I believe that he even said it in English. In fact I think it was in the bombastic/dramatic speech in which he pulled off his shoe and pounded it on the UN podium.
OTOH, I think that like about "capitalists will sell you the rope you use to hang them" comes from Lenin...and was originally in Russian.
(I suppose I ought to google those things before asserting them, but it doesn't seem important enough.)
Actually, robots can still get into a great deal of trouble. But this is more like "How long can we expect the customer to wait for service?". The example problems described aren't really problems for the robot, they're problems for the person asking for service...and people are often very unhappy about unreasonable wait times.
It's also a very temporary job. All the problems, and the solutions, are being recorded. The next model will have half the need for a "babysitter", and the algorithm is tail-recursive.
If they hadn't capitalized "Company" I'd be wondering which company's website they bought the phone from. I'll grant you, though, it isn't exactly explicit.
It's not really clear to me that there's enough insolation on the average to make this feasible. I'm all in favor of going solar as far and as fast as it feasible, but I suspect we're going to need other sources of power. And that wind and hydro won't suffice.
You need to remember to include maintenance costs and replacement costs into the equation.
Another looming problem is (mobile) batteries. While stationary batteries are pretty much solved, the batteries used in cars and phones depend on various metals that are in short supply. I presume that's being worked on, but otherwise we're going to run out.
So I see *lots* of "if"s in the projected future. It's not clear that any of them are insoluble, but it appears that we don't yet have the answers to many of them. Often I look at a problem and say "I trust someone's working on that".
For power, if solar, etc. don't prove sufficient, there are advanced designs of nuclear fission plants being developed in multiple places. So there will almost certainly be a reasonable answer. Particularly if one of the designs that allows radioactive "wastes" to be burned for power proves out. That would also eliminate one of the major arguments against the current plants. (The current approach of just letting hot rods sit around is both dangerous and wasteful. If nothing else, sinter them in glass and use them for thermal sources.)
The thing is, in each generation the teenagers adopt a new lingo specifically designed to obscure what they are saying from their parents. This is a continuing process. As they grow up, they drop much of the "lingo", but not all of it. The dictionary now is a lot larger than it was in Noah Webster's day. He would be stumped by diethylstilbestrol (DES), or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), or transistor, or cybernetic, or radio, or...
Well, the examples I picked betray my interest, but they are only a sample among multitudes. He would *know* was plastic means. It means deformable. So this rigid box can't be plastic.
And he would know many words that are almost just noises to us. But his meaning of spindle would have nothing to do with IBM cards. (It's a thing used to hold wool for spinning.)
Smart bullets wouldn't work. Not as anything self propelling. If you make something that small, you need to make it a target seeking poison injector. Sort of like a mechanical mosquito. Diphtheria toxin would be effective. It would be nice if it could really target seek, then you could target the spine at the base of the neck and use Novocaine to temporarily paralyze them. (I think that would work, but it might stop autonomic as well as voluntary muscles, which would kill rather than paralyze.)
What form is most effective depends on your purpose. Paralyzing would be much better is you wanted to kidnap someone for interrogation. Just be equipped to monitor their p52 brainwave during interrogation so you'll know when they're lying. (I'm not sure that reliably works, but I've seen reports that it's pretty good. Sorry, sadists, too much stress distorts the signals.)
The thing is, even if what I'm talking about is beyond doing at the moment, that doesn't mean it will be in 5 years. And it won't be expensive the way a nuclear arsenal is.
The current version of this stuff is already so cheap it's being used by non-state actors. There was a drone assault on an army base recently. The attackers did not identify themselves.
This stuff is coming. It may be unfortunate (probably is), but it's cheap enough and easy enough that primitive versions are already in use. So far they all depend on remote control, but simple versions that don't are easy...they just aren't as flexible. About all you need to add is a GPS starting point, an inertial guidance system, and a target.
You raise a valid point, but the problem is it depends entirely on the chosen "rules of engagement". And various governments have caused me to doubt that they would be merciful.
The problem is, it's stupid and insanely dangerous, but the danger is a long term danger, and the profit is immediate. And there's LOTS of people who can make one with various degrees of sophistication. Being moral and holding out won't stop this, we need another answer...but that that could be I don't know.
There's already enough people saying about this book or that "That was supposed to be a warning, not a handbook!". And that argument hasn't changed anything. Yes, 1984 was supposed to be a warning... but short term profit (of various kinds) was what determined the flow of events.
The problem is, the MAD solution was unstable even with three players. This is going to start off with dozens of players, so MAD is critically unstable even before the "game" has started.
It's not the lack of conscience of the devices, it's the lack of conscience of the criminals building and deploying them. We face enemies that have a different conscience than we do, one incompatible with our typical morals. THAT is the problem. They will build and use weapons of unacceptable, unimaginable brutality and efficiency, all to achieve their goals.
I'm not precisely disagreeing with you, but consider: It's not the lack of conscience of the devices, it's the lack of conscience of the governments building and deploying them. We face enemies that have a different conscience than we do, one incompatible with our typical morals. THAT is the problem. They will build and use weapons of unacceptable, unimaginable brutality and efficiency, all to achieve their goals.
If our government not building these devices would prevent them from coming into existence, I'd be totally against them. Unfortunately...
I'm rather certain that these devices are going to become increasingly available, until some people will have them patrolling their houses. Laws against booby-traps will probably make them illegal, but that won't totally prevent them. Certainly some intruders will use variants of them to scope out the scene, and perhaps to conduct the intrusion without their presence. An automated burglar would probably be more difficult than an automated assassin, though.
The argument that war being horrific will prevent it doesn't work very well historically. It's a bit better than "war is profitable", but that's a pretty low barrier.
To take your example, the middle ages is full of dukes/lords/kings leading armies back and forth across various battlefields until the area being fought over was so wrecked it couldn't support the people living there. That is often resulted in the duke/lord/king getting killed didn't stop things. It's not clear it slowed them down much. People tend to discount future dangers in favor of present gains.
Additionally consider the crowds at soccer games. They'd have a lot less chance of getting hurt if they didn't riot, but that doesn't reliably stop them.
So the available evidence seems to indicate that "war being horrific will keep it from happening" is a false claim. Much more likely is "War is unprofitable even in the short term.", so that's what we need to set up. But you still shouldn't expect perfection. The soccer fans don't have anything to gain, and they've got a lot to lose.
The recent drone attack on an army base has more or less convinced me that even non-state actors are finding automated weaponry a good choice. So costs can't be too much of a barrier.
OTOH, flexibility is still superior for the human. Most robots can only deal with a relatively small number of cases, and none are even approximately as good at self-repair. (But it's easier to replace parts...so that may be an even trade-off, except for costs.)
It strikes me as an extremely dangerous direction to head, but it also seems to be one that we are definitely headed in, because even if one group doesn't do it, another will.
It wasn't even always very much to do with technology. In "Eye in the Sky" I think he only threw in enough technology to qualify it as Science Fiction, it was really more an exploration of some aspects of medieval theology: "Thou, O God, seest me.", as often illustrated by a picture of an eye hovering in the sky. Or Ubik. The technology is really just window dressing.
I agree that it doesn't appear to be premeditated homicide by the police, but manslaughter seems too mild a term. What do you call murder by premeditated incompetence?
My actual thought was "I don't care what the reason is, bitcoin is so volatile that being down over two days is ridiculous. Isn't everyone who uses them going to abandon them ASAP?".
There are too many possible hitches, so I didn't even try to guess what they were. But it sounds as if they put up new software without running it in parallel for awhile first as a trial. (On duplicate hardware.) We used to do that for matters a lot less sensitive to our clients.
To be fair, there are things that computer generated music is definitely better at. E.g., the computer rendition of "The Endlessly Rising Canon" is superior to any human performance of the same thing, but this is because the composition depends on the alteration of the volume in the same note played in different octaves so that there is no audible distinction when the cycle revolved, with the notes starting off played so softly in a lower octave that they are difficult to hear, moving up to being played at a "normal" volume in the middle octaves, and again decreasing in volume at a calculated rate as they go into higher octaves.
This is an edge case, and there are several such edge cases. The thing they have in common is that extreme precision in certain kinds of performance are important. People aren't really good at that.
That said, my experience in this area is several decades old, and there have probably been expansions in the areas where computers out-perform humans.
*That* said, I'd like to comment about an earlier poster who claimed "the lyrics don't make any sense". This complaint is not new. The same was said about "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and several other songs. In fact the complaint is so traditional that it's specifically mentioned in "Mairzy Doats" (1944), i.e. "It may sound queer, and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey". And I recall needing to listen to some of Bob Dylan's middle-period songs several times before I could make out the words. So you need to be sure that this is something new that is being complained about, because it sounds just like the traditional older people's complaint about the younger folks music. (I don't listen to current music, as I refuse to support the RIAA even indirectly, so I'm purely working from historic analogies and current comments.)
You are conflating intentional evil with unexpected problems. Both happened, but in separate incidents. E.g., the bugs in the management engine were unintentional.
Point 3 is unfair. You are describing Spectre, not Meltdown, and nobody expected Spectre. Intel (and others) had reason to expect Meltdown.
Point 4 is also unfair, but much less so. There's no way that Intel could replace the chips that are causing problems. Some of them come from discontinued lines of manufacturing, and many of them can't be replaced individually, but would require that entire boards be replaced. So they can't replace the chips. One can argue that due to apparent malice they should replace the entire necessary equipment, but often they only made the CPU, and they don't have the *right* to replace the rest, and the company that originally made the equipment no longer makes it.
OTOH, the seem to be unwilling to even undertake such mitigation as would be reasonably feasible. I'm amenable to considering them a criminal enterprise engaged in the sale of defective goods.
The assertion was that AMD has other flaws. Your response doesn't even address that. This is independent of Meltdown (Intel only) and Spectre (all speculative execution chips).
OTOH, there haven't been any recent announcements of new AMD flaws that don't also apply to Intel.
I haven't heard anything convincing that says Spectre can be fixed with a software update. Even Meltdown can only be ameliorated, not fixed, with a software update. I'll admit I don't know how much could be done with a microcode update, but my guess is that the only fix to Spectre that you could get with a microcode update would be disabling of speculative execution entirely.
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I believe that he even said it in English. In fact I think it was in the bombastic/dramatic speech in which he pulled off his shoe and pounded it on the UN podium.
OTOH, I think that like about "capitalists will sell you the rope you use to hang them" comes from Lenin...and was originally in Russian.
(I suppose I ought to google those things before asserting them, but it doesn't seem important enough.)
Actually, robots can still get into a great deal of trouble. But this is more like "How long can we expect the customer to wait for service?". The example problems described aren't really problems for the robot, they're problems for the person asking for service...and people are often very unhappy about unreasonable wait times.
It's also a very temporary job. All the problems, and the solutions, are being recorded. The next model will have half the need for a "babysitter", and the algorithm is tail-recursive.
If they hadn't capitalized "Company" I'd be wondering which company's website they bought the phone from. I'll grant you, though, it isn't exactly explicit.
It's not really clear to me that there's enough insolation on the average to make this feasible. I'm all in favor of going solar as far and as fast as it feasible, but I suspect we're going to need other sources of power. And that wind and hydro won't suffice.
You need to remember to include maintenance costs and replacement costs into the equation.
Another looming problem is (mobile) batteries. While stationary batteries are pretty much solved, the batteries used in cars and phones depend on various metals that are in short supply. I presume that's being worked on, but otherwise we're going to run out.
So I see *lots* of "if"s in the projected future. It's not clear that any of them are insoluble, but it appears that we don't yet have the answers to many of them. Often I look at a problem and say "I trust someone's working on that".
For power, if solar, etc. don't prove sufficient, there are advanced designs of nuclear fission plants being developed in multiple places. So there will almost certainly be a reasonable answer. Particularly if one of the designs that allows radioactive "wastes" to be burned for power proves out. That would also eliminate one of the major arguments against the current plants. (The current approach of just letting hot rods sit around is both dangerous and wasteful. If nothing else, sinter them in glass and use them for thermal sources.)
The thing is, in each generation the teenagers adopt a new lingo specifically designed to obscure what they are saying from their parents. This is a continuing process. As they grow up, they drop much of the "lingo", but not all of it. The dictionary now is a lot larger than it was in Noah Webster's day. He would be stumped by diethylstilbestrol (DES), or dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), or transistor, or cybernetic, or radio, or...
Well, the examples I picked betray my interest, but they are only a sample among multitudes. He would *know* was plastic means. It means deformable. So this rigid box can't be plastic.
And he would know many words that are almost just noises to us. But his meaning of spindle would have nothing to do with IBM cards. (It's a thing used to hold wool for spinning.)
Smart bullets wouldn't work. Not as anything self propelling. If you make something that small, you need to make it a target seeking poison injector. Sort of like a mechanical mosquito. Diphtheria toxin would be effective. It would be nice if it could really target seek, then you could target the spine at the base of the neck and use Novocaine to temporarily paralyze them. (I think that would work, but it might stop autonomic as well as voluntary muscles, which would kill rather than paralyze.)
What form is most effective depends on your purpose. Paralyzing would be much better is you wanted to kidnap someone for interrogation. Just be equipped to monitor their p52 brainwave during interrogation so you'll know when they're lying. (I'm not sure that reliably works, but I've seen reports that it's pretty good. Sorry, sadists, too much stress distorts the signals.)
The thing is, even if what I'm talking about is beyond doing at the moment, that doesn't mean it will be in 5 years. And it won't be expensive the way a nuclear arsenal is.
The current version of this stuff is already so cheap it's being used by non-state actors. There was a drone assault on an army base recently. The attackers did not identify themselves.
This stuff is coming. It may be unfortunate (probably is), but it's cheap enough and easy enough that primitive versions are already in use. So far they all depend on remote control, but simple versions that don't are easy...they just aren't as flexible. About all you need to add is a GPS starting point, an inertial guidance system, and a target.
You raise a valid point, but the problem is it depends entirely on the chosen "rules of engagement". And various governments have caused me to doubt that they would be merciful.
The problem is, it's stupid and insanely dangerous, but the danger is a long term danger, and the profit is immediate. And there's LOTS of people who can make one with various degrees of sophistication. Being moral and holding out won't stop this, we need another answer...but that that could be I don't know.
There's already enough people saying about this book or that "That was supposed to be a warning, not a handbook!". And that argument hasn't changed anything. Yes, 1984 was supposed to be a warning... but short term profit (of various kinds) was what determined the flow of events.
The problem is, the MAD solution was unstable even with three players. This is going to start off with dozens of players, so MAD is critically unstable even before the "game" has started.
It's not the lack of conscience of the devices, it's the lack of conscience of the criminals building and deploying them. We face enemies that have a different conscience than we do, one incompatible with our typical morals. THAT is the problem. They will build and use weapons of unacceptable, unimaginable brutality and efficiency, all to achieve their goals.
I'm not precisely disagreeing with you, but consider:
It's not the lack of conscience of the devices, it's the lack of conscience of the governments building and deploying them. We face enemies that have a different conscience than we do, one incompatible with our typical morals. THAT is the problem. They will build and use weapons of unacceptable, unimaginable brutality and efficiency, all to achieve their goals.
If our government not building these devices would prevent them from coming into existence, I'd be totally against them. Unfortunately...
I'm rather certain that these devices are going to become increasingly available, until some people will have them patrolling their houses. Laws against booby-traps will probably make them illegal, but that won't totally prevent them. Certainly some intruders will use variants of them to scope out the scene, and perhaps to conduct the intrusion without their presence. An automated burglar would probably be more difficult than an automated assassin, though.
The argument that war being horrific will prevent it doesn't work very well historically. It's a bit better than "war is profitable", but that's a pretty low barrier.
To take your example, the middle ages is full of dukes/lords/kings leading armies back and forth across various battlefields until the area being fought over was so wrecked it couldn't support the people living there. That is often resulted in the duke/lord/king getting killed didn't stop things. It's not clear it slowed them down much. People tend to discount future dangers in favor of present gains.
Additionally consider the crowds at soccer games. They'd have a lot less chance of getting hurt if they didn't riot, but that doesn't reliably stop them.
So the available evidence seems to indicate that "war being horrific will keep it from happening" is a false claim. Much more likely is "War is unprofitable even in the short term.", so that's what we need to set up. But you still shouldn't expect perfection. The soccer fans don't have anything to gain, and they've got a lot to lose.
The recent drone attack on an army base has more or less convinced me that even non-state actors are finding automated weaponry a good choice. So costs can't be too much of a barrier.
OTOH, flexibility is still superior for the human. Most robots can only deal with a relatively small number of cases, and none are even approximately as good at self-repair. (But it's easier to replace parts...so that may be an even trade-off, except for costs.)
It strikes me as an extremely dangerous direction to head, but it also seems to be one that we are definitely headed in, because even if one group doesn't do it, another will.
It wasn't even always very much to do with technology. In "Eye in the Sky" I think he only threw in enough technology to qualify it as Science Fiction, it was really more an exploration of some aspects of medieval theology: "Thou, O God, seest me.", as often illustrated by a picture of an eye hovering in the sky. Or Ubik. The technology is really just window dressing.
I agree that it doesn't appear to be premeditated homicide by the police, but manslaughter seems too mild a term. What do you call murder by premeditated incompetence?
OTOH, ISPs used to be local outfits. I don't see why they couldn't be different ISPs in different states.
States do set highway speeds. But the feds decide whether they are going to give subsidies based on whether the state is following the fed guidelines.
OTOH, there are lots of cases where the courts have declared that the feds have ridiculously intrusive powers. So it's not clear.
My actual thought was "I don't care what the reason is, bitcoin is so volatile that being down over two days is ridiculous. Isn't everyone who uses them going to abandon them ASAP?".
There are too many possible hitches, so I didn't even try to guess what they were. But it sounds as if they put up new software without running it in parallel for awhile first as a trial. (On duplicate hardware.) We used to do that for matters a lot less sensitive to our clients.
If it's a cryptocurrency exchange shouldn't you be comparing it to the stock market rather than to a bank?
To be fair, there are things that computer generated music is definitely better at. E.g., the computer rendition of "The Endlessly Rising Canon" is superior to any human performance of the same thing, but this is because the composition depends on the alteration of the volume in the same note played in different octaves so that there is no audible distinction when the cycle revolved, with the notes starting off played so softly in a lower octave that they are difficult to hear, moving up to being played at a "normal" volume in the middle octaves, and again decreasing in volume at a calculated rate as they go into higher octaves.
This is an edge case, and there are several such edge cases. The thing they have in common is that extreme precision in certain kinds of performance are important. People aren't really good at that.
That said, my experience in this area is several decades old, and there have probably been expansions in the areas where computers out-perform humans.
*That* said, I'd like to comment about an earlier poster who claimed "the lyrics don't make any sense". This complaint is not new. The same was said about "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and several other songs. In fact the complaint is so traditional that it's specifically mentioned in "Mairzy Doats" (1944), i.e. "It may sound queer, and funny to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey". And I recall needing to listen to some of Bob Dylan's middle-period songs several times before I could make out the words. So you need to be sure that this is something new that is being complained about, because it sounds just like the traditional older people's complaint about the younger folks music. (I don't listen to current music, as I refuse to support the RIAA even indirectly, so I'm purely working from historic analogies and current comments.)
You are conflating intentional evil with unexpected problems. Both happened, but in separate incidents. E.g., the bugs in the management engine were unintentional.
Point 3 is unfair. You are describing Spectre, not Meltdown, and nobody expected Spectre. Intel (and others) had reason to expect Meltdown.
Point 4 is also unfair, but much less so. There's no way that Intel could replace the chips that are causing problems. Some of them come from discontinued lines of manufacturing, and many of them can't be replaced individually, but would require that entire boards be replaced. So they can't replace the chips. One can argue that due to apparent malice they should replace the entire necessary equipment, but often they only made the CPU, and they don't have the *right* to replace the rest, and the company that originally made the equipment no longer makes it.
OTOH, the seem to be unwilling to even undertake such mitigation as would be reasonably feasible. I'm amenable to considering them a criminal enterprise engaged in the sale of defective goods.
The assertion was that AMD has other flaws. Your response doesn't even address that. This is independent of Meltdown (Intel only) and Spectre (all speculative execution chips).
OTOH, there haven't been any recent announcements of new AMD flaws that don't also apply to Intel.
To me it sounds more like 5 minutes to half an hour. But it also sounds as if there is no recovery.
I haven't heard anything convincing that says Spectre can be fixed with a software update. Even Meltdown can only be ameliorated, not fixed, with a software update. I'll admit I don't know how much could be done with a microcode update, but my guess is that the only fix to Spectre that you could get with a microcode update would be disabling of speculative execution entirely.