I would rather actually fund education so more people would be qualified for work beyond being a meat-part in a machine, doing the same thing over and over again for days, months, years.
Automation seeks to destroy the concept of employing an uneducated human.
AI seeks to destroy the concept of employing an educated human. It won't even take true AI to do this, just "good enough" AI.
Sorry, but the justification to even educate a human is shrinking, not growing.
US production per worker is currently about $58,000, and seems to be going up by $10,000 per decade.
That's per capita, meaning "per person". If the per-capita output were distributed equally to every man, woman, and child everyone would have about $58.000 to spend. Each year. Including kids and babies. And they could do it again next year.
This will only go up as AI and automation take over. A huge number of driving jobs will be taken over by self-driving vehicles in the next decade (already happening with long-haul trucks), and AI and robotics will take over ever more of the production, working 24/7 and making more goods, more cheaply, and faster than humans.
More goods, and faster than humans? Gee, that's nice. Too bad the unemployable masses won't have any disposable income to buy any of that massively efficient inventory of goods and services. And the wealthy elite left with money won't be buying 10 million units of each.
We need to transition away from the current economic system real soon, or suffer massive riots and the downfall of our culture as unemployed people riot and take it down for us.
We need a way to spread the wealth out a little more evenly. UBI is one way, and we're getting really close to the point where UBI will be cheaper than the cost of government assistance plus the lost cost of higher crime and prison for the poor.
First of all, taxing the wealthy elite to fund UBI appears to be just about the only way to fund it, and we all know how easy it is to extract taxes from them today. This is is the first challenge of UBI, and it's a considerable one.
The little taxes you do succeed to extract will be so obscenely small that UBI will be Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses and not a penny more, confirming my initial statement regarding disposable income and goods and services. Those currently on welfare are not exactly living a glamorous lifestyle. As an example of the impact, Apple is one of largest corporations on the planet, and sells tens of millions of units, but essentially makes nothing that would be considered an affordable necessity for those barely able to fund their sustenance.
Perhaps taxing the robots and using the money to fund the rest of UBI would work.
Taxing the robots is taxing the wealthy elite. I've already described how that will work out. They'll lobby to maintain tax havens and loopholes, and lobby to pay the bare minimum. And they will succeed, much like they do today.
We could also lower the SS retirement age, or go to a 4-day work week.
To do what, drain it even faster, and accelerate it's already predicted death? Automation seeks to remove the human worker altogether, so there won't be a 4-day work week. It will be a 0-day work week for the unemployable masses.
Lots of options, many would work or could be made to work.
But we have to start transitioning just about now, or risk the downfall of our culture.
Many won't work. Greed N. Corruption is the CEO of capitalism now. Solve for that issue first, and then you might have a chance. Probably not though. Eat the Rich might be one option after the downfall.
An iPad can be easily operated by a 3-year old. You call that sophisticated?
Yes, absolutely. Making it lightweight, with a consistent, easy to use UI _is_ sophisticated.
I suppose it does take a certain level of sophistication and finesse with designs today in order to accept the fact that society continues to lower the bar and build a better idiot. Manufacturers would be stupid to walk away from that much revenue.
The future is an entire generation of purebred social media narcissists who are sponsored from their synthesized test-tube birth, born to be a product and pre-programmed to maximize revenue. By comparison, a full frontal lobotomy would create a better human.
...My pet theory is that it has been a slow decline over several generations, basically since corporal punishment was nixed from the socially acceptable parenting toolbox.
Your pet theory is nothing more than a bubble-wrapped PC-friendly way of describing or justifying our decline and what the future holds. Mine is not, because I see no value in presenting illusions.
Yup - glad to see I'm not the only one to wonder what will happen to all these people when Facebook implodes. It will eventually, just like all the other BBSs before it.
Delusional thinking.
Facebook is now an extension of governments for intelligence gathering.
It is also now larger than other industries that were deemed Too Big To Fail, and thus will never be allowed to implode.
This is a good example of why average people, who maybe only have a rudimentary background in science, no longer trust it or what scientists are claiming.
There have just been too many situations like this where scientists say one thing, as if they're 100% sure they're right, and then sometime latter they have to backtrack on their claims. Sometimes it even turns out that the exact opposite of what they're saying is actually true!
People don't trust science or studies because they are far too often bought and paid for by those who profit the most from "results", which the competition is often found buying the backtracking counter-argument.
Wading through the lies and bullshit to find truth and fact is the only true science left.
(our obesity levels actually can be measured against subsidies for corn in the US making both corn syrup and animal feed cheaper- if we have to subsidise farming- subsidizing corn is about the worst thing we can do).
The US Government currently subsidizes the shit out of corn, which will never stop, as it directly benefits their responsibility of resource management via population control (obesity and other diseases create death.) This activity also feeds the US Medical Industrial Complex, who makes trillions from a society riddled with massively profitable disease, perpetually treating and never curing.
No matter how fucked up those facts may seem from a moral perspective, subsidizing corn is viewed as the best thing they can do.
It's not a phone. It's a super computer in my pocket. I have instant access to books, movies, music, the internet, a camera, my photos, my friends, my email, games, my business accounts, my bank....Would I pay a hundred bucks a month for all that? Of course, I can afford it and I'd be stupid not to. If I was a Mennonite, a Luddite, or maybe just a contrarian asshole, then I can imagine being uppity about it. You mock people for having to have the latest "celebrity" gadget, but you're clearly using your lack of an iPhone as a way to feel superior to others, so what's the difference?
For the record, I use an iPhone (issued and paid for by my employer). Haven't paid a cell phone bill in over 20 years, and I take vacations sans cell service in order to actually call it a vacation and enjoy the real world and the people I love in it. I mock people because I run into far too many gadget addicts every day who sacrifice their health in order to afford their super-gadget lease and maintain an online status as a human product. I would ask addicts how they ever survived without a super-gadget, but they've never known anything else. They can't even make it through a single 5-minute discussion and maintain eye contact with another human. The masses want to dismiss gadget addiction as a way of life. We used to look down on narcissism; now social media rewards it. Everything from growing Apples to raising Zebras can be done without physically interacting with another human because there's an app for that. When everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, the justification for higher education turns into nothing more than a capitalist "tradition".
Enjoying and surviving in the real world without being utterly dependent on a super-gadget isn't something that should be dismissed as "old-fashioned", but I'm certain an addict will try and label my rant as such.
The move is evidently not an attempt to staunch companies from adopting automation technology.
Then it's pointless. Greed N. Corruption will demand automation, and not give a shit about the impact.
Rather, it is a kind of formal acknowledgment that unemployment is coming on a big enough scale to eat into South Korea's tax revenue.
Pointless moves are bullshit that only serve to fulfill an illusion of concern. The reality is policymakers serve Greeds lobbyist armies.
Policymakers are hoping that reducing the deduction incentives by a couple percentage points will offset the lost income tax and help keep the country's social services and welfare coffers filled.
Citizens are also hoping that policymakers represent their best interests, and look out for the people. How ironic that shit never seems to work out either. Coffers will empty because policymakers hold on to the delusional concept of taxing the rich to help the unemployable masses, failing to grasp the fact that Greed maintains wealth by dodging tax obligations.
Peoples accounts are hacked. Bitcoin is not. The fact that a bank or an exchange is robbed does not devalue the currency. Bitcoin, unlike any fiat currency, has not be counterfeited.
And how exactly does any of this reduce the risk for using bitcoin?
If banks were getting robbed A LOT, resulting in people losing their money, then using banks would be a considered a high risk. Victims could care less about the value of a dollar when all of their dollars are stolen. People also aren't investing in bitcoin for it's anti-counterfeiting crypto, which tends to be a moot point when sizeable exchanges are getting hacked.
I look at it this way: Apple gives you a 2 year, 0% loan on a phone. At the end of a year (or anytime thereafter), you can turn in the the phone and get the next model.
I look at it this way: Apple marketing is certainly working to ensure you're a customer of exorbitantly-priced hardware for life.
No, the new phone isn't going to be called an iPhone 8...There is no way on god's green earth it will be called the iPhone 8. They are more likely to just drop numbers entirely.
Ironically, my sarcasm was focused on the fact that I don't see any other name being chosen. History tends to validate that, and since the whole numbers thing was around when the almighty iSteve was in charge, they'll probably stick with it. After all, we have the iPhoneX to look forward to, which would mirror exactly what they did with other marketing.
At this point, it is too little, too late. Phones are not changing frequently enough to really need to upgrade all that often anymore. Being on the Galaxy S5 right now and looking at the S8, there is only marginal increases over the past three years. Sure, it has a little more processing power, a little more RAM, and a little more storage, but that isn't all that needed.
Quite often, the only real argument to buying newer models would be support.
Given the kind of information these devices hold, the cost of being compromised due to an insecure device can be quite high.
Puhleez, if you honestly though 90% of musicians wrote their own songs you are sadly mistaken.
Music used to be written and created. It held emotion and power.
Today, pop music is manufactured predictable shit. It's all based on a market-validated recipe of some brainless hottie laying oversexualizing Autotuned vocals on top of revenue-generating beats. The shift to letting AI create "music" only validates how truly easy it is to manufacture shit for the masses.
As I said before, the music standard has dropped lower than a dubstep track.
The AI composes the songs - not performs them. And many pop stars don't write their own songs.
Elvis Presley had an awesome career singing other people's songs.
Unlike damn near every entertainer today, Elvis Presley didn't need Autotune.
And the only reason they'll be "alright" is because the music standard has dropped so fucking low that we don't even call them musicians anymore; they're now entertainers. The fans will welcome these AI-writing overlords and not miss a beat.
No. I'll be honest, I don't understand why anyone would pay $99 to see that. Basically every other sporting event is free....
Ah, so charitable donations must explain the millions sports professionals get paid. After all, there's no revenue when every other sporting event is free, right?
Data mining is creeping me out. I constantly feel that I'm being manipulated.
Because you are. Manipulating you is pretty much the entire value proposition of consumer data mining.
What creeps me out is the fact that the masses happily give away their privacy and allow themselves to be manipulated, which is the cutesy Millennial term for brainwashing.
The future is an entire generation of purebred social media narcissists who are sponsored from their synthesized test-tube birth, born to be a product and pre-programmed to maximize revenue. By comparison, a full frontal lobotomy would create a better human.
Slashdot Mirror
I would rather actually fund education so more people would be qualified for work beyond being a meat-part in a machine, doing the same thing over and over again for days, months, years.
Automation seeks to destroy the concept of employing an uneducated human.
AI seeks to destroy the concept of employing an educated human. It won't even take true AI to do this, just "good enough" AI.
Sorry, but the justification to even educate a human is shrinking, not growing.
US production per worker is currently about $58,000, and seems to be going up by $10,000 per decade.
That's per capita, meaning "per person". If the per-capita output were distributed equally to every man, woman, and child everyone would have about $58.000 to spend. Each year. Including kids and babies. And they could do it again next year.
This will only go up as AI and automation take over. A huge number of driving jobs will be taken over by self-driving vehicles in the next decade (already happening with long-haul trucks), and AI and robotics will take over ever more of the production, working 24/7 and making more goods, more cheaply, and faster than humans.
More goods, and faster than humans? Gee, that's nice. Too bad the unemployable masses won't have any disposable income to buy any of that massively efficient inventory of goods and services. And the wealthy elite left with money won't be buying 10 million units of each.
We need to transition away from the current economic system real soon, or suffer massive riots and the downfall of our culture as unemployed people riot and take it down for us.
We need a way to spread the wealth out a little more evenly. UBI is one way, and we're getting really close to the point where UBI will be cheaper than the cost of government assistance plus the lost cost of higher crime and prison for the poor.
First of all, taxing the wealthy elite to fund UBI appears to be just about the only way to fund it, and we all know how easy it is to extract taxes from them today. This is is the first challenge of UBI, and it's a considerable one.
The little taxes you do succeed to extract will be so obscenely small that UBI will be Welfare 2.0 for the unemployable masses and not a penny more, confirming my initial statement regarding disposable income and goods and services. Those currently on welfare are not exactly living a glamorous lifestyle. As an example of the impact, Apple is one of largest corporations on the planet, and sells tens of millions of units, but essentially makes nothing that would be considered an affordable necessity for those barely able to fund their sustenance.
Perhaps taxing the robots and using the money to fund the rest of UBI would work.
Taxing the robots is taxing the wealthy elite. I've already described how that will work out. They'll lobby to maintain tax havens and loopholes, and lobby to pay the bare minimum. And they will succeed, much like they do today.
We could also lower the SS retirement age, or go to a 4-day work week.
To do what, drain it even faster, and accelerate it's already predicted death? Automation seeks to remove the human worker altogether, so there won't be a 4-day work week. It will be a 0-day work week for the unemployable masses.
Lots of options, many would work or could be made to work.
But we have to start transitioning just about now, or risk the downfall of our culture.
Many won't work. Greed N. Corruption is the CEO of capitalism now. Solve for that issue first, and then you might have a chance. Probably not though. Eat the Rich might be one option after the downfall.
Yes, absolutely. Making it lightweight, with a consistent, easy to use UI _is_ sophisticated.
I suppose it does take a certain level of sophistication and finesse with designs today in order to accept the fact that society continues to lower the bar and build a better idiot. Manufacturers would be stupid to walk away from that much revenue.
The future is an entire generation of purebred social media narcissists who are sponsored from their synthesized test-tube birth, born to be a product and pre-programmed to maximize revenue. By comparison, a full frontal lobotomy would create a better human.
...My pet theory is that it has been a slow decline over several generations, basically since corporal punishment was nixed from the socially acceptable parenting toolbox.
Your pet theory is nothing more than a bubble-wrapped PC-friendly way of describing or justifying our decline and what the future holds. Mine is not, because I see no value in presenting illusions.
"...we humans...often tend to leap to technologies that are sophisticated beyond comprehension."
An iPad can be easily operated by a 3-year old. You call that sophisticated?
What has grown beyond comprehension here is the fact that we are now forced to make technical devices idiot-proof in order for the masses to use them.
Put down the sci-fi bong and quit taking hits off fiction and fantasy.
Yup - glad to see I'm not the only one to wonder what will happen to all these people when Facebook implodes. It will eventually, just like all the other BBSs before it.
Delusional thinking.
Facebook is now an extension of governments for intelligence gathering.
It is also now larger than other industries that were deemed Too Big To Fail, and thus will never be allowed to implode.
apple hardware only? or any SSD / pci-e flash card
Damn good question.
Knowing Apple, I think we may sadly already know the answer.
This is a good example of why average people, who maybe only have a rudimentary background in science, no longer trust it or what scientists are claiming.
There have just been too many situations like this where scientists say one thing, as if they're 100% sure they're right, and then sometime latter they have to backtrack on their claims. Sometimes it even turns out that the exact opposite of what they're saying is actually true!
People don't trust science or studies because they are far too often bought and paid for by those who profit the most from "results", which the competition is often found buying the backtracking counter-argument.
Wading through the lies and bullshit to find truth and fact is the only true science left.
(our obesity levels actually can be measured against subsidies for corn in the US making both corn syrup and animal feed cheaper- if we have to subsidise farming- subsidizing corn is about the worst thing we can do).
The US Government currently subsidizes the shit out of corn, which will never stop, as it directly benefits their responsibility of resource management via population control (obesity and other diseases create death.) This activity also feeds the US Medical Industrial Complex, who makes trillions from a society riddled with massively profitable disease, perpetually treating and never curing.
No matter how fucked up those facts may seem from a moral perspective, subsidizing corn is viewed as the best thing they can do.
It's not a phone. It's a super computer in my pocket. I have instant access to books, movies, music, the internet, a camera, my photos, my friends, my email, games, my business accounts, my bank....Would I pay a hundred bucks a month for all that? Of course, I can afford it and I'd be stupid not to. If I was a Mennonite, a Luddite, or maybe just a contrarian asshole, then I can imagine being uppity about it. You mock people for having to have the latest "celebrity" gadget, but you're clearly using your lack of an iPhone as a way to feel superior to others, so what's the difference?
For the record, I use an iPhone (issued and paid for by my employer). Haven't paid a cell phone bill in over 20 years, and I take vacations sans cell service in order to actually call it a vacation and enjoy the real world and the people I love in it. I mock people because I run into far too many gadget addicts every day who sacrifice their health in order to afford their super-gadget lease and maintain an online status as a human product. I would ask addicts how they ever survived without a super-gadget, but they've never known anything else. They can't even make it through a single 5-minute discussion and maintain eye contact with another human. The masses want to dismiss gadget addiction as a way of life. We used to look down on narcissism; now social media rewards it. Everything from growing Apples to raising Zebras can be done without physically interacting with another human because there's an app for that. When everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, the justification for higher education turns into nothing more than a capitalist "tradition".
Enjoying and surviving in the real world without being utterly dependent on a super-gadget isn't something that should be dismissed as "old-fashioned", but I'm certain an addict will try and label my rant as such.
The move is evidently not an attempt to staunch companies from adopting automation technology.
Then it's pointless. Greed N. Corruption will demand automation, and not give a shit about the impact.
Rather, it is a kind of formal acknowledgment that unemployment is coming on a big enough scale to eat into South Korea's tax revenue.
Pointless moves are bullshit that only serve to fulfill an illusion of concern. The reality is policymakers serve Greeds lobbyist armies.
Policymakers are hoping that reducing the deduction incentives by a couple percentage points will offset the lost income tax and help keep the country's social services and welfare coffers filled.
Citizens are also hoping that policymakers represent their best interests, and look out for the people. How ironic that shit never seems to work out either. Coffers will empty because policymakers hold on to the delusional concept of taxing the rich to help the unemployable masses, failing to grasp the fact that Greed maintains wealth by dodging tax obligations.
Peoples accounts are hacked. Bitcoin is not. The fact that a bank or an exchange is robbed does not devalue the currency. Bitcoin, unlike any fiat currency, has not be counterfeited.
And how exactly does any of this reduce the risk for using bitcoin?
If banks were getting robbed A LOT, resulting in people losing their money, then using banks would be a considered a high risk. Victims could care less about the value of a dollar when all of their dollars are stolen. People also aren't investing in bitcoin for it's anti-counterfeiting crypto, which tends to be a moot point when sizeable exchanges are getting hacked.
I like owning things, vs perpetually renting them.
Enjoy it while you still can.
Greed N. Corruption are working hard to destroy the concept of ownership altogether.
The next generation won't even know what it feels like to own anything.
I look at it this way: Apple gives you a 2 year, 0% loan on a phone. At the end of a year (or anytime thereafter), you can turn in the the phone and get the next model.
I look at it this way: Apple marketing is certainly working to ensure you're a customer of exorbitantly-priced hardware for life.
Do some people actually still consider XYZ phone to be some sort of status symbol?
Considering the fact that Apple wouldn't even exist without marketing hardware as a fashion statement, I'd say most people do.
No, the new phone isn't going to be called an iPhone 8...There is no way on god's green earth it will be called the iPhone 8. They are more likely to just drop numbers entirely.
Ironically, my sarcasm was focused on the fact that I don't see any other name being chosen. History tends to validate that, and since the whole numbers thing was around when the almighty iSteve was in charge, they'll probably stick with it. After all, we have the iPhoneX to look forward to, which would mirror exactly what they did with other marketing.
At this point, it is too little, too late. Phones are not changing frequently enough to really need to upgrade all that often anymore. Being on the Galaxy S5 right now and looking at the S8, there is only marginal increases over the past three years. Sure, it has a little more processing power, a little more RAM, and a little more storage, but that isn't all that needed.
Quite often, the only real argument to buying newer models would be support.
Given the kind of information these devices hold, the cost of being compromised due to an insecure device can be quite high.
Lease or buy? Are we serious with this shit?
When a phone gets so fucking expensive I have to debate whether to lease or buy it, it's time to buy a cheaper phone.
Sadly, many people feel otherwise, and will sacrifice a lot in order to maintain the "celebrity" status of owning fashionable hardware.
Puhleez, if you honestly though 90% of musicians wrote their own songs you are sadly mistaken.
Music used to be written and created. It held emotion and power.
Today, pop music is manufactured predictable shit. It's all based on a market-validated recipe of some brainless hottie laying oversexualizing Autotuned vocals on top of revenue-generating beats. The shift to letting AI create "music" only validates how truly easy it is to manufacture shit for the masses.
As I said before, the music standard has dropped lower than a dubstep track.
"Apple is widely expected to unveil new iPhone models - including one called the iPhone 8..."
Wow, so it's gonna be called iPhone 8?
And here I thought the company whose marketing hasn't changed in a fucking decade was gonna call the new iPhone "Banana Fandango"...
The AI composes the songs - not performs them. And many pop stars don't write their own songs.
Elvis Presley had an awesome career singing other people's songs.
Unlike damn near every entertainer today, Elvis Presley didn't need Autotune.
And the only reason they'll be "alright" is because the music standard has dropped so fucking low that we don't even call them musicians anymore; they're now entertainers. The fans will welcome these AI-writing overlords and not miss a beat.
...Boxing, MMA, and a few other events happen irregularly and the parties involved vary so a one time fee to watch the event makes sense...
MMA events are irregular? the upcoming PPV schedule for UFC is 2 Sep, 7 Oct, 4 Nov, 2 Dec, and 30 Dec.
That monthly schedule is so regular you can adjust your budget for it.
Misery? Did you see any of the fight
No. I'll be honest, I don't understand why anyone would pay $99 to see that. Basically every other sporting event is free....
Ah, so charitable donations must explain the millions sports professionals get paid. After all, there's no revenue when every other sporting event is free, right?
Talk about delusional...
Data mining is creeping me out. I constantly feel that I'm being manipulated.
Because you are. Manipulating you is pretty much the entire value proposition of consumer data mining.
What creeps me out is the fact that the masses happily give away their privacy and allow themselves to be manipulated, which is the cutesy Millennial term for brainwashing.
The future is an entire generation of purebred social media narcissists who are sponsored from their synthesized test-tube birth, born to be a product and pre-programmed to maximize revenue. By comparison, a full frontal lobotomy would create a better human.
Is the drug able to be patented to guarantee billions in Big Pharma profits?
Is the drug addictive to guarantee endless repeat customers?
Is the drug deadly enough to guarantee benefits to population control?
No?
Forget it. Won't ever be approved.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming of Opium! Opium! Opium!