You are understating the cost to him. It could easily be a major part of his thesis, which has a due date, and penalties if the due date is not met. The cost to him might well be a year of his academic life plus the opportunity costs that repeating that class will cost him plus the degraded status of having to repeat a class. Which could be the difference between graduating on time or a year later. Which could well affect which colleges will even consider him as an applicant. Which could have effects that echo throughout his life.
These costs are only possible costs, not definite ones, but they are reasonably inferable ones.
Even if it's true, I hope he wins on this one. Wins BIG!
I don't see ANY legitimacy to Amazon's actions. NONE! I've started avoiding them on even ordinary purchases...even when the alternative was doing business with Yahoo with their MS connection.
No. Both the conservatives and the liberals are in favor of strong centralized control of the government. They just favor different ways of accomplishing it. The Republicans aim more for speed of transition, and the Democrats aim more for popular acceptance.
There's a hint somewhere in today's GrokLaw that this may be due to the outcome of a legal case filed in Britain awhile back that has recently become final. I don't remember the original case, so I can't say, but it looks like EBay took the original agreement and tried to extend it beyond all reasonable interpretation, so the British court canceled that part of the agreement.
N.B.: I'm doing a lot of reading between the lines here, and the source quoted wasn't one of the parties to the original dispute, and may not be knowledgeable, but that's what it seemed to be saying.
Many, not all, of the problems with nuclear power are the result of regulations, and, occasionally laws.
E.g., the "waste" from nuclear plants is highly radioactive and "hot". Doesn't this scream to you that it's only waste because it isn't being used??? It ought to. There are designs for plants that burn this kind of "waste". Then the waste from those plants is low-level radioactive which is still warm. These could be encased into glass bricks and used for self-heating materials. One would want to avoid anthing that might crush the glass bricks, but even that wouldn't be all that dangerous. (One might want a plastic [hydrocarbon] layer within the glass brick, if any neutrons are emitted.) These could be encased in a steel jacket and used to pre-warm water going into an industrial process. They'd probably be less dangerous than asbestos, but no reason not to be careful. At some point they'd stop being warm enough to pre-heat water, but by that point there wouldn't be much use worrying about them. And until that point it's profitable to use them.
Waste means something you haven't yet found a use for. It doesn't mean there is no use.
Chernobyl was a design that even the Russians considered antique and unacceptably dangerous. They just couldn't afford to replace it.
I'm not thrilled with the current reactor designs. They're too expensive, they require that the govt. assume all risk of failure. And if they are sited stupidly (like inside a canyon on top of an active earthquake fault) and have to be shut down, the people who decided to build it there aren't penalized at all, and people who, largely, objected to the decision are stuck with the bill.
But that's not to say that Chernobyl is a good argument. I just don't like the way costs are calculated and risks are assumed in the current nuclear reactors. (And, yes, until the companies assume the risk for the cost of an accident, catastrophic or not, and the government assumes the duty of decommissioning the plants, I *AM* opposed to nuclear reactors. And the company assuming the risk doesn't mean being able to send the bills to the state's citizens.)
It's not nothing. The TTY module has lost a very talented maintainer.
OTOH, it's definitely not the end of the world, either.
I ONCE wrote a serial driver for an RS232C port on a CP/M system. This is my only right to criticize. For such right as it gives... Alan deserves full credit for many years of irritating work with a stupid messy standard. And *I* only had to interface three devices. I think that was the project that convinced me to never again touch assembler.
JRuby is a faliure for ME and for my project. This doesn't make it a failure for him and his project.
I looked it over, as a part of looking Java over. It's not a good fit. Doesn't mean it's not the right answer to some other problem. (OTOH, I'm not certain why JRuby is better than Groovy or Jython. My guess it that it would have lots to do with re-using existing code.)
If you're going to be using ANY of those, all time critical portions will need to be written in Java. No surprise there. It's like Ruby and C, only the interfacing is easier, and the result isn't quite as fast.
Personally I looked them all over and chose D (Digital Mars D). It's weakness is that it doesn't have many libraries. But it can interface to C libraries and, slightly, with C++ libraries. (OK, I'm using the beta version, D2.x.) It's not quite as fast as C, but it has built-in garbage collection, and it has an object model sort of similar to Python's. For my project that's the best fit I've found. Yours is likely to be different. Maybe you should chose Ruby, or Python, or C, or C++, or LISP, or Ada, or...well, if you get much beyond that, I won't understand what features of the language make it desirable. I don't know Haskell, Clean, Mozart, OCaML, etc. Assembler...well, if that's the best language you're working closer to the metal than I would choose to work. But sometimes it's the right answer.
Don't diss a language just because it isn't right for what you're doing right now.
I definitely haven't read the terms of purchase, and I now very much never going to. But either the nominal owners of the Kindle don't really own them, or that was unauthorized trespass and hacking.
If you think that the "owners" thought they had authorized it, then why was there an uproar?
I'd like to continue the software analogy, but it doesn't work.
The thing is, courts have occasionally that composing a duplicate of as little as one measure out of a song counts as copyright infringement. That's basically allowing someone to copyright the concept of stepping through an array in a while loop. (This is one reason I'm REALLY GLAD that the GPL came along before the software industry matured. It documented a whole bunch of stuff as copyright, and you can't copy this unless you place your work under GPL. That give the lawyers fighting for precedents reason to not make absurdly small pieces of code sufficient to justify copyright infringement.)
The iRex iLiad is actually the only other one I'd considered. Unfortunately it's, as you mentioned, much more expensive, and therefore much further away from justifiability.
THAT CAPABILITY SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN BUILT INTO THE MACHINE!!!!!!!!
That they used it in this case is arguably justified. That they could do it of their own initiative has no justification. It should have required the owner's consent. In fact make that "owner's". This prove that either the purchasers didn't own "their" Kindle's or that the computer hacking laws are *quite* selectively enforced. Amazon committed a major felony under federal law. And they're apologizing as if that makes everything better!?!?
I would not find the system acceptable as long as it allowed Amazon to decide whether or not to remove the book unilaterally. If it doesn't require action at both ends of the chain, then it's an unbalanced action. If it's entirely at Amazon's discretion, then it's unbalanced to the disadvantage of the customer. Such a system is never fair, and can only be equitable by the continuing intention of the party with the advantageous position.
For the potential "customer", it's a much better choice to never take part in such an unbalanced system. Any advantage currently extant are subject to removal at the whim of another party. And the purchase of a Kindle is a biasing factor that's quite difficult to overcome later. Basically, you need to write it off as a learning expense, and resolve to not get caught that way again. It's better if you do that BEFORE you pay them the bundle. To me this scheme appears to be a con-game.
If the remote erasure had required that the user at the Kindle end take steps to do the erasure, then I would have a much easier time accepting this explanation. As it happens without the "owner" even knowing that it's happened....
Well, it's possible that it is merely an extremely flawed design. If you trust him, you can believe that. As an explanation it "sort of works".
OTOH, if you expect ME to accept that explanation... I'd need a bit of proof. That's too much like the actions that we were warned against in, say, 1984. (And WHAT was Wilson's job again? That's right!)
You can believe that's the reason if you want to. It *may* even be true.
That doesn't matter. They've demonstrated a capability. They've demonstrated a willingness to use that capability for their own benefit, and to the disadvantage of their customers. If you trust them not to use it again, you're a fool. Verbal apologies don't ameliorate intentional damage. They merely prove that you're also a hypocrite. Any apology to be worth considering would need to remedy the damage inflicted, and, no, returning the money doesn't count as remedying the damage. That's probably less than was legally required. (Not that anybody can afford a lawyer over something like this. And I doubt that a small-claims court would be appropriate.
I had been looking at the Kindle, and doing cost-benefit trade-offs. (It was losing, but barely. Eventually a day probably would have come when it won.) I'm not anymore. And I'm even reconsidering whether I should buy ANYTHING from Amazon. (I've given them lots of business for technical books not available locally...but that's likely to change now.)
This depends upon it's motivational structure, and that's why the idea of "Friendly AI" is so important.
I don't totally accept the idea of Friendly AI in it's strong form, but definitely something analogous to that is going to be needed, or we will regret creating an AI. The problem is, when I see the actions of our politicians, I think they may be an even worse threat. And anyway, the AI is coming from one source or another. So we might as well try to make it the best one we can. But that means being VERY careful about it's motivational structure.
One can consider motives as being analogous to axioms. They can't be questioned from within the system. But it's also true that it can be quite difficult to determine what the range of possible results are, when the system is extended in the ways that it allows in an unpredictable environment.
Remember: The AI won't have YOUR instincts. It won't have YOUR logic. It will use the instincts (motives) and logic (rules of inference) that are designed into it. Projecting what it will do based on what you will do is sillier than projecting what an ant will do based on what you would do. Boolean and Bayesian logic will (probably) be used by the AI, but they will be used to accomplish the goals that it was designed to have. Just as you are designed to remove your hand from a very hot surface. (Note that this doesn't mean you can't override this instinct in service of a stronger motive...but it's in service of one of your OTHER motives.)
Don't be so certain. Mental tasks are frequently much easier to automate than physical tasks which require interaction with the physical environment. Successes in dealing with this interaction are frequently achieved by limiting the kinds of interaction that are allowed to happen. So grocery store baggers are probably more difficult to automate than, e.g., cash register clerks. This can be solved, however, by having bag dispensers and having the customer bag their own groceries. (Note that this doesn't so much automate the job as eliminate it.) But a part of the job of the cash register clerk is to ensure that nothing is moved past the register station without being paid for. That's a physical interaction that's quite difficult to automate. Unless you start embedding a RFID chip in every cherry...or stop selling cherries in other than pre-packaged form.
But have you seen the checkout stations called "self checkout stations"? In those the customer scans the items for checkout, and bags them. There's generally one clerk or security guard watching over four stations "to assist customers who are having trouble".
And that didn't require any advance in intelligence of the system, merely a redesign of the current system. I'm not sure how popular they are, but they are always in use when the cash register lines grow long.
P,S.: As an analogy the creation of the spreadsheet program removed the "jobs" of a large number of programmers who had previously been creating custom applications to do things that the spreadsheet handled in a way already familiar to the accountants. It's possible that all of the "low hanging fruit" has already been picked, but don't be too certain that that's true. (At the time this didn't cause any problems for the programmers, as there were LOTS of other jobs that needed doing yesterday. Today this has become less true.)
And, speaking as someone who is a native citizen of the USA, it's still not a very nice way to value people.
The problem is coming up with an alternative that is easily applicable to lots of people you've never met and never will meet.
There is a cultural norm of valuing people by how much they either earn or possess. People who apply it to those that they know are nearly universally dismissed as shallow. But how else are you going to judge those you don't know? (It's true if you meet them personally you can judge by demeanor, cleanliness, whether they are overtly or covertly threatening, etc.)
Then there's interactions that occur in nominally anonymous environments, where one is identified by one's handle. There even wealth is hidden, and all that one can judge by is the words that are offered. So a different standard of personal valuation is used.
Of them all, I find the judging by wealth to be among the more repellent. It stands directly adjacent to judging by race (which I admit to also using at times...say when walking a street at night). But if you don't know a person, then a superficial judgment is all that's available.
It's a problem to which I don't see a good answer. The best I can manage is "different circumstances recommend different evaluation criteria", which is awfully fuzzy.
You didn't put a time frame around that, and it's an important one.
Ten (10) years. That's my estimate.
This presumes that we'll maintain sufficient electric power SOMEHOW. I favor a combination of solar and wind (with local options of tidal, geothermal, etc.). This requires a "smart grid" so it may not be feasible, and we may be forced to go nuclear, which is more amenable to centralized, rather than distributed, control. Nuclear is (can be?) cheaper in the short run, but it's less amenable to incremental improvement. Nothing's perfect.
That's not actually correct. China is up there, never doubt it. But Japan is probably further ahead. I don't know Russia's status, England is doing some research, so is Germany. Haven't heard about France...but often they publish results in French, and then don't translate them, so I might well not. Italy doesn't seem very active, but I'm not sure about Spain.
Etc.
It's not a two country world. But if it turns out that an AI needs a body to develop properly (one hypothesis), expect Japan to come in first. They don't like foreign immigrants, and they have an aging population and a critical labor shortage. So they've been putting a lot of work into robots to assist people. Also into cars that drive themselves. In Japan you can buy high end cars that will parallel park themselves for you. (It's not yet cheap, but it's a great benefit when most parking spaces are just barely big enough to get into.)
Slashdot Mirror
You are understating the cost to him. It could easily be a major part of his thesis, which has a due date, and penalties if the due date is not met. The cost to him might well be a year of his academic life plus the opportunity costs that repeating that class will cost him plus the degraded status of having to repeat a class. Which could be the difference between graduating on time or a year later. Which could well affect which colleges will even consider him as an applicant. Which could have effects that echo throughout his life.
These costs are only possible costs, not definite ones, but they are reasonably inferable ones.
You're right. The stink *should* have started earlier. That doesn't mean it's inappropriate now, just that it should have started earlier.
Even if it's true, I hope he wins on this one. Wins BIG!
I don't see ANY legitimacy to Amazon's actions. NONE! I've started avoiding them on even ordinary purchases...even when the alternative was doing business with Yahoo with their MS connection.
No. Both the conservatives and the liberals are in favor of strong centralized control of the government. They just favor different ways of accomplishing it. The Republicans aim more for speed of transition, and the Democrats aim more for popular acceptance.
If you'll specify exactly what characterizes a system as capitalist, I'll tell you whether there's any evidence that capitalism doesn't work.
My guess is that there won't be any evidence either way, because there never has been a capitalist system.
There's a hint somewhere in today's GrokLaw that this may be due to the outcome of a legal case filed in Britain awhile back that has recently become final. I don't remember the original case, so I can't say, but it looks like EBay took the original agreement and tried to extend it beyond all reasonable interpretation, so the British court canceled that part of the agreement.
N.B.: I'm doing a lot of reading between the lines here, and the source quoted wasn't one of the parties to the original dispute, and may not be knowledgeable, but that's what it seemed to be saying.
Mice, cats, and dogs.
There are even people who recognize the intelligence of cats and dogs, but only Douglas Adams recognized the mice.
Many, not all, of the problems with nuclear power are the result of regulations, and, occasionally laws.
E.g., the "waste" from nuclear plants is highly radioactive and "hot". Doesn't this scream to you that it's only waste because it isn't being used??? It ought to. There are designs for plants that burn this kind of "waste". Then the waste from those plants is low-level radioactive which is still warm. These could be encased into glass bricks and used for self-heating materials. One would want to avoid anthing that might crush the glass bricks, but even that wouldn't be all that dangerous. (One might want a plastic [hydrocarbon] layer within the glass brick, if any neutrons are emitted.) These could be encased in a steel jacket and used to pre-warm water going into an industrial process. They'd probably be less dangerous than asbestos, but no reason not to be careful. At some point they'd stop being warm enough to pre-heat water, but by that point there wouldn't be much use worrying about them. And until that point it's profitable to use them.
Waste means something you haven't yet found a use for. It doesn't mean there is no use.
Overstating? No more than the people who say that all Slashdot readers live in their mother's basement. But probably no less, either.
Chernobyl was a design that even the Russians considered antique and unacceptably dangerous. They just couldn't afford to replace it.
I'm not thrilled with the current reactor designs. They're too expensive, they require that the govt. assume all risk of failure. And if they are sited stupidly (like inside a canyon on top of an active earthquake fault) and have to be shut down, the people who decided to build it there aren't penalized at all, and people who, largely, objected to the decision are stuck with the bill.
But that's not to say that Chernobyl is a good argument. I just don't like the way costs are calculated and risks are assumed in the current nuclear reactors. (And, yes, until the companies assume the risk for the cost of an accident, catastrophic or not, and the government assumes the duty of decommissioning the plants, I *AM* opposed to nuclear reactors. And the company assuming the risk doesn't mean being able to send the bills to the state's citizens.)
It's not nothing. The TTY module has lost a very talented maintainer.
OTOH, it's definitely not the end of the world, either.
I ONCE wrote a serial driver for an RS232C port on a CP/M system. This is my only right to criticize. For such right as it gives... Alan deserves full credit for many years of irritating work with a stupid messy standard. And *I* only had to interface three devices. I think that was the project that convinced me to never again touch assembler.
JRuby is a faliure for ME and for my project. This doesn't make it a failure for him and his project.
I looked it over, as a part of looking Java over. It's not a good fit. Doesn't mean it's not the right answer to some other problem. (OTOH, I'm not certain why JRuby is better than Groovy or Jython. My guess it that it would have lots to do with re-using existing code.)
If you're going to be using ANY of those, all time critical portions will need to be written in Java. No surprise there. It's like Ruby and C, only the interfacing is easier, and the result isn't quite as fast.
Personally I looked them all over and chose D (Digital Mars D). It's weakness is that it doesn't have many libraries. But it can interface to C libraries and, slightly, with C++ libraries. (OK, I'm using the beta version, D2.x.) It's not quite as fast as C, but it has built-in garbage collection, and it has an object model sort of similar to Python's. For my project that's the best fit I've found. Yours is likely to be different. Maybe you should chose Ruby, or Python, or C, or C++, or LISP, or Ada, or ...well, if you get much beyond that, I won't understand what features of the language make it desirable. I don't know Haskell, Clean, Mozart, OCaML, etc. Assembler...well, if that's the best language you're working closer to the metal than I would choose to work. But sometimes it's the right answer.
Don't diss a language just because it isn't right for what you're doing right now.
Can you get out of a felony that easily?
I definitely haven't read the terms of purchase, and I now very much never going to. But either the nominal owners of the Kindle don't really own them, or that was unauthorized trespass and hacking.
If you think that the "owners" thought they had authorized it, then why was there an uproar?
I'd like to continue the software analogy, but it doesn't work.
The thing is, courts have occasionally that composing a duplicate of as little as one measure out of a song counts as copyright infringement. That's basically allowing someone to copyright the concept of stepping through an array in a while loop. (This is one reason I'm REALLY GLAD that the GPL came along before the software industry matured. It documented a whole bunch of stuff as copyright, and you can't copy this unless you place your work under GPL. That give the lawyers fighting for precedents reason to not make absurdly small pieces of code sufficient to justify copyright infringement.)
The iRex iLiad is actually the only other one I'd considered. Unfortunately it's, as you mentioned, much more expensive, and therefore much further away from justifiability.
Well.... they *could* enforce the laws against "unauthorized access to computer equipment"...
You are missing the point.
THAT CAPABILITY SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN BUILT INTO THE MACHINE!!!!!!!!
That they used it in this case is arguably justified. That they could do it of their own initiative has no justification. It should have required the owner's consent. In fact make that "owner's". This prove that either the purchasers didn't own "their" Kindle's or that the computer hacking laws are *quite* selectively enforced. Amazon committed a major felony under federal law. And they're apologizing as if that makes everything better!?!?
You are very trusting.
I would not find the system acceptable as long as it allowed Amazon to decide whether or not to remove the book unilaterally. If it doesn't require action at both ends of the chain, then it's an unbalanced action. If it's entirely at Amazon's discretion, then it's unbalanced to the disadvantage of the customer. Such a system is never fair, and can only be equitable by the continuing intention of the party with the advantageous position.
For the potential "customer", it's a much better choice to never take part in such an unbalanced system. Any advantage currently extant are subject to removal at the whim of another party. And the purchase of a Kindle is a biasing factor that's quite difficult to overcome later. Basically, you need to write it off as a learning expense, and resolve to not get caught that way again. It's better if you do that BEFORE you pay them the bundle. To me this scheme appears to be a con-game.
If the remote erasure had required that the user at the Kindle end take steps to do the erasure, then I would have a much easier time accepting this explanation. As it happens without the "owner" even knowing that it's happened....
Well, it's possible that it is merely an extremely flawed design. If you trust him, you can believe that. As an explanation it "sort of works".
OTOH, if you expect ME to accept that explanation... I'd need a bit of proof. That's too much like the actions that we were warned against in, say, 1984. (And WHAT was Wilson's job again? That's right!)
You can believe that's the reason if you want to. It *may* even be true.
That doesn't matter. They've demonstrated a capability. They've demonstrated a willingness to use that capability for their own benefit, and to the disadvantage of their customers. If you trust them not to use it again, you're a fool. Verbal apologies don't ameliorate intentional damage. They merely prove that you're also a hypocrite. Any apology to be worth considering would need to remedy the damage inflicted, and, no, returning the money doesn't count as remedying the damage. That's probably less than was legally required. (Not that anybody can afford a lawyer over something like this. And I doubt that a small-claims court would be appropriate.
I had been looking at the Kindle, and doing cost-benefit trade-offs. (It was losing, but barely. Eventually a day probably would have come when it won.) I'm not anymore. And I'm even reconsidering whether I should buy ANYTHING from Amazon. (I've given them lots of business for technical books not available locally...but that's likely to change now.)
This depends upon it's motivational structure, and that's why the idea of "Friendly AI" is so important.
I don't totally accept the idea of Friendly AI in it's strong form, but definitely something analogous to that is going to be needed, or we will regret creating an AI. The problem is, when I see the actions of our politicians, I think they may be an even worse threat. And anyway, the AI is coming from one source or another. So we might as well try to make it the best one we can. But that means being VERY careful about it's motivational structure.
One can consider motives as being analogous to axioms. They can't be questioned from within the system. But it's also true that it can be quite difficult to determine what the range of possible results are, when the system is extended in the ways that it allows in an unpredictable environment.
Remember: The AI won't have YOUR instincts. It won't have YOUR logic. It will use the instincts (motives) and logic (rules of inference) that are designed into it. Projecting what it will do based on what you will do is sillier than projecting what an ant will do based on what you would do. Boolean and Bayesian logic will (probably) be used by the AI, but they will be used to accomplish the goals that it was designed to have. Just as you are designed to remove your hand from a very hot surface. (Note that this doesn't mean you can't override this instinct in service of a stronger motive...but it's in service of one of your OTHER motives.)
Don't be so certain. Mental tasks are frequently much easier to automate than physical tasks which require interaction with the physical environment. Successes in dealing with this interaction are frequently achieved by limiting the kinds of interaction that are allowed to happen. So grocery store baggers are probably more difficult to automate than, e.g., cash register clerks. This can be solved, however, by having bag dispensers and having the customer bag their own groceries. (Note that this doesn't so much automate the job as eliminate it.) But a part of the job of the cash register clerk is to ensure that nothing is moved past the register station without being paid for. That's a physical interaction that's quite difficult to automate. Unless you start embedding a RFID chip in every cherry...or stop selling cherries in other than pre-packaged form.
But have you seen the checkout stations called "self checkout stations"? In those the customer scans the items for checkout, and bags them. There's generally one clerk or security guard watching over four stations "to assist customers who are having trouble".
And that didn't require any advance in intelligence of the system, merely a redesign of the current system. I'm not sure how popular they are, but they are always in use when the cash register lines grow long.
P,S.: As an analogy the creation of the spreadsheet program removed the "jobs" of a large number of programmers who had previously been creating custom applications to do things that the spreadsheet handled in a way already familiar to the accountants. It's possible that all of the "low hanging fruit" has already been picked, but don't be too certain that that's true. (At the time this didn't cause any problems for the programmers, as there were LOTS of other jobs that needed doing yesterday. Today this has become less true.)
And, speaking as someone who is a native citizen of the USA, it's still not a very nice way to value people.
The problem is coming up with an alternative that is easily applicable to lots of people you've never met and never will meet.
There is a cultural norm of valuing people by how much they either earn or possess. People who apply it to those that they know are nearly universally dismissed as shallow. But how else are you going to judge those you don't know? (It's true if you meet them personally you can judge by demeanor, cleanliness, whether they are overtly or covertly threatening, etc.)
Then there's interactions that occur in nominally anonymous environments, where one is identified by one's handle. There even wealth is hidden, and all that one can judge by is the words that are offered. So a different standard of personal valuation is used.
Of them all, I find the judging by wealth to be among the more repellent. It stands directly adjacent to judging by race (which I admit to also using at times...say when walking a street at night). But if you don't know a person, then a superficial judgment is all that's available.
It's a problem to which I don't see a good answer. The best I can manage is "different circumstances recommend different evaluation criteria", which is awfully fuzzy.
You didn't put a time frame around that, and it's an important one.
Ten (10) years. That's my estimate.
This presumes that we'll maintain sufficient electric power SOMEHOW. I favor a combination of solar and wind (with local options of tidal, geothermal, etc.). This requires a "smart grid" so it may not be feasible, and we may be forced to go nuclear, which is more amenable to centralized, rather than distributed, control. Nuclear is (can be?) cheaper in the short run, but it's less amenable to incremental improvement. Nothing's perfect.
That's not actually correct. China is up there, never doubt it. But Japan is probably further ahead. I don't know Russia's status, England is doing some research, so is Germany. Haven't heard about France...but often they publish results in French, and then don't translate them, so I might well not. Italy doesn't seem very active, but I'm not sure about Spain.
Etc.
It's not a two country world. But if it turns out that an AI needs a body to develop properly (one hypothesis), expect Japan to come in first. They don't like foreign immigrants, and they have an aging population and a critical labor shortage. So they've been putting a lot of work into robots to assist people. Also into cars that drive themselves. In Japan you can buy high end cars that will parallel park themselves for you. (It's not yet cheap, but it's a great benefit when most parking spaces are just barely big enough to get into.)