You sure about that: http://singularityhub.com/2012... The only thing preventing alot more automation is not lack of technology but rather the cost of that technology. As technology gets cheaper and/or labor gets more expensive you'll definitely see a shift. Go to a place where labor is cheap and digging holes is still done by 20 guys and you see very few pieces of heavy machinery. Go to a place where labor is expensive and you see 1 guy running a single piece of heavy machinery.
I hate mowing my lawn, if I can hire someone to do it at $10/hour, I'll do it. At $15/hour I can't afford to hire someone and I'll do it myself.
Example of high wage destroying jobs:
My labor cost goes up by 20% so it's now more cost effective to invest in a $200k machine that it is to hire 10 people.
But it's also worth noting that the jobs that are getting destroyed are the shit jobs where you are being treated like a half-machine already. We would all be better off if all the repetitive jobs like cashier were eliminated and people could actually do jobs that they enjoy. Whether this is possible is obviously subject to debate.
One way to bring in revenue like this without "breaking the internet" would be with banner ads. If there is a login page for net access, you could have banners to your "preferred" companies. As an ISP it would also be easy to insert BN.com ads into the html on amazon.com or even wrap amazon.com in a frame. Another possibility would be playing with the DNS where when someone went to amazon.com, it "suggested" another alternative before letting them continue thru to amazon.com. I'm not saying these are good ideas but blocking access to a site like amazon.com is a VERY BAD idea and these ideas would at least allow everything to still work. My opinion though is that you will still piss off your customers (you know, the ones paying rent)
I'm not sure what the threshold is but if you're spending enough money on google you get a phone number and a dedicated account person. We only spend a couple thousand a month with them but we can call a number and get immediate assistance. Also, if we disable our account, (i.e. stop the flow of money), we usually get a phone call within a couple of days offering to help us resolve any problems.
Some of that is new. When I last checked they only offered enterprise support. At a minimum of $15k/month that's well outside of our budget. I'm glad to see that they are now offering cheaper plans but when you're only running a half dozen servers even the business plan is pretty expensive and a 1 hour response time is pretty slow when other services like liquidweb and rackspace give me a faster response time and more personalized service for free. From what I can see with both their support packages and their server performance is that AWS is designed for and works well for companies with 50+ servers where they are load balancing and have multiple redundancies built in on every level. AWS didn't seem very reliable at all at the single server level. We never had all our servers go down at once but when we were with AWS it was common for one server to either go down or have degraded performance. If we had multiple servers for everything this probably wouldn't be a big deal. I hear that netflix actually intentionally randomly turns off servers to check their redundancy but when you are running stuff on single servers without full redundancy you can't afford to have those kind of hickups.
Yeah, in theory, "the cloud" is suppose to handle the failures transparently (and/or never fail) but I find it harder to trust hardware and backups procedures that I can't physically see or test. It would be very easy to create a virtual server which falsely claims to have full raid and geographic redundancy, etc... but without the ability to actually test a drive failure or a datacenter failure you are really just trusting the 3rd party to be honest and to perform due dilligence as usually their contracts state their maximum liability is limited to just giving you your hosting fees back.
I'm no doctor, but I've read a lot on this subject (mainly in order to debate loony antivaxers) and from what I understand, it's safer for a couple of unvaccinated kids to go to school with a bunch more vaccinated kids, because of herd immunity. If the unvaccinated kid is in a large population of vaccinated kids, they're much less likely to contract whatever the disease is from contact with other students, however if they were to attend school with a large population of similarly unvaccinated kids, they'd face a greater threat by virtue of the fact that there is a higher percentage of the people they come into daily contact with being vulnerable to the disease.
I'm not debating that it's not safer for an unvaccinated kid to be in with a bunch of vaccinated kids. I just think it's unfair to the expose the vaccinated kids to additional unvaccinated kids just because the unvaccinated kids parents are stupid. It's better to keep all the unvaccinated kids together in quarantine so when they all get sick they hopefully won't infect the people who did the right thing.
They are mirrored drives and we use a journalling filesystem and take good backups. We haven't seen any issues yet. Unfortunately that's one place where cloud is lacking. Even though stormondemand offers mirrored drives and bare metal servers, to my knowledge there is no way for me to actually check the raid status of the server.
We also had no problems with AWS pricing. Our problem was with their performance. They are not set up well for high io database applications. We switched to solid state drives on stormondemand(aka liquidweb) and have seen a 10 fold increase in performance. I prefer liquidweb's model as I can even opt to pick the exact specs of my machine but I still have all the same cloud features like spinning up a new instance or changing the size of an instance with a click of the button. To me stormondemand is the best of both worlds. Oh, and the best part is that I can actually talk to someone if there is a problem.
That's excess profit. That's like saying you didn't make any money last year because you spent it all on a house and a boat. Amazon is making plenty of profits. It's just spending them on expanding so it doesn't actually post profits but if you look at it's total net worth you can see that it is still growing every year.
anti-vaccine parents are presented with the options of enrolling their kids at a school with a high enough vaccination rate
Why would you want to sent the unvacinated kids to a different school? Better to keep them all at the same crazy school so that when there is an outbreak they are easier to contain. I would however support the option of allowing the VACCINATED children at a school with a low vaccination rate to enroll in an alternate school.
And don't even get me started on the implications of robotic cars and trucks on employment.
I think robotic cars and/or drones are a fullscale singularity on their own. People keep talking about truck drivers and taxi drivers losing their jobs. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Why would you own a car if you can order one delivered to your driveway whenever you wanted? We also have the technology to automate a ton of common tasks but it's currently not cost effective. With self driving cars this all changes. Home delivery of groceries becomes practical. Having a robot to clean your toilet becomes practical and cost effective if it can go house to house cleaning toilets and it doesn't need a human to deliver it to the job site. I don't think we have any clue how much the world will change once self driving cars (and smaller) become commonplace. The only thing holding back alot of automation right now is cost. Self driving vehicles would go a long way in reducing that cost and making alot more automation practical.
The current system sucks, but "loser pays" is even worse because it assumes that the person who is "wrong" is the person who always loses, and that simply is not the case.
If you can't make the basic assumption that the person in the wrong is the one who loses then the system is completely broken and needs to be reformed until you CAN safely make that assumption. Saying that loser-pay is a bad idea because the system is completely broken doesn't really support your argument.
Where are the control groups? Shouldn't there also be at least a few of these: 1) One group that showers daily and uses the spray. 2) One group that showers daily and sprays plain water. 3) One group that doesn't shower for 4 weeks and sprays plain water.
Number 3 is almost required for any accurate study and I would think it would the other 2 wouldn't hurt either.
It seems a stretch to jump from "wild mice run in a treadmill" to "mice like to exercise". What if the treadmill is similiar to what laser pointers are to cats or video games are to humans? It could be that the mice thinks it's accomplishing something or has some other reason that it uses the treadmill other than because it likes to exercise.
You said that the car doesn't need to know the difference between a bridge and a ditch and I'm saying that it definitely does. You said that the car should only stay on course with it's only recourse being to stop and I'm not sure that's enough. Yes, you should keep it simple but emergency reactions are anything but simple. Human drivers make emergency decisions all the time that are more than just "stop", they swerve out of the way, take the shoulder, etc... using their best judgement. I'm not saying the computer needs to do something it's not programmed to do. I'm saying the computer needs to be programmed to do stuff that violates standard road rules when that is the safest option. It can't stay on a predefined path ignoring everything on the side of the road with it's only recourse being to stop.
So are you saying that it's never ok to take the ditch? A human driver swerving off the road to avoid a collision has probably saved countless lives but that same human driver knows that hitting the shoulder is ok when there is soft piece of dirt next to it but knows that a collision is usually better than swerving off a bridge. I probably see a half dozen accidents a year avoided by someone taking the shoulder because the car in front stopped too fast. Some of these might be avoidable with a computer's faster reflexes but a self driving car still needs the ability to be able to break with the program and swerve off the road when that is the safest action.
The entirety of the car's programming should be summed up as: a. Is the way clear? If yes then go. b. If not, are the obstacles ones that I am programmed for? If yes then go. c. Stop.
That's all well and good but what if something jumps out in front of you and you don't have time to stop. This is where ethics comes in. There isn't time to give control back to the driver. There isn't time to stop. If you happen to be on a bridge you have to choose between plowing into the child in front of you or driving off the bridge. "Bridge or child" is the simplest but you can also replace with "oncoming traffic or dog", "sidewalk or child", "child or dog", etc... There are plenty of situations where there is not time to stop and/or give control back to the driver.
Considering how our society works, the most likely circumstance is that the manufacturers will design them to be "least liable" - i.e., they won't detect passengers in other vehicles, and they sure as hell won't bother with complex decision making algorithms.
I'm sure you're absolutely right. And besides, nobody is going to buy the first generation of autonomous cars if they know it's programmed to kill the driver (even if such a scenario is the most "rational" outcome according to a lot of different ethical standards).
My guess is the first generation car will require a driver and will immediately give control to the driver in that situation so even though the driver has no time to react the driver is technically in control of the car when it crashes.
People could say "decimate" means "blue" but that still doesn't make it right, nor contravene its etymological origins. Hard to get around "deci" in there.....
You mean like September, October, November and December? Words change.
You sound like a moron when you write 'kill one of ten" when you mean "kill most of." I could accept the changing use of the word if the damn prefix for one-tenth iwasn't part of it!
September, October, November, and December must drive you nuts then.
For some unknown reason, my favorite though is the divergence of Awful and Awesome.
Completely offtopic but I think 13 months each exactly 4 weeks long (or practically anything else) would make more sense than what we currently have. We could just have the extra day or two fall on a holiday so that the months/days/weeks always stay lined up.
But can we even create an intelligent machine with such a limited scope? Some of the things that makes humans so intelligent is there flexibility, adaptability, and being able to use context to solve with incomplete information. Google is building a self driving car by using brute force and coding for every possible problem that might be encountered. Noone, not even google, is claiming that this car can think. We are nowhere close to being able to create a true thinking machine but I'm doubtful that we can create a machine that can match human's intellligence without it also having some other traits like "curiousity", "desire", and possibly other traits which we may or may not want it to have.
Slashdot Mirror
How can that be? I thought nothing could go faster than the speed of light.
Or does the universe not have to obey it's own rule?
You sure about that: http://singularityhub.com/2012...
The only thing preventing alot more automation is not lack of technology but rather the cost of that technology.
As technology gets cheaper and/or labor gets more expensive you'll definitely see a shift.
Go to a place where labor is cheap and digging holes is still done by 20 guys and you see very few pieces of heavy machinery.
Go to a place where labor is expensive and you see 1 guy running a single piece of heavy machinery.
LOW WAGES DO NOT CREATE JOBS.
Example of low wages creating jobs:
I hate mowing my lawn, if I can hire someone to do it at $10/hour, I'll do it. At $15/hour I can't afford to hire someone and I'll do it myself.
Example of high wage destroying jobs:
My labor cost goes up by 20% so it's now more cost effective to invest in a $200k machine that it is to hire 10 people.
But it's also worth noting that the jobs that are getting destroyed are the shit jobs where you are being treated like a half-machine already.
We would all be better off if all the repetitive jobs like cashier were eliminated and people could actually do jobs that they enjoy.
Whether this is possible is obviously subject to debate.
One way to bring in revenue like this without "breaking the internet" would be with banner ads.
If there is a login page for net access, you could have banners to your "preferred" companies.
As an ISP it would also be easy to insert BN.com ads into the html on amazon.com or even
wrap amazon.com in a frame. Another possibility would be playing with the DNS where when
someone went to amazon.com, it "suggested" another alternative before letting them continue
thru to amazon.com. I'm not saying these are good ideas but blocking access to a site like
amazon.com is a VERY BAD idea and these ideas would at least allow everything to still work.
My opinion though is that you will still piss off your customers (you know, the ones paying rent)
Support isn't any better for advertisers.
I'm not sure what the threshold is but if you're spending enough money on google you get a phone number
and a dedicated account person. We only spend a couple thousand a month with them but we can call a
number and get immediate assistance. Also, if we disable our account, (i.e. stop the flow of money), we
usually get a phone call within a couple of days offering to help us resolve any problems.
Some of that is new. When I last checked they only offered enterprise support. At a minimum of $15k/month that's well outside of our budget.
I'm glad to see that they are now offering cheaper plans but when you're only running a half dozen servers even the business plan is pretty expensive
and a 1 hour response time is pretty slow when other services like liquidweb and rackspace give me a faster response time and more personalized
service for free. From what I can see with both their support packages and their server performance is that AWS is designed for and works well for
companies with 50+ servers where they are load balancing and have multiple redundancies built in on every level. AWS didn't seem very reliable at
all at the single server level. We never had all our servers go down at once but when we were with AWS it was common for one server to either go
down or have degraded performance. If we had multiple servers for everything this probably wouldn't be a big deal. I hear that netflix actually
intentionally randomly turns off servers to check their redundancy but when you are running stuff on single servers without full redundancy you can't
afford to have those kind of hickups.
Yeah, in theory, "the cloud" is suppose to handle the failures transparently (and/or never fail) but I
find it harder to trust hardware and backups procedures that I can't physically see or test.
It would be very easy to create a virtual server which falsely claims to have full raid and geographic
redundancy, etc... but without the ability to actually test a drive failure or a datacenter failure you are
really just trusting the 3rd party to be honest and to perform due dilligence as usually their contracts
state their maximum liability is limited to just giving you your hosting fees back.
I'm no doctor, but I've read a lot on this subject (mainly in order to debate loony antivaxers) and from what I understand, it's safer for a couple of unvaccinated kids to go to school with a bunch more vaccinated kids, because of herd immunity. If the unvaccinated kid is in a large population of vaccinated kids, they're much less likely to contract whatever the disease is from contact with other students, however if they were to attend school with a large population of similarly unvaccinated kids, they'd face a greater threat by virtue of the fact that there is a higher percentage of the people they come into daily contact with being vulnerable to the disease.
I'm not debating that it's not safer for an unvaccinated kid to be in with a bunch of vaccinated kids. I just think it's
unfair to the expose the vaccinated kids to additional unvaccinated kids just because the unvaccinated kids parents are stupid.
It's better to keep all the unvaccinated kids together in quarantine so when they all get sick they hopefully won't infect the
people who did the right thing.
They are mirrored drives and we use a journalling filesystem and take good backups.
We haven't seen any issues yet. Unfortunately that's one place where cloud is lacking.
Even though stormondemand offers mirrored drives and bare metal servers, to my
knowledge there is no way for me to actually check the raid status of the server.
We also had no problems with AWS pricing. Our problem was with their performance.
They are not set up well for high io database applications.
We switched to solid state drives on stormondemand(aka liquidweb) and have seen a 10 fold increase in performance.
I prefer liquidweb's model as I can even opt to pick the exact specs of my machine but I still have all the same
cloud features like spinning up a new instance or changing the size of an instance with a click of the button.
To me stormondemand is the best of both worlds. Oh, and the best part is that I can actually talk to someone if
there is a problem.
Um, actually Amazon tries not to make a profit. I'm not sure they've ever made more than 2% profit in a quarter. Typically, closer to 0%.
https://www.google.com/finance...
That's excess profit. That's like saying you didn't make any money last year because you spent it all on a house and a boat.
Amazon is making plenty of profits. It's just spending them on expanding so it doesn't actually post profits but if you look
at it's total net worth you can see that it is still growing every year.
And broken clocks are sometimes correct. You're still a paranoid delusional loony.
You're not paranoid or delusional if it's true. People might think you are and still lock you up though.
anti-vaccine parents are presented with the options of enrolling their kids at a school with a high enough vaccination rate
Why would you want to sent the unvacinated kids to a different school? Better to keep them all at the same crazy school so that when there
is an outbreak they are easier to contain. I would however support the option of allowing the VACCINATED children at a school with a low
vaccination rate to enroll in an alternate school.
And don't even get me started on the implications of robotic cars and trucks on employment.
I think robotic cars and/or drones are a fullscale singularity on their own.
People keep talking about truck drivers and taxi drivers losing their jobs. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Why would you own a car if you can order one delivered to your driveway whenever you wanted?
We also have the technology to automate a ton of common tasks but it's currently not cost effective.
With self driving cars this all changes. Home delivery of groceries becomes practical. Having a robot
to clean your toilet becomes practical and cost effective if it can go house to house cleaning toilets and
it doesn't need a human to deliver it to the job site. I don't think we have any clue how much the world
will change once self driving cars (and smaller) become commonplace. The only thing holding back alot
of automation right now is cost. Self driving vehicles would go a long way in reducing that cost and making
alot more automation practical.
The current system sucks, but "loser pays" is even worse because it assumes that the person who is "wrong" is the person who always loses, and that simply is not the case.
If you can't make the basic assumption that the person in the wrong is the one who loses then the system is completely broken and needs to be reformed until
you CAN safely make that assumption. Saying that loser-pay is a bad idea because the system is completely broken doesn't really support your argument.
Where are the control groups? Shouldn't there also be at least a few of these:
1) One group that showers daily and uses the spray.
2) One group that showers daily and sprays plain water.
3) One group that doesn't shower for 4 weeks and sprays plain water.
Number 3 is almost required for any accurate study and I would think it would
the other 2 wouldn't hurt either.
It seems a stretch to jump from "wild mice run in a treadmill" to "mice like to exercise".
What if the treadmill is similiar to what laser pointers are to cats or video games are to humans?
It could be that the mice thinks it's accomplishing something or has some other reason that
it uses the treadmill other than because it likes to exercise.
You said that the car doesn't need to know the difference between a bridge and a ditch
and I'm saying that it definitely does. You said that the car should only stay on course
with it's only recourse being to stop and I'm not sure that's enough.
Yes, you should keep it simple but emergency reactions are anything but simple.
Human drivers make emergency decisions all the time that are more than just "stop",
they swerve out of the way, take the shoulder, etc... using their best judgement.
I'm not saying the computer needs to do something it's not programmed to do. I'm
saying the computer needs to be programmed to do stuff that violates standard
road rules when that is the safest option. It can't stay on a predefined path ignoring
everything on the side of the road with it's only recourse being to stop.
So are you saying that it's never ok to take the ditch?
A human driver swerving off the road to avoid a collision has probably saved countless lives
but that same human driver knows that hitting the shoulder is ok when there is soft piece of dirt
next to it but knows that a collision is usually better than swerving off a bridge.
I probably see a half dozen accidents a year avoided by someone taking the shoulder
because the car in front stopped too fast. Some of these might be avoidable with a
computer's faster reflexes but a self driving car still needs the ability to be able to break
with the program and swerve off the road when that is the safest action.
self-replicating, self-repairing, autonomous entropic facilitator
Unfortunately, the self-repairing is limited to minor repairs only.
The entirety of the car's programming should be summed up as:
a. Is the way clear? If yes then go.
b. If not, are the obstacles ones that I am programmed for? If yes then go.
c. Stop.
That's all well and good but what if something jumps out in front of you and you don't have time to stop.
This is where ethics comes in. There isn't time to give control back to the driver. There isn't time to stop.
If you happen to be on a bridge you have to choose between plowing into the child in front of you or driving
off the bridge. "Bridge or child" is the simplest but you can also replace with "oncoming traffic or dog",
"sidewalk or child", "child or dog", etc... There are plenty of situations where there is not time to stop
and/or give control back to the driver.
Considering how our society works, the most likely circumstance is that the manufacturers will design them to be "least liable" - i.e., they won't detect passengers in other vehicles, and they sure as hell won't bother with complex decision making algorithms.
I'm sure you're absolutely right. And besides, nobody is going to buy the first generation of autonomous cars if they know it's programmed to kill the driver (even if such a scenario is the most "rational" outcome according to a lot of different ethical standards).
My guess is the first generation car will require a driver and will immediately give control to the driver in that situation so
even though the driver has no time to react the driver is technically in control of the car when it crashes.
Not necessarily.
People could say "decimate" means "blue" but that still doesn't make it right, nor contravene its etymological origins. Hard to get around "deci" in there.....
You mean like September, October, November and December? Words change.
You sound like a moron when you write 'kill one of ten" when you mean "kill most of."
I could accept the changing use of the word if the damn prefix for one-tenth iwasn't part of it!
September, October, November, and December must drive you nuts then.
For some unknown reason, my favorite though is the divergence of Awful and Awesome.
Completely offtopic but I think 13 months each exactly 4 weeks long (or practically anything else)
would make more sense than what we currently have. We could just have the extra day or two
fall on a holiday so that the months/days/weeks always stay lined up.
But can we even create an intelligent machine with such a limited scope?
Some of the things that makes humans so intelligent is there flexibility, adaptability,
and being able to use context to solve with incomplete information.
Google is building a self driving car by using brute force and coding for every
possible problem that might be encountered. Noone, not even google, is
claiming that this car can think. We are nowhere close to being able to create
a true thinking machine but I'm doubtful that we can create a machine that can
match human's intellligence without it also having some other traits like
"curiousity", "desire", and possibly other traits which we may or may not want
it to have.