Wrong. Computers aren't getting faster and faster. Moores Law is dead. You will only see incremental improvements. This isn't the 90s.
It's not dead, it's just gone sideways, as perhaps you've noticed. Moore never said anything about processor speed, but about transistor count. Now we get more cores instead of faster cores, and better-optimized silicon. My new gaming PC is about 40% faster per core in (CPU-related) benchmarks then my old, despite the clock being 10% slower. And it has 50% more cores. So, yeah, my new computer is twice as fast as my old one, so do go one about how Moores Law is dead.
For servers the core count is getting silly, but that's great for CPU-intensive work. I write nearly-unoptimized Java code, quite slow I'm sure, but I have millions of cores at my disposal if I need them (well, management would kick me out if I used them all for one task, but they're there).
For mobile speed is limited by energy consumption, and there's plenty of room for improvement there!
Were you around for the evolution of laser printers? From so expensive only a few specialists had them, to expensive enough you had to go to the shop down the road to use one, to expensive but available in the home, to the $100 model I bought 10 years ago and has worked ever since.
3D printing and the rest of custom manufacture will follow the same arc. Do you see now how people will be able to own the means of production, in their homes?
It's still mindless work being automated - are are you discussing some post-singularity fantasy?
I think the important question is that, quite unlike the last 400 years, and in fact, unlike to the whole human history, our species' productivity allows us to ask ourselves for the first time "what's the need to work for a living, after all?">/quote>
We work to make the things we want. We always want more, so there will always be work.
So, how many more vacation days have USA people now than in the seventies?
Wait, so you're arguing that automation causes more employment? Well, yes, I agree. We work because we want more. We always want more, thus there will always be jobs.
The French and British were constantly screwing with each other in general. The French took the opportunity to stuff the British at the US shore, which was great for us. But all that aside, we fought and won the land war, against the largest army that had even been shipped overseas.
Plenty of jobs are totally gone now (or near-enough, like blacksmith). Plenty of new jobs come to be. That's just how it works. We work not to fill our day, but to make all the stuff that we collectively want. And we always want more. Jobs just move up the hierarchy of needs.
It's interesting to work out how riding automation led to that failed revolution in America in the 19th century. As automation made slavery less and less economically viable, the southern states were campaigning to allows slaves to be sold to the western states - which was of course the central point in the Civil War.
Automation made slavery economically pointless in the South (or at least the writing was on the wall). Sounds like a Good Thing to me, despite the very high cost of transition. Turns out the slaves were in fact able to find work, and take care of their own lives, despite the predictions of the day about "unemployable people".
Automation always increases demand elsewhere, and people are less "unemployable" than you think.
Personal services will certainly grow, though hopefully more skilled ones. The history of automation is the history of the common man becoming able to afford stuff that previously only the rich could afford. More and more that means services, not just goods.
Walking around with a loaded gun isn't a threat of violence? What is the purpose of the gun then exactly?
Anti-gun nuts really are nuts. When you see a cop do you imagine he's threatening to shoot you every second you can see him? Is a skilled martial artist a threat of violence to everyone near him at all times?
"A commenter on a Facebook page" was being an asshole though.
The point is to engage with the public, explain to them that you know it's not the guns people need to be afraid of, it's the person
Exactly, none of those people were threatening, and so the guns weren't threatening. A person who intends to do you violence is a threat in most circumstances. A gun just equalizes the weak and the strong, A football player doesn't need a gun to kill my grandmother, after all.
Cut military spending by 80% and we'll have more money than we'd know what to do with.
It would barely make a dent. We spend more on each of Social Security and Medicare than we do on the military (each is almost twice as much these days). Military spending is only about 1/7th of the budget, and cutting military spending to 0 wouldn't even eliminate the budget deficit, sadly enough.
That's the myth, not the history. The revolution, from the first night, was led by veteran officers and generals, and fought by a mix of veteran soldiers and recruits - just like most armies.
Yes, we used tactics that were unconventional at the time, but not exactly unique - all the basics for a guerrilla insurgency were learned from the French and Indian War.
The French navy helped at one point by effectively blockading the British, which was indeed critical, but it's not like the war was fought by French troops.
Further, who the fuck said anything about attacking random strangers?
It's been happening constantly. The whole "it's OK to punch a Nazi, and a Nazi is whoever I say it is" thing. Political violence is on the verge of becoming serious in the US right now.
Apart from the blindingly obvious solutions, raise some taxes.
Raising taxes only works up to a point. In places like Greece, where austerity is actually a thing, they've taxed everything possible. In the US, we've never sustained federal tax revenue above 19-20% of GDP, despite a wide range of tax approaches, from 90% top bracket on down. That's not to say whether raising taxes from here would be a good idea, but then we're not facing austerity measures in the US to begin with. We can just print money (and have been, in a new way, with QE).
The first example was not a threat of violence, now was it? Or am I missing something.
The second example, well, we all know Trump is an asshole, even his supporters. I certainly don't think people should go around acting like Trump - does anyone?
American Independence wasn't based on threats and puffery (as least, from the US side), though admittedly there was some at a local level.
We were prepared for violence. We knew violence was likely. But we didn't just randomly start shooting royalists for the most part (violence against local royalists leaders, pre-war, isn't a part of our history I'm proud of). The British decided to send troops to confiscate guns. We decided not to let them. It sort of escalated from there. Military action, not punching random people in a crowd.
You make the case that your ideas are right. You resist government action that you disagree with, perhaps coming into conflict with agents of the government. You don't just go around attacking random strangers who you disagree with, and you don't threaten the life of the president.
You've misunderstood "austerity". Austerity works as follows:
* We don't have the tax revenues to pay for half the programs the government wants to fund. * We had been borrowing money for the other half. * No one will lend us any more money, because we're clearly never going to pay our debt off given our spending history. * We're stuck, no possible/I. way to keep spending at current rates
But, hey, maybe if we show lenders some evidence we're capable of spending less, cutting some programs we like, maybe they'll lends us at least a little. That's better than cutting half the programs to get back to tax revenue, right?
Austerity isn't some weird tickle-down economic theory or anything. It's what you do because you must, as for one reason or another, you can't print money to make up the shortfall.
Bad choices are those that hurt everyone for the gain of a few,
Said every modern tyrant ever.
Everything you do hurts others in some minor way. Everything you consume is less for everyone else. Everywhere you go is taking up space others cannot. Everything you say is likely to offend someone somewhere.
It is fundamental to freedom to accept that others' freedom will include minimal harm to yourself. We don't all have the same values, and we won't all see the same trade-offs as good or bad. If you love liberty, you'll be OK with that. But there are few left in America that love liberty.
90%? Lots of large companies, especially social media and content distribution. There will be some control stuff in-house, but all the heavy lifting is in the cloud.
And then there's the cloud providers, how much they "use cloud offerings" is a philosophical question, and Facebook/Google, which similarly "use the cloud" just their own cloud.
Until I can have a conversation with an artificial entity that can reason abstractly to extrapolate experience to apply against novel concepts to which it is introduced, we're not there.
That's a definition of AI used in SciFi, not by the people who actually get to define the term. We've had AI since the 70s, ever growing in the set of problems it can usefully solve. Voice recognition? AI. Machine vision? AI.
The scientists in the field get to define the terms, not Hollywood.
Like many Slashdotters, your idea of "real AI" is something from SciFi, not from the field. We have real AI right now, produced by real AI developers based on papers in peer-reviewed AI journals. This thing we have? That's what AI is.
You need a new term for machine consciousness, is that's what you mean.
Also, chickens are dinosaurs, for the same reason. The scientists in the field get to define the terms, That's just how it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Computers aren't getting faster and faster. Moores Law is dead. You will only see incremental improvements. This isn't the 90s.
It's not dead, it's just gone sideways, as perhaps you've noticed. Moore never said anything about processor speed, but about transistor count. Now we get more cores instead of faster cores, and better-optimized silicon. My new gaming PC is about 40% faster per core in (CPU-related) benchmarks then my old, despite the clock being 10% slower. And it has 50% more cores. So, yeah, my new computer is twice as fast as my old one, so do go one about how Moores Law is dead.
For servers the core count is getting silly, but that's great for CPU-intensive work. I write nearly-unoptimized Java code, quite slow I'm sure, but I have millions of cores at my disposal if I need them (well, management would kick me out if I used them all for one task, but they're there).
For mobile speed is limited by energy consumption, and there's plenty of room for improvement there!
Any time you mention Somalia, you concede the argument. Just so you know.
Were you around for the evolution of laser printers? From so expensive only a few specialists had them, to expensive enough you had to go to the shop down the road to use one, to expensive but available in the home, to the $100 model I bought 10 years ago and has worked ever since.
3D printing and the rest of custom manufacture will follow the same arc. Do you see now how people will be able to own the means of production, in their homes?
It's still mindless work being automated - are are you discussing some post-singularity fantasy?
I think the important question is that, quite unlike the last 400 years, and in fact, unlike to the whole human history, our species' productivity allows us to ask ourselves for the first time "what's the need to work for a living, after all?">/quote>
We work to make the things we want. We always want more, so there will always be work.
So, how many more vacation days have USA people now than in the seventies?
Wait, so you're arguing that automation causes more employment? Well, yes, I agree. We work because we want more. We always want more, thus there will always be jobs.
I just don't see why you have to walk down the street brandishing a rifle claiming that it is some sort of Second Amendment right.
The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Even if you're scared.
and they were brandishing loaded guns
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
The French and British were constantly screwing with each other in general. The French took the opportunity to stuff the British at the US shore, which was great for us. But all that aside, we fought and won the land war, against the largest army that had even been shipped overseas.
Plenty of jobs are totally gone now (or near-enough, like blacksmith). Plenty of new jobs come to be. That's just how it works. We work not to fill our day, but to make all the stuff that we collectively want. And we always want more. Jobs just move up the hierarchy of needs.
It's interesting to work out how riding automation led to that failed revolution in America in the 19th century. As automation made slavery less and less economically viable, the southern states were campaigning to allows slaves to be sold to the western states - which was of course the central point in the Civil War.
Automation made slavery economically pointless in the South (or at least the writing was on the wall). Sounds like a Good Thing to me, despite the very high cost of transition. Turns out the slaves were in fact able to find work, and take care of their own lives, despite the predictions of the day about "unemployable people".
Automation always increases demand elsewhere, and people are less "unemployable" than you think.
Personal services will certainly grow, though hopefully more skilled ones. The history of automation is the history of the common man becoming able to afford stuff that previously only the rich could afford. More and more that means services, not just goods.
The money they save from other things being cheaper, thanks to automation. Just like automation has done for 400 years, and will keep doing.
Walking around with a loaded gun isn't a threat of violence? What is the purpose of the gun then exactly?
Anti-gun nuts really are nuts. When you see a cop do you imagine he's threatening to shoot you every second you can see him? Is a skilled martial artist a threat of violence to everyone near him at all times?
"A commenter on a Facebook page" was being an asshole though.
The point is to engage with the public, explain to them that you know it's not the guns people need to be afraid of, it's the person
Exactly, none of those people were threatening, and so the guns weren't threatening. A person who intends to do you violence is a threat in most circumstances. A gun just equalizes the weak and the strong, A football player doesn't need a gun to kill my grandmother, after all.
Cut military spending by 80% and we'll have more money than we'd know what to do with.
It would barely make a dent. We spend more on each of Social Security and Medicare than we do on the military (each is almost twice as much these days). Military spending is only about 1/7th of the budget, and cutting military spending to 0 wouldn't even eliminate the budget deficit, sadly enough.
http://usdebtclock.org/
That's the myth, not the history. The revolution, from the first night, was led by veteran officers and generals, and fought by a mix of veteran soldiers and recruits - just like most armies.
Yes, we used tactics that were unconventional at the time, but not exactly unique - all the basics for a guerrilla insurgency were learned from the French and Indian War.
The French navy helped at one point by effectively blockading the British, which was indeed critical, but it's not like the war was fought by French troops.
Further, who the fuck said anything about attacking random strangers?
It's been happening constantly. The whole "it's OK to punch a Nazi, and a Nazi is whoever I say it is" thing. Political violence is on the verge of becoming serious in the US right now.
Apart from the blindingly obvious solutions, raise some taxes.
Raising taxes only works up to a point. In places like Greece, where austerity is actually a thing, they've taxed everything possible. In the US, we've never sustained federal tax revenue above 19-20% of GDP, despite a wide range of tax approaches, from 90% top bracket on down. That's not to say whether raising taxes from here would be a good idea, but then we're not facing austerity measures in the US to begin with. We can just print money (and have been, in a new way, with QE).
The first example was not a threat of violence, now was it? Or am I missing something.
The second example, well, we all know Trump is an asshole, even his supporters. I certainly don't think people should go around acting like Trump - does anyone?
American Independence wasn't based on threats and puffery (as least, from the US side), though admittedly there was some at a local level.
We were prepared for violence. We knew violence was likely. But we didn't just randomly start shooting royalists for the most part (violence against local royalists leaders, pre-war, isn't a part of our history I'm proud of). The British decided to send troops to confiscate guns. We decided not to let them. It sort of escalated from there. Military action, not punching random people in a crowd.
You make the case that your ideas are right. You resist government action that you disagree with, perhaps coming into conflict with agents of the government. You don't just go around attacking random strangers who you disagree with, and you don't threaten the life of the president.
You've misunderstood "austerity". Austerity works as follows:
* We don't have the tax revenues to pay for half the programs the government wants to fund.
* We had been borrowing money for the other half.
* No one will lend us any more money, because we're clearly never going to pay our debt off given our spending history.
* We're stuck, no possible/I. way to keep spending at current rates
But, hey, maybe if we show lenders some evidence we're capable of spending less, cutting some programs we like, maybe they'll lends us at least a little. That's better than cutting half the programs to get back to tax revenue, right?
Austerity isn't some weird tickle-down economic theory or anything. It's what you do because you must, as for one reason or another, you can't print money to make up the shortfall.
I hope the secret service pays you a visit. I really do.
Look, it's fine to say the president is an idiot - everyone always says that about presidents form the other party. It's a fine American tradition.
But threatening political violence is always wrong. have you read no history at all?
Bad choices are those that hurt everyone for the gain of a few,
Said every modern tyrant ever.
Everything you do hurts others in some minor way. Everything you consume is less for everyone else. Everywhere you go is taking up space others cannot. Everything you say is likely to offend someone somewhere.
It is fundamental to freedom to accept that others' freedom will include minimal harm to yourself. We don't all have the same values, and we won't all see the same trade-offs as good or bad. If you love liberty, you'll be OK with that. But there are few left in America that love liberty.
OK, Captain Pedantic - a Constitutional Republic is a kind of Democracy.
Yes, if you can only afford a toy kids car, a real man's cars seems heavy. It's great that you can make a virtue out of poverty, however.
100%? Common in start-ups.
90%? Lots of large companies, especially social media and content distribution. There will be some control stuff in-house, but all the heavy lifting is in the cloud.
And then there's the cloud providers, how much they "use cloud offerings" is a philosophical question, and Facebook/Google, which similarly "use the cloud" just their own cloud.
Nothing we're seeing these days is actually AI.
Until I can have a conversation with an artificial entity that can reason abstractly to extrapolate experience to apply against novel concepts to which it is introduced, we're not there.
That's a definition of AI used in SciFi, not by the people who actually get to define the term. We've had AI since the 70s, ever growing in the set of problems it can usefully solve. Voice recognition? AI. Machine vision? AI.
The scientists in the field get to define the terms, not Hollywood.
Like many Slashdotters, your idea of "real AI" is something from SciFi, not from the field. We have real AI right now, produced by real AI developers based on papers in peer-reviewed AI journals. This thing we have? That's what AI is.
You need a new term for machine consciousness, is that's what you mean.
Also, chickens are dinosaurs, for the same reason. The scientists in the field get to define the terms, That's just how it works.