Not even a little. The whole point of owning a newspaper is the ability to print whatever crap you want to. If Bezos wants to use his pet paper to pimp Amazon to the few dozen elderly people who still read it, more power to him. Individuals who own newspapers publishing what they want is the very essence of the First Amendment.
Are you offended that Democratic-party-publishing-organ WaPo is being used for dirty, dirty profits? Suggesting people listen to Democratic-party-publishing-organ NPR to get their opinion about it? Are you itching to suggest some government regulatory power to help out here?
Employing robots and AIs overall to do almost *anything* may soon be cheaper than employing most humans, similar to how we junk old computers because they use too much power per MIP even when they still "work".
Any day now, we'll have the Singularity. Sure we will. Along with fusion power, flying cars, and some sort of sane calendar and spelling.
Our current economic system produces a huge amount of goods and services but has trouble distributing them in a healthy way.
Goods and services are pretty nearly evenly distributed, for all the whining and envy. Money is not. Control of the means of production is not. But goods and services are.
we are perhaps already at the point where a significant percentage of the US population would not be able to feed themselves from jobs because their labor has little economic value in our competitive economy which included many desperate out-of-work people willing to work for low wages
Or, you know, people could learn a skill. There's no inherent value in work - just because it's difficult doesn't make it worthwhile. You have to do something that someone finds useful (someone other than yourself, for trade). Automation raises the "noise floor" there, but if we reject the Singularity BS, it doesn't do so alarmingly. Over the next 20-30 years at least, there's good pay to be had in the skilled trades. There's been a shortage of welders, plumbers, electricians, etc for a couple of decades now, and those jobs pay well. There was a brief downturn during the housing collapse, but there's been a big "help wanted" sign up at the construction site next to me for weeks now, and the market in my city is booming.
But getting a degree in "X Studies" with a minor in crushing debt, and then working retail? Yeah, not much future in that.
Essentially, there is a law of diminishing returns for more goods and services for any *healthy* human
This is why goods and services are reasonably evenly distributed. No matter how rich you are, there's only so much beer you can drink. But we tend to focus on the stuff that's scarce-yet-practically-available, and ignore the stuff that's not scare, or not practically available, leading to the false assumption that that narrow band is the only possible economy. But instead, that band between "too scarce" and "too available," where (most) jobs happen, just moves up.
The number of people employed as maids or gardeners today is unbelievably high as seen from 50 years ago. The middle class? With servants? Impossible by definition! But as manufacturing was replaced by automation, stuff got cheap enough (and economies of scale kicked in) for a wide swathe of Americans to afford to pay someone else to mow the grass and clean the toilet. Now of course, it's those jobs that will soon be done by robots, along with all the other unskilled labor in the next few decades.
Well, if everything provided by unskilled labor, plus food and manufactured good, were all available for next to nothing, what then would we like others to do for us that we just can't afford today? That we can't imagine being affordable because the economies of scale haven't kicked in? There's a lot, I think.
Another aspect of affluence is that everything we own also owns us because it has to be maintained and stored and worried about...
A study discussed a couple years ago on Slashdot suggested that in the USA money was closely correlated with happiness -- but only up to around US$75,000 a year. After that, more money did not make much of a difference.
That's all "things". There won't be any jobs making "things" anyway, other than in customizing them or inventing new things, so it's not like that sort of affluence would drive many jobs to begin with. (BTW, different people have differing utility curves - for ju
No point splitting hairs over what qualifies as "religion," but if this is the case, then there's more evidence for the Big Bang than for any other religion ever devised in the history of humanity, and that's saying something.
The evidence (which is nothing new, BTW) is amazing though. If the density of the universe were too low, or too high, we wouldn't have a universe to live in today. OK, that's not too odd - big crunch one way, big rip the other. What's astonishing is that the required density in the 1 ns universe to allow our universe to reach its current age must be correct to 24 significant digits.
Talk about fine tuning! One part in 10^24 higher or lower, and no universe today. That's about as anti-Copernican as you can get. Either we accept the "hand of god" in tuning the universe so precisely, or (far stupider IMO), we believe some silly anthropomorphic principle, or we simply accept that the physics is incomplete.
The last choice is of course where most working cosmologists are. There must be something we don't understand that explains why the early universe was necessarily so fine tuned - that it wasn't a happy accident, but could only be that way, or was very likely to be that way. Work on "inflationary" theories is a big part of the field these days, and this question is central to them.
There are a bunch of hypotheses that say, effectively, "the effect driving the early, very rapid inflation of the universe stopped, by it's very nature, at the point where the universe was exactly 'flat'". The dark energy seen driving expansion today is then explained as a different effect, incredibly weak by comparison.
99% of people used to work in agriculture. Now it's less than 5%. We're at the tail end of a similar cycle for manufacturing, and just starting a similar cycle for unskilled labor in general. It won't be the end of the world. It might be disruptive, sure. (OTOH I have little sympathy for someone currently getting paid less than the robot that could replace them who demands that they be paid more than the replacement robot costs. No one can sustainably be paid more than their work is worth.)
But right now, this year, help-wanted signs are everywhere around me. There are no lack of workforce-entry jobs, driving jobs, construction jobs, and so on. Skilled blue-collar jobs have had a labor shortage for a couple of decades now, and robots or no, no one's going to go broke as an AC repairman in Texas.
there is a limit to how much saturation your peer-peer economy, just like a creative economy, can tolerate. its very small.
As long as people want more than what robots can do, there will be jobs to provide that - how else could it work out? Why would there be any bounds on the size of the peer-to-peer economy, if robots meet all our basic needs. This isn't just hypothetical - you can see this play out today in some retirement communities, where the only work anyone does is peer-to-peer, but there's a robust economy there, often with homebrew currencies. But I expect this century will be the end of unskilled labor, and of much semi-skilled labor.
Perhaps you would care to identify some of them? I admit that I'm at a loss, but then I don't even want most current consumer gizmos.
I have, somewhere upthread I think. Gizmos: again, automated manufacturing, plus a few engineers. What services would you need if you could have any "stuff" you wanted, but didn't know what you'd like? If you could easily afford a decorator, a home theater installer (well, assuming you were the kind of person who calls the nearest/.er to help with such things), and so on, I think many people would. I spend an increasing amount of time broadening my education - I'd like it if I could easily afford undergrad-level individual instruction. Skilled person-to-person services.
FWIW, I think we would be much better off with a social restructuring that reduced the work week, initially, to 24 hours/week and hired more people to fill in the jobs opened up.
Oh, I agree, but you can't force social change. And be careful we don't repeat the mistake of the "40 hour week", otherwise known as "now I have to work 2 different 30 hour jobs and commute between them".
For some reason paying teachers and their aides seems to be very difficult for our current society to do. I'm not sure why, as it is perhaps the most important single job in society.
Teachers are well paid (amazing how many teachers told me otherwise growing up), typically around median income for their area, plus a hefty retirement package. But you don't get paid based on how important your job is; you get paid on how easy you are to replace, and lots of people are willing and able to be teachers at the current pay.
Money, ah yes. There is the big problem. Somehow this must be paid for, and those who control the power and wealth are reluctant to release control
Money is just an intermediary for barter. If you spend X hours working, and want X hours of personal services from others, it will all work out (assuming basic needs are met by robots).
Carwling out? Who is benefitting? Is it the people who lost their houses when they lost their jobs? Is it the workers at WalMart? Who?
You're describing the downturn. The worst in living memory. The economy is headed firmly upwards now, but it's got a long way to climb before it reaches "normal". Give it time. The economy is always cyclic.
I don't see any general recovery at all. I see isolated pockets of partial recovery...and they often don't look as if they're going to be able to maintain their recovery.
And that's what the start of "recovery" looks like. Unless you're somewhere like Detroit, of course - there are a few places that are simply doomed. I see help-wanted signs everywhere now in the Seattle area, signs that weren't there 6 months ago.
What it looks like to me is that certain areas of businesses have had a significant recovery. Others are hanging in there. Others are significantly depressed, and show no signs of recovery.
Well, no line of work lasts forever, I'd stay way from industries that were all the rage 100 years ago.
doesn't mean that automation isn't a real problem
How exactly is it a problem? If robots made all the stuff for basically free we'd all have... less stuff? How would that work exactly? Where would the stuff the robots make go? Buried next to the ET cartridges? I just don't get how the doomsayers picture that economy working.
Not at all. That would still leave everyone out of work. The point is that people will want other things, further up the hierarchy of needs, as they have following previous automation shifts.
Yup, that's one reason the state is so broke. Pension costs are insane, though, too. Uncontrollably rising costs coupled with an inability to raise revenue will end in tears.
Did you have an argument to make? Do you understand the hierarchy of needs?
You don't have to be an "all-consuming scumbag" to desire a better life. As material wants become non-scarce, a better life will be about entertainment, arts, education, hobbies and so on. There are labor-intensive elements to all of those.
Maybe you guys haven't been paying attention, but there was a vast layoff of "middlemen financial types" at the end of the financial bubble.
You might also not realize that there are plenty of service jobs that pay quite nicely. I used to work with a guy who switched from well-paid developer to home theater installer, and was making considerably more last I heard. Low wage service jobs are the unskilled sort that will also be done by robots soon enough. Skilled service jobs are exactly the sort of thing people spend money on once their basic needs are met.
The whole point of the argument was that as robots improve they will displace more and more jobs without creating sufficient new ones
People have been saying that about automation for centuries now, and they just keep being wrong. People don't want some fixed amount of goods and services. People want more. No matter how much is provided cheaply by automation, people will keep wanting more and different goods, services, entertainment, education, whatever. How much we each have is only a function of how much we each create. There will always be demand for everything made by robots plus everything made by people - at least, until fundamental human nature changes.*
tended to produce a certain number of middle class benefits and significant upper class benefits, but with each leap forward poverty becomes a bigger and bigger problem.
Sorry, but that's pure, unrefined ignorance of history. You simply have no idea. 95% of Americans live better than 99% of people who have ever lived. Most Americans are so far from real poverty they have no idea what it really is (heck, almost no one actually starved to death during the Great Depression, and food was still expensive then) . That's the victory of automation!
So in the next big leap, a non-trivial percentage of us middle class people will end up dropping below the poverty line.
The rich barely consume more stuff per-capita than the poor. In this century, how much does money limit the number of beers you can drink? The amount of food you can eat? The number of cars you can drive?
All that stuff that robots will be making? There will be enough to go around. It won't pile up in warehouses unsold. It can't possibly be consumed entirely by the rich (if the top 1% consume twice as much, no one will notice). The robots that make the stuff may even be in your house (cue 2000s memes) by then.
* And, hey, if fundamental human nature changes, maybe communism will work?
Those who still have utility value to the economy. In most cases either the very talented/creative or the rich.
With every industrial revolution new kinds of jobs come to exist. It won't just be engineers and creative geniuses with jobs. Robots can make things, and perform menial labor. They don't provide entertainment, and can't do any sort of work requiring any creativity.
As "things and menial labor" become fully automated, they simply become a small part of a very large economy, an economy that has shifted farther up the hierarchy of needs. We'll all be employed still, helping one another solve our "first world problems".
Don't like the way your apartment is decorated? You'll be able to afford to pay someone for that, since "things and menial labor" are so cheap. Confused by all your choices for wall screens and theater-quality sound systems, and don't know how to hook them up? You'll be able to afford to pay someone for that, since "things and menial labor" are so cheap. All the spa/beauty services that are luxuries today? You'll be able to afford to pay someone for that, since "things and menial labor" are so cheap.
There's already a very broad array of non-menial services available to the rich. As with every previous tech revolution, stuff available only to the rich becomes available to everyone. A century or so ago automation didn't destroy the world, because everyone could suddenly afford shoes and tableware and chairs and all sorts of stuff that used to be luxuries. After this revolution we'll all be keeping each other busy providing non-menial services to one another, not as servants but peer-to-peer (much as the culture of Lyft/Uber is different from traditional Taxis, though that particular job's life is limited by coming automation).
Cisco doesn't make money from $20 routers. The cloud is definitely replacing really expensive hardware load balancer with cheap software load balancing. I'm not sure how customer network boundaries and firewalling is done on Azure or EC2, but I doubt it's expensive networking hardware - like just routing through Linux boxes somewhere. "Software defined networking" is gradually replacing a lot of other high-end custom hardware with cheaper solutions. None of that gives Cisco a bright future.
The government does nothing to protect us from corporations. I can't fathom where this meme even comes from, that reducing the power of government would give corps more power. Not in this country, anyhow, where the government is already just an extension of corporate power. You reduce both together, or increase both together, your choice.
There are updates to Android on phones? I'm not sure my 5-year-old phone has ever received one, and I'm sure its security flaws are legion, just given the history of flaws over the past few years.
Still, it really makes you wonder how this BSOD slipped through - it's not like MS doesn't have vast test automation for stuff like this. It really makes you wonder about the recent massive layoff of QA (and the restructuring behind it). Given the timing, that change starts to seem ill-advised.
Yep - both MS and Google have both said they'll being doing this, but I don't believe them or anyone else till they block download of the Java installer.
It's easy to block stuff that's matches the "malware pattern" described in the TFA, but it's the potential lawsuits by malware distributers (claiming to be legit, of course) that have prevented us from the right answer so far. Both MS and Google have the money to stand up to any such attack, and to take on Oracle over Java if it comes to that - but do they have the balls?
You'd need to propose a mechanism by which flux maters, as I don't see it at all. The count of LHC-collision-level events happens naturally. The total energy in a second of colliding LHC beam happens naturally. Sure, cosmic ray collisions usually start high up, but the atmosphere appears quite dens at that speed, and momentum is conserved, so if some micro black hole formed, it would also see the atmosphere as quite dense, and then pass through the Earth very shortly thereafter.
As far as how we know: there are old planets. There are old neutron stars. Therefore, there are no events caused by cosmic ray collisions that cause destruction at that scale more frequently than "billions of years" per target.
The physicists who can do the actual math on this stuff are comfortable being in the same building with these collisions (and it's reached the point now where every particle physicist spends a few years at the LHC as part of normal career progress, so pretty much everyone in the know has strong reason to care)..
Prescriptivists always lose. Use defines the language.
Chillax broheim. Ain't no thing.
If you seek credibility when you write, as you might when you argue for a position, it's better to write in the manner of an educated adult. Much of what's admirable in humanity comes from our willingness to fight when it's likely that we'll lose.
The only inevitability is that the term "begs the question" is now and will remain ambiguous.
The phrase should be abandoned, IMO. Use "raises the question" for the one, and "assumes the conclusion" for the other, or "beggars the question" if your audience has half a clue.
Heh heh. The only problem of course being that they're not actually monitoring the LHC for all possible black holes that could potentially be created, and we have no idea how long it would take for a terminal event to build to noticeable levels. There could at this very moment be a microscopic black hole orbitting within the Earth, absorbing new matter just barely faster than it evaporates, biding it's time as it grows toward critical mass.
Ahh, you miss my point. LHC-level events happen in the atmosphere quite routinely and have for 4 billion years. Anything bad that happens, takes at least that long to destroy the world, and will happen today whether the LHC is on or off.
Anything spawned in the upper atmosphere is going to spend the first few seconds of it's existence falling through low-pressure air. Opportunities to "feed" off normal matter would be few and far between.
High energy cosmic rays are moving at very nearly the speed of light. From their point of view, the Earth's atmosphere is a nanometer or so think.
Would you care to speculate on how often a huge, super-tight cluster of cosmic rays manages to reach the Earth's surface all at once in order to mimic a single large-scale LHC test?
Sure, the cosmic ray particle flux is well known. Events at the scale of a LHC collision happen about once per square kilometer per 10 seconds. IRIC, the LHC gets about 100 million collisions a second. That's only about 8x what hit the Earth (of that energy level alone) continuously - for 4 billion years. And there's a whole sea of energy levels - single cosmic rays with all the energy in that second of LHC operation hit yearly.
Now imaging the same rain falling on every neutron star. No black holes form that way either, and that's as dense a target as you can ask for.
The space program evolved from the Cold War, partly as a way to show that your nation has the technology to launch "a payload" into orbit and "land" it anywhere in the world you care to, without involving mushroom clouds in the demonstration.
Building your own program, as India is, is for sure the only way to achieve that Cold War goal (especially if you also grow your own nukes). Rented space ships seem fine for science. For national pride? Probably varies by culture, but I'd think a good ad/propaganda agency could work with anything.
Meanwhile things like nanotech and biotech have the potential to completely escape our control. You don't even need a grey-goo scenario - release enough buckyballs into the environment and virtually all cellular life on the planet will grind to a stop - you can't clean the stuff up, and it essentially never breaks down.
What hubris. The only thing nano-scale that humans can make that will be more threatening than the worst plagues humanity has already survived are biological weapons based on the worst plagues humanity has already survived.
Not to mention doing things like operating particle accelerators on Earth that we think could well produce quantum black holes. Sure we're pretty sure they'd evaporate harmlessly, but if we were *certain* of the physics we wouldn't be wasting time building ever-larger particle accelerators
The only thing special about LHC energy levels is that they can occur inside some neat detectors and measurement equipment, When the LHC comes online with its new, higher beam energies, the goal is 6.5 TeV per beam. Not bad for monkeys playing with fire. The OMG Particle was about 300000000 TeV, and that's just the universe mooning us after a drunken party.
Still if you're nervous, check here form time to time - just to be sure.
The two parties have very different sets of pockets they compete to fill with taxpayer dollars. Their methods are the same, it's only the pockets that vary.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you see the problem now?
Not even a little. The whole point of owning a newspaper is the ability to print whatever crap you want to. If Bezos wants to use his pet paper to pimp Amazon to the few dozen elderly people who still read it, more power to him. Individuals who own newspapers publishing what they want is the very essence of the First Amendment.
Are you offended that Democratic-party-publishing-organ WaPo is being used for dirty, dirty profits? Suggesting people listen to Democratic-party-publishing-organ NPR to get their opinion about it? Are you itching to suggest some government regulatory power to help out here?
Employing robots and AIs overall to do almost *anything* may soon be cheaper than employing most humans, similar to how we junk old computers because they use too much power per MIP even when they still "work".
Any day now, we'll have the Singularity. Sure we will. Along with fusion power, flying cars, and some sort of sane calendar and spelling.
Our current economic system produces a huge amount of goods and services but has trouble distributing them in a healthy way.
Goods and services are pretty nearly evenly distributed, for all the whining and envy. Money is not. Control of the means of production is not. But goods and services are.
we are perhaps already at the point where a significant percentage of the US population would not be able to feed themselves from jobs because their labor has little economic value in our competitive economy which included many desperate out-of-work people willing to work for low wages
Or, you know, people could learn a skill. There's no inherent value in work - just because it's difficult doesn't make it worthwhile. You have to do something that someone finds useful (someone other than yourself, for trade). Automation raises the "noise floor" there, but if we reject the Singularity BS, it doesn't do so alarmingly. Over the next 20-30 years at least, there's good pay to be had in the skilled trades. There's been a shortage of welders, plumbers, electricians, etc for a couple of decades now, and those jobs pay well. There was a brief downturn during the housing collapse, but there's been a big "help wanted" sign up at the construction site next to me for weeks now, and the market in my city is booming.
But getting a degree in "X Studies" with a minor in crushing debt, and then working retail? Yeah, not much future in that.
Essentially, there is a law of diminishing returns for more goods and services for any *healthy* human
This is why goods and services are reasonably evenly distributed. No matter how rich you are, there's only so much beer you can drink. But we tend to focus on the stuff that's scarce-yet-practically-available, and ignore the stuff that's not scare, or not practically available, leading to the false assumption that that narrow band is the only possible economy. But instead, that band between "too scarce" and "too available," where (most) jobs happen, just moves up.
The number of people employed as maids or gardeners today is unbelievably high as seen from 50 years ago. The middle class? With servants? Impossible by definition! But as manufacturing was replaced by automation, stuff got cheap enough (and economies of scale kicked in) for a wide swathe of Americans to afford to pay someone else to mow the grass and clean the toilet. Now of course, it's those jobs that will soon be done by robots, along with all the other unskilled labor in the next few decades.
Well, if everything provided by unskilled labor, plus food and manufactured good, were all available for next to nothing, what then would we like others to do for us that we just can't afford today? That we can't imagine being affordable because the economies of scale haven't kicked in? There's a lot, I think.
Another aspect of affluence is that everything we own also owns us because it has to be maintained and stored and worried about ...
A study discussed a couple years ago on Slashdot suggested that in the USA money was closely correlated with happiness -- but only up to around US$75,000 a year. After that, more money did not make much of a difference.
That's all "things". There won't be any jobs making "things" anyway, other than in customizing them or inventing new things, so it's not like that sort of affluence would drive many jobs to begin with. (BTW, different people have differing utility curves - for ju
No point splitting hairs over what qualifies as "religion," but if this is the case, then there's more evidence for the Big Bang than for any other religion ever devised in the history of humanity, and that's saying something.
The evidence (which is nothing new, BTW) is amazing though. If the density of the universe were too low, or too high, we wouldn't have a universe to live in today. OK, that's not too odd - big crunch one way, big rip the other. What's astonishing is that the required density in the 1 ns universe to allow our universe to reach its current age must be correct to 24 significant digits.
Talk about fine tuning! One part in 10^24 higher or lower, and no universe today. That's about as anti-Copernican as you can get. Either we accept the "hand of god" in tuning the universe so precisely, or (far stupider IMO), we believe some silly anthropomorphic principle, or we simply accept that the physics is incomplete.
The last choice is of course where most working cosmologists are. There must be something we don't understand that explains why the early universe was necessarily so fine tuned - that it wasn't a happy accident, but could only be that way, or was very likely to be that way. Work on "inflationary" theories is a big part of the field these days, and this question is central to them.
There are a bunch of hypotheses that say, effectively, "the effect driving the early, very rapid inflation of the universe stopped, by it's very nature, at the point where the universe was exactly 'flat'". The dark energy seen driving expansion today is then explained as a different effect, incredibly weak by comparison.
99% of people used to work in agriculture. Now it's less than 5%. We're at the tail end of a similar cycle for manufacturing, and just starting a similar cycle for unskilled labor in general. It won't be the end of the world. It might be disruptive, sure. (OTOH I have little sympathy for someone currently getting paid less than the robot that could replace them who demands that they be paid more than the replacement robot costs. No one can sustainably be paid more than their work is worth.)
But right now, this year, help-wanted signs are everywhere around me. There are no lack of workforce-entry jobs, driving jobs, construction jobs, and so on. Skilled blue-collar jobs have had a labor shortage for a couple of decades now, and robots or no, no one's going to go broke as an AC repairman in Texas.
there is a limit to how much saturation your peer-peer economy, just like a creative economy, can tolerate. its very small.
As long as people want more than what robots can do, there will be jobs to provide that - how else could it work out? Why would there be any bounds on the size of the peer-to-peer economy, if robots meet all our basic needs. This isn't just hypothetical - you can see this play out today in some retirement communities, where the only work anyone does is peer-to-peer, but there's a robust economy there, often with homebrew currencies. But I expect this century will be the end of unskilled labor, and of much semi-skilled labor.
Perhaps you would care to identify some of them? I admit that I'm at a loss, but then I don't even want most current consumer gizmos.
I have, somewhere upthread I think. Gizmos: again, automated manufacturing, plus a few engineers. What services would you need if you could have any "stuff" you wanted, but didn't know what you'd like? If you could easily afford a decorator, a home theater installer (well, assuming you were the kind of person who calls the nearest /.er to help with such things), and so on, I think many people would. I spend an increasing amount of time broadening my education - I'd like it if I could easily afford undergrad-level individual instruction. Skilled person-to-person services.
FWIW, I think we would be much better off with a social restructuring that reduced the work week, initially, to 24 hours/week and hired more people to fill in the jobs opened up.
Oh, I agree, but you can't force social change. And be careful we don't repeat the mistake of the "40 hour week", otherwise known as "now I have to work 2 different 30 hour jobs and commute between them".
For some reason paying teachers and their aides seems to be very difficult for our current society to do. I'm not sure why, as it is perhaps the most important single job in society.
Teachers are well paid (amazing how many teachers told me otherwise growing up), typically around median income for their area, plus a hefty retirement package. But you don't get paid based on how important your job is; you get paid on how easy you are to replace, and lots of people are willing and able to be teachers at the current pay.
Money, ah yes. There is the big problem. Somehow this must be paid for, and those who control the power and wealth are reluctant to release control
Money is just an intermediary for barter. If you spend X hours working, and want X hours of personal services from others, it will all work out (assuming basic needs are met by robots).
Carwling out? Who is benefitting? Is it the people who lost their houses when they lost their jobs? Is it the workers at WalMart? Who?
You're describing the downturn. The worst in living memory. The economy is headed firmly upwards now, but it's got a long way to climb before it reaches "normal". Give it time. The economy is always cyclic.
I don't see any general recovery at all. I see isolated pockets of partial recovery...and they often don't look as if they're going to be able to maintain their recovery.
And that's what the start of "recovery" looks like. Unless you're somewhere like Detroit, of course - there are a few places that are simply doomed. I see help-wanted signs everywhere now in the Seattle area, signs that weren't there 6 months ago.
What it looks like to me is that certain areas of businesses have had a significant recovery. Others are hanging in there. Others are significantly depressed, and show no signs of recovery.
Well, no line of work lasts forever, I'd stay way from industries that were all the rage 100 years ago.
doesn't mean that automation isn't a real problem
How exactly is it a problem? If robots made all the stuff for basically free we'd all have ... less stuff? How would that work exactly? Where would the stuff the robots make go? Buried next to the ET cartridges? I just don't get how the doomsayers picture that economy working.
Not at all. That would still leave everyone out of work. The point is that people will want other things, further up the hierarchy of needs, as they have following previous automation shifts.
Yup, that's one reason the state is so broke. Pension costs are insane, though, too. Uncontrollably rising costs coupled with an inability to raise revenue will end in tears.
Did you have an argument to make? Do you understand the hierarchy of needs?
You don't have to be an "all-consuming scumbag" to desire a better life. As material wants become non-scarce, a better life will be about entertainment, arts, education, hobbies and so on. There are labor-intensive elements to all of those.
Maybe you guys haven't been paying attention, but there was a vast layoff of "middlemen financial types" at the end of the financial bubble.
You might also not realize that there are plenty of service jobs that pay quite nicely. I used to work with a guy who switched from well-paid developer to home theater installer, and was making considerably more last I heard. Low wage service jobs are the unskilled sort that will also be done by robots soon enough. Skilled service jobs are exactly the sort of thing people spend money on once their basic needs are met.
The whole point of the argument was that as robots improve they will displace more and more jobs without creating sufficient new ones
People have been saying that about automation for centuries now, and they just keep being wrong. People don't want some fixed amount of goods and services. People want more. No matter how much is provided cheaply by automation, people will keep wanting more and different goods, services, entertainment, education, whatever. How much we each have is only a function of how much we each create. There will always be demand for everything made by robots plus everything made by people - at least, until fundamental human nature changes.*
tended to produce a certain number of middle class benefits and significant upper class benefits, but with each leap forward poverty becomes a bigger and bigger problem.
Sorry, but that's pure, unrefined ignorance of history. You simply have no idea. 95% of Americans live better than 99% of people who have ever lived. Most Americans are so far from real poverty they have no idea what it really is (heck, almost no one actually starved to death during the Great Depression, and food was still expensive then) . That's the victory of automation!
So in the next big leap, a non-trivial percentage of us middle class people will end up dropping below the poverty line.
The rich barely consume more stuff per-capita than the poor. In this century, how much does money limit the number of beers you can drink? The amount of food you can eat? The number of cars you can drive?
All that stuff that robots will be making? There will be enough to go around. It won't pile up in warehouses unsold. It can't possibly be consumed entirely by the rich (if the top 1% consume twice as much, no one will notice). The robots that make the stuff may even be in your house (cue 2000s memes) by then.
* And, hey, if fundamental human nature changes, maybe communism will work?
agree it seems we should be seeing the rise of more "indulgence" and customization, but for some reason that is relatively stagnant.
How else would you describe all the 3D-printing hype?
The economy is crawling out of the worst recession in most /.ers' lifetimes. Give it a bit.
Those who still have utility value to the economy. In most cases either the very talented/creative or the rich.
With every industrial revolution new kinds of jobs come to exist. It won't just be engineers and creative geniuses with jobs. Robots can make things, and perform menial labor. They don't provide entertainment, and can't do any sort of work requiring any creativity.
As "things and menial labor" become fully automated, they simply become a small part of a very large economy, an economy that has shifted farther up the hierarchy of needs. We'll all be employed still, helping one another solve our "first world problems".
Don't like the way your apartment is decorated? You'll be able to afford to pay someone for that, since "things and menial labor" are so cheap. Confused by all your choices for wall screens and theater-quality sound systems, and don't know how to hook them up? You'll be able to afford to pay someone for that, since "things and menial labor" are so cheap. All the spa/beauty services that are luxuries today? You'll be able to afford to pay someone for that, since "things and menial labor" are so cheap.
There's already a very broad array of non-menial services available to the rich. As with every previous tech revolution, stuff available only to the rich becomes available to everyone. A century or so ago automation didn't destroy the world, because everyone could suddenly afford shoes and tableware and chairs and all sorts of stuff that used to be luxuries. After this revolution we'll all be keeping each other busy providing non-menial services to one another, not as servants but peer-to-peer (much as the culture of Lyft/Uber is different from traditional Taxis, though that particular job's life is limited by coming automation).
The cloud will replace routers. Cisco fuk yea.
Cisco doesn't make money from $20 routers. The cloud is definitely replacing really expensive hardware load balancer with cheap software load balancing. I'm not sure how customer network boundaries and firewalling is done on Azure or EC2, but I doubt it's expensive networking hardware - like just routing through Linux boxes somewhere. "Software defined networking" is gradually replacing a lot of other high-end custom hardware with cheaper solutions. None of that gives Cisco a bright future.
The government does nothing to protect us from corporations. I can't fathom where this meme even comes from, that reducing the power of government would give corps more power. Not in this country, anyhow, where the government is already just an extension of corporate power. You reduce both together, or increase both together, your choice.
There are updates to Android on phones? I'm not sure my 5-year-old phone has ever received one, and I'm sure its security flaws are legion, just given the history of flaws over the past few years.
Still, it really makes you wonder how this BSOD slipped through - it's not like MS doesn't have vast test automation for stuff like this. It really makes you wonder about the recent massive layoff of QA (and the restructuring behind it). Given the timing, that change starts to seem ill-advised.
Yep - both MS and Google have both said they'll being doing this, but I don't believe them or anyone else till they block download of the Java installer.
It's easy to block stuff that's matches the "malware pattern" described in the TFA, but it's the potential lawsuits by malware distributers (claiming to be legit, of course) that have prevented us from the right answer so far. Both MS and Google have the money to stand up to any such attack, and to take on Oracle over Java if it comes to that - but do they have the balls?
Time will tell.
You'd need to propose a mechanism by which flux maters, as I don't see it at all. The count of LHC-collision-level events happens naturally. The total energy in a second of colliding LHC beam happens naturally. Sure, cosmic ray collisions usually start high up, but the atmosphere appears quite dens at that speed, and momentum is conserved, so if some micro black hole formed, it would also see the atmosphere as quite dense, and then pass through the Earth very shortly thereafter.
As far as how we know: there are old planets. There are old neutron stars. Therefore, there are no events caused by cosmic ray collisions that cause destruction at that scale more frequently than "billions of years" per target.
The physicists who can do the actual math on this stuff are comfortable being in the same building with these collisions (and it's reached the point now where every particle physicist spends a few years at the LHC as part of normal career progress, so pretty much everyone in the know has strong reason to care)..
Prescriptivists always lose. Use defines the language.
Chillax broheim. Ain't no thing.
If you seek credibility when you write, as you might when you argue for a position, it's better to write in the manner of an educated adult. Much of what's admirable in humanity comes from our willingness to fight when it's likely that we'll lose.
Jus sayin.
The only inevitability is that the term "begs the question" is now and will remain ambiguous.
The phrase should be abandoned, IMO. Use "raises the question" for the one, and "assumes the conclusion" for the other, or "beggars the question" if your audience has half a clue.
Heh heh. The only problem of course being that they're not actually monitoring the LHC for all possible black holes that could potentially be created, and we have no idea how long it would take for a terminal event to build to noticeable levels. There could at this very moment be a microscopic black hole orbitting within the Earth, absorbing new matter just barely faster than it evaporates, biding it's time as it grows toward critical mass.
Ahh, you miss my point. LHC-level events happen in the atmosphere quite routinely and have for 4 billion years. Anything bad that happens, takes at least that long to destroy the world, and will happen today whether the LHC is on or off.
Anything spawned in the upper atmosphere is going to spend the first few seconds of it's existence falling through low-pressure air. Opportunities to "feed" off normal matter would be few and far between.
High energy cosmic rays are moving at very nearly the speed of light. From their point of view, the Earth's atmosphere is a nanometer or so think.
Would you care to speculate on how often a huge, super-tight cluster of cosmic rays manages to reach the Earth's surface all at once in order to mimic a single large-scale LHC test?
Sure, the cosmic ray particle flux is well known. Events at the scale of a LHC collision happen about once per square kilometer per 10 seconds. IRIC, the LHC gets about 100 million collisions a second. That's only about 8x what hit the Earth (of that energy level alone) continuously - for 4 billion years. And there's a whole sea of energy levels - single cosmic rays with all the energy in that second of LHC operation hit yearly.
Now imaging the same rain falling on every neutron star. No black holes form that way either, and that's as dense a target as you can ask for.
The space program evolved from the Cold War, partly as a way to show that your nation has the technology to launch "a payload" into orbit and "land" it anywhere in the world you care to, without involving mushroom clouds in the demonstration.
Building your own program, as India is, is for sure the only way to achieve that Cold War goal (especially if you also grow your own nukes). Rented space ships seem fine for science. For national pride? Probably varies by culture, but I'd think a good ad/propaganda agency could work with anything.
Give up. Language evolves.
Sure. But that doesn't mean it should, at least not in every case. In this case, it shouldn't. Fighting back is appropriate.
Meanwhile things like nanotech and biotech have the potential to completely escape our control. You don't even need a grey-goo scenario - release enough buckyballs into the environment and virtually all cellular life on the planet will grind to a stop - you can't clean the stuff up, and it essentially never breaks down.
What hubris. The only thing nano-scale that humans can make that will be more threatening than the worst plagues humanity has already survived are biological weapons based on the worst plagues humanity has already survived.
Not to mention doing things like operating particle accelerators on Earth that we think could well produce quantum black holes. Sure we're pretty sure they'd evaporate harmlessly, but if we were *certain* of the physics we wouldn't be wasting time building ever-larger particle accelerators
The only thing special about LHC energy levels is that they can occur inside some neat detectors and measurement equipment, When the LHC comes online with its new, higher beam energies, the goal is 6.5 TeV per beam. Not bad for monkeys playing with fire. The OMG Particle was about 300000000 TeV, and that's just the universe mooning us after a drunken party.
Still if you're nervous, check here form time to time - just to be sure.
The two parties have very different sets of pockets they compete to fill with taxpayer dollars. Their methods are the same, it's only the pockets that vary.