Here's the thing. I used to be really interested in all these kinds of scenarios. There was a time I was super spooked on the level of debt in countries.
This is the same with jobs in general. I used to sit around wondering what jobs will people do or who will they keep people in a good condition given free trade and automation.
Now, I just sit back and think well, maybe they can manage it all and maybe they can't. It's not really a resignation to ignorance. It's more like this is such a complex system and they have all these tools available (QE, public sector, government driven work...) that maybe they can make this all work. Or maybe it all blows up.
I really don't think jobs are a problem per se. There's so many jobs that need doing, I don't see society running out of them. The key will be for government to create productive jobs in this respect. Whether in healthcare, education, construction, research, space, environmental cleanup...
The problem of course is how do you fund these jobs in a global heavily automated system.
I like to think of Detroit and I like this simple way of thinking of it.
80K autoworkers could pay the taxes needed to support 80k nurses, teachers, police officers...
Notice there is just as much demand in Detroit today for nurses, teachers, police officers. The desire for more of those jobs has not gone away.
But the ability for the government to pay for those government created jobs has suffered.
That is the real crux of the issue in my view and it's heavily tied to debt and monetary policy. It's on that level that I just leave it to the those technocrats in charge and maybe they can play with the money to make this all work. And yes, maybe a UBI is part of that solution. But it's the same issue... where do you get the money for it?
Here's another way to think of it. Probably the center of all this AI and computing is california. Let this sink in. The center of all this new industry can't even provide the state it's in with wealth. To put it in context here, the oil industry in Norway or Saudi Arabia provides the wealth to make those places rich. California is not rich for even most of it's citizens.
If the Mecca of this new industry can't even provide wealth for it's own state, much less the country, you really have to think how they're going to be able to fund everything.
Again, that's not a doomsday thinking. They might well be able to do it. How you transition and deal with inflation/deflation or debt or trade... damned if I know, but without the collapse people fear, they might just make it work.
This is a fair objection, and there are several more. I'm not an advocate of this law or anything,
But these edge cases are nothing that can't be worked around. Just off the top of my head, one solution would be that even if the driver is drunk, the car would still start (maybe after a couple tries)?
But while driving, maybe some lights keep flashing or the horn goes off continuously or something. Basically something to let people know you are driving in an emergency. If the cops see that, well you should be glad because you're obviously in an emergency and they can rush your dad to the hospital.
Not really. Computer aided detection of anomalies in medical imaging has been pretty solid for a while.
I worked in the field over 15 years ago. Already for breast cancer anomaly detection, it was easily over 80% depending on the system when compared to even the best radiologists.
I obviously wouldn't book a surgery strictly on an automated analysis, but as a good first screening, we've had that covered for a while now comparable to real radiologists.
It is used, but generally people don't trust the automated results, so a radiologist is still there reading each one. That doesn't mean the computer isn't doing most of the work:P
I think Boeing handling of the MCAS in both its publication and implementation was horrible. That is Boeing's fault. You can also blame the regulator here. I really don't think anything wonky was going on. I've been in regulated industries my whole life and certification is always kind of a shitty game. That's nothing specific to the US. I'm in Canada, it's the same garbage here. There's just no way for an external person not on the project to really get into this level of detail and keep up with the project and release. You might think, but airlines! They gotta have some super duper regulatory process! But you'd probably be wrong. They probably have more certifications and checkboxes, but at the end of the day, they basically rely on what's submitted to them by Boeing.
You can kind of blame the regulators as it's their job to monitor such thing. Theoretically I blame them. Practically I don't. That's just Boeings job.
But as to the inclusion of safety features. I personally think that's more on the fault of airlines and regulators. It's like cars. Cars today come with optional safety equipment. My car has rear/side vehicle detection for example. I can't count the number of times that has prevented a possible issue for me. My wife's car does not.
Is read/side vehicle detection a mandatory feature? I don't know. I used to drive a car without it. I would say a well trained driver wouldn't need it. But I also wouldn't buy a car for myself today without it. No doubt Boeing positions it as a well trained pilot would not need one. Probably true.
It really is up to airlines to properly decide those needs. And then, it's up to regulators to keep up and mandate certain features they want for ALL airlines. Just like cars had to have mandatory seatbelts eventually. None of these additional safety features seem specific to the way a boeing 737 would fly. something like an AOA display or disagree light would seem pretty applicable to every kind of airplane.
funny enough, I saw the news in Canada last night. They covered 3 airlines.
There are two safety systems 1. Disagree lights 2. Angle of attack indicators
Air Canada bought both for their entire fleet. West Jet just got the disagree light Sunwing didn't respond.
I'd venture to say that many carriers bought at least one of the sensors, but I mean it's to question low cost airlines or developing countries might not have. That's how it played out in Canada. The main airlines bought the sensors. The low cost one did not respond.
Ok, you want experts in their fields. Fair enough. Now, how do you choose which people are experts?
That's a really really really really hard question. And all these experts have about as much diversity on most issues as average people.
Then how do you prevent a subset of experts from taking ideological control and exclude other experts. Again, think really hard about this. I was a teacher in Canada. Well I'm still qualified, but I don't teach anymore. Currently, there's a small subset of ideologues than are 'experts'. Most of my peers and myself were scared of our jobs to voice our professional opinion on most things.
Then you also have still have the problem of resources. Support you have an expert ministry of health and an expert ministry of education. They all have expert things they want to do. But how do divide the money between the two organizations? An expert finance committee?
Not to mention how the goals or intentions of experts might go against what people want to do with their lives. What then... a freedom committee expert?
I'm really a big fan of looking at history. There's not much new under the sun in terms of ideology or politics. There's a reason an 'expert' run society hasn't shown up despite it being talked about for thousands of years. This doesn't mean things can't change, but you should pay attention to history.
The messy work of politics is just that... messy. Because people are messy. And life is messy.
Just try to do something small like organize your family. Most of us fail in just trying to organize a small group of like a 5 person family.
What they're saying is that Amazon's ability to leverage the their dominant position as a marketplace to dominate other areas, like goods (clothing, batteries...), is not that great.
While perhaps true, it is definitely something to keep looking at, as we would any other semi monopoly situation (railroads, telecom....)
How much do they highlight their product? How much preferential treatment do they give their product? Are they operating anything at a loss?
I'm as a guilty as the next person. I used to buy Eneloops as my main batteries. This past purchase, i couldn't resist the Amazon Basics deal. It was nicely highlighted. How much does that take away from battery R&D from the companies dedicated to batteries? I have no idea. But I did it.
It's pretty common for stores to have in house brands. That's nothing new. Even my grocery store has in house brands.But if it gets this large, monitoring is needed as with any semi monopoly system. It would be like if my grocery store (Loblaws) had most of the marketshare and they control shelf space and pump up their in house brands. That would make it really hard for new entrants to get to consumers.
Doing this kind of thing is nothing new when you get this big, especially with network style semi monopolies. I don't know if we need to break them up, but some rules around ranking and preferential treatment should be there as in many other situations.
Actually, pretty much always. The answer to complex problems is "to leave it alone and hope it sorts itself out."
Well I just used your phrasing here, but let me walk you through it.
How do you know which of the million proposed solutions to any complex problem will work? You don't. That's why it's a complex problem. You probably risk making things worse by thinking you can make a solution.
So, your best bet is to actually leave it alone and know that many people will get off their butts and try and do something about it. Generally speaking, when that happens, good solutions emerge.
For example, when the colonial British had to deal with the Native Indians, they saw a problem. How do you integrate this vastly different culture and people with the more modern British one? They could have just left it as is and let culture and society progress as it may. Instead they decided, let's solve this problem by making Native children into British people. Let's remove them from their parents and educate them in residential schools and that will solve the problem. The result was worse than if they had just left them alone.
That's an example of screwing it up.
Here's a successful example.
Drug prices are a thing. Certain generic drugs were not readily available or priced reasonably. This is as true in Canada as in the US. I'm in Canada, and it is still a problem here. Here's what some US hospitals did: https://civicarx.org/about/
They created a non-profit generic drug manufacturer so they could solve that problem. They got off their butts and solved the problem. Best of all their way of solving the problem doesn't prevent or short change anyone else from trying to solve it either.
That's actually what people do. No one likes to sit around doing nothing. People solve problems. For the person who opens a pizza store to the guys who founded Google who saw the a chance at the Internet when Microsoft was slacking, to the guy who decided to try and clean up the ocean with that ocean cleaning floating device.
As it is with the minimum wage. You have no idea what to do with the minimum wage. How does that affect local wages? How about your ability to compete with India/China/Mexico. How does that all play out? I don't know and no one really knows either.
So best to let them play it out. If you really believe in good wages, please get off your butt and start a company and try it out. Just a pizza store, nothing complex.
Even your cat example. I don't know the exact organization you speak of, but no doubt it was a grass roots effort by some people who got off their butts and did something. Not just complain to the government to solve the problem. They might be getting some government aid now or cooperation with the government, but chances are they started out just trying to solve a problem and doing it.
yep, I agree. It depends on your geographic region. But you get the point. Leaders who make more than a normal middle class life don't get to complain. Whether its 100k or 200k, u get the general point.
You really have to recognize yourself as an employee.
In no job, are your contributions actually mapped to your pay. It doesn't matter what industry. Maybe the closest you will get is sales. But even there, there's so many intangibles.
Really, unless you're a founder or something, you're just an employee or worker bee. I don't say that as some kind of rational to be shitty or not do a good job. But you kind of accept that your pay doesn't really match your contributions.
You get paid within a range for your position and go on and live your life. Quite frankly, if you're making more than 100k, I don't think they should even track discrimination pay. You're playing at the higher levels and if you don't recognize your worth or fight for your pay and position, you don't deserve to be making more than 100k. And for the record, I just a regular employee who doesn't play at the high levels. But if some senior manager or executive were to ever complain about pay discrimination, I would instantly lose any respect for them. leaders don't get to whine and complain about discrimination.
And for the rest of us, after taxes, small variations in pay are just that. They're small. I'm going to lose sleep because someone makes an extra 5-10k than me? Not bloody likely. It doesn't matter much for those of us in 'middle class' jobs.
Where that 5-10k would matter is in the working class, and those jobs are generally standard pay across the board. I worked in warehouses. I don't stack skids much fast than the next person. We all generally got paid the same, baring shift leaders...
This is absolutely true. On the one hand, people like what they like and more power to them.
I know for myself, I like a more performance oriented car. No justification for it. It's just fun and I enjoy it. Yes, it is even a stick shift, which no doubt probably shifts slower than modern automatics.
I bought my car a while ago (Wrx). My wife and I both work and we do well now. She genuinely wonders why I don't get 'upgrade' to the STI or even a more powerful car like a porsche or BMW.
While, I could definitely see upgrading for refinement/status reasons, performance is just not a reason. As you say, it's rare I can even push my car to higher speeds on regular roads. But even taking it to the track, which I do on occasion, it is still plenty of power and speed for someone like me to drive and enjoy. I also don't want to wreck my car, and you start pushing those higher speeds, you have a reasonable chance to lose control. Tires only grip so much.
But even just acceleration wise and this is going to sound funny. You get to higher HP and it actually starts being less fun to drive for me. I've driven in some nicer BMWs and yeah, they're amazing. But here's the thing, you just tap the gas and bam, you're at 100 kph. It's actually kind of too powerful. There's no fun in getting up to 100. You're already there. It's like 1 sec on acceleration fun, and then done.
I've found my sweet spot, and I'd say for me, maxing out at like 300-350 HP and around a 4-5 second 0-60 time is perfect for daily driving. I really don't want any more. Again, I don't fault anyone who wants more. More power to you. I'll gladly enjoy driving your car once in a while:P But that's just my experience.
But it is something to think about. Chasing HP and speed often isn't even more fun and enjoyable. Sure, if you're in the race scene or something, do you. But that category of driver is already going to mod their car and remove any restrictions, like governer chips.
I think it's perfectly fair and quite frankly many of the new safety features are great. My car has rear/side vehicle detection, and it's fantastic. It just beeps because it can't control automatically; I think due to it being manual. These are just great safety features for 99% of use cases.
I asked a few tuners what they're doing with electric cars and if they fear loss of business that have more computers in them. They're on it, learning to mod them just the same. Apparently Teslas are pretty moddable from what they say.
So I don't see much changing. As long as the cars remain moddable (practically and legally), those who want to mess with their cars will. Yeah, you also might lose your warranty, but that's the trade off you make for wanting to drive off spec.
I'm in Canada, so maybe the situation really is that dire in the US. But here in Canada, we have people talking about food deserts and all this.
I was talking to someone lately and they said there's food deserts in Toronto, like in our 'ghetto' at Jane and Finch. It puzzled the crap out of me, because i grew up around there. There were plenty of grocery stores. I thought maybe things changed, so I google mapped the area. Plenty of grocery stores, just like I remember.
I'm really suspect of all these claims about food deserts and lack of grocery stores being the reason people eat McDonalds or what have you.
I remember being poor and in Jane and Finch. I can definitely see reasons why the poor might choose not so healthy options. The main one being time. My parents worked crazy jobs at odd hours, and I could see how some families might fall into the trap of not cooking. We were Indian immigrants, at least in my experience, many of us were dirt poor... yet it is just in our culture, that we ate home food.
It is just cheaper to eat from the grocery store. Do you know how cheap rice is? Seriously, you can get a 20kg bag of rice that will last you months for like 20 bucks. I've lived poor. I've cooked poor. It is not cheaper to eat out; even at mcdonalds. Rice people. You can't compete with that. Vegetables? A 1kg bag of frozen veggies (pretty healthy) is like 5-10 bucks. It will last you at least a week. Lentils, beans, paneer... dirt cheap for protein.
Grocery stores are just there. We even had more problems as we were Muslim and we had to go to the 'halal' stores for meat. So even travelled further than a few blocks to get meat.
Yes, grocery stores might not be closer than Mcdonalds, but again... a culture of home cookign and you shop once a week. You can take transit there. I'd be hardpressed to think you can't get to a grocery store in reasonable time once a week.
Now again, there's parts of the US I don't know about. The real ghettos, that maybe it is an issue there. But I've been to some pretty shady parts of Detroit and Chicago and I've always seen grocery stores. Again, not down the road, but close enough for that once a week trip.
Now do some people not have a culture of home cooking? Probably. Are some people too busy to shop and cook? Probably. And I'm not minimizing those issues. They're huge issues.
I also don't think the focus on 'fresh' food is particularly interesting. Fresh fruits and veggies are definitely hard to keep, but frozen fruits and veggies are adequately nutritious. Heck, I have the money now and I mainly eat frozen veggies. There's no need for poorer people to act like whole food shoppers here.
The problem is not McDonalds or fresh food prices. It is just isn't.
I've seen other comments here in terms of high quality goods lasting longer and being more economic. Maybe, but I've shopped at what was then Biway and walmart. The stuff is not bad quality by any stretch of the imagination. I grew in Canada and we didn't get new boots every year. I used my brothers hand me down boots and what not. That stuff lasts for years taken care of. Clothing... same thing. Leather boots are nice. But that I don't nylon plastic crap is pretty tough man.
Life as a poor person is hard. I know. Believe me. Time is probably the biggest problem. But the stuff companies offer... just not the problem.
I know you joke, but I really want to see more details on this. I've gotten older and I don't know the internals of android, but maybe someone can help. The article is just vague.
1. How does this get root access? If your app or webbrowser views an image, isn't that in some kind of 'user-space' running with the rights of the application?
2. I'd really like to see the actual source flaw. I remember a JPEG bug a long time ago with arbitrary code execution. How does this happen exactly. What is the exact lack of input validation that is occurring? I can see a lot of potential for flaws in inputs that allow scripting or what have you. But an image? Is there something funny about PNG files that I don't know about. Like can they embed some kind of algorithem in the PNG file itself as to how to decode it? Or is this just plain stupid not validating the input?
Not everybody loses. Life is a competition. It just is.
it's a competition at all levels from who gets the most attractive guy/girl to who gets to be top surgeon to who gets that brand spanking new Amazon HQ2.
Yes, we put in place rules to make the competition 'fair'. I can't just kidnap the most attractive spouse I want and take them. That would be unfair.
Regions never stop getting money from taxes. So New York gives some tax breaks to a corporation. All the workers for the corporation pay income tax, sales tax, and better yet... have jobs so they don't have to rely as much on government support. At the end of the day, all taxes are paid by people. Even investors are people who pay capital gains and other taxes. The government gets its money no matter what happens. All that matters is people get to brand it corporate taxes or whatever.
At this point in history, a company who offers thousands of jobs in a region is highly valuable. What does your region offer than others don't? Why would they pick your region instead of another region?
Some regions do better than others. Educated work force. Good university system. Already existing supply chain, transit, stable government...
You can definitely limit competition if you want. Generally that means limiting trading zones, but inside your zone, it's a competition. You can definitely move away from competition and allocate it via government. Every region gets x number tech jobs and y number nursing jobs...
One could even propose that since all taxes are paid by people, set the corporate tax rate to 0 to prevent this kind of tax shopping and just tax people. About the only tax you would need is something to prevent the corporation from hoarding money. But beyond that you capture all the money by either taxing investors and employees.
I'm not about to dive into the crazy numbers, but it's not that unreasonable a prediction. It won't go down to zero as then the conditions will change and people will change their behavior again.
We can all basically say that most of the developed world is in a condition of low birth rate and that includes most of Asia as well. North America, Europe, China, Japan...
That's a huge chunk of the Earth on the 2 kids or less bandwagon. You can probably throw in a whole bunch of other places like Brazil and parts of Latin America as well.
You then have to factor in the social changes going on throughout the world. Women's rights and what not are being found in even the most remote places on Earth. In often doesn't manifest itself in ways you think. Remember that Malala Yousafzai girl from tribal Pakistan who shot to fame fighting for education. These issues really are reaching even the most remote areas.
I'm from a conservative Muslim background, which I guess people still see as patriarchal, but even there we see the issues. Men and women alike not wanting to get married or limiting children. Even in a place like Saudi Arabia where you might picture the most patriarchal, the fertility rate is close to 2.
The idea of being the head patriarch to huge numbers of kids isn't appealing to many men in most countries. It's seen more as a liability today, perhaps limited to the truly wealthy or very remote regions.
You also take into account technology which means a lot of kids to work the farm or provide for the family is lessened.
Anything can happen in the world, but you can easily see how in one or two generation we could be facing population stabilization or even decline. It doesn't sound implausible at all.
Serious question. What is the real expense Wisconsin took on?
I could be reading it wrong, but it looks like most of the deal is in the form of tax breaks.
Wisconsin isn't putting up that money, they're just going to let FoxConn keep more of theirs. If FoxConn does build, Wisconsin gets well paid workers, other tax revenue streams (sales taxes from employees...)
If FoxConn doesn't build, there's no tax money to collect in the first place, and those tax breaks are meaningless.
Wisconsin might incur some real costs (land acquisition, builiding infrastructure for FoxConn...) but it looks like most of the money is just tax breaks that Wisconsin wouldn't get anything if FoxConn doesn't build in the first place.
There's direct subsidies and then there's tax breaks. Not that tax breaks are good or anything, but they don't cost you anything.
In the entire article, there is no mention of the word racism. There is mention of bias... and it is biased. It performs better against some groups and worse against others. Pretty much the definition of bias.
Now I am not saying you're connotation is wrong here.
There's a high chance some people will read the article and read 'bias' as 'racism' in these times we live in, when it is most likely just a case of Amazon's software not being as good as it could be. But there is no claim of racism in the article. The lady basically says she is just highlighting the difference to encourage the firms to do better. Sounds good to me.
Again, not naive here. You read into the article and assume they're charging racism when they're not doing it directly. Others will read into the study and assume Amazon is racist when they're not doing it directly either.
The claim in the article is that IBM and Microsoft do a better job across darker skin tones. I severely doubt anyone at Amazon is like, let's tailor the algorithm to identify black women as men. It's probably just some aspect of science as you say, and some aspect of not emphasizing darker tone identification in their trials. Their 'metric' for success is probably not something like 90% accuracy for white people, 90% for black people, 90% for Asian people... If it were they wouldn't release with such issues. Their 'metric' is probably 90% across a sample size.
And let's not pretend this kind of technology can't have a severe impact downstream. Suppose the end result of this is that blacks are misidentified 20% more than whites. That means innocent blacks getting stopped and questioned for misidentification 20% more than whites. No one is explicitly racist, but the end result is more problems that can manifest themselves in racial tensions.
Let me give an example here. I used to live in a 'troubled' neighborhood. The result was more policy presence (I think validly). But the problem was I got stopped a lot. When I started driving, I was terrified of being pulled over or stopped. Not for doing anything criminal. Just regular driving infractions like speeding or whatever. And I was stopped for all the stupid reasons you see on TV. "Oh sir your license plate light is out". Sure... go ahead and search my car so i can be on my way.
I then moved to a nicer neighborhood. I pretty much never got stopped. The screwed up part is, with my new found freedom, I actually did more 'illegal stuff' I had the freedom to think I could keep weed in the car and not worry about being stopped by police.
That got me thinking of two people, both living average low-level illegal lives. Drinking and driving, smoking weed...
One lives in a troubled area and gets pulled over by the police more often.
One lives in a nicer neighborhood and does not get pulled over.
Through no fault of the police. They're just doing their jobs, the system is unfair to the kid in the troubled area doing low level crime as he is more likely to be stopped and thus found out doing crime. The kid in the nicer neighborhood gets to do his youthful low level illegal behavior pretty much without consequence.
Now again, someone might say, well they're still doing a crime, so it's not a problem they get arrested. Just don't do anything wrong.
There's some truth to that. That's how I behaved living in the troubled neighborhood. I was told not to screw up and by in large I did not. But I was exceptional (stereotyped indian immigrant story). But should we as a society expect the other 95% of kids in troubled areas to behave like the very best boy scouts? Better than kids in better neighborhoods. That just sound unreasonable.
Anyways, I'm not complaining of racism here. I don't think I'd have the police act any differently. I'm just pointing out how things which are not explicitly 'racist' can still have an impact. Pushing for accurate and fair systems especially as we more to mass surveillance is definitely something to watch out for.
There could be lot of sources of error. Maybe Google doesn't know it a 100 km/h and to be safe defaults to say 50 km/h for roads it has no information on. Maybe it's a map routing issue. In either case, it is good for areas to stay on top of these things.
BirdsVille Development Rd is what you take to get the nice 4 hour drive. But read the article. It suggest keeping a speed of 80 km/h and watch out for rocks...
I don't think it's irresponsible for Google to maybe have used 80 or 60 or even 50 km/h as their base. This is clearly not a regular paved high way most people are used to driving 100 km/h on. That's probably what is 'safer' for most average visitors; especially tourists who may not feel comfortable zipping past everything.
I'm sure Google has millions and billions of data points in Google Maps. You're guaranteed to run into inaccuracies, especially as you move away from major cities. I'm not even sure this is even one of them. Last thing I'd want is for google to actually say 4 hour, but the road is hard and it actually takes me 7, and I'm stuck in the middle of the outback:P
While true, as a new father, I find myself asking this question.
Is our intelligence just "statistically correlated randomly-grouped information over millions of trials?"
I really ask that as a serious question. I watch my kind learn and he is like that pigeon you speak of. Maybe that's all our intelligence is. Just more complex.
Your last sentence really piqued my interest.
When we look at the world and identify objects, maybe we really do see more like:
"well it matches shape 22%, colour 17% and overall pattern roughness 19.4%"
and much less like
"I can see branches here, here and here. They are connected. The connection grow and increase in width. The thickness part, which looks trunk-like, ends in a solid base which resembles soil"
Again, I just wonder about such things. It's easy to dismiss AI just statistics or pattern recognition. But then you dismiss the pigeon as just pattern recognition. My genuine question is just how much of us is just pattern recognition? Maybe our intelligence is not something more mystical than that.
One of the biggest benefits of Netflix is it's simplicity. I never have to check the billing. It's the same price every month. I don't have to watch the usage like I do on other services or worry about a crazy number of packages.
So even if charging by stream would be rare, it's still that thing in the back of your mind. Like watching your internet usage cap. You also have to have more support with people calling in wondering when they used their 6th stream and disputing bills...
You also want to be careful about cutting people off just for streams. Maybe they really are on vacation and are watching netflix. Maybe you actually want some leeway for some general sharing. Like a kid going off to university using his 'home' parents account. You don't want to antoganize customers whose perception is they are legitimate.
AI is probably just a buzzword:P but if you can really get the data to determine those mass shared accounts where its beyond one household's or one family's general usage and then pursue those... more power to them.
I'm not advocating for or against the UBI. I'm just saying we'll never know how it will work until we try it. There really are too many what ifs. For example, I'm far less concerned about what the unemployed do (what the experiment in Ontario did). I really don't care that much if the unemployed take that money and smoke that legal marijuana and play fortnite all day. If it keeps them healthy and out of trouble, it might save society money.
What I worry about is keeping the people who are currently working... working or the impact on global competition or the impact a few generations down.
It is a huge leap that might turn society on its head. It might be ruinous. It might be needed. I have no clue. My only point is these small studies are kind of pointless as they don't really answer the important questions.
My personal view is that there is enough work left for us to do that I'd rather pay to get work done, than give it out for free. Last I checked, there's still subways and rail to be built. There's still trash outside. I would still like a basketball court in the park down the road. There's still a rash of home robberies in my area... Fill in your own version of things you'd like improved in your society. If we're just handing out money, I'd rather pay to get some things done, than just give it out for me. But that's just my view right now.
Some decisions are just not data driven, or should I say. The only way to really get all the data would be to actually implement the program.
All these small tests really are pretty pointless and a waste of money.
If I were to ask you how would a society work if all drugs were decriminalized? Would drug use go up and people become druggies. You wouldn't know. There's a million what ifs. Only by actually trying it for a substantial amount of time could you get a clue. When Portugal decriminalized all drugs (not legalized), they just did it and took a gamble.
Similarly with this. How will the unemployed behave? Will those with jobs keep working? How will this change 1,2,3... generations down. No one has any damn clue. Any small experiment is not going to answer the big questions at all.
If only we could all just know the results of decisions before trying, our decisions would just be easy. But life is not that simple.
I don't know. There are often times I wonder if I just grew up with a certain mindset and now I'm stuck with that for life.
There are some things, I just don't buy online. Clothes, food, any large purchase. I also don't think I'll ever be comfortable with push button start cars, any kind of Alexa/Google home...
I go on an old man rant here, but I'm not even that old. I just don't see any benefit to this stuff. But at work, I talk to guys just 10 years younger and they're good with it all.
Really I have no reason not to get more stuff online. I tell myself I like to go to a place to talk to a person, but frig, anytime I have had an online purchase, the support has been great. Amazon has handled exactly 100% of my problems perfectly. What do I have to complain about that I don't trust them for large purchases or food? I also hate dealing with returns. or waiting on deliveries of things I really need/want now even though the few times I have, it was pretty smooth. I don't know. I just don't.
I just leave it open. It's probably more me that will always go to the grocery store. I think the next generation might be more willing.
Also Amazon might be cheap, but that has just never been their selling point for me. Convenience and consistency has been my reason. I've seen things cheaper online, but I'll stay buy it from Amazon because they're reliable and always have delivered. I'm sure they squeeze the crap out of vendors like any business and I'm sure they treat their employees harshly, but from a consumer point of view, they're solid. Not the best I've seen in the business (that goes to logitech), but pretty darn good.
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Here's the thing. I used to be really interested in all these kinds of scenarios. There was a time I was super spooked on the level of debt in countries.
This is the same with jobs in general. I used to sit around wondering what jobs will people do or who will they keep people in a good condition given free trade and automation.
Now, I just sit back and think well, maybe they can manage it all and maybe they can't. It's not really a resignation to ignorance. It's more like this is such a complex system and they have all these tools available (QE, public sector, government driven work...) that maybe they can make this all work. Or maybe it all blows up.
I really don't think jobs are a problem per se. There's so many jobs that need doing, I don't see society running out of them. The key will be for government to create productive jobs in this respect. Whether in healthcare, education, construction, research, space, environmental cleanup...
The problem of course is how do you fund these jobs in a global heavily automated system.
I like to think of Detroit and I like this simple way of thinking of it.
80K autoworkers could pay the taxes needed to support 80k nurses, teachers, police officers...
Notice there is just as much demand in Detroit today for nurses, teachers, police officers. The desire for more of those jobs has not gone away.
But the ability for the government to pay for those government created jobs has suffered.
That is the real crux of the issue in my view and it's heavily tied to debt and monetary policy. It's on that level that I just leave it to the those technocrats in charge and maybe they can play with the money to make this all work. And yes, maybe a UBI is part of that solution. But it's the same issue... where do you get the money for it?
Here's another way to think of it. Probably the center of all this AI and computing is california. Let this sink in. The center of all this new industry can't even provide the state it's in with wealth. To put it in context here, the oil industry in Norway or Saudi Arabia provides the wealth to make those places rich. California is not rich for even most of it's citizens.
If the Mecca of this new industry can't even provide wealth for it's own state, much less the country, you really have to think how they're going to be able to fund everything.
Again, that's not a doomsday thinking. They might well be able to do it. How you transition and deal with inflation/deflation or debt or trade... damned if I know, but without the collapse people fear, they might just make it work.
This is a fair objection, and there are several more.
I'm not an advocate of this law or anything,
But these edge cases are nothing that can't be worked around. Just off the top of my head, one solution would be that even if the driver is drunk, the car would still start (maybe after a couple tries)?
But while driving, maybe some lights keep flashing or the horn goes off continuously or something. Basically something to let people know you are driving in an emergency. If the cops see that, well you should be glad because you're obviously in an emergency and they can rush your dad to the hospital.
Not really. Computer aided detection of anomalies in medical imaging has been pretty solid for a while.
I worked in the field over 15 years ago. Already for breast cancer anomaly detection, it was easily over 80% depending on the system when compared to even the best radiologists.
I obviously wouldn't book a surgery strictly on an automated analysis, but as a good first screening, we've had that covered for a while now comparable to real radiologists.
It is used, but generally people don't trust the automated results, so a radiologist is still there reading each one. That doesn't mean the computer isn't doing most of the work :P
I think Boeing handling of the MCAS in both its publication and implementation was horrible. That is Boeing's fault. You can also blame the regulator here. I really don't think anything wonky was going on. I've been in regulated industries my whole life and certification is always kind of a shitty game. That's nothing specific to the US. I'm in Canada, it's the same garbage here. There's just no way for an external person not on the project to really get into this level of detail and keep up with the project and release. You might think, but airlines! They gotta have some super duper regulatory process! But you'd probably be wrong. They probably have more certifications and checkboxes, but at the end of the day, they basically rely on what's submitted to them by Boeing.
You can kind of blame the regulators as it's their job to monitor such thing. Theoretically I blame them. Practically I don't. That's just Boeings job.
But as to the inclusion of safety features. I personally think that's more on the fault of airlines and regulators. It's like cars. Cars today come with optional safety equipment. My car has rear/side vehicle detection for example. I can't count the number of times that has prevented a possible issue for me. My wife's car does not.
Is read/side vehicle detection a mandatory feature? I don't know. I used to drive a car without it. I would say a well trained driver wouldn't need it. But I also wouldn't buy a car for myself today without it. No doubt Boeing positions it as a well trained pilot would not need one. Probably true.
It really is up to airlines to properly decide those needs. And then, it's up to regulators to keep up and mandate certain features they want for ALL airlines. Just like cars had to have mandatory seatbelts eventually. None of these additional safety features seem specific to the way a boeing 737 would fly. something like an AOA display or disagree light would seem pretty applicable to every kind of airplane.
funny enough, I saw the news in Canada last night.
They covered 3 airlines.
There are two safety systems
1. Disagree lights
2. Angle of attack indicators
Air Canada bought both for their entire fleet.
West Jet just got the disagree light
Sunwing didn't respond.
I'd venture to say that many carriers bought at least one of the sensors, but I mean it's to question low cost airlines or developing countries might not have. That's how it played out in Canada. The main airlines bought the sensors. The low cost one did not respond.
This really just shifts the problem down a level.
Ok, you want experts in their fields. Fair enough.
Now, how do you choose which people are experts?
That's a really really really really hard question. And all these experts have about as much diversity on most issues as average people.
Then how do you prevent a subset of experts from taking ideological control and exclude other experts. Again, think really hard about this. I was a teacher in Canada. Well I'm still qualified, but I don't teach anymore. Currently, there's a small subset of ideologues than are 'experts'. Most of my peers and myself were scared of our jobs to voice our professional opinion on most things.
Then you also have still have the problem of resources.
Support you have an expert ministry of health and an expert ministry of education. They all have expert things they want to do. But how do divide the money between the two organizations? An expert finance committee?
Not to mention how the goals or intentions of experts might go against what people want to do with their lives. What then... a freedom committee expert?
I'm really a big fan of looking at history. There's not much new under the sun in terms of ideology or politics. There's a reason an 'expert' run society hasn't shown up despite it being talked about for thousands of years. This doesn't mean things can't change, but you should pay attention to history.
The messy work of politics is just that... messy. Because people are messy. And life is messy.
Just try to do something small like organize your family. Most of us fail in just trying to organize a small group of like a 5 person family.
What they're saying is that Amazon's ability to leverage the their dominant position as a marketplace to dominate other areas, like goods (clothing, batteries...), is not that great.
While perhaps true, it is definitely something to keep looking at, as we would any other semi monopoly situation (railroads, telecom....)
How much do they highlight their product?
How much preferential treatment do they give their product?
Are they operating anything at a loss?
I'm as a guilty as the next person. I used to buy Eneloops as my main batteries. This past purchase, i couldn't resist the Amazon Basics deal. It was nicely highlighted. How much does that take away from battery R&D from the companies dedicated to batteries? I have no idea. But I did it.
It's pretty common for stores to have in house brands. That's nothing new. Even my grocery store has in house brands.But if it gets this large, monitoring is needed as with any semi monopoly system. It would be like if my grocery store (Loblaws) had most of the marketshare and they control shelf space and pump up their in house brands. That would make it really hard for new entrants to get to consumers.
Doing this kind of thing is nothing new when you get this big, especially with network style semi monopolies. I don't know if we need to break them up, but some rules around ranking and preferential treatment should be there as in many other situations.
Actually, pretty much always. The answer to complex problems is "to leave it alone and hope it sorts itself out."
Well I just used your phrasing here, but let me walk you through it.
How do you know which of the million proposed solutions to any complex problem will work? You don't. That's why it's a complex problem. You probably risk making things worse by thinking you can make a solution.
So, your best bet is to actually leave it alone and know that many people will get off their butts and try and do something about it. Generally speaking, when that happens, good solutions emerge.
For example, when the colonial British had to deal with the Native Indians, they saw a problem. How do you integrate this vastly different culture and people with the more modern British one? They could have just left it as is and let culture and society progress as it may. Instead they decided, let's solve this problem by making Native children into British people. Let's remove them from their parents and educate them in residential schools and that will solve the problem. The result was worse than if they had just left them alone.
That's an example of screwing it up.
Here's a successful example.
Drug prices are a thing.
Certain generic drugs were not readily available or priced reasonably. This is as true in Canada as in the US. I'm in Canada, and it is still a problem here. Here's what some US hospitals did:
https://civicarx.org/about/
They created a non-profit generic drug manufacturer so they could solve that problem. They got off their butts and solved the problem. Best of all their way of solving the problem doesn't prevent or short change anyone else from trying to solve it either.
That's actually what people do. No one likes to sit around doing nothing. People solve problems. For the person who opens a pizza store to the guys who founded Google who saw the a chance at the Internet when Microsoft was slacking, to the guy who decided to try and clean up the ocean with that ocean cleaning floating device.
As it is with the minimum wage. You have no idea what to do with the minimum wage. How does that affect local wages? How about your ability to compete with India/China/Mexico. How does that all play out? I don't know and no one really knows either.
So best to let them play it out. If you really believe in good wages, please get off your butt and start a company and try it out. Just a pizza store, nothing complex.
Even your cat example. I don't know the exact organization you speak of, but no doubt it was a grass roots effort by some people who got off their butts and did something. Not just complain to the government to solve the problem. They might be getting some government aid now or cooperation with the government, but chances are they started out just trying to solve a problem and doing it.
yep, I agree. It depends on your geographic region.
But you get the point. Leaders who make more than a normal middle class life don't get to complain. Whether its 100k or 200k, u get the general point.
You really have to recognize yourself as an employee.
In no job, are your contributions actually mapped to your pay. It doesn't matter what industry. Maybe the closest you will get is sales. But even there, there's so many intangibles.
Really, unless you're a founder or something, you're just an employee or worker bee. I don't say that as some kind of rational to be shitty or not do a good job. But you kind of accept that your pay doesn't really match your contributions.
You get paid within a range for your position and go on and live your life. Quite frankly, if you're making more than 100k, I don't think they should even track discrimination pay. You're playing at the higher levels and if you don't recognize your worth or fight for your pay and position, you don't deserve to be making more than 100k. And for the record, I just a regular employee who doesn't play at the high levels. But if some senior manager or executive were to ever complain about pay discrimination, I would instantly lose any respect for them. leaders don't get to whine and complain about discrimination.
And for the rest of us, after taxes, small variations in pay are just that. They're small. I'm going to lose sleep because someone makes an extra 5-10k than me? Not bloody likely. It doesn't matter much for those of us in 'middle class' jobs.
Where that 5-10k would matter is in the working class, and those jobs are generally standard pay across the board. I worked in warehouses. I don't stack skids much fast than the next person. We all generally got paid the same, baring shift leaders...
This is absolutely true. On the one hand, people like what they like and more power to them.
I know for myself, I like a more performance oriented car. No justification for it. It's just fun and I enjoy it. Yes, it is even a stick shift, which no doubt probably shifts slower than modern automatics.
I bought my car a while ago (Wrx). My wife and I both work and we do well now. She genuinely wonders why I don't get 'upgrade' to the STI or even a more powerful car like a porsche or BMW.
While, I could definitely see upgrading for refinement/status reasons, performance is just not a reason. As you say, it's rare I can even push my car to higher speeds on regular roads. But even taking it to the track, which I do on occasion, it is still plenty of power and speed for someone like me to drive and enjoy. I also don't want to wreck my car, and you start pushing those higher speeds, you have a reasonable chance to lose control. Tires only grip so much.
But even just acceleration wise and this is going to sound funny. You get to higher HP and it actually starts being less fun to drive for me. I've driven in some nicer BMWs and yeah, they're amazing. But here's the thing, you just tap the gas and bam, you're at 100 kph. It's actually kind of too powerful. There's no fun in getting up to 100. You're already there. It's like 1 sec on acceleration fun, and then done.
I've found my sweet spot, and I'd say for me, maxing out at like 300-350 HP and around a 4-5 second 0-60 time is perfect for daily driving. I really don't want any more. Again, I don't fault anyone who wants more. More power to you. I'll gladly enjoy driving your car once in a while :P But that's just my experience.
But it is something to think about. Chasing HP and speed often isn't even more fun and enjoyable. Sure, if you're in the race scene or something, do you. But that category of driver is already going to mod their car and remove any restrictions, like governer chips.
I think it's perfectly fair and quite frankly many of the new safety features are great. My car has rear/side vehicle detection, and it's fantastic. It just beeps because it can't control automatically; I think due to it being manual. These are just great safety features for 99% of use cases.
I asked a few tuners what they're doing with electric cars and if they fear loss of business that have more computers in them. They're on it, learning to mod them just the same. Apparently Teslas are pretty moddable from what they say.
So I don't see much changing. As long as the cars remain moddable (practically and legally), those who want to mess with their cars will. Yeah, you also might lose your warranty, but that's the trade off you make for wanting to drive off spec.
I'm in Canada, so maybe the situation really is that dire in the US. But here in Canada, we have people talking about food deserts and all this.
I was talking to someone lately and they said there's food deserts in Toronto, like in our 'ghetto' at Jane and Finch. It puzzled the crap out of me, because i grew up around there. There were plenty of grocery stores. I thought maybe things changed, so I google mapped the area. Plenty of grocery stores, just like I remember.
I'm really suspect of all these claims about food deserts and lack of grocery stores being the reason people eat McDonalds or what have you.
I remember being poor and in Jane and Finch. I can definitely see reasons why the poor might choose not so healthy options. The main one being time. My parents worked crazy jobs at odd hours, and I could see how some families might fall into the trap of not cooking. We were Indian immigrants, at least in my experience, many of us were dirt poor... yet it is just in our culture, that we ate home food.
It is just cheaper to eat from the grocery store. Do you know how cheap rice is? Seriously, you can get a 20kg bag of rice that will last you months for like 20 bucks. I've lived poor. I've cooked poor. It is not cheaper to eat out; even at mcdonalds. Rice people. You can't compete with that. Vegetables? A 1kg bag of frozen veggies (pretty healthy) is like 5-10 bucks. It will last you at least a week. Lentils, beans, paneer... dirt cheap for protein.
Grocery stores are just there. We even had more problems as we were Muslim and we had to go to the 'halal' stores for meat. So even travelled further than a few blocks to get meat.
Yes, grocery stores might not be closer than Mcdonalds, but again... a culture of home cookign and you shop once a week. You can take transit there. I'd be hardpressed to think you can't get to a grocery store in reasonable time once a week.
Now again, there's parts of the US I don't know about. The real ghettos, that maybe it is an issue there. But I've been to some pretty shady parts of Detroit and Chicago and I've always seen grocery stores. Again, not down the road, but close enough for that once a week trip.
Now do some people not have a culture of home cooking? Probably. Are some people too busy to shop and cook? Probably. And I'm not minimizing those issues. They're huge issues.
I also don't think the focus on 'fresh' food is particularly interesting. Fresh fruits and veggies are definitely hard to keep, but frozen fruits and veggies are adequately nutritious. Heck, I have the money now and I mainly eat frozen veggies. There's no need for poorer people to act like whole food shoppers here.
The problem is not McDonalds or fresh food prices. It is just isn't.
I've seen other comments here in terms of high quality goods lasting longer and being more economic. Maybe, but I've shopped at what was then Biway and walmart. The stuff is not bad quality by any stretch of the imagination. I grew in Canada and we didn't get new boots every year. I used my brothers hand me down boots and what not. That stuff lasts for years taken care of. Clothing... same thing. Leather boots are nice. But that I don't nylon plastic crap is pretty tough man.
Life as a poor person is hard. I know. Believe me. Time is probably the biggest problem. But the stuff companies offer... just not the problem.
That is the implication in the article.
The predecessor to Facebook allowed you to rate your female friends.
I would assume they had some functionality built in to get the list of female friends... that would make it easy to rate.
Somehow this functionality was kept in facebook including the search strings.
Probably an honest mistake, but also surprising it wasn't taken out or have the male version added as time went on.
I know you joke, but I really want to see more details on this. I've gotten older and I don't know the internals of android, but maybe someone can help. The article is just vague.
1. How does this get root access? If your app or webbrowser views an image, isn't that in some kind of 'user-space' running with the rights of the application?
2. I'd really like to see the actual source flaw. I remember a JPEG bug a long time ago with arbitrary code execution. How does this happen exactly. What is the exact lack of input validation that is occurring? I can see a lot of potential for flaws in inputs that allow scripting or what have you. But an image? Is there something funny about PNG files that I don't know about. Like can they embed some kind of algorithem in the PNG file itself as to how to decode it? Or is this just plain stupid not validating the input?
Not everybody loses.
Life is a competition. It just is.
it's a competition at all levels from who gets the most attractive guy/girl to who gets to be top surgeon to who gets that brand spanking new Amazon HQ2.
Yes, we put in place rules to make the competition 'fair'. I can't just kidnap the most attractive spouse I want and take them. That would be unfair.
Regions never stop getting money from taxes.
So New York gives some tax breaks to a corporation. All the workers for the corporation pay income tax, sales tax, and better yet... have jobs so they don't have to rely as much on government support. At the end of the day, all taxes are paid by people. Even investors are people who pay capital gains and other taxes. The government gets its money no matter what happens. All that matters is people get to brand it corporate taxes or whatever.
At this point in history, a company who offers thousands of jobs in a region is highly valuable. What does your region offer than others don't? Why would they pick your region instead of another region?
Some regions do better than others. Educated work force. Good university system. Already existing supply chain, transit, stable government...
You can definitely limit competition if you want. Generally that means limiting trading zones, but inside your zone, it's a competition. You can definitely move away from competition and allocate it via government. Every region gets x number tech jobs and y number nursing jobs...
One could even propose that since all taxes are paid by people, set the corporate tax rate to 0 to prevent this kind of tax shopping and just tax people. About the only tax you would need is something to prevent the corporation from hoarding money. But beyond that you capture all the money by either taxing investors and employees.
Unintentional dark pun.
I'm not about to dive into the crazy numbers, but it's not that unreasonable a prediction. It won't go down to zero as then the conditions will change and people will change their behavior again.
We can all basically say that most of the developed world is in a condition of low birth rate and that includes most of Asia as well. North America, Europe, China, Japan...
That's a huge chunk of the Earth on the 2 kids or less bandwagon. You can probably throw in a whole bunch of other places like Brazil and parts of Latin America as well.
You then have to factor in the social changes going on throughout the world. Women's rights and what not are being found in even the most remote places on Earth. In often doesn't manifest itself in ways you think. Remember that Malala Yousafzai girl from tribal Pakistan who shot to fame fighting for education. These issues really are reaching even the most remote areas.
I'm from a conservative Muslim background, which I guess people still see as patriarchal, but even there we see the issues. Men and women alike not wanting to get married or limiting children. Even in a place like Saudi Arabia where you might picture the most patriarchal, the fertility rate is close to 2.
The idea of being the head patriarch to huge numbers of kids isn't appealing to many men in most countries. It's seen more as a liability today, perhaps limited to the truly wealthy or very remote regions.
You also take into account technology which means a lot of kids to work the farm or provide for the family is lessened.
Anything can happen in the world, but you can easily see how in one or two generation we could be facing population stabilization or even decline. It doesn't sound implausible at all.
Serious question. What is the real expense Wisconsin took on?
I could be reading it wrong, but it looks like most of the deal is in the form of tax breaks.
Wisconsin isn't putting up that money, they're just going to let FoxConn keep more of theirs.
If FoxConn does build, Wisconsin gets well paid workers, other tax revenue streams (sales taxes from employees...)
If FoxConn doesn't build, there's no tax money to collect in the first place, and those tax breaks are meaningless.
Wisconsin might incur some real costs (land acquisition, builiding infrastructure for FoxConn...) but it looks like most of the money is just tax breaks that Wisconsin wouldn't get anything if FoxConn doesn't build in the first place.
There's direct subsidies and then there's tax breaks.
Not that tax breaks are good or anything, but they don't cost you anything.
I'll just latch on here.
In the entire article, there is no mention of the word racism. There is mention of bias... and it is biased. It performs better against some groups and worse against others. Pretty much the definition of bias.
Now I am not saying you're connotation is wrong here.
There's a high chance some people will read the article and read 'bias' as 'racism' in these times we live in, when it is most likely just a case of Amazon's software not being as good as it could be. But there is no claim of racism in the article. The lady basically says she is just highlighting the difference to encourage the firms to do better. Sounds good to me.
Again, not naive here.
You read into the article and assume they're charging racism when they're not doing it directly.
Others will read into the study and assume Amazon is racist when they're not doing it directly either.
The claim in the article is that IBM and Microsoft do a better job across darker skin tones. I severely doubt anyone at Amazon is like, let's tailor the algorithm to identify black women as men. It's probably just some aspect of science as you say, and some aspect of not emphasizing darker tone identification in their trials. Their 'metric' for success is probably not something like 90% accuracy for white people, 90% for black people, 90% for Asian people... If it were they wouldn't release with such issues. Their 'metric' is probably 90% across a sample size.
And let's not pretend this kind of technology can't have a severe impact downstream. Suppose the end result of this is that blacks are misidentified 20% more than whites. That means innocent blacks getting stopped and questioned for misidentification 20% more than whites. No one is explicitly racist, but the end result is more problems that can manifest themselves in racial tensions.
Let me give an example here. I used to live in a 'troubled' neighborhood. The result was more policy presence (I think validly). But the problem was I got stopped a lot. When I started driving, I was terrified of being pulled over or stopped. Not for doing anything criminal. Just regular driving infractions like speeding or whatever. And I was stopped for all the stupid reasons you see on TV. "Oh sir your license plate light is out". Sure... go ahead and search my car so i can be on my way.
I then moved to a nicer neighborhood. I pretty much never got stopped. The screwed up part is, with my new found freedom, I actually did more 'illegal stuff' I had the freedom to think I could keep weed in the car and not worry about being stopped by police.
That got me thinking of two people, both living average low-level illegal lives. Drinking and driving, smoking weed...
One lives in a troubled area and gets pulled over by the police more often.
One lives in a nicer neighborhood and does not get pulled over.
Through no fault of the police. They're just doing their jobs, the system is unfair to the kid in the troubled area doing low level crime as he is more likely to be stopped and thus found out doing crime. The kid in the nicer neighborhood gets to do his youthful low level illegal behavior pretty much without consequence.
Now again, someone might say, well they're still doing a crime, so it's not a problem they get arrested. Just don't do anything wrong.
There's some truth to that. That's how I behaved living in the troubled neighborhood. I was told not to screw up and by in large I did not. But I was exceptional (stereotyped indian immigrant story). But should we as a society expect the other 95% of kids in troubled areas to behave like the very best boy scouts? Better than kids in better neighborhoods. That just sound unreasonable.
Anyways, I'm not complaining of racism here. I don't think I'd have the police act any differently. I'm just pointing out how things which are not explicitly 'racist' can still have an impact. Pushing for accurate and fair systems especially as we more to mass surveillance is definitely something to watch out for.
There could be lot of sources of error. Maybe Google doesn't know it a 100 km/h and to be safe defaults to say 50 km/h for roads it has no information on. Maybe it's a map routing issue. In either case, it is good for areas to stay on top of these things.
Just for kicks, I too google'd this place.
https://www.couriermail.com.au...
BirdsVille Development Rd is what you take to get the nice 4 hour drive. But read the article. It suggest keeping a speed of 80 km/h and watch out for rocks...
I don't think it's irresponsible for Google to maybe have used 80 or 60 or even 50 km/h as their base. This is clearly not a regular paved high way most people are used to driving 100 km/h on. That's probably what is 'safer' for most average visitors; especially tourists who may not feel comfortable zipping past everything.
I'm sure Google has millions and billions of data points in Google Maps. You're guaranteed to run into inaccuracies, especially as you move away from major cities. I'm not even sure this is even one of them. Last thing I'd want is for google to actually say 4 hour, but the road is hard and it actually takes me 7, and I'm stuck in the middle of the outback :P
While true, as a new father, I find myself asking this question.
Is our intelligence just "statistically correlated randomly-grouped information over millions of trials?"
I really ask that as a serious question. I watch my kind learn and he is like that pigeon you speak of. Maybe that's all our intelligence is. Just more complex.
Your last sentence really piqued my interest.
When we look at the world and identify objects, maybe we really do see more like:
"well it matches shape 22%, colour 17% and overall pattern roughness 19.4%"
and much less like
"I can see branches here, here and here. They are connected. The connection grow and increase in width. The thickness part, which looks trunk-like, ends in a solid base which resembles soil"
Again, I just wonder about such things. It's easy to dismiss AI just statistics or pattern recognition. But then you dismiss the pigeon as just pattern recognition. My genuine question is just how much of us is just pattern recognition? Maybe our intelligence is not something more mystical than that.
Well let's go through all the business problems.
One of the biggest benefits of Netflix is it's simplicity. I never have to check the billing. It's the same price every month. I don't have to watch the usage like I do on other services or worry about a crazy number of packages.
So even if charging by stream would be rare, it's still that thing in the back of your mind. Like watching your internet usage cap. You also have to have more support with people calling in wondering when they used their 6th stream and disputing bills...
You also want to be careful about cutting people off just for streams. Maybe they really are on vacation and are watching netflix. Maybe you actually want some leeway for some general sharing. Like a kid going off to university using his 'home' parents account. You don't want to antoganize customers whose perception is they are legitimate.
AI is probably just a buzzword :P but if you can really get the data to determine those mass shared accounts where its beyond one household's or one family's general usage and then pursue those... more power to them.
I'm not advocating for or against the UBI. I'm just saying we'll never know how it will work until we try it. There really are too many what ifs. For example, I'm far less concerned about what the unemployed do (what the experiment in Ontario did). I really don't care that much if the unemployed take that money and smoke that legal marijuana and play fortnite all day. If it keeps them healthy and out of trouble, it might save society money.
What I worry about is keeping the people who are currently working... working or the impact on global competition or the impact a few generations down.
It is a huge leap that might turn society on its head. It might be ruinous. It might be needed. I have no clue. My only point is these small studies are kind of pointless as they don't really answer the important questions.
My personal view is that there is enough work left for us to do that I'd rather pay to get work done, than give it out for free. Last I checked, there's still subways and rail to be built. There's still trash outside. I would still like a basketball court in the park down the road. There's still a rash of home robberies in my area... Fill in your own version of things you'd like improved in your society. If we're just handing out money, I'd rather pay to get some things done, than just give it out for me. But that's just my view right now.
Outside my main point.
Some decisions are just not data driven, or should I say. The only way to really get all the data would be to actually implement the program.
All these small tests really are pretty pointless and a waste of money.
If I were to ask you how would a society work if all drugs were decriminalized? Would drug use go up and people become druggies. You wouldn't know. There's a million what ifs. Only by actually trying it for a substantial amount of time could you get a clue. When Portugal decriminalized all drugs (not legalized), they just did it and took a gamble.
Similarly with this. How will the unemployed behave? Will those with jobs keep working? How will this change 1,2,3... generations down. No one has any damn clue. Any small experiment is not going to answer the big questions at all.
If only we could all just know the results of decisions before trying, our decisions would just be easy. But life is not that simple.
I don't know. There are often times I wonder if I just grew up with a certain mindset and now I'm stuck with that for life.
There are some things, I just don't buy online. Clothes, food, any large purchase. I also don't think I'll ever be comfortable with push button start cars, any kind of Alexa/Google home...
I go on an old man rant here, but I'm not even that old. I just don't see any benefit to this stuff. But at work, I talk to guys just 10 years younger and they're good with it all.
Really I have no reason not to get more stuff online. I tell myself I like to go to a place to talk to a person, but frig, anytime I have had an online purchase, the support has been great. Amazon has handled exactly 100% of my problems perfectly. What do I have to complain about that I don't trust them for large purchases or food? I also hate dealing with returns. or waiting on deliveries of things I really need/want now even though the few times I have, it was pretty smooth. I don't know. I just don't.
I just leave it open. It's probably more me that will always go to the grocery store. I think the next generation might be more willing.
Also Amazon might be cheap, but that has just never been their selling point for me. Convenience and consistency has been my reason. I've seen things cheaper online, but I'll stay buy it from Amazon because they're reliable and always have delivered. I'm sure they squeeze the crap out of vendors like any business and I'm sure they treat their employees harshly, but from a consumer point of view, they're solid. Not the best I've seen in the business (that goes to logitech), but pretty darn good.