from bullshit. Not sure why you feel we're still validating how we do this thousands of years later. We still use the word "liar" too, which also has a pretty clear definition.
Is there a difference in the experience of playing cops and robbers, and using an imaginary weapon to take down an opponent, compared to the experience of simulated violence that is highly realistic? Where you aim your weapon at the detailed representation of a human head and attacking results in that head exploding, with blood and brains painting the wall.
Fantasy is fantasy, no matter how "realistic" you can portray it. And a sick mind is a sick mind, no matter how cartoonish murder may appear. When you look at the sheer number of kids who play violent video games vs. the number of kids who go out and murder people in real life, the end result is so obscenely minuscule that looking for correlation and/or causation is ridiculous at best.
What variable is that conditioning effect of many hours experiencing this violent simulation, for an adolescent brain still in development. Does the repetition of visually experiencing human opponents being eviscerated into piles of gore contribute to the lack of empathy required to actually fire a weapon into crowded hallways? If not, why not?
Again, one only has to look at statistics. I could say that drinking carbonated soft drinks or using a smartphone contributes to kids becoming killers too, and that correlation would be labeled "crazy", but for some reason anything from Wile E. Coyote to playing Call of Duty has been fingered as the clay that creates psychopaths, even when statistics utterly fails to prove it.
What is the relationship between the kids that are bullied at school and who engage in violent video games. When is the behavior necessary to succeed at simulated competitive manslaughter seen as the only tool to deal with real-life enemies. For every school shooting, how often was that course of action considered and rejected.
How about we start looking at things that ACTUALLY alter the mind? How many mass shooters were taking psychiatric drugs? Why do we attack the gun lobby and give Big Pharma a pass in all this bullshit? How many adults don't murder people and yet come home to engage in FPS games to blow off corporate "bullying" and pressure from everything from work to real life? Somehow adults are exempt in this analysis? Let's start looking at some REAL factors first, instead of looking at such common statistics that equate to searching for a needle in 10,000 haystacks.
It seems there is much more to consider than just "kids will be kids".
Yes, there is. But as usual, it starts with understanding that correlation does not create causation.
Thousands of game journalists have been proclaiming for years there is a link between sexism in games, and sexism in real life. They also constantly whined there were too many violent shooters and so on.
So why would you not expect any non-gamer to read what the game journalists wrote and take it to heart? Trump would seem to be well-aligned with what the press has been saying for years, that games are affecting behavior.
A little late to back out now fellows now that someone you hate has finally listened. Who did you think would listen to you, the game developers that actually have to make money from what they sell?
Tell me something. If you truly believe that there's somehow a link between make-believe warfare and those who actually go out and murder people in real life, what the hell kind of impact does actual warfare on society have?
The US sustains one of the largest Military armies in the world. We often represent ourselves as the Global Police force, engaging in conflicts that have little or no justification. The Military Industrial Complex was forewarned by a standing president in 1961 which prevented fucking nothing. And now hundreds of billions are tied to sustaining pointless warmongering today.
Before Trump targets the fantasy that is video games, perhaps he should take a look at the impact of real world violence created by our own government.
Look at the number of people who purchase and play games like Call of Duty, Fallout, or any other FPS game vs. the number of people who actually go out and murder people in real life. It's a fraction of a percent. It should be pretty fucking obvious that the "association" that is trying to be portrayed here is utter bullshit.
Mental illness and the ability to murder people is not created by playing fucking video games. And we literally have decades of evidence to validate that fact. This meeting with Trump is probably nothing more than window dressing.
Exactly this, and things like smart home speakers are nothing but a bunch of pre programmed algorithms, you spend long enough on it you get enough algorithms to cover just about every use case someone can ask it. But at this point how many times have you asked something of a smart speaker and its like I dont know how to help you with that, or i dont know that.
If it were truly intelligent it would be able to figure out on its own how to do that thing or find that information that isn't built into it's library of algorithms.
You are rather dismissive of the fact that most humans rely on a bunch of pre-programmed algorithms to perform a LOT of jobs these days. Think about troubleshooting a malware infection. You have specific steps you take to remedy the situation, but it is certainly a finite amount of steps. Same goes for working on a car. Or an A/C unit. Or hell, even repairing a human. Our technical educations we attain do nothing more than educate us with a finite number of steps to take to resolve a problem.
And as much as we're bashing the ignorance of the "smart" assistants, they've only been around for a very short time. Advancements will be considerable in the next 5 - 10 years.
I'm still trying to find anything resembling AI. So far it's all marketing gimmicks and none of it is actually anywhere near intelligent. It's just a program that has preprogrammed responses based on expected input and it fails just as bad as an old DOS machine when you give it a command it doesn't understand.
And you can continue to assume that AI won't impact human jobs, or you can come to the realization that it won't take but "good-enough" AI to start replacing tens of millions of humans.
Think about AI advancement on the IQ scale. In the next decade, it might hold somewhere around 70 - 80. How many employed humans are targeted once it reaches 100? 120? The impact scale a massive curve, which is exactly why we should not be assuming it will take "perfect" or "true" AI to cause considerable disruption, because there sure as hell aren't "perfect" humans.
Historically jobs have improved over time as automation has come increased. Or course you need new training, but that's kind of normal in this industry even without robots.
Care to tell me what you're going to do with the tens of millions of humans who are incapable of learning a 21st century trade?
You can shove STEM books in front of little Johnny Halfwit all damn day. It won't make a bit of difference, because we keep failing to account for the one thing that has not advanced much in the last few hundred years; mental capacity.
And the societal and financial impact of targeting millions who are employed in boring, highly-repetitive and easily automated jobs is considerable. And we have no answer to that.
What? No. The robot should pay ME for the honor of doing MY job!
Yeah, the "robot" will. It's called welfare. In the future we'll give it a fancy name like "UBI" to make you feel better, but make no mistake as to how much Greed will help fund UBI for the unemployable masses; it will be fucking welfare and not a penny more.
Smile. You won't have to work anymore. You can relax and enjoy your new lifestyle that barely sustains life. At least until you get sick. Then you'll just die, which will be by design. Easiest way to create the necessary cull is to cut off medical support.
Automation has not destroyed more jobs than it creates in 200 years. AI will be the same.
No it won't, because AI is targeting the one thing that hasn't ever been targeted before; educated humans.
Those willing to learn will prosper. The current IT, Tech, Engineering, and Science shortages are proof.
The ignorance of this statement is the fact that you are not taking into account those who are incapable of learning. The human race has advanced in many ways over the last few hundred years, but mental capacity isn't really one of them. Anyone who has worked in IT long enough knows damn well that not everyone is cut out for that kind of work. Stop assuming the tens of millions of people currently employed in the kind of job that is easily replaced by automation hold the mental capacity to learn a 21st century trade. Those who make a career out of those kinds of jobs usually do so because they have to. Enrolling Little Johnny Halfwit in STEM courses is going to quickly prove pointless.
As the unemployment rate rises due to the unemployable, and our current or future (UBI) welfare programs are underfunded and unsustainable, desperation will lead to considerable increases in criminal activity. The impact is coming. Best not be so ignorant about this reality.
this next iteration of progress is different because it will make humans unemployable.
It won't. It will do the same thing that every iteration of technology in history has done. You're focusing on "hey a position to do X is no longer a job people do" and not on the macro-economy of "hey it still takes SOME human labor to make anything, and consumers keep buying more whenever they can spend more, so the demand for human labor goes up".
Humans will remain employable until 100% of all production scales infinitely with absolutely zero additional human labor.
I'm not focused or even concerned about reaching the 100% goal. My point is it won't even take but 10 - 20% of the workforce becoming unemployable to create a massive impact on society and economic stability. And that percentage is a rather easy number to reach as much as we're seeing automation continue to evolve. Again, mental capacity is not something that has improved drastically, which means there are millions and millions of humans who will not easily find the kind of work they are capable of doing as simplistic jobs are permanently replaced by automation.
And keeping humans employed in order to maintain demand does not represent reality either. Greed doesn't care about human employment. Greed cares about the bottom line. The gig economy is a good example of this as a lot of people struggle to find full-time employment.
You only know what you see, and you only see the narcissists. They may be one in 10k and you won't even know about the others because that's how they like it.
One in 10K doesn't even come close to the number of users who regularly use social media on a daily basis. Hell, one out of every four humans is on Facebook. And when you look at how society now rewards narcissism (e.g. YouTube millionaires and sponsored Insta-celebrities), it's not hard to understand why so many people participate in oversharing.
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies.
This won't happen. We automated farming, we automated manufacture, we automated IT. Everything you use today used to take hundreds or thousands of times as many human labor hours to provide. That's right: we've eliminated 99.999% of all jobs in the past two centuries.
Yes, we've eliminated a lot of jobs, but we've also been rather busy creating a metric fuckton of jobs to replace those 99.999% of jobs. The advent of the internet alone created and sustains millions of jobs. But all of that is irrelevant going forward. My main point is the next generation of progress will make many humans unemployable. We've advanced ourselves a lot in the last few hundred years, but mental capacity is not really one of them. There are simpletons doing boring, simple jobs today just as there were 100 years ago. Those who choose to make a career out of a simple job usually do so because they have to. There is no "go get an education" option for them. Little Johnny Halfwit grew up and didn't get any smarter, and there's not a damn thing he can do other than a simple job. And there's a LOT of Johnny Halfwits out there. The simple jobs ARE going to be the ones attacked by automation first. And you will not pace Greed. The instant people started demanding a $15 minimum wage, corporations started investing in automation instead. Greed only cares about the bottom line, and usually cannot see any farther than the next few fiscal quarters.
On top of that, what jobs do intelligent people hold as they start climbing the proverbial ladder of success? What job helped pay your way through college? That's right, it was likely a simple job. Waitresses, cashiers, warehouse stockers, delivery drivers, etc. Cashiers alone comprise millions of jobs. And when you can replace the need for a cashier AND the cash register with an app (e.g. Sams Club Scan and Go), Greed starts looking at automation as the investment it truly is, impact to human employment be damned. Remove the simple jobs, and you start removing all people's ability to climb the ladder of success.
The only problem is progress causes transitional unemployment. Too much at once--too fast for your economy to shift demand and drive new supply, thus reallocating labor to new jobs--causes a pile-up of unemployment. If it's paced correctly, progress is limitless in the sense that it never results in permanent increases in unemployment.
Look at history, and you'll see we went through many painful transitions. The future is not hard to predict, and our economy is highly dependent on stability. Even a doubling of the unemployment rate would likely cause a considerable impact. As I said before, this next iteration of progress is different because it will make humans unemployable. And looking to tax the rich in order to create and fund some kind of UBI will also be predictable; we can't get the rich to pay taxes even today.
Interesting idea in theory,
However the car is broadcasting data to the public, that an individual may not want to share. Lets say it is linked to the GPS and shows where to turn, for the most part that will be great, because it is like an enhanced reality display, except for the fact everyone else knows where you are going.
This privacy concern is becoming more and more irrelevant. Social media narcissists always seem to feel the need to tell the world what they're doing and where they're going every minute of the day. You could probably find out where the person is going by looking at their social media accounts. It's easy to find them online since the vanity license plate is their fucking Twitter handle.
Suppose we could buy flippy for cheap, $5,000. Then we don't have to visit McDonald's for a burger. You can just tell the robot to cook your meal instead and save a ton of money.
A home solution? Give me a break. Talk about automation for automation's sake.
Suppose we could flip our own fucking burgers at home. Gee, what a novel idea.
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
Uh, "shift" in economies?
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies. This alone will likely cause chaos, so we may not even get to the second phase.
When 90% of the human population is unemployable 30 - 40 years from now due to good-enough AI, there will be no "economy" to speak of. Most of the population will belong to the Global Welfare State. And UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the masses. The uber-rich who own the automation/AI solutions will be the only ones with an income, and they will do all the things they do today to avoid paying the taxes that will be necessary to fund UBI programs. The human race won't be thriving at that point; they will merely be surviving.
Solve for the Disease of Greed. Otherwise, the future is inevitable.
You do realize you're agreeing that existing telecoms have government-enforced monopolies, right?
Does "expired" mean something different in your version of English?...being the incumbent in any utility (Internet, telephone, water, power, etc) is a huge advantage. You've already paid off your capital costs, so you can slash your prices to kill off anyone who tries to install new wires to compete with you.
If anyone could afford to invest in the infrastructure in order to get their product out there and at least start competing, it would be a mega-corp like Google.
Like I said before, if Google is struggling to deploy, no one else stands a fucking chance. Bottom line is it ain't as simple as you make it out to be, no matter how you want to define "expired".
But relaxing the existing rules to allow competition would be DE-REGULATION! Nobody wants that, right? It's not like regulatory capture is often used to stifle competition by existing markets or anything.
Since de-regulation will never happen, I don't want to hear the US bitching anymore about their shitty broadband capability vs. the rest of the world.
When corrupt lawmakers support the Broadband Mafia at the highest levels, we get what we fucking deserve.
"broadband deployment remains a rough business. It's a business made all the rougher by state and local regulators and lawmakers who've been in the pockets of entrenched providers like Comcast for the better part of a generation.
Well, the last part of that statement almost summed up the real issue; "been in the pockets of entrenched providers" is the PC-friendly way of saying that fucking greed and corruption have destroyed competition.
If Google can't succeed, don't think for a fucking second ANY lesser company stands a chance. Not until the Broadband Mafia is deregulated.
Saving *a lot* of money is relative to the value of a more important commodity: Time. I never learned how to change my spark plugs or oil. or to replace the cabinets in my kitchen. But I make FAR more per hour it takes a mechanic or carpenter to do it during that same period, not even including the time to actually LEARN the skill, much less perform it. It's not an issue of "self-sufficiency", it's an issue of time efficiency, and this shit doesn't even fucking register. Conversely, there are things I do in my own time, at loss of efficiency return, because I actually enjoy it. For example, I don't take broken laptops and computers into the shop to get repaired, I do it because I don't mind it, and it's a nice distraction. Sure, it "saves" me money, but not when accounting for time invested.
Did you ever consider that changing spark plugs or oil, or even DIYing a kitchen is a nice distraction for others, in the same way that I no longer piss away precious time fucking around with broken laptops and computers?
To each their own. We all recognize time as the precious commodity, especially as we get older. But each of us define distractions in different ways. As a salaried employee,I feel I get paid 24/7 anyway, and distractions are often a good thing to stave off being burned out from overwork. The money saved is just a bonus.
That's a nice emotional outburst you have there, but it doesn't match the facts. Facts are that there is no "human safety net behind the wheel" most of the time.
If you look at fatalities per mile driven, automatic cars are safer.
If you look at the occurance of accidents due to distracted driving, they are going up rather than down.
As much as it makes you uncomfortable and unhappy, this is not a net negative in terms of safety.
Let me clarify my concerns, in priority order:
#1: The security of the autonomous network that all vehicles will likely use.
#2: The amount of damage one can incite if the equivalent of a DDoS attack was ever done on an autonomous network.
#3: The ability to paralyze an entire economy with such an attack in a future that is completely dependent on autonomous transport. (Consider this in the future; one good attack that kills 10,000 people would likely be enough to incite mass fear across a society that doesn't even know how to drive a car anymore)
#4: The autonomous technology and car itself (Yup, waaaay down on the list)
Hackers murdering 20,000 people per year in the future due to insecurities in autonomous solutions isn't going to make people somehow feel better about burying loved ones because it's still a "net benefit" on the 40,000 lives lost today.
Technology isn't really to blame for lack of hammer skills. it is the rise of the economy, bartering and capitalism. this led to job specialization, a Baker spends all his time baking, a hammer isn't much use to him in his job. if he needs a new shelf built he bakes some bread then barters it or sells it and hires a carpenter, that is skilled in using a hammer and would do a much better job than the baker could. meanwhile the carpenter might be able to build a kitchen, but that doesn't mean he is able to bake.
Basic baking or carpentry skills are not exactly reserved for licensed specialists. Both hold value in normal everyday life, and can save you a lot of money.
I know that the default excuse to growing up in life and having essentially no knowledge is "teh interwebs", but there is some value in not having to call up Mommy or download a 7-step instructables guide in order to learn how to boil water. I guess the concept of being self-sufficient is rapidly becoming extinct.
"Safety is our top concern and we are ready to begin working with manufacturers that are prepared to test fully driverless vehicles in California."
With the elimination of the human safety net behind the wheel, safety is about as much of a top concern as security is in the IoT market.
And speaking of IoT, can you say rush-to-market-capitalistic-greed? It's not too fucking hard to paint the picture as to where autonomous solutions are going and how fast.
You do you, California. Good luck with your beta testing. Hope it doesn't get too bloody.
Slashdot Mirror
...Overall, this is a huge problem, but it's not actually a counterargument to the first post. Both game violence and military violence can be real problems simultaneously.
Uh, not really.
We've been arguing for literally decades that video game violence could or might cause real problems.
There is no longer ANY doubt as to the real problems caused by those who have engaged in bloody warfare. The suicide rate among veterans is considerable. PTSD and its proven association with war is not some maybe theory. And the term Shell Shock (a.k.a. the original PTSD) has been around since World War I.
The latter is a uncontested factual reality. The former is still mired in theory, fighting against correlation/causation and crushing statistics. Big difference.
... which is truth and which is "fake news"?
People have been arguing that issue for thousands of years.
Putting religion aside for a moment, we generally use these things called "facts" to discern truth from bullshit. Not sure why you feel we're still validating how we do this thousands of years later. We still use the word "liar" too, which also has a pretty clear definition.
Is there a difference in the experience of playing cops and robbers, and using an imaginary weapon to take down an opponent, compared to the experience of simulated violence that is highly realistic? Where you aim your weapon at the detailed representation of a human head and attacking results in that head exploding, with blood and brains painting the wall.
Fantasy is fantasy, no matter how "realistic" you can portray it. And a sick mind is a sick mind, no matter how cartoonish murder may appear. When you look at the sheer number of kids who play violent video games vs. the number of kids who go out and murder people in real life, the end result is so obscenely minuscule that looking for correlation and/or causation is ridiculous at best.
What variable is that conditioning effect of many hours experiencing this violent simulation, for an adolescent brain still in development. Does the repetition of visually experiencing human opponents being eviscerated into piles of gore contribute to the lack of empathy required to actually fire a weapon into crowded hallways? If not, why not?
Again, one only has to look at statistics. I could say that drinking carbonated soft drinks or using a smartphone contributes to kids becoming killers too, and that correlation would be labeled "crazy", but for some reason anything from Wile E. Coyote to playing Call of Duty has been fingered as the clay that creates psychopaths, even when statistics utterly fails to prove it.
What is the relationship between the kids that are bullied at school and who engage in violent video games. When is the behavior necessary to succeed at simulated competitive manslaughter seen as the only tool to deal with real-life enemies. For every school shooting, how often was that course of action considered and rejected.
How about we start looking at things that ACTUALLY alter the mind? How many mass shooters were taking psychiatric drugs? Why do we attack the gun lobby and give Big Pharma a pass in all this bullshit? How many adults don't murder people and yet come home to engage in FPS games to blow off corporate "bullying" and pressure from everything from work to real life? Somehow adults are exempt in this analysis? Let's start looking at some REAL factors first, instead of looking at such common statistics that equate to searching for a needle in 10,000 haystacks.
It seems there is much more to consider than just "kids will be kids".
Yes, there is. But as usual, it starts with understanding that correlation does not create causation.
The world is fractal and chaotic. AI depends on the world being predictable. Good luck with this.
Luck? Humans are fucking ridiculously predicable, which AI can easily replicate.
If that were not true, then social media marketing would be deemed worthless.
Thousands of game journalists have been proclaiming for years there is a link between sexism in games, and sexism in real life. They also constantly whined there were too many violent shooters and so on.
So why would you not expect any non-gamer to read what the game journalists wrote and take it to heart? Trump would seem to be well-aligned with what the press has been saying for years, that games are affecting behavior.
A little late to back out now fellows now that someone you hate has finally listened. Who did you think would listen to you, the game developers that actually have to make money from what they sell?
Tell me something. If you truly believe that there's somehow a link between make-believe warfare and those who actually go out and murder people in real life, what the hell kind of impact does actual warfare on society have?
The US sustains one of the largest Military armies in the world. We often represent ourselves as the Global Police force, engaging in conflicts that have little or no justification. The Military Industrial Complex was forewarned by a standing president in 1961 which prevented fucking nothing. And now hundreds of billions are tied to sustaining pointless warmongering today.
Before Trump targets the fantasy that is video games, perhaps he should take a look at the impact of real world violence created by our own government.
Look at the number of people who purchase and play games like Call of Duty, Fallout, or any other FPS game vs. the number of people who actually go out and murder people in real life. It's a fraction of a percent. It should be pretty fucking obvious that the "association" that is trying to be portrayed here is utter bullshit.
Mental illness and the ability to murder people is not created by playing fucking video games. And we literally have decades of evidence to validate that fact. This meeting with Trump is probably nothing more than window dressing.
Exactly this, and things like smart home speakers are nothing but a bunch of pre programmed algorithms, you spend long enough on it you get enough algorithms to cover just about every use case someone can ask it. But at this point how many times have you asked something of a smart speaker and its like I dont know how to help you with that, or i dont know that.
If it were truly intelligent it would be able to figure out on its own how to do that thing or find that information that isn't built into it's library of algorithms.
You are rather dismissive of the fact that most humans rely on a bunch of pre-programmed algorithms to perform a LOT of jobs these days. Think about troubleshooting a malware infection. You have specific steps you take to remedy the situation, but it is certainly a finite amount of steps. Same goes for working on a car. Or an A/C unit. Or hell, even repairing a human. Our technical educations we attain do nothing more than educate us with a finite number of steps to take to resolve a problem.
And as much as we're bashing the ignorance of the "smart" assistants, they've only been around for a very short time. Advancements will be considerable in the next 5 - 10 years.
I'm still trying to find anything resembling AI. So far it's all marketing gimmicks and none of it is actually anywhere near intelligent. It's just a program that has preprogrammed responses based on expected input and it fails just as bad as an old DOS machine when you give it a command it doesn't understand.
And you can continue to assume that AI won't impact human jobs, or you can come to the realization that it won't take but "good-enough" AI to start replacing tens of millions of humans.
Think about AI advancement on the IQ scale. In the next decade, it might hold somewhere around 70 - 80. How many employed humans are targeted once it reaches 100? 120? The impact scale a massive curve, which is exactly why we should not be assuming it will take "perfect" or "true" AI to cause considerable disruption, because there sure as hell aren't "perfect" humans.
Historically jobs have improved over time as automation has come increased. Or course you need new training, but that's kind of normal in this industry even without robots.
Care to tell me what you're going to do with the tens of millions of humans who are incapable of learning a 21st century trade?
You can shove STEM books in front of little Johnny Halfwit all damn day. It won't make a bit of difference, because we keep failing to account for the one thing that has not advanced much in the last few hundred years; mental capacity.
And the societal and financial impact of targeting millions who are employed in boring, highly-repetitive and easily automated jobs is considerable. And we have no answer to that.
What? No. The robot should pay ME for the honor of doing MY job!
Yeah, the "robot" will. It's called welfare. In the future we'll give it a fancy name like "UBI" to make you feel better, but make no mistake as to how much Greed will help fund UBI for the unemployable masses; it will be fucking welfare and not a penny more.
Smile. You won't have to work anymore. You can relax and enjoy your new lifestyle that barely sustains life. At least until you get sick. Then you'll just die, which will be by design. Easiest way to create the necessary cull is to cut off medical support.
Automation has not destroyed more jobs than it creates in 200 years. AI will be the same.
No it won't, because AI is targeting the one thing that hasn't ever been targeted before; educated humans.
Those willing to learn will prosper. The current IT, Tech, Engineering, and Science shortages are proof.
The ignorance of this statement is the fact that you are not taking into account those who are incapable of learning. The human race has advanced in many ways over the last few hundred years, but mental capacity isn't really one of them. Anyone who has worked in IT long enough knows damn well that not everyone is cut out for that kind of work. Stop assuming the tens of millions of people currently employed in the kind of job that is easily replaced by automation hold the mental capacity to learn a 21st century trade. Those who make a career out of those kinds of jobs usually do so because they have to. Enrolling Little Johnny Halfwit in STEM courses is going to quickly prove pointless.
As the unemployment rate rises due to the unemployable, and our current or future (UBI) welfare programs are underfunded and unsustainable, desperation will lead to considerable increases in criminal activity. The impact is coming. Best not be so ignorant about this reality.
this next iteration of progress is different because it will make humans unemployable.
It won't. It will do the same thing that every iteration of technology in history has done. You're focusing on "hey a position to do X is no longer a job people do" and not on the macro-economy of "hey it still takes SOME human labor to make anything, and consumers keep buying more whenever they can spend more, so the demand for human labor goes up".
Humans will remain employable until 100% of all production scales infinitely with absolutely zero additional human labor.
I'm not focused or even concerned about reaching the 100% goal. My point is it won't even take but 10 - 20% of the workforce becoming unemployable to create a massive impact on society and economic stability. And that percentage is a rather easy number to reach as much as we're seeing automation continue to evolve. Again, mental capacity is not something that has improved drastically, which means there are millions and millions of humans who will not easily find the kind of work they are capable of doing as simplistic jobs are permanently replaced by automation.
And keeping humans employed in order to maintain demand does not represent reality either. Greed doesn't care about human employment. Greed cares about the bottom line. The gig economy is a good example of this as a lot of people struggle to find full-time employment.
You only know what you see, and you only see the narcissists. They may be one in 10k and you won't even know about the others because that's how they like it.
One in 10K doesn't even come close to the number of users who regularly use social media on a daily basis. Hell, one out of every four humans is on Facebook. And when you look at how society now rewards narcissism (e.g. YouTube millionaires and sponsored Insta-celebrities), it's not hard to understand why so many people participate in oversharing.
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies.
This won't happen. We automated farming, we automated manufacture, we automated IT. Everything you use today used to take hundreds or thousands of times as many human labor hours to provide. That's right: we've eliminated 99.999% of all jobs in the past two centuries.
Yes, we've eliminated a lot of jobs, but we've also been rather busy creating a metric fuckton of jobs to replace those 99.999% of jobs. The advent of the internet alone created and sustains millions of jobs. But all of that is irrelevant going forward. My main point is the next generation of progress will make many humans unemployable. We've advanced ourselves a lot in the last few hundred years, but mental capacity is not really one of them. There are simpletons doing boring, simple jobs today just as there were 100 years ago. Those who choose to make a career out of a simple job usually do so because they have to. There is no "go get an education" option for them. Little Johnny Halfwit grew up and didn't get any smarter, and there's not a damn thing he can do other than a simple job. And there's a LOT of Johnny Halfwits out there. The simple jobs ARE going to be the ones attacked by automation first. And you will not pace Greed. The instant people started demanding a $15 minimum wage, corporations started investing in automation instead. Greed only cares about the bottom line, and usually cannot see any farther than the next few fiscal quarters.
On top of that, what jobs do intelligent people hold as they start climbing the proverbial ladder of success? What job helped pay your way through college? That's right, it was likely a simple job. Waitresses, cashiers, warehouse stockers, delivery drivers, etc. Cashiers alone comprise millions of jobs. And when you can replace the need for a cashier AND the cash register with an app (e.g. Sams Club Scan and Go), Greed starts looking at automation as the investment it truly is, impact to human employment be damned. Remove the simple jobs, and you start removing all people's ability to climb the ladder of success.
The only problem is progress causes transitional unemployment. Too much at once--too fast for your economy to shift demand and drive new supply, thus reallocating labor to new jobs--causes a pile-up of unemployment. If it's paced correctly, progress is limitless in the sense that it never results in permanent increases in unemployment.
Look at history, and you'll see we went through many painful transitions. The future is not hard to predict, and our economy is highly dependent on stability. Even a doubling of the unemployment rate would likely cause a considerable impact. As I said before, this next iteration of progress is different because it will make humans unemployable. And looking to tax the rich in order to create and fund some kind of UBI will also be predictable; we can't get the rich to pay taxes even today.
Interesting idea in theory, However the car is broadcasting data to the public, that an individual may not want to share. Lets say it is linked to the GPS and shows where to turn, for the most part that will be great, because it is like an enhanced reality display, except for the fact everyone else knows where you are going.
This privacy concern is becoming more and more irrelevant. Social media narcissists always seem to feel the need to tell the world what they're doing and where they're going every minute of the day. You could probably find out where the person is going by looking at their social media accounts. It's easy to find them online since the vanity license plate is their fucking Twitter handle.
Suppose we could buy flippy for cheap, $5,000. Then we don't have to visit McDonald's for a burger. You can just tell the robot to cook your meal instead and save a ton of money.
A home solution? Give me a break. Talk about automation for automation's sake.
Suppose we could flip our own fucking burgers at home. Gee, what a novel idea.
The thing to realize is that we're fast approaching a point in which untrained or lowly trained human labor will become essentially worthless, and even most positions requiring a higher education will be in the same situation a couple decades from now with the advances in AI. Anyone who thinks human beings can in the long term remain competitive with systems that are specifically designed to be more cost-efficient than humans, doesn't understand a thing about automation or economics, or what this shift means for economies overall.
Uh, "shift" in economies?
When 20 - 30% of the human population is unemployable 10 - 20 years from now due to automation, there will be a considerable disruption to global economies. This alone will likely cause chaos, so we may not even get to the second phase.
When 90% of the human population is unemployable 30 - 40 years from now due to good-enough AI, there will be no "economy" to speak of. Most of the population will belong to the Global Welfare State. And UBI will become nothing more than Welfare 2.0 for the masses. The uber-rich who own the automation/AI solutions will be the only ones with an income, and they will do all the things they do today to avoid paying the taxes that will be necessary to fund UBI programs. The human race won't be thriving at that point; they will merely be surviving.
Solve for the Disease of Greed. Otherwise, the future is inevitable.
You do realize you're agreeing that existing telecoms have government-enforced monopolies, right?
Does "expired" mean something different in your version of English?...being the incumbent in any utility (Internet, telephone, water, power, etc) is a huge advantage. You've already paid off your capital costs, so you can slash your prices to kill off anyone who tries to install new wires to compete with you.
If anyone could afford to invest in the infrastructure in order to get their product out there and at least start competing, it would be a mega-corp like Google.
Like I said before, if Google is struggling to deploy, no one else stands a fucking chance. Bottom line is it ain't as simple as you make it out to be, no matter how you want to define "expired".
Legal because I have no doubt they can create a tax or fee on anything they want to.
Tens of millions of people break laws every single day.
Legality doesn't mean jack shit unless you have the resources to enforce it.
But relaxing the existing rules to allow competition would be DE-REGULATION! Nobody wants that, right? It's not like regulatory capture is often used to stifle competition by existing markets or anything.
Since de-regulation will never happen, I don't want to hear the US bitching anymore about their shitty broadband capability vs. the rest of the world.
When corrupt lawmakers support the Broadband Mafia at the highest levels, we get what we fucking deserve.
"broadband deployment remains a rough business. It's a business made all the rougher by state and local regulators and lawmakers who've been in the pockets of entrenched providers like Comcast for the better part of a generation.
Well, the last part of that statement almost summed up the real issue; "been in the pockets of entrenched providers" is the PC-friendly way of saying that fucking greed and corruption have destroyed competition.
If Google can't succeed, don't think for a fucking second ANY lesser company stands a chance. Not until the Broadband Mafia is deregulated.
Saving *a lot* of money is relative to the value of a more important commodity: Time. I never learned how to change my spark plugs or oil. or to replace the cabinets in my kitchen. But I make FAR more per hour it takes a mechanic or carpenter to do it during that same period, not even including the time to actually LEARN the skill, much less perform it. It's not an issue of "self-sufficiency", it's an issue of time efficiency, and this shit doesn't even fucking register. Conversely, there are things I do in my own time, at loss of efficiency return, because I actually enjoy it. For example, I don't take broken laptops and computers into the shop to get repaired, I do it because I don't mind it, and it's a nice distraction. Sure, it "saves" me money, but not when accounting for time invested.
Did you ever consider that changing spark plugs or oil, or even DIYing a kitchen is a nice distraction for others, in the same way that I no longer piss away precious time fucking around with broken laptops and computers?
To each their own. We all recognize time as the precious commodity, especially as we get older. But each of us define distractions in different ways. As a salaried employee,I feel I get paid 24/7 anyway, and distractions are often a good thing to stave off being burned out from overwork. The money saved is just a bonus.
That's a nice emotional outburst you have there, but it doesn't match the facts. Facts are that there is no "human safety net behind the wheel" most of the time.
If you look at fatalities per mile driven, automatic cars are safer.
If you look at the occurance of accidents due to distracted driving, they are going up rather than down.
As much as it makes you uncomfortable and unhappy, this is not a net negative in terms of safety.
Let me clarify my concerns, in priority order:
#1: The security of the autonomous network that all vehicles will likely use.
#2: The amount of damage one can incite if the equivalent of a DDoS attack was ever done on an autonomous network.
#3: The ability to paralyze an entire economy with such an attack in a future that is completely dependent on autonomous transport. (Consider this in the future; one good attack that kills 10,000 people would likely be enough to incite mass fear across a society that doesn't even know how to drive a car anymore)
#4: The autonomous technology and car itself (Yup, waaaay down on the list)
Hackers murdering 20,000 people per year in the future due to insecurities in autonomous solutions isn't going to make people somehow feel better about burying loved ones because it's still a "net benefit" on the 40,000 lives lost today.
Technology isn't really to blame for lack of hammer skills. it is the rise of the economy, bartering and capitalism. this led to job specialization, a Baker spends all his time baking, a hammer isn't much use to him in his job. if he needs a new shelf built he bakes some bread then barters it or sells it and hires a carpenter, that is skilled in using a hammer and would do a much better job than the baker could. meanwhile the carpenter might be able to build a kitchen, but that doesn't mean he is able to bake.
Basic baking or carpentry skills are not exactly reserved for licensed specialists. Both hold value in normal everyday life, and can save you a lot of money.
I know that the default excuse to growing up in life and having essentially no knowledge is "teh interwebs", but there is some value in not having to call up Mommy or download a 7-step instructables guide in order to learn how to boil water. I guess the concept of being self-sufficient is rapidly becoming extinct.
"Safety is our top concern and we are ready to begin working with manufacturers that are prepared to test fully driverless vehicles in California."
With the elimination of the human safety net behind the wheel, safety is about as much of a top concern as security is in the IoT market.
And speaking of IoT, can you say rush-to-market-capitalistic-greed? It's not too fucking hard to paint the picture as to where autonomous solutions are going and how fast.
You do you, California. Good luck with your beta testing. Hope it doesn't get too bloody.