If you actually have rare skills then sure supply and demand means you should get paid more. Shitty jobs mean less people are willing to do those jobs too though so supply and demand means the people working those jobs should also get paid more. It's the people with easy decent jobs that should get paid less. Someone whose job involves sitting in an office doing something easy is easily replaced so unless they do a very good job they don't need to be paid a lot.
I don't think just going to school makes you deserving of being paid more though. Either you need rare skills or talent (redundant?), to do the job better than most (either through better skills or harder work), or to have a crappy job others don't want to do if you want to make more money - a combination of those is even better. Hardly an unusual viewpoint really. Degrees are a dime a dozen today so it doesn't do so much for your earning potential. I know a lot of people with degrees that don't have the skills or work ethic to back them up and they're all but worthless.
Even spent a day digging ditches? It's really hard work. Try shoveling gravel non-stop for a couple hours and see how you much you feel that time was worth after. Ever seen the turnover in that kind of job? If you find someone that does it well you hold on to them. A good worker can get the job done a lot better and faster and paying people well, even if you don't need to, can make a lot of people into that better worker. Just because you can hire some cheap illegal immigrant labor doesn't mean that there is really a huge line of people waiting to do your shitty jobs on the cheap.
I've always liked companies that paid every employee (mgmt included) the same, cost of living, salary and that awarded everyone stock based on their job position and how well they did their job. I personally think that the people that are hardest and most effective working should reap the most stock. A janitor that works 12 hours a day of hard labor and does their job well deserves as much reward as an exec that golfs all day but effectively does their job and more than an exec that golfs all day but doesn't get their job done.
I've studied such things for years and my experience is most of those people haven't the foggiest idea what they're talking about in practical terms. Yes the brain is complex but that doesn't mean you can't implement the same functionality with a different method. Reverse engineering the biochemistry and physics involved is interesting but besides the point. If you can achieve the same functionality without emulating the native enviroment it'll probably run faster than in emulation. Computers are currently very different in design than a brain so emulation is a very slow method of implementation.
Computers are linear but all that they do doesn't have to be linear. Games, networking, etc can be very non-linear but can be processed by a computer. They can sit around examining their own navel lint and saying whatever they want but at the same time I'm out there making programs that do what they claim isn't possible. So I don't think very much of their claims.
With the time required to make the transition most of those jobs could be automated and those that couldn't might become the highest paid jobs as fewer people would want to do them. Also you're assuming that we won't naturally have less intelligent or less upwardly mobile citizens which seems unlikely to me. I don't think we need to worry that there won't be enough people to work lower quality jobs.
To have emotions you have to create a biological need but that does not mean you need to be organic. Such a machine should be able to understand fear, love, hope, despair, etc just as we do. Is it ever going to be identical to humans? Probably not but for that matter is my feelings of pain and love identical to yours or different? I'd say that while similar such feelings are very individual and are never exactly the same between two of us. So it is with bots with emotional systems.
By giving the AI a few simple rules it'll figure out the rest if it's designed properly. A simple system might define pain as a bad thing and pleasure as a good thing and give a few rules by which the system can influence these two traits. If the system is a learning system it can learn more complex needs from it's enviroment and feedback from humans or even animals or other bots. I'd define these more complex needs as emotions. You learn that A gives you pleasure so that the fear of lossing A gives you pain. You're not actually experiencing pain but the memory of pain sends out pain-like signals because you fear lose. Things like that. Not really that complex as it mostly builds chains of concepts off one another such that they interact with the basic feedback of wanting pleasure and avoiding pain.
I tend to think of modeling the exact physics and chemistry of a brain as sort of the brute force method to AI. Neural nets make an effort at that with varying degress of success. More important is to understand how we ourselves feel and think. If we understand our own behaviors we can formalize rules to those behaviors. If you can make formalized rules for something then you can put it into a computer.
A computer, quite simply, is any device that computes. You can't get much more of a basic definition than that. It's not as if I'm claiming that the brain is an iMac running Tiger. Doh.
Hey, I love my N-Gage QD! It makes other phones look like crap when it comes to playing games. If only they'd keep advancing it to stay with the times. A good built-in camera would go a long way. Not quite as powerful as a PSP but smaller and certainly powerful enough for some very nice games. Better than a GameBoy or whatever is crammed into your normal phone.
If you could program a machine that behaved intelligently without the ability to learn and adapt I'd be highly surprised but I'd have to agree with you that if it did behave intelligently in that case that it'd hardly matter if it had the programming hard coded or if it was a learned behavior.
Certain behaviors are hard coded but not as many as people like to assume I think. For instance I raised a dog away from other dogs and it never learned to bark until I moved somewhere with other dogs. Most people would assume that barking was a built-in behavior and it probably is but knowing when and how to bark is a learned behavior built around a very simple instinct.
Be all mystical if it makes you feel better. There is no reason the brain needs to be as complex as you make out but even if it is that makes it no less a computer. A very powerful computer in many regards but still a computer. The human brain is probably the most complex machine we've yet discovered and no doubt it'll be quite a while until we've figured it all out (willingness of test subjects to have their brains experimented on being as limited as it is) but there is no evidence that there is anything as complex or mystical going on as you seem to want to believe.
Even smart people are sometimes religious. All of us have our little quirks and failures. If it makes you feel better to believe the world has things about it that are so mystical that we cannot solve their mysteries then go right ahead. For me, religious though I am not, I am much more amazed by the power of our Creator for having created something where everything runs in an orderly fashion and can be explained and manipulated if you are smart enough and work hard enough. No the Universe isn't as simple as clockwork but it is just as orderly. We may never have enough time and mental capacity to unravel all the secrets but that doesn't mean the secrets could not be unraveled.
A computer is any machine that calculates. The brain is a machine that calculates. Therefore by definition a brain is a computer. You can replicate that behavior in part in today's computers and maybe all in the computers of the future. You don't even have to duplicate the exact functionality - you just need to create functionality on the level that does what you need. As I pointed out emotions are not hard to replicate and can be done in a fairly low powered computer. Every living thing with any brain at all has some form of emotions so there is no reason a computerized pet can't.
I agree. If the telcos fuck with the users to much someone will just come along and make a lot of money by supplying a better experience. In this day and age they can't rely on not having compitition. I'll switch from any telco that behaves in this way the same as I've switched for other misbehavior (such as charging by usage rather than unlimited or firewalling my access to certain ports). Do they really think that trying to blackmail companies like Google won't make it into the media? I can only imagine Google would put up a big nasty 'Why your connection sucks and what you can do about it!' link on all their sites.
*shrugs* The difference between brain and computer is arguable I guess since nobody really understands the brain entirely yet but pretty much any kind of processing can be done on a computer that can be done in the brain if you know how it works. Slower but the same thing in principal. My experience is that emotions are not very intensive to process as it's just a much more internal network of experience than a thinking system. If you do something and it hurts then you quickly learn that and the relationships are pretty simple. Not nearly as hard to process as advanced relationships that are required for understanding language, navigation, science, math, etc.
No doubt commercially available toys are pretty simple. I'd be surprised to learn that any of them have a real learning system in place much less psuedo-emotions based on a learning system. Still it's very possible to do and has been done often enough in non-commercial products. I've had several virtual pets of my own design that had complex emotional systems.
Why not? A brain is nothing but a computer and emotions are nothing but a function of the mind. If it is hard programmed to do these emotions then it is only a mimic. If it learns them itself then it is feeling them.
Good point, I wonder how a non-intelligent psuedo-pet compares to a more intelligent model so far as the benefits on the human psyche. Anything we associate with comfort and stability I imagine would have a strong bond with how we react to them.
For example a favorite pair of jeans or any similar item. We're not even associating them with a living being but we still tend to personify them and cling to them as something we'd miss even if we replaced them with an identical item.
It depends how smart your robot dog is. I've had some robotic and digital pets that were very intelligent and because they had built-in emotion systems and learning they could learn love, hate, loyalty, etc. Not as good as a real animal yet but it does have the benefit that when it breaks you can fix it which is something I sadly cannot say of my real pets which I've lost many of over the years.
Society causes many artificial barriers but I think money is probably still the number one barrier stopping people from finishing higher education. Before we spend a lot of time trying to change soft barriers we should work on fixing hard barriers like a lack of funds.
I'd suggest people like that compare the number of scholarships for straight white males to any minority group they might happen to belong to and then whine about how rough it is. Funny that I happen to be one of those SWM's and also happened to come from a poor family and yet I wasn't going around expecting donations. I sure as hell had to work my way up and why shouldn't they have to do the same.
Myself, I think since higher education is required in today's job market that it should be covered by the government the same as lower education is. Having so many people that are less productive than they could be because they lack the financial resources to make themselves better is not a wise course of action for a country. There should be no difference in age, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc - just educate everyone that is willing to learn without forcing them to jump through hurdles.
I for one vote on requiring female scientists to wear something sexy and revealing at all times. They need to always look like the brainy girls of science as shown in romantic comedies and porn movies. I think this will solve all our problems. More hotties will get into science causing more men to get into science and as they mate and produce attractive yet brainy children humanity will evolve. I can't wait to have myself a hot geek girl in tight black latex as my overlord.. err mistress.
On the other hand many of us do notice we have these random features and just ignore them because they impede the primary functionality of the site that we're looking for. ie I rarely moderate because I'd rather bounce ideas around and moderation seems to be impossible in the same story as discussion and I simply don't care enough to moderate in stories I don't want to talk about.
So add random features but don't punish us for using them and some of us will. Maybe try adding them randomly only for users of a certain experience level.
Putting no follows in seems a retarded idea to me if the poster poster something that was legit. Nofollow exists to stop spam and not to censor people off-line.
I switch my URL back and forth as I feel like and often it has to do with what I'm working on or what I think other users might find interesting. Sure it means that my URL choice of the day might get a little search engine boost and IMO that is a good thing because I'm adding to the Internet by posting real content while my competition is getting their boost by running spam bots. In the past I've used Slashdot, Freshmeat, etc to help get my websites that have useful information such as howto guides and FAQs to rank well in search engines - I guess Slashdotters would rather porn sites and link farms hold those spots instead. Smart move people.
One less reason for me to use Slashdot. These reasons keep stacking up. I guess there isn't room for those of us who've been around for years to keep using the system as we've grown used to.
Which is why we need a group of us to buy up such things. Get a quarter million of us working together and we could buy up enough stocks, advertising time, pay off politicians, etc to start being noticed. Isn't that how most other groups influence things in the US? Why shouldn't we do the same?
This kind of study is just retarded but so are stand-by modes. In PC equipment standby mode is more annoying than useful and is just a hack fix for making PCs use less energy all the time and boot quickly.
On my laptop for instance it annoys me quite a bit that there is no way to disable it's need to go into standby mode when you shut it. Very annoying as I often have to move around when using it and need it to keep processing while it's closed. I find it hard to believe that this is saving any significant amount of electricity over just turning off the screen when the laptop closes. Besides that I've worked with thousands of computers over the years and many of them have off and on issues with sleep mode causing the system to hang or worse.
If they want to attack something useful that is seriously wasting major amounts of electricity why not complain that devices such as televisions and vcr's tend to lose their setting when power is cut - meaning that these devices must be on all the time. It doesn't save much power to turn something like a dvd player off if it's still plugged in because it has to use electricity to retain it's settings and because most electrical devices continue using electricty regardless to any use so long as they are plugged in. Easily fixed for a couple dollars per device but nobody is bitching about this so it's gone ignored for years. Sure a hell of an annoyance in general as even a brief power outage requires reprogramming every damn device you own that doesn't have it's own battery. Fix the problem and make manufacturers hard disconnect the power from their devices when the switch is thrown.
Maybe it'd get rid of the damn constellation of blinking little lights that seem to fill every inch of my house at night when I'm trying to sleep.
Is there a way I can buy part of a share? I'm broke this week but I'd cough up $20 towards helping Google especially if it meant owning even a small piece of Google. We should start some sort of open source, open standards freedom group that people can join that'll buy up significant amounts of stock in different tech companies and help direct them.
Slashdot Mirror
If you actually have rare skills then sure supply and demand means you should get paid more. Shitty jobs mean less people are willing to do those jobs too though so supply and demand means the people working those jobs should also get paid more. It's the people with easy decent jobs that should get paid less. Someone whose job involves sitting in an office doing something easy is easily replaced so unless they do a very good job they don't need to be paid a lot.
I don't think just going to school makes you deserving of being paid more though. Either you need rare skills or talent (redundant?), to do the job better than most (either through better skills or harder work), or to have a crappy job others don't want to do if you want to make more money - a combination of those is even better. Hardly an unusual viewpoint really. Degrees are a dime a dozen today so it doesn't do so much for your earning potential. I know a lot of people with degrees that don't have the skills or work ethic to back them up and they're all but worthless.
Even spent a day digging ditches? It's really hard work. Try shoveling gravel non-stop for a couple hours and see how you much you feel that time was worth after. Ever seen the turnover in that kind of job? If you find someone that does it well you hold on to them. A good worker can get the job done a lot better and faster and paying people well, even if you don't need to, can make a lot of people into that better worker. Just because you can hire some cheap illegal immigrant labor doesn't mean that there is really a huge line of people waiting to do your shitty jobs on the cheap.
I've always liked companies that paid every employee (mgmt included) the same, cost of living, salary and that awarded everyone stock based on their job position and how well they did their job. I personally think that the people that are hardest and most effective working should reap the most stock. A janitor that works 12 hours a day of hard labor and does their job well deserves as much reward as an exec that golfs all day but effectively does their job and more than an exec that golfs all day but doesn't get their job done.
I've studied such things for years and my experience is most of those people haven't the foggiest idea what they're talking about in practical terms. Yes the brain is complex but that doesn't mean you can't implement the same functionality with a different method. Reverse engineering the biochemistry and physics involved is interesting but besides the point. If you can achieve the same functionality without emulating the native enviroment it'll probably run faster than in emulation. Computers are currently very different in design than a brain so emulation is a very slow method of implementation.
Computers are linear but all that they do doesn't have to be linear. Games, networking, etc can be very non-linear but can be processed by a computer. They can sit around examining their own navel lint and saying whatever they want but at the same time I'm out there making programs that do what they claim isn't possible. So I don't think very much of their claims.
With the time required to make the transition most of those jobs could be automated and those that couldn't might become the highest paid jobs as fewer people would want to do them. Also you're assuming that we won't naturally have less intelligent or less upwardly mobile citizens which seems unlikely to me. I don't think we need to worry that there won't be enough people to work lower quality jobs.
To have emotions you have to create a biological need but that does not mean you need to be organic. Such a machine should be able to understand fear, love, hope, despair, etc just as we do. Is it ever going to be identical to humans? Probably not but for that matter is my feelings of pain and love identical to yours or different? I'd say that while similar such feelings are very individual and are never exactly the same between two of us. So it is with bots with emotional systems.
By giving the AI a few simple rules it'll figure out the rest if it's designed properly. A simple system might define pain as a bad thing and pleasure as a good thing and give a few rules by which the system can influence these two traits. If the system is a learning system it can learn more complex needs from it's enviroment and feedback from humans or even animals or other bots. I'd define these more complex needs as emotions. You learn that A gives you pleasure so that the fear of lossing A gives you pain. You're not actually experiencing pain but the memory of pain sends out pain-like signals because you fear lose. Things like that. Not really that complex as it mostly builds chains of concepts off one another such that they interact with the basic feedback of wanting pleasure and avoiding pain.
I tend to think of modeling the exact physics and chemistry of a brain as sort of the brute force method to AI. Neural nets make an effort at that with varying degress of success. More important is to understand how we ourselves feel and think. If we understand our own behaviors we can formalize rules to those behaviors. If you can make formalized rules for something then you can put it into a computer.
Take the black latex away and you have nude bodies. Woot!
A computer, quite simply, is any device that computes. You can't get much more of a basic definition than that. It's not as if I'm claiming that the brain is an iMac running Tiger. Doh.
Hey, I love my N-Gage QD! It makes other phones look like crap when it comes to playing games. If only they'd keep advancing it to stay with the times. A good built-in camera would go a long way. Not quite as powerful as a PSP but smaller and certainly powerful enough for some very nice games. Better than a GameBoy or whatever is crammed into your normal phone.
If you could program a machine that behaved intelligently without the ability to learn and adapt I'd be highly surprised but I'd have to agree with you that if it did behave intelligently in that case that it'd hardly matter if it had the programming hard coded or if it was a learned behavior.
Certain behaviors are hard coded but not as many as people like to assume I think. For instance I raised a dog away from other dogs and it never learned to bark until I moved somewhere with other dogs. Most people would assume that barking was a built-in behavior and it probably is but knowing when and how to bark is a learned behavior built around a very simple instinct.
Be all mystical if it makes you feel better. There is no reason the brain needs to be as complex as you make out but even if it is that makes it no less a computer. A very powerful computer in many regards but still a computer. The human brain is probably the most complex machine we've yet discovered and no doubt it'll be quite a while until we've figured it all out (willingness of test subjects to have their brains experimented on being as limited as it is) but there is no evidence that there is anything as complex or mystical going on as you seem to want to believe.
Even smart people are sometimes religious. All of us have our little quirks and failures. If it makes you feel better to believe the world has things about it that are so mystical that we cannot solve their mysteries then go right ahead. For me, religious though I am not, I am much more amazed by the power of our Creator for having created something where everything runs in an orderly fashion and can be explained and manipulated if you are smart enough and work hard enough. No the Universe isn't as simple as clockwork but it is just as orderly. We may never have enough time and mental capacity to unravel all the secrets but that doesn't mean the secrets could not be unraveled.
A computer is any machine that calculates. The brain is a machine that calculates. Therefore by definition a brain is a computer. You can replicate that behavior in part in today's computers and maybe all in the computers of the future. You don't even have to duplicate the exact functionality - you just need to create functionality on the level that does what you need. As I pointed out emotions are not hard to replicate and can be done in a fairly low powered computer. Every living thing with any brain at all has some form of emotions so there is no reason a computerized pet can't.
I agree. If the telcos fuck with the users to much someone will just come along and make a lot of money by supplying a better experience. In this day and age they can't rely on not having compitition. I'll switch from any telco that behaves in this way the same as I've switched for other misbehavior (such as charging by usage rather than unlimited or firewalling my access to certain ports). Do they really think that trying to blackmail companies like Google won't make it into the media? I can only imagine Google would put up a big nasty 'Why your connection sucks and what you can do about it!' link on all their sites.
*shrugs* The difference between brain and computer is arguable I guess since nobody really understands the brain entirely yet but pretty much any kind of processing can be done on a computer that can be done in the brain if you know how it works. Slower but the same thing in principal. My experience is that emotions are not very intensive to process as it's just a much more internal network of experience than a thinking system. If you do something and it hurts then you quickly learn that and the relationships are pretty simple. Not nearly as hard to process as advanced relationships that are required for understanding language, navigation, science, math, etc.
No doubt commercially available toys are pretty simple. I'd be surprised to learn that any of them have a real learning system in place much less psuedo-emotions based on a learning system. Still it's very possible to do and has been done often enough in non-commercial products. I've had several virtual pets of my own design that had complex emotional systems.
Why not? A brain is nothing but a computer and emotions are nothing but a function of the mind. If it is hard programmed to do these emotions then it is only a mimic. If it learns them itself then it is feeling them.
Good point, I wonder how a non-intelligent psuedo-pet compares to a more intelligent model so far as the benefits on the human psyche. Anything we associate with comfort and stability I imagine would have a strong bond with how we react to them.
For example a favorite pair of jeans or any similar item. We're not even associating them with a living being but we still tend to personify them and cling to them as something we'd miss even if we replaced them with an identical item.
It depends how smart your robot dog is. I've had some robotic and digital pets that were very intelligent and because they had built-in emotion systems and learning they could learn love, hate, loyalty, etc. Not as good as a real animal yet but it does have the benefit that when it breaks you can fix it which is something I sadly cannot say of my real pets which I've lost many of over the years.
Society causes many artificial barriers but I think money is probably still the number one barrier stopping people from finishing higher education. Before we spend a lot of time trying to change soft barriers we should work on fixing hard barriers like a lack of funds.
I'd suggest people like that compare the number of scholarships for straight white males to any minority group they might happen to belong to and then whine about how rough it is. Funny that I happen to be one of those SWM's and also happened to come from a poor family and yet I wasn't going around expecting donations. I sure as hell had to work my way up and why shouldn't they have to do the same.
Myself, I think since higher education is required in today's job market that it should be covered by the government the same as lower education is. Having so many people that are less productive than they could be because they lack the financial resources to make themselves better is not a wise course of action for a country. There should be no difference in age, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc - just educate everyone that is willing to learn without forcing them to jump through hurdles.
I for one vote on requiring female scientists to wear something sexy and revealing at all times. They need to always look like the brainy girls of science as shown in romantic comedies and porn movies. I think this will solve all our problems. More hotties will get into science causing more men to get into science and as they mate and produce attractive yet brainy children humanity will evolve. I can't wait to have myself a hot geek girl in tight black latex as my overlord.. err mistress.
On the other hand many of us do notice we have these random features and just ignore them because they impede the primary functionality of the site that we're looking for. ie I rarely moderate because I'd rather bounce ideas around and moderation seems to be impossible in the same story as discussion and I simply don't care enough to moderate in stories I don't want to talk about.
So add random features but don't punish us for using them and some of us will. Maybe try adding them randomly only for users of a certain experience level.
Putting no follows in seems a retarded idea to me if the poster poster something that was legit. Nofollow exists to stop spam and not to censor people off-line.
I switch my URL back and forth as I feel like and often it has to do with what I'm working on or what I think other users might find interesting. Sure it means that my URL choice of the day might get a little search engine boost and IMO that is a good thing because I'm adding to the Internet by posting real content while my competition is getting their boost by running spam bots. In the past I've used Slashdot, Freshmeat, etc to help get my websites that have useful information such as howto guides and FAQs to rank well in search engines - I guess Slashdotters would rather porn sites and link farms hold those spots instead. Smart move people.
One less reason for me to use Slashdot. These reasons keep stacking up. I guess there isn't room for those of us who've been around for years to keep using the system as we've grown used to.
Which is why we need a group of us to buy up such things. Get a quarter million of us working together and we could buy up enough stocks, advertising time, pay off politicians, etc to start being noticed. Isn't that how most other groups influence things in the US? Why shouldn't we do the same?
This kind of study is just retarded but so are stand-by modes. In PC equipment standby mode is more annoying than useful and is just a hack fix for making PCs use less energy all the time and boot quickly.
On my laptop for instance it annoys me quite a bit that there is no way to disable it's need to go into standby mode when you shut it. Very annoying as I often have to move around when using it and need it to keep processing while it's closed. I find it hard to believe that this is saving any significant amount of electricity over just turning off the screen when the laptop closes. Besides that I've worked with thousands of computers over the years and many of them have off and on issues with sleep mode causing the system to hang or worse.
If they want to attack something useful that is seriously wasting major amounts of electricity why not complain that devices such as televisions and vcr's tend to lose their setting when power is cut - meaning that these devices must be on all the time. It doesn't save much power to turn something like a dvd player off if it's still plugged in because it has to use electricity to retain it's settings and because most electrical devices continue using electricty regardless to any use so long as they are plugged in. Easily fixed for a couple dollars per device but nobody is bitching about this so it's gone ignored for years. Sure a hell of an annoyance in general as even a brief power outage requires reprogramming every damn device you own that doesn't have it's own battery. Fix the problem and make manufacturers hard disconnect the power from their devices when the switch is thrown.
Maybe it'd get rid of the damn constellation of blinking little lights that seem to fill every inch of my house at night when I'm trying to sleep.
Now we know why it's marked a beta. ;)
I've put together a bunch of those. A very nice recovery tool and much nicer to use than a thumbdrive. Takes about five minutes to put together.
Is there a way I can buy part of a share? I'm broke this week but I'd cough up $20 towards helping Google especially if it meant owning even a small piece of Google. We should start some sort of open source, open standards freedom group that people can join that'll buy up significant amounts of stock in different tech companies and help direct them.