I'm happy to hear the company is being sold but I really have to wonder about this. I was sure some pretty heavy hitters were financing Gawker for the sake of getting their narratives pushed. Maybe the Gawker name just became too toxic? We'll know if some other media company rises from obscurity to start shitting out the same kind of bias written by the same people.
I think there's non-terrestrial life all over the place but we're too unimaginative to see it. Asteroids that collide in specific ways to make other asteroids that do the same. Star dwelling hydrogen eating beasts whose bodies are formed of energy fields. Lightyear-wide self-forming nebulae that communicate by making protostars. Three-atom-wide nanobugs. Systems of sand dunes that graze on sandstone and excrete dust. It's arrogant to define life as "things like us"
That data was up for sale. Only the very least informed trusted it to be private. What Linkedin really lost was the chance to sell out their members, if the information should be publicly leaked.
It's your fault. You, the gamers. Yes, this one is in your lap. It's your fault because you persist in preordering games without looking into the stability of past releases. Your fault for putting features ahead of stability. Your fault for letting "ooh shiny" distract you from bugs. Your fault for believing reviewers who keep lying to you. Stop it! Start stopping it by not buying this game until it's rock solid.
Unreliable heart rate detection, GPS and fitness tracking, voice recording on command, what else? In the future a smart watch will be able to project directions on the ground to somewhere or someone you're trying to find; to remind you in the grocery store that you wanted to pick up some milk; to answer arbitrary questions from the internet; to alert emergency services when you've suffered a stroke or car collision; an many other things.
But for now the functionality is so low as to put them in the category of "ornament".
The most important consideration, above all else is that it be a fun, engaging experience. Who cares whether they walk away knowing important names and dates? If they walk away thinking "computers are fun" that will do more for the future of computer science than any amount of knowledge you can pack into their little heads in that time. Here are some ideas:
Mechanical computers: use colorful balls on ramps to perform basic addition and subtraction.Let them tinker with the ramps.
Blinkenlights. A big panel from one of the old supercomputers where they can push and pull and switch all the different things to make output on a punch paper. And they get to keep the punch paper.
A basic movement programming environment implemented with physical puzzle blocks. When they assemble a workable program they get to see a robotic turtle move the way it was told. Add obstacles and dots they can pick up for bonus points.
Tin cans on a string, but with a simple, observable interface that lets them push 1 and 0 and see letters and numbers come up for the ASCII they entered.
It's the collateral damage of copyright trolls. Even if it's unlikely (and it may not be unlikely) Fox would sue for copyright violation a new company can't afford to take that risk. Chilling effects all around.
Aging is not a law of physics. Aging is not inevitable. Aging is a degenerative disease that we've been fighting for decades and we are winning ground against it. The human body and genome are a massive, complicated puzzle, but the puzzle is finite. Human life span is increasing by.4 years per year right now. As we speak you get to add half again to your expected age at death just because of the advances you can expect to happen by then.
Charlatans have been promising life extension since the first cave man wondered why his dad was turning small and gray and wondered if it would happen to him. But the progress is real. In the face of apparent miracles it's popular and easy to declare them not to be real. It's the conservative thing, to expect nothing to get better. Hope hurts. But it's time to face that pain, Slashdot. Aging is a dragon we will conquer, and the sooner you recognize it can be conquered the sooner you'll get out your sword. Do not go gently into that good night.
The futurist in me wonders if they can latch onto a submarine cable, cut it, insert a passively recording hub, and leave with only having changed the impedance and signal time (a little) and caused a brief outage.
Most of their video was about how you can do lots and lots of work to put it together and get it working properly. It would take way less time to just study gardening on the internet and tend your own garden, or less money to just buy the food. They know this, which is why they emphasize and re-emphasize having perfect control over how your food is grown. I don't know bout you but I couldn't give a toss what soil moisture my lettuce had between days 2 and 10 of growth.
Don't get me wrong, I love the can-do maker and hacker culture. Just don't confuse it with productivity. This technology will be ready for the world when it actually takes less time and money to grow one's own food with the bot.
While I agree with the pattern you're pointing out the TSA seriously needs to go. The only reason it's still around is that it provides jobs for the unemployable.
If it's a jobs program we're looking for spend the money on replacing thousands of municipal waterworks running on pipes so corroded and plugged up that fire hydrants don't give enough pressure. Or spend the money creating a final say that will stop environmentalists from blocking desert solar power plants. Or finish making section 8 to break up the ghettos. Or clean out Chicago. There are a thousand other things that will pay back their costs. The TSA is a broken window.
Proving unbiased results is an old problem in science. It's a solved problem. The solution is applicable to many other fields of human endeavor. If you want to hire without bias have someone without hiring authority ask interview questions. Change the names on resumes to "candidate 1, candidate 2" etc. The hiring manager sees the resumes and answers but not the candidates. Sincerity is harder to judge but it's still easy to see who knows what they're talking about.
But Facebook doesn't want unbiased hiring. They want to preferentially hire certain people. Fuck Facebook and every other company with bigotry in its soul.
Avoiding rendering views that wouldn't show up in the final picture? They call it LMS:
SMP can be used specifically for VR to achieve what Nvidia calls âLens Matched Shadingâ(TM). The goal of LMS is to avoid rendering pixels which end up being discarded in the final view sent to the display in the VR headset after the distortion process.
What happens when employers stop re-training employees and start shitcanning anyone as soon as possible, relying on obtaining trained people from the rest of the economy when people are needed again? That's right: trained people are quickly drained from the economy leaving only the trained who command very high wages and the untrained, who cannot be employed.
It's popular on Slashdot to loudly pronounce that strong AI is impossible. This is different from years past. I take the change to mean that it's coming very soon. As it seems more inevitable people who don't want change (whether out of fear, distrust, or sour grapes) will decry AI more.
Now weak AI isn't just coming. It has arrived. And Moore's law was supposed to have stopped years ago but supercomputers and video cards are still on a logarithmic slope for performance and price. The human brain is estimated to calculate between 100 petaflops and 1 exaflop. I know that's not a good metric but for this purpose it suffices. But as performance keeps doubling and doubling it becomes more evident that even the highest estimates are a question of a few more doubling periods. And the highest estimates assume direct one-to-one simulation of each neuron. Consider how many neurons are used for breathing, processing vision, and other things that either aren't needed in a machine or have already been done at a much lower computational cost on silicon.
It's true we don't know everything about how the human brain works. But recent progress is undeniable in terms of success stories. Jeopardy. Go. Commodity trading. Corporate resource balancing. Piloting. To keep shouting that strong AI is impossible is to only betray one's own insecurity. You are not special. Your brain doesn't run on quantum magic. You have no soul. Fucking deal with it.
The greatest cost of this is the room. It doesn't matter how far the price comes down if the user doesn't have a spare room for it. So that price drop you're anticipating won't come with the technology costing less but with construction costs (including the seats) costing less. I'm not saying it won't happen but it will take much longer than you're thinking.
Most information on the internet is best presented as text. Some is best as audio, and some as video. It's delightful that the latter two (and now VR format) are available. But the medium should be chosen by the type of information, not because it's new and shiny.
I've ranted before about Youtubers posting videos for every kind of thing they may want to communicate. A video of a static image. A video of a slide show. A video of a graph. A video of a man reading a paragraph of text. Only in that last format is it even possible for the video format to add value. And I've seen game reviews where the person is just reading his review text with completely unrelated and detached gameplay in the background. They don't do it because video is the ideal way to absorb the information. They do it because they can get ad revenue.
Now I don't have anything against VR as a medium. I love it! But converting static text to video format is as useless as converting video to VR format. If it doesn't need 3-D visualization, you're wasting bandwidth and making it harder to take in the presented information.
It's very simple. If you have formatted text with topics, text, and bullet points use a text medium. If you want to include links to related pages, use hyperlink medium. If you need to present things that should be heard (either for ease of understanding or because text doesn't easily translate to the sound) use audio. If you need to show visual information that doesn't change dynamically, use a picture. I don't think I need to go on. If and only if 3D pictures or video is ideal, use VR. Otherwise you're just getting in the way.
I'm sure he thinks reporting everything I do to the NSA will help humanity. This is just the zeroth law warmed over and when the rubber hits the road it becomes utterly meaningless. Whoever owns the AI decides what will help humanity. Iran thinks making nukes will help humanity. The US thinks killing durkadurkas will help humanity. Japan thinks imposing strict social order will help humanity. Google thinks Google having all the world's information will help humanity.
-AI must be transparent.
To its maker? It already is, unless you're talking about neural nets with unpredictable output. In which case the problem of determinism has been rehashed a million times and is involved in the discussion of every advanced AI ever made. To everyone else? HA! Ask some of those day trading AI companies for their source code. Let me know how that works for you.
-AI must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people.
Also meaningless, and for the same reason. Some people thing America's homeless living in the gutter have dignity if they're so much as given food stamps. Some people think my dignity is preserved even if a company is raping my files for every bit of information they can get. Efficiency is as debatable.
-AI must be designed for intelligent privacy.
Finally something I agree with. Too bad Microsoft doesn't. But each person building an AI will decide what privacy means. So how can it be enforced? With legislation?
-AI needs algorithmic accountability so humans can undo unintended harm.
This is just a rewording of the problem of determinism.
-AI must guard against bias.
How will you enforce it?
-It's critical for humans to have empathy.
What does that have to do with AI?
-It's critical for humans to have education.
What does that have to do with AI?
-The need for human creativity won't change.
The people writing AI's that will make tomorrow's music, novels, and salesmen disagree.
-A human has to be ultimately accountable for the outcome of a computer-generated diagnosis or decision.
And we're back to nebulous definitions. There are guns on the Korean DMZ that shoot anything human near them. Who is responsible for those bullets? If an escaping family gets mowed down I can promise no politician will accept responsibility. As soon as it becomes politically inconvenient, just as with human decisions, AI decisions will become the responsibility of "policy" or "the board" or "a bug".
I refuse to believe Satya Nadella is an idiot. And that means the whole speech is politically aimed attempts at redefining words, double talk, and pandering.
I fondly remember many hours spent playing Oregon Trail in school but it would be pretty silly to say I learned a lot from it. Come to think of it I didn't learn much from the teachers either. Anyway my point is intelligent courseware can teach kids things, but it has to be way smarter than Civ V. It has to be able to detect a child's level of understanding and continually require additional knowledge to play the game. Not as a condition of being permitted to play but as part of the game itself.
Go ahead. Call FedEx and say you want them to swing by your house every day just in case you have outgoing mail. Tell them volume will be very low. Tell them you won't sign a contract. And tell them you're willing to pay fifty cents per one ounce parcel to be sent anywhere in America. The US parcel service isn't afraid of change, they've embraced every bit of cost saving technology possible. But there are millions of Americans that the internet still doesn't reach. People too (literally) retarded, too poor or just unwilling to buy PC's and people too poor or too disabled to walk to the nearest parcel delivery store. (hundreds of miles for a few, by the way)
Okay I wrote all that before I clicked the link: it's a bad link. Canada is actually using community boxes which require a short walk. Less ideal but it still preserves the principle of the thing. My point is the USPS is the last remaining government service that's keeping millions of Americans from being completely priced out of being able to effectively communicate with the world. It's also offering a service no one else can. Government mail delivery won't be obsolete until another company can actually match its costs (and not by cutting services)
The theory (I'll call this The Theory) goes like this: If you give free food to Africa, you'll price out African farmers who will starve because they have nothing else to do. And then the people will starve when you stop donating food.
That complaint seriously misses the point. Let me tell you why: African farmers don't need to farm. They need to do something that pays for what they need. Any work will do, really. As long as an unskilled person can do it. So there are three possibilities here: Industrialization is impossible for African nations (so there can't be other work) OR there isn't enough investment to drive industry (so the farmers can't get other work) OR technological unemployment now makes unskilled work insufficiently profitable to support a person.
Now African farmers are already doing something otherwise (effectively entirely) done by machine in first world countries. A farm in Europe requires far, far less human labor. A European farmer's job is more in the line of managing machines, scheduling planting, organizing finances, and so forth. You won't see him on his knees weeding a patch of land. You won't see him with a scythe in his hand at harvest time. You won't even see him helping a pig give birth or tending a sick cow* An EU farm averages "...an average size of 16.1 hectares per agricultural holding. An average EU farm has less than one person see here. 12 million farms, 10 million farmers.
If the above theory about farmers going out of work is to be believed then it's impossible for farming to make up a significant percentage of employment. Otherwise the complaint would be invalid. So the farming singularity has not arrived in Africa. I'm going to beg the question that a strong industrial economy and a service economy also haven't, I think it's obvious. This leaves the third possible support for The Theory completely without support. In Africa unskilled labor can still pay what passes for a living wage. On to the first possibility.
The statistics here tell us that Africa has averaged a 3 to 6 percent increase in GDP for the last decade. This is despite AIDS, Malaria, pants-on-head retarded or just evil actions by African politicians, revolutionary wars, and otherwise being the unwashed asshole of the world. More to the point, this increase represents industrialization. For evidence see this economic diversification report.
It may not be enough yet, or even certain but it is happening.
Going back to africaneconomicoutlook.org if we look at table 10, foreign direct investment we see that the middle objection to food exports to Africa is quite strong. Africa has averaged 51 billion dollars per year of direct foreign investment. For a whole continent that's shockingly small. As shown by continual growth through massive problems... problems that are going away one by one, Africa is at the cusp of a new era. All that needs to be done is entice a rational amount of foreign investment (say, 400 billion dollars per year) by parties interested in money, not power (actual economic investment, not strings-attached economic manipulation) and it will industrialize at a clip only seen so far in China's rise to power.
If that happens: 1. The Theory's complaint will be rendered moot very quickly by African farmers reaching par for productivity. 2. Food can be freely given on the basis that the vast majority of
In my mind I could see a Rolls Royce engineer compiling that video on a 20 year old supercomputer equivalent to a modern workstation and not noticing the low quality and frame rate because the computer was usually used to design cars. In the background a hastily gathered panel of 50 year old futurists talking to an artist and turning out retrofuture concepts at a rapid clip.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm happy to hear the company is being sold but I really have to wonder about this. I was sure some pretty heavy hitters were financing Gawker for the sake of getting their narratives pushed. Maybe the Gawker name just became too toxic? We'll know if some other media company rises from obscurity to start shitting out the same kind of bias written by the same people.
I think there's non-terrestrial life all over the place but we're too unimaginative to see it. Asteroids that collide in specific ways to make other asteroids that do the same. Star dwelling hydrogen eating beasts whose bodies are formed of energy fields. Lightyear-wide self-forming nebulae that communicate by making protostars. Three-atom-wide nanobugs. Systems of sand dunes that graze on sandstone and excrete dust. It's arrogant to define life as "things like us"
That data was up for sale. Only the very least informed trusted it to be private. What Linkedin really lost was the chance to sell out their members, if the information should be publicly leaked.
It's your fault. You, the gamers. Yes, this one is in your lap. It's your fault because you persist in preordering games without looking into the stability of past releases. Your fault for putting features ahead of stability. Your fault for letting "ooh shiny" distract you from bugs. Your fault for believing reviewers who keep lying to you. Stop it! Start stopping it by not buying this game until it's rock solid.
Unreliable heart rate detection, GPS and fitness tracking, voice recording on command, what else? In the future a smart watch will be able to project directions on the ground to somewhere or someone you're trying to find; to remind you in the grocery store that you wanted to pick up some milk; to answer arbitrary questions from the internet; to alert emergency services when you've suffered a stroke or car collision; an many other things.
But for now the functionality is so low as to put them in the category of "ornament".
The most important consideration, above all else is that it be a fun, engaging experience. Who cares whether they walk away knowing important names and dates? If they walk away thinking "computers are fun" that will do more for the future of computer science than any amount of knowledge you can pack into their little heads in that time. Here are some ideas:
Mechanical computers: use colorful balls on ramps to perform basic addition and subtraction.Let them tinker with the ramps.
Blinkenlights. A big panel from one of the old supercomputers where they can push and pull and switch all the different things to make output on a punch paper. And they get to keep the punch paper.
A basic movement programming environment implemented with physical puzzle blocks. When they assemble a workable program they get to see a robotic turtle move the way it was told. Add obstacles and dots they can pick up for bonus points.
Tin cans on a string, but with a simple, observable interface that lets them push 1 and 0 and see letters and numbers come up for the ASCII they entered.
It's the collateral damage of copyright trolls. Even if it's unlikely (and it may not be unlikely) Fox would sue for copyright violation a new company can't afford to take that risk. Chilling effects all around.
So charge her under whatever law was used against Nishimura.
Aging is not a law of physics. Aging is not inevitable. Aging is a degenerative disease that we've been fighting for decades and we are winning ground against it. The human body and genome are a massive, complicated puzzle, but the puzzle is finite. Human life span is increasing by .4 years per year right now. As we speak you get to add half again to your expected age at death just because of the advances you can expect to happen by then.
Charlatans have been promising life extension since the first cave man wondered why his dad was turning small and gray and wondered if it would happen to him. But the progress is real. In the face of apparent miracles it's popular and easy to declare them not to be real. It's the conservative thing, to expect nothing to get better. Hope hurts. But it's time to face that pain, Slashdot. Aging is a dragon we will conquer, and the sooner you recognize it can be conquered the sooner you'll get out your sword. Do not go gently into that good night.
The futurist in me wonders if they can latch onto a submarine cable, cut it, insert a passively recording hub, and leave with only having changed the impedance and signal time (a little) and caused a brief outage.
Most of their video was about how you can do lots and lots of work to put it together and get it working properly. It would take way less time to just study gardening on the internet and tend your own garden, or less money to just buy the food. They know this, which is why they emphasize and re-emphasize having perfect control over how your food is grown. I don't know bout you but I couldn't give a toss what soil moisture my lettuce had between days 2 and 10 of growth.
Don't get me wrong, I love the can-do maker and hacker culture. Just don't confuse it with productivity. This technology will be ready for the world when it actually takes less time and money to grow one's own food with the bot.
Nothing worse than a sold out politician who won't stay bought. Texas politicians have integrity.
While I agree with the pattern you're pointing out the TSA seriously needs to go. The only reason it's still around is that it provides jobs for the unemployable.
If it's a jobs program we're looking for spend the money on replacing thousands of municipal waterworks running on pipes so corroded and plugged up that fire hydrants don't give enough pressure. Or spend the money creating a final say that will stop environmentalists from blocking desert solar power plants. Or finish making section 8 to break up the ghettos. Or clean out Chicago. There are a thousand other things that will pay back their costs. The TSA is a broken window.
It's still way better than the US, where instead of public works companies donate directly to the Clinton Slush Fund.
Proving unbiased results is an old problem in science. It's a solved problem. The solution is applicable to many other fields of human endeavor. If you want to hire without bias have someone without hiring authority ask interview questions. Change the names on resumes to "candidate 1, candidate 2" etc. The hiring manager sees the resumes and answers but not the candidates. Sincerity is harder to judge but it's still easy to see who knows what they're talking about.
But Facebook doesn't want unbiased hiring. They want to preferentially hire certain people. Fuck Facebook and every other company with bigotry in its soul.
How is that not ray tracing?
What happens when employers stop re-training employees and start shitcanning anyone as soon as possible, relying on obtaining trained people from the rest of the economy when people are needed again? That's right: trained people are quickly drained from the economy leaving only the trained who command very high wages and the untrained, who cannot be employed.
It's popular on Slashdot to loudly pronounce that strong AI is impossible. This is different from years past. I take the change to mean that it's coming very soon. As it seems more inevitable people who don't want change (whether out of fear, distrust, or sour grapes) will decry AI more.
Now weak AI isn't just coming. It has arrived. And Moore's law was supposed to have stopped years ago but supercomputers and video cards are still on a logarithmic slope for performance and price. The human brain is estimated to calculate between 100 petaflops and 1 exaflop. I know that's not a good metric but for this purpose it suffices. But as performance keeps doubling and doubling it becomes more evident that even the highest estimates are a question of a few more doubling periods. And the highest estimates assume direct one-to-one simulation of each neuron. Consider how many neurons are used for breathing, processing vision, and other things that either aren't needed in a machine or have already been done at a much lower computational cost on silicon.
It's true we don't know everything about how the human brain works. But recent progress is undeniable in terms of success stories. Jeopardy. Go. Commodity trading. Corporate resource balancing. Piloting. To keep shouting that strong AI is impossible is to only betray one's own insecurity. You are not special. Your brain doesn't run on quantum magic. You have no soul. Fucking deal with it.
The greatest cost of this is the room. It doesn't matter how far the price comes down if the user doesn't have a spare room for it. So that price drop you're anticipating won't come with the technology costing less but with construction costs (including the seats) costing less. I'm not saying it won't happen but it will take much longer than you're thinking.
Most information on the internet is best presented as text. Some is best as audio, and some as video. It's delightful that the latter two (and now VR format) are available. But the medium should be chosen by the type of information, not because it's new and shiny.
I've ranted before about Youtubers posting videos for every kind of thing they may want to communicate. A video of a static image. A video of a slide show. A video of a graph. A video of a man reading a paragraph of text. Only in that last format is it even possible for the video format to add value. And I've seen game reviews where the person is just reading his review text with completely unrelated and detached gameplay in the background. They don't do it because video is the ideal way to absorb the information. They do it because they can get ad revenue.
Now I don't have anything against VR as a medium. I love it! But converting static text to video format is as useless as converting video to VR format. If it doesn't need 3-D visualization, you're wasting bandwidth and making it harder to take in the presented information.
It's very simple. If you have formatted text with topics, text, and bullet points use a text medium. If you want to include links to related pages, use hyperlink medium. If you need to present things that should be heard (either for ease of understanding or because text doesn't easily translate to the sound) use audio. If you need to show visual information that doesn't change dynamically, use a picture. I don't think I need to go on. If and only if 3D pictures or video is ideal, use VR. Otherwise you're just getting in the way.
-AI must be designed to assist humanity.
I'm sure he thinks reporting everything I do to the NSA will help humanity. This is just the zeroth law warmed over and when the rubber hits the road it becomes utterly meaningless. Whoever owns the AI decides what will help humanity. Iran thinks making nukes will help humanity. The US thinks killing durkadurkas will help humanity. Japan thinks imposing strict social order will help humanity. Google thinks Google having all the world's information will help humanity.
-AI must be transparent.
To its maker? It already is, unless you're talking about neural nets with unpredictable output. In which case the problem of determinism has been rehashed a million times and is involved in the discussion of every advanced AI ever made. To everyone else? HA! Ask some of those day trading AI companies for their source code. Let me know how that works for you.
-AI must maximize efficiencies without destroying the dignity of people.
Also meaningless, and for the same reason. Some people thing America's homeless living in the gutter have dignity if they're so much as given food stamps. Some people think my dignity is preserved even if a company is raping my files for every bit of information they can get. Efficiency is as debatable.
-AI must be designed for intelligent privacy.
Finally something I agree with. Too bad Microsoft doesn't. But each person building an AI will decide what privacy means. So how can it be enforced? With legislation?
-AI needs algorithmic accountability so humans can undo unintended harm.
This is just a rewording of the problem of determinism.
-AI must guard against bias.
How will you enforce it?
-It's critical for humans to have empathy.
What does that have to do with AI?
-It's critical for humans to have education.
What does that have to do with AI?
-The need for human creativity won't change.
The people writing AI's that will make tomorrow's music, novels, and salesmen disagree.
-A human has to be ultimately accountable for the outcome of a computer-generated diagnosis or decision.
And we're back to nebulous definitions. There are guns on the Korean DMZ that shoot anything human near them. Who is responsible for those bullets? If an escaping family gets mowed down I can promise no politician will accept responsibility. As soon as it becomes politically inconvenient, just as with human decisions, AI decisions will become the responsibility of "policy" or "the board" or "a bug".
I refuse to believe Satya Nadella is an idiot. And that means the whole speech is politically aimed attempts at redefining words, double talk, and pandering.
I fondly remember many hours spent playing Oregon Trail in school but it would be pretty silly to say I learned a lot from it. Come to think of it I didn't learn much from the teachers either. Anyway my point is intelligent courseware can teach kids things, but it has to be way smarter than Civ V. It has to be able to detect a child's level of understanding and continually require additional knowledge to play the game. Not as a condition of being permitted to play but as part of the game itself.
Go ahead. Call FedEx and say you want them to swing by your house every day just in case you have outgoing mail. Tell them volume will be very low. Tell them you won't sign a contract. And tell them you're willing to pay fifty cents per one ounce parcel to be sent anywhere in America. The US parcel service isn't afraid of change, they've embraced every bit of cost saving technology possible. But there are millions of Americans that the internet still doesn't reach. People too (literally) retarded, too poor or just unwilling to buy PC's and people too poor or too disabled to walk to the nearest parcel delivery store. (hundreds of miles for a few, by the way)
Okay I wrote all that before I clicked the link: it's a bad link. Canada is actually using community boxes which require a short walk. Less ideal but it still preserves the principle of the thing. My point is the USPS is the last remaining government service that's keeping millions of Americans from being completely priced out of being able to effectively communicate with the world. It's also offering a service no one else can. Government mail delivery won't be obsolete until another company can actually match its costs (and not by cutting services)
The theory (I'll call this The Theory) goes like this: If you give free food to Africa, you'll price out African farmers who will starve because they have nothing else to do. And then the people will starve when you stop donating food.
That complaint seriously misses the point. Let me tell you why: African farmers don't need to farm. They need to do something that pays for what they need. Any work will do, really. As long as an unskilled person can do it. So there are three possibilities here: Industrialization is impossible for African nations (so there can't be other work) OR there isn't enough investment to drive industry (so the farmers can't get other work) OR technological unemployment now makes unskilled work insufficiently profitable to support a person.
Now African farmers are already doing something otherwise (effectively entirely) done by machine in first world countries. A farm in Europe requires far, far less human labor. A European farmer's job is more in the line of managing machines, scheduling planting, organizing finances, and so forth. You won't see him on his knees weeding a patch of land. You won't see him with a scythe in his hand at harvest time. You won't even see him helping a pig give birth or tending a sick cow* An EU farm averages "...an average size of 16.1 hectares per agricultural holding. An average EU farm has less than one person see here. 12 million farms, 10 million farmers.
If the above theory about farmers going out of work is to be believed then it's impossible for farming to make up a significant percentage of employment. Otherwise the complaint would be invalid. So the farming singularity has not arrived in Africa. I'm going to beg the question that a strong industrial economy and a service economy also haven't, I think it's obvious. This leaves the third possible support for The Theory completely without support. In Africa unskilled labor can still pay what passes for a living wage. On to the first possibility.
The statistics here tell us that Africa has averaged a 3 to 6 percent increase in GDP for the last decade. This is despite AIDS, Malaria, pants-on-head retarded or just evil actions by African politicians, revolutionary wars, and otherwise being the unwashed asshole of the world. More to the point, this increase represents industrialization. For evidence see this economic diversification report.
It may not be enough yet, or even certain but it is happening.
Going back to africaneconomicoutlook.org if we look at table 10, foreign direct investment we see that the middle objection to food exports to Africa is quite strong. Africa has averaged 51 billion dollars per year of direct foreign investment. For a whole continent that's shockingly small. As shown by continual growth through massive problems... problems that are going away one by one, Africa is at the cusp of a new era. All that needs to be done is entice a rational amount of foreign investment (say, 400 billion dollars per year) by parties interested in money, not power (actual economic investment, not strings-attached economic manipulation) and it will industrialize at a clip only seen so far in China's rise to power.
If that happens:
1. The Theory's complaint will be rendered moot very quickly by African farmers reaching par for productivity.
2. Food can be freely given on the basis that the vast majority of
In my mind I could see a Rolls Royce engineer compiling that video on a 20 year old supercomputer equivalent to a modern workstation and not noticing the low quality and frame rate because the computer was usually used to design cars. In the background a hastily gathered panel of 50 year old futurists talking to an artist and turning out retrofuture concepts at a rapid clip.