Then you must not be very important if the company can survive an entire month without you.
Or else - if they're very, very clever indeed - they might have worked out some kind of a rota whereby employees with similar qualifications and expertise cover for one another's absence. Hmmmm... now how would that work... maybe if you need a minimum of four employees, if you possibly had five or six, then one of them at a time could go and have a week or two off. We might call it a "vacation", or a "holiday". Things might even go better when the employees occasionally got some rest & recreation.
Unless, of course, you subscribe to what Tim Lister and Tom De Marco (in their classic book "Peopleware") call the "Spanish theory of management". That's the one where managers vie with one another to extract the maximum value from their employees, and the one whose people suffer the most heart attacks wins. ("*He* didn't leave anything on the table, did he?")
"Without the ZIRP rates, the mortgages they lure people into, and the housing bubbles this creates, the amount of money circulating in our economies would shrink so much and so fast the whole shebang would fall to bits. "That’s right: the survival of our economies today depends [on] the existence of housing bubbles. No bubble means no money creation means no functioning economy". https://www.theautomaticearth....
"The US owes the world 453,000 tonnes of gold which is almost 3 times all the gold ever produced in history". https://goldswitzerland.com/th...
I well remember, many years ago, seeing a job advertisement in the British "Daily Telegraph". It was for a job at some college in Melbourne, and it ended along these lines:
"Accomodation provided at xyz - 85 miles from Melbourne (one hour's drive)".
Either that or there also wasn't any 'south vietnamese' government during the Vietnam police action, which was at the time heavily supported by the US, but just a conflict between North Vietnam and the US.
Nearly right. The "South Vietnamese" government was an illegal and illegitimate device conjured up by Washington to justify its violent intervention. There was a nation called Vietnam. After international talks, an election was scheduled for Vietnam. Washington decided that the Communists were certain to win the election, so it engineered a "rebellion" by a newly-invented entity called "South Vietnam". Insofar as it ever existed, South Vietnam must have seceded from Vietnam, just as Washington maintains Crimea wasn't allowed to secede from Ukraine.
Incidentally, lots of people are saying that the referendum through which Crimea returned to Russia was illegitimate. It's not often mentioned that, after the dissolution of the USSR in 1990, the people of Ukraine (including Crimea) were not consulted at all about the decision to declare a new nation called "Ukraine". If you consult the history books, you will find that there had NEVER before been a nation state called "Ukraine". It had always been part of Russia, except when it was conquered by the Turks or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
And the coup d'etat of 2014 which overthrew President Yanukovych was both violent and illegal - a fact which the present "acting" President Poroshenko has publicly admitted.
Thanks! If anyone is interested in reading a bit about the theory behind my point of view, the best place to start is David Graeber's magnificent "Debt: The First 5000 Years". You'll be chuckling within a few pages, and awed within the first 100.
You'll also be stunned at all the wrong beliefs that many people accept and take for granted. At the risk of further enraging those of other persuasions, I can reveal that one of Graeber's biggest ideas is that human beings naturally practice a form of "rough communism". Unless educated to do otherwise, we have a strong tendency to cooperate and help out. Here are a couple of choice extracts:
"After all, we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions – all of this we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make sense to think of this as a debt? After all, a debt is something that we could at least imagine paying back”.
“[Peter] Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him. The man objected indignantly: “’Up in our country, we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anyone say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs’. “The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began ‘comparing power with power, measuring, calculating’ and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt”.
“You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
I'll see you and raise you this:
"The busy man is never wise, and the wise man is never busy". - Lin Yutang
A lot of religious ideas and speculation can be explained by the "God of the Gaps" theory. That is, before human beings had acquired a worthwhile body of reliable scientific knowledge, interesting or scary things that were otherwise inexplicable were attributed to God. Like thunder and lightning, for instance. The more science has advanced, the more that kind of theological phenomenon has been squeezed out.
Much the same is true of philosophy. Since the Enlightenment or even before - say the time of Francis Bacon - science has been building up an increasingly large and fairly coherent body of reliable knowledge. That has irritated many philosophers, because the things they used to muse and pontificate about are now off limits - or, at least, explained by science to most people's satisfaction.
That's why, about a century ago, philosophy suffered an uncomfortable "fork". A lot of people who called themselves philosophers focused more and more tightly on an analysis of language and epistemology - for example, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a majority of 20th century British philosophers. Others saw this as an admission of defeat and confinement to mere analysis of words, and tried to aim higher. Karl Popper, for instance, tried to lay down rules for what scientists could, and could not, legitimately do.
So today, when they are so hemmed in by well-established scientific knowledge, some philosophers are delighted to find such promising topics as whether the universe is a simulation. It's not so very different from the preoccupation of the pre-Socratics who argued interminably about whether the world was ultimately made of water, air, earth, or the unknowable "apeiron". Not much progress, you might say; but then it's always been one of the delightful (or irritating, according to your temperament) aspects of philosophy that it never really comes to any final conclusions.
The remedy is in all our hands. Simply don't buy (or "buy") such products at all. The owners and managers of the corporations that sell them are in business for exactly one reason: to get as much of your money as quickly as possible, with an acceptably low risk of being imprisoned. (Technically known as "business").
If we all stopped buying Lexmark products we would soon be hearing less of this nonsense. And please don't tell me that all printer manufacturers (or even most of them) would join in solidarity with Lexmark. They are about as loyal to one another as a bunch of sharks.
"One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill". - Edward Abbey ("A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”)
You can never be sure how much of those effects is cultural, and how much is just plain old-fashioned stupidity. Back in 1976 or thereabouts I went into a shop in London (England) to buy an alarm clock/radio. Having found one I liked, with the added attraction of a 25% discount, I told a young shop assistant that I'd like to buy it.
The sticker price was £30, with a 25% discount. He got out a calculator, played around with it for a while, then announced that I had to pay £34.81. I had to call the manager to get it sorted out. The young fellow didn't understand that a discount meant "less", not "more". I'm not altogether convinced that he even understood that £34.81 was more than £30.
And I bet he never used a computer outside the store.
As I said in an earlier reply, it may entail some effort and spending a little money. In the scheme of things, buying a new sound card isn't necessarily a huge sacrifice. (Unless you are an aficionado and have a very expensive one, of course).
Another approach would be to buy a completely new computer specified for Linux from the ground up. It would be an investment, but how much money have most of us "invested" in computers to run various editions of Windows?
From now on I'll be running Windows in a virtual CPU I think.
The tipping point where it's worth getting everything I need working on Linux has arrived. I'm off to look for ScanSnap drivers.
Likewise! The interesting thing is that this may be true for a very large number of users. For years we have put up with sub-optimal results from successive editions of Windows, but because most of us have day jobs which are rather higher-priority, we lived with Windows as long as it sort-kinda worked.
But in the long term, or even the medium term - which Microsoft may be in the process of changing into the short term - we are going to be forced to change. Next time I want a new PC, which may not be for a year or two yet, I will probably go for one of the new AMD processors. As I have resolved never to "upgrade" beyond Windows 7, that will force me to go over to Linux as my standard everyday OS. There are no obstacles that I can't overcome with a few days of effort and a little (a very little) money. It's just that I never felt it was *quite* worth the effort or the money before.
But Clarke was on solid ground regarding the theoretical possibility of such things.
I strongly disagree. There is absolutely no sign as yet that it will ever be possible to create robot brains that understand such high abstractions as "harm", or indeed even "human being".
Oh dear. Like the other AC (or are you the same?) you don't seem to grasp that even if Asimov's laws failed to achieve their intended consequences, that has nothing to do with the fact that they could not be implemented anyway.
In other words, Asimov may have been interested in showing that the laws didn't accomplish what was intended. But they were also impossible.
One of the rules of hard science fiction is that the author must not introduce more departures from known scientific facts than absolutely necessary. Ideally, one departure should be the limit.
Asimov's "Positronic Brains" were a flat-out "deus ex machina". He assumed that the problems of both weak and strong AI would be solved; 50 years later neither has even been approached.
You haven't actually read Asimov's Robot stories, have you? If you had, you'd know that the implementation of the three laws of robotics was entirely irrelevant to the points he was trying to make.
I had read all of them - some several times - by 1965. When were you born?
It sounds like a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, which is very common in large corporations.
I had an experience that was similar in some respects, although (fortunately) nothing like as traumatic.
While working for a large multinational computer corporation many years ago, I had occasion several times to accompany the sales rep for the RAF on some of his calls. I was asked to make some presentations and to answer questions, and after a while the sales guy told me that the RAF loved my attitude and approach, and had asked if I could become his technical assistant. I replied that I'd be delighted to work with him and with such a great bunch of people as the RAF, and we thought that was that.
Until HR got involved. Apparently no position at that level could be filled without an HR inteview, and I met with a complete stranger who talked to me for about one hour. Then he told me immediately that I was wholly unqualified, and quite the wrong person for the job. My answers revealed that I was not very sociable, and more interested in "things" than in "people". That ruled me out for a presales job.
No one told the little HR man that his description of me was also a perfect fit for everyone whom I had met in the RAF. They, too, were all about technology and getting results. They revelled in technical specifications and discussions, and never wasted a moment on unnecessary social chit-chat. And they appreciated the fact that I knew my company's products and their capabilities almost as well as they understood their aircraft and procedures - unlike most of my colleagues whom they had met. (Including senior managers).
"The cells are separated by safety doors and the robot should not have been able to move. But it somehow reached Holbrook, and was intent on loading a trailer-hitch assembly part right where she stood over a similar part in another cell".
From a design/programming point of view, the key words are: "...the robot should not have been able to move. But it somehow reached Holbrook..."
"Should not". Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Sounds as though someone made a mistake designing the system. Which is easily done. Restoring a dead person to life is much harder, so robotic systems like this should be deployed with EXTREME caution. Any software involved should be subject to formal reviews at least as stringent as those applied to avionics software.
The term "human colleague" immediately reveals that the writer has no idea of what a "robot" is. The most important thing always to keep in mind is that a "robot" is a machine - or, more likely nowadays, a collection of machines. It is a tool, even if that tool is capable of a limited set of autonomous actions. The accidental death described in TFA is a perfect illustration of this vital principle. Maybe there should be signs ten feet tall prominently displayed on all walls in workplaces that use robots: "A ROBOT IS *NOT* A 'COLLEAGUE'!"
Mind you, this confusion has been inherent since the word was first coined. "The word 'robot' was first used to denote a fictional humanoid in a 1920 play R.U.R. by the Czech writer, Karel Capek but it was Karel's brother Josef Capek who was the word's true inventor". [Wikipedia] The word is derived from the Slavic language root meaning "work" or "worker", and strongly suggests that a robot is to some extent intechangeable with human workers. Of course, that is absolutely not the case.
Isaac Asimov confronted these issues head-on when he began writing science fiction stories about robots. His "Three Laws of Robotics", which essentially forbid any robot to harm a human being, are treated as indispensable in his stories. But Asimov blandly ignored the obvious fact that there is no known way to implement such laws, which incorporate high-level abstract notions and moral principles. Until robots become at least as intelligent and complex as human nervous systems, such commands cannot be implemented. And if they ever do, we will immediately face even more tremendous problems.
Why would you even see predictive data as a liberal/left wing thing?
Conservatives tend to believe "if ain't broke, don't fix it". That doesn't mean change and improvement should never happen, but you need to be very sure that the benefits will outweigh the drawbacks. Usually, that implies a lot of thorough testing.
Liberals/radicals/progressives (often lumped together as "left wing") are generally much more ready to leap into action and change things - often without much testing, and often a whole lot of things together (or in quick succession).
There is room for both kinds of thinking, and perhaps the best we can do is to have an ongoing debate between conservatives and progressives. If they compromise on most things, we will have progress that is not too fast and dangerous.
Most slashdotters are familiar with programming. In accordance with Robert Conquest's First Law of Politics, "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best", ask yourself: "When dealing with a large, complex software system some of whose effects are safety-critical, should we
A. Quickly decide on all the changes anyone would like to see, and try to implement them as soon as possible - without any up-front testing?
or
B. Carefully review and study the requests for change; determine which of them can be made without too much risk of serious consequences; work out a plan for (maybe) implementing some of the tougher requests later on; and then cautiously design and implement one feature at a time, testing thoroughly as we go?
Slashdot Mirror
Then you must not be very important if the company can survive an entire month without you.
Or else - if they're very, very clever indeed - they might have worked out some kind of a rota whereby employees with similar qualifications and expertise cover for one another's absence. Hmmmm... now how would that work... maybe if you need a minimum of four employees, if you possibly had five or six, then one of them at a time could go and have a week or two off. We might call it a "vacation", or a "holiday". Things might even go better when the employees occasionally got some rest & recreation.
Unless, of course, you subscribe to what Tim Lister and Tom De Marco (in their classic book "Peopleware") call the "Spanish theory of management". That's the one where managers vie with one another to extract the maximum value from their employees, and the one whose people suffer the most heart attacks wins. ("*He* didn't leave anything on the table, did he?")
"Without the ZIRP rates, the mortgages they lure people into, and the housing bubbles this creates, the amount of money circulating in our economies would shrink so much and so fast the whole shebang would fall to bits.
"That’s right: the survival of our economies today depends [on] the existence of housing bubbles. No bubble means no money creation means no functioning economy".
https://www.theautomaticearth....
"The US owes the world 453,000 tonnes of gold which is almost 3 times all the gold ever produced in history".
https://goldswitzerland.com/th...
I well remember, many years ago, seeing a job advertisement in the British "Daily Telegraph". It was for a job at some college in Melbourne, and it ended along these lines:
"Accomodation provided at xyz - 85 miles from Melbourne (one hour's drive)".
Either that or there also wasn't any 'south vietnamese' government during the Vietnam police action, which was at the time heavily supported by the US, but just a conflict between North Vietnam and the US.
Nearly right. The "South Vietnamese" government was an illegal and illegitimate device conjured up by Washington to justify its violent intervention. There was a nation called Vietnam. After international talks, an election was scheduled for Vietnam. Washington decided that the Communists were certain to win the election, so it engineered a "rebellion" by a newly-invented entity called "South Vietnam". Insofar as it ever existed, South Vietnam must have seceded from Vietnam, just as Washington maintains Crimea wasn't allowed to secede from Ukraine.
Incidentally, lots of people are saying that the referendum through which Crimea returned to Russia was illegitimate. It's not often mentioned that, after the dissolution of the USSR in 1990, the people of Ukraine (including Crimea) were not consulted at all about the decision to declare a new nation called "Ukraine". If you consult the history books, you will find that there had NEVER before been a nation state called "Ukraine". It had always been part of Russia, except when it was conquered by the Turks or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
And the coup d'etat of 2014 which overthrew President Yanukovych was both violent and illegal - a fact which the present "acting" President Poroshenko has publicly admitted.
Thanks! If anyone is interested in reading a bit about the theory behind my point of view, the best place to start is David Graeber's magnificent "Debt: The First 5000 Years". You'll be chuckling within a few pages, and awed within the first 100.
You'll also be stunned at all the wrong beliefs that many people accept and take for granted. At the risk of further enraging those of other persuasions, I can reveal that one of Graeber's biggest ideas is that human beings naturally practice a form of "rough communism". Unless educated to do otherwise, we have a strong tendency to cooperate and help out. Here are a couple of choice extracts:
"After all, we do owe everything we are to others. This is simply true. The language we speak and even think in, our habits and opinions, the kind of food we like to eat, the knowledge that makes our lights switch on and toilets flush, even the style in which we carry out our gestures of defiance and rebellion against social conventions – all of this we learned from other people, most of them long dead. If we were to imagine what we owe them as a debt, it could only be infinite. The question is: Does it really make sense to think of this as a debt? After all, a debt is something that we could at least imagine paying back”.
“[Peter] Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him. The man objected indignantly:
“’Up in our country, we are human!’ said the hunter. ‘And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anyone say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs’.
“The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began ‘comparing power with power, measuring, calculating’ and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt”.
“You eat a coffee for lunch,” the ad proclaims. “You follow through on your follow through. Sleep deprivation is your drug of choice. You might be a doer.”
I'll see you and raise you this:
"The busy man is never wise, and the wise man is never busy".
- Lin Yutang
http://moscowproject.org/
to keep up.
Oh, what a relief! For a moment there I thought Microsoft was going into the dairy business.
Since you are so obviously in favour of choice, for your lunch you have the following choices:
1. Shit sandwich
2. Vomit stew
3. Ground glass hash
Enjoy!
A lot of religious ideas and speculation can be explained by the "God of the Gaps" theory. That is, before human beings had acquired a worthwhile body of reliable scientific knowledge, interesting or scary things that were otherwise inexplicable were attributed to God. Like thunder and lightning, for instance. The more science has advanced, the more that kind of theological phenomenon has been squeezed out.
Much the same is true of philosophy. Since the Enlightenment or even before - say the time of Francis Bacon - science has been building up an increasingly large and fairly coherent body of reliable knowledge. That has irritated many philosophers, because the things they used to muse and pontificate about are now off limits - or, at least, explained by science to most people's satisfaction.
That's why, about a century ago, philosophy suffered an uncomfortable "fork". A lot of people who called themselves philosophers focused more and more tightly on an analysis of language and epistemology - for example, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a majority of 20th century British philosophers. Others saw this as an admission of defeat and confinement to mere analysis of words, and tried to aim higher. Karl Popper, for instance, tried to lay down rules for what scientists could, and could not, legitimately do.
So today, when they are so hemmed in by well-established scientific knowledge, some philosophers are delighted to find such promising topics as whether the universe is a simulation. It's not so very different from the preoccupation of the pre-Socratics who argued interminably about whether the world was ultimately made of water, air, earth, or the unknowable "apeiron". Not much progress, you might say; but then it's always been one of the delightful (or irritating, according to your temperament) aspects of philosophy that it never really comes to any final conclusions.
The remedy is in all our hands. Simply don't buy (or "buy") such products at all. The owners and managers of the corporations that sell them are in business for exactly one reason: to get as much of your money as quickly as possible, with an acceptably low risk of being imprisoned. (Technically known as "business").
If we all stopped buying Lexmark products we would soon be hearing less of this nonsense. And please don't tell me that all printer manufacturers (or even most of them) would join in solidarity with Lexmark. They are about as loyal to one another as a bunch of sharks.
"One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill".
- Edward Abbey ("A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”)
You can never be sure how much of those effects is cultural, and how much is just plain old-fashioned stupidity. Back in 1976 or thereabouts I went into a shop in London (England) to buy an alarm clock/radio. Having found one I liked, with the added attraction of a 25% discount, I told a young shop assistant that I'd like to buy it.
The sticker price was £30, with a 25% discount. He got out a calculator, played around with it for a while, then announced that I had to pay £34.81. I had to call the manager to get it sorted out. The young fellow didn't understand that a discount meant "less", not "more". I'm not altogether convinced that he even understood that £34.81 was more than £30.
And I bet he never used a computer outside the store.
Can they talk?
... all passengers will have to travel naked. Clothing can conceal bombs.
As I said in an earlier reply, it may entail some effort and spending a little money. In the scheme of things, buying a new sound card isn't necessarily a huge sacrifice. (Unless you are an aficionado and have a very expensive one, of course).
Another approach would be to buy a completely new computer specified for Linux from the ground up. It would be an investment, but how much money have most of us "invested" in computers to run various editions of Windows?
From now on I'll be running Windows in a virtual CPU I think.
The tipping point where it's worth getting everything I need working on Linux has arrived. I'm off to look for ScanSnap drivers.
Likewise! The interesting thing is that this may be true for a very large number of users. For years we have put up with sub-optimal results from successive editions of Windows, but because most of us have day jobs which are rather higher-priority, we lived with Windows as long as it sort-kinda worked.
But in the long term, or even the medium term - which Microsoft may be in the process of changing into the short term - we are going to be forced to change. Next time I want a new PC, which may not be for a year or two yet, I will probably go for one of the new AMD processors. As I have resolved never to "upgrade" beyond Windows 7, that will force me to go over to Linux as my standard everyday OS. There are no obstacles that I can't overcome with a few days of effort and a little (a very little) money. It's just that I never felt it was *quite* worth the effort or the money before.
I am appalled that this thoughtful and reasonable comment has been moderated down to -1. Maybe Slashdot is a waste of time.
But Clarke was on solid ground regarding the theoretical possibility of such things.
I strongly disagree. There is absolutely no sign as yet that it will ever be possible to create robot brains that understand such high abstractions as "harm", or indeed even "human being".
Oh dear. Like the other AC (or are you the same?) you don't seem to grasp that even if Asimov's laws failed to achieve their intended consequences, that has nothing to do with the fact that they could not be implemented anyway.
In other words, Asimov may have been interested in showing that the laws didn't accomplish what was intended. But they were also impossible.
One of the rules of hard science fiction is that the author must not introduce more departures from known scientific facts than absolutely necessary. Ideally, one departure should be the limit.
Asimov's "Positronic Brains" were a flat-out "deus ex machina". He assumed that the problems of both weak and strong AI would be solved; 50 years later neither has even been approached.
You haven't actually read Asimov's Robot stories, have you? If you had, you'd know that the implementation of the three laws of robotics was entirely irrelevant to the points he was trying to make.
I had read all of them - some several times - by 1965. When were you born?
It sounds like a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, which is very common in large corporations.
I had an experience that was similar in some respects, although (fortunately) nothing like as traumatic.
While working for a large multinational computer corporation many years ago, I had occasion several times to accompany the sales rep for the RAF on some of his calls. I was asked to make some presentations and to answer questions, and after a while the sales guy told me that the RAF loved my attitude and approach, and had asked if I could become his technical assistant. I replied that I'd be delighted to work with him and with such a great bunch of people as the RAF, and we thought that was that.
Until HR got involved. Apparently no position at that level could be filled without an HR inteview, and I met with a complete stranger who talked to me for about one hour. Then he told me immediately that I was wholly unqualified, and quite the wrong person for the job. My answers revealed that I was not very sociable, and more interested in "things" than in "people". That ruled me out for a presales job.
No one told the little HR man that his description of me was also a perfect fit for everyone whom I had met in the RAF. They, too, were all about technology and getting results. They revelled in technical specifications and discussions, and never wasted a moment on unnecessary social chit-chat. And they appreciated the fact that I knew my company's products and their capabilities almost as well as they understood their aircraft and procedures - unlike most of my colleagues whom they had met. (Including senior managers).
That's essentially why big corporations fail.
You are jumping to conclusions that are not supported by evidence.
And, ironically, so are you.
Damn straight. I couldn't agree more. Perhaps this is the time for Britain do decide that enough is enough, and put up a stand for human decency.
"The cells are separated by safety doors and the robot should not have been able to move. But it somehow reached Holbrook, and was intent on loading a trailer-hitch assembly part right where she stood over a similar part in another cell".
From a design/programming point of view, the key words are: "...the robot should not have been able to move. But it somehow reached Holbrook..."
"Should not". Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Sounds as though someone made a mistake designing the system. Which is easily done. Restoring a dead person to life is much harder, so robotic systems like this should be deployed with EXTREME caution. Any software involved should be subject to formal reviews at least as stringent as those applied to avionics software.
The term "human colleague" immediately reveals that the writer has no idea of what a "robot" is. The most important thing always to keep in mind is that a "robot" is a machine - or, more likely nowadays, a collection of machines. It is a tool, even if that tool is capable of a limited set of autonomous actions. The accidental death described in TFA is a perfect illustration of this vital principle. Maybe there should be signs ten feet tall prominently displayed on all walls in workplaces that use robots: "A ROBOT IS *NOT* A 'COLLEAGUE'!"
Mind you, this confusion has been inherent since the word was first coined. "The word 'robot' was first used to denote a fictional humanoid in a 1920 play R.U.R. by the Czech writer, Karel Capek but it was Karel's brother Josef Capek who was the word's true inventor". [Wikipedia] The word is derived from the Slavic language root meaning "work" or "worker", and strongly suggests that a robot is to some extent intechangeable with human workers. Of course, that is absolutely not the case.
Isaac Asimov confronted these issues head-on when he began writing science fiction stories about robots. His "Three Laws of Robotics", which essentially forbid any robot to harm a human being, are treated as indispensable in his stories. But Asimov blandly ignored the obvious fact that there is no known way to implement such laws, which incorporate high-level abstract notions and moral principles. Until robots become at least as intelligent and complex as human nervous systems, such commands cannot be implemented. And if they ever do, we will immediately face even more tremendous problems.
Why would you even see predictive data as a liberal/left wing thing?
Conservatives tend to believe "if ain't broke, don't fix it". That doesn't mean change and improvement should never happen, but you need to be very sure that the benefits will outweigh the drawbacks. Usually, that implies a lot of thorough testing.
Liberals/radicals/progressives (often lumped together as "left wing") are generally much more ready to leap into action and change things - often without much testing, and often a whole lot of things together (or in quick succession).
There is room for both kinds of thinking, and perhaps the best we can do is to have an ongoing debate between conservatives and progressives. If they compromise on most things, we will have progress that is not too fast and dangerous.
Most slashdotters are familiar with programming. In accordance with Robert Conquest's First Law of Politics, "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best", ask yourself: "When dealing with a large, complex software system some of whose effects are safety-critical, should we
A. Quickly decide on all the changes anyone would like to see, and try to implement them as soon as possible - without any up-front testing?
or
B. Carefully review and study the requests for change; determine which of them can be made without too much risk of serious consequences; work out a plan for (maybe) implementing some of the tougher requests later on; and then cautiously design and implement one feature at a time, testing thoroughly as we go?