That's probably a bad driver. Drivers can keep their configuration only in the registry, and that registry rarely, if ever, gets cleaned during reinstall of the driver. If those registry settings are wrong, and the driver doesn't check, then it may fail. It's possible to delete the keys manually, but it's not easy to find them.
I agree that a laptop is likely to see more plug/unplug events than a desktop, just because that's how it is used. But even then a desktop sees hotplug events on every power up and down. However those devices don't move between ports, whereas in a laptop that is likely, and as I said a driver can get confused. I think MS designed it poorly - there is no reason for a driver to reinstall itself if a device is plugged into a different port. That might have been a reasonable idea on PCI, but a mighty dumb one on USB.
Oh and I'm guessing you don't have to deal with plugging in a load of peripherals every time you sit down with your laptop. If you did you might have noticed how often something doesn't work right and you lose half an hour sorting it out
I have right now about a dozen devices connected to this laptop - two USB hubs included. They all work, and I'd be surprised if they wouldn't. It's the same hardware and the same software as in a desktop, only assembled on a different PCB and with bundled peripherals. There is no magic.
It would be easier, actually, to do better QA on a laptop because it has only one m/board. Desktops may be sold with different m/boards, and even the same one can have several revisions that the desktop assembler doesn't know about. A laptop manufacturer, OTOH, makes their own m/boards and always knows what they are selling.
Well, I should have typed "ethernet" but there are plenty of excuses anyway - nobody stops you from running TCP/IP over AX.25 from your laptop to your browser, over 9600 bps RS232:-) Ethernet is so limiting:-)
Some homes are very hard to install cables in, unless they are already in walls. You may need to do some demolition to pull the cables through corners and around obstacles. This house has *some* Ethernet wiring, and this laptop is connected to the router through two switches, all wired. But my other computer, Samsung Q1, is connected wirelessly. The main reason for that is the cable is just too ugly, and it's inconvenient to use a handheld tablet with a bunch of thick wires connected to it.
But the main laptop (this one) is wired. I tried wireless too, and found that it's not as reliable. Also I do streaming video from my own cameras (on the local network) and their traffic can be too much for 802.11 links.
I don't see any reason to connect a stationary system to a wireless network
Your home may not have wired Internet at all. There may be only one shared AP somewhere in or near the building. Another reason would be to allow your other mobile devices to connect to your PC, and through it to the wired Internet (in essence running an AP.)
Reverse that funding ratio and over the next 50 years you'll get densely populated cities with heavily utilised mass transit
You sound like "densely populated cities" is something good. In those cities people live in tiny cells stacked one on top of another, have hardly any privacy, step on each other's toes whenever they venture out of their apartments, and see trees only in old photos. The air quality in cities is also awful.
The US cities are what they are because people like to live this way - in low density areas, in their own homes, with plenty of trees, on quiet streets. The highways were built because people wanted them, because they fulfilled a clear and obvious function. Ask a city-dwelling European if he's like to move from his 30 sq.m. apartment on 17th floor in the urban jungle to a private home, with garage and a small garden, a few miles outside of the city, and with nice highways to it too.
wouldn't they still require energy equivalent to the difference in acceleration? For example, if we could make antigravs, the energy needed to cancel out gravity would equal the energy needed to overcome it in the first place?
A common spring can hold an item suspended against forces of gravity, and springs don't require batteries. Another example is the levitating magnet.
Arguably, yes, bottom of the ocean may be as dangerous and as inhospitable as space. But it's a lot easier to get to, and a lot less expensive.
If you saw ROV feeds from BP, it's eternal night at mere 5000', temperature near freezing, hardly any life, and soft silt hundreds of feet deep. Humans can't just don a spacesuit and walk there, they need a robot or a very expensive submarine. Space is easier to work with, even though it's harder to get there. Also space is more natural for humans, and there is more to do there. There isn't much to do at the bottom of an ocean. You can't have any industry there; vacuum is far better than water. If your pressurized vehicle develops a leak in vacuum you can stop it with a chewing gum. If the same happens deep under water, that thin stream of water will slice you in two.
Okay, let's say Toyota does that. It costs something close to $0 to produce a car now. Great. Toyota has competitors. Either they also automate, or they go out of business. Let's say they automate. Competition drives the price of a new car to... something close to zero.
Your last words there are where the problem is. "close to zero" just doesn't happen. There is a term for that, "race to the bottom" and you can't win it. If the market wants to lower the price below what you, the manufacturer, consider reasonable, you simply stop producing, thus introducing artificial scarcity. Example: De Beers and its diamonds. Example: Jewelry. Example: cell phones, plans and airtime. The cell phones are a great example, by the way, because the cellular network is already ran by robots. Humans can't even run it physically; they only can service it when required. And so what do we get out of those cell towers on every corner? We get plans that become more and more expensive every year, even though you'd expect a basic phone plan to be nearly free now.
The shareholders make normal profits, [...] and cars are ultra-cheap.
The shareholders can't make normal profits if each car is sold for 1% of what it was sold before. That would require selling 100x more cars, and that is not very likely. There isn't even space on our roads for so many new cars, even if people decide to hoard them. More than one SciFi writer introduced the concept of planned obsolescence, with products that have built-in timers in them and fail right on schedule, forcing you to go out and buy a replacement. Cars last a long time, so far; and if you start recycling them faster... Earth, however large it is, is not infinite.
every car worker needs a new job [...]
Yes, that's the sticky point, isn't it?:-) The rest of your comment I could have written myself:-) There is only one catch:
It would work, unlike communism in the USSR, because in this (far-distant future) scenario, there really is no scarcity left.
I can only reiterate that though every person in that society will be adequately fed and housed, the society will rot. This is exactly what happened in the USSR, even though they haven't yet achieved Communism. In that new society of yours you will be told that your work is not needed, you are not wanted, and unless you want to amuse your friends by your art and music (which robots don't provide, so far) you should go to your room, lock the door, and don't get out until you die. But you will be fed in your room for however many decades it takes you to die. You are not needed, and your work is not appreciated.
The closest approximation of that society is in "The City and the Stars". But note that citizens of that city were modified at each rebirth to make them docile and to keep them within the walls. Only a few people were given special traits, and the book is about them. But the rest, as you recall, are pretty pathetic creatures, with no will to even leave the city and see what's outside. The best they can imagine is to make some paintings and set them outside for other people to look at. (And then a wandering holographic dragon eats them, of course:-) No modern human can exist in such a prison, but that's exactly the world that we will get if robots do everything.
Well, when it gets to the point that very little human labor or entrepreneurship is necessary in creating goods, we will almost be at a point where economics basically doesn't apply anymore, because everything will be near-free.
That's just a fiction, and it depends on robots that are mutually owned by everyone. A large leap of faith is required to get there from here. Since the society changes slowly, we can presume existence of all kinds of transitional forms.
For example, let's posit that Toyota fully robotized its factories, from energy production to mining to smelting to manufacturing. Even all dealerships are robotted by robots. The CEO of Toyota is a computer. Great. The labor costs to make one car are zero; let's assume that robots don't wear out, and that Japanese taxes are out of the equation.
Once that wonderful car factory is built, it's still owned by a few shareholders - all of them humans. Do you think the board will decide to give cars away just because it costs them nothing to produce? (assume that competition is in the same boat.) Imagine ex-Toyota worker who was assembling cars for decades, and he is now fired. He goes to the dealership and tells the robot there that he has no money, and no prospects of getting any, but he wants a car. What do you think will happen?
About engineers. This all-new factory needs engineers. How many? Not too many; perhaps one per 1,000 robots. There are many engineers on the planet, but Toyota needs only a few. Do you think they will be overpaid, if for every one there are 100 standing in line at the HR office? And even if that engineer is indeed overpaid (say, getting $250K/yr on today's pay scale) how many other people this salary can sustain? Maybe five, if he spends it all. That's not a sufficient ratio.
So the point is, as long as humans are involved you will get problems. Penniless people are not a market; they will be seen as a human waste, ready for the Dipple:
To the south was the Dipple, a collection of utilitarian, stark, unattractive housing. To live there was a badge of inferiority. A man from the Dipple had three choices for a cloudy future. He could try to exist without subcitizenship and a work permit, haunting the Casual Labor Center to compete with too many of his fellows for the very limited crumbs of employment; he could somehow raise the stiff entrance fee and buy his way into the strictly illegal but flourishing and perilous Thieves' Guild; or he could sign on as contract labor and be shipped off world in deep freeze with no beforehand knowledge of his destination or work.
Again, the problem is that in a highly roboticized society very few humans would be able to offer valuable services. Most would be simply irrelevant. One solution to that is that the society owns robots, all of them, and everyone benefits from them equally or however it pleases them. That is generally known as Communism. There is nothing really wrong with that, except that it had been attempted, and it doesn't work. Even its earlier phase, Socialism, results in decay of the society because that's what people do when they don't have to work for a piece of bread. You can find plenty of examples in the USA of what happens when too many idle hands are concentrated in some "inner cities." USSR attempted to build a "new human" and failed; but without that new human, who is all gentle, kind and thoughtful, you can't have your Communism, unless roaming gangs of killers on motorcycles is one of your preferences. So far every single society that was attempted proved that a human *must* work hard to stay sane. And if someone doesn't want to work hard he must be forced to do so, through the law (USSR) or physical needs (USA).
To summarize, introduction of a large number of community-owned robots into the economy would be identical to placing everyone on social security and food stamps. And we know very well how that works and what results can be expected.
High-tech cheaters can get away by standing in front of the system and using a special set-up to project a different image inside the camera.
Or, to put it simply, by wearing a mask. If a voice is involved, a simple DSP box will convert your speech to the natural range of the target voice. The stupid computer won't be able to do much else with the audio. Of course if the voice exchange is not a challenge-response but a mere password then any voice recorder will do.
That's OK, you are not alone who missed the "a typical US city" phrase that I used twice in my original comment:-) My opinion applies only to the USA and Canada, countries that I know something about. I have never been to India or Singapore or China or Japan, and can't say anything about their mass transit. Even some US cities (like NYC) make good use of mass transit, by the way - when there are plenty of riders and well-established transit patterns.
It doesn't work well in rural areas, but even there you can have fairly reliable public transit without the need for cars.
Maybe in India that is so. The rural USA, where I travel frequently, has no public transit (and no taxis either.) A farmer or a rancher already owns a few vehicles just to service his farm, feed cows, etc. - and if those vehicles are available then who would even want to pay big bucks for a trip to the nearest city? Note that some of those properties are huge, and so are the distances between any two points that you want to travel between. A couple of weeks ago I was on a ranch that is 10 miles from the nearest food store (or any other store that you can imagine.) It's 10 minutes in a car, and infinitely long on a bus (because there are no buses.) Some ranches are up to 40 miles away from towns. Even if a bus is present, it would take forever to get to town; and once in town you want to buy half a ton of stuff so that you don't have to go there every other day... but that half a ton of stuff won't fit into the bus, and you can't carry it in your hands anyway.
How is saying "give me a raise or replace me with at least two other people" pseudo-blackmail?
You think the company will save time or money by firing him and then bringing two new guys up to speed for a much higher combined salary?
It is possible that the company will have no choice but to let him go and hire whatever replacements are needed. This will happen if he loses trust of his boss. Most companies would really like an employee who is happy, but will be OK with an employee who is just doing his job. But it is dangerous to keep a disgruntled employee, for many obvious reasons. It all depends, of course, on what the guy tells his boss and how they discuss it all. But even if the boss doesn't see the guy as disgruntled, the boss clearly understands that the employee will be looking for a job elsewhere, and thus a replacement is needed. After that it's merely a race between the employee quitting and the boss finding a replacement.
Of course my other thought is that I'd much rather go back to writing and working with marketing than getting back into IT.
If that's what you really want, then that's what you should be working toward. IT is a thankless, 24/7 routine where you do well if nothing happens; and since nothing happens there is sometimes a belief of some managers that you aren't really doing anything. Writing and working with marketing is far better in this aspect (and in many others.) Besides, if you become a reluctant IT guy you will eventually lose your writing skills; you won't be marketable for what you love to do, and you won't be a great IT guy either. You need experience in your chosen field if you want to develop professionally, and if you don't want a career in IT then don't go for it. If the company doesn't want you any more in the writing/marketing position then look for another job before it's too late.
Just be careful about divide-by-zero calculations....
The math in the mpg meter code is correct. Only the instantaneous efficiency can be infinite (if the ICE never started in the 5 minutes that correspond to one bar.) The meter code doesn't, of course, try to average infinity.
It doesn't give you more in the city - it may give you more compared to other cars
This only proves that you don't own a Prius; perhaps those who own one know better? Prius does have a better fuel efficiency in dense, slow traffic. You can easily see 100 mpg bars on the meter, and that is because the car is running only on electric power. I saw one such bar just yesterday; typically if the traffic is bad the efficiency is about 70-75 mpg. The purely electric drive is limited to speeds up to 42 mph.
The Prius is crap compared to some old cars too - the citroen AX diesel could hit 100mpg... why can't we do at least similar now?
There are cars built by enthusiasts who are incredibly light and efficient. They are also impractical because they can't carry anything and accelerate like a snail. Prius is popular because it offers great fuel economy and at the same time is a medium size car that has plenty of power for 99% of users.
So we are thinking somehow that "cooperative" will work with 2000lb vehicles traveling on highways at over 60MPH/100KPH? Somehow I have a feeling that this will work out about as well as SMTP is working for us now.
Cooperation works for 200,000 lb vehicles (known as airplanes) - see TCAS for example.
Your complaints about unreliable cooperation involve people. People are unreliable. But machines can be as reliable as we build them to be. They certainly can be more reliable than people - machines don't get tired, don't lose attention, don't daydream. If you have a forward looking radar that keeps the distance to the car ahead, that radar will react faster than you when the car ahead starts braking. Furthermore, the radar will not slam on the brakes - it will be braking just enough to keep safe distance, and that means that the car behind has a better chance of not rear-ending your car.
I would suspect other places as well are finding mass transit is not the panacea the environmentalists make it out to be.
Mass transit doesn't work because there are no "masses" to transport.
In the old USSR there were buses going to and from industrial areas. So when people go to work they take those buses, and the buses are full, and the fuel economy is achieved, and it's inexpensive. Once the shifts at factories start, the buses start going less frequently, until the next batch of passengers is expected. This works because it is a highly point to point travel, from the nearest subway station (or bus transfer point) to the area's points of interest.
But a typical US city has no such points of interest that attract thousands of riders. If you map the travel routes you will see that people go from anywhere to anywhere. The fact that residential and industrial areas are randomly interleaved doesn't help either. No mass transit, short of personal computer-controlled taxis, can service such disorganized travelers. You'd need several transfers, and if you dare carrying stuff with you (like 10 grocery bags) you'd start swearing at the gods of the domain well before you get home.
Mass transit is doomed to be slow and backward way to travel just because it has to collect riders at many places. But no car owner will go to work by zigzagging through hundreds of residential streets and stopping at every minor intersection. Buses do that. Cars go straight to the nearest major road or a freeway, and proceed there, at 65 mph (minimum speed.)
There is another issue that is relevant to many US cities - safety from criminals. A car offers a pretty good protection. A bus offers zero protection, and there are many cases where buses become a crime scene. The bus driver is not going to protect you; he at best will report the crime to the overworked police, who may show up to collect your body. At worst the driver will ignore the crime - he is in the area every day, and he needs no trouble with locals. And of course once you are on the bus you can't ask the driver to skip the problematic area. In a car you never even get close to those areas.
There is nothing to maintain. Just replace the oil periodically, and tires as they wear out.
I'm sure an electric Hummer would beat your Prius in MPG eqv's (I've simulated it)
Any EV will beat any non-EV in MPG equivalent. However EVs that we have today are either underpowered, or have short range, or impossibly expensive, or all of the above. There is that Tesla Motors' EV that can beat most cars on the road today, it's just it costs $100K, and its Lithium batteries aren't going to take many recharge cycles - that's one maintenance chore that will empty your bank account in no time.
I use my car for relatively long trips (420 miles per day for the most recent one) and currently it takes me about 3 minutes to "recharge" the car at any gas station. I'll switch to an EV as soon as it gets just as good as a Prius in terms of range, power and cost - and can be recharged just as quickly.
I don't think a 5 year old Prius would be worse than a Hummer, but still it will be bad. Probably a lot worse than expected.
I don't know what the expectations are out there, but my 5-year old Prius gives me 52 mpg highway and even more in the city. I doubt a Hummer can beat that, unless you drop it from orbit:-)
Unless your income is based on intellectual property, then only the uncreative will starve.
There are plenty of uncreative people in the world, but I guess they have to die in the brave new world because robots would have no use of them. Also not every creative person gets to eat - writers, composers, sculptors, artists will have nothing to offer to the robots. Only engineers who can be of use to create newer and better robots will be allowed to live.
This scenario doesn't require sentient robots. It works just fine if someone owns a bunch of primitive robots; even a farmer will do. People who he used to hire in previous years aren't needed any more. The farmer could afford to feed them anyway, but will he? Most likely not.
Apparently the harnessing of energy is not automated, otherwise it would not be included in the price. Therefore, you work at a nuclear power plant and have the income necessary to buy food.
That is correct - to trade with robots you need to offer them something that they need. Unfortunately robots don't need most of what humans need or like to do. The future society will be populated exclusively by robots and human engineers - until the latter develop a robot that can do engineering. Then only robots will be left.
That's because even given the huge number of people employed by corporations it's an unbelievably rare event.
Not so rare, actually. It happened a few years ago at a company where I worked. But only few people knew, it was handled very quietly. So while you indeed may not hear much about suicides, they do occur. Japan is particularly affected, even though it is a wealthy country. Should we now blame Sony?
Foxconn's employees were not slaves; at any time they could walk out of the door and never be back. It might be true that it's hard for them to find another job, and so on - but it's hard to find a job in the USA too. Probably one of major reasons of those suicides is lack of will to live, and that is not necessarily related to salary or work conditions. Slaves in Greece, Rome and USA were working much harder, but I haven't read about them suiciding left and right. But there were rich and wealthy people in Rome who killed themselves just because "they were done here." So it's all in one's mind, and I'm willing to accept an external cause as valid only from someone on a torturer's rack or in a deathbed. For everyone else it's a deliberate decision to leave this world instead of struggling to get a better life. It may or may not be a wise decision, I'm not a judge of that; I only believe that they can't blame external circumstances on their choice.
Imagine a 100% automated economy. Robots produce food, and other robots repair those robots. You, a human, only need to pay for the energy that goes into that process. But since you are unemployed (robots do everything, remember) you don't have any money, however little it takes to buy food.
When you enter the working world, you have to use whatever operating system (or other equipment) your employer has arbitrarily chosen, and frequently you'll have to pay for your own equipment.
Only mechanics own their own tools. Not only companies don't require you to buy your own computer to do the company's work - they usually forbid that. If an employee is expected to work from home or road, he gets a company laptop with a VPN, full disk encryption and remote access for administration.
I think the Macbook is a great choice since it can run OSX, Windows, or several flavors of *ux, either with BootCamp or Parallels.
I'm sure that is a good cause for ${method_of_celebration} if you are a geek. But most students can't fiddle with any of that while they are trying to capture teacher's proof of some theorem. Money overpaid for a Mac will be just wasted. A student, IMO, doesn't need any computer, they are only a distraction (unless this is a programming class.) But if there is a decision to go ahead and require computers, then make sure that anyone with a Web browser can do everything the school needs. That would be just Google Docs, likely.
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That's probably a bad driver. Drivers can keep their configuration only in the registry, and that registry rarely, if ever, gets cleaned during reinstall of the driver. If those registry settings are wrong, and the driver doesn't check, then it may fail. It's possible to delete the keys manually, but it's not easy to find them.
I agree that a laptop is likely to see more plug/unplug events than a desktop, just because that's how it is used. But even then a desktop sees hotplug events on every power up and down. However those devices don't move between ports, whereas in a laptop that is likely, and as I said a driver can get confused. I think MS designed it poorly - there is no reason for a driver to reinstall itself if a device is plugged into a different port. That might have been a reasonable idea on PCI, but a mighty dumb one on USB.
Oh and I'm guessing you don't have to deal with plugging in a load of peripherals every time you sit down with your laptop. If you did you might have noticed how often something doesn't work right and you lose half an hour sorting it out
I have right now about a dozen devices connected to this laptop - two USB hubs included. They all work, and I'd be surprised if they wouldn't. It's the same hardware and the same software as in a desktop, only assembled on a different PCB and with bundled peripherals. There is no magic.
It would be easier, actually, to do better QA on a laptop because it has only one m/board. Desktops may be sold with different m/boards, and even the same one can have several revisions that the desktop assembler doesn't know about. A laptop manufacturer, OTOH, makes their own m/boards and always knows what they are selling.
Well, I should have typed "ethernet" but there are plenty of excuses anyway - nobody stops you from running TCP/IP over AX.25 from your laptop to your browser, over 9600 bps RS232 :-) Ethernet is so limiting :-)
Some homes are very hard to install cables in, unless they are already in walls. You may need to do some demolition to pull the cables through corners and around obstacles. This house has *some* Ethernet wiring, and this laptop is connected to the router through two switches, all wired. But my other computer, Samsung Q1, is connected wirelessly. The main reason for that is the cable is just too ugly, and it's inconvenient to use a handheld tablet with a bunch of thick wires connected to it.
But the main laptop (this one) is wired. I tried wireless too, and found that it's not as reliable. Also I do streaming video from my own cameras (on the local network) and their traffic can be too much for 802.11 links.
I don't see any reason to connect a stationary system to a wireless network
Your home may not have wired Internet at all. There may be only one shared AP somewhere in or near the building. Another reason would be to allow your other mobile devices to connect to your PC, and through it to the wired Internet (in essence running an AP.)
Reverse that funding ratio and over the next 50 years you'll get densely populated cities with heavily utilised mass transit
You sound like "densely populated cities" is something good. In those cities people live in tiny cells stacked one on top of another, have hardly any privacy, step on each other's toes whenever they venture out of their apartments, and see trees only in old photos. The air quality in cities is also awful.
The US cities are what they are because people like to live this way - in low density areas, in their own homes, with plenty of trees, on quiet streets. The highways were built because people wanted them, because they fulfilled a clear and obvious function. Ask a city-dwelling European if he's like to move from his 30 sq.m. apartment on 17th floor in the urban jungle to a private home, with garage and a small garden, a few miles outside of the city, and with nice highways to it too.
wouldn't they still require energy equivalent to the difference in acceleration? For example, if we could make antigravs, the energy needed to cancel out gravity would equal the energy needed to overcome it in the first place?
A common spring can hold an item suspended against forces of gravity, and springs don't require batteries. Another example is the levitating magnet.
Arguably, yes, bottom of the ocean may be as dangerous and as inhospitable as space. But it's a lot easier to get to, and a lot less expensive.
If you saw ROV feeds from BP, it's eternal night at mere 5000', temperature near freezing, hardly any life, and soft silt hundreds of feet deep. Humans can't just don a spacesuit and walk there, they need a robot or a very expensive submarine. Space is easier to work with, even though it's harder to get there. Also space is more natural for humans, and there is more to do there. There isn't much to do at the bottom of an ocean. You can't have any industry there; vacuum is far better than water. If your pressurized vehicle develops a leak in vacuum you can stop it with a chewing gum. If the same happens deep under water, that thin stream of water will slice you in two.
Okay, let's say Toyota does that. It costs something close to $0 to produce a car now. Great. Toyota has competitors. Either they also automate, or they go out of business. Let's say they automate. Competition drives the price of a new car to ... something close to zero.
Your last words there are where the problem is. "close to zero" just doesn't happen. There is a term for that, "race to the bottom" and you can't win it. If the market wants to lower the price below what you, the manufacturer, consider reasonable, you simply stop producing, thus introducing artificial scarcity. Example: De Beers and its diamonds. Example: Jewelry. Example: cell phones, plans and airtime. The cell phones are a great example, by the way, because the cellular network is already ran by robots. Humans can't even run it physically; they only can service it when required. And so what do we get out of those cell towers on every corner? We get plans that become more and more expensive every year, even though you'd expect a basic phone plan to be nearly free now.
The shareholders make normal profits, [...] and cars are ultra-cheap.
The shareholders can't make normal profits if each car is sold for 1% of what it was sold before. That would require selling 100x more cars, and that is not very likely. There isn't even space on our roads for so many new cars, even if people decide to hoard them. More than one SciFi writer introduced the concept of planned obsolescence, with products that have built-in timers in them and fail right on schedule, forcing you to go out and buy a replacement. Cars last a long time, so far; and if you start recycling them faster ... Earth, however large it is, is not infinite.
every car worker needs a new job [...]
Yes, that's the sticky point, isn't it? :-) The rest of your comment I could have written myself :-) There is only one catch:
It would work, unlike communism in the USSR, because in this (far-distant future) scenario, there really is no scarcity left.
I can only reiterate that though every person in that society will be adequately fed and housed, the society will rot. This is exactly what happened in the USSR, even though they haven't yet achieved Communism. In that new society of yours you will be told that your work is not needed, you are not wanted, and unless you want to amuse your friends by your art and music (which robots don't provide, so far) you should go to your room, lock the door, and don't get out until you die. But you will be fed in your room for however many decades it takes you to die. You are not needed, and your work is not appreciated.
The closest approximation of that society is in "The City and the Stars". But note that citizens of that city were modified at each rebirth to make them docile and to keep them within the walls. Only a few people were given special traits, and the book is about them. But the rest, as you recall, are pretty pathetic creatures, with no will to even leave the city and see what's outside. The best they can imagine is to make some paintings and set them outside for other people to look at. (And then a wandering holographic dragon eats them, of course :-) No modern human can exist in such a prison, but that's exactly the world that we will get if robots do everything.
Well, when it gets to the point that very little human labor or entrepreneurship is necessary in creating goods, we will almost be at a point where economics basically doesn't apply anymore, because everything will be near-free.
That's just a fiction, and it depends on robots that are mutually owned by everyone. A large leap of faith is required to get there from here. Since the society changes slowly, we can presume existence of all kinds of transitional forms.
For example, let's posit that Toyota fully robotized its factories, from energy production to mining to smelting to manufacturing. Even all dealerships are robotted by robots. The CEO of Toyota is a computer. Great. The labor costs to make one car are zero; let's assume that robots don't wear out, and that Japanese taxes are out of the equation.
Once that wonderful car factory is built, it's still owned by a few shareholders - all of them humans. Do you think the board will decide to give cars away just because it costs them nothing to produce? (assume that competition is in the same boat.) Imagine ex-Toyota worker who was assembling cars for decades, and he is now fired. He goes to the dealership and tells the robot there that he has no money, and no prospects of getting any, but he wants a car. What do you think will happen?
About engineers. This all-new factory needs engineers. How many? Not too many; perhaps one per 1,000 robots. There are many engineers on the planet, but Toyota needs only a few. Do you think they will be overpaid, if for every one there are 100 standing in line at the HR office? And even if that engineer is indeed overpaid (say, getting $250K/yr on today's pay scale) how many other people this salary can sustain? Maybe five, if he spends it all. That's not a sufficient ratio.
So the point is, as long as humans are involved you will get problems. Penniless people are not a market; they will be seen as a human waste, ready for the Dipple:
Again, the problem is that in a highly roboticized society very few humans would be able to offer valuable services. Most would be simply irrelevant. One solution to that is that the society owns robots, all of them, and everyone benefits from them equally or however it pleases them. That is generally known as Communism. There is nothing really wrong with that, except that it had been attempted, and it doesn't work. Even its earlier phase, Socialism, results in decay of the society because that's what people do when they don't have to work for a piece of bread. You can find plenty of examples in the USA of what happens when too many idle hands are concentrated in some "inner cities." USSR attempted to build a "new human" and failed; but without that new human, who is all gentle, kind and thoughtful, you can't have your Communism, unless roaming gangs of killers on motorcycles is one of your preferences. So far every single society that was attempted proved that a human *must* work hard to stay sane. And if someone doesn't want to work hard he must be forced to do so, through the law (USSR) or physical needs (USA).
To summarize, introduction of a large number of community-owned robots into the economy would be identical to placing everyone on social security and food stamps. And we know very well how that works and what results can be expected.
High-tech cheaters can get away by standing in front of the system and using a special set-up to project a different image inside the camera.
Or, to put it simply, by wearing a mask. If a voice is involved, a simple DSP box will convert your speech to the natural range of the target voice. The stupid computer won't be able to do much else with the audio. Of course if the voice exchange is not a challenge-response but a mere password then any voice recorder will do.
Mumbai doesn't either.
That's OK, you are not alone who missed the "a typical US city" phrase that I used twice in my original comment :-) My opinion applies only to the USA and Canada, countries that I know something about. I have never been to India or Singapore or China or Japan, and can't say anything about their mass transit. Even some US cities (like NYC) make good use of mass transit, by the way - when there are plenty of riders and well-established transit patterns.
It doesn't work well in rural areas, but even there you can have fairly reliable public transit without the need for cars.
Maybe in India that is so. The rural USA, where I travel frequently, has no public transit (and no taxis either.) A farmer or a rancher already owns a few vehicles just to service his farm, feed cows, etc. - and if those vehicles are available then who would even want to pay big bucks for a trip to the nearest city? Note that some of those properties are huge, and so are the distances between any two points that you want to travel between. A couple of weeks ago I was on a ranch that is 10 miles from the nearest food store (or any other store that you can imagine.) It's 10 minutes in a car, and infinitely long on a bus (because there are no buses.) Some ranches are up to 40 miles away from towns. Even if a bus is present, it would take forever to get to town; and once in town you want to buy half a ton of stuff so that you don't have to go there every other day... but that half a ton of stuff won't fit into the bus, and you can't carry it in your hands anyway.
How is saying "give me a raise or replace me with at least two other people" pseudo-blackmail? You think the company will save time or money by firing him and then bringing two new guys up to speed for a much higher combined salary?
It is possible that the company will have no choice but to let him go and hire whatever replacements are needed. This will happen if he loses trust of his boss. Most companies would really like an employee who is happy, but will be OK with an employee who is just doing his job. But it is dangerous to keep a disgruntled employee, for many obvious reasons. It all depends, of course, on what the guy tells his boss and how they discuss it all. But even if the boss doesn't see the guy as disgruntled, the boss clearly understands that the employee will be looking for a job elsewhere, and thus a replacement is needed. After that it's merely a race between the employee quitting and the boss finding a replacement.
Of course my other thought is that I'd much rather go back to writing and working with marketing than getting back into IT.
If that's what you really want, then that's what you should be working toward. IT is a thankless, 24/7 routine where you do well if nothing happens; and since nothing happens there is sometimes a belief of some managers that you aren't really doing anything. Writing and working with marketing is far better in this aspect (and in many others.) Besides, if you become a reluctant IT guy you will eventually lose your writing skills; you won't be marketable for what you love to do, and you won't be a great IT guy either. You need experience in your chosen field if you want to develop professionally, and if you don't want a career in IT then don't go for it. If the company doesn't want you any more in the writing/marketing position then look for another job before it's too late.
Just be careful about divide-by-zero calculations....
The math in the mpg meter code is correct. Only the instantaneous efficiency can be infinite (if the ICE never started in the 5 minutes that correspond to one bar.) The meter code doesn't, of course, try to average infinity.
It doesn't give you more in the city - it may give you more compared to other cars
This only proves that you don't own a Prius; perhaps those who own one know better? Prius does have a better fuel efficiency in dense, slow traffic. You can easily see 100 mpg bars on the meter, and that is because the car is running only on electric power. I saw one such bar just yesterday; typically if the traffic is bad the efficiency is about 70-75 mpg. The purely electric drive is limited to speeds up to 42 mph.
The Prius is crap compared to some old cars too - the citroen AX diesel could hit 100mpg... why can't we do at least similar now?
There are cars built by enthusiasts who are incredibly light and efficient. They are also impractical because they can't carry anything and accelerate like a snail. Prius is popular because it offers great fuel economy and at the same time is a medium size car that has plenty of power for 99% of users.
So we are thinking somehow that "cooperative" will work with 2000lb vehicles traveling on highways at over 60MPH/100KPH? Somehow I have a feeling that this will work out about as well as SMTP is working for us now.
Cooperation works for 200,000 lb vehicles (known as airplanes) - see TCAS for example.
Your complaints about unreliable cooperation involve people. People are unreliable. But machines can be as reliable as we build them to be. They certainly can be more reliable than people - machines don't get tired, don't lose attention, don't daydream. If you have a forward looking radar that keeps the distance to the car ahead, that radar will react faster than you when the car ahead starts braking. Furthermore, the radar will not slam on the brakes - it will be braking just enough to keep safe distance, and that means that the car behind has a better chance of not rear-ending your car.
I would suspect other places as well are finding mass transit is not the panacea the environmentalists make it out to be.
Mass transit doesn't work because there are no "masses" to transport.
In the old USSR there were buses going to and from industrial areas. So when people go to work they take those buses, and the buses are full, and the fuel economy is achieved, and it's inexpensive. Once the shifts at factories start, the buses start going less frequently, until the next batch of passengers is expected. This works because it is a highly point to point travel, from the nearest subway station (or bus transfer point) to the area's points of interest.
But a typical US city has no such points of interest that attract thousands of riders. If you map the travel routes you will see that people go from anywhere to anywhere. The fact that residential and industrial areas are randomly interleaved doesn't help either. No mass transit, short of personal computer-controlled taxis, can service such disorganized travelers. You'd need several transfers, and if you dare carrying stuff with you (like 10 grocery bags) you'd start swearing at the gods of the domain well before you get home.
Mass transit is doomed to be slow and backward way to travel just because it has to collect riders at many places. But no car owner will go to work by zigzagging through hundreds of residential streets and stopping at every minor intersection. Buses do that. Cars go straight to the nearest major road or a freeway, and proceed there, at 65 mph (minimum speed.)
There is another issue that is relevant to many US cities - safety from criminals. A car offers a pretty good protection. A bus offers zero protection, and there are many cases where buses become a crime scene. The bus driver is not going to protect you; he at best will report the crime to the overworked police, who may show up to collect your body. At worst the driver will ignore the crime - he is in the area every day, and he needs no trouble with locals. And of course once you are on the bus you can't ask the driver to skip the problematic area. In a car you never even get close to those areas.
Have you done a lot of maintenance to your Prius?
There is nothing to maintain. Just replace the oil periodically, and tires as they wear out.
I'm sure an electric Hummer would beat your Prius in MPG eqv's (I've simulated it)
Any EV will beat any non-EV in MPG equivalent. However EVs that we have today are either underpowered, or have short range, or impossibly expensive, or all of the above. There is that Tesla Motors' EV that can beat most cars on the road today, it's just it costs $100K, and its Lithium batteries aren't going to take many recharge cycles - that's one maintenance chore that will empty your bank account in no time.
I use my car for relatively long trips (420 miles per day for the most recent one) and currently it takes me about 3 minutes to "recharge" the car at any gas station. I'll switch to an EV as soon as it gets just as good as a Prius in terms of range, power and cost - and can be recharged just as quickly.
I don't think a 5 year old Prius would be worse than a Hummer, but still it will be bad. Probably a lot worse than expected.
I don't know what the expectations are out there, but my 5-year old Prius gives me 52 mpg highway and even more in the city. I doubt a Hummer can beat that, unless you drop it from orbit :-)
Unless your income is based on intellectual property, then only the uncreative will starve.
There are plenty of uncreative people in the world, but I guess they have to die in the brave new world because robots would have no use of them. Also not every creative person gets to eat - writers, composers, sculptors, artists will have nothing to offer to the robots. Only engineers who can be of use to create newer and better robots will be allowed to live.
This scenario doesn't require sentient robots. It works just fine if someone owns a bunch of primitive robots; even a farmer will do. People who he used to hire in previous years aren't needed any more. The farmer could afford to feed them anyway, but will he? Most likely not.
Apparently the harnessing of energy is not automated, otherwise it would not be included in the price. Therefore, you work at a nuclear power plant and have the income necessary to buy food.
That is correct - to trade with robots you need to offer them something that they need. Unfortunately robots don't need most of what humans need or like to do. The future society will be populated exclusively by robots and human engineers - until the latter develop a robot that can do engineering. Then only robots will be left.
That's because even given the huge number of people employed by corporations it's an unbelievably rare event.
Not so rare, actually. It happened a few years ago at a company where I worked. But only few people knew, it was handled very quietly. So while you indeed may not hear much about suicides, they do occur. Japan is particularly affected, even though it is a wealthy country. Should we now blame Sony?
Foxconn's employees were not slaves; at any time they could walk out of the door and never be back. It might be true that it's hard for them to find another job, and so on - but it's hard to find a job in the USA too. Probably one of major reasons of those suicides is lack of will to live, and that is not necessarily related to salary or work conditions. Slaves in Greece, Rome and USA were working much harder, but I haven't read about them suiciding left and right. But there were rich and wealthy people in Rome who killed themselves just because "they were done here." So it's all in one's mind, and I'm willing to accept an external cause as valid only from someone on a torturer's rack or in a deathbed. For everyone else it's a deliberate decision to leave this world instead of struggling to get a better life. It may or may not be a wise decision, I'm not a judge of that; I only believe that they can't blame external circumstances on their choice.
Imagine a 100% automated economy. Robots produce food, and other robots repair those robots. You, a human, only need to pay for the energy that goes into that process. But since you are unemployed (robots do everything, remember) you don't have any money, however little it takes to buy food.
dying to benefit ones family has never been a call that rational individuals would make.
Nobody claimed that those individuals were perfectly rational. Quite possibly they were suffering from depression.
When you enter the working world, you have to use whatever operating system (or other equipment) your employer has arbitrarily chosen, and frequently you'll have to pay for your own equipment.
Only mechanics own their own tools. Not only companies don't require you to buy your own computer to do the company's work - they usually forbid that. If an employee is expected to work from home or road, he gets a company laptop with a VPN, full disk encryption and remote access for administration.
I think the Macbook is a great choice since it can run OSX, Windows, or several flavors of *ux, either with BootCamp or Parallels.
I'm sure that is a good cause for ${method_of_celebration} if you are a geek. But most students can't fiddle with any of that while they are trying to capture teacher's proof of some theorem. Money overpaid for a Mac will be just wasted. A student, IMO, doesn't need any computer, they are only a distraction (unless this is a programming class.) But if there is a decision to go ahead and require computers, then make sure that anyone with a Web browser can do everything the school needs. That would be just Google Docs, likely.