No because the driver is supposed to remain alert and watching the road and so remains responsible.
That is NOT how product liability works. He would be liable for any reasonably foreseeable use of the product and even for negative outcomes he could not foresee. It may not matter at all if he warns the passenger to remain alert. Most likely any case would be held to the strict liability standard which means intent to harm is irrelevant.
Unless the thingy is 98%+ safe it _is_ 100% crap for normal purposes.
"98%+ safe" is incredibly unsafe for an automobile presuming you are using any reasonably standard measure of safety like deaths per 100 million miles traveled. That means that it would get into an accident once every 50 miles! For reference current human driven vehicles in the US experience 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. That is 99.99999998% safe by that measurement. Any automated driving system will have to beat that number and beat it by a lot.
People tend to think that saying something is 99% successful is a good thing but in reality that can be a terrible outcome. A vehicle that was 98% safe under any reasonable measurement would be immediately and rightly labeled a death trap.
What about them? They don't have any weight against a judge ordering the information they are protecting to be produced.
In a jury trail can they say one of people on the jury works for an competing companies and we can't let them have the code?
Easily shown to be a lie in most cases and even if true jurors can be dismissed if they have a conflict of interest. Furthermore the judge can review and potential evidence and decide whether or not it should make it into the trial.
self driving cars can hide under an system of subcontractors to get out of liability / dump it on some small business unit that has no funds to payout damages in a big crash and no rights to any software / code / logs / etc and in a court case.
A properly motivated judge can bust through that nonsense in no time. There is a well established principle of beneficial ownership and related laws that put the responsibility exactly where it belongs.
This was always the endgame for Uber - drivers are costly and aren't available all the time.
Maybe but Uber's current model does have some huge advantages. 1) The pool of potential drivers is huge - basically anyone who owns a car in theory. 2) Uber doesn't have any capital costs when they use a "ridesharing" model. Buying your own taxis and operating them costs a LOT of money. 3) The economics of driverless taxis are still unclear both from a capital investment and from a legal framework standpoint, not to mention insurance costs. 4) Uber has been able to semi-plausibly deny that they are actually a taxi service and thus exempt from regulation as one. This shoots a car sized whole in that argument.
I'm not arguing for or against Uber using driverless cars but merely pointing out that it isn't all upside to Uber or anyone else.
That somewhat depends on who ends up owning the self-driving cars, doesn't it?
I suppose but Uber clearly owns these ones. Frankly I cannot imagine the insurance cost for a driverless car would be tenable for anyone but a large company like Uber any time soon. You raise some reasonable questions but frankly they are moot. If Uber is actually using driverless cars that they own then they are unambiguously a taxi service. Not that there was ever really any doubt about that fact before to anyone with a functioning brain.
This blows a HUGE hole in Uber's argument that they aren't a taxi service and shouldn't be regulated as one. They can't argue that self driving cars are independent contractors or that they are merely middlemen facilitating a service with an app.
Despite the greed of predatory capitalism at its ugliest shown by ISPs, there is a real bandwidth problem with mobile.
Which has nothing to do with net neutrality. That is not a valid argument for Comcast to be allowed to prioritize their NBC data over data from Google.
A fair, metered, user-controlled, pay for what you use, is the answer
Already have that on wireless. Basically everyone pays for some amount of data per month. How this data is prioritized should not be up to the wireless carrier. If I use more then I pay more. On wired it is a non-issue. There is no spectrum limitation there.
However, most of the low-skilled jobs are getting machined out of existence.
Demonstrably not true. WHICH jobs they do changes but there so far is no evidence of an end to low skill jobs. Unemployment rates are well within historical norms for all types of jobs even allowing for higher numbers of folks not actively looking. Which jobs low skilled people do is changing but they aren't going away. The problem they face is not automation but competition in a global market. If someone in china is willing to do the same job for half the price someone who hasn't learned any skills is going to have a hard time.
Even Chinese companies are moving towards robotics.
That's because Chinese wages are rising fast. It is exactly what you would expect to see happen. Automation makes sense once labor costs hit a certain tipping point for a given product. The average wage of a Chinese worker has been rising ridiculously fast so it should surprise no one that automation is starting to appear in places, specifically for high volume or high precision production. But China still has a labor surplus so jobs that would be automated in the US will not be automated anytime soon in China. Some business that formerly would have gone to China is not going elsewhere (like Vietnam) to places with lower wages. It's not a bad thing - it just means our friends in China are doing well for themselves.
We already see this in the U.S. Companies are complaining they cannot hire machinists or tool and die makers because those are not low skilled jobs any longer.
Speaking as someone who hires machinists semi-routinely, those NEVER were low skilled jobs. That is skilled labor and always has been. Perhaps you are confusing machinists with machine tenders (people that just load and unload parts). The reasons we sometimes have trouble in some places finding those people primarily is two fold. One is that in the US our education system tends to emphasize college instead of skilled trades and so their is in places a dearth of trained individuals. In places like Germany where trade schools are more well regarded this problem is substantially less. The second is that for certain labor intensive (as opposed to capital intensive) industries much of the labor has gone overseas. US manufacturing is alive and well but the sorts of products we make domestically are different than they were 40 years ago. That means the skill sets of the remaining machinists has had to shift somewhat. Some made the transition just fine, others not so much.
Now where I live (midwest) it isn't generally terribly hard to find a competent machinist. In other parts of the country it can be more challenging. Conversely where I live good programmers are a comparative rarity but in Silicon Valley you trip over them constantly. Various places enjoy a comparative advantage for particular skill sets.
Where they would have hired 5 workers in the past, they only need 1 to run the machines because the machines they use are so much more efficient now, but they also require higher skill levels
You don't work in a lot of machine shops do you? I have yet to be in a machine shop where one person is managing 5 busy machines simultaneously. Even two is often a stretch if they are reasonably busy. Machine shops where one person can juggle 5 machines are either doing parts with VERY long cycle times or the machine shop simply isn't very busy. Yes productivity has improved in manufacturing but let's not overstate how much.
Your argument sounds like the argument against cutting down a tree limb over a house. Gee, it's never fallen in the past 200 years, it won't fall now. Economic conditions fundamentally change over time.
Your argument presumes there is a tree there in the first place and I disagree with how you frame the is
You don't need to eliminate truck drivers to eliminate most of the jobs. If you can make a truck that can drive in fully automated mode on the interstate, then you can make a truck that has a bunk for the driver to sleep in and can go 24/7, with a driver only doing the parts near built-up areas. That could easily eliminate half (possibly more than half) of truck driving jobs.
Several responses to that. 1) None of that is going to happen within 5 years. We aren't even close technologically no matter what Elon Musk claims. 2) Even if the technology were ready today (which it isn't) it would take far longer than 5 years for it to roll out. A full rollout will cost hundreds of billions of dollars (probably trillions actually) and will take many years to accomplish. Economically it is going to take quite a long time to happen even if the technology is perfect from day one - which it won't be. 3) There are about 2.5-3 millions trucks that require a CDL on US roads (about 1.6 million tractor trailers). No more 800,000 are used for non-local operations. So no, you wouldn't eliminate even close to half of truck driving jobs even under the most idealistic assumptions just by somehow miraculously eliminating long haul trucking jobs.
I take it you've not used customer support recently. Remember all of those humans who used to follow a script in call centres? Now they're tier 2 support - a chat bot is tier 1 and if you divert from the script too much it will elevate you to tier 2.
That is a FAR cry from chatbots actually replacing 6% of the workforce. We already have that today and if Siri and Cortana are indicators of state of the art, those call center jobs are safe for many years yet to come.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor. Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs.
Sometimes they do but sometimes automation replaces skilled labor. To use a simple example, welding is a job that requires considerable skill and training to do well. You can replace a welder with a robot in cases where the economics make sense. You could in principle replace something like a radiologist with a computer program that reads xrays or replace a paralegal with an expert system. Vulnerability of a specific job to automation has less to do with skilled vs unskilled than it does the economics of that particular job. Automation comes into play when there are opportunities to decrease the unit cost of production. The limit on automation tends to be more economic than technical in a lot of cases.
Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs. Many times getting new jobs with less incomes. The past recession has taught us that.
In the short run this will be true for any job at any time. The entire industrial revolution has been people being pushed from jobs that were no longer necessary into new ones. That's been a good thing for over 200 years and there is no reason to believe that it will cease being a good thing any time soon. Yes sometimes this involves some near term difficulty for some of the work force. In places like the US that have enjoyed higher than average incomes for several decades it might involve a reversion to the mean on incomes compared with global competitors.
Many underachievers or low skill people will begin to see less and less opportunities. This poses a serious potential of increased demand for government assistance.
Umm, why do you think this is something new? That has ALWAYS been the case.
By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers.
Bullshit. I work with robots and automation in my day job. This is a complete fabrication. We are not going to eliminate truck drivers within 5 years. End of story. Will not happen. The technology just isn't even close to being there yet. Even if it was ready today (which it isn't) it would take a decade at minimum to roll it out. No business is going to throw out a perfectly functional truck to buy an expensive self driving truck just because one became available.
The notion that Siri is going to supplant customer service representatives in any meaningful way within 5 years is just stupid. Siri can't even deal with very basic questions that any human would easily understand. And yet they are basically arguing that it will be a substitute for a human within 5 years? Not buying it outside of some corner cases. I can't imaging an automated attendant being able to deal with a screwed up credit card statement. And let's say that somehow they magically pull that trick off. They think that will replace 5%+ of the workforce in under 5 years? Hogwash. Just complete nonsense.
Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.
Umm, what? Some idiot thinks Siri has anything remotely to do with the technology in self driving cars? That is the biggest hand waive I've seen in many a year. We've had Siri and similar technologies for about 5 years and they are no where close to being ready to replace humans in any meaningful numbers. And those technologies have essentially nothing to do with the technologies that would be involved in physical automation.
Not true. If I am audio chatting with a friend, I want packets delivered in milliseconds. But if I am running a torrent in the background, anytime in the next hour or so is good enough. It would be nice to be able to set my own preferences.
No it really wouldn't. Maybe you are technologically adept enough to make sane decisions. Most people are not. My mother doesn't even know what a torrent is much less what priority it should receive. Furthermore the moment you put a control like that in, companies with an economic interest in seeing their traffic prioritized will bend heaven and earth to get it adjusted in their favor. Don't for a moment believe that they would not.
Basically you are naively thinking this would be some innocuous control used only by well informed end users with economically interested companies politely deferring to whatever the users want. The real world doesn't work that way.
Whats is wrong with "A" technology? It is a technology if it solves a problem.
This appears to be a technological solution to a social problem and those rarely work well. Net neutrality is only a problem because certain companies feel their economic self interest should be more important than the good of the overall system or the needs/wants of the end user.
I actually agree with what this solution does. No one will care that their netflix packets are prioritized lower than their voice packets, since netflix streams and voice needs to be near real-time. Same thing for SSH sessions, page loads, or IM applications. They need faster response times than your Carbonite subscription or drop-box sync.
They will care when AT&T or Comcast starts a massive campaign to convince people to prioritize the services they favor over the ones that the user might otherwise choose. What, you think they'll sit idly on the sidelines over something that could make them huge amounts of money?
Doing it this way (but making it adjustable to the home user by doing something like... right-click on the application and set its "priority" on a scale or something) could be really useful, especially in bandwidth-limited deployments when your backup starts and kills your phone conversation.
This will fail the "mom test" horribly. I can see the family tech support calls coming in now. Shudder...
Can anyone explain to me why the phase of the moon would have anything to do with its gravitational pull?
The phase itself doesn't have any meaningful effect that I am aware of but the factors that cause the moon phase DO cause real changes in tides. Primarily orbit of the moon in relation to other bodies including the Earth. It isn't the phase per-se that causes the differences but the fact that phase and lunar orbit are closely related.
Some examples:
1) Tidal forces don't just come from the Moon. The Sun exerts significant tidal forces as well. The sum of these forces is dependent on the position (and by extension phase) of the Moon in its orbit. So you will tend to see the strongest tides during Full and New moons because the Sun and moon are (approximately) directly lined up.
2) Also the lunar orbit isn't circular so the moon will exert different amounts of tidal force on the Earth depending on its proximity. You will see different phases of the moon depending on its orbital position. Stronger tides occur when the moon is closest in its orbit to the Earth.
- The Moon, as mentioned by others is tidally locked with Earth. i.e.: It's always the same side facing Earth that means that Earth tidal stress is always "pulling" the exact same part. thus no change in this "pull" and therefore no directly-earth-caused tides on the moon.
Incorrect. The Earth is not a uniform sphere and it is not (yet) tide locked to the Moon. The Earth does exert tidal stresses on the Moon because the gravitational pull on the moon is not uniform.
- The Moon is a huge solid rock, it doesn't move much, whereas the Earth is pieces of solid crust all covering a molten mantle on which they more or less float (the "more of less" part being when they bump into each other, rub against each other, or one dives under another).
That very malleability of the Earth is a big part of what causes tidal stresses on the Moon. Remember that tidal forces are simply the results of unequal gravity between two bodies. If the bodies aren't uniform the tidal forces by definition cannot be zero. Tidal lock does not mean no tidal stresses. In fact I'm pretty sure it is tidal stresses that create and maintain the tidal lock.
Are you serious? The moon is in gravitational lock, so experiences no tidal stress.
Not actually true. Because Earth is not tidal locked to the moon, the rotation of the Earth will cause tidal stresses on the Moon because the Earth is not a uniform body, nor is the moon. Tidal locking does not equal no tidal stresses.
Have you not noticed that the same side of the moon always faces the earth?
Again not completely true. See lunar libration. The orbit of the moon is not circular, the Earth itself rotates and their respective axis of rotation are not identical. So we don't always see precisely the same face of the moon. We actually see about 59% of the moon's surface though not all at the same time.
OK, there is some tidal force from the sun, but the moon is also kind of small, and solid. No molten core, no ocean, no thin crust, no plate tectonics.
There also are some tidal forces from the Earth on the moon. The effect appears to be quite minor. Moonquakes are apparently a thing and apparently ARE caused at least in part by tidal interactions between the Earth and the Moon.
You are postulating that we knew how to cook food before our brain developed
We developed fire as a technology, used it for cooking and it has been a key factor in the CONTINUED growth of our brain. You misunderstand the argument completely. Modern humans look quite different than humans from around the time we started cooking food. Our brains had already evolved to the point we could figure out how to utilize fire. Cooking food created evolutionary pressures which accelerated certain aspects of our development as a species.
It wasn't that we started cooking food and BAM our brains suddenly developed any more than we developed antibiotics and our brains suddenly improved. The evolutionary effects took place over long periods of time. Nor was it the case that we developed our current big brains and only then learned how to cook food. Fire was a technology we learned to harness and it's evolutionary pressures have revealed themselves over millennia.
Sorry, but I honestly can't think of any sensible way how meat would occur as naturally cooked, at least not in quantities that would provide sustenance to a relevant amount of people for a long enough time that an evolutionary process could occur.
Big fail on understanding how evolution works. Something doesn't have to occur "naturally" to create an evolutionary pressure. Diseases, parasites, technologies, climate, predation, food sources, genetic mutation, selective breeding, politics, war, and much more can all create evolutionary pressures. Some of these are "natural" and others not so much. Evolutionary pressures do not have to occur by random chance. The dogs in my living room are there because of selective breeding by another species (us). Had nothing to do with any "natural" randomly occurring process out in the wild.
One of the reasons why a "Paleo-Diet" works, it takes your body a lot more investment of energy to digest uncooked food, hence you lose weight despite eating "the same" food.
The paelo-diet is another in a long line of diet fads popularized and marketed on cherry picked and often incorrect or unsupported ideas about health and nutrition. It was not developed based on scientific methodologies but instead some half baked ideas poorly supported by actual evidence at the time it was popularized starting around 2002. It draws on an appeal to nature and various conspiracy theories regarding the food industry. It's based on the notion that by eating what our ancient ancestors ate that we will be healthier. (Never mind the fact that the actual foods our ancestors ate are no longer available to us) When it works it has little to do with requiring a greater "investment of energy to digest uncooked food". That's a very convenient (but wrong) sound bite explanation for something which is FAR more complicated in reality.
There's no way an engineer comes up with a scheme like this on their own.
Even if he did there is no way to keep it a secret for long and it would be virtually impossible for management to not know about it. But engineering is pretty much a team sport with a product this complex and there would be no way it would be one rogue engineer. It simply doesn't work that way.
German companies are very meticulous, so I'm sure they have the exact email, timestamped to the millisecond, showing the management team telling the engineers to put the defeat device in.
More than likely this is true. It shouldn't be too hard to work their way up the food chain if the investigators are sufficiently motivated and funded.
WTF? why does some engineer get thrown under the VW bus?
Because they are the easiest to get to. Hopefully they'll work their way up the ladder. It's almost always hardest to get to the guys at the top and you usually have to start at the bottom and work up. He'll probably get a lighter sentence in exchange for giving up a bigger fish and then the bigger fish will get a deal to give up the next guy up the food chain. Eventually you get to the top but it takes a while and a lot of work.
It much easier to say that if you have money in the bank and no kids to feed.
Yes it is. But it's not impossible to do even if you don't have those obligations. You might have to live very frugally for a while but it can usually be done. I get that it might be tough for some people but sometimes the price to do the right thing is high. Don't live beyond your means and always have a plan in case things go south.
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No because the driver is supposed to remain alert and watching the road and so remains responsible.
That is NOT how product liability works. He would be liable for any reasonably foreseeable use of the product and even for negative outcomes he could not foresee. It may not matter at all if he warns the passenger to remain alert. Most likely any case would be held to the strict liability standard which means intent to harm is irrelevant.
Unless the thingy is 98%+ safe it _is_ 100% crap for normal purposes.
"98%+ safe" is incredibly unsafe for an automobile presuming you are using any reasonably standard measure of safety like deaths per 100 million miles traveled. That means that it would get into an accident once every 50 miles! For reference current human driven vehicles in the US experience 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. That is 99.99999998% safe by that measurement. Any automated driving system will have to beat that number and beat it by a lot.
People tend to think that saying something is 99% successful is a good thing but in reality that can be a terrible outcome. A vehicle that was 98% safe under any reasonable measurement would be immediately and rightly labeled a death trap.
What about NDA's / EULA's??
What about them? They don't have any weight against a judge ordering the information they are protecting to be produced.
In a jury trail can they say one of people on the jury works for an competing companies and we can't let them have the code?
Easily shown to be a lie in most cases and even if true jurors can be dismissed if they have a conflict of interest. Furthermore the judge can review and potential evidence and decide whether or not it should make it into the trial.
self driving cars can hide under an system of subcontractors to get out of liability / dump it on some small business unit that has no funds to payout damages in a big crash and no rights to any software / code / logs / etc and in a court case.
A properly motivated judge can bust through that nonsense in no time. There is a well established principle of beneficial ownership and related laws that put the responsibility exactly where it belongs.
This was always the endgame for Uber - drivers are costly and aren't available all the time.
Maybe but Uber's current model does have some huge advantages. 1) The pool of potential drivers is huge - basically anyone who owns a car in theory. 2) Uber doesn't have any capital costs when they use a "ridesharing" model. Buying your own taxis and operating them costs a LOT of money. 3) The economics of driverless taxis are still unclear both from a capital investment and from a legal framework standpoint, not to mention insurance costs. 4) Uber has been able to semi-plausibly deny that they are actually a taxi service and thus exempt from regulation as one. This shoots a car sized whole in that argument.
I'm not arguing for or against Uber using driverless cars but merely pointing out that it isn't all upside to Uber or anyone else.
That somewhat depends on who ends up owning the self-driving cars, doesn't it?
I suppose but Uber clearly owns these ones. Frankly I cannot imagine the insurance cost for a driverless car would be tenable for anyone but a large company like Uber any time soon. You raise some reasonable questions but frankly they are moot. If Uber is actually using driverless cars that they own then they are unambiguously a taxi service. Not that there was ever really any doubt about that fact before to anyone with a functioning brain.
This blows a HUGE hole in Uber's argument that they aren't a taxi service and shouldn't be regulated as one. They can't argue that self driving cars are independent contractors or that they are merely middlemen facilitating a service with an app.
How many times do we have to say that 1984 was not an instruction manual?
Evidently one more time as always.
Despite the greed of predatory capitalism at its ugliest shown by ISPs, there is a real bandwidth problem with mobile.
Which has nothing to do with net neutrality. That is not a valid argument for Comcast to be allowed to prioritize their NBC data over data from Google.
A fair, metered, user-controlled, pay for what you use, is the answer
Already have that on wireless. Basically everyone pays for some amount of data per month. How this data is prioritized should not be up to the wireless carrier. If I use more then I pay more. On wired it is a non-issue. There is no spectrum limitation there.
However, most of the low-skilled jobs are getting machined out of existence.
Demonstrably not true. WHICH jobs they do changes but there so far is no evidence of an end to low skill jobs. Unemployment rates are well within historical norms for all types of jobs even allowing for higher numbers of folks not actively looking. Which jobs low skilled people do is changing but they aren't going away. The problem they face is not automation but competition in a global market. If someone in china is willing to do the same job for half the price someone who hasn't learned any skills is going to have a hard time.
Even Chinese companies are moving towards robotics.
That's because Chinese wages are rising fast. It is exactly what you would expect to see happen. Automation makes sense once labor costs hit a certain tipping point for a given product. The average wage of a Chinese worker has been rising ridiculously fast so it should surprise no one that automation is starting to appear in places, specifically for high volume or high precision production. But China still has a labor surplus so jobs that would be automated in the US will not be automated anytime soon in China. Some business that formerly would have gone to China is not going elsewhere (like Vietnam) to places with lower wages. It's not a bad thing - it just means our friends in China are doing well for themselves.
We already see this in the U.S. Companies are complaining they cannot hire machinists or tool and die makers because those are not low skilled jobs any longer.
Speaking as someone who hires machinists semi-routinely, those NEVER were low skilled jobs. That is skilled labor and always has been. Perhaps you are confusing machinists with machine tenders (people that just load and unload parts). The reasons we sometimes have trouble in some places finding those people primarily is two fold. One is that in the US our education system tends to emphasize college instead of skilled trades and so their is in places a dearth of trained individuals. In places like Germany where trade schools are more well regarded this problem is substantially less. The second is that for certain labor intensive (as opposed to capital intensive) industries much of the labor has gone overseas. US manufacturing is alive and well but the sorts of products we make domestically are different than they were 40 years ago. That means the skill sets of the remaining machinists has had to shift somewhat. Some made the transition just fine, others not so much.
Now where I live (midwest) it isn't generally terribly hard to find a competent machinist. In other parts of the country it can be more challenging. Conversely where I live good programmers are a comparative rarity but in Silicon Valley you trip over them constantly. Various places enjoy a comparative advantage for particular skill sets.
Where they would have hired 5 workers in the past, they only need 1 to run the machines because the machines they use are so much more efficient now, but they also require higher skill levels
You don't work in a lot of machine shops do you? I have yet to be in a machine shop where one person is managing 5 busy machines simultaneously. Even two is often a stretch if they are reasonably busy. Machine shops where one person can juggle 5 machines are either doing parts with VERY long cycle times or the machine shop simply isn't very busy. Yes productivity has improved in manufacturing but let's not overstate how much.
Your argument sounds like the argument against cutting down a tree limb over a house. Gee, it's never fallen in the past 200 years, it won't fall now. Economic conditions fundamentally change over time.
Your argument presumes there is a tree there in the first place and I disagree with how you frame the is
You don't need to eliminate truck drivers to eliminate most of the jobs. If you can make a truck that can drive in fully automated mode on the interstate, then you can make a truck that has a bunk for the driver to sleep in and can go 24/7, with a driver only doing the parts near built-up areas. That could easily eliminate half (possibly more than half) of truck driving jobs.
Several responses to that. 1) None of that is going to happen within 5 years. We aren't even close technologically no matter what Elon Musk claims. 2) Even if the technology were ready today (which it isn't) it would take far longer than 5 years for it to roll out. A full rollout will cost hundreds of billions of dollars (probably trillions actually) and will take many years to accomplish. Economically it is going to take quite a long time to happen even if the technology is perfect from day one - which it won't be. 3) There are about 2.5-3 millions trucks that require a CDL on US roads (about 1.6 million tractor trailers). No more 800,000 are used for non-local operations. So no, you wouldn't eliminate even close to half of truck driving jobs even under the most idealistic assumptions just by somehow miraculously eliminating long haul trucking jobs.
I take it you've not used customer support recently. Remember all of those humans who used to follow a script in call centres? Now they're tier 2 support - a chat bot is tier 1 and if you divert from the script too much it will elevate you to tier 2.
That is a FAR cry from chatbots actually replacing 6% of the workforce. We already have that today and if Siri and Cortana are indicators of state of the art, those call center jobs are safe for many years yet to come.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor. Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs.
Sometimes they do but sometimes automation replaces skilled labor. To use a simple example, welding is a job that requires considerable skill and training to do well. You can replace a welder with a robot in cases where the economics make sense. You could in principle replace something like a radiologist with a computer program that reads xrays or replace a paralegal with an expert system. Vulnerability of a specific job to automation has less to do with skilled vs unskilled than it does the economics of that particular job. Automation comes into play when there are opportunities to decrease the unit cost of production. The limit on automation tends to be more economic than technical in a lot of cases.
Leaving them with less options for alternative jobs. Many times getting new jobs with less incomes. The past recession has taught us that.
In the short run this will be true for any job at any time. The entire industrial revolution has been people being pushed from jobs that were no longer necessary into new ones. That's been a good thing for over 200 years and there is no reason to believe that it will cease being a good thing any time soon. Yes sometimes this involves some near term difficulty for some of the work force. In places like the US that have enjoyed higher than average incomes for several decades it might involve a reversion to the mean on incomes compared with global competitors.
Many underachievers or low skill people will begin to see less and less opportunities. This poses a serious potential of increased demand for government assistance.
Umm, why do you think this is something new? That has ALWAYS been the case.
By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the U.S., starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers.
Bullshit. I work with robots and automation in my day job. This is a complete fabrication. We are not going to eliminate truck drivers within 5 years. End of story. Will not happen. The technology just isn't even close to being there yet. Even if it was ready today (which it isn't) it would take a decade at minimum to roll it out. No business is going to throw out a perfectly functional truck to buy an expensive self driving truck just because one became available.
The notion that Siri is going to supplant customer service representatives in any meaningful way within 5 years is just stupid. Siri can't even deal with very basic questions that any human would easily understand. And yet they are basically arguing that it will be a substitute for a human within 5 years? Not buying it outside of some corner cases. I can't imaging an automated attendant being able to deal with a screwed up credit card statement. And let's say that somehow they magically pull that trick off. They think that will replace 5%+ of the workforce in under 5 years? Hogwash. Just complete nonsense.
Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.
Umm, what? Some idiot thinks Siri has anything remotely to do with the technology in self driving cars? That is the biggest hand waive I've seen in many a year. We've had Siri and similar technologies for about 5 years and they are no where close to being ready to replace humans in any meaningful numbers. And those technologies have essentially nothing to do with the technologies that would be involved in physical automation.
Not true. If I am audio chatting with a friend, I want packets delivered in milliseconds. But if I am running a torrent in the background, anytime in the next hour or so is good enough. It would be nice to be able to set my own preferences.
No it really wouldn't. Maybe you are technologically adept enough to make sane decisions. Most people are not. My mother doesn't even know what a torrent is much less what priority it should receive. Furthermore the moment you put a control like that in, companies with an economic interest in seeing their traffic prioritized will bend heaven and earth to get it adjusted in their favor. Don't for a moment believe that they would not.
Basically you are naively thinking this would be some innocuous control used only by well informed end users with economically interested companies politely deferring to whatever the users want. The real world doesn't work that way.
Whats is wrong with "A" technology? It is a technology if it solves a problem.
This appears to be a technological solution to a social problem and those rarely work well. Net neutrality is only a problem because certain companies feel their economic self interest should be more important than the good of the overall system or the needs/wants of the end user.
I actually agree with what this solution does. No one will care that their netflix packets are prioritized lower than their voice packets, since netflix streams and voice needs to be near real-time. Same thing for SSH sessions, page loads, or IM applications. They need faster response times than your Carbonite subscription or drop-box sync.
They will care when AT&T or Comcast starts a massive campaign to convince people to prioritize the services they favor over the ones that the user might otherwise choose. What, you think they'll sit idly on the sidelines over something that could make them huge amounts of money?
Doing it this way (but making it adjustable to the home user by doing something like... right-click on the application and set its "priority" on a scale or something) could be really useful, especially in bandwidth-limited deployments when your backup starts and kills your phone conversation.
This will fail the "mom test" horribly. I can see the family tech support calls coming in now. Shudder...
Can anyone explain to me why the phase of the moon would have anything to do with its gravitational pull?
The phase itself doesn't have any meaningful effect that I am aware of but the factors that cause the moon phase DO cause real changes in tides. Primarily orbit of the moon in relation to other bodies including the Earth. It isn't the phase per-se that causes the differences but the fact that phase and lunar orbit are closely related.
Some examples:
1) Tidal forces don't just come from the Moon. The Sun exerts significant tidal forces as well. The sum of these forces is dependent on the position (and by extension phase) of the Moon in its orbit. So you will tend to see the strongest tides during Full and New moons because the Sun and moon are (approximately) directly lined up.
2) Also the lunar orbit isn't circular so the moon will exert different amounts of tidal force on the Earth depending on its proximity. You will see different phases of the moon depending on its orbital position. Stronger tides occur when the moon is closest in its orbit to the Earth.
- The Moon, as mentioned by others is tidally locked with Earth.
i.e.: It's always the same side facing Earth that means that Earth tidal stress is always "pulling" the exact same part. thus no change in this "pull" and therefore no directly-earth-caused tides on the moon.
Incorrect. The Earth is not a uniform sphere and it is not (yet) tide locked to the Moon. The Earth does exert tidal stresses on the Moon because the gravitational pull on the moon is not uniform.
- The Moon is a huge solid rock, it doesn't move much, whereas the Earth is pieces of solid crust all covering a molten mantle on which they more or less float (the "more of less" part being when they bump into each other, rub against each other, or one dives under another).
That very malleability of the Earth is a big part of what causes tidal stresses on the Moon. Remember that tidal forces are simply the results of unequal gravity between two bodies. If the bodies aren't uniform the tidal forces by definition cannot be zero. Tidal lock does not mean no tidal stresses. In fact I'm pretty sure it is tidal stresses that create and maintain the tidal lock.
Are you serious? The moon is in gravitational lock, so experiences no tidal stress.
Not actually true. Because Earth is not tidal locked to the moon, the rotation of the Earth will cause tidal stresses on the Moon because the Earth is not a uniform body, nor is the moon. Tidal locking does not equal no tidal stresses.
Have you not noticed that the same side of the moon always faces the earth?
Again not completely true. See lunar libration. The orbit of the moon is not circular, the Earth itself rotates and their respective axis of rotation are not identical. So we don't always see precisely the same face of the moon. We actually see about 59% of the moon's surface though not all at the same time.
OK, there is some tidal force from the sun, but the moon is also kind of small, and solid. No molten core, no ocean, no thin crust, no plate tectonics.
There also are some tidal forces from the Earth on the moon. The effect appears to be quite minor. Moonquakes are apparently a thing and apparently ARE caused at least in part by tidal interactions between the Earth and the Moon.
You are postulating that we knew how to cook food before our brain developed
We developed fire as a technology, used it for cooking and it has been a key factor in the CONTINUED growth of our brain. You misunderstand the argument completely. Modern humans look quite different than humans from around the time we started cooking food. Our brains had already evolved to the point we could figure out how to utilize fire. Cooking food created evolutionary pressures which accelerated certain aspects of our development as a species.
It wasn't that we started cooking food and BAM our brains suddenly developed any more than we developed antibiotics and our brains suddenly improved. The evolutionary effects took place over long periods of time. Nor was it the case that we developed our current big brains and only then learned how to cook food. Fire was a technology we learned to harness and it's evolutionary pressures have revealed themselves over millennia.
Sorry, but I honestly can't think of any sensible way how meat would occur as naturally cooked, at least not in quantities that would provide sustenance to a relevant amount of people for a long enough time that an evolutionary process could occur.
Big fail on understanding how evolution works. Something doesn't have to occur "naturally" to create an evolutionary pressure. Diseases, parasites, technologies, climate, predation, food sources, genetic mutation, selective breeding, politics, war, and much more can all create evolutionary pressures. Some of these are "natural" and others not so much. Evolutionary pressures do not have to occur by random chance. The dogs in my living room are there because of selective breeding by another species (us). Had nothing to do with any "natural" randomly occurring process out in the wild.
One of the reasons why a "Paleo-Diet" works, it takes your body a lot more investment of energy to digest uncooked food, hence you lose weight despite eating "the same" food.
The paelo-diet is another in a long line of diet fads popularized and marketed on cherry picked and often incorrect or unsupported ideas about health and nutrition. It was not developed based on scientific methodologies but instead some half baked ideas poorly supported by actual evidence at the time it was popularized starting around 2002. It draws on an appeal to nature and various conspiracy theories regarding the food industry. It's based on the notion that by eating what our ancient ancestors ate that we will be healthier. (Never mind the fact that the actual foods our ancestors ate are no longer available to us) When it works it has little to do with requiring a greater "investment of energy to digest uncooked food". That's a very convenient (but wrong) sound bite explanation for something which is FAR more complicated in reality.
Silly question. Why telnet? Because it is cheap and they don't give a crap if you get hacked. Not their problem if you do.
We're talking about someone who was complicit in a fraud. I see no value in sympathy. They could easily have refused to be a part of this crime.
There's no way an engineer comes up with a scheme like this on their own.
Even if he did there is no way to keep it a secret for long and it would be virtually impossible for management to not know about it. But engineering is pretty much a team sport with a product this complex and there would be no way it would be one rogue engineer. It simply doesn't work that way.
German companies are very meticulous, so I'm sure they have the exact email, timestamped to the millisecond, showing the management team telling the engineers to put the defeat device in.
More than likely this is true. It shouldn't be too hard to work their way up the food chain if the investigators are sufficiently motivated and funded.
WTF? why does some engineer get thrown under the VW bus?
Because they are the easiest to get to. Hopefully they'll work their way up the ladder. It's almost always hardest to get to the guys at the top and you usually have to start at the bottom and work up. He'll probably get a lighter sentence in exchange for giving up a bigger fish and then the bigger fish will get a deal to give up the next guy up the food chain. Eventually you get to the top but it takes a while and a lot of work.
It much easier to say that if you have money in the bank and no kids to feed.
Yes it is. But it's not impossible to do even if you don't have those obligations. You might have to live very frugally for a while but it can usually be done. I get that it might be tough for some people but sometimes the price to do the right thing is high. Don't live beyond your means and always have a plan in case things go south.