Why are we calling this "fake" news instead of "incorrect news" or "wrong news" or "wacko conspiracy theory"?
Because the "news" in question isn't just false, it's deliberately false and inflammatory. As in, made up out of whole cloth by trolls, just to wreak havoc, or by paid provocateurs, to drive gullible people towards advertisements by provoking them. The people behind the fake news are well aware that it is 100% fiction, and they don't care.
That's different from inadvertently getting a story wrong, and it's different from being genuinely insane and thereby sending out incorrect information that you honestly think is correct.
"Fake" is in fact the most accurate way to describe it. So if you're going to question other peoples' ulterior motives, what dark motives are you concealing?
The closest to an argument I've heard is we'll tax factory output instead of income, but that doesn't work. You'll be accused of seizing factories ala Communism.
No matter what you do you're going to be accused of something by the people who stand to benefit from the status quo. If you let the possibility of accusations veto a plan, then you'll never be able to plan anything; which is de facto equivalent to planning for the problem to be resolved (one way or another) for you via massive civil unrest.
"Tax the robots" is probably as close an answer as you're going to get to the "who's gonna pay for it" question. Elections are won on feelings, as you say, and I suspect there are going to be a lot of anti-robot feelings in the future, unless/until this problem is solved.
But WAIT A SECOND, while the pies and baskets have each fallen in value by a factor of ten, a pie is still worth ONE basket. So Abby and Betty can just continue life as before. The robots changed nothing.
The just-so story is pretty, but it's hard to take it seriously as a prediction of the future when it doesn't even predict the past accurately.
If I replace "robots" with "cheap foreign labor", can you explain why so many American manufacturers went out of business (or moved operations abroad) in the last few decades?
According to your theory, American companies should have been able to continue operating just as before ("the foreign workers changed nothing"), because one ton of American steel was still worth exactly one American-made car (or etc). But that isn't what happened, is it? Instead, many people lost their jobs and ended up either unemployed or working at less-desirable unskilled service jobs afterwards, because they were unable to compete with the cheaper/more efficient new foreign producers who didn't need to hire them.
Abby can just switch to making baskets
Can she "just switch"? Does Abby somehow already have the skills to make baskets, or the time and resources to learn those skills to the point where she can perform them at a commercially viable level? Switching to a completely different skill set is not without cost; not everyone can afford to spend months or years without any income while they retrain themselves. That's why so many previously-high-earning people end up "switching down" to something like Walmart cashier after the industry they trained for becomes non-viable.
So the most likely scenario is to put [the "losers"] on some sort of welfare until we can get riot control robots perfected
And here is exactly where the core of the problem lies. As the skill level of available automation rises, the pool of "losers" (i.e. people who aren't sufficiently skilled or adaptable to economically compete with cheap automation) gets larger every year, and eventually includes most (if not all) of the human population.
Dismissing that issue as a negligible corner case is ignoring the problem entirely. The fact that you think "riot control robots" are the endgame suggests that you do also see the problem; you just refuse to label it as a problem because you lack sympathy for "those people".
Well I could sue the police and retire on the settlement. Its like winning the lottery only with a beatdown thrown in
You haven't been paying attention to the news much, have you? It's very rare that police officers are held accountable for misbehavior; society (for better or worse) gives them a lot of latitude. Police officers literally get away with murder(*) on a regular basis.
(*) or at least, actions that would definitely be called murder if anyone else did the same thing
I see that Hawking is continuing the tradition of world-renowned physicist commenting on things they have no specialty in.
Well, why shouldn't he? Everyone else on this thread is doing the exact same thing. Commenting on things you aren't an expert on is something just about everyone does, on a daily basis.
The only difference is that when we make a brilliant (or stupid) post to Slashdot, it doesn't get picked up by any news agency. If you find that troublesome, you ought to blame the news agencies, not Hawking.
No, your code generates code, or outputs it, or produces it. It doesn't "write" it, and provided you actually do write some code, this should be beyond obvious to you.
But he is writing much less code than someone would have had to write 20 or 30 years ago to get the same results. Now he can get the same amount of functionality implemented by himself that would have taken a whole team previously. Thus his company didn't have to hire so many programmers.
And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
From taxing the profits of companies who have successfully used automation to drive their costs down to near-zero -- with negligible labor, their only costs are input materials, maintenance, and the electric bill.
The one good thing about a vast army of robot workers is that they can provide their owners with fantastic 24/7 productivity at low cost, and thus generate vast material wealth; the only question is whether that vast wealth will accumulate in the savings accounts of the 1% while everyone else starves, or whether some mechanism will be found to allow that wealth to benefit the rest of mankind so that civilized society can continue.
How will it work if you have 90% unemployment? Simple, it won't be that way for long. You will have massive unrest, and all of the horrors that would entail.
And what are then eventual results of that unrest? Laws to ban robots so that low-paid humans get to do all the menial work instead, forever? I suppose that's a possibility, but the other (more sensible) outcome would be laws to tax the robots to fund training and/or subsidize employment for humans, so that the humans can find work in other (less-menial) areas that robots are not so good at.
(And the end-game of that, when robots and AIs are finally better than humans at absolutely everything, would be that the training/employment programs would end up supporting humans in "jobs" that are really hobbies; e.g. dance instructor or pottery making. And that would be a fine outcome IMO)
What DOES (apparently) take an expert, is to see that they are wrong this time too, for mostly the same reasons.
Can you find me such an expert? I'd very much like to understand what kind of gainful employment the blue-collar workers of today and white-collar workers of tomorrow can look forward to in our future AIs-and-robots-do-all-the-work-better-and-cheaper-than-humans-can paradise.
I recall hearing a calculation on the radio: if we keep expanding our energy use at the present rate, in 2000 years, we will need more energy than all the stars in our galaxy produce.
Something will need to sit idle or at least underutlized to provide peak load on cloudy days or you will end up with Brownouts. The only true solution to this problem is Timzeone spanning Backbone Transmission lines.
The other possible solution would be bulk energy storage. It's not cost effective yet, but there's no reason to think some form of it won't become cost effective at some point in the foreseeable future.
How much debt can we actually run up, before the shit hits the fan? AFAIK when you're a government (and particularly the US government, which is in control of the world's de facto reserve currency), there's no fixed limit, only some theoretical, undetectable-except-in-retrospect event-horizon at which the world's investors start to lose faith in your ability to pay off your debt.
I think that if there is one thing everyone should have learned from the 2016 election, it's that the words that are heard coming out of Trump's mouth on any given day N are no indication of what his words or behavior will be on day N+1 or later.
You might as well listen to a white noise stream; there's an equal amount of useful information present, and it's a lot more soothing.
Pass a real exam and secure a place at a really great campus. Pay your tuition or get a scholarship but the skills will be real. Study with only the very best and get a great education.
Hey, you copied that right out of the Trump University brochure!
I don't see how they're pushing forward if my friend, who bought a Volt, had to shop around because the three nearest GM/Chevrolet dealerships weren't even interested in selling the Volt to him.
Your complaint is about the dealerships, not about GM itself. (The lack of coherence between the priorities of the manufacturer and those of the dealerships is in fact one of the main reasons Tesla decided to avoid selling through dealerships; GM, on the other hand, had no such option, since their relationships with dealers are very long-standing, widely encoded into law, and nearly impossible for them to get out of)
To be fair, GM is pushing forward as well. The Volt and the Bolt may not be as meme-tactic as the Tesla cars are, but they do each represent a significant advancement for electricity-powered passenger cars.
Photosynthesis by plants is another: carbon dioxide is converted, with the help of water and light energy from the sun, into sugars, which are used to make more plant matter, locking the carbon away in wood and leaves.
... until the plant dies, and wood/leaves either burn or rot, at which point the CO2 is released into the atmosphere again.
We'll also need some way of getting the plant material back under the ground if we want to keep the CO2 permanently out of the atmosphere. (yes, I realize that does happen, as that's where all the coal deposits came from, etc, but I do wonder what percentage of the new plants will end up that way)
Slashdot Mirror
Why are we calling this "fake" news instead of "incorrect news" or "wrong news" or "wacko conspiracy theory"?
Because the "news" in question isn't just false, it's deliberately false and inflammatory. As in, made up out of whole cloth by trolls, just to wreak havoc, or by paid provocateurs, to drive gullible people towards advertisements by provoking them. The people behind the fake news are well aware that it is 100% fiction, and they don't care.
That's different from inadvertently getting a story wrong, and it's different from being genuinely insane and thereby sending out incorrect information that you honestly think is correct.
"Fake" is in fact the most accurate way to describe it. So if you're going to question other peoples' ulterior motives, what dark motives are you concealing?
The closest to an argument I've heard is we'll tax factory output instead of income, but that doesn't work. You'll be accused of seizing factories ala Communism.
No matter what you do you're going to be accused of something by the people who stand to benefit from the status quo. If you let the possibility of accusations veto a plan, then you'll never be able to plan anything; which is de facto equivalent to planning for the problem to be resolved (one way or another) for you via massive civil unrest.
"Tax the robots" is probably as close an answer as you're going to get to the "who's gonna pay for it" question. Elections are won on feelings, as you say, and I suspect there are going to be a lot of anti-robot feelings in the future, unless/until this problem is solved.
Eh, I think you meant "mechanical engineer"(*)
(*) I don't mean a robot who is trained in engineering, I mean a human being who designs physical objects ;)
But WAIT A SECOND, while the pies and baskets have each fallen in value by a factor of ten, a pie is still worth ONE basket. So Abby and Betty can just continue life as before. The robots changed nothing.
The just-so story is pretty, but it's hard to take it seriously as a prediction of the future when it doesn't even predict the past accurately.
If I replace "robots" with "cheap foreign labor", can you explain why so many American manufacturers went out of business (or moved operations abroad) in the last few decades?
According to your theory, American companies should have been able to continue operating just as before ("the foreign workers changed nothing"), because one ton of American steel was still worth exactly one American-made car (or etc). But that isn't what happened, is it? Instead, many people lost their jobs and ended up either unemployed or working at less-desirable unskilled service jobs afterwards, because they were unable to compete with the cheaper/more efficient new foreign producers who didn't need to hire them.
Abby can just switch to making baskets
Can she "just switch"? Does Abby somehow already have the skills to make baskets, or the time and resources to learn those skills to the point where she can perform them at a commercially viable level? Switching to a completely different skill set is not without cost; not everyone can afford to spend months or years without any income while they retrain themselves. That's why so many previously-high-earning people end up "switching down" to something like Walmart cashier after the industry they trained for becomes non-viable.
So the most likely scenario is to put [the "losers"] on some sort of welfare until we can get riot control robots perfected
And here is exactly where the core of the problem lies. As the skill level of available automation rises, the pool of "losers" (i.e. people who aren't sufficiently skilled or adaptable to economically compete with cheap automation) gets larger every year, and eventually includes most (if not all) of the human population.
Dismissing that issue as a negligible corner case is ignoring the problem entirely. The fact that you think "riot control robots" are the endgame suggests that you do also see the problem; you just refuse to label it as a problem because you lack sympathy for "those people".
Well I could sue the police and retire on the settlement. Its like winning the lottery only with a beatdown thrown in
You haven't been paying attention to the news much, have you? It's very rare that police officers are held accountable for misbehavior; society (for better or worse) gives them a lot of latitude. Police officers literally get away with murder(*) on a regular basis.
(*) or at least, actions that would definitely be called murder if anyone else did the same thing
I see that Hawking is continuing the tradition of world-renowned physicist commenting on things they have no specialty in.
Well, why shouldn't he? Everyone else on this thread is doing the exact same thing. Commenting on things you aren't an expert on is something just about everyone does, on a daily basis.
The only difference is that when we make a brilliant (or stupid) post to Slashdot, it doesn't get picked up by any news agency. If you find that troublesome, you ought to blame the news agencies, not Hawking.
No, your code generates code, or outputs it, or produces it. It doesn't "write" it, and provided you actually do write some code, this should be beyond obvious to you.
But he is writing much less code than someone would have had to write 20 or 30 years ago to get the same results. Now he can get the same amount of functionality implemented by himself that would have taken a whole team previously. Thus his company didn't have to hire so many programmers.
And exactly where does this *magic* money come from to pay out all this Universal Basic Income?
From taxing the profits of companies who have successfully used automation to drive their costs down to near-zero -- with negligible labor, their only costs are input materials, maintenance, and the electric bill.
The one good thing about a vast army of robot workers is that they can provide their owners with fantastic 24/7 productivity at low cost, and thus generate vast material wealth; the only question is whether that vast wealth will accumulate in the savings accounts of the 1% while everyone else starves, or whether some mechanism will be found to allow that wealth to benefit the rest of mankind so that civilized society can continue.
How will it work if you have 90% unemployment? Simple, it won't be that way for long. You will have massive unrest, and all of the horrors that would entail.
And what are then eventual results of that unrest? Laws to ban robots so that low-paid humans get to do all the menial work instead, forever? I suppose that's a possibility, but the other (more sensible) outcome would be laws to tax the robots to fund training and/or subsidize employment for humans, so that the humans can find work in other (less-menial) areas that robots are not so good at.
(And the end-game of that, when robots and AIs are finally better than humans at absolutely everything, would be that the training/employment programs would end up supporting humans in "jobs" that are really hobbies; e.g. dance instructor or pottery making. And that would be a fine outcome IMO)
What DOES (apparently) take an expert, is to see that they are wrong this time too, for mostly the same reasons.
Can you find me such an expert? I'd very much like to understand what kind of gainful employment the blue-collar workers of today and white-collar workers of tomorrow can look forward to in our future AIs-and-robots-do-all-the-work-better-and-cheaper-than-humans-can paradise.
Islam will only be defeated when the World understands that it is FICTION and is FALSE
... which is something that will happen right after the World understands the same about Christianity, or Hinduism, or (pick your religion here).
Which is to say, never. Religion doesn't work that way. You can't reason people out of beliefs they never reasoned their way into.
Don't worry, Barron is on it. He's really good with the cyber.
Once you've seen the goatse, it's too late to avert your eyes. What is seen can never be unseen.
I recall hearing a calculation on the radio: if we keep expanding our energy use at the present rate, in 2000 years, we will need more energy than all the stars in our galaxy produce.
True, but we won't be around to see it, because of the black hole that will be created by the mass of all of the disco records we'll have produced by then.
Something will need to sit idle or at least underutlized to provide peak load on cloudy days or you will end up with Brownouts. The only true solution to this problem is Timzeone spanning Backbone Transmission lines.
The other possible solution would be bulk energy storage. It's not cost effective yet, but there's no reason to think some form of it won't become cost effective at some point in the foreseeable future.
How much debt can we actually run up, before the shit hits the fan? AFAIK when you're a government (and particularly the US government, which is in control of the world's de facto reserve currency), there's no fixed limit, only some theoretical, undetectable-except-in-retrospect event-horizon at which the world's investors start to lose faith in your ability to pay off your debt.
It'd be a real shame if Ta'u can't keep up the payments to Solar City and their power controllers all stopped working at the same time.
As opposed to the regular diesel shipments, which would definitely continue to arrive whether any payments were made or not?
I think that if there is one thing everyone should have learned from the 2016 election, it's that the words that are heard coming out of Trump's mouth on any given day N are no indication of what his words or behavior will be on day N+1 or later.
You might as well listen to a white noise stream; there's an equal amount of useful information present, and it's a lot more soothing.
Clearly you are unaware of the miracle of copy&update :)
All well and good until someone bridges the air gap (e.g. By plugging in their infected home laptop)
Pass a real exam and secure a place at a really great campus. Pay your tuition or get a scholarship but the skills will be real. Study with only the very best and get a great education.
Hey, you copied that right out of the Trump University brochure!
I don't see how they're pushing forward if my friend, who bought a Volt, had to shop around because the three nearest GM/Chevrolet dealerships weren't even interested in selling the Volt to him.
Your complaint is about the dealerships, not about GM itself. (The lack of coherence between the priorities of the manufacturer and those of the dealerships is in fact one of the main reasons Tesla decided to avoid selling through dealerships; GM, on the other hand, had no such option, since their relationships with dealers are very long-standing, widely encoded into law, and nearly impossible for them to get out of)
To be fair, GM is pushing forward as well. The Volt and the Bolt may not be as meme-tactic as the Tesla cars are, but they do each represent a significant advancement for electricity-powered passenger cars.
Apple doesn't make design compromises to meet performance targets... apple just makes performance compromises until it fits into their design targets.
And Apple isn't necessarily wrong to do so, either. Speed isn't everything, otherwise we'd all be driving Ferraris.
Photosynthesis by plants is another: carbon dioxide is converted, with the help of water and light energy from the sun, into sugars, which are used to make more plant matter, locking the carbon away in wood and leaves.
... until the plant dies, and wood/leaves either burn or rot, at which point the CO2 is released into the atmosphere again.
We'll also need some way of getting the plant material back under the ground if we want to keep the CO2 permanently out of the atmosphere. (yes, I realize that does happen, as that's where all the coal deposits came from, etc, but I do wonder what percentage of the new plants will end up that way)