With FindFace and the similar services that are sure to follow in its footsteps, almost everybody will be able to identify almost anybody else in a few seconds. This heralds the end of privacy as we know it. Even widespread video cameras and NSA communications monitoring don't do as much damage to privacy as these services will, because the public at large doesn't have access to the video footage and the data that the NSA and other TLA's gather.
I'm afraid privacy will soon be officially a thing of the past. At least I can take comfort in the fact that I have been diligent about not having my picture appear on the Web - identifying me using a FindFace-like service would probably be quite difficult. Until hackers break into the Ministry of Transportation and steal my driver's licence photo, that is... As for all those people who are promiscuous users of Facebook and the like, I'm sure they don't care about this any more than the lemmings a few ranks back from the edge of the cliff care about what's coming up shortly. Good luck to us all in this brave new world.
From everything I've heard about Windows 10, (excluding various noises from MS shills), it's not an upgrade by any sensible meaning of the term. It's time the members of the tech community who know what Win 10 is really about, started calling it a downgrade. Then the term might, just possibly, come into widespread use, hurting Microsoft at least a little at a time when they deserve every last bit of comeuppance and blowback that can be heaped upon them.
(A little bit of make work) isn't necessarily a bad thing. Given the amount of Automation going on we're either gonna figure out what to do with all the people who aren't genius grade or let billions starve. That was the original purpose of the military industrial complex. Eisenhower talked about it in his memoirs.
Given the efficiencies that come with extreme automation, won't we as a species be able to afford the keeping and feeding of all of us? Those of us who are so inclined will still work at something, because we're motivated by interest and/or purpose. Others will live the life of bread and circuses, (without the full bellies and distracting entertainments being used to ultimately subjugate them and screw them over), until they either get bored and pull their heads out of the sand, or commit suicide over the futility of their lives. With rampant automation, and provided we don't over-tax the earth's ability to sustain us, (that's a whole 'nother argument), I don't see any need for anyone to starve.
As for obedience you're reading too much into it...
You may be right, but I'd say that remains to be seen.
...and over estimating the average joe's ability to make change. We can't even get these folks to bother voting in a mid term. Who needs obedience when apathy will do?
Yeah, it makes me sad to have to agree with that. And it makes me even sadder that I laughed when I read your final question. But I like to think that a significant percentage of those folks would be engaged if their votes were truly relevant and if that military-industrial complex you mentioned wasn't so effective at stacking the deck against them. I may be naive and perhaps deluded, but I live in hope...
FTA:
"the screenings were necessary to ensure passenger safety"
I rather suspect the screenings are 'necessary' for two reasons having nothing to do with passenger safety:
-- To further grow the thriving empire that is government-mandated security theatre, so more people can draw bigger salaries and have better job security as they pretend to contribute to the good of society.
-- To expand and reinforce among the population the knee-jerk response of obedience to the dictates of authority, regardless of the pointlessness and impracticality of said dictates.
FTA:
"[Our] initial analysis only scratches the surface of this important area, but it is clear that policymakers need to develop a better understanding of mistrust in the privacy and security of the internet and the resulting chilling effects."
Hmmm... "chilling effects". Are they worried about the chilling effect on sharing ideas and doing useful research? Are they worried about the effect on the Web as a kind of social hangout? (I mean the kind of 'social hangout' the Internet was before the 'play date' version, e.g. Facebook, emerged to co-opt the process and spoil the party). Do they care about the Internet as part of the social fabric? It seems to me they're primarily interested in the impact on companies' bottom lines, and couldn't give a toss about anything else.
As far as I'm concerned this is just another example of the impoverished view that the Web is merely another tool of commerce.
Anyone who has gotten burned by this kind of crap and is surprised, hurt, or indignant, please repeat after me: "If I'm not paying for the product, I AM the product". Now, continue to repeat it, out loud if necessary, until it sticks. Make it a daily mantra. When you see a 'free' service you're interested in, if your immediate thought is "how will I and / or my data be taken advantage of if I sign up for this?", then you've successfully activated your best protection against being an unwitting victim of 'free'.
Cute, he thinks poor have no income, if that were true, they couldn't buy drugs, booze or lottery tickets. I'm not saying all poor people allocate their resources in such frivolous ways, but some do. Additionally there are some very extensive underground economies in most neighborhoods, that provide incomes that are completely undocumented.
GP was talking about when the poor have no income; i.e. in the future when automation has taken away their opportunities to earn money. Do you really think having a much, much bigger percentage of economic activity based on "drugs, booze (and) lottery tickets" and "extensive underground economies" is going to be good for society?
Besides, what about the principled working poor holding down two, three, or more jobs, working stupid numbers of hours in a day, six or seven days a week, trying legally to provide the bare necessities of life for their families, and only a couple pf paychecks away from living on the street? What happens when there are no jobs for them to go to? What happens when their numbers swell to a horrendous percentage of citizens? Are they going to live off those magical underground economies you mentioned, the ones whose money is conjured up via fairy dust and unicorn farts?
FTA:
"WhatsApp has over a billion customers, overwhelmingly good people," Comey said. "But in that billion customers are terrorists and criminals, and so that now ubiquitous feature of all WhatsApp products will affect both sides of the house."
Translation:
"The United States has over 300 million people, overwhelmingly good people," Comey said. "But in that 300 million people are terrorists and criminals, and so that now-under-siege document called The Constitution will be further undermined by law enforcement agencies."
Nope, not a liar - at least not this time... I've never actually installed Chrome, and it's been a long time since I last used it. But my memory of its setup is 'what setup?', because it seemed that there wasn't much at all in the way of configurability.
I was using Debian when Firefox's Australis interface came out, so I got a reprieve because in whichever release I was on, Iceweasel was a step or two behind the main Firefox releases. When I did get a taste of Australis, I reverted and held back on upgrading. Eventually I found Pale Moon, so my current daily browser experience is pretty much that of Firefox circa Version 25. It's still not as nice as earlier versions of FF but it's stable and I find it quite useable.
They started treating the browser as a toy-like consumer appliance instead of as a tool. Even without this latest addon, Firefox has more blinkenlights, bells, whistles, misfeatures, and extraneous junk than a cheap 80's era Yorx stereo-with-disco-lights. And it works about as well as Yorx stereos did too.
One sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting a different result. Mozilla keeps making their browser uglier, slower, and harder to use, while expecting to regain the market share they've lost as a result of having made their browser uglier, slower, and harder to use. They are clearly insane.
First he helps to create the utterly evil PayPal; then he starts funding a list of politicians who, (with the possible exception of Ron Paul), are venomous and/or vacuous scuzzbuckets. "Peter Thiel - Raising Corporate Political Influence while Razing Your Country". Sounds rather like a campaign slogan, doesn't it?
fx File Explorer has always been great for me. I use the free version - no ads. There is also a paid version with additional features. Easy, intuitive, works well as either user or root.
Oh shit - I think I just wrote a Slashvertisement...
I assume payroll is tax-deductible. That the money you pay your employees can be deducted from the gross that the business earns before paying corporate taxes. What if we exclude foreign payroll and expenses from being deductible? If the employees are coming physically to the U.S., perhaps a minimum salary is in order as some suggest (based upon industry). Maybe require the company to retain the employees that they're firing.
Any thoughts? Good or bad about this.
That would be great, if the 'elected' folks who would have to implement and enforce your excellent ideas, hadn't had their jobs bought and paid for by the very corporations whose policies you're trying to counter.
This shit, and so much other shit like it, is ultimately the result of a badly broken electoral system. Fix that, and everything else becomes at least possible. Until we force electoral reforms that do away with elected offices going (mostly) to the highest bidder, we'll be stuck - bent over, holding our ankles, and paying for the privilege.
they decided to test 41 shades between each blue to see which users preferred...
Way to give a meaning to noise.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure differences between one monitor or screen and the next, will totally overshadow the majority of the differences among those '41 shades'. Hell, on my desktop monitor I can select among four wildly different colour, contrast, and brightness profiles with the touch of a button.
There is no such thing as digital, unless you are talking about quantum mechanics. All digital phones, even digital computers, are fundamentally analog systems. Digital means that you ignore all signal level below a threshold. Something like -55dB/decade.
That's true, but it's irrelevant to the discussion, and you're being pedantic. The cellular companies themselves provided the digital / analog nomenclature to differentiate between the two systems. And in the context of the current discussion, the difference is important.
The average transmitted power of handsets on the old analog cellular networks was far higher than that on handsets using a digital network. And I can attest to the difference. The first cell phone I ever used was analog. When I held it to one ear, in a few minutes I would get an uncomfortable itching sensation that felt like it was inside my head, two or three inches above my eye and slightly to the outside. So I'd change ears, and the sensation would go away - only to come back on the other side a few minutes later. This happened every single time I used the phone for more than a couple of minutes.
When I started using a digital handset, the problem mostly went away. I'd still feel that itch occasionally when using the phone though. And every time it happened, when I looked at the display the phone was in analog mode. Since cell networks abandoned analog mode altogether, I've never again felt that sensation in my head.
No, correlation is not causation, and my experience might be unrelated to the handset transmitter power and the signal's characteristics. Nevertheless, when studying whatever biological effects might arise from close-up exposure to RF fields, average transmitter power has to be considered an important variable, just as dosage would be considered in a drug trial.
The only "bonus" these criminals are likely to see could be a bullet to their apparently empty skulls. The person wronged probably knows people who know people in low places who'd take on the challenge pro-bono, after a proper "cooling-off" period.
WTF? Digger is simply speculating that the victim of the forfeiture proceeding might be pissed off enough to go after the terminal kind of revenge. That seems like a reasonable speculation to me, and does not constitute a threat. However, perhaps more to the point is the comment Digger posted immediately prior to the one quoted in TFS:
Everyone on the government side of this should have grand theft and / or larceny charges filed against them, and double the jail time as it is a slam dunk case. They did not follow proper procedures, they no longer have the protection or immunity to prosecution normally afforded to government agents. By failing to follow procedure, they've shown their true colors and should be treated as the criminals that they are.
I suspect the DHS, and whichever other TLAs and LEOs stepped on their own dicks in this case, are more upset about the comment Digger posted first, and are only using the one he posted next as a flimsy excuse to go hunting. Frankly, if they really believe Digger poses or is connected to a threat, then they might as well be the Keystone Cops. And if they DON'T believe in the threat, then they're bullies and thugs. Either way, they all need to be dismissed and barred from any further government jobs.
FTA:
The TTIP would "harmonize regulations across a huge range of business sectors, providing a boost to exporters on both sides of the Atlantic"...
Translation:
The TTIP would "gut governmental control and oversight in as many business sectors as we can get away with, putting even more power in the hands of corporations and further screwing over average citizens on both sides of the Atlantic..."
It's amazing how much longer that sentence becomes when you look past the Orwellian euphemisms to what's really being said.
I suspect we'll see a lot of similar geo-hacks and assorted other climate hacks in the coming decades as weather patterns continue to change. Climate science in general will evolve far beyond what it is today, and may supplant tech as a primary driver of the world's economies. It's time to start steering our kids towards climatology and related fields.
If AI eliminates the need for us humans to live by the sweat of our brows, (and if we can get our shit together to tear down the ridiculous classism upon which our current social hierarchies are founded), we might have utopia within our grasp, with some caveats:
-- We don't end up committing mass suicide as a result of a sense of meaninglessness and a lack of perceived usefulness
-- We don't all eat ourselves into a morbidly obese stupor
-- We don't end up as the subjects of robotic overlords
-- The AIs aren't under the control of a small handful of 'elite' human overlords who control and abuse the rest of us 'just for fun'
-- We don't fall victim to warring between competing AIs
Come to think about it, I'm not too optimistic about an AI-filled future right now...
In any market, the higher the ratio of supply to demand, the lower the price paid per unit of whatever is being supplied. Tech firms aren't simply interested in fulfilling their personnel needs - they want a sizeable surplus workforce so they can keep wages low. That way they can have lots of people whose first language is English and for whom local cultural norms are second nature, competing for relatively low-paying jobs. Then the whole H-1B thing will no longer be an issue.
Any corporation would like nothing better than for the vast majority of its workforce to consist of fully interchangeable commodity 'components'.
Informative and insightful - thanks. You've given me an idea too. I've often thought that Detroit auto engineers should spend one year in four working as mechanics in garages, just to give them incentive to not make some of the truly wrong-headed design decisions they seem so fond of. So how about having university-based PhDs work one year in four, (or five, or six), in their field, outside of the university? They could work for the private sector, a government agency, or a non-profit. Or they could teach, but at high school or community college, under the watchful eye of someone who can prevent them from confusing the students too much. Or probably any of a half-dozen other alternatives I haven't thought of.
This would put some (more) holes in the blanket of academic insulation, and provide the "real world" connection whose importance was rightly pointed out by GP.
First of all, those in industry are not your "Colleagues". If they are getting paid 3-4x more than a PhD working for a university, then they are almost certainly worth that 3-4x increase in pay. It is called "real-world" experience for a reason. They produce more for the company they work for or they disappear unlike some professor or assistant who doesn't have experience developing real products. Don't get me wrong, we need university research, but it really doesn't pay the bills for anyone, it only sucks resources from the tax base.
I'd mod you Troll but I already posted, so Ill take the bait instead. You say that "real products" and "real world experience" are worth money, then go on to say that the university research upon which those products are often based, (and which you admit we need), "sucks resources". If you don't see the contradiction there then your opinion isn't worth much. If you DO see the contradiction, then why did you post it? Oh yeah, I temporarily forgot - you're trolling...
... Also no, not anti-knowledge. Having access to knowledge is pro-knowledge. I don't know how you could make that mistake.
Parent wasn't being sarcastic or ironic, yet I'm sure you must have heard a very loud 'whoosh!' as you wrote your post. You might want to try reading more carefully there, sport.
Slashdot Mirror
With FindFace and the similar services that are sure to follow in its footsteps, almost everybody will be able to identify almost anybody else in a few seconds. This heralds the end of privacy as we know it. Even widespread video cameras and NSA communications monitoring don't do as much damage to privacy as these services will, because the public at large doesn't have access to the video footage and the data that the NSA and other TLA's gather.
I'm afraid privacy will soon be officially a thing of the past. At least I can take comfort in the fact that I have been diligent about not having my picture appear on the Web - identifying me using a FindFace-like service would probably be quite difficult. Until hackers break into the Ministry of Transportation and steal my driver's licence photo, that is... As for all those people who are promiscuous users of Facebook and the like, I'm sure they don't care about this any more than the lemmings a few ranks back from the edge of the cliff care about what's coming up shortly. Good luck to us all in this brave new world.
Did McAfee really write that anti-virus software? Or was it written by a Bangkok prostitute?
From everything I've heard about Windows 10, (excluding various noises from MS shills), it's not an upgrade by any sensible meaning of the term. It's time the members of the tech community who know what Win 10 is really about, started calling it a downgrade. Then the term might, just possibly, come into widespread use, hurting Microsoft at least a little at a time when they deserve every last bit of comeuppance and blowback that can be heaped upon them.
(A little bit of make work) isn't necessarily a bad thing. Given the amount of Automation going on we're either gonna figure out what to do with all the people who aren't genius grade or let billions starve. That was the original purpose of the military industrial complex. Eisenhower talked about it in his memoirs.
Given the efficiencies that come with extreme automation, won't we as a species be able to afford the keeping and feeding of all of us? Those of us who are so inclined will still work at something, because we're motivated by interest and/or purpose. Others will live the life of bread and circuses, (without the full bellies and distracting entertainments being used to ultimately subjugate them and screw them over), until they either get bored and pull their heads out of the sand, or commit suicide over the futility of their lives. With rampant automation, and provided we don't over-tax the earth's ability to sustain us, (that's a whole 'nother argument), I don't see any need for anyone to starve.
As for obedience you're reading too much into it...
You may be right, but I'd say that remains to be seen.
...and over estimating the average joe's ability to make change. We can't even get these folks to bother voting in a mid term. Who needs obedience when apathy will do?
Yeah, it makes me sad to have to agree with that. And it makes me even sadder that I laughed when I read your final question. But I like to think that a significant percentage of those folks would be engaged if their votes were truly relevant and if that military-industrial complex you mentioned wasn't so effective at stacking the deck against them. I may be naive and perhaps deluded, but I live in hope...
FTA:
"the screenings were necessary to ensure passenger safety"
I rather suspect the screenings are 'necessary' for two reasons having nothing to do with passenger safety:
-- To further grow the thriving empire that is government-mandated security theatre, so more people can draw bigger salaries and have better job security as they pretend to contribute to the good of society.
-- To expand and reinforce among the population the knee-jerk response of obedience to the dictates of authority, regardless of the pointlessness and impracticality of said dictates.
FTA:
"[Our] initial analysis only scratches the surface of this important area, but it is clear that policymakers need to develop a better understanding of mistrust in the privacy and security of the internet and the resulting chilling effects."
Hmmm... "chilling effects". Are they worried about the chilling effect on sharing ideas and doing useful research? Are they worried about the effect on the Web as a kind of social hangout? (I mean the kind of 'social hangout' the Internet was before the 'play date' version, e.g. Facebook, emerged to co-opt the process and spoil the party). Do they care about the Internet as part of the social fabric? It seems to me they're primarily interested in the impact on companies' bottom lines, and couldn't give a toss about anything else.
As far as I'm concerned this is just another example of the impoverished view that the Web is merely another tool of commerce.
Anyone who has gotten burned by this kind of crap and is surprised, hurt, or indignant, please repeat after me: "If I'm not paying for the product, I AM the product". Now, continue to repeat it, out loud if necessary, until it sticks. Make it a daily mantra. When you see a 'free' service you're interested in, if your immediate thought is "how will I and / or my data be taken advantage of if I sign up for this?", then you've successfully activated your best protection against being an unwitting victim of 'free'.
Cute, he thinks poor have no income, if that were true, they couldn't buy drugs, booze or lottery tickets. I'm not saying all poor people allocate their resources in such frivolous ways, but some do. Additionally there are some very extensive underground economies in most neighborhoods, that provide incomes that are completely undocumented.
GP was talking about when the poor have no income; i.e. in the future when automation has taken away their opportunities to earn money. Do you really think having a much, much bigger percentage of economic activity based on "drugs, booze (and) lottery tickets" and "extensive underground economies" is going to be good for society?
Besides, what about the principled working poor holding down two, three, or more jobs, working stupid numbers of hours in a day, six or seven days a week, trying legally to provide the bare necessities of life for their families, and only a couple pf paychecks away from living on the street? What happens when there are no jobs for them to go to? What happens when their numbers swell to a horrendous percentage of citizens? Are they going to live off those magical underground economies you mentioned, the ones whose money is conjured up via fairy dust and unicorn farts?
FTA:
"WhatsApp has over a billion customers, overwhelmingly good people," Comey said. "But in that billion customers are terrorists and criminals, and so that now ubiquitous feature of all WhatsApp products will affect both sides of the house."
Translation:
"The United States has over 300 million people, overwhelmingly good people," Comey said. "But in that 300 million people are terrorists and criminals, and so that now-under-siege document called The Constitution will be further undermined by law enforcement agencies."
Nope, not a liar - at least not this time... I've never actually installed Chrome, and it's been a long time since I last used it. But my memory of its setup is 'what setup?', because it seemed that there wasn't much at all in the way of configurability.
I was using Debian when Firefox's Australis interface came out, so I got a reprieve because in whichever release I was on, Iceweasel was a step or two behind the main Firefox releases. When I did get a taste of Australis, I reverted and held back on upgrading. Eventually I found Pale Moon, so my current daily browser experience is pretty much that of Firefox circa Version 25. It's still not as nice as earlier versions of FF but it's stable and I find it quite useable.
They started treating the browser as a toy-like consumer appliance instead of as a tool. Even without this latest addon, Firefox has more blinkenlights, bells, whistles, misfeatures, and extraneous junk than a cheap 80's era Yorx stereo-with-disco-lights. And it works about as well as Yorx stereos did too.
One sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting a different result. Mozilla keeps making their browser uglier, slower, and harder to use, while expecting to regain the market share they've lost as a result of having made their browser uglier, slower, and harder to use. They are clearly insane.
First he helps to create the utterly evil PayPal; then he starts funding a list of politicians who, (with the possible exception of Ron Paul), are venomous and/or vacuous scuzzbuckets. "Peter Thiel - Raising Corporate Political Influence while Razing Your Country". Sounds rather like a campaign slogan, doesn't it?
fx File Explorer has always been great for me. I use the free version - no ads. There is also a paid version with additional features. Easy, intuitive, works well as either user or root.
Oh shit - I think I just wrote a Slashvertisement ...
I assume payroll is tax-deductible. That the money you pay your employees can be deducted from the gross that the business earns before paying corporate taxes. What if we exclude foreign payroll and expenses from being deductible? If the employees are coming physically to the U.S., perhaps a minimum salary is in order as some suggest (based upon industry). Maybe require the company to retain the employees that they're firing.
Any thoughts? Good or bad about this.
That would be great, if the 'elected' folks who would have to implement and enforce your excellent ideas, hadn't had their jobs bought and paid for by the very corporations whose policies you're trying to counter.
This shit, and so much other shit like it, is ultimately the result of a badly broken electoral system. Fix that, and everything else becomes at least possible. Until we force electoral reforms that do away with elected offices going (mostly) to the highest bidder, we'll be stuck - bent over, holding our ankles, and paying for the privilege.
they decided to test 41 shades between each blue to see which users preferred ...
Way to give a meaning to noise.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure differences between one monitor or screen and the next, will totally overshadow the majority of the differences among those '41 shades'. Hell, on my desktop monitor I can select among four wildly different colour, contrast, and brightness profiles with the touch of a button.
and up you a bigger, better mirror!
There is no such thing as digital, unless you are talking about quantum mechanics. All digital phones, even digital computers, are fundamentally analog systems. Digital means that you ignore all signal level below a threshold. Something like -55dB/decade.
That's true, but it's irrelevant to the discussion, and you're being pedantic. The cellular companies themselves provided the digital / analog nomenclature to differentiate between the two systems. And in the context of the current discussion, the difference is important.
The average transmitted power of handsets on the old analog cellular networks was far higher than that on handsets using a digital network. And I can attest to the difference. The first cell phone I ever used was analog. When I held it to one ear, in a few minutes I would get an uncomfortable itching sensation that felt like it was inside my head, two or three inches above my eye and slightly to the outside. So I'd change ears, and the sensation would go away - only to come back on the other side a few minutes later. This happened every single time I used the phone for more than a couple of minutes.
When I started using a digital handset, the problem mostly went away. I'd still feel that itch occasionally when using the phone though. And every time it happened, when I looked at the display the phone was in analog mode. Since cell networks abandoned analog mode altogether, I've never again felt that sensation in my head.
No, correlation is not causation, and my experience might be unrelated to the handset transmitter power and the signal's characteristics. Nevertheless, when studying whatever biological effects might arise from close-up exposure to RF fields, average transmitter power has to be considered an important variable, just as dosage would be considered in a drug trial.
The original Techdirt comment:
The only "bonus" these criminals are likely to see could be a bullet to their apparently empty skulls.
The person wronged probably knows people who know people in low places who'd take on the challenge pro-bono, after a proper "cooling-off" period.
WTF? Digger is simply speculating that the victim of the forfeiture proceeding might be pissed off enough to go after the terminal kind of revenge. That seems like a reasonable speculation to me, and does not constitute a threat.
However, perhaps more to the point is the comment Digger posted immediately prior to the one quoted in TFS:
Everyone on the government side of this should have grand theft and / or larceny charges filed against them, and double the jail time as it is a slam dunk case.
They did not follow proper procedures, they no longer have the protection or immunity to prosecution normally afforded to government agents.
By failing to follow procedure, they've shown their true colors and should be treated as the criminals that they are.
I suspect the DHS, and whichever other TLAs and LEOs stepped on their own dicks in this case, are more upset about the comment Digger posted first, and are only using the one he posted next as a flimsy excuse to go hunting. Frankly, if they really believe Digger poses or is connected to a threat, then they might as well be the Keystone Cops. And if they DON'T believe in the threat, then they're bullies and thugs. Either way, they all need to be dismissed and barred from any further government jobs.
FTA:
The TTIP would "harmonize regulations across a huge range of business sectors, providing a boost to exporters on both sides of the Atlantic"...
Translation:
The TTIP would "gut governmental control and oversight in as many business sectors as we can get away with, putting even more power in the hands of corporations and further screwing over average citizens on both sides of the Atlantic..."
It's amazing how much longer that sentence becomes when you look past the Orwellian euphemisms to what's really being said.
I suspect we'll see a lot of similar geo-hacks and assorted other climate hacks in the coming decades as weather patterns continue to change. Climate science in general will evolve far beyond what it is today, and may supplant tech as a primary driver of the world's economies. It's time to start steering our kids towards climatology and related fields.
If AI eliminates the need for us humans to live by the sweat of our brows, (and if we can get our shit together to tear down the ridiculous classism upon which our current social hierarchies are founded), we might have utopia within our grasp, with some caveats:
-- We don't end up committing mass suicide as a result of a sense of meaninglessness and a lack of perceived usefulness
-- We don't all eat ourselves into a morbidly obese stupor
-- We don't end up as the subjects of robotic overlords
-- The AIs aren't under the control of a small handful of 'elite' human overlords who control and abuse the rest of us 'just for fun'
-- We don't fall victim to warring between competing AIs
Come to think about it, I'm not too optimistic about an AI-filled future right now...
In any market, the higher the ratio of supply to demand, the lower the price paid per unit of whatever is being supplied. Tech firms aren't simply interested in fulfilling their personnel needs - they want a sizeable surplus workforce so they can keep wages low. That way they can have lots of people whose first language is English and for whom local cultural norms are second nature, competing for relatively low-paying jobs. Then the whole H-1B thing will no longer be an issue.
Any corporation would like nothing better than for the vast majority of its workforce to consist of fully interchangeable commodity 'components'.
Informative and insightful - thanks. You've given me an idea too. I've often thought that Detroit auto engineers should spend one year in four working as mechanics in garages, just to give them incentive to not make some of the truly wrong-headed design decisions they seem so fond of. So how about having university-based PhDs work one year in four, (or five, or six), in their field, outside of the university? They could work for the private sector, a government agency, or a non-profit. Or they could teach, but at high school or community college, under the watchful eye of someone who can prevent them from confusing the students too much. Or probably any of a half-dozen other alternatives I haven't thought of.
This would put some (more) holes in the blanket of academic insulation, and provide the "real world" connection whose importance was rightly pointed out by GP.
First of all, those in industry are not your "Colleagues". If they are getting paid 3-4x more than a PhD working for a university, then they are almost certainly worth that 3-4x increase in pay. It is called "real-world" experience for a reason. They produce more for the company they work for or they disappear unlike some professor or assistant who doesn't have experience developing real products. Don't get me wrong, we need university research, but it really doesn't pay the bills for anyone, it only sucks resources from the tax base.
I'd mod you Troll but I already posted, so Ill take the bait instead. You say that "real products" and "real world experience" are worth money, then go on to say that the university research upon which those products are often based, (and which you admit we need), "sucks resources". If you don't see the contradiction there then your opinion isn't worth much. If you DO see the contradiction, then why did you post it? Oh yeah, I temporarily forgot - you're trolling...
... Also no, not anti-knowledge. Having access to knowledge is pro-knowledge. I don't know how you could make that mistake.
Parent wasn't being sarcastic or ironic, yet I'm sure you must have heard a very loud 'whoosh!' as you wrote your post. You might want to try reading more carefully there, sport.