From a legal point of view, adding autonomous features to cars have not required special permission so long as a driver is in control for liability purposes.
Do you actually know if that's true, or are you just saying what you think the law ought to say? What matters is what it actually says. And yes, the law does distinguish between fully autonomous vehicles and ones with driver assistance abilities.
Don't take my word for it. It took me about one minute to look it up. California Vehicle Code Section 38750 provides the following definitions:
"Autonomous technology" means technology that has the capability to drive a vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring by a human operator.
"Autonomous vehicle" means any vehicle equipped with autonomous technology that has been integrated into that vehicle. An autonomous vehicle does not include a vehicle that is equipped with one or more collision avoidance systems, such as electronic blind spot assistance, automated emergency braking systems, park assist, adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, lane departure warning, and traffic jam and queuing assist.
Uber's cars have "the capability to drive a vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring by a human operator." Yes there's a human in the car, and hopefully that human is actively monitoring what the car does. But the car has the capability to keep driving itself even if the driver takes a nap, which is what the law cares about.
In the case of Steve Jobs, it sounds like they were just doing their job. He was appointed to a presidential council. Of course they did a background check on him. That's just standard procedure.
do you think the FBI's investigative powers will grow or shrink over the next four to eight years?
Who was the last president who actually shrank government surveillance? We all thought Obama would, but he didn't. I doubt Clinton would have either. Maybe Sanders would have. Mostly it's not a question of whether it will grow or shrink, just how much it will grow.
How do you define "earned"? If someone inherits $1 million, have they earned it? If they then invest it, and it turns into $2 million with no further effort on their part, did they earn that second million? If two people work the same number of hours each week, but one gets paid 50 times more than the other, did they earn 50 times more?
That's not what "earn" means to me. I can trace the reasons some people have much more than others, but they're rarely reasons I would describe as "earning" that much more.
the more human-like we make our AIs, the more human-like the code they generate is likely to be.
Except that the machines can be better than the humans at finding and applying heuristics. In the last few years we've seen that happen with a lot of hard problems: image recognition, speech transcription, playing Go, etc. These all take the sort of fuzzy, hard to define reasoning that computers used to be much worse than humans at. But now they do them better than us.
The only example it gives is Intellisense, which we've all been using for half a decade now or longer
Closer to two decades. JBuilder had it back in 2000. Really cutting edge stuff.
Trouble is Alan Turing. He's explicitly told us that some problems flat out aren't computable. Which means heuristics have to be involved.
I don't think that's the problem. Heuristics are what deep learning is really good at. But programming takes a complicated mix of logic and intuition that we haven't figured out how to handle yet. If a task is pure logic, expert systems work great. If it's pure heuristics, deep learning works well. But if it involves constant switching back and forth between the two in ways we can't clearly define, that's beyond what current AI can do.
I was about to say the same thing. "Roughly four in five Americans agree... that they can easily determine what information is trustworthy." Translation: "Roughly four in five Americans don't realize how bad they are at recognizing trustworthy information."
I'm trying really really hard to strip away the sarcasm and insinuation from your post and figure out what you're trying to say underneath it all. I think you're claiming mainstream news sources are less honest or accurate than Breitbart. Is that it? If so, could you please justify that claim? I don't mean more name calling and innuendo, I mean specific concrete facts to back up your claim. And keep in mind that you posted in response to an article in which Breitbart clearly and intentionally distorted the facts, and got called out for it by the very source they were citing to justify their claims.
But I don't block ads, I just run NoScript. If they can't make ads that work without javascript, that's their problem. And any ad network that lets advertisers bundle javascript is incompetent or evil or both. It's called a "malware distribution network", not an ad network.
I've occasionally thought about reading it, but one of the things that always stopped me is doubts about how relevant it still is today. Could you comment on that?
This book was written when computers only had one core and multithreaded algorithms weren't a thing. When there wasn't such a thing as vector units, to say nothing of massively parallel processors like GPUs. When performance was entirely determined by computation, whereas today it's often dominated by memory access. The factors that go into designing a good algorithm today are really different from what they were in the 1970s.
Even aside from that, there's been a lot of progress since then. Maybe it's a great reference for 50 year old sorting algorithms, but there are better algorithms known today.
Let's start by toning down the rhetoric, ok? If you begin by saying "you're an idiot" to anyone who disagrees with you, you've pretty much promised not to listen to anyone else or learn anything. So let's approach this as sensible, rational people (I know, we aren't, if we were we wouldn't be human, but let's at least try) and have a calm, respectful discussion.
Your position seems to be based on the assumption that geographic units are more important than people. You mention three different ones: states, cities, and counties. Strangely, you speak approvingly of states and counties, but disparagingly of cities. I don't really understand what you're getting at with that. Maybe you can explain. But anyway, I don't see why you think that a "county" or a "state" is a relevant unit for picking the president. Do you think that Loving County, TX (population 82) should be given the same weight as Los Angeles County, CA (population 9.8 million)? Seriously? If not, then why does the number of counties have anything to do with it?
So let's not talk about "a handful of cities". Let's talk about "the majority of voters in the country". Those voters are widely distributed through the country. They come from every state, and probably every county. Some are in cities, others in the country. But they're all citizens of the U.S. and all have equal reason to care who becomes president.
So please explain, as clearly and explicitly as possible, why you think some of those people's votes should count four times as much as others. Or to put it differently: you objected to "the rest of the nation" being "completely ignored", so why are you ok with the majority of the country's population being, in fact, completely ignored?
Unless something magical happens, I don't see wind and solar cell systems generating enough power to run factories to replace themselves.
That's because you haven't looked up the numbers. Fortunately, you have me to do it for you.:)
First for wind power. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., "Globally, the long-term technical potential of wind energy is believed to be five times total current global energy production, or 40 times current electricity demand, assuming all practical barriers needed were overcome."
That's a lot. But it's nothing compared to solar. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., "The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined."
Of course, we'll never harvest more than a tiny fraction of that energy. But then, even a tiny fraction is way more than we need. And it's not going to run out for as long as the sun keeps shining.
realistically nobody believes China and India or the other developing nations will stop modernizing to keep emissions down.
China is working hard to shift away from coal too. See http://arstechnica.com/science.... In particular where it says, "Accounting for the fact that 2016 was a leap year with an extra day, they estimate that China’s emissions will drop by about 0.5 percent (largely due to coal use declining nearly two percent)."
They have huge pollution problems, and they know that shifting to cleaner energy sources is necessary to do anything about it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...: "In 2015 China became the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power, at 43 GW installed capacity. China also led the world in the production and use of wind power and smart grid technologies, generating almost as much water, wind, and solar energy as all of France and Germany's power plants combined."
So you just read a summary on slashdot. I bet you believed what it said without question. Am I right?
Did you follow the link to see what the original story said? Did you check the URL to make sure it was really Engadget, not a fake page designed to look like it? Did you look up the study to see if it really said what the super short, not at all detailed article claimed it said?
No? Then you can't spot fake news either. You just believe what you read, as long as it sounds reasonable, without doing the work to find out if it's true or not.
1. Who could have anticipated the field of web programming in 1800? Thats what I mean by completely new fields.
"Web programming" is not itself a field in the sense I'm talking about, it's just a means to an end. Many different ends: publishing news, selling goods, etc. Those fields have become massively automated. There were newspapers in 1800, and they had to be printed by hand, one sheet at a time, then distributed by hand by teams of people carrying them around. Today, a few web programmers can do work that used to take hundreds of people. Selling goods was a low thoughput field in 1800. Modern stores sell far more with far fewer people. No one cares about "web programming" as such, any more than they care about "buggy whip manufacturing".
But that's all really beside the point. Whatever new jobs come up, whatever new tasks need to be accomplished, most of them will eventually be done by machines, not humans. That's the future we're heading toward.
The field of strong AI has stagnated ever since ELISA. That computers could someday surpass us is simpy a far away theoretical possibilities, if that. The AI hype machine and actual AI research are two very different things.
That's... um... a bit of a distortion. In fact we're right in the middle of an amazing explosion in AI. I've never seen anything like it before in any field. Practically every few days there's another new paper describing some major advancement. And they aren't just theoretical. As often as not, they're describing something that's already been put into production. It's amazing.
I don't know where it will end. "Strong AI" is poorly defined, and mostly a red herring anyway. We may never create a sentient computer that thinks just like a human. Or maybe we will. If we do create one, it won't necessarily be any more useful than a much simpler, non-sentient computer. Real AI research is about getting computers to do useful things, not about getting them to say, "I think therefore I am." And it's making amazing progress at getting them to do useful things.
Humans, and particularly our brain do not stay the same, this is the whole principle behind neuroplasticity.
No. That's a misunderstanding. Neuroplasticity just means you can learn new skills. It doesn't mean you have no limits. Brains today are no more plastic than they were in 1800. We have the same number of neurons, they hook together in the same way. We're no smarter or better at learning skills than our ancestors were. Newton is just as much a genius by modern standards as he was in his own day. Same with Mozart and da Vinci and Socrates. The limits of the human brain are very real and we all hit them every day. And those limits haven't changed. The rare people whose limits are slightly beyond most people's limits stand out as geniuses, even when we look at them hundreds of years later.
Your fear of bein rendered obsolete by computers is just as nonsensical as a hypothetical fear of the heat death of the universe, this is what I was trying to say.
Who said anything about being afraid?:) I can't wait for machines to replace us as workers! You think I like having to go to work every day? There are so many things I'd rather be doing.
It is far too general, it does not take into account the passage of time nor the creation of completely new fields that today simply do not exist.
Could you elaborate what you mean by that? The passage of time is exactly what it does take into account. And I don't know what you mean by "the creation of completely new fields". Here's the simple fact: every year computers become more powerful and humans stay basically the same. Once computers surpass all the abilities of a human brain, that's it. If a new field comes along, computers will be better than humans at that field too. They'll learn it faster and do it better.
By that logic we may all commit suicide since clearly the entropy of the universe will get us all one day, or the heat death, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Um. I think that was a non-sequitur. In a few billion years the earth will be swallowed by the sun. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether that means you should commit suicide. But it tells us nothing about whether automation will lead to unemployment. I guess if you kill yourself, that will be one less unemployed person. But that's the only connection I see.
But predicting that we will be seeing 95% unemployment in the future is just plain silly.
Why do you think it's silly? "The future" covers a lot of time. It's not going to happen in the next 10 years, but what about the next 50? Or the next 150?
It's hard to predict the future, but some extrapolations are easy to make. Machines already do a lot of things better than humans. That set of things is growing quickly. If technology keeps progressing (and there's every reason to think it will), eventually we'll reach a time when the machines are better at almost everything. If you want to argue against that, you've got a really hard case to make. But if you accept it, what do you think it will do to human employment?
I think you have that backwards. Clinton has been incredibly gracious. She conceded the election as soon as it became clear she wouldn't win, and called on all her supporters to accept the result. If it had gone the other way, do you think Trump would have been half as gracious? This is the man who has been claiming for months that the election would be rigged, who refused to say he would accept the results if he lost. It's also the man whose response to anyone who criticizes him is to swear at them and mock their appearance.
In my view, that system would be even worse than the current one. The fraction of congressional districts that are competitive is much smaller than the fraction of states that are. It also would mean that gerrymandering would start affecting the presidency. No one is redrawing state boundaries to get a political advantage, but congressional districts get redrawn every ten years, and in a lot of states, that's done by whichever party controls the state legislature specifically to give themselves an advantage. That would really really suck if you believe in "one person, one vote".
The broad but sparse rural population has different concerns than suburbanites.
Agreed, and they should have influence exactly in proportion to their population. No more and no less. One person, one vote.
But what does this have to do with the electoral college? We don't give votes in rural Pennsylvania more weight than votes in Pittsburgh. But we give votes in Rhode Island (a tiny almost entirely urban state) more weight than votes in Arkansas (a larger, much more rural state).
Indeed, they should have influence exactly in proportion to their populations. Just like every other division, whether it's race, religion, urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, whatever. Each group gets votes exactly in proportion to its population. Except large states vs. small states. We're talking about a national office, not a state one. Why should a vote cast in Alaska count 3 times as much as one cast in California? It's insane and undemocratic and completely unjust.
You left out the main reason the electoral college works the way it does: the small states insisted on it. They wouldn't agree to the constitution unless they were given outsized power relative to their populations. It was a devil's bargain from the very start: build an undemocratic system into the constitution, or the small states would walk away and there wouldn't be any constitution. Everything else is just rationalizations that people have added to cover that fact.
Slashdot Mirror
and revoke the company's license to operate autonomous vehicles
You mean the one they don't have because they refused to apply for it?
From a legal point of view, adding autonomous features to cars have not required special permission so long as a driver is in control for liability purposes.
Do you actually know if that's true, or are you just saying what you think the law ought to say? What matters is what it actually says. And yes, the law does distinguish between fully autonomous vehicles and ones with driver assistance abilities.
Don't take my word for it. It took me about one minute to look it up. California Vehicle Code Section 38750 provides the following definitions:
"Autonomous technology" means technology that has the capability to drive a vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring by a human operator.
"Autonomous vehicle" means any vehicle equipped with autonomous technology that has been integrated into that vehicle. An autonomous vehicle does not include a vehicle that is equipped with one or more collision avoidance systems, such as electronic blind spot assistance, automated emergency braking systems, park assist, adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, lane departure warning, and traffic jam and queuing assist.
Uber's cars have "the capability to drive a vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring by a human operator." Yes there's a human in the car, and hopefully that human is actively monitoring what the car does. But the car has the capability to keep driving itself even if the driver takes a nap, which is what the law cares about.
In the case of Steve Jobs, it sounds like they were just doing their job. He was appointed to a presidential council. Of course they did a background check on him. That's just standard procedure.
do you think the FBI's investigative powers will grow or shrink over the next four to eight years?
Who was the last president who actually shrank government surveillance? We all thought Obama would, but he didn't. I doubt Clinton would have either. Maybe Sanders would have. Mostly it's not a question of whether it will grow or shrink, just how much it will grow.
Get an adjustable sit/stand desk. Especially if you tend to get back/neck pain, it will make a big difference in how you feel at the end of the day.
But that's the modern way of doing business! It's a great business model.
1. Start a _____ company.
2. Ignore all laws and regulations that _____ companies are required to follow.
3. Profit!!!
You can fill in the blank with any kind of company you want. They call it "disruptive innovation". I guess because ignoring laws is so innovative.
They robot's owners earned it.
How do you define "earned"? If someone inherits $1 million, have they earned it? If they then invest it, and it turns into $2 million with no further effort on their part, did they earn that second million? If two people work the same number of hours each week, but one gets paid 50 times more than the other, did they earn 50 times more?
That's not what "earn" means to me. I can trace the reasons some people have much more than others, but they're rarely reasons I would describe as "earning" that much more.
the more human-like we make our AIs, the more human-like the code they generate is likely to be.
Except that the machines can be better than the humans at finding and applying heuristics. In the last few years we've seen that happen with a lot of hard problems: image recognition, speech transcription, playing Go, etc. These all take the sort of fuzzy, hard to define reasoning that computers used to be much worse than humans at. But now they do them better than us.
The only example it gives is Intellisense, which we've all been using for half a decade now or longer
Closer to two decades. JBuilder had it back in 2000. Really cutting edge stuff.
Trouble is Alan Turing. He's explicitly told us that some problems flat out aren't computable. Which means heuristics have to be involved.
I don't think that's the problem. Heuristics are what deep learning is really good at. But programming takes a complicated mix of logic and intuition that we haven't figured out how to handle yet. If a task is pure logic, expert systems work great. If it's pure heuristics, deep learning works well. But if it involves constant switching back and forth between the two in ways we can't clearly define, that's beyond what current AI can do.
I was about to say the same thing. "Roughly four in five Americans agree ... that they can easily determine what information is trustworthy." Translation: "Roughly four in five Americans don't realize how bad they are at recognizing trustworthy information."
I'm trying really really hard to strip away the sarcasm and insinuation from your post and figure out what you're trying to say underneath it all. I think you're claiming mainstream news sources are less honest or accurate than Breitbart. Is that it? If so, could you please justify that claim? I don't mean more name calling and innuendo, I mean specific concrete facts to back up your claim. And keep in mind that you posted in response to an article in which Breitbart clearly and intentionally distorted the facts, and got called out for it by the very source they were citing to justify their claims.
Darn, you made me feel so guilty! ;)
But I don't block ads, I just run NoScript. If they can't make ads that work without javascript, that's their problem. And any ad network that lets advertisers bundle javascript is incompetent or evil or both. It's called a "malware distribution network", not an ad network.
I've occasionally thought about reading it, but one of the things that always stopped me is doubts about how relevant it still is today. Could you comment on that?
This book was written when computers only had one core and multithreaded algorithms weren't a thing. When there wasn't such a thing as vector units, to say nothing of massively parallel processors like GPUs. When performance was entirely determined by computation, whereas today it's often dominated by memory access. The factors that go into designing a good algorithm today are really different from what they were in the 1970s.
Even aside from that, there's been a lot of progress since then. Maybe it's a great reference for 50 year old sorting algorithms, but there are better algorithms known today.
Let's start by toning down the rhetoric, ok? If you begin by saying "you're an idiot" to anyone who disagrees with you, you've pretty much promised not to listen to anyone else or learn anything. So let's approach this as sensible, rational people (I know, we aren't, if we were we wouldn't be human, but let's at least try) and have a calm, respectful discussion.
Your position seems to be based on the assumption that geographic units are more important than people. You mention three different ones: states, cities, and counties. Strangely, you speak approvingly of states and counties, but disparagingly of cities. I don't really understand what you're getting at with that. Maybe you can explain. But anyway, I don't see why you think that a "county" or a "state" is a relevant unit for picking the president. Do you think that Loving County, TX (population 82) should be given the same weight as Los Angeles County, CA (population 9.8 million)? Seriously? If not, then why does the number of counties have anything to do with it?
So let's not talk about "a handful of cities". Let's talk about "the majority of voters in the country". Those voters are widely distributed through the country. They come from every state, and probably every county. Some are in cities, others in the country. But they're all citizens of the U.S. and all have equal reason to care who becomes president.
So please explain, as clearly and explicitly as possible, why you think some of those people's votes should count four times as much as others. Or to put it differently: you objected to "the rest of the nation" being "completely ignored", so why are you ok with the majority of the country's population being, in fact, completely ignored?
Unless something magical happens, I don't see wind and solar cell systems generating enough power to run factories to replace themselves.
That's because you haven't looked up the numbers. Fortunately, you have me to do it for you. :)
First for wind power. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., "Globally, the long-term technical potential of wind energy is believed to be five times total current global energy production, or 40 times current electricity demand, assuming all practical barriers needed were overcome."
That's a lot. But it's nothing compared to solar. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., "The amount of solar energy reaching the surface of the planet is so vast that in one year it is about twice as much as will ever be obtained from all of the Earth's non-renewable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, and mined uranium combined."
Of course, we'll never harvest more than a tiny fraction of that energy. But then, even a tiny fraction is way more than we need. And it's not going to run out for as long as the sun keeps shining.
realistically nobody believes China and India or the other developing nations will stop modernizing to keep emissions down.
China is working hard to shift away from coal too. See http://arstechnica.com/science.... In particular where it says, "Accounting for the fact that 2016 was a leap year with an extra day, they estimate that China’s emissions will drop by about 0.5 percent (largely due to coal use declining nearly two percent)."
They have huge pollution problems, and they know that shifting to cleaner energy sources is necessary to do anything about it. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...: "In 2015 China became the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power, at 43 GW installed capacity. China also led the world in the production and use of wind power and smart grid technologies, generating almost as much water, wind, and solar energy as all of France and Germany's power plants combined."
So you just read a summary on slashdot. I bet you believed what it said without question. Am I right?
Did you follow the link to see what the original story said? Did you check the URL to make sure it was really Engadget, not a fake page designed to look like it? Did you look up the study to see if it really said what the super short, not at all detailed article claimed it said?
No? Then you can't spot fake news either. You just believe what you read, as long as it sounds reasonable, without doing the work to find out if it's true or not.
1. Who could have anticipated the field of web programming in 1800? Thats what I mean by completely new fields.
"Web programming" is not itself a field in the sense I'm talking about, it's just a means to an end. Many different ends: publishing news, selling goods, etc. Those fields have become massively automated. There were newspapers in 1800, and they had to be printed by hand, one sheet at a time, then distributed by hand by teams of people carrying them around. Today, a few web programmers can do work that used to take hundreds of people. Selling goods was a low thoughput field in 1800. Modern stores sell far more with far fewer people. No one cares about "web programming" as such, any more than they care about "buggy whip manufacturing".
But that's all really beside the point. Whatever new jobs come up, whatever new tasks need to be accomplished, most of them will eventually be done by machines, not humans. That's the future we're heading toward.
The field of strong AI has stagnated ever since ELISA. That computers could someday surpass us is simpy a far away theoretical possibilities, if that. The AI hype machine and actual AI research are two very different things.
That's... um... a bit of a distortion. In fact we're right in the middle of an amazing explosion in AI. I've never seen anything like it before in any field. Practically every few days there's another new paper describing some major advancement. And they aren't just theoretical. As often as not, they're describing something that's already been put into production. It's amazing.
I don't know where it will end. "Strong AI" is poorly defined, and mostly a red herring anyway. We may never create a sentient computer that thinks just like a human. Or maybe we will. If we do create one, it won't necessarily be any more useful than a much simpler, non-sentient computer. Real AI research is about getting computers to do useful things, not about getting them to say, "I think therefore I am." And it's making amazing progress at getting them to do useful things.
Humans, and particularly our brain do not stay the same, this is the whole principle behind neuroplasticity.
No. That's a misunderstanding. Neuroplasticity just means you can learn new skills. It doesn't mean you have no limits. Brains today are no more plastic than they were in 1800. We have the same number of neurons, they hook together in the same way. We're no smarter or better at learning skills than our ancestors were. Newton is just as much a genius by modern standards as he was in his own day. Same with Mozart and da Vinci and Socrates. The limits of the human brain are very real and we all hit them every day. And those limits haven't changed. The rare people whose limits are slightly beyond most people's limits stand out as geniuses, even when we look at them hundreds of years later.
Your fear of bein rendered obsolete by computers is just as nonsensical as a hypothetical fear of the heat death of the universe, this is what I was trying to say.
Who said anything about being afraid? :) I can't wait for machines to replace us as workers! You think I like having to go to work every day? There are so many things I'd rather be doing.
It is far too general, it does not take into account the passage of time nor the creation of completely new fields that today simply do not exist.
Could you elaborate what you mean by that? The passage of time is exactly what it does take into account. And I don't know what you mean by "the creation of completely new fields". Here's the simple fact: every year computers become more powerful and humans stay basically the same. Once computers surpass all the abilities of a human brain, that's it. If a new field comes along, computers will be better than humans at that field too. They'll learn it faster and do it better.
By that logic we may all commit suicide since clearly the entropy of the universe will get us all one day, or the heat death, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Um. I think that was a non-sequitur. In a few billion years the earth will be swallowed by the sun. I'll leave it up to you to decide whether that means you should commit suicide. But it tells us nothing about whether automation will lead to unemployment. I guess if you kill yourself, that will be one less unemployed person. But that's the only connection I see.
But predicting that we will be seeing 95% unemployment in the future is just plain silly.
Why do you think it's silly? "The future" covers a lot of time. It's not going to happen in the next 10 years, but what about the next 50? Or the next 150?
It's hard to predict the future, but some extrapolations are easy to make. Machines already do a lot of things better than humans. That set of things is growing quickly. If technology keeps progressing (and there's every reason to think it will), eventually we'll reach a time when the machines are better at almost everything. If you want to argue against that, you've got a really hard case to make. But if you accept it, what do you think it will do to human employment?
I think you have that backwards. Clinton has been incredibly gracious. She conceded the election as soon as it became clear she wouldn't win, and called on all her supporters to accept the result. If it had gone the other way, do you think Trump would have been half as gracious? This is the man who has been claiming for months that the election would be rigged, who refused to say he would accept the results if he lost. It's also the man whose response to anyone who criticizes him is to swear at them and mock their appearance.
In my view, that system would be even worse than the current one. The fraction of congressional districts that are competitive is much smaller than the fraction of states that are. It also would mean that gerrymandering would start affecting the presidency. No one is redrawing state boundaries to get a political advantage, but congressional districts get redrawn every ten years, and in a lot of states, that's done by whichever party controls the state legislature specifically to give themselves an advantage. That would really really suck if you believe in "one person, one vote".
The broad but sparse rural population has different concerns than suburbanites.
Agreed, and they should have influence exactly in proportion to their population. No more and no less. One person, one vote.
But what does this have to do with the electoral college? We don't give votes in rural Pennsylvania more weight than votes in Pittsburgh. But we give votes in Rhode Island (a tiny almost entirely urban state) more weight than votes in Arkansas (a larger, much more rural state).
Indeed, they should have influence exactly in proportion to their populations. Just like every other division, whether it's race, religion, urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, whatever. Each group gets votes exactly in proportion to its population. Except large states vs. small states. We're talking about a national office, not a state one. Why should a vote cast in Alaska count 3 times as much as one cast in California? It's insane and undemocratic and completely unjust.
You left out the main reason the electoral college works the way it does: the small states insisted on it. They wouldn't agree to the constitution unless they were given outsized power relative to their populations. It was a devil's bargain from the very start: build an undemocratic system into the constitution, or the small states would walk away and there wouldn't be any constitution. Everything else is just rationalizations that people have added to cover that fact.