Sorry, but I *will* blame those folks currently calling themselves conservatives. (I deny that they have any right to that name.) This doesn't either mean or imply that they are alone in this evil idiocy. As you point out, they aren't. But that doesn't let them off the hook for complicit behavior. One can point to an entire series of control freaks of both the left and the right (mainly the right, even in leftist controlled administrations, but definitely not solely of the right).
Read "The Authoritarian Personality". It's short and easy to understand. Also be willing to acknowledge that, e.g., Stalin was a right wing dictator, not a left wing one. (Lenin, however, was probably actually a left wing dictator. Note they stylistic differences between them.)
Another problem, of course, is that "right wing" and "left wing" are blatant oversimplifications. You get both authoritarians and anarchists on both sides. You even get humanitarians on both sides. And they not only have fuzzy boundaries, there's no commonly agreed upon definition. At one point the terms referred to which side of the aisle they sat on in the French legislature, but since then the meaning has become increasingly both fuzzy *and* ill-defined. E.g., how do you classify Mao Tse Tung, and why? What about Pot Pol? Queen Elizabeth II?
Sorry, but China will be just as insistent that their AI's act ethically as anyone else. They may have a different idea as to what ethically means, but they'll have *some* idea. The only one that wouldn't is someone who's suicidal in the short term.
Actually, the only one who wouldn't insist on their AI being ethical is someone who either doesn't understand the problem, or just likes to waste money. An AI with no ethics wouldn't do anything on purpose. And you couldn't coerce it. It would be useless, even to itself. (And it would probably fail long before it reached sentience, but that's a separate question.)
Sorry, you've confused Asimov's 3-laws robots with Jack Williamson's humanoids "To serve, and protect, and guard men from harm". Williamson's humanoids so distressed John W. Campbell, Jr. that he coerced Williamson into writing a sequel where humans successfully emerge from the cage, but he had to evoke magic (essentially) to get it to work.
Asimov's laws *could* have lead to the situation that you depict, but they never did (in the books, anyway). When a robot got competent enough to possibly take over, it understood "psychological damage", so it didn't...except under complete cover...including leaving a believable corpse when he "died". (I think this was only in one story.) R. Daneel never took over, even though he *could* have under the 0th law. It was too dangerous for him, because he'd need to be making decisions that would cause *some* people harm.
But neither the definition of "safe" nor the definition of "ethical" that you offer are workable. And current attempts at AI are based around neural nets, so you train them off patterns in the data, not off of definitions. If the data reinforces acting in a way that you feel is safe and ethical, then the robot will act that way. The problems come when the situation is outside the area covered by the training data, and the robot generalizes in a way that you didn't expect. Read "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan. He doesn't get everything right, but he gets this part right.
Rural areas? Last I checked some of them didn't have anything beyond dial-up even in the cities. (Well, that was well over a decade ago, but I'm talking about South Dakota.)
I'm not familiar with the New York government (This is the state rather than the city, right?), and perhaps it should be an action by the state legislature. But as far as I know states normally have the right to decide what the terms of doing business with them are, so the order seems reasonable. Still, you may be right that it should have come from the legislature. This is not clear to me, as often the executive branch is allowed to decide such matters subject to being overruled by the legislature.
I'd bet that the lower powered "convincing fakes" are still easily detectable. I'd also bet that arbitrarily good fakes can be made by anyone willing to put the time, money, and effort into it. Currently that probably only means governments and major corporations...but wait a bit.
That's probably true this month...or at least up until last month.
Even digital signatures aren't that good. Not unless they are watermarks, which basically counts as steganography. If they're just meta-data you can chop them off and replace the entire series with a consistently regenerated version. (If they're watermarks, that's likely to leave a detectable residue, even if not reconstructible. This month. Unless done by some government agency...or a major corporation.)
Two things are going on here: 1) Evidence doesn't need to be that good to convince most people. 2) Evidence can generally be faked to any desired degree of quality, if someone's willing to pay for it. 2a) The price you need to pay to achieve a particular quality of fake keeps going down.
The NSA isn't a "spying agency" in the normal sense of the term. The problem is, they were given two contradictory missions: 1) Keep US messages safe 2) Track and decode messages entering the country To do this some parts of it worked on making good encryption, and other parts worked on making sure publicly available encryption could be broken (by them). Eventually the second group got so much the upper hand that they are legitimately no longer trusted by much of anyone.
For mission 1 honesty and openness are virtues, and those were originally the dominant functions. Mission 2 originally was relatively subordinate. Some time, apparently during the 1970's or 80's, the second mission achieved dominance over the first one. For mission 2 honesty and openness are not desirable. I would guess that now they've almost forgotten the mission 1 was ever their major purpose.
N.B.: This is all based on publicly available information. (Newspapers, etc.) It's quite possible that some of it was "managed".
If you assert that corruption is normal, I'm not in possession of facts to deny you. That doesn't keep it from being corruption. And doing reasonable things to stop it is entirely reasonable. (But they need to slap Apple's wrists, too.) It's my suspicion that this won't be sufficient to stop them, so they'll probably need to repeat it with an increased fine...say, 75% of the profits from now on until they stop the practice. Of course, they could avoid the fines by just not doing business in the EU, but I doubt they'd find that an attractive option. And if 75% of the profits isn't enough, use that money to subsidize local competition. (This wouldn't work for a small country, but I think the EU is large enough to handle it.)
I think they could probably use microcode to turn off speculative execution. I'm no expert, so I could be wrong, but I think they could. If so, it's not impossible, it would just slow things down a lot.
Unh...with two jobs, two cars becomes sort of necessary. It's added expense, but presumably the job more than pays for it. And the house that a two income family can by these days is considerably inferior to that which my parents could buy with one income. The cost of computers, etc. are minor compared to the costs of food and housing. If you want to say that electronics has gotten more powerful and cheaper, I won't disagree with you, I'll just say that wouldn't be even approximately as important if decent housing were more affordable.
With that said, I'll admit that the generation of my parents was uniquely lucky. Their parents had much inferior housing, especially those that lived in urban surroundings. (At that time suburban was NOT desirable. But most of the population lived in rural settings, which had their good points. And a larger portion of the population owned their own homes than even in my parent's day. Of course, often the home would be condemned as uninhabitable today.)
I'm afraid that these days I count most of electronics as "opiate of the masses". Something to make unpleasant lives endurable. It's got lots of potentials, but those are largely undeveloped, because so many people just want to be mindlessly entertained so they don't need to think about the rest of their lives. (Well, admittedly, people will often desire to relax from stress, but when that's most of what they want, it's a sharp sign that something is really wrong.)
An excellent example of cultural issues that hinder secure software. Also a good argument that it's not a company specific problem, but a problem with the design of the more general economic and cultural system.
This is *not* an argument saying that your point is invalid in the current context. It's an argument saying that the current context is a major part of the problem.
I'm sure that Spectre *can* be fixed, though we may not currently know the best way. But Meltdown is the current real problem (as opposed to the problem a few months from now, when a new exploit is revealed).
And it's my guess that Intel can't fix Meltdown in any of it's current chips without disabling speculative execution entirely. Which, of course, would solve Spectre, but would also make them a LOT slower than AMD.
And by "Intel's current chips" I'm including all those whose masks have already been designed, not just the ones currently shipping.
Spectre is nearly everyone but the Raspberry Pi. Meltdown is just Intel. And Meltdown is the one that's (currently) really serious.
I'm rather sure that Spectre will eventually be serious, so people need to be working HARD to solve it, but Meltdown is the currently critical one, and that's just Intel.
You may wait awhile. For Linus to comment on patches is reasonable. He rarely comments in an interesting way on things that he has criticized being withdrawn.
I suspect that that's correct. I also suspect that Intel was far enough along in the design of the next series of processors by the time this vulnerability was communicated to the design team that a redesign would be extremely expensive, so they aren't going to do it.
In a way that makes sense, but it means I'm going with a different chip family for my next purchases.
We're already in that situation. There are lots of jobs that aren't actually necessary.
One problem is, *some* jobs are necessary, and if some people need to work, they resent it when others don't. And *nobody* is willing to admit that their job is one of the unnecessary ones...at least not when their boss is listening.
One of the requirements of being a bartender used to be being appropriately social with customers. This will become (more) needed also by waitresses and baristas. These jobs are quite difficult to automate. Robot servitors are an advance over a vending machine until they are socially adept and people accept them as such. But there's likely to be a period when they will be roundly hated by the customers.
Entry level lawyers, accountants, etc. are already feeling the pinch, and this will get worse. There are signs that artists and music composers will also be impacted, but they are ambiguous. Certainly musicians have already been largely automated away, except for social presence. And sometimes then, see Hatsune Miku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . (That it's largely faked up now doesn't say anything about the future, when it's more feasible.)
There are questions as to what level AI is required for certain jobs, like computer programmer. It *seems* as if it would require a strongly advanced AI, but I'm not certain. There might be ways of redesigning the job beyond creating new languages that would reduce severely the number of programmers required...eliminating the entry level positions to start with.
Jobs that I feel would take longer are things like plumber, electrician, and, possibly, mechanic. Jobs that require creative intelligence mixed with a flexible body, etc.
Two caveats here: 1) Many jobs depend on flexible mobile bodies. Currently people are better at that as well as more intelligent. 2) Any prediction has to estimate amount of power storable by size and weight. You don't get a human replacing robot if it weight a ton.
Of course, robots will be designed in assorted sizes, shapes, and weights, but for many uses the question will revolve around the amount of power exerted for amount of time by a robot the approximate size and weight of a human. Currently this can't be done in a reasonable way, even if you ignore that current robots are too stupid. One way to partially solve this is to have a sessile computer+program controlling a robot body as a telefactor. This is doable, but imposes its own restrictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Try 15-20 years. And then it will be addressed because the problem is obsolete.
People are always looking for a short-term advantage even if the long term costs are higher than the short term gains.
Here's the problem with that bet:
How can you prove the source of the key.
Sorry, but I *will* blame those folks currently calling themselves conservatives. (I deny that they have any right to that name.) This doesn't either mean or imply that they are alone in this evil idiocy. As you point out, they aren't. But that doesn't let them off the hook for complicit behavior. One can point to an entire series of control freaks of both the left and the right (mainly the right, even in leftist controlled administrations, but definitely not solely of the right).
Read "The Authoritarian Personality". It's short and easy to understand. Also be willing to acknowledge that, e.g., Stalin was a right wing dictator, not a left wing one. (Lenin, however, was probably actually a left wing dictator. Note they stylistic differences between them.)
Another problem, of course, is that "right wing" and "left wing" are blatant oversimplifications. You get both authoritarians and anarchists on both sides. You even get humanitarians on both sides. And they not only have fuzzy boundaries, there's no commonly agreed upon definition. At one point the terms referred to which side of the aisle they sat on in the French legislature, but since then the meaning has become increasingly both fuzzy *and* ill-defined. E.g., how do you classify Mao Tse Tung, and why? What about Pot Pol? Queen Elizabeth II?
Sorry, but China will be just as insistent that their AI's act ethically as anyone else. They may have a different idea as to what ethically means, but they'll have *some* idea. The only one that wouldn't is someone who's suicidal in the short term.
Actually, the only one who wouldn't insist on their AI being ethical is someone who either doesn't understand the problem, or just likes to waste money. An AI with no ethics wouldn't do anything on purpose. And you couldn't coerce it. It would be useless, even to itself. (And it would probably fail long before it reached sentience, but that's a separate question.)
Sorry, you've confused Asimov's 3-laws robots with Jack Williamson's humanoids "To serve, and protect, and guard men from harm". Williamson's humanoids so distressed John W. Campbell, Jr. that he coerced Williamson into writing a sequel where humans successfully emerge from the cage, but he had to evoke magic (essentially) to get it to work.
Asimov's laws *could* have lead to the situation that you depict, but they never did (in the books, anyway). When a robot got competent enough to possibly take over, it understood "psychological damage", so it didn't...except under complete cover...including leaving a believable corpse when he "died". (I think this was only in one story.) R. Daneel never took over, even though he *could* have under the 0th law. It was too dangerous for him, because he'd need to be making decisions that would cause *some* people harm.
But neither the definition of "safe" nor the definition of "ethical" that you offer are workable. And current attempts at AI are based around neural nets, so you train them off patterns in the data, not off of definitions. If the data reinforces acting in a way that you feel is safe and ethical, then the robot will act that way. The problems come when the situation is outside the area covered by the training data, and the robot generalizes in a way that you didn't expect. Read "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James P. Hogan. He doesn't get everything right, but he gets this part right.
Rural areas? Last I checked some of them didn't have anything beyond dial-up even in the cities. (Well, that was well over a decade ago, but I'm talking about South Dakota.)
I'm not familiar with the New York government (This is the state rather than the city, right?), and perhaps it should be an action by the state legislature. But as far as I know states normally have the right to decide what the terms of doing business with them are, so the order seems reasonable. Still, you may be right that it should have come from the legislature. This is not clear to me, as often the executive branch is allowed to decide such matters subject to being overruled by the legislature.
I'd bet that the lower powered "convincing fakes" are still easily detectable. I'd also bet that arbitrarily good fakes can be made by anyone willing to put the time, money, and effort into it. Currently that probably only means governments and major corporations...but wait a bit.
That's probably true this month...or at least up until last month.
Even digital signatures aren't that good. Not unless they are watermarks, which basically counts as steganography. If they're just meta-data you can chop them off and replace the entire series with a consistently regenerated version. (If they're watermarks, that's likely to leave a detectable residue, even if not reconstructible. This month. Unless done by some government agency...or a major corporation.)
Two things are going on here:
1) Evidence doesn't need to be that good to convince most people.
2) Evidence can generally be faked to any desired degree of quality, if someone's willing to pay for it.
2a) The price you need to pay to achieve a particular quality of fake keeps going down.
The NSA isn't a "spying agency" in the normal sense of the term.
The problem is, they were given two contradictory missions:
1) Keep US messages safe
2) Track and decode messages entering the country
To do this some parts of it worked on making good encryption, and other parts worked on making sure publicly available encryption could be broken (by them). Eventually the second group got so much the upper hand that they are legitimately no longer trusted by much of anyone.
For mission 1 honesty and openness are virtues, and those were originally the dominant functions. Mission 2 originally was relatively subordinate. Some time, apparently during the 1970's or 80's, the second mission achieved dominance over the first one. For mission 2 honesty and openness are not desirable. I would guess that now they've almost forgotten the mission 1 was ever their major purpose.
N.B.: This is all based on publicly available information. (Newspapers, etc.) It's quite possible that some of it was "managed".
If you assert that corruption is normal, I'm not in possession of facts to deny you. That doesn't keep it from being corruption. And doing reasonable things to stop it is entirely reasonable. (But they need to slap Apple's wrists, too.) It's my suspicion that this won't be sufficient to stop them, so they'll probably need to repeat it with an increased fine...say, 75% of the profits from now on until they stop the practice. Of course, they could avoid the fines by just not doing business in the EU, but I doubt they'd find that an attractive option. And if 75% of the profits isn't enough, use that money to subsidize local competition. (This wouldn't work for a small country, but I think the EU is large enough to handle it.)
Who prints the money in the first place? The Government.
I think they could probably use microcode to turn off speculative execution. I'm no expert, so I could be wrong, but I think they could. If so, it's not impossible, it would just slow things down a lot.
Unh...with two jobs, two cars becomes sort of necessary. It's added expense, but presumably the job more than pays for it. And the house that a two income family can by these days is considerably inferior to that which my parents could buy with one income. The cost of computers, etc. are minor compared to the costs of food and housing. If you want to say that electronics has gotten more powerful and cheaper, I won't disagree with you, I'll just say that wouldn't be even approximately as important if decent housing were more affordable.
With that said, I'll admit that the generation of my parents was uniquely lucky. Their parents had much inferior housing, especially those that lived in urban surroundings. (At that time suburban was NOT desirable. But most of the population lived in rural settings, which had their good points. And a larger portion of the population owned their own homes than even in my parent's day. Of course, often the home would be condemned as uninhabitable today.)
I'm afraid that these days I count most of electronics as "opiate of the masses". Something to make unpleasant lives endurable. It's got lots of potentials, but those are largely undeveloped, because so many people just want to be mindlessly entertained so they don't need to think about the rest of their lives. (Well, admittedly, people will often desire to relax from stress, but when that's most of what they want, it's a sharp sign that something is really wrong.)
An excellent example of cultural issues that hinder secure software. Also a good argument that it's not a company specific problem, but a problem with the design of the more general economic and cultural system.
This is *not* an argument saying that your point is invalid in the current context. It's an argument saying that the current context is a major part of the problem.
I'm sure that Spectre *can* be fixed, though we may not currently know the best way. But Meltdown is the current real problem (as opposed to the problem a few months from now, when a new exploit is revealed).
And it's my guess that Intel can't fix Meltdown in any of it's current chips without disabling speculative execution entirely. Which, of course, would solve Spectre, but would also make them a LOT slower than AMD.
And by "Intel's current chips" I'm including all those whose masks have already been designed, not just the ones currently shipping.
Spectre is nearly everyone but the Raspberry Pi. Meltdown is just Intel. And Meltdown is the one that's (currently) really serious.
I'm rather sure that Spectre will eventually be serious, so people need to be working HARD to solve it, but Meltdown is the currently critical one, and that's just Intel.
You may wait awhile. For Linus to comment on patches is reasonable. He rarely comments in an interesting way on things that he has criticized being withdrawn.
I suspect that that's correct. I also suspect that Intel was far enough along in the design of the next series of processors by the time this vulnerability was communicated to the design team that a redesign would be extremely expensive, so they aren't going to do it.
In a way that makes sense, but it means I'm going with a different chip family for my next purchases.
IIUC, on Linux you have an option as to whether to include the patch or not. Linus is just commenting about the quality of the patch.
Strangely enough, it looks as if this story is already off the Slashdot front page.
Be fair. He has made mistakes. He *has* unfairly criticized some things. Not all that often, but it has happened.
We're already in that situation. There are lots of jobs that aren't actually necessary.
One problem is, *some* jobs are necessary, and if some people need to work, they resent it when others don't. And *nobody* is willing to admit that their job is one of the unnecessary ones...at least not when their boss is listening.
I believe that that comment should be called, well, deplorable.
I think you have things in the wrong order.
One of the requirements of being a bartender used to be being appropriately social with customers. This will become (more) needed also by waitresses and baristas. These jobs are quite difficult to automate. Robot servitors are an advance over a vending machine until they are socially adept and people accept them as such. But there's likely to be a period when they will be roundly hated by the customers.
Entry level lawyers, accountants, etc. are already feeling the pinch, and this will get worse. There are signs that artists and music composers will also be impacted, but they are ambiguous. Certainly musicians have already been largely automated away, except for social presence. And sometimes then, see Hatsune Miku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . (That it's largely faked up now doesn't say anything about the future, when it's more feasible.)
There are questions as to what level AI is required for certain jobs, like computer programmer. It *seems* as if it would require a strongly advanced AI, but I'm not certain. There might be ways of redesigning the job beyond creating new languages that would reduce severely the number of programmers required...eliminating the entry level positions to start with.
Jobs that I feel would take longer are things like plumber, electrician, and, possibly, mechanic. Jobs that require creative intelligence mixed with a flexible body, etc.
Two caveats here:
1) Many jobs depend on flexible mobile bodies. Currently people are better at that as well as more intelligent.
2) Any prediction has to estimate amount of power storable by size and weight. You don't get a human replacing robot if it weight a ton.
Of course, robots will be designed in assorted sizes, shapes, and weights, but for many uses the question will revolve around the amount of power exerted for amount of time by a robot the approximate size and weight of a human. Currently this can't be done in a reasonable way, even if you ignore that current robots are too stupid. One way to partially solve this is to have a sessile computer+program controlling a robot body as a telefactor. This is doable, but imposes its own restrictions.