As the newfangled quill became more popular, we began to see more and more children lack the hand strength to use a hammer and chisel. Sadly, we have yet to recover from such a blow to society. Once again technology has degraded our quality of life.
Kids today still don't know how to use a fucking hammer, which is ironically STILL a very useful tool 4,000 years later. That has nothing to do with the adaption of the quill, and has everything to do with the real issue, which is sheltering the living shit out of children and letting them grow up in a fucking fantasyland that doesn't even come close to resembling real life.
It's pretty sad to think that an EMP bomb would be just as deadly as any nuclear bomb to this generation.
Couldn't agree more, but this is the future consumers obviously want, as they vote with their wallets and support this bullshit by the droves.
I laugh every time I hear about the "cord cutters" bragging about how they're saving money. HBO, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, UFC...the content fracturing is endless, and soon the aggregated monthly cost to access all the shit you want to watch will be twice as much as cable ever was.
The concept of ownership will soon be completely dead.
Automation and good-enough AI is targeting educated jobs
This was _always_ true. You think relative-to-then-society speaking cotton/corn pickers, textile workers, horse buggy drivers, train drivers, etc were uneducated? Relatively speaking, they were probably as educated as the average Facebook user is to today's society's level of education.
The "average" Facebook user is not the metric for hire today. Someone who has a college degree (a.k.a. the new high school diploma) IS. And NO, I would not consider cotton/corn pickers, textile workers, horse buggy drivers, train drivers as "educated". Look at what it actually takes to DO their job. Mental capacity is being valued FAR more than physical capacity these days. There's a reason college graduates GO to college; so they don't have to bag groceries for the rest of their life, which is NO different than every example you've provided.
ignorant assumptions
"Ignorant: lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated". On one side we have people looking in terms of historical context and the knowledge gathered over multiple examples and millennia... and on the other is "But THIS time it is different. It won't be like the 100 times before!" I don't think "ignorant" is the right word here... maybe "unempathetic"?
Just replacing cashiers... targets 3 million jobs just in the US
That's less than 2% of our current workforce. A single checkout machine at the store will replace... what 2 workers? A single cotton gin took out 49 workers! Wake me when you got a 1-10+ ratio example.
Cashiers and salespeople comprise the top jobs in the US, or about 10% of the labor force. Your ignorance keeps you looking at the past. I don't give a shit what the cotton gin impacted 100 years ago; that has ZERO relevance to the impact today.
Mental capacity is often the reason a LOT of humans are employed in tedious, boring, easily automated jobs.
Relatively speaking, this has always been the case historically. If anything, the less tedious, decision making, high profit jobs were relegated to a much much smaller part of society. Just through the centuries of automation alone, we have far less of the jobs you speak up. So historically, automation did a LOT of replacement and destruction of those kinds of jobs; more than it can ever do today or tomorrow.
Unless you want to argue that the centuries of automation somehow created more tedious jobs then before... in which case, OK, I guess we got nothing to worry about this time around.
Worst case scenario: Lets setup a system where we hire people to dig a holes for a week, fill holes for a week, and take care of their room, board, & meals. The cost to society would be more than offset by the increased health and thus reduced healthcare costs.
Worst-case scenario is when humans start demanding a $15/hour minimum wage, and employers realize that automation is cheaper. Healthcare costs only reaffirm the burden that humans bring to employment. Mental capacity hasn't grown in the last few hundred years, but automation capacity HAS, which is why we are now able to replace a cashier easily.
Last thing I'd want while talking to a 911 dispatcher is for them to be allowed to have doubt in my story.
Last thing I'd want is a bunch of people wrongfully shot dead because doubt is too scary for some other people who might have a story that "requires" a paramilitary strike.
That takes proper training to assess a threat, and has little to do with the problem of fake calls. You either have trigger-happy idiots behind an armed response, or you do not.
This is a two-fold problem. Make no mistake that change needs to happen on BOTH sides.
If there is really no way for a 911 dispatcher to tell that a call is arriving from somewhere outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service, that is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be addressed. Probably all SWATing hoaxes involve that kind of proxy to reach the target dispatch, and probably vanishingly few legitimate emergency calls use those services.
If a dispatcher sees a VoIP call that indicates a high risk of violence or strongly points to heavily armed response, that should be good grounds to watch out for a hoax.
The problem with your "easy" fix is when you're wrong, and someone dies as a result.
With the popularity of cloud-based phone services, WiFi calling, and the number of people who have no "home" phone, it's hard to use VoIP as a delineation point.
Automate all the work you want... just socialize all the profits. The problem with increased economic efficiency is that it leads to exponentially greater concentration of wealth.
You planning on using prayer or your magic wand to socialize all those profits?
Mankind has never found a cure for the disease of insatiable greed, and that chasm between the worlds multi-billionaires and the other 99.9999% of the human population isn't shrinking.
Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
Automation is NOT going to result in the Apocalypse. It is NOT going to take everyone's job away. It is NOT going to result in a global financial meltdown. There is NOT going to be a singularity.
Naturally, everyone wants to look at the solutions of yesteryear, back when we just told the unemployed masses to "go get an education!". That bullshit isn't going to work in the future. Automation and good-enough AI is targeting educated jobs, so please STOP with the ignorant assumptions that this change is anything like the previous ones. Put simply, it's not.
Yes, some people will be displaced out of some jobs and have to find something else to do. No this will not be easy for some of them but it will be good for society overall...A lot of progress is held back simply because humans are stuck doing work that we don't yet have a machine for.
Uh, some people? Just replacing cashiers with automated checkout stations (which is happening everywhere) targets 3 million jobs just in the US. Forget AI, automation will make a LOT of people unemployable. Mental capacity is often the reason a LOT of humans are employed in tedious, boring, easily automated jobs. Put simply, not everyone can be valued in future jobs. In fact, the vast majority cannot. And "go get an education!" isn't the answer.
...If automation progresses faster than we can handle it then we will pass laws to slow it down or in extreme circumstances revolt (possibly violently).
Because we've been so successful in managing the balance of wealth and power in the world so far? That gap between the world's billionaires and their insatiable greed and the other 99.9999% of the population isn't shrinking. You will have as much chance of slowing down insatiable greed tomorrow as you have today. A violent revolt will likely be the solution as our economy starts to die as millions join the global welfare state.
If parents were serious they'd take the mobile devices away.
If your preteen was "addicted" to heroin, you'd hope most parents would do more than wring their hands over it. At the very least not tolerate it under their roof.
An addict never sees a problem with addiction. Doesn't fucking help matters when the junkies are also the parents.
That their parents were afraid they were addicted to TV?!
Their parents' parents were afraid they were addicted to radio.
Apparently this is a thing with every generation that advances somewhat from the old.
Addiction to television and radio did not cause thousands of deaths every year. And distracted driving deaths are on the rise.
Don't be ignorant as to why this addiction is considerably different than the concerns of yesteryear. Addicts can't put their fucking phone down to stop killing innocent people on the road, and that is a threat that damn near every one of us have to face on a daily basis.
ot quite show how the hell Trump could have not known this.
I'm not sure how he would know. His kids are too old...
Too old? MPAA subratings have been around for almost 20 years, 4 out of his 5 children were under the age of 18 when they came out, and Trump has a young son born in 2006.
Right, because the cutting-edge equipment needed to run a fully automated retail establishment is so much cheaper than ubiquitous, tried-and-true tech like fucking cash registers.
Uh, yes it likely is, considering they can operate 24x7x365, and won't get sick, show up late, need vacations, lie, steal, create sexual harassment lawsuits, need medical and dental insurance, etc. You seem to forget all the tried-and-true burdens of those fucking humans you'll need to hire to operate those fucking cash registers.
And automated solutions will be far from "cutting-edge" 3-5 years from now.
Wow, AI tracks what you take and automatically charges you? The advances in AI are incredible! Hopefully it records the purchase in a blockchain ledger too. That would be TOO COOL.
We can mock this technology all we want, but two facts remain; it works, and it's likely a HELL of a lot cheaper than the traditional method of purchasing and managing cashiers, baggers, and cash register hardware.
You should expect this kind of store concept to become infectious, and not just with Amazon Would a grocery chain be willing to license this Amazon solution if it proves to be 30% cheaper than the traditional method of transaction management? You bet your ass they would, and Amazon would be stupid not to oblige.
Cashiers make up over 3 million jobs in the US. Let's see how well we manage unemployment in 10 years, along with managing the unemployable.
"Although the researchers offer only general guidance for how to deal with these threats, they do offer a path forward for policy makers."
Oh, so there's a path forward for the policy makers? And what makes you think when it comes to autonomous weapons systems that countries are going to follow "policy"? Not even the UN is the all-encompassing ruler of all, and plenty of countries will happily put warmongering profits over everything else.
We've already proven that entire industries can and will be deployed with little or no security (IoT). Based on related profits and popularity, consumers certainly don't give a shit that security is lacking. I foresee little incentive to secure the future, even when lives are on the line.
Fast forward to an autonomous vehicle utopia; 10,000 people are murdered in a single massive autonomous vehicle DDoS attack. I can already hear lawyers defending the lack of security that lead to a breach with the "at least it's better than when dangerous humans used to drive" defense.
In short, Greed doesn't give a shit about safety or security. Greed cares about Profits. Rules, morals, and ethics are for pussies.
Let's be realistic, Apple hasn't been innovative in a very long time. They're certainly not offering anything that isn't available from many others.
The only thing that really makes them innovative, is their ability to sell computing hardware at an obscene markup to millions still willing to pay for the fashion statement that it is. They're not a tech company; they're a fashion company. Once they lose their fashionable edge, they will crash and burn faster than Milli Vanilli on The Voice.
And Tim Cook trying and deliver a You-Just-Don't-Understand shtick? That's like listening to a Millennial justify a resume that consists of bong hits and Guitar Hero high scores.
"...this time around both the company and its customers will be praying that the fix for Skylake, Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake chips actually does the job."
I can understand the masses praying for a legitimate fix, but the company is praying this will work? Did they suddenly abandon the concept of testing prior to release?
I mean, it's not like Intel has to go digging to find a metric fuckton of affected hardware...
Humans have a rather massive track record at underestimating the future. 20 years ago we were still using modems to dial-up to the internet. Today, we connect at Gigabit speeds via FTTP, which NO ONE would have predicted two decades ago.
Are you sure? I think predicting that Internet speeds will increase over time was the easiest prediction ever. Just like predicting the CPU power growth.
I was definitely using 1 Gbps Ethernet 15 years ago, which was standardized 20 years ago. 1 Gbit Fiber Channel appeared in 1997.
Predicting and predicting with accuracy are two different things, and no one was predicting 1Gb internet speeds in your home 20 years ago. Every one of us in the technology sector had a definition of "massive" 20 years ago, back when we thought 32MB of RAM was a lot of memory, and a 20GB hard drive was obscenely huge. Again, no one predicted 30TB hard drives two decades ago.
Predict technology or Greed 20 years from now. If Slashdot (or the internet) is still around by then, we'll come back for a laugh.
Why would the human magically become unemployable? Is the AI going to dig ditches?
If you were looking for an example of a job that won't be easily replaced, ditch digging certainly wasn't it. Mere automation will be able to eventually replace that job.
Mental capacity is the other obvious reason ditch diggers won't be able to become rocket scientists.
No, Rome fell because they abandoned their Republican framework and went for a dictatorial cult of personality model instead. It's why Cuba is poorer than Chile. It's why North Korea is a gulag-infested hell hole resorting to threats of violence to bully for food. It's why Venezuela is eating itself alive.
Greed N. Corruption is the CEO of Control, Inc. today, which has been the case for centuries, and is proven to be the root cause in damn near every one of your examples. Obviously we will continue with the longstanding joke of those who don't fail to learn from history will be doomed to repeat it. Like I said, Human Ignorance, is timeless...
I can remember this sort of thing being predicted in movies, and twilight zone episodes, from the 1950s.
Technology is going replace humans! They took our jobs!
It is hard for me to take this threat serious, when the alarmists have been wrong for so many decades.
How much more intelligent has the average human become in the last 100 years?
How many people do you think we can employ in those futuristic tech jobs that are automation and AI-resistant?
Bottom line is the old "Go get an education" mantra doesn't apply with this iteration, and there's a reason we still employ a LOT of humans in highly-repetitive, mind-numbing jobs, which they are not mentally capable of doing anything more. If you wish to dismiss this threat, remember one fact; Human Ignorance has never been extinct.
"Destroy" is the wrong word. Automation frees people from jobs. Would you complain that a miracle drug destroys your fight against cancer or heart disease? Does sex destroy your lust? Do shoes destroy your concerns about walking through an alley littered with glass shards?
Automation also "frees" you from earning an income. Also known as that thing that makes the world go 'round.
Try and grasp the impact before ignorantly commenting next time. The real world isn't fucking made of sunshine and rainbows, and doesn't give a shit if you and your "free" family starve to death in a ditch somewhere. Employment now and for the immediate future, is mandatory for survival.
...What about something as sensible as letting go the workers whose work the AI is doing?
Uh, that would require a shitload of middle and upper management to let themselves go. Needless to say those doing the firing always consider themselves necessary.
Embrace it? Sorry, but your ignorance isn't helping matters. For hundreds of years, the answer to progress and technology destroying jobs was "Go get an education." Now, automation and AI is targeting educated jobs, so it's stupid and ignorant to simply dismiss this problem under the guise of "Why is this news?", as if the answer of yesteryear still applies.
The answer to that, as always, has been that you need to increase the level of education accordingly. Those who write and maintain AIs are going to have jobs. But a high school diploma isn't going to cut it, any more than finishing 7th grade was going to cut it once we got automation and computers.
Society will always adjust to new circumstances. There's no profit in, nor benefit to society of having a large number of useless people who are just mouths to feed. So they will need to find something else to do. The ability to do so is what is going to separate winners from losers. And judging by what you write, you may not be in the former category.
Sorry, but you are patently wrong, and I cannot believe you can't see it based on your own initial recommendation. How many humans today have the mental capability to "write and maintain AIs"? Perhaps 1% of society?!? No matter how you may want to dispute it, the average human is not capable of the level of education you claim as the "answer" in the future. There is a valid reason a LOT of humans are employed in simple, repetitive jobs that can easily be replaced by automation today, and "education" isn't the answer for them.
Forget AI for a moment, the impact of mere automation may be too much for our economy to endure. Do you remember the jobs you held that fueled your ability to obtain a higher education that are now targeted to be replaced by automation (cashiers, warehouse workers, assemblers, baristas, drivers, etc.)? Do you understand just how many of those jobs comprise the lower rungs in the proverbial Ladder of Success? Remove the bottom dozen rungs, and NO ONE can climb to succeed. Remove those jobs, and our economy starts to collapse.
Society will not merely "adjust" because Greed has proven time and time again that it doesn't give a fuck about the victims of its success. As far as what category I'm in, ignorance assumes you're any different (unless I'm talking to a billionaire.)
Slashdot Mirror
As the newfangled quill became more popular, we began to see more and more children lack the hand strength to use a hammer and chisel. Sadly, we have yet to recover from such a blow to society. Once again technology has degraded our quality of life.
Kids today still don't know how to use a fucking hammer, which is ironically STILL a very useful tool 4,000 years later. That has nothing to do with the adaption of the quill, and has everything to do with the real issue, which is sheltering the living shit out of children and letting them grow up in a fucking fantasyland that doesn't even come close to resembling real life.
It's pretty sad to think that an EMP bomb would be just as deadly as any nuclear bomb to this generation.
...OneDrive is easy to disable.
For now. Don't think for a fucking second that will continue to be allowed forever.
Subscription model is user abuse. Well done.
Couldn't agree more, but this is the future consumers obviously want, as they vote with their wallets and support this bullshit by the droves.
I laugh every time I hear about the "cord cutters" bragging about how they're saving money. HBO, Netflix, Disney, Hulu, UFC...the content fracturing is endless, and soon the aggregated monthly cost to access all the shit you want to watch will be twice as much as cable ever was.
The concept of ownership will soon be completely dead.
Automation and good-enough AI is targeting educated jobs
This was _always_ true. You think relative-to-then-society speaking cotton/corn pickers, textile workers, horse buggy drivers, train drivers, etc were uneducated? Relatively speaking, they were probably as educated as the average Facebook user is to today's society's level of education.
The "average" Facebook user is not the metric for hire today. Someone who has a college degree (a.k.a. the new high school diploma) IS. And NO, I would not consider cotton/corn pickers, textile workers, horse buggy drivers, train drivers as "educated". Look at what it actually takes to DO their job. Mental capacity is being valued FAR more than physical capacity these days. There's a reason college graduates GO to college; so they don't have to bag groceries for the rest of their life, which is NO different than every example you've provided.
ignorant assumptions
"Ignorant: lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated". On one side we have people looking in terms of historical context and the knowledge gathered over multiple examples and millennia... and on the other is "But THIS time it is different. It won't be like the 100 times before!" I don't think "ignorant" is the right word here... maybe "unempathetic"?
Just replacing cashiers... targets 3 million jobs just in the US
That's less than 2% of our current workforce. A single checkout machine at the store will replace... what 2 workers? A single cotton gin took out 49 workers! Wake me when you got a 1-10+ ratio example.
Cashiers and salespeople comprise the top jobs in the US, or about 10% of the labor force. Your ignorance keeps you looking at the past. I don't give a shit what the cotton gin impacted 100 years ago; that has ZERO relevance to the impact today.
Mental capacity is often the reason a LOT of humans are employed in tedious, boring, easily automated jobs.
Relatively speaking, this has always been the case historically. If anything, the less tedious, decision making, high profit jobs were relegated to a much much smaller part of society. Just through the centuries of automation alone, we have far less of the jobs you speak up. So historically, automation did a LOT of replacement and destruction of those kinds of jobs; more than it can ever do today or tomorrow.
Unless you want to argue that the centuries of automation somehow created more tedious jobs then before... in which case, OK, I guess we got nothing to worry about this time around.
Worst case scenario: Lets setup a system where we hire people to dig a holes for a week, fill holes for a week, and take care of their room, board, & meals. The cost to society would be more than offset by the increased health and thus reduced healthcare costs.
Worst-case scenario is when humans start demanding a $15/hour minimum wage, and employers realize that automation is cheaper. Healthcare costs only reaffirm the burden that humans bring to employment. Mental capacity hasn't grown in the last few hundred years, but automation capacity HAS, which is why we are now able to replace a cashier easily.
Last thing I'd want while talking to a 911 dispatcher is for them to be allowed to have doubt in my story.
Last thing I'd want is a bunch of people wrongfully shot dead because doubt is too scary for some other people who might have a story that "requires" a paramilitary strike.
That takes proper training to assess a threat, and has little to do with the problem of fake calls. You either have trigger-happy idiots behind an armed response, or you do not.
This is a two-fold problem. Make no mistake that change needs to happen on BOTH sides.
If there is really no way for a 911 dispatcher to tell that a call is arriving from somewhere outside the local area through a commercial VoIP service, that is a shameful state of affairs that needs to be addressed. Probably all SWATing hoaxes involve that kind of proxy to reach the target dispatch, and probably vanishingly few legitimate emergency calls use those services.
If a dispatcher sees a VoIP call that indicates a high risk of violence or strongly points to heavily armed response, that should be good grounds to watch out for a hoax.
The problem with your "easy" fix is when you're wrong, and someone dies as a result.
With the popularity of cloud-based phone services, WiFi calling, and the number of people who have no "home" phone, it's hard to use VoIP as a delineation point.
Automate all the work you want... just socialize all the profits. The problem with increased economic efficiency is that it leads to exponentially greater concentration of wealth.
You planning on using prayer or your magic wand to socialize all those profits?
Mankind has never found a cure for the disease of insatiable greed, and that chasm between the worlds multi-billionaires and the other 99.9999% of the human population isn't shrinking.
Just as past generations turned away the mines for better careers, modern workers whose jobs are altered by automation will see their roles in society evolve rather than disappear.
Automation is NOT going to result in the Apocalypse. It is NOT going to take everyone's job away. It is NOT going to result in a global financial meltdown. There is NOT going to be a singularity.
Naturally, everyone wants to look at the solutions of yesteryear, back when we just told the unemployed masses to "go get an education!". That bullshit isn't going to work in the future. Automation and good-enough AI is targeting educated jobs, so please STOP with the ignorant assumptions that this change is anything like the previous ones. Put simply, it's not.
Yes, some people will be displaced out of some jobs and have to find something else to do. No this will not be easy for some of them but it will be good for society overall...A lot of progress is held back simply because humans are stuck doing work that we don't yet have a machine for.
Uh, some people? Just replacing cashiers with automated checkout stations (which is happening everywhere) targets 3 million jobs just in the US. Forget AI, automation will make a LOT of people unemployable. Mental capacity is often the reason a LOT of humans are employed in tedious, boring, easily automated jobs. Put simply, not everyone can be valued in future jobs. In fact, the vast majority cannot. And "go get an education!" isn't the answer.
...If automation progresses faster than we can handle it then we will pass laws to slow it down or in extreme circumstances revolt (possibly violently).
Because we've been so successful in managing the balance of wealth and power in the world so far? That gap between the world's billionaires and their insatiable greed and the other 99.9999% of the population isn't shrinking. You will have as much chance of slowing down insatiable greed tomorrow as you have today. A violent revolt will likely be the solution as our economy starts to die as millions join the global welfare state.
If parents were serious they'd take the mobile devices away.
If your preteen was "addicted" to heroin, you'd hope most parents would do more than wring their hands over it. At the very least not tolerate it under their roof.
An addict never sees a problem with addiction. Doesn't fucking help matters when the junkies are also the parents.
That their parents were afraid they were addicted to TV?!
Their parents' parents were afraid they were addicted to radio.
Apparently this is a thing with every generation that advances somewhat from the old.
Addiction to television and radio did not cause thousands of deaths every year. And distracted driving deaths are on the rise.
Don't be ignorant as to why this addiction is considerably different than the concerns of yesteryear. Addicts can't put their fucking phone down to stop killing innocent people on the road, and that is a threat that damn near every one of us have to face on a daily basis.
I'm not sure how he would know. His kids are too old...
Too old? MPAA subratings have been around for almost 20 years, 4 out of his 5 children were under the age of 18 when they came out, and Trump has a young son born in 2006.
.. and cash register hardware
Right, because the cutting-edge equipment needed to run a fully automated retail establishment is so much cheaper than ubiquitous, tried-and-true tech like fucking cash registers.
Uh, yes it likely is, considering they can operate 24x7x365, and won't get sick, show up late, need vacations, lie, steal, create sexual harassment lawsuits, need medical and dental insurance, etc. You seem to forget all the tried-and-true burdens of those fucking humans you'll need to hire to operate those fucking cash registers.
And automated solutions will be far from "cutting-edge" 3-5 years from now.
"Maybe they have to put a rating system for that."
Uh, they have a rating system. Been in place for a long damn time now, not quite show how the hell Trump could have not known this.
If he's looking for more than that, there's an easy answer. It's called Parenting.
Wow, AI tracks what you take and automatically charges you? The advances in AI are incredible! Hopefully it records the purchase in a blockchain ledger too. That would be TOO COOL.
We can mock this technology all we want, but two facts remain; it works, and it's likely a HELL of a lot cheaper than the traditional method of purchasing and managing cashiers, baggers, and cash register hardware.
You should expect this kind of store concept to become infectious, and not just with Amazon Would a grocery chain be willing to license this Amazon solution if it proves to be 30% cheaper than the traditional method of transaction management? You bet your ass they would, and Amazon would be stupid not to oblige.
Cashiers make up over 3 million jobs in the US. Let's see how well we manage unemployment in 10 years, along with managing the unemployable.
"Although the researchers offer only general guidance for how to deal with these threats, they do offer a path forward for policy makers."
Oh, so there's a path forward for the policy makers? And what makes you think when it comes to autonomous weapons systems that countries are going to follow "policy"? Not even the UN is the all-encompassing ruler of all, and plenty of countries will happily put warmongering profits over everything else.
We've already proven that entire industries can and will be deployed with little or no security (IoT). Based on related profits and popularity, consumers certainly don't give a shit that security is lacking. I foresee little incentive to secure the future, even when lives are on the line.
Fast forward to an autonomous vehicle utopia; 10,000 people are murdered in a single massive autonomous vehicle DDoS attack. I can already hear lawyers defending the lack of security that lead to a breach with the "at least it's better than when dangerous humans used to drive" defense.
In short, Greed doesn't give a shit about safety or security. Greed cares about Profits. Rules, morals, and ethics are for pussies.
Let's be realistic, Apple hasn't been innovative in a very long time. They're certainly not offering anything that isn't available from many others.
The only thing that really makes them innovative, is their ability to sell computing hardware at an obscene markup to millions still willing to pay for the fashion statement that it is. They're not a tech company; they're a fashion company. Once they lose their fashionable edge, they will crash and burn faster than Milli Vanilli on The Voice.
And Tim Cook trying and deliver a You-Just-Don't-Understand shtick? That's like listening to a Millennial justify a resume that consists of bong hits and Guitar Hero high scores.
In the spirit of fairness, I believe we ought to also hear from at least one advocate for quackery. Gilbert Gottfried?
Given the effectiveness of fake news, you don't exactly have to go searching for advocates these days...
"...this time around both the company and its customers will be praying that the fix for Skylake, Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake chips actually does the job."
I can understand the masses praying for a legitimate fix, but the company is praying this will work? Did they suddenly abandon the concept of testing prior to release?
I mean, it's not like Intel has to go digging to find a metric fuckton of affected hardware...
Are you sure? I think predicting that Internet speeds will increase over time was the easiest prediction ever. Just like predicting the CPU power growth.
I was definitely using 1 Gbps Ethernet 15 years ago, which was standardized 20 years ago. 1 Gbit Fiber Channel appeared in 1997.
Predicting and predicting with accuracy are two different things, and no one was predicting 1Gb internet speeds in your home 20 years ago. Every one of us in the technology sector had a definition of "massive" 20 years ago, back when we thought 32MB of RAM was a lot of memory, and a 20GB hard drive was obscenely huge. Again, no one predicted 30TB hard drives two decades ago.
Predict technology or Greed 20 years from now. If Slashdot (or the internet) is still around by then, we'll come back for a laugh.
Why would the human magically become unemployable? Is the AI going to dig ditches?
If you were looking for an example of a job that won't be easily replaced, ditch digging certainly wasn't it. Mere automation will be able to eventually replace that job.
Mental capacity is the other obvious reason ditch diggers won't be able to become rocket scientists.
No, Rome fell because they abandoned their Republican framework and went for a dictatorial cult of personality model instead. It's why Cuba is poorer than Chile. It's why North Korea is a gulag-infested hell hole resorting to threats of violence to bully for food. It's why Venezuela is eating itself alive.
Greed N. Corruption is the CEO of Control, Inc. today, which has been the case for centuries, and is proven to be the root cause in damn near every one of your examples. Obviously we will continue with the longstanding joke of those who don't fail to learn from history will be doomed to repeat it. Like I said, Human Ignorance, is timeless...
I can remember this sort of thing being predicted in movies, and twilight zone episodes, from the 1950s.
Technology is going replace humans! They took our jobs!
It is hard for me to take this threat serious, when the alarmists have been wrong for so many decades.
How much more intelligent has the average human become in the last 100 years?
How many people do you think we can employ in those futuristic tech jobs that are automation and AI-resistant?
Bottom line is the old "Go get an education" mantra doesn't apply with this iteration, and there's a reason we still employ a LOT of humans in highly-repetitive, mind-numbing jobs, which they are not mentally capable of doing anything more. If you wish to dismiss this threat, remember one fact; Human Ignorance has never been extinct.
"Destroy" is the wrong word. Automation frees people from jobs. Would you complain that a miracle drug destroys your fight against cancer or heart disease? Does sex destroy your lust? Do shoes destroy your concerns about walking through an alley littered with glass shards?
Automation also "frees" you from earning an income. Also known as that thing that makes the world go 'round.
Try and grasp the impact before ignorantly commenting next time. The real world isn't fucking made of sunshine and rainbows, and doesn't give a shit if you and your "free" family starve to death in a ditch somewhere. Employment now and for the immediate future, is mandatory for survival.
...What about something as sensible as letting go the workers whose work the AI is doing?
Uh, that would require a shitload of middle and upper management to let themselves go. Needless to say those doing the firing always consider themselves necessary.
Embrace it? Sorry, but your ignorance isn't helping matters. For hundreds of years, the answer to progress and technology destroying jobs was "Go get an education." Now, automation and AI is targeting educated jobs, so it's stupid and ignorant to simply dismiss this problem under the guise of "Why is this news?", as if the answer of yesteryear still applies.
The answer to that, as always, has been that you need to increase the level of education accordingly. Those who write and maintain AIs are going to have jobs. But a high school diploma isn't going to cut it, any more than finishing 7th grade was going to cut it once we got automation and computers.
Society will always adjust to new circumstances. There's no profit in, nor benefit to society of having a large number of useless people who are just mouths to feed. So they will need to find something else to do. The ability to do so is what is going to separate winners from losers. And judging by what you write, you may not be in the former category.
Sorry, but you are patently wrong, and I cannot believe you can't see it based on your own initial recommendation. How many humans today have the mental capability to "write and maintain AIs"? Perhaps 1% of society?!? No matter how you may want to dispute it, the average human is not capable of the level of education you claim as the "answer" in the future. There is a valid reason a LOT of humans are employed in simple, repetitive jobs that can easily be replaced by automation today, and "education" isn't the answer for them.
Forget AI for a moment, the impact of mere automation may be too much for our economy to endure. Do you remember the jobs you held that fueled your ability to obtain a higher education that are now targeted to be replaced by automation (cashiers, warehouse workers, assemblers, baristas, drivers, etc.)? Do you understand just how many of those jobs comprise the lower rungs in the proverbial Ladder of Success? Remove the bottom dozen rungs, and NO ONE can climb to succeed. Remove those jobs, and our economy starts to collapse.
Society will not merely "adjust" because Greed has proven time and time again that it doesn't give a fuck about the victims of its success. As far as what category I'm in, ignorance assumes you're any different (unless I'm talking to a billionaire.)