More seriously, people may prefer human-like AIs (for some purposes anyway) precisely because they find inscrutible "alien" AIs uncomfortable to interact with, and are looking for something more friendly and personable.
People made all the same criticisms about air travel back in the 1920's. Their mistake was assuming that the technology would never develop much further than the (slow, cloth-and-wood framed, 1-2 person) aircraft that were in existence at the time.
I think this teaches us a great deal about what AI will actually be like when it inevitably arrives. It won't be r2d2 or c3p0 or data - it will be an alien mind that will be incomprehensible to the rest of us.
Except, of course, for the AIs that are trained to emulate human thought processes -- those will be comprehensible to us (or at least, we'll be able to pretend that they are;))
It's too quiet. How can pedestrians keep being absorbed in their smartphones if you can't hear traffic anymore over the music you're playing on your headphones?
It's possibly a valid complaint, e.g. for people with impaired vision who rely on audio cues to know when traffic is clear.
It's also easy to address -- just add a speaker to the front of the vehicle that emits some sort of noise when appropriate.
Who said anything about "need"? The list of technologies we don't need (but developed anyway, simply because we like them) is a lot longer than the list of technologies we do need.
Cash has its own problems, as anyone who has been pickpocketed (or wound up holding a worthless counterfeit bill) will tell you.
Credit cards are nothing but evil. Although, if you want to travel, you can't live without them.
They aren't entirely evil, since as you admit they can be really useful.
The problem with credit cards is they are insecure; in particular they are vulnerable to replay attacks.
Upgrade them to a proper cryptographic protocol and they can be just as secure as any other type of electronic payment system (e.g. Apple Pay or Android Pay), with no need to trust Pizza the Hut or anyone else to keep secrets for you. Why the credit card companies haven't done this already is a bit of a head-scratcher; the technology and the know-how is out there.
Can you cite a reason why autonomous car fleet services won't be regulated the way the cable providers are?
Assuming that self-driving cars really are safer than human drivers, I'd expect them to be regulated about as much as current non-autonomous car fleet services (e.g. Uber, Lyft, Hertz, Zipcar, etc) are, which is to say, lightly.
If self-driving cars aren't safer than human drivers, then I'd expect them to be outlawed entirely.
Autonomous cars on a course to put taxi's and real drivers out of business, then charge everyone taxi prices to go anywhere. Maybe more, depending whether you are going to an affluent area. The future seems to suck.
What's going to stop Autonomous Car Owner A from charging a bit less than Autonomous Car Owner B, in order to get more customers? And what's then going to stop A from reducing his prices a bit below B again, in order to get customers back? And why won't this cycle continue until the prices paid by customers are only slightly higher than the costs incurred by the car owners?
In other words, why do you think there will be no price-competition in The Sucky Future?
It's okay to like a movie and criticize it at the same time. Even the best movies have their flaws; indeed, a flawless movie probably wouldn't be very interesting to watch or discuss.
It's Intel's R&D investment; they can sell it or sit on it as they see fit. They are a for-profit corporation, not a public service, and are under no obligation to anyone to sell their technology on any set schedule.
That said, Intel-vs-AMD is a good example of the value of competition to improve products for the consumer. Without AMD on their heels, God only knows how long Intel would have coasted.
I wonder what they will do with such a huge facility when Musk is out of business.
Some other company would purchase it and use it to make batteries, of course. Regardless of whether Tesla succeeds or fails, there's going to be a big market for electric cars (and hence, for batteries to put into them).
Funny you should bring in advertising. This is publicity money can't buy, and this is *exactly* why they're doing it.
And it's a brilliant move, too, since it gives them a chance to demonstrate to the world the utility of their product and how it solves a problem (lightning-fast rollout of 24/7 power) that "traditional" power grids cannot.
It's one thing for a company to say "give us money and we promise we can do this for you", and a much more powerful thing when the company can say "look what we did for Puerto Rico on a small budget and miniscule timeline".
I'm absolutely sick and tired of walking into a physical local store location with cash in hand... only for them to not even stock what I'm looking to purchase.
This is absolutely a problem; it's just not one that a small-to-medium-sized retail outlet can easily solve. In order to guarantee that (whatever you are looking for on a given day) will be in stock on that day, they need to keep a large inventory at their store -- inventory which costs a lot of money to procure and takes up a lot of expensive retail space to store on-site. Then they either have to pass those costs on to you as higher prices, or eat the loss and eventually go out of business. So they either do the former, and lose business to Amazon because they aren't price-competitive, or they reduce their inventory to only the big sellers, and lose business to Amazon because people get frustrated with their lack of selection.
I don't see any way for retail to win here; Amazon keeps a huge amount of inventory in cheap warehouses and uses automation to keep their labor costs down; short of a big increase in the cost of shipping, I'd say it's game, set, and match for Amazon.
how can a cryptocurrency have any value if nobody will even accept it as a medium of exchange?
It couldn't. So if we accept that these currencies have a valuation, then the likely explanation is that people exist who are willing to buy the currency at (roughly) that price.
Well, either that or someone is making up a price to see if they can find someone willing to buy at that price; but the likelihood of "imaginative pricing" diminishes as the number of buyers and sellers increases.
It's cute that you need a language altogether. When you're ready to be a real programmer, you can learn how to write all your own op-codes in assembler, like a grown-up developer.
Assembly language is also a language. Toggle in the bits directly via the front panel switches, like a real man:)
On the other hand, static typing generally induces a slow compilation step that you have to wait through hundreds of times when developing a significant application.
Hopefully the compilation step isn't that slow -- if it is, ask your boss for a faster development computer, it will pay for itself many times over. In my C++ coding, a partial recompile (just of the files I've edited recently) rarely takes longer than 10 seconds. (A full recompile could take several minutes, but that generally isn't necessary).
When that 10-second recompile step immediately catches newly-introduced bugs that would have taken me minutes or hours to detect and diagnose via run-time testing of every possible codepath, I count that as a big win for static typing.
On the brighter(?) side, at least the destruction will be mostly confined to the vehicle and a section of the hyperloop track. i.e. you're unlikely to ever see hijackers taking over the hyperloop-train and steering it into their least-favorite skyscraper.
The real mystery isn't who did it, but how. There's always somebody nefarious; but this particular somebody seems to have invented a weapon that nobody else has even thought of.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would we do that ?
For the sexbots, obviously. ;)
More seriously, people may prefer human-like AIs (for some purposes anyway) precisely because they find inscrutible "alien" AIs uncomfortable to interact with, and are looking for something more friendly and personable.
If it's big enough to recharge your EV, it's probably also big enough to just pick up your EV and carry it to its destination :)
You could build and fly bigger aircraft without changing the infrastructure.
Untrue -- bigger planes required bigger runways and bigger terminals. And so, bigger runways and bigger terminals were duly built.
People made all the same criticisms about air travel back in the 1920's. Their mistake was assuming that the technology would never develop much further than the (slow, cloth-and-wood framed, 1-2 person) aircraft that were in existence at the time.
I think this teaches us a great deal about what AI will actually be like when it inevitably arrives. It won't be r2d2 or c3p0 or data - it will be an alien mind that will be incomprehensible to the rest of us.
Except, of course, for the AIs that are trained to emulate human thought processes -- those will be comprehensible to us (or at least, we'll be able to pretend that they are ;))
Cheap solar panel and lithium battery production are absolute hell on Mother Earth.
Says who? The oil companies?
It's too quiet. How can pedestrians keep being absorbed in their smartphones if you can't hear traffic anymore over the music you're playing on your headphones?
It's possibly a valid complaint, e.g. for people with impaired vision who rely on audio cues to know when traffic is clear.
It's also easy to address -- just add a speaker to the front of the vehicle that emits some sort of noise when appropriate.
Who said anything about "need"? The list of technologies we don't need (but developed anyway, simply because we like them) is a lot longer than the list of technologies we do need.
And folks, that's why cash is best.
Cash has its own problems, as anyone who has been pickpocketed (or wound up holding a worthless counterfeit bill) will tell you.
Credit cards are nothing but evil. Although, if you want to travel, you can't live without them.
They aren't entirely evil, since as you admit they can be really useful.
The problem with credit cards is they are insecure; in particular they are vulnerable to replay attacks.
Upgrade them to a proper cryptographic protocol and they can be just as secure as any other type of electronic payment system (e.g. Apple Pay or Android Pay), with no need to trust Pizza the Hut or anyone else to keep secrets for you. Why the credit card companies haven't done this already is a bit of a head-scratcher; the technology and the know-how is out there.
Because there is no price competition currently with taxis for good reason.
Uber and Lyft don't count?
Can you cite a reason why autonomous car fleet services won't be regulated the way the cable providers are?
Assuming that self-driving cars really are safer than human drivers, I'd expect them to be regulated about as much as current non-autonomous car fleet services (e.g. Uber, Lyft, Hertz, Zipcar, etc) are, which is to say, lightly.
If self-driving cars aren't safer than human drivers, then I'd expect them to be outlawed entirely.
Autonomous cars on a course to put taxi's and real drivers out of business, then charge everyone taxi prices to go anywhere. Maybe more, depending whether you are going to an affluent area. The future seems to suck.
What's going to stop Autonomous Car Owner A from charging a bit less than Autonomous Car Owner B, in order to get more customers? And what's then going to stop A from reducing his prices a bit below B again, in order to get customers back? And why won't this cycle continue until the prices paid by customers are only slightly higher than the costs incurred by the car owners?
In other words, why do you think there will be no price-competition in The Sucky Future?
It's okay to like a movie and criticize it at the same time. Even the best movies have their flaws; indeed, a flawless movie probably wouldn't be very interesting to watch or discuss.
Musk's last update on when the self diving capability of Tesla cars week be delivered was the end of the year.
Teslas already have excellent self-diving capability; just point them towards the edge of the cliff and place a brick on the accelerator pedal.
It's Intel's R&D investment; they can sell it or sit on it as they see fit. They are a for-profit corporation, not a public service, and are under no obligation to anyone to sell their technology on any set schedule.
That said, Intel-vs-AMD is a good example of the value of competition to improve products for the consumer. Without AMD on their heels, God only knows how long Intel would have coasted.
I wonder what they will do with such a huge facility when Musk is out of business.
Some other company would purchase it and use it to make batteries, of course. Regardless of whether Tesla succeeds or fails, there's going to be a big market for electric cars (and hence, for batteries to put into them).
Is there a *rational* explanation for all this bugaboo reporting?
Nope, it's just the natural human tendency to want to first amp up the next big thing, and then tear it down again.
Of course, there's no rational explanation for Tesla's current stock valuation either. :)
Funny you should bring in advertising. This is publicity money can't buy, and this is *exactly* why they're doing it.
And it's a brilliant move, too, since it gives them a chance to demonstrate to the world the utility of their product and how it solves a problem (lightning-fast rollout of 24/7 power) that "traditional" power grids cannot.
It's one thing for a company to say "give us money and we promise we can do this for you", and a much more powerful thing when the company can say "look what we did for Puerto Rico on a small budget and miniscule timeline".
I'm absolutely sick and tired of walking into a physical local store location with cash in hand... only for them to not even stock what I'm looking to purchase.
This is absolutely a problem; it's just not one that a small-to-medium-sized retail outlet can easily solve. In order to guarantee that (whatever you are looking for on a given day) will be in stock on that day, they need to keep a large inventory at their store -- inventory which costs a lot of money to procure and takes up a lot of expensive retail space to store on-site. Then they either have to pass those costs on to you as higher prices, or eat the loss and eventually go out of business. So they either do the former, and lose business to Amazon because they aren't price-competitive, or they reduce their inventory to only the big sellers, and lose business to Amazon because people get frustrated with their lack of selection.
I don't see any way for retail to win here; Amazon keeps a huge amount of inventory in cheap warehouses and uses automation to keep their labor costs down; short of a big increase in the cost of shipping, I'd say it's game, set, and match for Amazon.
how can a cryptocurrency have any value if nobody will even accept it as a medium of exchange?
It couldn't. So if we accept that these currencies have a valuation, then the likely explanation is that people exist who are willing to buy the currency at (roughly) that price.
Well, either that or someone is making up a price to see if they can find someone willing to buy at that price; but the likelihood of "imaginative pricing" diminishes as the number of buyers and sellers increases.
It's cute that you need a language altogether. When you're ready to be a real programmer, you can learn how to write all your own op-codes in assembler, like a grown-up developer.
Assembly language is also a language. Toggle in the bits directly via the front panel switches, like a real man :)
On the other hand, static typing generally induces a slow compilation step that you have to wait through hundreds of times when developing a significant application.
Hopefully the compilation step isn't that slow -- if it is, ask your boss for a faster development computer, it will pay for itself many times over. In my C++ coding, a partial recompile (just of the files I've edited recently) rarely takes longer than 10 seconds. (A full recompile could take several minutes, but that generally isn't necessary).
When that 10-second recompile step immediately catches newly-introduced bugs that would have taken me minutes or hours to detect and diagnose via run-time testing of every possible codepath, I count that as a big win for static typing.
the real Slashdot died years ago.
Did Netcraft confirm it?
On the brighter(?) side, at least the destruction will be mostly confined to the vehicle and a section of the hyperloop track. i.e. you're unlikely to ever see hijackers taking over the hyperloop-train and steering it into their least-favorite skyscraper.
The real mystery isn't who did it, but how. There's always somebody nefarious; but this particular somebody seems to have invented a weapon that nobody else has even thought of.