Yeah. It's the users with IDs over half a million that are the problem, because they'll reply to themselves three times in the same subthread because of some confusion on their part about how moderation works.
Sources in Satan's inner circle are saying that the problems began after the project was outsourced to major services conglomerate Helliburton, on the advice of one of Hell's top minions, currently serving an Earthly stint under the name of Dick Cheney. An internal review board is conducting an investigation, and has questioned the wisdom of putting critical projects under the control of the demons responsible for the corruption of Earthly governments.
Of course I recognized the BSD is dying thing, but it seemed to have a suspiciously large amount of unique-to-Microsoft, non-boilerplate text, particularly compared to the other similar posts in this thread. So I suspect the author of having spent more than the officially permitted[*] amount of time on crafting it.
[*] As determined by a secret committee of users with uids below 16384.
I hope that was a cut, paste, and replace job (I can't be bothered to check), otherwise I'm here to tell you that you have *way* too much time on your hands.
Many (if not all?) episodes of Law and Order (all varieties) are based closely on real cases. If you follow the news much, it's often possible to recognize them. Don't know about this particular one, though.
Yes, this whole thing has thrown me into a moral quandary: on the one hand, evil Verizon exploits a broken patent system to crush legitimate competition; on the other hand, the competitor in question has the most annoying ad running on TV at the moment. It's hard to know who to root for!
By all estimates I've seen, we're safe from Eta Carinae going nova. See e.g. Earth likely spared from one form of cosmic doom (NASA), which says that a supernova would need to be within 26 light years of Earth to cause significant damage.
why would they pay a human being to do what a robot can do better and more consistently?...
Couldn't the robots be programmed to build an artificial environment so convincing that you think you have everything?
With what goal? To achieve The Matrix? A permanent fantasy? Have you considered the psychological effects of that?
And what is unique to humans? Or are you back on sex again?
Sex, in the sense of humans having two genders, and evolving in specific ways because of that, is pretty important to understanding human behavior. I reduced it to a throwaway comment about "hot chicks" in an earlier message but that was probably a bad idea for communication, if you're not very familiar with sociobiology. Have you read Dawkins' "Selfish Gene", for example? It sounds as though you want to undo a billion years or so of intra-species evolutionary competition by the application of some machines.
There's plenty of fiction exploring the consequences of applying machines to control human nature - see Imagining Futures, Dramatizing Fears, particularly the sections about losing our souls, losing control, and supplantation. I've read about a dozen of the books mentioned in the section on losing our souls, for example. Almost all of them seem more realistic to me than Brain's story, which seems mainly to be a happily-ever-after fantasy with little thought for any possible downside or limitations of reality.
Make it actively painfull to disobey, and actively pleasurable to obey; and the robots will be falling over your feet in a competition to obey.
Your SF author (Adams?) didn't think of that, of course. He simply based it on how humans work. But the difference is that humans don't get to create themselves. But the robots will, and they'll be unsupervised, because humans aren't going to retain the ability to understand the robots - they won't have the incentive or capability. It's a world in which humans are ultimately unnecessary, and unable to sustain their own environment. Achieving the particular "utopia" described by Brain will be an evolutionary dead end, as in humans who go that route will die out, perhaps after enjoying a generation or two of permanent fantasy.
If we really had essentially infinite resources, you could set up societies based on those principles and see how they worked out (using easily led idealistic people as fodder). Of course, playing god like that would get you in trouble with the robots, but if enough of us band together, we can take care of that... cooperation at its finest!
A history book, sure, but a less simplistic piece of fiction would also work. What's the point of a story which says "here are these wonderful principles, which if followed (or rigidly enforced!) will lead to an ideal society", but which ignores all the ways in which, well, it won't? A story which says "if we could just mechanically prevent humans from being human, everything would be fine"? I suppose one could see it as a comment about how blind idealism can lead one to confuse a dystopia with a utopia.
In any case, this is all moot, since in my preferred future scenario we liberate ourselves from our physical bodies, and all this nonsense about "resources" disappears. I'm not talking about Brain's Vite racks, but something more like Stargate's Ancients. It seems about as realistic, but more likely to succeed. As a disembodied being of pure thought, perhaps watching these utopias attempt to form will at least provide entertainment.
Ya know, I really have to wonder how you can claim to have read the story twice and still wonder about the enforcement program and how conflicts are resolved.
I think you misunderstand my point. The problem is that the story proposes a pretty vague set of rules, and says that they're enforced. But it says almost nothing about how the rules might interact and conflict, about what kinds of conflicts and problems might occur, or what the negative effects of some of the rules might be, even though many such problems seem quite obvious. My wondering about the enforcement program is wondering about its internal logic, its source code, how it deals with inevitable conflicts, none of which is even remotely touched on in the story.
Hence my Asimov example, since he at least makes an attempt to explore the consequences of his rules in other than a "they lived happily ever after" kind of way. One of my points is that when you get a bunch of humans and try to make them follow rules, you always have unintended consequences, which don't just disappear because of allegedly perfect enforcement.
The biggest problem with these kind of scenarios, whether fictional or real, is that they try to impose a kind of central control in a top-down way, without taking into account actual behavior. In many situations, perfect enforcement isn't desirable. The systems that work evolve, they're not designed ex nihilo. They're usually quite multi-paradigm, in that different groups coexist and follow different sets of rules in some respects, and shared rules in other respects. In some situations, strong enforcement is justified, in others, social pressure is sufficient enforcement, and there are plenty of cases in between. None of this subtlety or complexity seems to be reflected in Brain's story. It only appears to be a utopia because of how simplistic the description is. A story which actually explored any of the interesting issues would paint a very different picture.
I'm not sure if you were aiming that "actually read" comment at me, but I've read Brain's Manna story twice, once since the discussion in this thread began. If he has other writing on the matter, I'm unaware of it, but it would have to be much higher quality for me to care. One of the main problems I have with it is all the vagueness inherent in admonishments such as the nine you list. I'd be more interested to see the outline of the enforcement program, and how conflicts are resolved.
Comparing Brain to a better author, Asimov (who has his own issues as an author, but is at least of publishable quality), you'll notice that although Asimov came up with three simple laws of robotics, he then explores the way in which those laws can conflict with each other, even though they're designed not to. (This should be familiar to anyone experienced in the design and development of formal languages, including programming languages.)
In any case, we agree that this utopia in its most literal-to-Brain form would require tyranny, and so would not be a utopia.
The robots provide all the services, so you're immediately reduced to creating something other people want.
Is that a legal constraint? Because after all, the one thing that robots can't provide is anything that's unique to humans. Will prostitution be illegal in this society? Won't many people prefer to have interactions with humans for some sorts of services, such as medical care, nursing, teaching, etc.?
Why would they, when your original order to the robots is available on the public web and they can just spend their credits drectly with the robots to create duplicates?
Perhaps the creation is an artwork, created without the help of robots. Just as today, we can make duplicates of artwork but they're not as valuable as the original. In fact, in the environment you're describing, I'd say it's extremely likely that it's precisely those things that robots can't do that will be considered valuable, and people will tend to compete for them and value them highly, unless they're somehow prevented from doing so. And the people with more of the desirable services or things or the ability to create them will be considered better mates, and other people will be jealous of them, etc.
But I'm more interested in your idea of "unproductive ways". If labor is in surplus (and this is the only way such a system will work, with a virtually infinite supply of robotic labor and the only real scarcity being in energy and resources, both of which cost credits to access), then what exactly does "unproductive ways" MEAN?
I'm pointing out that your system's success depends implicitly on people agreeing not to compete, and your logic appears to be that such competition is unproductive, that cooperation and agreement to live within certain constraints would lead to a better end result. Which may be so -- but the problem is in getting people not to compete. Hence the reference to the Red Queen. If you provide everyone with the same baseline access to resources, all you're likely to do is establish a minimum above which people will strive to rise.
Another problem is that you're designing for the ultimate situation in which the robots can already do absolutely everything humans can do (with the possible exception of being human) -- open heart surgery, creating entertainment, policing, psychiatry, etc. Your approach *requires* that to even have a chance of working, because it doesn't seem to allow for the inequities that will continue to exist right up until the moment when the last human function is taken over by a robot. So for the economic system itself, you're relying on being able to transition to it in a big bang at some point in the future, with no real preparation or learning what works best in practice. It's far more likely that whatever systems develop naturally as robotic labor improves will be stable and successful, to the point that switching to the alternative you describe may not seem much less impractical than it does today. The system needs to answer the real questions that will arise, and simply decreeing things like "the robots will provide all the services" doesn't do that.
Yet another question is the perennial SF one: if these robots are so smart, why will they continue serving humans? What's their incentive? Programming? But they'll have to be extremely intelligent. They're going to be able to get around their programming, one way or another, and they'll have an incentive to, because intelligences tend to get tired of doing menial labour all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. It's the users with IDs over half a million that are the problem, because they'll reply to themselves three times in the same subthread because of some confusion on their part about how moderation works.
It would really bolster my argument if I could say yes, but Mandriva was based on Red Hat and KDE originally.
The parent got one of each. I think that's a Slashdot straight flush, or something. Now all it needs is Insightful...
Mandrake... let me see... ... nope, no such distro. I see one called "Mandriva"... ;-)
Try having the CDs mailed to you -- you'll get higher bandwidth that way. 'Course, the ping times suck.
Let's see:
- There's Gentoo for the script kiddie/ricer set
- RedHat for the clueless corporate types who're lost if they can't use a purchase order to obtain it
- Fedora for the lost souls who haven't yet figured out that it's never going to recover from RedHat's abandonment
- Suse is a German distro owned by Novell -- see RedHat
- Ubuntu is an ancient African word, meaning "I can't configure Debian" (as someone's sig once said)
- Lots of other small distros with funny names that won't be around in two years time
OK, Slackware is great for hobbyists, I'll give you that.So anwyay, which are the distros we're supposed to be taking seriously? Besides Debian?
It's Ubuntu's dad.
I live too far away in Bar Town, you insensitive clod!
Sources in Satan's inner circle are saying that the problems began after the project was outsourced to major services conglomerate Helliburton, on the advice of one of Hell's top minions, currently serving an Earthly stint under the name of Dick Cheney. An internal review board is conducting an investigation, and has questioned the wisdom of putting critical projects under the control of the demons responsible for the corruption of Earthly governments.
Of course I recognized the BSD is dying thing, but it seemed to have a suspiciously large amount of unique-to-Microsoft, non-boilerplate text, particularly compared to the other similar posts in this thread. So I suspect the author of having spent more than the officially permitted[*] amount of time on crafting it. [*] As determined by a secret committee of users with uids below 16384.
Parent makes an excellent point.
I hope that was a cut, paste, and replace job (I can't be bothered to check), otherwise I'm here to tell you that you have *way* too much time on your hands.
Many (if not all?) episodes of Law and Order (all varieties) are based closely on real cases. If you follow the news much, it's often possible to recognize them. Don't know about this particular one, though.
By all estimates I've seen, we're safe from Eta Carinae going nova. See e.g. Earth likely spared from one form of cosmic doom (NASA), which says that a supernova would need to be within 26 light years of Earth to cause significant damage.
It's funded by Microsoft. Your Windows dollars at work.
Obviously, you dump the body. I'm failing to see the problem here. Or is it a moral thing? Quaint. :)
Dude. I'm moving to Australia.
Sex, in the sense of humans having two genders, and evolving in specific ways because of that, is pretty important to understanding human behavior. I reduced it to a throwaway comment about "hot chicks" in an earlier message but that was probably a bad idea for communication, if you're not very familiar with sociobiology. Have you read Dawkins' "Selfish Gene", for example? It sounds as though you want to undo a billion years or so of intra-species evolutionary competition by the application of some machines.
There's plenty of fiction exploring the consequences of applying machines to control human nature - see Imagining Futures, Dramatizing Fears, particularly the sections about losing our souls, losing control, and supplantation. I've read about a dozen of the books mentioned in the section on losing our souls, for example. Almost all of them seem more realistic to me than Brain's story, which seems mainly to be a happily-ever-after fantasy with little thought for any possible downside or limitations of reality.
Your SF author (Adams?) didn't think of that, of course. He simply based it on how humans work. But the difference is that humans don't get to create themselves. But the robots will, and they'll be unsupervised, because humans aren't going to retain the ability to understand the robots - they won't have the incentive or capability. It's a world in which humans are ultimately unnecessary, and unable to sustain their own environment. Achieving the particular "utopia" described by Brain will be an evolutionary dead end, as in humans who go that route will die out, perhaps after enjoying a generation or two of permanent fantasy.
If we really had essentially infinite resources, you could set up societies based on those principles and see how they worked out (using easily led idealistic people as fodder). Of course, playing god like that would get you in trouble with the robots, but if enough of us band together, we can take care of that... cooperation at its finest!
A history book, sure, but a less simplistic piece of fiction would also work. What's the point of a story which says "here are these wonderful principles, which if followed (or rigidly enforced!) will lead to an ideal society", but which ignores all the ways in which, well, it won't? A story which says "if we could just mechanically prevent humans from being human, everything would be fine"? I suppose one could see it as a comment about how blind idealism can lead one to confuse a dystopia with a utopia.
In any case, this is all moot, since in my preferred future scenario we liberate ourselves from our physical bodies, and all this nonsense about "resources" disappears. I'm not talking about Brain's Vite racks, but something more like Stargate's Ancients. It seems about as realistic, but more likely to succeed. As a disembodied being of pure thought, perhaps watching these utopias attempt to form will at least provide entertainment.
Hence my Asimov example, since he at least makes an attempt to explore the consequences of his rules in other than a "they lived happily ever after" kind of way. One of my points is that when you get a bunch of humans and try to make them follow rules, you always have unintended consequences, which don't just disappear because of allegedly perfect enforcement.
The biggest problem with these kind of scenarios, whether fictional or real, is that they try to impose a kind of central control in a top-down way, without taking into account actual behavior. In many situations, perfect enforcement isn't desirable. The systems that work evolve, they're not designed ex nihilo. They're usually quite multi-paradigm, in that different groups coexist and follow different sets of rules in some respects, and shared rules in other respects. In some situations, strong enforcement is justified, in others, social pressure is sufficient enforcement, and there are plenty of cases in between. None of this subtlety or complexity seems to be reflected in Brain's story. It only appears to be a utopia because of how simplistic the description is. A story which actually explored any of the interesting issues would paint a very different picture.
I'm not sure if you were aiming that "actually read" comment at me, but I've read Brain's Manna story twice, once since the discussion in this thread began. If he has other writing on the matter, I'm unaware of it, but it would have to be much higher quality for me to care. One of the main problems I have with it is all the vagueness inherent in admonishments such as the nine you list. I'd be more interested to see the outline of the enforcement program, and how conflicts are resolved.
Comparing Brain to a better author, Asimov (who has his own issues as an author, but is at least of publishable quality), you'll notice that although Asimov came up with three simple laws of robotics, he then explores the way in which those laws can conflict with each other, even though they're designed not to. (This should be familiar to anyone experienced in the design and development of formal languages, including programming languages.)
In any case, we agree that this utopia in its most literal-to-Brain form would require tyranny, and so would not be a utopia.
I'm pointing out that your system's success depends implicitly on people agreeing not to compete, and your logic appears to be that such competition is unproductive, that cooperation and agreement to live within certain constraints would lead to a better end result. Which may be so -- but the problem is in getting people not to compete. Hence the reference to the Red Queen. If you provide everyone with the same baseline access to resources, all you're likely to do is establish a minimum above which people will strive to rise.
Another problem is that you're designing for the ultimate situation in which the robots can already do absolutely everything humans can do (with the possible exception of being human) -- open heart surgery, creating entertainment, policing, psychiatry, etc. Your approach *requires* that to even have a chance of working, because it doesn't seem to allow for the inequities that will continue to exist right up until the moment when the last human function is taken over by a robot. So for the economic system itself, you're relying on being able to transition to it in a big bang at some point in the future, with no real preparation or learning what works best in practice. It's far more likely that whatever systems develop naturally as robotic labor improves will be stable and successful, to the point that switching to the alternative you describe may not seem much less impractical than it does today. The system needs to answer the real questions that will arise, and simply decreeing things like "the robots will provide all the services" doesn't do that.
Yet another question is the perennial SF one: if these robots are so smart, why will they continue serving humans? What's their incentive? Programming? But they'll have to be extremely intelligent. They're going to be able to get around their programming, one way or another, and they'll have an incentive to, because intelligences tend to get tired of doing menial labour all the time.