Tim O'Reilly said: "Regulation is not a good in itself. It is a means of achieving public goods. And so far, it is pretty clear that Uber and Lyft (and in particular, the competition between them) are improving the transportation options in American cities. Regulators should be using the opportunity to revisit the old way of doing things rather than trying to make the new conform to outdated rules that no longer serve their purpose."
Yeah, regulation is not the goal , but neither is the goal what he cites- "achieving public goods". That phrase "achieving public goods" sounds like it's conflating "public goods" with "the pubic good". We advance "the public good" when society reforms itself so as to better confer upon ALL our citizens, what Roosevelt called the Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech Freedom of worship Freedom from want Freedom from fear.
Delivering goods to the public can be done it plenty of ways including slavery, as the Romans did when they built their cities using slave labor.
We don't want to "achieve public goods" at the permanent impoverishment of any of society's members, including the class of "people who make money driving other people around ". That is what the essay she wrote is about. How can we improve taxi service and make it better while not creating a no-winner but the 1% , dog-eat-dog service?
We COULD have a world in which people work for absolutely ANY wage just to stave off sheer destitution. That's exactly where a perfectly free market goes, fast People who own companies don't NEED to make another 50 million opening another branch the way people applying for jobs NEED to make rent, buy food and eat. One said can always simply wait out the other. It's not a long wait. form of that dynamic is what you are seeing when you read about some company closing their plant in state X or country Y to relocate to more "business friendly" climates. If they don't get just what they want, then they have options including delaying for months or years a chance to make more money for themselves. People have stomachs that are on stricter schedule.
So the problem with Uber and Lyft is it replaces a professional workforce that pays a livable wage (they say) with a throw-away workforce that's on their own, "hey, fuck you". The the executives at these companies are the only ones making money (25-30% of *pre-expense* income) and the pocket money their drivers make after shouldering the burden of maintenance, gas, car insurance etc. etc. etc. etc. is just that- pocket money, $12.50 an hour:
We have perfectly good examples of what happens to workers, wages and the distribution of society's wealth when people are forced into no-benefit 1099 "private contractor" status which is what Uber and Lyft want to classify their workers as or worse "part-time temp-worker" status. This is the further Walmartization of the economy, the same cost-shifting from the employer and receiver of the good onto the back of individuals. This is the same bullshit Microsoft tried to pull with their workforce. "I'll call you an independent contractor then I am free of any burden of having to provide you any kind of benefit".
It's not a clever "new business model" for a "new economy" if it can basically be described as making money by paying people less to do deliver the exact same service. That's not even a form of efficiency, since an increase in efficiency would mean doing more with less or fewer people. no Uber and Lyft are just opening the floodgates of the labor pool upon what is otherwise a functioning system.
That would be like letting anyone anywhere in the world m
I agree that Kissinger and the prosecution of the Vietnam war was an abomination, even more so since the govt. had privately concluded we could not win it (this is what the Pentagon Papers contained) but that was forty years ago. Forty years is like two generations ago. Fifty five years ago they blew away JFK. That was the government then. Go back further, it gets even more brazen if not uglier still.
But that is not what we are today anymore than Nazis are what Germans are today.
Just because a thing is referred to by an unchanging name doesn't mean it's identity is constant and unchanging.
If you think the govt is all up in your shit online because you might download some Disney movie illegally, just wait until you can crash cars via internet access.
Then you'll need a license to even USE the internet. Think that's far fetched? It's not. If we let the internet become a common vector of attack against just everything, then kiss even your pseudo-anonymity goodbye. They will pull your license to surf just like they can pull your driver's license.
We don't NEED IoT so let's not rush and build an insecure one. Security in IoT should be more or less impossible to break or tamper with and if we can't think of a way to achieve that yet, then let's wait until we can.
OK I RTFA and the cache of documents. They are hard to understand owing to the use of acronyms but the Guardian article helps a lot with that (ABP == Advanced Battlefield Placement) .
I'm sorry, but it looks to me like the drone war is on track and performing as well as can be expected. Since the alternatives are doing nothing or risking boots on the ground in remote places with little local support and trying to leverage intelligence which by it's very nature is ephemeral (Person X is at location Y at time Z) , it seems like the best way to prosecute this war.
Sure, we'd like the strikes to be even more pinpoint. You have to imagine we're working on it.
In the meantime- what else are we supposed to do? Let them alone to peace so they can do what they did on 9-11 again?
Greenwald et.al. take every instance of collateral damage- a horrible term for killing the wrong people- and try to whip it up into some kind of War Crime committed by people displaying just gross indifference to their fellow human beings.
You know what? It's not. It's just not. No one tries harder than the US military to avoid taking innocent life. What army, what society in the history of humans making war on each other has ever expended so many resources - time , money, effort, research that goes on for decades and decades, on creating weapons that kill as FEW people as possible?
The drone war is war on a completely new basis, where the enemy is identified PERSONALLY and targeted PERSONALLY. It's still imperfect, not least because targets deliberately spend as little time alone as possible for obvious reasons, but its goals are a huge humanitarian advance in warfare. They are.
Greenwald et. al. feign surprise when people die in war, when innocent people get accidentally targeted or hit with the target. They hate military action of virtually any sort. Greenwald is a libertarian and also basically hates the government to begin with. Sorry , that's just not my POV so I have a different take on this same information.
Take aways from the article:
EKIA: (enemy killed in action) is a controversial category used, its critics claim, to misclassify innocent people physically near the target when he was hit. They outnumber 5 to 1 the targets themselves.
MAM: (military age man) are usually what's around the targets when they're hit. It's not unreasonable and probably even correct to guess that they are also soldiers prosecuting the same war as the target they're standing next to.
The drone war has been ferocious and effective, but not as effective as we'd like. Specific improvements involve more satellites so the satellite coverage doesn't ever "blink" (their term) and lose the target. More HUMINT ( human intelligence) and more live captures for the purpose of interrogations. Better cameras on the drones and faster time to target.
If even ONE person in the longish chain of authorization says "no" to a target, then the operation is stopped.
If any civilians are likely to be hit, then the President wants to see the case personally and sign off on it personally. It's his decision to go or no-go. He is personally involved in and concerned with limiting collateral damage.
There is some kind of drone turf war between JSOC and the CIA and the release of these documents are a part of that.
A sense of the scale of things. The number of specific targets in a calendar year numbers less than 100 generally. This is not 1000s of people being killed by drones.
Exactly no one wants to think of the negative use case scenarios and what the scale of those use case scenarios might mean to society.
The whole stampede towards IoT and internet on everything is driven purely by 1) multi-millionaire investors looking to be the next multi-billionaire and 2) people who are high on the curiosity / inventiveness scale but disastrously low on the harder-to-do societal implication / moral reasoning / counterfactual hypothesizing scales.
Q What if people don't use the technology in the way you intended? Answers:
A It's not my fault.
Q What ways might someone deploy this technology which could plausibly lead to a large-scale, high human tragedy disaster?
A. I don't think about that shit man, besides, people kill each other with shovels- do you want to control shovels too?
Q. With this technology, does the level of possible disaster scale linearly with the level of adoption by society ?
A. Fuck you man. If it was left to people like you, we'd still be sitting in the dark. "Oh, electricity, it looks so dangerous, just think what bad people could do with this. Better ban it! Someone get me a candle!
There is no specific gene for forward-thinking, defensive strategizing in the absence of a very well defined and concrete threat to the herd. Basically, it seems like a low-interest, highly speculative, low-value activity.
There IS a gene for taking parts which have different capabilities and creating cool composite new things with them that bring me abilities and extend my power over the world in some way !
There's also a lot of money to be made engaging with the second and, well, you'd have to pay people to engage in the first.
I think we can see where this is going.
but please, let my low score and follow on comments speak for themselves.
"There is actually some sound reasoning behind this change, and that's because there is a perfect storm brewing between the cold war hotting up again as Putin reignites it, and a number of pro-Putin politicians gaining prominence. For example, there's Jeremy Corbyn, who hates his own country's culture and history and is sympathetic to communist ideals and showing a steadfast refusal to condemn Putin, whilst condemning his own country and it's allies for doing the exact same thing who is now leader of the main parliamentary opposition. There's also Nigel Farage, backed by Russian money from Arron Banks who is married to a Russian spy that was outed in the Hancock scandal, and not infrequently flies to Russia to meet with Putin."
You need to check your fascist tendencies. The whole POINT of a democracy is to let a million ideological flowers bloom. If some MP is sympathetic to Russia and Putin, well, so what? Presumably he has the sympathies of his constituents or he would be turned out of office.
It's this way in the States. The lunatics in Congress presumably have the sympathies of their voters.
Unless it involves the absolute total destruction of anything recognizable as civilization itself, - as was actually the case during WWII and is not the case in global warming- there is no reason to see dissenters, even two or three standard deviations from some supposed norm, as a threat worth spying on or taking executive action against.
People here in the US Congress want to make Christianity the official religion of the nation, want to ban teaching of evolution in schools and think no woman should be able to get an abortion for any reason whatsoever, even to save her own life. That's all their fair opinion and they get to hold office and have those opinions without anyone spying on them.
You can't conflate unpopular even MOFO crazy opinion holding with legitimate threats to national security using as a rationale the canard " but what if EVERYONE thought this same way?". That's the road to the stifling of meaningful dissent and fascism.
The special issue regarding government surveillance and blackmail is that the government has extraordinary powers to obtain blackmail information which the other entities you cite- corporations, individuals- do not. The special legal positioning given to government surveillance makes it a completely unique threat.
Sure, other entities are capable of blackmail. OK. Can they pose under cover of official LEO action and frame the blackmail as "seeking co-operation in a criminal case or matter of national security" from their victim? It's entirely legal to use the offer of immunity from prosecution as a motivating incentive to criminals in order to secure their co-operation in an ongoing investigation.
"We were going to prosecute you for this crime, but just help us out here and we'll bury this evidence against you forever instead."
So your argument that other entities are theoretically capable of blackmail also and therefore the UK's spying on MPs is not uniquely troubling is, well, itself uniquely troubling.
Dyson has succeeded in destroying his reputation as a serious and credible observer and commentator of society and his times by propagating pseudo-science around climate change. His actual scientific achievements are of course spared.
Freeman Dyson is not a climate scientist. He's a scientist who dabbles in theorizing about the climate because he wants to. He is trading on his name and reputation, to the detriment of both. It doesn't matter how smart you are or how accomplished you are in other areas; if it's not your specific area of expertise, then you're in over your head.\
If you want to see Dyson's theorizing on climate systematically and thoroughly destroyed - (amongst other things he gets caught in just plain old logical fallacies) by actual climatologists, here's what that looks like:
Went to a large, well-known building complex, Place X, in a large metro area Metro Y which sells a specific type of good (vague enough for you?). Previously had never expressed interest in this type of good. Had not sent or received email / text / FB, / Twitter nothing not even Googled it or Mapquested it since I know where to find this large complex as does everyone else who lives in that Metro Y area.
No reason at all I should have generated any digital data around my spontaneous decision to *walk left three blocks and pop into very large Place X in Metro Y*. Not even a phone call just before or during or just after my visit. Just a person walking with their phone.
Next day, WHAM, 10,000 ads all over Google in my inbox in my spam box about this type of good.
They know who you are, where you are, why (they believe) you are there whether it's online, online using a VPN, probably online using Tor or just walking around. I take that as my reality and have for a few years now.
I have repeatedly and seriously considered giving up my tracking device, er I mean phone. Tried to revert to an earlier technology but it was pre e-911 ability and so my carrier cannot connect it to their (or any) system any longer.
I may still pull the trigger on this dump the phone idea.
I want Congress to step in here and do for us what the EU does for their citizens and more. After all, we're the home of the free, right? I don't feel free when I am tracked constantly. I feel surveilled, exploited and I feel my autonomy, privacy and self-determination compromised by strangers whose current and future motives are unknown to me .
Oh yes it's a huge new threat we now face- the workplace might cease to resemble so closely a pirate ship where every ship is out to scuttle destroy and otherwise steal from the others and the people who work on each pirate ship have no loyalty that's not coerced by the threat of being thrown overboard .
Where the interpersonal relationships are characterized by pure power and rank plays and people setup then backstab each other to gain more power.
Yes because Zappos workplace does not resemble a 15th century pirate ship we need to start making comparisons to Mao who killed tens of millions of his countrymen while attempting to impose an unsupported, anti-scientific, irrational belief system he claimed was some form of Communism.
God yes, we need to worry about this and worry about this a lot.
It's not about bacteria per se, it's about genes. It's about mass tinkering with genes just to see what can happen. Bad idea. Bad idea. Very. Bad. Idea.
Sorry it goes against my grain too, but some technologies are better restricted, limited, denied and otherwise controlled by responsible parties who can at least be presumed to not be, you know, totally insane.
So far, the US govt hasn't released a DIY nuke kit and neither has the former USSR.
That's where the real power utility of the herd comes in. No one person is going to be left to go their own way and do whatever their mind can conceive of without other people second guessing them, watching what they're doing, checking on them and not just trusting them or worse, making it an article of faith or what have you.
Or worst of all, as some asshole in some university held forth the other day on/. - all science is protected by 1st Amendment rights, therefore get outta my way.
We have survived as a society so far by a enacting a complex web of limitations, laws, circumventions, tricks, treaties, maneuverings, policies, norms and *other* against the things which would threaten us. It's a patchwork framework, just like everything in biology.
We will continue to survive by *not* raising any principle higher than the survival principle, aka The Constitution Is Not A Suicide pact Principle.
People with extremist ideologies like that professor need to not be listened to. And yes, extremism in defense of *just any form of* liberty is indeed a vice.
Exactly. To get some idea how well the democratization of knowledge serves as a defense against BadGuys, take a look at how we're doing on the internet. There we have full democratic access to a technology of mid-value intellectual difficulty. Do you feel like you can defend your computer against all created viruses trojans etc. or do you turn to professionals to provide you with tools to do that job?
And about those professionals. How are they doing?
Last I looked, they were basically getting a near zero-score for near zero-days.
That's because they're good at defending themselves against what they recognize and know about and can fingerprint but essentially terrible at recognizing the uncatalogued attack, the novel approach, the slightly innovative variation.
I point this out because I hear the argument that the more DIY biohacking we do, the better able we will be to defend ourselves. It really hasn't worked out that way. Things- people, cats dogs puzzles- go together one way. They can be taken apart in an infinity of ways.
The surface of attack is infinite within the bounds of the target's particular characteristics. That's not a good castle to have to defend. The fewer people who can attack the castle, the better.
You have no idea what you're yacking on about. What you call a "European" circa 500 CE is some admixture of Mediterranean, Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Eurasian, Russian , Ukrainian and Maikop. The LAST thing the European continent was ever is "isolated" at least not since 2500 BCE.
If you want to see what happens with genes when they're isolated, go to the Galapagos Islands.
"Now researchers are beginning to reveal a surprising genetic history of the plague. A rash of discoveries show how just a small handful of genetic changes â" an altered protein here, a mutated gene there â" can transform a relatively innocuous stomach bug into a pandemic capable of killing off a large fraction of a continent."
And people say we have nothing to fear from the biohacking movement.
We all benefit from 80s-style expert systems every day. Even your GPS is a form of expert system.
The idea we'll soon be of replacing humans, which is causing a sort of mini moral panic amongst some engaged and intelligent but non-expert part of the population is totally off course.
Just focusing in on driving applications, lane awareness and accident avoidance are two great uses of AI but the thing is, they serve only to take minor, stereo-typical (get back in your lane! Break right now as hard as you can!) actions in response to common re-accident scenarios in which there is only one-best-thing-to-do (so do it now!) It is assumed that the driver will take over to address the possibly more complex real-time situation.
AI is not going to parse out every possible set of real world events which a driver may encounter. Google is finding that out now. The situations are too varied, too unpredictable (the technical term for this is "fucked up") and engage too many independent actors whose reactions are unknowable but critical.
Sure , it can be used on highways with a human driver, and warehouses (maybe) and golf courses and it can , you know replace the guy who drivers the smoother over your local ice skating rink, OK now HE'S got a job to defend against AI, but when you mix in the liability issues there is about zero chance Google cars are going to be how people get around.
When Palm finally quit trying to recognize all possible handwriting from everyone and started instead to make people write using their stylized alphabet, then they became successful. So also here. We'll all drvie Google cars when and if Google convinces the legislature to re-engineer the roads, the rules of the road, and the liability laws to support their technology or, to be more precise, the limitations of their technology.
Society moves forward and changes so don't say THAT won't happen. It might. It might not. It's a lot of money, but then it would save a lot of lives, save a lot of money and reduce crime a lot also. Maybe THIS is their REAL end game.
At any rate, something like the above changes is going to happen sooner than a Google car is going to replace your car, with everything otherwise staying the same.
OK that's the conceit of NN in a nutshell- just like a biological brain, so you said it. To me that's like saying a camera is like an eye. The brain is more than just neurons firing over synapses and reinforcing the ability to communicate across synpases. For example, nitrous oxide diffuses through the brain and is used in signalling. There are other things like that going on.
I am not saying that I think NN are worthless. I probably came across like that; a delay reaction from years of overexposure to NN cheerleaders. It may be the start of a good way to model the actual working of the brain. I am all about Rodney Brooks' bottom up approach. The thing is, so far, it's NOT a good way to gain insight into the brain. It's all going the other way- NN models built on Hebbian learning and all that.
I get sick of people pushing AI as "on the verge of an incredible breakthrough" or worse , doing what IBM did with Deep Jeopardy or whatever they called it, Deep Thought . That whole thing was a total dog and pony show that potentially misled the general public, potential investors and government funding authorities about what they had achieved (virtually nothing significant) and where it might lead (nowhere).
AI has a very very long and ignoble history of overhawking its wares, dating back to the 60s then the 80s then the 90s.. oh fuck it, every 10 or 15 years..
In '68 HAL9000 was completely plausible by 2001 in the eyes of the AI establishment.
Great things have come out of basic AI research. Expert systems. Defense systems. But the idea that we're anywhere close to "the Singularity" which a lot of naive people believe, anywhere close at all is just not true.
So Google is big on AI. I give you 100 to 1 that their self driving cars FAIL as a general mode of transportation by the year 2050.
You're point is valid. WRT to neural networks, I am not impressed really. In a nutshell, I think it's a disguised way of doing statistics. An iterative, on-analytical way. With neural nets, after it's trained, no one can tell why the neural net functions as it does and no one can tell you when the neural net will do something completely insane.
There is no analytical framework which decomposes a neural network which has arrived at THESE weights on THESE node with THIS many layers using THIS algorithm to update itself. It's just a standalone thing that works OK... until it doesn't.
My uni was so huge on neural nets especially my dept. If you wanted to irritate the profs,who had been made famous by their research in NN, ask them a few of these questions. If you wanted to really destroy your career whilst still an undergrad, press the point.
Not impressed then, not impressed now. OK not impressed is not quite right; more like "underwhelmed".
What WOULD be interesting is if there were analytical rapprochement between neural nets and statistics or at least an analytical framework whereby number of layers number of nodes connections weights, update algorithms and reward algorithms were understood well enough to support a predictive framework such that given a goal, you could write a NN without having to "train" it or given an arbitrary NN, you could analytically decompose it and understand what it was capable of.
>> Do you never think there will be a time in which our government overreach will land us in another McCarthy era and use this kind of monitoring to have witch hunts?
Yes absolutely. In my mind, there's no doubt that if Cheney at. al. had had the powers we have today when they first started their governmental careers we'd have disappeared political opposition, people framed and ruined, entire departments of government at the end of a short blackmail chain. All in the name of "national security", because their opponents' policies would have endangered us all. Even today, Cheney actually makes this claim in the media against Obama. What do you think he would have done to candidate Obama if he had had the chance? After all, national security.
One source of hope ()and that's all it is really) that this won't materialize is that the people who come of age with this technology won't abuse it just because they've grown up in a time in which fear of it's abuse was discussed in the larger culture, and they don't want to be The Bad Guy. that is, they've absorbed society's norms and values and won't contradict them.
If that sounds too optimistic to you, sociopaths like Gonzales, Cheney and Oliver North have a preternatural ability to rise to the top of organizations, then you like me are more interested in structural solutions to the McCarthy problem.
What are those solutions? We don't know, but they must be brought into existence.
OK there's a difference between ability to do something and the actual doing of it. No government organization can contemplate the exchanges between all people, much less all people all the time. But they have the ability to zero in people if they believe it's warranted. That's how it's always worked. That's how it is now. The ability to tap a phone was always there, but not all phones were tapped.
Now, in a sense, all phones ARE tapped, but they don't have the ability to listen to all that, so they're NOT tapped in the sense of they're listening in. Looked at in this way, the concept of "tapped" has been deconstructed into its constituent parts- recording the fact of the call, and human awareness of what was said , followed by action. "Tap" used to imply both of those things.
You have the right to not incriminate yourself, as ever. The right to remain silent (in the US, but not really in the UK, which is shocking to Americans). But the police had always had the power to subpoena witnesses, material, phone records etc.
I am not suggesting anyone take the expansion, ease and ubiquity of these police powers without trepidation. I would like to see more worry about them. In response to that worry I would like to see structural, inspectable safeguards, unassailable and possibly anonymous (to the police) overseers, and severe, crippling life-ruining punishment for anyone, at any position of government who abuses them to any degree or anyone who covers up the same, lies about the same to Congress ever for any reason (Clapper) without exception and anyone who knows about the same, but does not report it to a disconnected, legally unassailable watchdog.
But as time goes on, we will trend towards wanting greater and greater transparency of all individuals, at will, anywhere and everywhere and at any and all times, both in and out of government.
That's just where we're being forced by both constructive and destructive advances in technology.
Civil Liberties = number of people it takes to do it / (degree of harm * number of people effected)
All kinds of violence can be categorized using this
Examples:
normal person on person crime:
Large number of people to do small harm to small number of people (aka , normal life) Civil Liberties not effected (stays around 1)
war
large number of people to do large harm to large number of people (aka war) civil liberties might go down (as they do at war time)
humdrum terrorism
small number of people to do large harm to small (1000s at most) number of people. Civil liberties start to be noticeably effected. It starts to become structural.
supercharged terrorism
small number of people, tending towards one, render high degree of damage (death) to large numbers of people (tens of thousands, millions, everyone...). Civil Liberties severely curtailed , eliminated or redefined by public demand. It's structural and it's permanent.
We want to do everything we can to never reach the last one. This may involve redefining notions which in the face of scientific progress prove themselves to be outdated and archaic.
I hate these stories. Games were designed (albeit evolutionarily, through generations of culture) to exploit specific human cognitive limitations in exhaustive search and look ahead, and thereby force us to fall back on things like heuristics and strategies. This makes games unpredictable and interesting.
But computers don't have those limitations. Of course they can out play us at games. They also add faster than we do.
This is all IBM's DeepBlue was, a massive, massive lookahead machine which used a little human-discovered / human programmed rules of thumb to reduce the search space and then human-discovered, human programmed rules of thumb for judging the relative goodness of each move.
The fact that computers are good at beating humans at something specifically designed to make humans perform badly is not an advancement in A.I.
Slashdot Mirror
Your story was more interesting than this one, if only because it's about an actual event in the real world as opposed to opinions, including mine....
Tim O'Reilly said:
"Regulation is not a good in itself. It is a means of achieving public goods. And so far, it is pretty clear that Uber and Lyft (and in particular, the competition between them) are improving the transportation options in American cities. Regulators should be using the opportunity to revisit the old way of doing things rather than trying to make the new conform to outdated rules that no longer serve their purpose."
Yeah, regulation is not the goal , but neither is the goal what he cites- "achieving public goods". That phrase "achieving public goods" sounds like it's conflating "public goods" with "the pubic good". We advance "the public good" when society reforms itself so as to better confer upon ALL our citizens, what Roosevelt called the Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech Freedom of worship Freedom from want Freedom from fear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Delivering goods to the public can be done it plenty of ways including slavery, as the Romans did when they built their cities using slave labor.
We don't want to "achieve public goods" at the permanent impoverishment of any of society's members, including the class of "people who make money driving other people around ". That is what the essay she wrote is about. How can we improve taxi service and make it better while not creating a no-winner but the 1% , dog-eat-dog service?
We COULD have a world in which people work for absolutely ANY wage just to stave off sheer destitution. That's exactly where a perfectly free market goes, fast People who own companies don't NEED to make another 50 million opening another branch the way people applying for jobs NEED to make rent, buy food and eat. One said can always simply wait out the other. It's not a long wait. form of that dynamic is what you are seeing when you read about some company closing their plant in state X or country Y to relocate to more "business friendly" climates. If they don't get just what they want, then they have options including delaying for months or years a chance to make more money for themselves. People have stomachs that are on stricter schedule.
So the problem with Uber and Lyft is it replaces a professional workforce that pays a livable wage (they say) with a throw-away workforce that's on their own, "hey, fuck you". The the executives at these companies are the only ones making money (25-30% of *pre-expense* income) and the pocket money their drivers make after shouldering the burden of maintenance, gas, car insurance etc. etc. etc. etc. is just that- pocket money, $12.50 an hour :
http://www.moneyunder30.com/ho...
http://www.fastcompany.com/304...
We have perfectly good examples of what happens to workers, wages and the distribution of society's wealth when people are forced into no-benefit 1099 "private contractor" status which is what Uber and Lyft want to classify their workers as or worse "part-time temp-worker" status. This is the further Walmartization of the economy, the same cost-shifting from the employer and receiver of the good onto the back of individuals. This is the same bullshit Microsoft tried to pull with their workforce. "I'll call you an independent contractor then I am free of any burden of having to provide you any kind of benefit".
It's not a clever "new business model" for a "new economy" if it can basically be described as making money by paying people less to do deliver the exact same service. That's not even a form of efficiency, since an increase in efficiency would mean doing more with less or fewer people. no Uber and Lyft are just opening the floodgates of the labor pool upon what is otherwise a functioning system.
That would be like letting anyone anywhere in the world m
I agree that Kissinger and the prosecution of the Vietnam war was an abomination, even more so since the govt. had privately concluded we could not win it (this is what the Pentagon Papers contained) but that was forty years ago. Forty years is like two generations ago. Fifty five years ago they blew away JFK. That was the government then. Go back further, it gets even more brazen if not uglier still.
But that is not what we are today anymore than Nazis are what Germans are today.
Just because a thing is referred to by an unchanging name doesn't mean it's identity is constant and unchanging.
If you think the govt is all up in your shit online because you might download some Disney movie illegally, just wait until you can crash cars via internet access.
Then you'll need a license to even USE the internet. Think that's far fetched? It's not. If we let the internet become a common vector of attack against just everything, then kiss even your pseudo-anonymity goodbye. They will pull your license to surf just like they can pull your driver's license.
We don't NEED IoT so let's not rush and build an insecure one. Security in IoT should be more or less impossible to break or tamper with and if we can't think of a way to achieve that yet, then let's wait until we can.
OK I RTFA and the cache of documents. They are hard to understand owing to the use of acronyms but the Guardian article helps a lot with that (ABP == Advanced Battlefield Placement) .
I'm sorry, but it looks to me like the drone war is on track and performing as well as can be expected. Since the alternatives are doing nothing or risking boots on the ground in remote places with little local support and trying to leverage intelligence which by it's very nature is ephemeral (Person X is at location Y at time Z) , it seems like the best way to prosecute this war.
Sure, we'd like the strikes to be even more pinpoint. You have to imagine we're working on it.
In the meantime- what else are we supposed to do? Let them alone to peace so they can do what they did on 9-11 again?
Greenwald et.al. take every instance of collateral damage- a horrible term for killing the wrong people- and try to whip it up into some kind of War Crime committed by people displaying just gross indifference to their fellow human beings.
You know what? It's not. It's just not. No one tries harder than the US military to avoid taking innocent life. What army, what society in the history of humans making war on each other has ever expended so many resources - time , money, effort, research that goes on for decades and decades, on creating weapons that kill as FEW people as possible?
The drone war is war on a completely new basis, where the enemy is identified PERSONALLY and targeted PERSONALLY. It's still imperfect, not least because targets deliberately spend as little time alone as possible for obvious reasons, but its goals are a huge humanitarian advance in warfare. They are.
Greenwald et. al. feign surprise when people die in war, when innocent people get accidentally targeted or hit with the target. They hate military action of virtually any sort. Greenwald is a libertarian and also basically hates the government to begin with. Sorry , that's just not my POV so I have a different take on this same information.
Take aways from the article:
EKIA: (enemy killed in action) is a controversial category used, its critics claim, to misclassify innocent people physically near the target when he was hit. They outnumber 5 to 1 the targets themselves.
MAM: (military age man) are usually what's around the targets when they're hit. It's not unreasonable and probably even correct to guess that they are also soldiers prosecuting the same war as the target they're standing next to.
The drone war has been ferocious and effective, but not as effective as we'd like. Specific improvements involve more satellites so the satellite coverage doesn't ever "blink" (their term) and lose the target. More HUMINT ( human intelligence) and more live captures for the purpose of interrogations. Better cameras on the drones and faster time to target.
If even ONE person in the longish chain of authorization says "no" to a target, then the operation is stopped.
If any civilians are likely to be hit, then the President wants to see the case personally and sign off on it personally. It's his decision to go or no-go. He is personally involved in and concerned with limiting collateral damage.
There is some kind of drone turf war between JSOC and the CIA and the release of these documents are a part of that.
A sense of the scale of things. The number of specific targets in a calendar year numbers less than 100 generally. This is not 1000s of people being killed by drones.
Exactly no one wants to think of the negative use case scenarios and what the scale of those use case scenarios might mean to society.
The whole stampede towards IoT and internet on everything is driven purely by 1) multi-millionaire investors looking to be the next multi-billionaire and 2) people who are high on the curiosity / inventiveness scale but disastrously low on the harder-to-do societal implication / moral reasoning / counterfactual hypothesizing scales.
Q What if people don't use the technology in the way you intended? Answers:
A It's not my fault.
Q What ways might someone deploy this technology which could plausibly lead to a large-scale, high human tragedy disaster?
A. I don't think about that shit man, besides, people kill each other with shovels- do you want to control shovels too?
Q. With this technology, does the level of possible disaster scale linearly with the level of adoption by society ?
A. Fuck you man. If it was left to people like you, we'd still be sitting in the dark. "Oh, electricity, it looks so dangerous, just think what bad people could do with this. Better ban it! Someone get me a candle!
There is no specific gene for forward-thinking, defensive strategizing in the absence of a very well defined and concrete threat to the herd. Basically, it seems like a low-interest, highly speculative, low-value activity.
There IS a gene for taking parts which have different capabilities and creating cool composite new things with them that bring me abilities and extend my power over the world in some way !
There's also a lot of money to be made engaging with the second and, well, you'd have to pay people to engage in the first.
I think we can see where this is going.
but please, let my low score and follow on comments speak for themselves.
That should have read "is NOW the case in global warming", not "is NOT the case with global warming"
Wow one little letter...
LOL....
"There is actually some sound reasoning behind this change, and that's because there is a perfect storm brewing between the cold war hotting up again as Putin reignites it, and a number of pro-Putin politicians gaining prominence. For example, there's Jeremy Corbyn, who hates his own country's culture and history and is sympathetic to communist ideals and showing a steadfast refusal to condemn Putin, whilst condemning his own country and it's allies for doing the exact same thing who is now leader of the main parliamentary opposition. There's also Nigel Farage, backed by Russian money from Arron Banks who is married to a Russian spy that was outed in the Hancock scandal, and not infrequently flies to Russia to meet with Putin."
You need to check your fascist tendencies. The whole POINT of a democracy is to let a million ideological flowers bloom. If some MP is sympathetic to Russia and Putin, well, so what? Presumably he has the sympathies of his constituents or he would be turned out of office.
It's this way in the States. The lunatics in Congress presumably have the sympathies of their voters.
Unless it involves the absolute total destruction of anything recognizable as civilization itself, - as was actually the case during WWII and is not the case in global warming- there is no reason to see dissenters, even two or three standard deviations from some supposed norm, as a threat worth spying on or taking executive action against.
People here in the US Congress want to make Christianity the official religion of the nation, want to ban teaching of evolution in schools and think no woman should be able to get an abortion for any reason whatsoever, even to save her own life. That's all their fair opinion and they get to hold office and have those opinions without anyone spying on them.
You can't conflate unpopular even MOFO crazy opinion holding with legitimate threats to national security using as a rationale the canard " but what if EVERYONE thought this same way?". That's the road to the stifling of meaningful dissent and fascism.
The special issue regarding government surveillance and blackmail is that the government has extraordinary powers to obtain blackmail information which the other entities you cite- corporations, individuals- do not. The special legal positioning given to government surveillance makes it a completely unique threat.
Sure, other entities are capable of blackmail. OK. Can they pose under cover of official LEO action and frame the blackmail as "seeking co-operation in a criminal case or matter of national security" from their victim? It's entirely legal to use the offer of immunity from prosecution as a motivating incentive to criminals in order to secure their co-operation in an ongoing investigation.
"We were going to prosecute you for this crime, but just help us out here and we'll bury this evidence against you forever instead."
So your argument that other entities are theoretically capable of blackmail also and therefore the UK's spying on MPs is not uniquely troubling is, well, itself uniquely troubling.
Control Panel\System and Security\Windows Update\Change settings -> choose "never check for updates"
Dyson has succeeded in destroying his reputation as a serious and credible observer and commentator of society and his times by propagating pseudo-science around climate change. His actual scientific achievements are of course spared.
Freeman Dyson is not a climate scientist. He's a scientist who dabbles in theorizing about the climate because he wants to. He is trading on his name and reputation, to the detriment of both. It doesn't matter how smart you are or how accomplished you are in other areas; if it's not your specific area of expertise, then you're in over your head.\
If you want to see Dyson's theorizing on climate systematically and thoroughly destroyed - (amongst other things he gets caught in just plain old logical fallacies) by actual climatologists, here's what that looks like:
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
http://initforthegold.blogspot...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
Went to a large, well-known building complex, Place X, in a large metro area Metro Y which sells a specific type of good (vague enough for you?). Previously had never expressed interest in this type of good. Had not sent or received email / text / FB, / Twitter nothing not even Googled it or Mapquested it since I know where to find this large complex as does everyone else who lives in that Metro Y area.
No reason at all I should have generated any digital data around my spontaneous decision to *walk left three blocks and pop into very large Place X in Metro Y*. Not even a phone call just before or during or just after my visit. Just a person walking with their phone.
Next day, WHAM, 10,000 ads all over Google in my inbox in my spam box about this type of good.
They know who you are, where you are, why (they believe) you are there whether it's online, online using a VPN, probably online using Tor or just walking around. I take that as my reality and have for a few years now.
I have repeatedly and seriously considered giving up my tracking device, er I mean phone. Tried to revert to an earlier technology but it was pre e-911 ability and so my carrier cannot connect it to their (or any) system any longer.
I may still pull the trigger on this dump the phone idea.
I want Congress to step in here and do for us what the EU does for their citizens and more. After all, we're the home of the free, right? I don't feel free when I am tracked constantly. I feel surveilled, exploited and I feel my autonomy, privacy and self-determination compromised by strangers whose current and future motives are unknown to me .
Oh yes it's a huge new threat we now face- the workplace might cease to resemble so closely a pirate ship where every ship is out to scuttle destroy and otherwise steal from the others and the people who work on each pirate ship have no loyalty that's not coerced by the threat of being thrown overboard .
Where the interpersonal relationships are characterized by pure power and rank plays and people setup then backstab each other to gain more power.
Yes because Zappos workplace does not resemble a 15th century pirate ship we need to start making comparisons to Mao who killed tens of millions of his countrymen while attempting to impose an unsupported, anti-scientific, irrational belief system he claimed was some form of Communism.
God yes, we need to worry about this and worry about this a lot.
Let's get started.
It's not about bacteria per se, it's about genes. It's about mass tinkering with genes just to see what can happen. Bad idea. Bad idea. Very. Bad. Idea.
Sorry it goes against my grain too, but some technologies are better restricted, limited, denied and otherwise controlled by responsible parties who can at least be presumed to not be, you know, totally insane.
So far, the US govt hasn't released a DIY nuke kit and neither has the former USSR.
That's where the real power utility of the herd comes in. No one person is going to be left to go their own way and do whatever their mind can conceive of without other people second guessing them, watching what they're doing, checking on them and not just trusting them or worse, making it an article of faith or what have you.
Or worst of all, as some asshole in some university held forth the other day on /. - all science is protected by 1st Amendment rights, therefore get outta my way.
We have survived as a society so far by a enacting a complex web of limitations, laws, circumventions, tricks, treaties, maneuverings, policies, norms and *other* against the things which would threaten us. It's a patchwork framework, just like everything in biology.
We will continue to survive by *not* raising any principle higher than the survival principle, aka The Constitution Is Not A Suicide pact Principle.
People with extremist ideologies like that professor need to not be listened to. And yes, extremism in defense of *just any form of* liberty is indeed a vice.
Yes exactly!
Exactly. To get some idea how well the democratization of knowledge serves as a defense against BadGuys, take a look at how we're doing on the internet. There we have full democratic access to a technology of mid-value intellectual difficulty. Do you feel like you can defend your computer against all created viruses trojans etc. or do you turn to professionals to provide you with tools to do that job?
And about those professionals. How are they doing?
Last I looked, they were basically getting a near zero-score for near zero-days.
That's because they're good at defending themselves against what they recognize and know about and can fingerprint but essentially terrible at recognizing the uncatalogued attack, the novel approach, the slightly innovative variation.
I point this out because I hear the argument that the more DIY biohacking we do, the better able we will be to defend ourselves. It really hasn't worked out that way. Things- people, cats dogs puzzles- go together one way. They can be taken apart in an infinity of ways.
The surface of attack is infinite within the bounds of the target's particular characteristics. That's not a good castle to have to defend. The fewer people who can attack the castle, the better.
You have no idea what you're yacking on about. What you call a "European" circa 500 CE is some admixture of Mediterranean, Near Eastern, Middle Eastern, Eurasian, Russian , Ukrainian and Maikop. The LAST thing the European continent was ever is "isolated" at least not since 2500 BCE.
If you want to see what happens with genes when they're isolated, go to the Galapagos Islands.
"Now researchers are beginning to reveal a surprising genetic history of the plague. A rash of discoveries show how just a small handful of genetic changes â" an altered protein here, a mutated gene there â" can transform a relatively innocuous stomach bug into a pandemic capable of killing off a large fraction of a continent."
And people say we have nothing to fear from the biohacking movement.
We all benefit from 80s-style expert systems every day. Even your GPS is a form of expert system.
The idea we'll soon be of replacing humans, which is causing a sort of mini moral panic amongst some engaged and intelligent but non-expert part of the population is totally off course.
Just focusing in on driving applications, lane awareness and accident avoidance are two great uses of AI but the thing is, they serve only to take minor, stereo-typical (get back in your lane! Break right now as hard as you can!) actions in response to common re-accident scenarios in which there is only one-best-thing-to-do (so do it now!) It is assumed that the driver will take over to address the possibly more complex real-time situation.
AI is not going to parse out every possible set of real world events which a driver may encounter. Google is finding that out now. The situations are too varied, too unpredictable (the technical term for this is "fucked up") and engage too many independent actors whose reactions are unknowable but critical.
Sure , it can be used on highways with a human driver, and warehouses (maybe) and golf courses and it can , you know replace the guy who drivers the smoother over your local ice skating rink, OK now HE'S got a job to defend against AI, but when you mix in the liability issues there is about zero chance Google cars are going to be how people get around.
When Palm finally quit trying to recognize all possible handwriting from everyone and started instead to make people write using their stylized alphabet, then they became successful. So also here. We'll all drvie Google cars when and if Google convinces the legislature to re-engineer the roads, the rules of the road, and the liability laws to support their technology or, to be more precise, the limitations of their technology.
Society moves forward and changes so don't say THAT won't happen. It might. It might not. It's a lot of money, but then it would save a lot of lives, save a lot of money and reduce crime a lot also. Maybe THIS is their REAL end game.
At any rate, something like the above changes is going to happen sooner than a Google car is going to replace your car, with everything otherwise staying the same.
OK that's the conceit of NN in a nutshell- just like a biological brain, so you said it. To me that's like saying a camera is like an eye. The brain is more than just neurons firing over synapses and reinforcing the ability to communicate across synpases. For example, nitrous oxide diffuses through the brain and is used in signalling. There are other things like that going on.
I am not saying that I think NN are worthless. I probably came across like that; a delay reaction from years of overexposure to NN cheerleaders. It may be the start of a good way to model the actual working of the brain. I am all about Rodney Brooks' bottom up approach. The thing is, so far, it's NOT a good way to gain insight into the brain. It's all going the other way- NN models built on Hebbian learning and all that.
I get sick of people pushing AI as "on the verge of an incredible breakthrough" or worse , doing what IBM did with Deep Jeopardy or whatever they called it, Deep Thought . That whole thing was a total dog and pony show that potentially misled the general public, potential investors and government funding authorities about what they had achieved (virtually nothing significant) and where it might lead (nowhere).
AI has a very very long and ignoble history of overhawking its wares, dating back to the 60s then the 80s then the 90s.. oh fuck it, every 10 or 15 years..
In '68 HAL9000 was completely plausible by 2001 in the eyes of the AI establishment.
Great things have come out of basic AI research. Expert systems. Defense systems. But the idea that we're anywhere close to "the Singularity" which a lot of naive people believe, anywhere close at all is just not true.
So Google is big on AI. I give you 100 to 1 that their self driving cars FAIL as a general mode of transportation by the year 2050.
You're point is valid. WRT to neural networks, I am not impressed really. In a nutshell, I think it's a disguised way of doing statistics. An iterative, on-analytical way. With neural nets, after it's trained, no one can tell why the neural net functions as it does and no one can tell you when the neural net will do something completely insane.
There is no analytical framework which decomposes a neural network which has arrived at THESE weights on THESE node with THIS many layers using THIS algorithm to update itself. It's just a standalone thing that works OK ... until it doesn't.
My uni was so huge on neural nets especially my dept. If you wanted to irritate the profs,who had been made famous by their research in NN, ask them a few of these questions. If you wanted to really destroy your career whilst still an undergrad, press the point.
Not impressed then, not impressed now. OK not impressed is not quite right; more like "underwhelmed".
What WOULD be interesting is if there were analytical rapprochement between neural nets and statistics or at least an analytical framework whereby number of layers number of nodes connections weights, update algorithms and reward algorithms were understood well enough to support a predictive framework such that given a goal, you could write a NN without having to "train" it or given an arbitrary NN, you could analytically decompose it and understand what it was capable of.
OK now THAT would be interesting.
>> Do you never think there will be a time in which our government overreach will land us in another McCarthy era and use this kind of monitoring to have witch hunts?
Yes absolutely. In my mind, there's no doubt that if Cheney at. al. had had the powers we have today when they first started their governmental careers we'd have disappeared political opposition, people framed and ruined, entire departments of government at the end of a short blackmail chain. All in the name of "national security", because their opponents' policies would have endangered us all. Even today, Cheney actually makes this claim in the media against Obama. What do you think he would have done to candidate Obama if he had had the chance? After all, national security.
One source of hope ()and that's all it is really) that this won't materialize is that the people who come of age with this technology won't abuse it just because they've grown up in a time in which fear of it's abuse was discussed in the larger culture, and they don't want to be The Bad Guy. that is, they've absorbed society's norms and values and won't contradict them.
If that sounds too optimistic to you, sociopaths like Gonzales, Cheney and Oliver North have a preternatural ability to rise to the top of organizations, then you like me are more interested in structural solutions to the McCarthy problem.
What are those solutions? We don't know, but they must be brought into existence.
OK there's a difference between ability to do something and the actual doing of it. No government organization can contemplate the exchanges between all people, much less all people all the time. But they have the ability to zero in people if they believe it's warranted. That's how it's always worked. That's how it is now. The ability to tap a phone was always there, but not all phones were tapped.
Now, in a sense, all phones ARE tapped, but they don't have the ability to listen to all that, so they're NOT tapped in the sense of they're listening in. Looked at in this way, the concept of "tapped" has been deconstructed into its constituent parts- recording the fact of the call, and human awareness of what was said , followed by action. "Tap" used to imply both of those things.
You have the right to not incriminate yourself, as ever. The right to remain silent (in the US, but not really in the UK, which is shocking to Americans). But the police had always had the power to subpoena witnesses, material, phone records etc.
I am not suggesting anyone take the expansion, ease and ubiquity of these police powers without trepidation. I would like to see more worry about them. In response to that worry I would like to see structural, inspectable safeguards, unassailable and possibly anonymous (to the police) overseers, and severe, crippling life-ruining punishment for anyone, at any position of government who abuses them to any degree or anyone who covers up the same, lies about the same to Congress ever for any reason (Clapper) without exception and anyone who knows about the same, but does not report it to a disconnected, legally unassailable watchdog.
But as time goes on, we will trend towards wanting greater and greater transparency of all individuals, at will, anywhere and everywhere and at any and all times, both in and out of government.
That's just where we're being forced by both constructive and destructive advances in technology.
Civil Liberties = number of people it takes to do it / (degree of harm * number of people effected)
All kinds of violence can be categorized using this
Examples:
normal person on person crime:
Large number of people to do small harm to small number of people (aka , normal life) Civil Liberties not effected (stays around 1)
war
large number of people to do large harm to large number of people (aka war) civil liberties might go down (as they do at war time)
humdrum terrorism
small number of people to do large harm to small (1000s at most) number of people. Civil liberties start to be noticeably effected. It starts to become structural.
supercharged terrorism
small number of people, tending towards one, render high degree of damage (death) to large numbers of people (tens of thousands, millions, everyone...). Civil Liberties severely curtailed , eliminated or redefined by public demand. It's structural and it's permanent.
We want to do everything we can to never reach the last one. This may involve redefining notions which in the face of scientific progress prove themselves to be outdated and archaic.
I hate these stories. Games were designed (albeit evolutionarily, through generations of culture) to exploit specific human cognitive limitations in exhaustive search and look ahead, and thereby force us to fall back on things like heuristics and strategies. This makes games unpredictable and interesting.
But computers don't have those limitations. Of course they can out play us at games. They also add faster than we do.
This is all IBM's DeepBlue was, a massive, massive lookahead machine which used a little human-discovered / human programmed rules of thumb to reduce the search space and then human-discovered, human programmed rules of thumb for judging the relative goodness of each move.
The fact that computers are good at beating humans at something specifically designed to make humans perform badly is not an advancement in A.I.
Well, OK it is, but that's not saying much.