From: http://www.stevepavlina.com/bl... "Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press On" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. (Calvin Coolidge)"
Of course, it has also been said: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)"
Perhaps the difference lies in having some way of validating that you are making some progress through your persistence, even if infinitesimally?
Sharing such rarely changing authentication data is at the heart of the issue as you point out. It seems like a trade-off of convenience and security with some background fraud cost. However, the issue is always convenience for who and fraud for who? In this case, banks have succeeded in mostly privatizing gains from transactions costs from credit card transaction fees while socializing the cost of identity theft to the general public (who have to change their accounts, deal with years of worries, try to straighten out fraudulent charges at riskof not being able to get a job or buy a house, etc.). This is an example of capitalism at its finest from one point of view -- privatizing gains while socializing costs and risks. That is when we need government (as the will of the People) to step in and force banks to internalize the cost of identity theft rather than pass it on indirectly. Ultimately, that might have to be done by big fines for breaches or taxes on unsecured transactions. And if banks had to do that, they would probably rapidly deploy something better because it would be cheaper than raising costs to customers and losing business to other banks that did implement better systems.
Perhaps the only worse thing is when businesses in the USA are allowed to use essentially unchangeable info about a person like date of birth or social security number to authenticate them. Other countries seem to handle this better by having an additional private PIN as part of a SSN. Some also include using the post office as part of the authentication process (like to present your ID at the post-office to approve some transaction or initiate some communications link). I'm surprised the US post office (which handles US passports now) does not get involved with authentication in general, as it seems like a surefire money-maker in the digital age, and the US post office already has procedures in place from passports to verify identity.
Neat post. Conceptually, single-celled organisms can't get "cancer" because, in a way, they are cancer. However, they no doubt can suffer mutations or other genetic changes (like from viruses) that make them survive and reproduce more or less well, all things considered for their current environment. Cancer has to do with a cell deciding not to play nicely with the rest in a body, and to strike out on its own, so to speak. Cancer in general is a bit like a crazy individual or small group in a society trying to take over the whole thing (current US plutocrats?); generally it works out badly for everyone as core services start to fail and the cancer cells are no longer supported by the rest of the body. Cancer is like spammers, who for a quick buck in the short term, are busy destroying email and the rest of the internet that could otherwise bring everyone abundance. Cancer is about "selfishness" where the individual ignores its part to play in the whole and where the whole supports the individual. But since evolution involves variation and selection, the underlying mechanism of cancer via mutation or viral infection also in a sense underlies evolution. So yes, it will always be with us.
I've heard most people in the USA age 40+ years old have cancerous cells in small amounts, but the immune system is continually killing them off to keep them from spreading.
Good nutrition helps with that, like Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr... "Though most people would prefer to take a pill and continue their eating habits, this will not provide the desired protection. Unrefined plant foods, with their plentiful anti-cancer compounds, must be eaten in abundance to flood the body's tissues with protective substances. Vegetables and fruits protect against all types of cancers if consumed in large enough quantities. Hundreds of scientific studies document this. The most prevalent cancers in our societies are plant-food-deficiency diseases. The benefits of lifestyle changes are proportional to the changes made. As we add more vegetable servings, we increase our phytochemical intake and leave less room in our diets for harmful foods, enhancing cancer protection even further. Let's review some of these research findings and then review what a powerful, anti-cancer diet will look like.... A typical anti-cancer diet should contain at least 4 fresh fruits daily, at least one large raw green salad, as well as a two other cooked (steamed) vegetables, such as broccoli, carrots and peas, squash or other colorful vegetables. A huge pot of soup laden with vegetables, herbs and beans can be made once a week and conveniently taken for lunch. Raw nuts and seeds are another important, but often overlooked, group of foods with documented health benefits contributing to longevity...."
One thing Fuhrman misses in his discussion is that these compounds are not "Anti-cancer" as much as the human body has adapted via evolution to use these compounds to prevent or fight cancer.
He is right that cancer is best prevented rather than treated. As I've heard, it said, you can either get your chemotherapy every day from fruits and vegetables, or you can end up getting it all at once in the oncologist's office (not that most current chemotherapy is probably worth it anyway).
But your point stands that this is all combinatorial (statistical, entropical?) about when something gets out of hand. Even when we have Elysium-like medical beds that get rid of cancer instantly, some computer virus or malicious person may make them work incorrectly. Or, as in the movie, selfish elites can keep the healing beds to themselves.
http://irwinallentvseries.wiki... "Don and John come out of the ship asking about carbon tetrachloride. Smith says he uses it to remove stains--he's used it and left the top off. John asks him if he has any thoughts besides his immediate needs---without the carbon tetrachloride they will lose their food supply. They use it as food preservation (NOTE: how is a mystery---it is highly toxic). They will have to eat only non-perishable items and now face a food shortage (what about the hydroponic garden?)....":-)
Will Robinson saved the day on that episode, but he had to come all the way to Earth via an alien matter transporter to do it.
A post from me to comp.robotics.misc in 1999 about Silent Running drones which spawned a thread with 32 messages: https://groups.google.com/foru... --- Anyone remember the drones (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) from the sci-fi movie Silent Running?
Some links:...
They have always captivated me, and were an early influence in getting me interested in robotics and AI.
I particularly liked the scene where all three worked together to perform a medical operation.
I've long wanted to build some robots like these for gardening and maintenance. It seems to me that multifuncional drones such as those (with changeable end effectors) would be very valuable in agriculture, by reducing the need for pesticides and fertilizers through picking off pests, pulling weeds, and spot applying fertilizer, and by not compacting the soil like tractors.
Has anyone given any though to what it would take to make such drones today? How much would it cost to build such a system (part cost, design time cost, assembly time cost)? How long would it take? How much could it lift? How long would the battery (fuel cell?) life be? How well could they be made to walk or climb stairs with today's technology?
Anyone out there started such a project to clone these drones?
Any advice on where to find more information on their design, or maybe the originals made for the movies?
Would that design concept (one armed, collaborative walking robots, three feet high) now be considered obsolete (i.e. compared to the post model in Hans Moravec's latest book "Robot")?
Could a business case be made today for a company to build such robots? Or instead, would anyone be interested in collaborating on an open source design for robots that looked like those?
See especially: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... "A 2010 study published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems showed that biointensive methods resulted in significantly increased production and a reduction of energy use when compared with conventional agriculture (Moore, S.R., 2010, Energy efficiency in smallâscale biointensive organic onion production in Pennsylvania, USA, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 25:3, pp. 181â188). This study states that "Current mechanized agriculture has an energy efficiency ratio of 0.9... energy efficiency for biointensive production of onions in our study was over 50 times higher than this value (51.5), and 83% of the total energy required is renewable energy."
The fact that many people have inefficient backyard gardens does not mean that people could not have very productive gardens if they knew more and had more time for them. Biosphere II was a good example of intensive food production in a small space.
Granted, that is mostly about organic vegetables and beans. Grains may be a somewhat different issue, but they are already heavily automated in many ways. But as Dr. Fuhrman suggests, eating more fruits and vegetables is healthier than eating more grains (especially refined grains).
You should not discount that gardening in the sunshine can be good health-promoting exercise. It saves money indirectly by displacing other less healthy recreational activities like shopping for the next unneeded consumer item.
BTW, we can grind up rock to get good fertilizer for relatively cheap, especially if powered by excess renewable energy: http://remineralize.org/
By this estimate by economist Julian Simon, there is plenty of opportunities for growing lots more food if we want to: http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
General purpose agricultural robotics makes intensive gardening so much more feasible to do on a small local scale... Still, highly-automated indoor agriculture powered by cheap energy is probably more the future of food production because it is so much more predictable.
(Unrelated work and also two years of grad school to learn more about ecological modelling plus excessive ambition caused delays in getting it done...)
But there are other text-based games like Hamurabi which goes all the way back to 1968 where you "plant" crops and harvest them. I played a variation of tha first around 1980 or so. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
I've long wanted to build a general purpose gardening (and maintenance) robot like the ones in "Silent Running". For some reason, there has been economic resistance to supporting general purpose agricultural robots. Cheap illegal labor in that sense harmed my career in robotics in the 1980s when I really, really wanted to make such things.:-(
That's one reason I've just done software, which is cheaper to do on your own than robotics. Or it was, now that robotics is getting so much cheaper for various reasons due to cheap powerful embedded computers and cheaper sensors and actuators and 3D printing and web-based design and manufacturing like via 100K garages and such. http://www.100kgarages.com/
There were a couple times I spoke with academic roboticists about making general purpose agricultural robotics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both were interested in industry-fundable specific purpose robots, like for seeding transfer in greenhouses (Rutgers) or for autonomous wheat harvesting with big machines (CMU). Those were no doubt fairly practical ideas, and I may have been well served in a robotics career to have pursued such practical ideas in cooperation with those professors, but they were not the general purpose system I really wanted to work on like the Silent Running-type drones. Still, they might have been stepping stones to better systems -- but it is easy to be too ambitious and impatient when you are young.
Nowadays though, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in agricultural robotics, and I wonder if crackdowns on illegal agricultural labor may even be connected to it? "Crackdown on illegal immigrants left crops rotting in Georgia fields, ag chief tells US lawmakers http://blog.al.com/wire/2011/1...
Also, this is a problematical statement from the point of view of a robotics engineer: "A robust agricultural guest worker program, properly designed, will not displace American workers," Black said in remarks prepared for the hearing. "As my testimony shows, in Georgia, even with current high unemployment rates, it is difficult for farmers to fill their labor needs."
That guest worker program displaces robotics engineers... Otherwise there would be a much greater demand for general purpose agricultural robots.
... from 1932 echos part of your point: http://harpers.org/archive/193... "First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earthâ(TM)s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising. Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. These are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might, therefore, be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example."
The key part agreeing with you being: "The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given."
You make another interesting point on equal distribution of material wealth in the USA essentially in terms of mass. To support your point, it's true that a lot of "money" controlled by the wealthiest 0.1% is now in the "casino economy" of the stock market and so on (FIRE sector) and so unavailable for use by most people to signal demand for material goods.
Still, I can doubt your point on equal distribution of goods and services is true overall, even if it is no doubt true for, say, beverages. I'd be curious to see more substantiation of that point.
It seems to me in the USA that wealthy people own a lot of land (and control corporations and politics, see: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa... ), they have in general better quality products and services (including education and food), as families they have more potential free time and self-determination, they have better access to medical care, and they face less financial precarity in their day-to-day lives. In general, they are not forced to take on risks that poorer people are (unsafe cars, unsafe neighborhoods, unsafe food, unsafe jobs, etc.). Those are enormous benefits towards a happier life. Still, as you point out, by strictly material standards, most people in the USA are better off than even the wealthy of 100 years ago. That is an important point. However, there is more to life that material goods. Things like face-to-face community, craftsmanship, general literacy, time spent by mothers with their young children, and time spent in nature and in sunshine seem to have declined per capita in the USA -- as have birth rates. A whole bunch of illnesses, including mental illness, seem to be on the rise.
There is a deeper issue here if we put aside the controversial issue that robots and AIs could do most jobs soon (and in a way, robots etc. just crank up a trend that has been going on for decades) . The fact is, most human labor is already not needed for use to live near to our current standard of living. Bertrand Russel pointed this out in that 1932 essay: "Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one. This was made obvious during the War. At that time all the men in the armed forces, all the men and women engaged in the produc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... "The Dymaxion was completed in 1930 after two years of development, and redesigned in 1945. Buckminster Fuller wanted to mass-produce a bathroom and a house. His first "Dymaxion" design was based on the design of a grain bin.... The Siberian grain-silo house was the first system in which Fuller noted the "dome effect." Many installations have reported that a dome induces a local vertical heat-driven vortex that sucks cooler air downward into a dome if the dome is vented properly (a single overhead vent, and peripheral vents). Fuller adapted the later units of the grain-silo house to use this effect."
Internally, I like the radial design of the server clusters around the central networking core to reduce and make consistent network physical travel paths within the system.
BTW, I just saw this old article which suggests Assange has a "sunlamp", but as in my other comments, I can wonder if it is good enough for adequate vitamin D production? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... "The fugitive has just a sunlamp, a running machine and internet connection in the threadbare room inside the ground-floor apartment in Knightsbridge."
A comment here suggests Ecuador only rents a few offices from the Columbian embassy, so maybe they don't control enough contiguous space to get Assange to the roof? http://www.talkleft.com/story/... "They are saying the Assange hasn't seen light since he got there, so I assume no roof access, and judging from the vehicle traffic, it doesn't even appear to have a garage. He's sleeping on an air mattress in someone's office. I can't find the link, but I read that Ecuador only occupies a couple offices in the building, basically renting space from the Colombian embassy."
And: http://boards.straightdope.com... "The "B" implies that the embassy occupies one of the floors, not the entirety of number 3. Which floor depends on how they are labelling them. The usual way in the UK would be for the ground floor to be plain "3", then the next floor up "3A" etc. Now, it looks like this building has a mews level, so who knows, it may just be the one floor above ground level, rather than the second."
So, it seems possible the Ecuadoran embassy subpart of the building has no roof access.
Perhaps his lamp put out mostly UV-A (which tans and burns) instead of UV-B which produces vitamin D? See my other posts in this thread on the difference. But too much of almost anything can be a bad thing.
As you say, it sounds like, short of being smuggled to another country in a diplomatic courier bag, Assange can't avoid facing charges if he leaves the embassy. I don't see what leverage by Ecuador could cause the UK to relent.
Of course, in "real life", people also may just make up stuff for various reasons: http://www.detainedbyus.org/th... "In an effort to capture enemy combatants during the War on Terror the United States implemented a bounty program offering monetary rewards for information on, or the surrender of, possible enemy combatants. The bounty system has been beneficial in bringing forward actionable information against enemy combatants because it has functioned as a strong motivator, but that may also have led to the detention of innocent civilians at both Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Airbase. Turning over individuals to U.S. troops was a lucrative business venture for bounty hunters, the Pakistani and Afghan governments, and civilian reward seekers who could convince the U.S. that the person they had captured or were making accusations against, was connected to Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or another terrorist group."
Here is another article that mentions Vitamin D and Assange: http://www.independent.co.uk/n... "It had been reported earlier that he is suffering from arrhythmia (abnormal heart beats), high blood pressure and other health problems associated with a lack of Vitamin D, after his not being exposed to sunlight for that length of time, and that he would need to leave the embassy to go to hospital."
Granted, it might be a "BS" excuse, as you suggest. Nonetheless, I still think it is possible he is not supplementing adequately given a too low RDA and also, perhaps, using the wrong UV sunlamps? There is so much misinformation out there about Vitamin D.
The good news is, more and more people in the UK are coming to understand the connection between Vitamin D deficiency and illness. Could it even contribute to some Middle Eastern (or US/UK) extremism? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea... "A deficiency in this crucial vitamin, thanks to our increasingly indoor lifestyles, is already blamed for the reappearance of rickets, the painful and deforming bone disease in children, in the UK. But gradually, evidence is emerging that links low vitamin D levels to a rise in a whole host of "modern" diseases, some of which were virtually unheard of in the pre-industrial era.... Dr John McGrath, international expert in schizophrenia based at the University of Queensland, Australia, says the evidence suggests that sun exposure in pregnancy and early life protects against schizophrenia and "raises the tantalising prospect that optimising vitamin D status during pregnancy may lead to the primary prevention of the disease"....
Could lack of vitamin D in pregnancy also explain autism? The latest evidence suggests that a low vitamin D level in the mother's body during pregnancy may induce her immune system to make antibodies which can damage the baby's brain, as well as causing certain genes to malfunction. Last month, Rhonda Patrick and Bruce Ames from the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, in California, published research findings that these genes normally make the chemical serotonin. Too little of this neurotransmitter is associated with abnormal social behaviour while too much in the digestive tract causes sensitivity to foods which may explain some autistic children's difficult eating habits.
Neat info, thanks! The weblink did not work for me with a "forbidden" error, BTW, but I get the idea. Interesting about the different spectrums for different areas. I did not realize LED lighting systems were becoming so configurable.
Because we have electric heat, I've also thought about doing indoor agriculture with my own kid during the winter with tomatoes, lettuce, and such -- since the cost of electricity for lighting would be essentially free as it just displaces electric heat. A few things that have stopped me are: * the space it would take up * equipment costs * concerns about indoor humidity and mold * worries about getting on some list related to indoors growers, as in: http://www.infowars.com/police... "Apparently Americans who employ hydroponics are the newest targets in an insane "drug war" that has gone from bad to ludicrous since it was first "declared" in the early 1980s."
Instead I sometimes grow bean sprouts which don't take light. But it still bothers me that I could be getting more use out of that electricity before it become heat. I've also though it might be useful to use the electricity to run computers in the winter first and get heat as the byproduct -- too bad I did not mine BitCoin with that power when it was easy.
To support your point: http://www.theatlantic.com/hea... "In a touching Medium post a few days ago, the writer and programmer Paul Ford shared what he thinks is the secret to his politeness. In conversations with new acquaintances, Ford asks plenty of questions and lets the other person do the talking. He tries not to ask what they do for a living, but if it comes to that, he responds to their job description--whatever it is--with, "Wow. That sounds hard." "Nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult," he writes. He describes how this process once worked with a woman whose work is not something most people would consider taxing:..."
One point made by Mercola is that it could take 48 hours for the body to absorb vitamin D produced in skin oils from sun exposure, so bathing with soap become problematical if you want maximum Vitamin D? People in other times and cultures both generally got lots more sunlight and did not bathe very often.
Here is a comment suggesting looking into special UV-B enhanced bulbs available for reptile care, but I wonder if they are enhanced enough to be the best choice for humans, given it seems many reptiles need UV-A to see colors correctly? http://www.dailypaul.com/24584...
My wife found vitamin D supplements are more effective than a blue LED SAD light...
Anyway, I've been learning some new stuff while re-exploring this topic. I usually take a vitamin D supplement. I get some sunshine when I can, but since I take a shower every day, I wonder if the sunlight is really that effective for vitamin D production? Still, as above, like Dr. John Cannell talks about, I wonder if there is still something missing that my skin might produce from real sun exposure.
Still, there remain many unknowns about human health, so would getting only UV-B (which makes vitamin D) and no UV-A (which tans the skin) be health promoting for humans? The human body is adapted to a certain environment which includes exercise in the sunlight. When we change our environment to one that seems better but is less natural, it is hard to know what we may lose out on. The same is true when we eat foods that may seem more enjoyable like with lots of sugar, fat, and salt via refined grains, but may leave us missing out on micronutrients and fiber that we need to stay healthy. https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
Assange may well not be around for much longer without access to sunlight or at least supplementing with vitamin D. The article says: "Asked about his health, Assange said anyone would be affected by spending two years in a building with no outside areas or direct sunlight, a complaint he has made several times before."
He might need more for a while to catch up if he is already severely vitamin D deficient. The US RDA for vitamin D for most adults is about 5X-10X too low, so generally you don't get enough from food. Many indoor workers are vitamin D deficient these days, given we usually work, play, and commute inside something with windows that block UV-B radiation. Our carpets maybe won't fade from filtered sunlight, but our health will.
However, we don't know all the compounds that the human skin makes in response to sunlight. He might want to look into using special purpose UV-B lamps as well. Mercola talks about that: http://articles.mercola.com/si...
There are some rare health conditions like sarcoidosis that make vitamin D supplements problematical, so if he has any special health issues like that, he should talk to a knowledgeable doctor before supplementing.
Great dynamic analysis of engineering social systems! For ways around this via skunkworks development, see William L. Livingston's writings, like "Have Fun At Work": http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun...
From a review: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipm... "It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system.
This is the message of William L. Livingston, a mechanical engineer with over 100 patents and decades of industrial experience. Several books and a newsletter detail his disturbing but important worldview....
``Have Fun at Work'' (1988, ISBN 0-937063-05-3, $24.95) is the basic work.... The book sketches a different social structure that is better equipped to cope with complexity: the Skunkworks. The term comes from a legendary aircraft development shop that produced the U-2 and Blackbird aircraft. In general, a Skunkworks is a small (3--5) team of battle-hardened, generalist engineers equipped with the latest in software tools for simulating the behavior of all the involved systems (mechanical, electrical, software, and social).
On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there.
Livingston's more recent work, ``Friends in High Places'' (1990, ISBN 0-937063-06-1, $28.50), spends less time discussing organizational pathologies and more time discussing the Skunkworks procedure. It is a somewhat more positive, less bitter work than ``Have Fun at Work.''"
I also think free and open source collaborations via "stigmergy" are another way around this, where people collaborate by adding to a shared digital artifact. http://p2pfoundation.net/Stigm... "3. Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output. 4. Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy. "
Even at IBM Research, technologies like the Jikes Java compiler only got picked up by other groups because they were made open source. Otherwise the organizational barriers within a big organization like IBM would be too strong to use the tools. That was something mentioned somewhere by one of the authors as the biggest surprise of open sourcing Jikes, that other IBMers suddenly were using it. http://jikes.sourceforge.net/
By contrast, back aound the same time Jikes went open source, I desperately wanted to try IBM's embedded Smalltalk (acquired from OTI) in a research project at IBM instead of using VxWorks for the portable IBM Personal Speech Assistant (a handheld speech recognizer and TTS system as a coprocesser to a Palm Pilot, a forerunner in a way to Siri and Google Voice). That other group said I would need to come up with about US$200,000+ worth of funding to their team before they would make their code available for use even just inside IBM, claiming they would have to dedicate a support person to it. Sadly, that was not feasible; I was only a contractor, and this was my own idea because I loved Smalltalk. So that technology did not get used at all in that project. Too bad for that group, because the then IBM chairman Lou Gerstner asked for one of the devices for his office to show people -- and wouldn't it have been nice for that IBM group if their technology had been used instead of or in addition to VxWorks?
Thanks for the amusingly accurate XKCD link and insightful game comparison! I agree. However, it can be tricky to get a good game balance and have a good "microworld" framework for open-ended exploration. KSP pulls it off, whereas, say, our FOSS garden simulator from around 1997 does not. http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...
That gardening simulator was written in part as a first step towards a space habitat simulator -- since you need to grow food even in space. Unfortunately, funding it ourselves for years (much of the living expenses for that work funded crazily on credit cards which took many years of doing unrelated work afterwards to repay), we had to triage out many of the open-ended interesting parts of gardening to get the first version done. We emphasized scientific accuracy as far as we could, which probably was a mistake compared to starting with simpler models. My wife and I both had been in a graduate program in ecology an evolution, so we has an academic bias. After the first version, we did not have time and resources to revisit it. We had hopes and sketches back then for activities like canning your own food, "survival" gardening where you had to grow enough calories or starve, interactions with neighbors, a virtual computer in the simulation where you did garden planning and looked up gardening info, and so on. A few vestiges of those remain, like the simulation being able to provide a calorie count of what you harvest. The open ended parts like designing your own tools, soil amendments, and plants were not that engaging in how they were implemented. By contrast, the "Harvest Moon" video game series emphasized fun parts of gardening for most people (like interactions with neighbors), although they lacked the science. It can be hard to bring that all together.
Here was a related (unfunded) NSF pre-proposal from 1997 for a second version of the garden simulator (never made) emphasizing creating an open-ended FOSS modeling environment for gardening-related models, but even that probably would not have been that much fun for most people even if it might have transformed the field of agricultural simulation: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... "The usual outcome of an effort such as ours is a commercially distributed software product with proprietary source code. However, research continues on modeling of soil processes and plant growth, and this product will soon fall out of step. A proprietary program may be a bridge, but no one can walk across it. By making the model source code available, we will bring scientists out from their side of the bridge to interact with the models, while at the other end of the bridge the general public will step out by changing the models themselves."
But that was before I understood "the Big Crunch" like Dr. David Goodstein talks about and how hard it was to get grant money of any sort: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg... "The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research.... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service,
Posted the below to: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog... --- For all that, here is a recent Atlantic article and related slashdot discussion on why email is not going anywhere, which makes much the same points as I have here previously (email is decentralized, standards-based, non-proprietary, interoperable, ubiquitous, extensible, mobile-friendly, etc.): http://www.theatlantic.com/tec... http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
I'd agree it would be good to have something even better than email (a social semantic desktop?), but closed-source proprietary centralized walled garden solutions like you repeatedly profer don't seem like a general improvement. And what do you do if these platforms close up shop? Why notfigure out how to build something better for knowledge exchange on email or other open web standards? Still, WordPress with Akismet is an excellent platform for exchanging knowledge -- but it still relies usually in practice on email for push notifications.
Ultimately, what are your "requirements" for a better platform?
Amazing point! And further, work done by NASA is public domain, but work done by hired contractors is generally proprietary. I spoke with someone at NASA at an SSI conference who said NASA had a difficult time making realistic simulations of things like the space shuttle or space station because the contracts specified they would receive blueprints, not CAD files, and the contractors would not release the CAD files, so NASA had to reverse engineer them from blueprints. That is one story that inspired me to write essays like these on why government funded and charitably funded works (even in part) need to be released under free licenses: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-f... http://www.pdfernhout.net/open... "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research...."
Even in the 1980s, I met an ex-NASA person who was somewhat disgusted by the fact that when he worked at NASA, he wanted to design and build stuff, but ended up having to manage contractors instead (and said that was most of what people at NASA did). That is one reason working at NASA sounded like a not so good idea if you actually were interested in creating new technology for supporting human life in space.
I can still dream of working at NASA developing simulations of life in space and releasing all the code and content in the public domain. I talked with Al Globus at NASA about such ideas around 2000 (in relation to my OSCOMAK proposal and his own supervision of NASA's educational efforts related to a space settlement/habitat contest), and he had some good suggestions about game-like aspects for a simulation of living off the land in space, but the ideas went nowhere back then. But at least, a decade later, we now have the proprietary programs of Kerbal Space Program and Space Engineers (and to a lesser extent MineCraft/InfiniMiner). In some ways, those simulation programs may be doing more for the development of space in terms of inspiring the next generation and teaching skills of design and cooperation than the last couple decades of NASA efforts involving real hardware (as important as they may be)?
Still, NASA has supported some educational simulations, like MoonBase Alpha, but is seems proprietary? http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ed... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... "Moonbase Alpha is a video game that provides a realistic simulation of life on a natural satellite based on potential moon base programs. It was made by the Army Game Studio, developers of America's Army, and Virtual Heroes, Inc. in conjunction with NASA Learning Technologies. The game was released on July 6, 2010, as a free download on Steam.[2] At the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in 2010, the games won the top honors in the government category of the Serious Game Showcase & Challenge.[3]"
But it looks proprietary even though NASA funded it, because I don;t see a free license for the source and content, even if it is "free to play"?
Looks like NASA is supporting other stuff, but again, proprietary stuff developed outside of NASA itself by contractors? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... "Starlite (formerly associated with Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond) is the title of a multiplayer online game which as of November 25, 2009, is being
tl;dr Employing robots and AIs overall to do almost *anything* may soon be cheaper than employing most humans, similar to how we junk old computers because they use too much power per MIP even when they still "work". Also, the demand for market-supplied goods and services is limited as people move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and want to do more things for themselves and want to do creative things of a (generally) less materially-intensive nature. Thus mainstream capitalism is about to face divide-by-zero errors.
=== Two key assumptions of mainstream capitalist economics
Your insightful comment really gets at the heart of the controversy (from a mainstream economics viewpoint) and so deserves a significant response. I agree that we can see many of the material aspects of US society today as a "victory for automation". Still, as your post implies, mainstream economics includes two assumptions, and if either of these assumptions becomes false, mainstream economics will falter (although it may press on anyway at the cost of great human suffering).
These two assumptions are: 1. The assumption that most human labor will always have significant exchange value in the market regardless of advances in AI, robotics, and other automation (as well as other trends like voluntary social networks, accumulation of infrastructure and know-how, cheap energy like from fusion power, and so on). Significant means at least enough value to purchase at least the bare minimum to survive (given almost all the land has been privatized or otherwise enclosed preventing subsistence through hunting, gathering, and gardening). Further there is the assumption nowadays that the exchange value of labor in the USA by most people willing and able to work is high enough for more than subsistence to achieve at least a "middle class" US life or better. 2. The assumption that demand for goods and services is infinite for any given population (or at least demand grows faster than supply over the long term), thus ensuring there is always a need for more labor no matter how much automation can meet previous demands. There is also the assumption this excess demand for goods and services beyond supply will be great enough to prevent a race to the bottom in wages through competition regarding supply and demand of human labor. In short, without major government intervention like a basic income, a capitalist system as we know it needs to continually expand to be viable for human survival if most humans require employment to survive.
Let's see if either of those assumptions can be debunked. It only takes debunking one to show how mainstream economics is failing in the 21st century. Debunking either would mean there would be zero wages for most humans or zero new net demand, and some mainstream economic equations will blow up with divide-by-zero errors in such a case.
== Assumption 1: Most human labor will always have market-place value
Debunking the first assumption about human labor always having significant exchange value is what the video is mostly about. And it is enough to invalidate mainstream economics as we know it in the USA. A similar point was made in "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964, although for various reasons I mention on my site was ahead of its time in its predictions. As an analogy, many Slashdotters have older computer around they don't use anymore. Those older computers are generally turned off because compared to later computers, they are slower, are noisier, consume more power per MIP, can't be updated for newer security threats, have limited memory, may have more complex UIs or maintenance procedures, and so on. It is easier in most cases to just run VirtualBox on a multi-core machine with a task-specific VM or to use small cheap recent dedicated hardware for functions like routing or firewalls or file serving. Or Slashdotters might just do more with cloud computing that others maintain. The CGP Grey video is about the trend towards most humans becoming like old computers as far as employa
More an this topic. There is also perhaps an issue with labeling people "trolls" or "bullies". Most people can and will act differently in different contexts. There is also a continuum of human behavior all people engage in. In the case of "bullying", it is fairly human for people to banter back and forth and insult each other in what might generally be seen as healthy relationships (as Izzy Kalman suggests). So, bans on all perceived insults in a classroom or workspace may actually be counterproductive by ramping up the stress of the situations when they do happen for whatever reason.
And it is all too easy to call an unpopular opinion a troll. Also, for the person responding to the "troll", it is hard to know sometimes when some person saying a rude thing or clueless thing or factually incorrect thing might benefit from a response. Or even to say someone has an agenda when they maybe just made a mistake; a recent example of that: http://hardware.slashdot.org/c...
I do feel we need better tools for online discussions though, including being able to tag message after-the-fact by crowdsourcing like Slashdot does. Here is one of many posts I've mode on that, this one when in 2010 someone reposted an email Adrian Bowyer wrote when he unsubscribed from the RepRap list: https://groups.google.com/foru...
Still, there are no doubt people out there at any given time trying to hurt others or do shocking things purely for the shock value for whatever reason. It is hard to know what to do with the worst sort of trolling, as mentioned by someone else in another comment: "Robin William' daughter gives up social media due to abusive messages" http://www.japantoday.com/cate...
Such really awful messages probably comes in part out of the fact that the internet deprives people of social cues that would happen in face-to-face interactions. See also on progressive desensitization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is a non-fiction book by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, first published in 2007. It deals with cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and other cognitive biases, using these psychological theories to illustrate how the perpetrators (and victims) of hurtful acts justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes become polarized."
AC wrote: "It's not as much a problem of trolls as it is a problem of people being incapable of simply filtering out stuff on the Internet,..."
That is much the same message as Izzy Kalman has about how to deal with most bullies (who are driven by seeing the victim's reactions): http://bullies2buddies.com/
AC wrote: "Based on what I've seen, I just assume that the AI from that Eagle Eye movie has taken over the NSA. Why else would they want to collect a mountain of data that no "person" is going to access?"
Hadn't know of that movie; thanks for mentioning it (partial spoiler below): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... "Ethan monitored the DOD's top secret intelligence-gathering supercomputer, the Autonomous Reconnaissance Intelligence Integration Analyst (ARIIA).... Both groups learn that after ARIIA's recommendation was ignored and a botched operation in Balochistan resulted in the deaths of American citizens, ARIIA concluded that "to prevent more bloodshed, the executive branch must be removed." Acting on behalf of "We the People", and citing the Declaration of Independence ("whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it"), ARIIA is acting in compliance with Section 216 of the Patriot Act which "allows us to circumvent probable cause in the face of a national security threat, in this case, the chain of command itself."..."
Another related story I first saw mentioned on slashdot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... "Despite the Humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids."
Although aspects of our current social systems are heading that way with or without AI anyway... Example: https://www.schneier.com/blog/... "We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats."
See also Marshall Brain's "Manna" sci-fi story about computer systems taking over. James P. Hogan goes into that in his sci-fi novel "Two Faces of Tomorrow". Two episodes of Eureka have Carter's Smart House take over, one of those times in order to prevent injuries, which includes mentally reprogramming people who might disagree with it. http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/H... http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/L...
Around 1984, I sat in on an undergrad course by Stephen Cohen in Soviet Politics. After one class where he mentioned the potential liberating power of personal computers in a USSR where every typewriter was licensed and every photocopier guarded, I suggested that ultimately personal computers could analyze what people wrote on them, looking for keywords, and report on the user. I had not envisioned networks doing that which is more what we actually got, but the effect is much the same given almost anything significant related to social change is done by communicating groups of people. Back to the point through, you don't really need need AIs to analyze massive data looking for keywords or phrases or to make statistical inferences about patterns of writings or commercial transactions. AIs might be useful, but regular software can do much of that already. You also don't have to flag everything to have a massive chilling effect that upholds the status quo.
The article says: "Viv could provide all those services -- in exchange for a cut of the transactions that resulted."
We seriously need to rethink our economics for a world of abundance and AI and robotics before we get crazier and crazier AIs driven by the profit motive than the out-of-control corporate "AIs" already stomping all over the planet and the people who live there. See also my comment here in 2000: http://www.dougengelbart.org/c... "And, as the story "Colossus: The Forbin Project" shows, all it takes for a smart computer to run the world is control of a (nuclear) arsenal. And, as the novel "The Great Time Machine Hoax" shows, all it takes for a computer to run an industrial empire and do its own research and development is a checking account and the ability to send letters, such as: "I am prepared to transfer $200,000 dollars to your bank account if you make the following modifications to a computer at this location...". So robot manipulators are not needed for an AI to run the world to its satisfaction -- just a bank account and email. "
See also the 1950s sci-fi movie "The Invisible Boy" for a malevolent AI that provides just a few key pieces of biased advise that let it almost take over the world. Of course, we already have Fox News... Thank goodness Robby the Robot's emotions save the day in at least the movie...
Slashdot Mirror
From: http://www.stevepavlina.com/bl... "Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press On" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. (Calvin Coolidge)"
Of course, it has also been said: "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein)"
Perhaps the difference lies in having some way of validating that you are making some progress through your persistence, even if infinitesimally?
Sharing such rarely changing authentication data is at the heart of the issue as you point out. It seems like a trade-off of convenience and security with some background fraud cost. However, the issue is always convenience for who and fraud for who? In this case, banks have succeeded in mostly privatizing gains from transactions costs from credit card transaction fees while socializing the cost of identity theft to the general public (who have to change their accounts, deal with years of worries, try to straighten out fraudulent charges at riskof not being able to get a job or buy a house, etc.). This is an example of capitalism at its finest from one point of view -- privatizing gains while socializing costs and risks. That is when we need government (as the will of the People) to step in and force banks to internalize the cost of identity theft rather than pass it on indirectly. Ultimately, that might have to be done by big fines for breaches or taxes on unsecured transactions. And if banks had to do that, they would probably rapidly deploy something better because it would be cheaper than raising costs to customers and losing business to other banks that did implement better systems.
Perhaps the only worse thing is when businesses in the USA are allowed to use essentially unchangeable info about a person like date of birth or social security number to authenticate them. Other countries seem to handle this better by having an additional private PIN as part of a SSN. Some also include using the post office as part of the authentication process (like to present your ID at the post-office to approve some transaction or initiate some communications link). I'm surprised the US post office (which handles US passports now) does not get involved with authentication in general, as it seems like a surefire money-maker in the digital age, and the US post office already has procedures in place from passports to verify identity.
Also, a "basic income" might be part of the solution rather than or in addition to "make work" jobs.
Neat post. Conceptually, single-celled organisms can't get "cancer" because, in a way, they are cancer. However, they no doubt can suffer mutations or other genetic changes (like from viruses) that make them survive and reproduce more or less well, all things considered for their current environment. Cancer has to do with a cell deciding not to play nicely with the rest in a body, and to strike out on its own, so to speak. Cancer in general is a bit like a crazy individual or small group in a society trying to take over the whole thing (current US plutocrats?); generally it works out badly for everyone as core services start to fail and the cancer cells are no longer supported by the rest of the body. Cancer is like spammers, who for a quick buck in the short term, are busy destroying email and the rest of the internet that could otherwise bring everyone abundance. Cancer is about "selfishness" where the individual ignores its part to play in the whole and where the whole supports the individual. But since evolution involves variation and selection, the underlying mechanism of cancer via mutation or viral infection also in a sense underlies evolution. So yes, it will always be with us.
I've heard most people in the USA age 40+ years old have cancerous cells in small amounts, but the immune system is continually killing them off to keep them from spreading.
Good nutrition helps with that, like Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about ... A typical anti-cancer diet should contain at least 4 fresh fruits daily, at least one large raw green salad, as well as a two other cooked (steamed) vegetables, such as broccoli, carrots and peas, squash or other colorful vegetables. A huge pot of soup laden with vegetables, herbs and beans can be made once a week and conveniently taken for lunch. Raw nuts and seeds are another important, but often overlooked, group of foods with documented health benefits contributing to longevity. ..."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Though most people would prefer to take a pill and continue their eating habits, this will not provide the desired protection. Unrefined plant foods, with their plentiful anti-cancer compounds, must be eaten in abundance to flood the body's tissues with protective substances. Vegetables and fruits protect against all types of cancers if consumed in large enough quantities. Hundreds of scientific studies document this. The most prevalent cancers in our societies are plant-food-deficiency diseases. The benefits of lifestyle changes are proportional to the changes made. As we add more vegetable servings, we increase our phytochemical intake and leave less room in our diets for harmful foods, enhancing cancer protection even further. Let's review some of these research findings and then review what a powerful, anti-cancer diet will look like.
One thing Fuhrman misses in his discussion is that these compounds are not "Anti-cancer" as much as the human body has adapted via evolution to use these compounds to prevent or fight cancer.
He is right that cancer is best prevented rather than treated. As I've heard, it said, you can either get your chemotherapy every day from fruits and vegetables, or you can end up getting it all at once in the oncologist's office (not that most current chemotherapy is probably worth it anyway).
Fasting may also sometimes help prevent cancer as well as can a ketogenic (fat burning) diet that deprives cancer cells of sugar.
https://www.google.com/search?...
https://www.google.com/search?...
But your point stands that this is all combinatorial (statistical, entropical?) about when something gets out of hand. Even when we have Elysium-like medical beds that get rid of cancer instantly, some computer virus or malicious person may make them work incorrectly. Or, as in the movie, selfish elites can keep the healing beds to themselves.
http://irwinallentvseries.wiki... ..." :-)
"Don and John come out of the ship asking about carbon tetrachloride. Smith says he uses it to remove stains--he's used it and left the top off. John asks him if he has any thoughts besides his immediate needs---without the carbon tetrachloride they will lose their food supply. They use it as food preservation (NOTE: how is a mystery---it is highly toxic). They will have to eat only non-perishable items and now face a food shortage (what about the hydroponic garden?).
Will Robinson saved the day on that episode, but he had to come all the way to Earth via an alien matter transporter to do it.
Kidding aside, you make a great point!
A post from me to comp.robotics.misc in 1999 about Silent Running drones which spawned a thread with 32 messages:
https://groups.google.com/foru...
---
Anyone remember the drones (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) from the sci-fi movie Silent Running?
Some links: ...
They have always captivated me, and were an early influence in getting me interested in robotics and AI.
I particularly liked the scene where all three worked together to perform a medical operation.
I've long wanted to build some robots like these for gardening and maintenance. It seems to me that multifuncional drones such as those (with changeable end effectors) would be very valuable in agriculture, by reducing the need for pesticides and fertilizers through picking off pests, pulling weeds, and spot applying fertilizer, and by not compacting the soil like tractors.
Has anyone given any though to what it would take to make such drones today?
How much would it cost to build such a system (part cost, design time cost, assembly time cost)?
How long would it take?
How much could it lift?
How long would the battery (fuel cell?) life be?
How well could they be made to walk or climb stairs with today's technology?
Anyone out there started such a project to clone these drones?
Any advice on where to find more information on their design, or maybe the originals made for the movies?
Would that design concept (one armed, collaborative walking robots, three feet high) now be considered obsolete (i.e. compared to the post model in Hans Moravec's latest book "Robot")?
Could a business case be made today for a company to build such robots? Or instead, would anyone be interested in collaborating on an open source design for robots that looked like those?
Other styles of farming whether square foot gardening or indoor hydroponics can be much more productive per acre than big field farming with tractors, but they are *labor* and *knowledge* intensive. Robotics (or other automation) make greater yields per square foot much more achievable more cheaply. That also makes vertical farming in cities more feasible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.motherearthnews.com...
http://www.verticalfarm.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
See especially: ... energy efficiency for biointensive production of onions in our study was over 50 times higher than this value (51.5), and 83% of the total energy required is renewable energy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
"A 2010 study published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems showed that biointensive methods resulted in significantly increased production and a reduction of energy use when compared with conventional agriculture (Moore, S.R., 2010, Energy efficiency in smallâscale biointensive organic onion production in Pennsylvania, USA, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 25:3, pp. 181â188). This study states that "Current mechanized agriculture has an energy efficiency ratio of 0.9
The fact that many people have inefficient backyard gardens does not mean that people could not have very productive gardens if they knew more and had more time for them. Biosphere II was a good example of intensive food production in a small space.
See also books on "Survival Gardening".
http://theprepperproject.com/s...
The best one I've seen (by that name, by John Freeman) is not mentioned there though:
http://www.amazon.com/Survival...
Don't know about this new one by someone else:
http://www.amazon.com/Survival...
Granted, that is mostly about organic vegetables and beans. Grains may be a somewhat different issue, but they are already heavily automated in many ways. But as Dr. Fuhrman suggests, eating more fruits and vegetables is healthier than eating more grains (especially refined grains).
You should not discount that gardening in the sunshine can be good health-promoting exercise. It saves money indirectly by displacing other less healthy recreational activities like shopping for the next unneeded consumer item.
BTW, we can grind up rock to get good fertilizer for relatively cheap, especially if powered by excess renewable energy:
http://remineralize.org/
By this estimate by economist Julian Simon, there is plenty of opportunities for growing lots more food if we want to:
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
General purpose agricultural robotics makes intensive gardening so much more feasible to do on a small local scale... Still, highly-automated indoor agriculture powered by cheap energy is probably more the future of food production because it is so much more predictable.
Though only finished and released around 1997: http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...
(Unrelated work and also two years of grad school to learn more about ecological modelling plus excessive ambition caused delays in getting it done...)
And MECC's "Lunar Greenhouse" from 1989 ran on the Apple II:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/...
This emulator did not work for me, but seemingly Lunar Greenhouse is online:
http://www.virtualapple.org/me...
http://www.virtualapple.org/J_...
But there are other text-based games like Hamurabi which goes all the way back to 1968 where you "plant" crops and harvest them. I played a variation of tha first around 1980 or so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
It can be played online:
http://www.hammurabigame.com/h...
I've long wanted to build a general purpose gardening (and maintenance) robot like the ones in "Silent Running". For some reason, there has been economic resistance to supporting general purpose agricultural robots. Cheap illegal labor in that sense harmed my career in robotics in the 1980s when I really, really wanted to make such things. :-(
That's one reason I've just done software, which is cheaper to do on your own than robotics. Or it was, now that robotics is getting so much cheaper for various reasons due to cheap powerful embedded computers and cheaper sensors and actuators and 3D printing and web-based design and manufacturing like via 100K garages and such.
http://www.100kgarages.com/
There were a couple times I spoke with academic roboticists about making general purpose agricultural robotics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both were interested in industry-fundable specific purpose robots, like for seeding transfer in greenhouses (Rutgers) or for autonomous wheat harvesting with big machines (CMU). Those were no doubt fairly practical ideas, and I may have been well served in a robotics career to have pursued such practical ideas in cooperation with those professors, but they were not the general purpose system I really wanted to work on like the Silent Running-type drones. Still, they might have been stepping stones to better systems -- but it is easy to be too ambitious and impatient when you are young.
Nowadays though, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in agricultural robotics, and I wonder if crackdowns on illegal agricultural labor may even be connected to it?
"Crackdown on illegal immigrants left crops rotting in Georgia fields, ag chief tells US lawmakers
http://blog.al.com/wire/2011/1...
Also, this is a problematical statement from the point of view of a robotics engineer: "A robust agricultural guest worker program, properly designed, will not displace American workers," Black said in remarks prepared for the hearing. "As my testimony shows, in Georgia, even with current high unemployment rates, it is difficult for farmers to fill their labor needs."
That guest worker program displaces robotics engineers... Otherwise there would be a much greater demand for general purpose agricultural robots.
Instead, I worked on virtual gardening software for growing virtual plants. My wife and I also made a simpler version of the garden simulator just for breeding virtual plants (mostly her work):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
That said, there is little that is better for mental health for many people than
... from 1932 echos part of your point: http://harpers.org/archive/193...
"First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earthâ(TM)s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising. Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. These are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might, therefore, be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example."
The key part agreeing with you being: "The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given."
You make another interesting point on equal distribution of material wealth in the USA essentially in terms of mass. To support your point, it's true that a lot of "money" controlled by the wealthiest 0.1% is now in the "casino economy" of the stock market and so on (FIRE sector) and so unavailable for use by most people to signal demand for material goods.
Still, I can doubt your point on equal distribution of goods and services is true overall, even if it is no doubt true for, say, beverages. I'd be curious to see more substantiation of that point.
It seems to me in the USA that wealthy people own a lot of land (and control corporations and politics, see: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesa... ), they have in general better quality products and services (including education and food), as families they have more potential free time and self-determination, they have better access to medical care, and they face less financial precarity in their day-to-day lives. In general, they are not forced to take on risks that poorer people are (unsafe cars, unsafe neighborhoods, unsafe food, unsafe jobs, etc.). Those are enormous benefits towards a happier life. Still, as you point out, by strictly material standards, most people in the USA are better off than even the wealthy of 100 years ago. That is an important point. However, there is more to life that material goods. Things like face-to-face community, craftsmanship, general literacy, time spent by mothers with their young children, and time spent in nature and in sunshine seem to have declined per capita in the USA -- as have birth rates. A whole bunch of illnesses, including mental illness, seem to be on the rise.
There is a deeper issue here if we put aside the controversial issue that robots and AIs could do most jobs soon (and in a way, robots etc. just crank up a trend that has been going on for decades) . The fact is, most human labor is already not needed for use to live near to our current standard of living. Bertrand Russel pointed this out in that 1932 essay: "Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one. This was made obvious during the War. At that time all the men in the armed forces, all the men and women engaged in the produc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... ... The Siberian grain-silo house was the first system in which Fuller noted the "dome effect." Many installations have reported that a dome induces a local vertical heat-driven vortex that sucks cooler air downward into a dome if the dome is vented properly (a single overhead vent, and peripheral vents). Fuller adapted the later units of the grain-silo house to use this effect."
"The Dymaxion was completed in 1930 after two years of development, and redesigned in 1945. Buckminster Fuller wanted to mass-produce a bathroom and a house. His first "Dymaxion" design was based on the design of a grain bin.
Internally, I like the radial design of the server clusters around the central networking core to reduce and make consistent network physical travel paths within the system.
Good question... Maybe the roof is sloped?
BTW, I just saw this old article which suggests Assange has a "sunlamp", but as in my other comments, I can wonder if it is good enough for adequate vitamin D production?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
"The fugitive has just a sunlamp, a running machine and internet connection in the threadbare room inside the ground-floor apartment in Knightsbridge."
A comment here suggests Ecuador only rents a few offices from the Columbian embassy, so maybe they don't control enough contiguous space to get Assange to the roof?
http://www.talkleft.com/story/...
"They are saying the Assange hasn't seen light since he got there, so I assume no roof access, and judging from the vehicle traffic, it doesn't even appear to have a garage. He's sleeping on an air mattress in someone's office. I can't find the link, but I read that Ecuador only occupies a couple offices in the building, basically renting space from the Colombian embassy."
And:
http://boards.straightdope.com...
"The "B" implies that the embassy occupies one of the floors, not the entirety of number 3. Which floor depends on how they are labelling them. The usual way in the UK would be for the ground floor to be plain "3", then the next floor up "3A" etc. Now, it looks like this building has a mews level, so who knows, it may just be the one floor above ground level, rather than the second."
So, it seems possible the Ecuadoran embassy subpart of the building has no roof access.
Perhaps his lamp put out mostly UV-A (which tans and burns) instead of UV-B which produces vitamin D? See my other posts in this thread on the difference. But too much of almost anything can be a bad thing.
As you say, it sounds like, short of being smuggled to another country in a diplomatic courier bag, Assange can't avoid facing charges if he leaves the embassy. I don't see what leverage by Ecuador could cause the UK to relent.
Of course, in "real life", people also may just make up stuff for various reasons:
http://www.detainedbyus.org/th...
"In an effort to capture enemy combatants during the War on Terror the United States implemented a bounty program offering monetary rewards for information on, or the surrender of, possible enemy combatants. The bounty system has been beneficial in bringing forward actionable information against enemy combatants because it has functioned as a strong motivator, but that may also have led to the detention of innocent civilians at both Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Airbase. Turning over individuals to U.S. troops was a lucrative business venture for bounty hunters, the Pakistani and Afghan governments, and civilian reward seekers who could convince the U.S. that the person they had captured or were making accusations against, was connected to Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or another terrorist group."
Here is another article that mentions Vitamin D and Assange:
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
"It had been reported earlier that he is suffering from arrhythmia (abnormal heart beats), high blood pressure and other health problems associated with a lack of Vitamin D, after his not being exposed to sunlight for that length of time, and that he would need to leave the embassy to go to hospital."
Granted, it might be a "BS" excuse, as you suggest. Nonetheless, I still think it is possible he is not supplementing adequately given a too low RDA and also, perhaps, using the wrong UV sunlamps? There is so much misinformation out there about Vitamin D.
The good news is, more and more people in the UK are coming to understand the connection between Vitamin D deficiency and illness. Could it even contribute to some Middle Eastern (or US/UK) extremism? ... Dr John McGrath, international expert in schizophrenia based at the University of Queensland, Australia, says the evidence suggests that sun exposure in pregnancy and early life protects against schizophrenia and "raises the tantalising prospect that optimising vitamin D status during pregnancy may lead to the primary prevention of the disease". ...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea...
"A deficiency in this crucial vitamin, thanks to our increasingly indoor lifestyles, is already blamed for the reappearance of rickets, the painful and deforming bone disease in children, in the UK. But gradually, evidence is emerging that links low vitamin D levels to a rise in a whole host of "modern" diseases, some of which were virtually unheard of in the pre-industrial era.
Could lack of vitamin D in pregnancy also explain autism? The latest evidence suggests that a low vitamin D level in the mother's body during pregnancy may induce her immune system to make antibodies which can damage the baby's brain, as well as causing certain genes to malfunction. Last month, Rhonda Patrick and Bruce Ames from the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, in California, published research findings that these genes normally make the chemical serotonin. Too little of this neurotransmitter is associated with abnormal social behaviour while too much in the digestive tract causes sensitivity to foods which may explain some autistic children's difficult eating habits.
Neat info, thanks! The weblink did not work for me with a "forbidden" error, BTW, but I get the idea. Interesting about the different spectrums for different areas. I did not realize LED lighting systems were becoming so configurable.
Because we have electric heat, I've also thought about doing indoor agriculture with my own kid during the winter with tomatoes, lettuce, and such -- since the cost of electricity for lighting would be essentially free as it just displaces electric heat. A few things that have stopped me are:
* the space it would take up
* equipment costs
* concerns about indoor humidity and mold
* worries about getting on some list related to indoors growers, as in:
http://www.infowars.com/police...
"Apparently Americans who employ hydroponics are the newest targets in an insane "drug war" that has gone from bad to ludicrous since it was first "declared" in the early 1980s."
Instead I sometimes grow bean sprouts which don't take light. But it still bothers me that I could be getting more use out of that electricity before it become heat. I've also though it might be useful to use the electricity to run computers in the winter first and get heat as the byproduct -- too bad I did not mine BitCoin with that power when it was easy.
To support your point: http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...
"In a touching Medium post a few days ago, the writer and programmer Paul Ford shared what he thinks is the secret to his politeness. In conversations with new acquaintances, Ford asks plenty of questions and lets the other person do the talking. He tries not to ask what they do for a living, but if it comes to that, he responds to their job description--whatever it is--with, "Wow. That sounds hard."
"Nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult," he writes. He describes how this process once worked with a woman whose work is not something most people would consider taxing:..."
Also cited here: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Interesting DIY! Do the bulbs you use just put out UV-B and minimize UV-A? Something on the difference regarding vitamin D production vs. skin damage:
General: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
http://articles.mercola.com/si...
http://articles.mercola.com/si...
One point made by Mercola is that it could take 48 hours for the body to absorb vitamin D produced in skin oils from sun exposure, so bathing with soap become problematical if you want maximum Vitamin D? People in other times and cultures both generally got lots more sunlight and did not bathe very often.
Here is a comment suggesting looking into special UV-B enhanced bulbs available for reptile care, but I wonder if they are enhanced enough to be the best choice for humans, given it seems many reptiles need UV-A to see colors correctly?
http://www.dailypaul.com/24584...
Some interesting SAD-and-light-color related comment here:
http://www.instructables.com/i...
My wife found vitamin D supplements are more effective than a blue LED SAD light...
Anyway, I've been learning some new stuff while re-exploring this topic. I usually take a vitamin D supplement. I get some sunshine when I can, but since I take a shower every day, I wonder if the sunlight is really that effective for vitamin D production? Still, as above, like Dr. John Cannell talks about, I wonder if there is still something missing that my skin might produce from real sun exposure.
Still, there remain many unknowns about human health, so would getting only UV-B (which makes vitamin D) and no UV-A (which tans the skin) be health promoting for humans? The human body is adapted to a certain environment which includes exercise in the sunlight. When we change our environment to one that seems better but is less natural, it is hard to know what we may lose out on. The same is true when we eat foods that may seem more enjoyable like with lots of sugar, fat, and salt via refined grains, but may leave us missing out on micronutrients and fiber that we need to stay healthy.
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
Assange may well not be around for much longer without access to sunlight or at least supplementing with vitamin D. The article says: "Asked about his health, Assange said anyone would be affected by spending two years in a building with no outside areas or direct sunlight, a complaint he has made several times before."
According to these, he probably needs on the order of 2000-5000 IU Vitamin D3 daily as supplements:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
He might need more for a while to catch up if he is already severely vitamin D deficient. The US RDA for vitamin D for most adults is about 5X-10X too low, so generally you don't get enough from food. Many indoor workers are vitamin D deficient these days, given we usually work, play, and commute inside something with windows that block UV-B radiation. Our carpets maybe won't fade from filtered sunlight, but our health will.
However, we don't know all the compounds that the human skin makes in response to sunlight. He might want to look into using special purpose UV-B lamps as well. Mercola talks about that:
http://articles.mercola.com/si...
There are some rare health conditions like sarcoidosis that make vitamin D supplements problematical, so if he has any special health issues like that, he should talk to a knowledgeable doctor before supplementing.
Great dynamic analysis of engineering social systems! For ways around this via skunkworks development, see William L. Livingston's writings, like "Have Fun At Work":
http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun...
From a review: ... ...
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipm...
"It is dangerous, and often fruitless, to try and solve problems without considering the underlying social system.
This is the message of William L. Livingston, a mechanical engineer with over 100 patents and decades of industrial experience. Several books and a newsletter detail his disturbing but important worldview.
``Have Fun at Work'' (1988, ISBN 0-937063-05-3, $24.95) is the basic work.
The book sketches a different social structure that is better equipped to cope with complexity: the Skunkworks. The term comes from a legendary aircraft development shop that produced the U-2 and Blackbird aircraft. In general, a Skunkworks is a small (3--5) team of battle-hardened, generalist engineers equipped with the latest in software tools for simulating the behavior of all the involved systems (mechanical, electrical, software, and social).
On a purely practical level, this book is an excellent survival manual for results-oriented engineers who have developed attitude problems about the structural barriers to success in their work environments. Livingston discusses how to evaluate your social structure's potential for success, ways to get working projects out the door in spite of these barriers, and how to tell when you're wasting your time even working there.
Livingston's more recent work, ``Friends in High Places'' (1990, ISBN 0-937063-06-1, $28.50), spends less time discussing organizational pathologies and more time discussing the Skunkworks procedure. It is a somewhat more positive, less bitter work than ``Have Fun at Work.''"
I also think free and open source collaborations via "stigmergy" are another way around this, where people collaborate by adding to a shared digital artifact.
http://p2pfoundation.net/Stigm...
"3. Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output.
4. Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy. "
Even at IBM Research, technologies like the Jikes Java compiler only got picked up by other groups because they were made open source. Otherwise the organizational barriers within a big organization like IBM would be too strong to use the tools. That was something mentioned somewhere by one of the authors as the biggest surprise of open sourcing Jikes, that other IBMers suddenly were using it.
http://jikes.sourceforge.net/
By contrast, back aound the same time Jikes went open source, I desperately wanted to try IBM's embedded Smalltalk (acquired from OTI) in a research project at IBM instead of using VxWorks for the portable IBM Personal Speech Assistant (a handheld speech recognizer and TTS system as a coprocesser to a Palm Pilot, a forerunner in a way to Siri and Google Voice). That other group said I would need to come up with about US$200,000+ worth of funding to their team before they would make their code available for use even just inside IBM, claiming they would have to dedicate a support person to it. Sadly, that was not feasible; I was only a contractor, and this was my own idea because I loved Smalltalk. So that technology did not get used at all in that project. Too bad for that group, because the then IBM chairman Lou Gerstner asked for one of the devices for his office to show people -- and wouldn't it have been nice for that IBM group if their technology had been used instead of or in addition to VxWorks?
If IBM/OTI Embedded Small
Thanks for the amusingly accurate XKCD link and insightful game comparison! I agree. However, it can be tricky to get a good game balance and have a good "microworld" framework for open-ended exploration. KSP pulls it off, whereas, say, our FOSS garden simulator from around 1997 does not.
http://www.gardenwithinsight.c...
That gardening simulator was written in part as a first step towards a space habitat simulator -- since you need to grow food even in space. Unfortunately, funding it ourselves for years (much of the living expenses for that work funded crazily on credit cards which took many years of doing unrelated work afterwards to repay), we had to triage out many of the open-ended interesting parts of gardening to get the first version done. We emphasized scientific accuracy as far as we could, which probably was a mistake compared to starting with simpler models. My wife and I both had been in a graduate program in ecology an evolution, so we has an academic bias. After the first version, we did not have time and resources to revisit it. We had hopes and sketches back then for activities like canning your own food, "survival" gardening where you had to grow enough calories or starve, interactions with neighbors, a virtual computer in the simulation where you did garden planning and looked up gardening info, and so on. A few vestiges of those remain, like the simulation being able to provide a calorie count of what you harvest. The open ended parts like designing your own tools, soil amendments, and plants were not that engaging in how they were implemented. By contrast, the "Harvest Moon" video game series emphasized fun parts of gardening for most people (like interactions with neighbors), although they lacked the science. It can be hard to bring that all together.
Here was a related (unfunded) NSF pre-proposal from 1997 for a second version of the garden simulator (never made) emphasizing creating an open-ended FOSS modeling environment for gardening-related models, but even that probably would not have been that much fun for most people even if it might have transformed the field of agricultural simulation:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The usual outcome of an effort such as ours is a commercially distributed software product with proprietary source code. However, research continues on modeling of soil processes and plant growth, and this product will soon fall out of step. A proprietary program may be a bridge, but no one can walk across it. By making the model source code available, we will bring scientists out from their side of the bridge to interact with the models, while at the other end of the bridge the general public will step out by changing the models themselves."
But that was before I understood "the Big Crunch" like Dr. David Goodstein talks about and how hard it was to get grant money of any sort: ... By now, in the 1990's, the situation has changed dramatically. With the Cold War over, National Security is rapidly losing its appeal as a means of generating support for scientific research. There are those who argue that research is essential for our economic future, but the managers of the economy know better. The great corporations have decided that central research laboratories were not such a good idea after all. Many of the national laboratories have lost their missions and have not found new ones. The economy has gradually transformed from manufacturing to service,
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"The period 1950-1970 was a true golden age for American science. Young Ph.D's could choose among excellent jobs, and anyone with a decent scientific idea could be sure of getting funds to pursue it. The impressive successes of scientific projects during the Second World War had paved the way for the federal government to assume responsibility for the support of basic research.
Posted the below to: http://ibiblio.org/pjones/blog...
---
For all that, here is a recent Atlantic article and related slashdot discussion on why email is not going anywhere, which makes much the same points as I have here previously (email is decentralized, standards-based, non-proprietary, interoperable, ubiquitous, extensible, mobile-friendly, etc.):
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
I'd agree it would be good to have something even better than email (a social semantic desktop?), but closed-source proprietary centralized walled garden solutions like you repeatedly profer don't seem like a general improvement. And what do you do if these platforms close up shop? Why notfigure out how to build something better for knowledge exchange on email or other open web standards? Still, WordPress with Akismet is an excellent platform for exchanging knowledge -- but it still relies usually in practice on email for push notifications.
Ultimately, what are your "requirements" for a better platform?
Amazing point! And further, work done by NASA is public domain, but work done by hired contractors is generally proprietary. I spoke with someone at NASA at an SSI conference who said NASA had a difficult time making realistic simulations of things like the space shuttle or space station because the contracts specified they would receive blueprints, not CAD files, and the contractors would not release the CAD files, so NASA had to reverse engineer them from blueprints. That is one story that inspired me to write essays like these on why government funded and charitably funded works (even in part) need to be released under free licenses: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-f...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/open...
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research.
Even in the 1980s, I met an ex-NASA person who was somewhat disgusted by the fact that when he worked at NASA, he wanted to design and build stuff, but ended up having to manage contractors instead (and said that was most of what people at NASA did). That is one reason working at NASA sounded like a not so good idea if you actually were interested in creating new technology for supporting human life in space.
I can still dream of working at NASA developing simulations of life in space and releasing all the code and content in the public domain. I talked with Al Globus at NASA about such ideas around 2000 (in relation to my OSCOMAK proposal and his own supervision of NASA's educational efforts related to a space settlement/habitat contest), and he had some good suggestions about game-like aspects for a simulation of living off the land in space, but the ideas went nowhere back then. But at least, a decade later, we now have the proprietary programs of Kerbal Space Program and Space Engineers (and to a lesser extent MineCraft/InfiniMiner). In some ways, those simulation programs may be doing more for the development of space in terms of inspiring the next generation and teaching skills of design and cooperation than the last couple decades of NASA efforts involving real hardware (as important as they may be)?
Still, NASA has supported some educational simulations, like MoonBase Alpha, but is seems proprietary?
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ed...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"Moonbase Alpha is a video game that provides a realistic simulation of life on a natural satellite based on potential moon base programs. It was made by the Army Game Studio, developers of America's Army, and Virtual Heroes, Inc. in conjunction with NASA Learning Technologies. The game was released on July 6, 2010, as a free download on Steam.[2] At the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference in 2010, the games won the top honors in the government category of the Serious Game Showcase & Challenge.[3]"
But it looks proprietary even though NASA funded it, because I don;t see a free license for the source and content, even if it is "free to play"?
Looks like NASA is supporting other stuff, but again, proprietary stuff developed outside of NASA itself by contractors?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"Starlite (formerly associated with Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond) is the title of a multiplayer online game which as of November 25, 2009, is being
tl;dr Employing robots and AIs overall to do almost *anything* may soon be cheaper than employing most humans, similar to how we junk old computers because they use too much power per MIP even when they still "work". Also, the demand for market-supplied goods and services is limited as people move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and want to do more things for themselves and want to do creative things of a (generally) less materially-intensive nature. Thus mainstream capitalism is about to face divide-by-zero errors.
=== Two key assumptions of mainstream capitalist economics
Your insightful comment really gets at the heart of the controversy (from a mainstream economics viewpoint) and so deserves a significant response. I agree that we can see many of the material aspects of US society today as a "victory for automation". Still, as your post implies, mainstream economics includes two assumptions, and if either of these assumptions becomes false, mainstream economics will falter (although it may press on anyway at the cost of great human suffering).
These two assumptions are:
1. The assumption that most human labor will always have significant exchange value in the market regardless of advances in AI, robotics, and other automation (as well as other trends like voluntary social networks, accumulation of infrastructure and know-how, cheap energy like from fusion power, and so on). Significant means at least enough value to purchase at least the bare minimum to survive (given almost all the land has been privatized or otherwise enclosed preventing subsistence through hunting, gathering, and gardening). Further there is the assumption nowadays that the exchange value of labor in the USA by most people willing and able to work is high enough for more than subsistence to achieve at least a "middle class" US life or better.
2. The assumption that demand for goods and services is infinite for any given population (or at least demand grows faster than supply over the long term), thus ensuring there is always a need for more labor no matter how much automation can meet previous demands. There is also the assumption this excess demand for goods and services beyond supply will be great enough to prevent a race to the bottom in wages through competition regarding supply and demand of human labor. In short, without major government intervention like a basic income, a capitalist system as we know it needs to continually expand to be viable for human survival if most humans require employment to survive.
Let's see if either of those assumptions can be debunked. It only takes debunking one to show how mainstream economics is failing in the 21st century. Debunking either would mean there would be zero wages for most humans or zero new net demand, and some mainstream economic equations will blow up with divide-by-zero errors in such a case.
== Assumption 1: Most human labor will always have market-place value
Debunking the first assumption about human labor always having significant exchange value is what the video is mostly about. And it is enough to invalidate mainstream economics as we know it in the USA. A similar point was made in "The Triple Revolution Memorandum" from 1964, although for various reasons I mention on my site was ahead of its time in its predictions. As an analogy, many Slashdotters have older computer around they don't use anymore. Those older computers are generally turned off because compared to later computers, they are slower, are noisier, consume more power per MIP, can't be updated for newer security threats, have limited memory, may have more complex UIs or maintenance procedures, and so on. It is easier in most cases to just run VirtualBox on a multi-core machine with a task-specific VM or to use small cheap recent dedicated hardware for functions like routing or firewalls or file serving. Or Slashdotters might just do more with cloud computing that others maintain. The CGP Grey video is about the trend towards most humans becoming like old computers as far as employa
More an this topic. There is also perhaps an issue with labeling people "trolls" or "bullies". Most people can and will act differently in different contexts. There is also a continuum of human behavior all people engage in. In the case of "bullying", it is fairly human for people to banter back and forth and insult each other in what might generally be seen as healthy relationships (as Izzy Kalman suggests). So, bans on all perceived insults in a classroom or workspace may actually be counterproductive by ramping up the stress of the situations when they do happen for whatever reason.
And it is all too easy to call an unpopular opinion a troll. Also, for the person responding to the "troll", it is hard to know sometimes when some person saying a rude thing or clueless thing or factually incorrect thing might benefit from a response. Or even to say someone has an agenda when they maybe just made a mistake; a recent example of that:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/c...
I do feel we need better tools for online discussions though, including being able to tag message after-the-fact by crowdsourcing like Slashdot does. Here is one of many posts I've mode on that, this one when in 2010 someone reposted an email Adrian Bowyer wrote when he unsubscribed from the RepRap list:
https://groups.google.com/foru...
Still, there are no doubt people out there at any given time trying to hurt others or do shocking things purely for the shock value for whatever reason. It is hard to know what to do with the worst sort of trolling, as mentioned by someone else in another comment:
"Robin William' daughter gives up social media due to abusive messages"
http://www.japantoday.com/cate...
Such really awful messages probably comes in part out of the fact that the internet deprives people of social cues that would happen in face-to-face interactions. See also on progressive desensitization:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is a non-fiction book by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, first published in 2007. It deals with cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and other cognitive biases, using these psychological theories to illustrate how the perpetrators (and victims) of hurtful acts justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes become polarized."
AC wrote: "It's not as much a problem of trolls as it is a problem of people being incapable of simply filtering out stuff on the Internet, ..."
That is much the same message as Izzy Kalman has about how to deal with most bullies (who are driven by seeing the victim's reactions):
http://bullies2buddies.com/
AC wrote: "Based on what I've seen, I just assume that the AI from that Eagle Eye movie has taken over the NSA. Why else would they want to collect a mountain of data that no "person" is going to access?"
Hadn't know of that movie; thanks for mentioning it (partial spoiler below): ... Both groups learn that after ARIIA's recommendation was ignored and a botched operation in Balochistan resulted in the deaths of American citizens, ARIIA concluded that "to prevent more bloodshed, the executive branch must be removed." Acting on behalf of "We the People", and citing the Declaration of Independence ("whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it"), ARIIA is acting in compliance with Section 216 of the Patriot Act which "allows us to circumvent probable cause in the face of a national security threat, in this case, the chain of command itself." ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
"Ethan monitored the DOD's top secret intelligence-gathering supercomputer, the Autonomous Reconnaissance Intelligence Integration Analyst (ARIIA).
Another related story I first saw mentioned on slashdot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"Despite the Humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids."
Although aspects of our current social systems are heading that way with or without AI anyway... Example:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
"We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats."
See also Marshall Brain's "Manna" sci-fi story about computer systems taking over. James P. Hogan goes into that in his sci-fi novel "Two Faces of Tomorrow". Two episodes of Eureka have Carter's Smart House take over, one of those times in order to prevent injuries, which includes mentally reprogramming people who might disagree with it.
http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/H...
http://eureka.wikia.com/wiki/L...
Around 1984, I sat in on an undergrad course by Stephen Cohen in Soviet Politics. After one class where he mentioned the potential liberating power of personal computers in a USSR where every typewriter was licensed and every photocopier guarded, I suggested that ultimately personal computers could analyze what people wrote on them, looking for keywords, and report on the user. I had not envisioned networks doing that which is more what we actually got, but the effect is much the same given almost anything significant related to social change is done by communicating groups of people. Back to the point through, you don't really need need AIs to analyze massive data looking for keywords or phrases or to make statistical inferences about patterns of writings or commercial transactions. AIs might be useful, but regular software can do much of that already. You also don't have to flag everything to have a massive chilling effect that upholds the status quo.
But surveillance is still a different point than
The article says: "Viv could provide all those services -- in exchange for a cut of the transactions that resulted."
We seriously need to rethink our economics for a world of abundance and AI and robotics before we get crazier and crazier AIs driven by the profit motive than the out-of-control corporate "AIs" already stomping all over the planet and the people who live there. See also my comment here in 2000:
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
"And, as the story "Colossus: The Forbin Project" shows, all it takes for a smart computer to run the world is control of a (nuclear) arsenal. And, as the novel "The Great Time Machine Hoax" shows, all it takes for a computer to run an industrial empire and do its own research and development is a checking account and the ability to send letters, such as: "I am prepared to transfer $200,000 dollars to your bank account if you make the following modifications to a computer at this location...". So robot manipulators are not needed for an AI to run the world to its satisfaction -- just a bank account and email. "
See also the 1950s sci-fi movie "The Invisible Boy" for a malevolent AI that provides just a few key pieces of biased advise that let it almost take over the world. Of course, we already have Fox News... Thank goodness Robby the Robot's emotions save the day in at least the movie...