Why? The people who had the foresight, work ethic, and brains to create or own the robot workforce have NO legal, ethical, or moral reason to "share" the fruits of their labors (or laborers) with others
Because in a world where 99% of the people are literally unemployable (because anything they can do, a robot can do better and cheaper), the alternatives are grim -- either mass starvation, or civil war.
If you want a piece of the pie, work your ass off and buy a piece, or go and make a pie of your own.
Yes, I'm familiar with the standard conservative moralizing. But that approach only works in a world where those actions are possible, and in the scenario we are discussing, they won't be.
You are right. It's not an open source project. All it does is open its source.
I never said it wasn't open source. My comment was about whether or not it's "locked to a single platform". I assert that without a herculean porting effort, it effectively is.
C'mon. Bridging API frameworks is where "it's at" today.
I'll believe it when I see it. I guess getting it to run under WINE might be doable, but then again that was equally doable (at least in principle) when the source was closed.
Computers can't be any smarter than their creators and we can't even keep each other from hacking ourselves.
I'm not sure how sound that logic is. You might as well say that cars can't be any faster than their creators.
My computer is already smarter than me in certain ways; for example it can calculate a square root much faster than I can, it can beat me at chess, and it can translate English into Arabic better than I can. Of course we no longer think of those things as necessarily indicating intelligence, but that merely indicates that we did not in the past have a clear definition of what constitutes 'intelligence', and that we probably still don't. Meanwhile, every year our game of "No True Scotsman" whittles away our definition of "true intelligence" a bit more, until one day there's nothing left.
In 20-30 years, people will begin looking back at 2015 as "the good ol' days" never to be seen again as unemployment and civil unrest grow.
While your prediction is entirely valid, I'd like to point out that it won't be the robots causing the civil unrest, but rather society's (hopefully temporary) failure to adapt to a new economic model where workers are no longer required for most tasks.
Having menial labor done "for free" is actually a huge advantage for humanity -- the challenge will be coming up with a legal framework so that the fruits of all that free labor get distributed widely, and not just to the few people who own the robot workforce.
Because what the pessimist in me is seeing, isn't a cherrypicked 11 x increase in one bench but overall core performance stagnation.
Well, you can't say you weren't warned; there have been about a zillion articles along the lines of "everybody better learn how to multithread, because we've hit the wall on single-core performance and the only way to make use of extra transistors now is to add more cores".
This scares the shit out of me, a guy with almost 30 years of programming experience. What the hell is Grampa supposed to do?
Same thing he usually does, I suppose... he'll just keep using whatever is currently installed on his PC, until one day he decides to buy a new PC, at which point he'll start using whatever OS was pre-installed on that one.
Young men are surely going to impress their dates when they show up in the modern equivalent of a rusty self-driving Pinto. For extra points, the last user was hauling dead fish and cow manure.
Right, because there won't be any upscale car-sharing companies that specialize in date-worthy automobiles. That could never happen, the free market wouldn't allow it!
I was thinking more along the lines of sending up an anti-drone drone to grab it and drag it back down. After that you can rely on the legal precedent of "finders, keepers" to add it to your drone collection.
What do you mean "locked to a single platform". I admit that I haven't tried it, but they give away the source code to VS 2015.
I don't think having access to the source code to VS 2015 is going to allow anyone to compile VS for any non-Windows platform. Not unless you have a few million man-hours available for porting and redesign (since much of the functionality present in VS wouldn't even make sense outside of Windows)
The technical problems you mention have obvious solutions.
Not enough roof space on a high-rise to supply power to all of its residents? No problem, just put the solar panels somewhere else instead. Wires make it easy to move electricity from one place to another.
Need more power when the sun isn't shining? That's a bit more expensive to solve, but the solution is obvious -- generate excess power in advance and store it in batteries, so that it is available when you need it. The cell phone, laptop, tablet, and electric car markets are all driving the costs of battery storage down to the point where this will soon be economical to do at scale.
I'm kind of wondering where they would all go. If each panel was a square meter, that's 193 square miles of solar panels.
193 square miles is 0.006% of the surface area of the United States.
Or, if we wanted to only put the solar panels on existing residential roofs -- there are currently about 6184 square miles of residential roof space in the USA. (ref)
For it to work in a corporate environment, it must be mandated by the company so that everyone does it, everyone must have a client that supports it, keys must exist and be distributed
Of course in a non-corporate/general-email environment, all of those things won't happen (or at least, not all at the same time), so there is a big chicken-and-egg problem if we require all of that. Fortunately, I don't think we need to require all of that.
then can everyone rely on an unsigned message being invalid
I don't think it is necessary to rely on an unauthenticated message being invalid. An unauthenticated message is just that -- unauthenticated. It might be valid or invalid. If it's something important, the "unauthenticated" flag is an indication to the user that he should verify the message's authenticity using other means (e.g. by calling the boss and asking him about it).
If your boss forgets to sign a message telling you to do something and you ignore it, you better have a company policy backing you up.
You wouldn't ignore it, you'd call the boss (or email him) and ask him if he really send the message you received.
And hopefully the boss would almost never "forget" to sign an email, because all of his emails would be automatically signed simply as part of the act of sending them from his regular email account.
That puts it in the realm of a social problem, not a technical one. And it does not solve the problem of external sources of email that don't sign anything being the alleged source of the email asking you to "click here" because your train reservation has changed and you need to pay a bit extra.
True, you can't fix stupid. But you can at least make it easier for people to see a difference between a known-authentic email and an email of unproven origin.
It seems like relying solely on peoples' good judgement to figure out which emails are legitimate vs which ones are phishing spam (or worse, spear-phishing spam) is asking for trouble.
I can imagine email service providers using cryptographic signing techniques to assist the email client in reliably identifying which emails are definitely coming from their boss (or at least, from their boss's legitimate email account) vs which ones are unauthenticated and could have been written by anyone.
With that implemented, after a few weeks people would grow used to seeing the happy green "sender authenticated" sign at the top of each email from their boss, and if an email came in purporting to be from the boss, but with a big angry red "WARNING -- UNAUTHENTICATED MESSAGE -- MAY BE FRAUDULENT" (or whatever) sign at the top, they'd be less likely to hand over the company jewels without first confirming the email's validity.
Does something like this exist? If so, it seems like it's not widely used. If GMail/hotmail/yahoo could agree on a method and then start implementing it by default, I think that would go a long way towards reducing the effectiveness of email phishing attacks.
Why, just this morning I turned on a computer that initialized itself to be compatible with an Intel 8086 from 1978.
Which leads me to a question... if Intel were to one day do away with its old-timey segmented memory modes and what not, would anybody notice?
I'm a little surprised they haven't done so already. Even if the extra transistors required to support that aren't significant, there is still the matter of having to test, verify, and support all 27 different layers of compatibility for every CPU model they come out with. It seems like it would be a pain to do all that if nobody is using that functionality anyway.
I use neural networks on a daily basis based on a very old design.
They still let people use their brains at your work, eh? No such luck at my company, they threw all of those out years ago when they upgraded to PowerPoint.
I propose sending robots first. Once the robots are done constructing a nice moon base and spaceport, we can send some astronauts up to move in to it. (then they can start supervising the Helium-3 mining, the tourists, and of course the low-gravity professional sports)
Of course there will be a time where manual driving will be outlawed
Why "of course"? If automatic-crash-avoidance technology can make it so that even (semi)manually-driven cars can't get into accidents, then there would be no safety benefit to outlawing (semi)manually-driven cars.
I can imagine a law requiring manually-driven cars to have crash-avoidance technology installed, though.
As far as I'm concerned, we should make it a goal to work to get safe self driving cars on the road ASAP, and then get really strict on issuing drivers licenses so that almost nobody is allowed to do it.
That goal might be a technically sound one, but I don't think it's politically viable. Telling people they are not allowed to drive their car anymore is likely to be even less popular than telling Americans they can't own a gun anymore.
A more attainable way to improve safety would be to allow people to continue to drive if they want to, but to add intelligent accident-avoidance software to the automobile so that when the person is driving, if the car notices he is about to cause a crash, it can step in and take the necessary actions to avoid or minimize the crash. In this case, if the car noticed that the driver wasn't braking sufficiently to avoid rear-ending the car in front, it could start applying the brakes for him. This approach is not only possible, but is already implemented in some cars.
Perhaps that is actually a battery pack? I'd imagine something like this would need a lot of power if you want to go very far with it (and not risk collapsing in the middle of the street somewhere)
I have never really heard a GOOD reason for Java to be in the browser to being with. Ever... Enlighten me if you wish. I am truly curious - legitimate question.
Originally Java was intended to fill all of the custom-client-side-logic use cases that JavaScript (and to a steadily shrinking extent) Flash do now. But it didn't do a very good job of that, and instead found its calling on the server side.
"it's hard to compete with a fertile field in a nice climate" you should watch a few of the youtube videos about these LED hydro places, you might change your mind
I think I'll wait until I start reading about farmers going out of business due to price competition from indoor produce growers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an old wives' tale that frogs will allow themselves to be boiled if you turn the temperature up slow enough.
Have you tried leaving the lid on the pot?
Why? The people who had the foresight, work ethic, and brains to create or own the robot workforce have NO legal, ethical, or moral reason to "share" the fruits of their labors (or laborers) with others
Because in a world where 99% of the people are literally unemployable (because anything they can do, a robot can do better and cheaper), the alternatives are grim -- either mass starvation, or civil war.
If you want a piece of the pie, work your ass off and buy a piece, or go and make a pie of your own.
Yes, I'm familiar with the standard conservative moralizing. But that approach only works in a world where those actions are possible, and in the scenario we are discussing, they won't be.
You are right. It's not an open source project. All it does is open its source.
I never said it wasn't open source. My comment was about whether or not it's "locked to a single platform". I assert that without a herculean porting effort, it effectively is.
C'mon. Bridging API frameworks is where "it's at" today.
I'll believe it when I see it. I guess getting it to run under WINE might be doable, but then again that was equally doable (at least in principle) when the source was closed.
Computers can't be any smarter than their creators and we can't even keep each other from hacking ourselves.
I'm not sure how sound that logic is. You might as well say that cars can't be any faster than their creators.
My computer is already smarter than me in certain ways; for example it can calculate a square root much faster than I can, it can beat me at chess, and it can translate English into Arabic better than I can. Of course we no longer think of those things as necessarily indicating intelligence, but that merely indicates that we did not in the past have a clear definition of what constitutes 'intelligence', and that we probably still don't. Meanwhile, every year our game of "No True Scotsman" whittles away our definition of "true intelligence" a bit more, until one day there's nothing left.
In 20-30 years, people will begin looking back at 2015 as "the good ol' days" never to be seen again as unemployment and civil unrest grow.
While your prediction is entirely valid, I'd like to point out that it won't be the robots causing the civil unrest, but rather society's (hopefully temporary) failure to adapt to a new economic model where workers are no longer required for most tasks.
Having menial labor done "for free" is actually a huge advantage for humanity -- the challenge will be coming up with a legal framework so that the fruits of all that free labor get distributed widely, and not just to the few people who own the robot workforce.
Because what the pessimist in me is seeing, isn't a cherrypicked 11 x increase in one bench but overall core performance stagnation.
Well, you can't say you weren't warned; there have been about a zillion articles along the lines of "everybody better learn how to multithread, because we've hit the wall on single-core performance and the only way to make use of extra transistors now is to add more cores".
This scares the shit out of me, a guy with almost 30 years of programming experience. What the hell is Grampa supposed to do?
Same thing he usually does, I suppose... he'll just keep using whatever is currently installed on his PC, until one day he decides to buy a new PC, at which point he'll start using whatever OS was pre-installed on that one.
Young men are surely going to impress their dates when they show up in the modern equivalent of a rusty self-driving Pinto. For extra points, the last user was hauling dead fish and cow manure.
Right, because there won't be any upscale car-sharing companies that specialize in date-worthy automobiles. That could never happen, the free market wouldn't allow it!
Sure, just toss a net over it.
I was thinking more along the lines of sending up an anti-drone drone to grab it and drag it back down. After that you can rely on the legal precedent of "finders, keepers" to add it to your drone collection.
What do you mean "locked to a single platform". I admit that I haven't tried it, but they give away the source code to VS 2015.
I don't think having access to the source code to VS 2015 is going to allow anyone to compile VS for any non-Windows platform. Not unless you have a few million man-hours available for porting and redesign (since much of the functionality present in VS wouldn't even make sense outside of Windows)
The technical problems you mention have obvious solutions.
Not enough roof space on a high-rise to supply power to all of its residents? No problem, just put the solar panels somewhere else instead. Wires make it easy to move electricity from one place to another.
Need more power when the sun isn't shining? That's a bit more expensive to solve, but the solution is obvious -- generate excess power in advance and store it in batteries, so that it is available when you need it. The cell phone, laptop, tablet, and electric car markets are all driving the costs of battery storage down to the point where this will soon be economical to do at scale.
I'm kind of wondering where they would all go.
If each panel was a square meter, that's 193 square miles of solar panels.
193 square miles is 0.006% of the surface area of the United States.
Or, if we wanted to only put the solar panels on existing residential roofs -- there are currently about 6184 square miles of residential roof space in the USA. (ref)
For it to work in a corporate environment, it must be mandated by the company so that everyone does it, everyone must have a client that supports it, keys must exist and be distributed
Of course in a non-corporate/general-email environment, all of those things won't happen (or at least, not all at the same time), so there is a big chicken-and-egg problem if we require all of that. Fortunately, I don't think we need to require all of that.
then can everyone rely on an unsigned message being invalid
I don't think it is necessary to rely on an unauthenticated message being invalid. An unauthenticated message is just that -- unauthenticated. It might be valid or invalid. If it's something important, the "unauthenticated" flag is an indication to the user that he should verify the message's authenticity using other means (e.g. by calling the boss and asking him about it).
If your boss forgets to sign a message telling you to do something and you ignore it, you better have a company policy backing you up.
You wouldn't ignore it, you'd call the boss (or email him) and ask him if he really send the message you received.
And hopefully the boss would almost never "forget" to sign an email, because all of his emails would be automatically signed simply as part of the act of sending them from his regular email account.
That puts it in the realm of a social problem, not a technical one. And it does not solve the problem of external sources of email that don't sign anything being the alleged source of the email asking you to "click here" because your train reservation has changed and you need to pay a bit extra.
True, you can't fix stupid. But you can at least make it easier for people to see a difference between a known-authentic email and an email of unproven origin.
It seems like relying solely on peoples' good judgement to figure out which emails are legitimate vs which ones are phishing spam (or worse, spear-phishing spam) is asking for trouble.
I can imagine email service providers using cryptographic signing techniques to assist the email client in reliably identifying which emails are definitely coming from their boss (or at least, from their boss's legitimate email account) vs which ones are unauthenticated and could have been written by anyone.
With that implemented, after a few weeks people would grow used to seeing the happy green "sender authenticated" sign at the top of each email from their boss, and if an email came in purporting to be from the boss, but with a big angry red "WARNING -- UNAUTHENTICATED MESSAGE -- MAY BE FRAUDULENT" (or whatever) sign at the top, they'd be less likely to hand over the company jewels without first confirming the email's validity.
Does something like this exist? If so, it seems like it's not widely used. If GMail/hotmail/yahoo could agree on a method and then start implementing it by default, I think that would go a long way towards reducing the effectiveness of email phishing attacks.
Why, just this morning I turned on a computer that initialized itself to be compatible with an Intel 8086 from 1978.
Which leads me to a question... if Intel were to one day do away with its old-timey segmented memory modes and what not, would anybody notice?
I'm a little surprised they haven't done so already. Even if the extra transistors required to support that aren't significant, there is still the matter of having to test, verify, and support all 27 different layers of compatibility for every CPU model they come out with. It seems like it would be a pain to do all that if nobody is using that functionality anyway.
I use neural networks on a daily basis based on a very old design.
They still let people use their brains at your work, eh? No such luck at my company, they threw all of those out years ago when they upgraded to PowerPoint.
I propose sending robots first. Once the robots are done constructing a nice moon base and spaceport, we can send some astronauts up to move in to it. (then they can start supervising the Helium-3 mining, the tourists, and of course the low-gravity professional sports)
Little-known fact about the T-Rex: it had a very small carbon footprint. Dudes went everywhere on foot.
Of course there will be a time where manual driving will be outlawed
Why "of course"? If automatic-crash-avoidance technology can make it so that even (semi)manually-driven cars can't get into accidents, then there would be no safety benefit to outlawing (semi)manually-driven cars.
I can imagine a law requiring manually-driven cars to have crash-avoidance technology installed, though.
I've NEVER been rear-ended in the UK because of something like that. People just fucking well pay attention.
Really, that's your logic? "X has never happened to me personally, therefore it must never happen in the UK"?
As far as I'm concerned, we should make it a goal to work to get safe self driving cars on the road ASAP, and then get really strict on issuing drivers licenses so that almost nobody is allowed to do it.
That goal might be a technically sound one, but I don't think it's politically viable. Telling people they are not allowed to drive their car anymore is likely to be even less popular than telling Americans they can't own a gun anymore.
A more attainable way to improve safety would be to allow people to continue to drive if they want to, but to add intelligent accident-avoidance software to the automobile so that when the person is driving, if the car notices he is about to cause a crash, it can step in and take the necessary actions to avoid or minimize the crash. In this case, if the car noticed that the driver wasn't braking sufficiently to avoid rear-ending the car in front, it could start applying the brakes for him. This approach is not only possible, but is already implemented in some cars.
Perhaps that is actually a battery pack? I'd imagine something like this would need a lot of power if you want to go very far with it (and not risk collapsing in the middle of the street somewhere)
I have never really heard a GOOD reason for Java to be in the browser to being with. Ever... Enlighten me if you wish. I am truly curious - legitimate question.
Originally Java was intended to fill all of the custom-client-side-logic use cases that JavaScript (and to a steadily shrinking extent) Flash do now. But it didn't do a very good job of that, and instead found its calling on the server side.
Those who fail to understand Java will attempt to reinvent it. Poorly. And compile it to JavaScript.
Given the current state of Java-inside-the-web-browser, I don't see how they could do any worse than Sun/Oracle did...
"it's hard to compete with a fertile field in a nice climate" you should watch a few of the youtube videos about these LED hydro places, you might change your mind
I think I'll wait until I start reading about farmers going out of business due to price competition from indoor produce growers.