You bring up an interesting point, the context realistically matters more than the word. Fed Mein Kampf, it should be able to tell that "Jew" is being used pejoratively. On the other hand, even if the system has a systematic bias to favor Christians, it should also be able to tell that Christian words are being used negatively in an anti-Christian tract. This shows that the bias actually is a real problem from an AI training perspective, because the bias would lead to more negative scores for language about the Jewish people (positive works wouldn't be rated as positively and negative works would be rated even more negatively), while it would lead to more positive scores for language about Christianity (positive works would be considered even more glowing, while negative works would be rated more positively than they actually are). Given a mildly negative comment about Christianity, it might even consider it a positive remark!
It seems to me that they're likely still doing relatively poorly even with more context. You would think that the phrase "I am (a/an) X." would get a strong positive sentiment boost in most cases, since you are self-identifying as X, which likely means you have a positive opinion of X. One of the few exceptions to that might be something potentially self-effacing like "I'm a dog.", which I am surprised was thought by the system to be neutral. Maybe the system picked up on these self-effacing cases and thinks that minority affiliation is self-effacing too? That's worrying from an AI training perspective, since this clearly isn't correct. More likely though, it just picked up on the simpler [short response] + [this word] = [pejorative] (which is yet again an issue, because many reasonable short responses without clear positive markers could be very positive).
I'd say your sister's rule should be the default rule, and you should only deviate from it if you're very confident it's an exception, since it's socially much safer to accept a gift than reject it (as you point out, you can't always tell the difference between these scenarios). You should only turn down a gift if you realize there's something attached that you don't want (for instance, they "like" you and want a deeper relationship you're not interested in, they are bribing you, etc.). The best indicator that something is secretly attached is if the value of the gift is way out of proportion to your current relationship and it's gift they specifically got for you (as opposed to something valuable they want to get rid of, like event tickets they can't use). Even if you mess up here, they might get upset when you don't uphold your end of the "deal", but in all seriousness that's not really your fault, as a freely given gift is still a gift. They made the mistake, not you, and nobody is going to think poorly of you for resisting pressure from one individual to do something you never actually agreed to (since if they made you agree to something up front it would be an exchange, not a gift). The issue should work itself out in the long run as long as you don't sway from your position, since they'll eventually give up.
Also, if you do like the person back and they just gave you a poor gift, you still want to accept the gift instead of turning them down. Turning them down at that juncture is basically telling them you don't like them back. Unless you really don't like/don't want to deal with someone, accidentally sending that signal could be much more catastrophic than accidentally confusing someone by accepting the gift.
A good general solution is to politely accept the gift and later donate it to charity (or sell it, or throw it out as appropriate). Once you donate it, it's not your problem anymore, and someone else will surely find a use for it (after all, any decent gift should have some value). The gift giver will almost certainly never know (the most likely counter-scenario here is if the gift giver suddenly asks why you aren't using their gift...if someone you're not intimate with does this then their behavior is out of line (I would respond "I don't have it with me right now", since this is technically true and then leave it at that, though if they continue to be pushy about it then tell them it's none of their business); however, if you are intimate it's a good idea to store unwanted gifts in a nice location for at least a few weeks or months before getting rid of them so that if this comes up you can start using their gift for a while before putting it back in storage and maybe eventually eliminating it, and if this comes up frequently you should really consider if the relationship is worth this kind of hassle). One more thing to note here is that if the gift has inseparable personal information, you should just throw it out, preferably shredding/destroying it first. In general though, donating unwanted gifts to charity a simple, all-purpose solution for these situations, with very low risk of real social problems arising from it.
As an added bonus, it's one less thing in your life. That unwanted gift took up space in your trunk the whole time and spent fuel transporting it around, so it became a minor burden in your life and it would have been better to get rid of it.
You can also tell people you're trying to be more minimalistic to simplify your life, and most people will be sympathetic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... You might even find you like the lifestyle.
Writing all this definitely proves your main point. There's an insane number of rules, exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions. Most of us are lucky to have a co-processor that's hard-wired to work through these issues. I feel like mine is faulty sometimes, but I seem to do fine overall.
The other thing I was thinking of while writing this is that without the
If proof of stake works, it will fix the fundamental scalability issues that cryptocurrencies currently struggle with. It could also implode spectacularly if people figure out how to game the system or figure out a major exploit. It makes sense that he'd be very confident in his course of action, but only time will tell whether he's right or not.
Etherium is going to move to a whole new way of handling transactions (proof of stake) that will blow the current methods out of the water...if it works safely. Proof of work is not particularly scalable, but proof of stake is.
As you can see from these coindesk news stories, this planned transition is old news, so I don't get why these stories aren't mentioning it.
The parent is talking about what people think, not what the actual situation is. It's easy for someone who doesn't do their research to think it's profit-motivated, even if it isn't.
So the vaccine and climate science deniers take the easy path. Until the 10 years of record temperatures (each year sets the record for highest temperature) or a Measles outbreak kills someone they love.
If the local populace's reaction in Liberia and Sierra Leone to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 is any indication, many people won't get the message even after a serious outbreak kills many in their community.
The lend lease program was a much bigger contribution than you're making it out to be. In particular, the contribution the US made to the Soviets was both immensely valuable and poorly repaid.
Overall, a little under $11 billion in goods (in old timey dollars) was shipped to the USSR and only three quarters of $1 billion were ever repaid. These supplies were around 4%-7% of the USSR's total production during the war.
There were many crucial industrial and logistical supplies sent, such as locomotives, trucks, etc. I think one of the most important single supplies (or at least a huge unsung hero of the war) was shoes and leather, of which over 5 million boots and something like 100k tons of additional leather were delivered to the USSR. Would the Soviet economy have been able to support their military logistics needs without these supplies? Would Soviet soldiers have gone without boots in the brutal Russian winter? Presumably these supplies were chosen for the program because the Soviets were having a hard time producing enough of them domestically, so it's hard to tell if they could have produced them or if they would have had to basically do without. They definitely would have had to re-purpose their economy to fill these needs (ex. making trucks and locomotives instead of tanks).
It's hard to tell for sure, but I think it's very likely to have been an important factor, especially since some of the biggest battles like Stalingrad and Kursk were fairly close contests and were late enough in the war for the supplies and resultant economic investment to have mattered. Without the lend lease program, the Soviets may have been something like 5%-20% weaker (my speculation, but 5% is very conservative) at that point in the war, so it's quite possible that the Germans could have prevailed strategically even if they didn't really stand a chance in our timeline, especially if the economic investment (producing more domestically thanks to the early capital investment) and logistic (getting produced supplies to the troops) boosts from the program's supplies were high.
From a US perspective, this was definitely worth it despite the lack of repayment, especially if the USSR would have collapsed without assistance. These supplies likely saved many US and Anglo lives in the long run.
While I agree with your overall sentiment (push on through and adapt to the change), I worry about one major issue.
Socialist policies of the type that completely provide for an individual can very easily strip a person of their dignity. A person on welfare continues to live at the pleasure of the state. Without some sort of gainful employment for a person to take pride in, many will lose hope and self-determination. With complete control of a person's income, the state has exceptional power over the affairs of that person and the state has great leverage to dictate how they live. Welfare is a prison, though perhaps a very nice one.
Make-work employment does not help. As make-work it is by definition purpouseless and thus not gainful. Such work would help few psychologically and would prevent any sort of alternate improvement in this area such as some people finding pride and purpose in volunteer work. Worse, it makes the nice prison of welfare into a form of slavery, but without even the usefulness of labor that some slaves took pride in. It is the worst kind of human dedigration. It also does nothing to abate the total power of the state over the individual. I am totally opposed to make-work employment.
Unfortunately, solving this problem will be very difficult. My main thought for the moment is the formation of an "ownership society", where each person owns capital and acquires the majority of their income from the production of capital. People tend to take pride in ownership, and those who need something more hands-on can do volunteer work, creative work, or aspire to work in a job that can't be automated. The state will definitely play a role in this, providing a safety net for those who lose their fortunes to bad luck and can no longer sustain themselves, but their job would be to give such individuals a "jump start" to get them going again and not to hold on to them indefinitely.
However, I feel that the initial creation of this situation will be very difficult (though I am sure it would work given we are in a situation where capital replaces most/all human labor). The main problems are the process of grading between our current situation and the new one without destroying the economy that we require to move us toward the new situation while still taking care of those who fall through the cracks early...and competing ideas, such as state welfare, make-work, not changing anything, and others.
There might also be better solutions that I haven't thought of. I'd be happy to hear them, but they must address these issues if we are to avoid a dystopian future for the majority of the population.
The sun outputs 384.6*10^24W. Of that 174.0 PW reaches the Earth directly. Of that 89.0 PW reaches the ground and is absorbed by it. The gross efficiency of modern solar power facilities is around 2.6%, so that cuts it down to 2.314 PW. Split over 10 billion people, that leaves each person on Earth with a maximum energy budget of 231.4 MW. If we capture only 1% of that energy (as clearly we don't want to cover the Earth in solar panels), it comes out to 2.3MW of sustainable energy per person (23.14 TW total compared to 16 TW today). At 1MW, a car is less than half of this budget.
Additionally, each person is not travelling by car 100% of the time. On average people drive close to 3 hours a day, so it only takes 12.5% of the above figure. That means that we would only use about 5.4% of our energy budget on transport. Now of course, this assumes everyone is driving alone in 1MW personal vehicles, which isn't true, there's lots of larger vehicles as well as carpooling. However, the real figure is unlikely to exceed the 20% we use on transportation currently, and personal transport is only a portion of that pie.
Finally, my initial assumptions are fairly conservative. We could gather more than 1% of the Earth's energy by building more solar or using other sources such as wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. We could capture energy that would normally miss the Earth entirely by building solar arrays in space. Increases in efficiency could improve the situation as well. Lastly, although it's not as sustainable as fusion power from the sun, fission power from the Earth could dramatically boost our total energy budget for a very long time.
My point is that there's plenty of sustainable energy for personal transport. It really is sustainable.
One last note...I'm not saying this will be easy either. There's a lot of challenges to be overcome and infrastructure to be built to make sustainable energy a reality. In particular the power grid needs a great deal of rework. There may even be some changes that many people do not like (such as longer refuelling times or having to use communal batteries). However, I don't see any insurmountable obstacles to keeping up our present energy usage while switching to sustainable sources.
DDT is villianized far out of proportion these days. Although admittedly they are both POPs, setting it rhetorically alongside Agent Orange as though they are the same is absurd.
DDT's carcinogenic properties are not really all that serious. We expose ourselves to more carcinogenic substances all the time, such as gasoline fumes. These minor effects were played up by DDT's opponents back in the day to scare people into accepting a DDT ban. Similarly, the acute toxicity is minor. To my knowledge, there's only one case where someone died from consuming DDT, and in that case the DDT may have contained other harmful chemicals.
On the other side of the coin, DDT saved millions of lives by eliminating malarial mosquitoes and other harmful insects. It easily saved more lives than it took.
Agent Orange on the other hand has caused awful damage in the areas where it was used extensively. If DDT was even close to as dangerous as it was made out to be by its opponents, then the present day impacts would be like a worldwide version of the Agent Orange boondoggle...times 1000.
Several comments here have criticized the NIF for being a poor candidate for practical fusion power. Ok, fair enough.
This misses the point. The NIF is not supposed to produce power or even produce a method that will be able to produce power. The NIF's real contribution is research. Achieving ignition is a grand scientific goal, a huge and difficult challenge that drives research and engineering to new heights, much like going to the moon.
Why did we go to the moon? In JFK's famous speech he said: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
JFK was an unusually forward thinking fellow, and he was absolutely right. While the Apollo program was extremely expensive and the accomplishment of its primary goal did not substantially change our lives for the better, the program more than paid for itself in spin-off technologies that were only created due to needs that would not arise under normal circumstances, but nonetheless turned out to have terrestrial applications. We are better off for undergoing the Apollo program than if we hadn't.
It's not easy to motivate the public to back challenging projects such as these despite their long term benefits, so they must wrap themselves in a popular cause. The Apollo program was only possible because it could be framed in terms of "beating" the Soviet Union. JFK's rhetoric about taking on hard scientific challenges would have had little impact on the public without the competition that the Soviets provided during the space race. The entire program cost $145 billion in 2007 dollars, more than the present day GDP of the entire state of Kansas, or enough to run the National Institute of Health for over 4 years, and all this back at a time when the national GDP was only a fraction of its current level. This frankly absurd amount of money would have certainly been earmarked for more mundane uses had Sputnik not shaken up the nation a few years earlier, and had this occured instead of the Apollo program then we would be worse off today. Smaller projects like the NIF must also wrap themselves in popular causes like energy research in order to get funded, even if that makes little practical sense.
Now that's not to say that every large scientific program is worthwhile. Some projects are too easy, and thus don't push the boundaries enough, and so these projects should directly produce something useful whenever possible. This was one of the many problems with the Space Shuttle program, which was overly focused on easy goals which it achieved poorly and at a high cost (though the Shuttle program too spawned many interesting spin-offs, so in the long run it too may have been worth it, but that's a topic for another time). Some projects are way too hard for us to handle now or could only be realistically solved in a destructive manner. For instance, it would be crazy to think we could get a manned flight to Jupiter in the next decade, and the only real solution to such a challenge would be to build an Orion-style spacecraft. These insurmountable challenges can be broken up into smaller pieces, for instance by tackling more reasonable challenges like getting to Mars first or building a permenant habitation on the Moon before thinking about Jupiter.
Is the NIF worth it? I can't say for sure. However, the fact that they're running into problems actually makes the program more likely to pay off in the long run. Why? Well according to our theory, this should work...but it doesn't. Why doesn't it work? This is a mystery that could lead to important practical physics breakthroughs, and the research and engineering needed to properly investigate this mystery could lead to valuable spin offs and new research directions that could open totally new doors.
Fully recycling plastic and producing synthetic oil and oil products is expensive, but quite possible. Once extracting oil becomes expensive, we'll lean on and improve these technologies more and more.
Material isn't the problem, energy is...and really that's not too big of a problem between nuclear, coal, natural gas, solar, and eventually fusion.
The main potentially troublesome thing is our environmental impact (especially if we don't use nuclear and thus end up leaning heavily on coal), as this issue is a textbook tragedy of the commons situation, and we humans are terrible at dealing with those.
Well...compared to 1712's standards, we have a lot fewer problems like the kinds you mentioned.
The unfortunate thing about such problems is that they will always exist. 120 Americans died of starvation in 2004. That's substantially less than one-in-a-million, but it still happened. Getting enough food to not starve is not a problem for even the poorest of the poor in the US (getting killed by yourself is over 4000 times more likely), and yet 120 people managed to fall through the cracks and starve anyway.
The two specific problems you mentioned are even tougher to deal with because they involve some amount of lifestyle choice. If someone is dying from self-imposed starvation, you can legitimately strap them into a hospital bed and feed them back to health. If they resist then it is clearly attempted suicide and the state is allowed to restrain them for their own good. However, if someone is living out on the street or in the wilderness, can you really force them into living in a shelter or a home? If someone refuses to see a doctor about the early symptoms of some curable disease, can you really force them into a hospital? What if nobody notices until it's too late?
As strange as these scenarios may seem, I've actually met people who fit them perfectly. While I was in college, I met a fellow student who seemed ordinary enough. He was studying to be a Japanese translator and was quite a nice guy. As it turned out though, he was homeless throughout much of the year (which I discovered when he asked me to store some of his furniture in my apartment until he could find a new place in a few months). When I asked him why he went homeless, he said it was much cheaper than renting an apartment and he had gotten quite good at getting what he needed. I can even sympathize with his decision, as I put most of my pathetic college-era income into keeping a roof over my head and essentially ended up as a studious shut-in (I once decided to celebrate the end of a particularly important series of final exams by going out to eat pizza with my friends, what a luxury!). Faced with the same situation, he simply chose a more exciting option.
The other person is my alcoholic uncle. He too was homeless for many years despite considerable financial support from his mother, and even today he has a great deal of pride about his homeless experiences. Based on what he's told me as well as what I know about him, I feel he was primarily motivated by his love for exploration (and getting into trouble), as well as reducing his costs so he could buy more booze and cigarettes with the money he had. At the moment though, my main concern for him is the other problem you mentioned. He's a long time smoker and alcoholic, and now that he's getting old his health is deteriorating fast. I'll spare you the details, but l'll just say that blood is involved in many of his symptoms. Despite this, he refuses to go to the doctor for even a basic checkup. He mainly cites money as the cause, but this is BS as I offered to completely cover his expenses and he still refused (it's not like he didn't believe me either, as I was in a position to seriously do it at the time). My family refuses to force him into it (and I had to leave the situation behind due to a new job in another state), so the problem continues to fester and grow and will probably end with him being rushed into the emergency room...or worse.
In both of these examples, they weren't even suffering from any obvious mental illness. My college friend made a conscious choice to be homeless and last I checked he was doing great and has probably graduated by now and moved on to better things. My uncle is of sound mind and although his body is messed up after decades of self-abuse, he's not crippled either. I'm certain that a professional psycological evaluation on the two of them would not come up with anything serious.
I'm not saying that there aren't real problems here, or that it's all the fault of the people suffering from these problems...or that money isn't the issue (
Leaving aside any discussion of whether or not this is new and its possible impact on the thorium fuel cycle...there's an even bigger story here that nobody seems to have mentioned.
If someone could make fissionable Uranium easily and covertly from Thorium using only readily available equipment, what's stopping them from just doing it? We don't need a thorium fuel cycle for someone with nefarious plans to use this information.
We've only been able to keep uranium and its byproducts under control because commercially viable reserves are concentrated in a few relatively stable countries and the amount of naturally-occurring uranium that needs to be mined to make a bomb is huge compared to the amount that goes into the bomb itself. Thorium is readily available worldwide in massive quantities, most of which is the right isotope. Controlling the Thorium supply is going to be a nightmare.
It seems to me that this blows the lid totally off of the proliferation situation. Pretty much anyone with the resources needed to build an atomic bomb could do this to get the material they need. How can we possibly hope to keep this situation under control?
So it's just like the DRM arms race between content companies and technically capable pirates that has caused collateral damage (to legitimate users) along the way?
The main issue here is that we're using different definitions of education. I'm more specifically thinking of a liberal education. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education In particular, when I say that someone has an education I'm really talking about the state that a liberal education strives to create.
So training is bad education? Every talent can be reduced to (possibly multiple simultaneous) walks of a graph, wisely choosing from a set of alternatives at each node.
No, it's a compliment to education. It's what makes one fluent at whatever they're doing. For instance, when I typed that last sentence, my training in the English language allowed me to realize that outcome quickly and efficiently. Without my training, I'd be constantly stopping to look up words and remember grammatical rules. It would be slow and tedious. Training is critical for any function that isn't purely instinctual. Most of what you learn in any realistic educational system is training.
However, learning to think independently is much harder. If one cannot think independently, one can't learn to think independently by themselves. Worse yet, it can't be externally trained. How can one learn to be an independent person when there is a teacher (or book) to be dependent upon? The best a teacher can do is set up an environment that is likely to lead to independent thought. Even in the best situation there is no guarantee it will work. In fact, this is true even assuming we're deterministic machines like computers, because questions about independent thought gets into self-referential territory and proving stuff about it becomes undecidable (or intractable if you want to get really technical, as we don't have infinite memory...but the size of your tree for a human is exponential with an input number somewhere around the number of neurons in the human brain...easily more than 2^100,000,000,000 which is way more than the 10^80-ish atoms in the universe).
a general knowledge of "geology" is education
A general knowledge of geology is (extensive) training.
By the way, I have known several scientists and programmers with a relatively low capability for independent thought. It's much rarer than in the general populace, but it's still there. Also, I've noticed that certain national educational systems create large numbers of graduates that can't think independently. I was recently in a training program with nearly 40 programmers from such an educational system and it was almost comical how few of them could do anything substantial without external support.
On the contrary, some (not all!) sports played at high level require a sharp mind: to analyse the field, to predict, to respond at the right moment, etc. It is the cunning, unpredictable players who will shine.
This is true, but I used it as an example because: 1. most people call sports preparation training and 2. it's undeniable that it takes a LOT of training to succeed at a sport.
OK, but good training encourages self-improvement. Back to the tree-walk, the organisation of learning ("learning how to learn") is itself a talent which can be learned. Looking at education this way, is it not just another subject to be trained? Components of this training are part of all good "training"/"education" in any field.
Learning to learn is another one of those tricky self-referential skills (how do you learn how to learn in the first place when you don't know how to learn?), so it can't be deterministically trained. The best we can do is set up the environment so it happens most of the time.
In an egalitarian society, there is certainly no "upper class" from which to differentiate a "non-upper class", and education is not only offered to the bright.
I guess that's true in the strictest sense, but if so there is no such thing as an egalit
I'd say that education and training really are two very different things. Training is specific to an individual task or set of tasks while education is broader and has more to do with cultivating independent thought.
In this example, the training is specific to earthquake detection. In theory, you could train someone to just detect earthquakes given a set of input data (from seismometers and such) and leave them worthless at anything else geology-related. In practice though the specific training rests on top of a deeper education (at least for most scientific and analytical jobs). As another example, in programming when you learn a new technology or language you're training in those things, despite the fact that this training rests upon a deeper education.
It should also be noted that a lot of what we commonly consider "education" is actually training in disguise. For instance, arithmetic and calculus are just methods to produce a desired result. When we spend time learning how to do these methods by hand, we're doing training. It's no different from training to do a sport, as the end goal is to be able to fluently perform a desired action so you can perform on command. Even highly educated individuals spend more time training than being educated.
Education is more meta and has more to do with the effective use of training (including training one does not personally have) as well as some even more meta concerns (which is to say less practical stuff that enriches you as a human being, but is really only interesting internally). From a practical standpoint, an educated person can effectively organize their own training to great effect as well as (hopefully) organizing the training of others into a cohesive whole (though leadership has its own required training).
The "class-obsession" you talk about has more to do with how training and education are used in practice. Most non-upper class students receive the minimum required education, with most of their "education" being composed of training. In egalitarian societies, a real education is additionally offered to the brightest non-upper class students, as they are very useful when they are properly educated. I should know, I was born into a working class family and received both classes of education at different times.
A bit off topic, this is why I'm worried about the economic and social impact that weak AI will have. We're able to train computers now and only those with a real education will have value to add as weak AI becomes smarter and more common. Since a large percentage of the populace is only marginally educated, this does not bode well.
I'm a proponent of nuclear power and I'm a bit skeptical about the practicality of renewables in the short term, but I believe that in the long run solar is going to dominate the energy scene. The amount of energy the Earth recieves from the sun is staggering, and the amount of solar energy we could generate if we created huge sun-orbiting solar power plants is pretty much unimaginable in modern terms (the sun outputs enough energy to sustain a population of 24 trillion billion humans at present rates of consumption). As such, I have no doubt that we will one day be able to meet our basic needs using solar power. It would be conservative to predict that eventually we will be drawing in massively more energy from solar power than we consume today from all sources.
In particular though, solar is the most direct and efficient power source that does not suffer from Jevons Paradox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox If we perfected fission and fusion power, we'd simply amp up our power usage massively. Cheaper energy means we can afford to do more with it. Suborbital commuter flights? Launching city-sized spacecraft? Colonizing the solar system and maintaining the colonies with regular shipments of supplies? Not a problem...but with such massive energy consumption, we'd eventually face yet another energy crisis. Although it may seem rediculous now, supplies of easily obtainable, high yield fusion and fission fuel would probably be depleted to worrying levels within the timeframe of a human lifetime.
This doesn't apply to the sun. You can't mine the sun, it's simply too hot. Plus, it's already a fantastic fusion power plant, so there's no need to try it. The only "downside" is that the sun has a production limit, which is fairly stable and not easily increased. However, this is really a blessing in the long run as we can't consume more than what the sun gives off in a given time period, leading to long-term stability. Therefore solar is the only notable power source in the long run.
That said, non-solar nuclear still has an important place. In the short term, fission can help reduce our reliance on coal during the gap between fossil fuels and solar. In the medium term, nuclear has an important place in space colonization and turning the sun into a giant fusion power plant. In the long run, it may still have a place as a high-density energy storage medium. The point here is that the energy we use doesn't just vanish. What we make out of it can have a big impact. We wouldn't have gotten to the point where we could make the leap to nuclear and solar without fossil fuels...or at the very least it would have taken much longer to get where we are now. The use of "consumable" nuclear power will jumpstart our next big push.
The biggest problem with developing software is that any non-trivial system takes time to deliver regardless of the methodology, You can take time to properly spec out and design a bridge over a river because it'll be good for 50 years. But the world of software changes so fast that any system is obsolescent by the time it's done, and if you spend a few months specing/designing it's time for a redesign before you even start writing the code.
This is true most of the time, but there are a few shockingly old systems in places where high reliability is required. They tend to show up as controllers for things that last a long time (like nuclear power plants or airplanes), in work environments with a highly conservative culture (hospitals), or in places where uptime trumps many other concerns (financial backend or power grid calculations). In these cases, it's critical to treat software similarly to building a bridge you expect to last 50+ years, because you really have no idea how long someone is going to keep using it (and anyway, you really don't want it to fail even if it is new).
Of course, this kind of software represents a tiny percentage of all software. In most cases today, you're right. It certainly doesn't make sense to ensure that a new video game or office productivity feature is perfect if by cutting down on quality a bit we can get it to market faster. That said, you never know when your non-critical software might be used to make this kind of critical software. OSes and libraries are particularly likely to be pulled into such a project. Furthermore, the amount of critical software is likely to expand in the near future. A good example from the recent past is that back in the really olden days there weren't computers small, light, and cheap enough to put into aircraft to control their flight, but nowadays fly-by-wire is common. There aren't any 50 year old fly-by-wire aircraft because the first ones were built 40 years ago. How long will some people hold on to their early model self-driving cars? As computers become more cheap and ubiquitous, these issues will become more widespread.
Durability and reliability requirements are important to consider early in any project, and different answers will lead to the need for totally different approaches to developing the software.
I'm a different guy, readin's argument probably hasn't changed.
Nobody is perfect and neither are governments composed of imperfect people. People make mistakes, people do selfish and even evil things, and people are behind all of the decisions made by governments. Sometimes this is pretty direct (Stalin led the USSR pretty much directly during his reign) and other times this is filtered through lots of other people and laws (made by imperfect people).
For a large government, small imperfections are often magnified a million times and on the small scale will seem overwhelmingly massive. This isn't made any easier by the fact that large governments have to deal with *all* of the most ridiculous people and governments out there. For instance, the US can't just ignore North Korea. If we took a neutral stance towards NK, then we'd soon have American citizens (and others) trading with NK. Then soon we'd have US civilian hostages and a revitalized NK. What do we do to rescue those hostages? A more powerful NK would lead to NK's neighbors reacting. SK might consider a pre-emptive invasion and it might start its own nuclear program over fears that NK will have nukes and they won't. Japan would also likely decide that it can't rely on the US anymore and militarize. They would likely have nuclear weapons within a year. Who knows how China might react, as they've been allies with NK for a long time but they also seem tired of NK's BS and the reactions of SK and Japan will have a profound impact on their new stance. A big war between NK and somebody else is almost inevitable and the region might even spiral into a much bigger bloodier war between nuclear armed nations. Who's to blame? The US. What did we do? Nothing!
The US can't ignore the world like a small country can because our residual influence is so massive. This isn't unique to the US either, it applies to all really huge nations and nation blocs. We have to make choices, and some of them will be hard and the imperfect people making these hard decisions will inevitably mess things up.
The best we can hope for is high quality and ethical decisions more often. I think the US has a pretty decent track record in that regard compared to those with comparable influence. The Soviets and Chinese each outright murdered tens of millions, and we don't know how much more they quietly swept under the rug. The Axis powers did so much evil and killed so many people, they seem more like comic book villains than something real. The British Empire starved millions in the late 19th century (when there were a lot fewer people). The Mongol empire obliterated Baghdad and turned the whole region into a desert. The Roman republic and empire was built on slavery. etc. etc. It doesn't matter where you look, if there's a major power there's blood, corruption, exploitation...and lots of it.
When you make historical comparisons, the US isn't really so bad.
it didn't enter World War 2 because they need to stop the Nazi's, they did so because they were attacked by Japan, hell, the US didn't even declare war on Germany! Germany declared war on the US.
This still doesn't explain why the US spent the resources they did against the Nazis. Just because some far away country declares war on you doesn't mean you have to respond beyond protecting your borders. The US threw more resources into defeating the Nazis than the Japanese who they were worried might start knocking on their doorstep. It also does nothing to explain the lend-lease program. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-lease It's pretty clear that the US administration of the time had its sights set on the Nazis well before Pearl Harbor, and that attack simply gave them the excuse they needed to pull out the stops.
It is only by examining history can the US realise they can't use force to overthrow governments, they will only be fragi
In my opinion though, we shouldn't care so much about the sins of the past. Even an 18 year old in 1970 would be 60 today, and the vast majority of the people who made these decisions are dead or dying today. The USSR doesn't even exist anymore. Learning history is important because we don't want to repeat the bad parts, but we do a terrible disservice to ourselves when we use the past to excuse our present positions and actions.
I don't want to sound too negative, but your plan boils down to: A: Solve the problem of AI B: Program a visual cortex for your AI C: Give your AI a body
I suppose this is due to having practically zero time to explain yourself, but your ethics seems almost arbitrary. I can see one wanting to avoid military work due to the possibility that your work might kill people, but what's wrong with finance and medicine? Several other people in the thread have brought up medicine, but I haven't seen any defense of finance.
Now yes, I know that much finance work out there today is pretty nasty, especially stuff like HFT. That said, finance doesn't have to be unethical. It's not an inherently bad thing. At its core, finance is about bringing people together so they can do more together than they could do apart. Good investment changes lives for the better, and is much more reliable than charity because there are many more people willing to lend money than give it outright.
For instance, my mother is a small business owner, doing what she loves for a living. Without enough capital to have started her business, she never would have gotten off the ground and thus would be stuck in some dead end job she hates, and at this point we would have lost our home as my father's income fell dramatically soon after we moved here.
Not all finance work is unethical, it's just a matter of finding a financial institution that tries to do ethical work. I've heard some good things about the field of microfinance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfinance I'm not sure how HPC fits into that particular subfield, but I'd imagine the various microfinance players can use algorithmic work just like any other financial institution.
By the way...you will never find a job where you are not hurting people in some way. Military kills. Medicine has errors and experimentation. Finance must be hard on hopeless cases so others in need may be helped with limited resources and they need to support themselves somehow. Entertainment saps peoples' time and money. Engineering has failures, like bridge collapses and airplane crashes. Mining involves worker deaths, environmental damage, and often exploitation of locals. Agriculture massacres animals, puts bad things into peoples' bodies, and causes environmental damage. Academia comes pretty close to being harmless, but the things you think up may have massive implications (after all, atomic bombs came out of academia) and the resources you consume could help elsewhere. Even charities have administrative waste and need to constantly find people to extract money out of. It doesn't matter what the field is, you'll be doing harm to someone in some way. In this kind of situation, you can't focus excessively on the negatives...you have to look at the balance between the good you are doing and the bad you are doing. Ethically you should strive to have the most positive impact when both good and bad are taken into consideration.
One last thing, you also need to keep in mind that people naturally get paid better when they do unethical work for someone. Doing clearly unethical things is a downside for most people, so the market price for such work is higher in much the same way that the market price is higher for work that is undesirable for other reasons (like jobs where one is in danger or away from home for extended time periods). Lower worker supply drives up the price of labor. So don't look at the high wages given by those need you to do unethical things for them and think you can get paid the same for ethical work. Look for someone doing ethical work that can use your skills first and deal with wages later...they will be lower. If ethics are really important to you then you will be happier in such a job even at a lower wage. The feel-good of doing ethical work is part of your compensation.
In any case, if my argument didn't change your mind...what about working for one of the national laboratories? I was considering working for ORNL due to academic connections I had and they seem to pay a lot better than ordinary academia while doing lots of academic-type work. They also have amazing
While it may not be a advance in AI, it's still pretty amazing what they've managed to do with it. It's much like seeing the airplane advance from the Wright flyer to an early practical biplane. It may not be really new and it's not quite to the point where it starts really changing most lives, but it's a visible sign of what's to come in the near future.
I guess my point is that it takes time and effort to move from revolutionary ideas to practical demonstrations to products and Watson is a highly visible sign that we've made progress in this regard. Furthermore, that progress actually means something, as the work IBM has done on Watson is valuable in that they have certainly discovered many practical issues while creating Watson and their code can be reused in new systems that can make use of their approach. We don't yet know exactly what areas will find their approach valuable, but some areas do look promising. We'll see.
Similar to Watson but likely with a more noticeable and immediate impact is Google's self-driving car. I'm not entirely sure what AI is behind that project, but the practical things they've been able to do with it are simply amazing. Who would have expected that we'd have a working example of a self-driving car that could handle difficult conditions and share the road with human drivers 10 years ago?
I know that weak AI like this won't replace humans completely, as at the very least someone has to program them and set up their environment reasonably. However, AIs like Watson and Google's self-driving car demonstrate that this newest batch of AI can deal with far less structure than previously and this may be enough to replace a large number of human workers doing routine work today. Could the self-driving car replace millions of drivers? Could Watson-like systems replace many low-end information worker jobs? What other routine jobs might be on the chopping block in a few years once weak AI systems are developed for them? Most humans have routine jobs, so this could be a huge social and economic issue in the near future. AI advances could potentially put tens of millions out of work in the space of a decade or two, and this kind of rapid change would put enormous strain on our economy and society.
As for strong AI, I don't know how far away from it we are. We will definitely need some major AI breakthroughs to get there, so it could take quite some time. That said, it may be shockingly soon. For instance, if the Blue Brain project succeeds then we will have a strong AI of a sort by 2023. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_brain Furthermore, if we can realistically make a molecular-scale model of the human brain by then...then we'll have grossly more computing resources than required to make strong AI with other more efficient techniques. At that point, the real question is *when* we make the requisite AI breakthrough. The adoption of strong AI will make the issues surrounding weak AI look minor by comparison...
By the way, I don't think that human-level AIs need to be just like us. Something that is very different from us would be hard to understand and have a hard time understanding us, but I think it could have intelligence on par with our own or even superior to ours. I think such an AI could even interact, understand, and possibly even relate to us in some way without having our characteristics. As an example, humans relate to cats and dogs and vice versa despite some serious differences between our species. We can't even "see" the world in the same way as them, as our senses differ dramatically. Yet even though we don't share certain characteristics with our pets, most pet owners come to understand their differences and make accommodations vice versa. That said, I don't think we will be too interested in developing AIs that are too alien, as they will freak us out and seem dangerous, so our AIs will carry on many of our characteristics...and pass them on to their AIs and so on.
Rodney Brooks' approach to AI is interesting, and I'll be interested to see what emerges from it in the near future.
You're right that Watson by itself isn't going to replace humans, and we're currently not that close to doing so, but despite everything you're saying Watson still represents a major accomplishment. An AI was able to answer a wide variety of natural language queries with an impressive success rate. Would this have even been possible 10 years ago? What new kinds of work will this lead to the automation of? It's not like you need full human generality for all jobs.
More important than the specific accomplishment though is the overall progress it represents. What goalposts will AI surpass next? Is there anything we can say for certain that an AI can't do?
By the way, why do you think that all AIs will always suffer from the frame problem? What makes humans so special? In particular, what if one made an AI by scanning a human brain and simulating it on a computer? Such a simulation would be an intelligent computer program. If this is possible, then why couldn't we develop an AI that avoids the frame problem? Sure, it might be very different from present-day AIs, but it should be possible. If this is not possible, then why not?
Slashdot Mirror
You bring up an interesting point, the context realistically matters more than the word. Fed Mein Kampf, it should be able to tell that "Jew" is being used pejoratively. On the other hand, even if the system has a systematic bias to favor Christians, it should also be able to tell that Christian words are being used negatively in an anti-Christian tract. This shows that the bias actually is a real problem from an AI training perspective, because the bias would lead to more negative scores for language about the Jewish people (positive works wouldn't be rated as positively and negative works would be rated even more negatively), while it would lead to more positive scores for language about Christianity (positive works would be considered even more glowing, while negative works would be rated more positively than they actually are). Given a mildly negative comment about Christianity, it might even consider it a positive remark!
It seems to me that they're likely still doing relatively poorly even with more context. You would think that the phrase "I am (a/an) X." would get a strong positive sentiment boost in most cases, since you are self-identifying as X, which likely means you have a positive opinion of X. One of the few exceptions to that might be something potentially self-effacing like "I'm a dog.", which I am surprised was thought by the system to be neutral. Maybe the system picked up on these self-effacing cases and thinks that minority affiliation is self-effacing too? That's worrying from an AI training perspective, since this clearly isn't correct. More likely though, it just picked up on the simpler [short response] + [this word] = [pejorative] (which is yet again an issue, because many reasonable short responses without clear positive markers could be very positive).
I'd say your sister's rule should be the default rule, and you should only deviate from it if you're very confident it's an exception, since it's socially much safer to accept a gift than reject it (as you point out, you can't always tell the difference between these scenarios). You should only turn down a gift if you realize there's something attached that you don't want (for instance, they "like" you and want a deeper relationship you're not interested in, they are bribing you, etc.). The best indicator that something is secretly attached is if the value of the gift is way out of proportion to your current relationship and it's gift they specifically got for you (as opposed to something valuable they want to get rid of, like event tickets they can't use). Even if you mess up here, they might get upset when you don't uphold your end of the "deal", but in all seriousness that's not really your fault, as a freely given gift is still a gift. They made the mistake, not you, and nobody is going to think poorly of you for resisting pressure from one individual to do something you never actually agreed to (since if they made you agree to something up front it would be an exchange, not a gift). The issue should work itself out in the long run as long as you don't sway from your position, since they'll eventually give up.
Also, if you do like the person back and they just gave you a poor gift, you still want to accept the gift instead of turning them down. Turning them down at that juncture is basically telling them you don't like them back. Unless you really don't like/don't want to deal with someone, accidentally sending that signal could be much more catastrophic than accidentally confusing someone by accepting the gift.
A good general solution is to politely accept the gift and later donate it to charity (or sell it, or throw it out as appropriate). Once you donate it, it's not your problem anymore, and someone else will surely find a use for it (after all, any decent gift should have some value). The gift giver will almost certainly never know (the most likely counter-scenario here is if the gift giver suddenly asks why you aren't using their gift...if someone you're not intimate with does this then their behavior is out of line (I would respond "I don't have it with me right now", since this is technically true and then leave it at that, though if they continue to be pushy about it then tell them it's none of their business); however, if you are intimate it's a good idea to store unwanted gifts in a nice location for at least a few weeks or months before getting rid of them so that if this comes up you can start using their gift for a while before putting it back in storage and maybe eventually eliminating it, and if this comes up frequently you should really consider if the relationship is worth this kind of hassle). One more thing to note here is that if the gift has inseparable personal information, you should just throw it out, preferably shredding/destroying it first. In general though, donating unwanted gifts to charity a simple, all-purpose solution for these situations, with very low risk of real social problems arising from it.
As an added bonus, it's one less thing in your life. That unwanted gift took up space in your trunk the whole time and spent fuel transporting it around, so it became a minor burden in your life and it would have been better to get rid of it.
You can also tell people you're trying to be more minimalistic to simplify your life, and most people will be sympathetic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... You might even find you like the lifestyle.
Writing all this definitely proves your main point. There's an insane number of rules, exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions. Most of us are lucky to have a co-processor that's hard-wired to work through these issues. I feel like mine is faulty sometimes, but I seem to do fine overall.
The other thing I was thinking of while writing this is that without the
He's expecting this change due to the planned switch-over to proof of stake:
https://www.coindesk.com/ether...
https://www.coindesk.com/ether...
https://github.com/ethereum/wi...
If proof of stake works, it will fix the fundamental scalability issues that cryptocurrencies currently struggle with. It could also implode spectacularly if people figure out how to game the system or figure out a major exploit. It makes sense that he'd be very confident in his course of action, but only time will tell whether he's right or not.
Why do none of these stories contain any information about the real reason he's so confident in his assertions?
https://www.coindesk.com/ether...
https://www.coindesk.com/ether...
https://github.com/ethereum/wi...
Etherium is going to move to a whole new way of handling transactions (proof of stake) that will blow the current methods out of the water...if it works safely. Proof of work is not particularly scalable, but proof of stake is.
As you can see from these coindesk news stories, this planned transition is old news, so I don't get why these stories aren't mentioning it.
The parent is talking about what people think, not what the actual situation is. It's easy for someone who doesn't do their research to think it's profit-motivated, even if it isn't.
So the vaccine and climate science deniers take the easy path. Until the 10 years of record temperatures (each year sets the record for highest temperature) or a Measles outbreak kills someone they love.
If the local populace's reaction in Liberia and Sierra Leone to the Ebola outbreak in 2014 is any indication, many people won't get the message even after a serious outbreak kills many in their community.
The lend lease program was a much bigger contribution than you're making it out to be. In particular, the contribution the US made to the Soviets was both immensely valuable and poorly repaid.
Overall, a little under $11 billion in goods (in old timey dollars) was shipped to the USSR and only three quarters of $1 billion were ever repaid. These supplies were around 4%-7% of the USSR's total production during the war.
There were many crucial industrial and logistical supplies sent, such as locomotives, trucks, etc. I think one of the most important single supplies (or at least a huge unsung hero of the war) was shoes and leather, of which over 5 million boots and something like 100k tons of additional leather were delivered to the USSR. Would the Soviet economy have been able to support their military logistics needs without these supplies? Would Soviet soldiers have gone without boots in the brutal Russian winter? Presumably these supplies were chosen for the program because the Soviets were having a hard time producing enough of them domestically, so it's hard to tell if they could have produced them or if they would have had to basically do without. They definitely would have had to re-purpose their economy to fill these needs (ex. making trucks and locomotives instead of tanks).
It's hard to tell for sure, but I think it's very likely to have been an important factor, especially since some of the biggest battles like Stalingrad and Kursk were fairly close contests and were late enough in the war for the supplies and resultant economic investment to have mattered. Without the lend lease program, the Soviets may have been something like 5%-20% weaker (my speculation, but 5% is very conservative) at that point in the war, so it's quite possible that the Germans could have prevailed strategically even if they didn't really stand a chance in our timeline, especially if the economic investment (producing more domestically thanks to the early capital investment) and logistic (getting produced supplies to the troops) boosts from the program's supplies were high.
From a US perspective, this was definitely worth it despite the lack of repayment, especially if the USSR would have collapsed without assistance. These supplies likely saved many US and Anglo lives in the long run.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.rbth.com/business/...
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/f... (contains the amounts and value of stuff sent; while not the original source, I know it was pulled from a US government report after the war, which I had found earlier)
While I agree with your overall sentiment (push on through and adapt to the change), I worry about one major issue.
Socialist policies of the type that completely provide for an individual can very easily strip a person of their dignity. A person on welfare continues to live at the pleasure of the state. Without some sort of gainful employment for a person to take pride in, many will lose hope and self-determination. With complete control of a person's income, the state has exceptional power over the affairs of that person and the state has great leverage to dictate how they live. Welfare is a prison, though perhaps a very nice one.
Make-work employment does not help. As make-work it is by definition purpouseless and thus not gainful. Such work would help few psychologically and would prevent any sort of alternate improvement in this area such as some people finding pride and purpose in volunteer work. Worse, it makes the nice prison of welfare into a form of slavery, but without even the usefulness of labor that some slaves took pride in. It is the worst kind of human dedigration. It also does nothing to abate the total power of the state over the individual. I am totally opposed to make-work employment.
Unfortunately, solving this problem will be very difficult. My main thought for the moment is the formation of an "ownership society", where each person owns capital and acquires the majority of their income from the production of capital. People tend to take pride in ownership, and those who need something more hands-on can do volunteer work, creative work, or aspire to work in a job that can't be automated. The state will definitely play a role in this, providing a safety net for those who lose their fortunes to bad luck and can no longer sustain themselves, but their job would be to give such individuals a "jump start" to get them going again and not to hold on to them indefinitely.
However, I feel that the initial creation of this situation will be very difficult (though I am sure it would work given we are in a situation where capital replaces most/all human labor). The main problems are the process of grading between our current situation and the new one without destroying the economy that we require to move us toward the new situation while still taking care of those who fall through the cracks early...and competing ideas, such as state welfare, make-work, not changing anything, and others.
There might also be better solutions that I haven't thought of. I'd be happy to hear them, but they must address these issues if we are to avoid a dystopian future for the majority of the population.
The sun outputs 384.6*10^24W. Of that 174.0 PW reaches the Earth directly. Of that 89.0 PW reaches the ground and is absorbed by it. The gross efficiency of modern solar power facilities is around 2.6%, so that cuts it down to 2.314 PW. Split over 10 billion people, that leaves each person on Earth with a maximum energy budget of 231.4 MW. If we capture only 1% of that energy (as clearly we don't want to cover the Earth in solar panels), it comes out to 2.3MW of sustainable energy per person (23.14 TW total compared to 16 TW today). At 1MW, a car is less than half of this budget.
Additionally, each person is not travelling by car 100% of the time. On average people drive close to 3 hours a day, so it only takes 12.5% of the above figure. That means that we would only use about 5.4% of our energy budget on transport. Now of course, this assumes everyone is driving alone in 1MW personal vehicles, which isn't true, there's lots of larger vehicles as well as carpooling. However, the real figure is unlikely to exceed the 20% we use on transportation currently, and personal transport is only a portion of that pie.
Finally, my initial assumptions are fairly conservative. We could gather more than 1% of the Earth's energy by building more solar or using other sources such as wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. We could capture energy that would normally miss the Earth entirely by building solar arrays in space. Increases in efficiency could improve the situation as well. Lastly, although it's not as sustainable as fusion power from the sun, fission power from the Earth could dramatically boost our total energy budget for a very long time.
My point is that there's plenty of sustainable energy for personal transport. It really is sustainable.
One last note...I'm not saying this will be easy either. There's a lot of challenges to be overcome and infrastructure to be built to make sustainable energy a reality. In particular the power grid needs a great deal of rework. There may even be some changes that many people do not like (such as longer refuelling times or having to use communal batteries). However, I don't see any insurmountable obstacles to keeping up our present energy usage while switching to sustainable sources.
DDT is villianized far out of proportion these days. Although admittedly they are both POPs, setting it rhetorically alongside Agent Orange as though they are the same is absurd.
DDT's carcinogenic properties are not really all that serious. We expose ourselves to more carcinogenic substances all the time, such as gasoline fumes. These minor effects were played up by DDT's opponents back in the day to scare people into accepting a DDT ban. Similarly, the acute toxicity is minor. To my knowledge, there's only one case where someone died from consuming DDT, and in that case the DDT may have contained other harmful chemicals.
On the other side of the coin, DDT saved millions of lives by eliminating malarial mosquitoes and other harmful insects. It easily saved more lives than it took.
Agent Orange on the other hand has caused awful damage in the areas where it was used extensively. If DDT was even close to as dangerous as it was made out to be by its opponents, then the present day impacts would be like a worldwide version of the Agent Orange boondoggle...times 1000.
Several comments here have criticized the NIF for being a poor candidate for practical fusion power. Ok, fair enough.
This misses the point. The NIF is not supposed to produce power or even produce a method that will be able to produce power. The NIF's real contribution is research. Achieving ignition is a grand scientific goal, a huge and difficult challenge that drives research and engineering to new heights, much like going to the moon.
Why did we go to the moon? In JFK's famous speech he said: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
JFK was an unusually forward thinking fellow, and he was absolutely right. While the Apollo program was extremely expensive and the accomplishment of its primary goal did not substantially change our lives for the better, the program more than paid for itself in spin-off technologies that were only created due to needs that would not arise under normal circumstances, but nonetheless turned out to have terrestrial applications. We are better off for undergoing the Apollo program than if we hadn't.
It's not easy to motivate the public to back challenging projects such as these despite their long term benefits, so they must wrap themselves in a popular cause. The Apollo program was only possible because it could be framed in terms of "beating" the Soviet Union. JFK's rhetoric about taking on hard scientific challenges would have had little impact on the public without the competition that the Soviets provided during the space race. The entire program cost $145 billion in 2007 dollars, more than the present day GDP of the entire state of Kansas, or enough to run the National Institute of Health for over 4 years, and all this back at a time when the national GDP was only a fraction of its current level. This frankly absurd amount of money would have certainly been earmarked for more mundane uses had Sputnik not shaken up the nation a few years earlier, and had this occured instead of the Apollo program then we would be worse off today. Smaller projects like the NIF must also wrap themselves in popular causes like energy research in order to get funded, even if that makes little practical sense.
Now that's not to say that every large scientific program is worthwhile. Some projects are too easy, and thus don't push the boundaries enough, and so these projects should directly produce something useful whenever possible. This was one of the many problems with the Space Shuttle program, which was overly focused on easy goals which it achieved poorly and at a high cost (though the Shuttle program too spawned many interesting spin-offs, so in the long run it too may have been worth it, but that's a topic for another time). Some projects are way too hard for us to handle now or could only be realistically solved in a destructive manner. For instance, it would be crazy to think we could get a manned flight to Jupiter in the next decade, and the only real solution to such a challenge would be to build an Orion-style spacecraft. These insurmountable challenges can be broken up into smaller pieces, for instance by tackling more reasonable challenges like getting to Mars first or building a permenant habitation on the Moon before thinking about Jupiter.
Is the NIF worth it? I can't say for sure. However, the fact that they're running into problems actually makes the program more likely to pay off in the long run. Why? Well according to our theory, this should work...but it doesn't. Why doesn't it work? This is a mystery that could lead to important practical physics breakthroughs, and the research and engineering needed to properly investigate this mystery could lead to valuable spin offs and new research directions that could open totally new doors.
We already recycle most of our metal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_recycling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper#Recycling
In the future, scarcer metal supplies will probably lead to even better recycling technology and more incentive to save or even recover already disposed of metal.
Fully recycling plastic and producing synthetic oil and oil products is expensive, but quite possible. Once extracting oil becomes expensive, we'll lean on and improve these technologies more and more.
Material isn't the problem, energy is...and really that's not too big of a problem between nuclear, coal, natural gas, solar, and eventually fusion.
The main potentially troublesome thing is our environmental impact (especially if we don't use nuclear and thus end up leaning heavily on coal), as this issue is a textbook tragedy of the commons situation, and we humans are terrible at dealing with those.
Well...compared to 1712's standards, we have a lot fewer problems like the kinds you mentioned.
The unfortunate thing about such problems is that they will always exist. 120 Americans died of starvation in 2004. That's substantially less than one-in-a-million, but it still happened. Getting enough food to not starve is not a problem for even the poorest of the poor in the US (getting killed by yourself is over 4000 times more likely), and yet 120 people managed to fall through the cracks and starve anyway.
The two specific problems you mentioned are even tougher to deal with because they involve some amount of lifestyle choice. If someone is dying from self-imposed starvation, you can legitimately strap them into a hospital bed and feed them back to health. If they resist then it is clearly attempted suicide and the state is allowed to restrain them for their own good. However, if someone is living out on the street or in the wilderness, can you really force them into living in a shelter or a home? If someone refuses to see a doctor about the early symptoms of some curable disease, can you really force them into a hospital? What if nobody notices until it's too late?
As strange as these scenarios may seem, I've actually met people who fit them perfectly. While I was in college, I met a fellow student who seemed ordinary enough. He was studying to be a Japanese translator and was quite a nice guy. As it turned out though, he was homeless throughout much of the year (which I discovered when he asked me to store some of his furniture in my apartment until he could find a new place in a few months). When I asked him why he went homeless, he said it was much cheaper than renting an apartment and he had gotten quite good at getting what he needed. I can even sympathize with his decision, as I put most of my pathetic college-era income into keeping a roof over my head and essentially ended up as a studious shut-in (I once decided to celebrate the end of a particularly important series of final exams by going out to eat pizza with my friends, what a luxury!). Faced with the same situation, he simply chose a more exciting option.
The other person is my alcoholic uncle. He too was homeless for many years despite considerable financial support from his mother, and even today he has a great deal of pride about his homeless experiences. Based on what he's told me as well as what I know about him, I feel he was primarily motivated by his love for exploration (and getting into trouble), as well as reducing his costs so he could buy more booze and cigarettes with the money he had. At the moment though, my main concern for him is the other problem you mentioned. He's a long time smoker and alcoholic, and now that he's getting old his health is deteriorating fast. I'll spare you the details, but l'll just say that blood is involved in many of his symptoms. Despite this, he refuses to go to the doctor for even a basic checkup. He mainly cites money as the cause, but this is BS as I offered to completely cover his expenses and he still refused (it's not like he didn't believe me either, as I was in a position to seriously do it at the time). My family refuses to force him into it (and I had to leave the situation behind due to a new job in another state), so the problem continues to fester and grow and will probably end with him being rushed into the emergency room...or worse.
In both of these examples, they weren't even suffering from any obvious mental illness. My college friend made a conscious choice to be homeless and last I checked he was doing great and has probably graduated by now and moved on to better things. My uncle is of sound mind and although his body is messed up after decades of self-abuse, he's not crippled either. I'm certain that a professional psycological evaluation on the two of them would not come up with anything serious.
I'm not saying that there aren't real problems here, or that it's all the fault of the people suffering from these problems...or that money isn't the issue (
Leaving aside any discussion of whether or not this is new and its possible impact on the thorium fuel cycle...there's an even bigger story here that nobody seems to have mentioned.
If someone could make fissionable Uranium easily and covertly from Thorium using only readily available equipment, what's stopping them from just doing it? We don't need a thorium fuel cycle for someone with nefarious plans to use this information.
We've only been able to keep uranium and its byproducts under control because commercially viable reserves are concentrated in a few relatively stable countries and the amount of naturally-occurring uranium that needs to be mined to make a bomb is huge compared to the amount that goes into the bomb itself. Thorium is readily available worldwide in massive quantities, most of which is the right isotope. Controlling the Thorium supply is going to be a nightmare.
It seems to me that this blows the lid totally off of the proliferation situation. Pretty much anyone with the resources needed to build an atomic bomb could do this to get the material they need. How can we possibly hope to keep this situation under control?
So it's just like the DRM arms race between content companies and technically capable pirates that has caused collateral damage (to legitimate users) along the way?
Weird.
The main issue here is that we're using different definitions of education. I'm more specifically thinking of a liberal education. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education In particular, when I say that someone has an education I'm really talking about the state that a liberal education strives to create.
So training is bad education? Every talent can be reduced to (possibly multiple simultaneous) walks of a graph, wisely choosing from a set of alternatives at each node.
No, it's a compliment to education. It's what makes one fluent at whatever they're doing. For instance, when I typed that last sentence, my training in the English language allowed me to realize that outcome quickly and efficiently. Without my training, I'd be constantly stopping to look up words and remember grammatical rules. It would be slow and tedious. Training is critical for any function that isn't purely instinctual. Most of what you learn in any realistic educational system is training.
However, learning to think independently is much harder. If one cannot think independently, one can't learn to think independently by themselves. Worse yet, it can't be externally trained. How can one learn to be an independent person when there is a teacher (or book) to be dependent upon? The best a teacher can do is set up an environment that is likely to lead to independent thought. Even in the best situation there is no guarantee it will work. In fact, this is true even assuming we're deterministic machines like computers, because questions about independent thought gets into self-referential territory and proving stuff about it becomes undecidable (or intractable if you want to get really technical, as we don't have infinite memory...but the size of your tree for a human is exponential with an input number somewhere around the number of neurons in the human brain...easily more than 2^100,000,000,000 which is way more than the 10^80-ish atoms in the universe).
a general knowledge of "geology" is education
A general knowledge of geology is (extensive) training.
By the way, I have known several scientists and programmers with a relatively low capability for independent thought. It's much rarer than in the general populace, but it's still there. Also, I've noticed that certain national educational systems create large numbers of graduates that can't think independently. I was recently in a training program with nearly 40 programmers from such an educational system and it was almost comical how few of them could do anything substantial without external support.
On the contrary, some (not all!) sports played at high level require a sharp mind: to analyse the field, to predict, to respond at the right moment, etc. It is the cunning, unpredictable players who will shine.
This is true, but I used it as an example because: 1. most people call sports preparation training and 2. it's undeniable that it takes a LOT of training to succeed at a sport.
OK, but good training encourages self-improvement. Back to the tree-walk, the organisation of learning ("learning how to learn") is itself a talent which can be learned. Looking at education this way, is it not just another subject to be trained? Components of this training are part of all good "training"/"education" in any field.
Learning to learn is another one of those tricky self-referential skills (how do you learn how to learn in the first place when you don't know how to learn?), so it can't be deterministically trained. The best we can do is set up the environment so it happens most of the time.
In an egalitarian society, there is certainly no "upper class" from which to differentiate a "non-upper class", and education is not only offered to the bright.
I guess that's true in the strictest sense, but if so there is no such thing as an egalit
I'd say that education and training really are two very different things. Training is specific to an individual task or set of tasks while education is broader and has more to do with cultivating independent thought.
In this example, the training is specific to earthquake detection. In theory, you could train someone to just detect earthquakes given a set of input data (from seismometers and such) and leave them worthless at anything else geology-related. In practice though the specific training rests on top of a deeper education (at least for most scientific and analytical jobs). As another example, in programming when you learn a new technology or language you're training in those things, despite the fact that this training rests upon a deeper education.
It should also be noted that a lot of what we commonly consider "education" is actually training in disguise. For instance, arithmetic and calculus are just methods to produce a desired result. When we spend time learning how to do these methods by hand, we're doing training. It's no different from training to do a sport, as the end goal is to be able to fluently perform a desired action so you can perform on command. Even highly educated individuals spend more time training than being educated.
Education is more meta and has more to do with the effective use of training (including training one does not personally have) as well as some even more meta concerns (which is to say less practical stuff that enriches you as a human being, but is really only interesting internally). From a practical standpoint, an educated person can effectively organize their own training to great effect as well as (hopefully) organizing the training of others into a cohesive whole (though leadership has its own required training).
The "class-obsession" you talk about has more to do with how training and education are used in practice. Most non-upper class students receive the minimum required education, with most of their "education" being composed of training. In egalitarian societies, a real education is additionally offered to the brightest non-upper class students, as they are very useful when they are properly educated. I should know, I was born into a working class family and received both classes of education at different times.
A bit off topic, this is why I'm worried about the economic and social impact that weak AI will have. We're able to train computers now and only those with a real education will have value to add as weak AI becomes smarter and more common. Since a large percentage of the populace is only marginally educated, this does not bode well.
I'm a proponent of nuclear power and I'm a bit skeptical about the practicality of renewables in the short term, but I believe that in the long run solar is going to dominate the energy scene. The amount of energy the Earth recieves from the sun is staggering, and the amount of solar energy we could generate if we created huge sun-orbiting solar power plants is pretty much unimaginable in modern terms (the sun outputs enough energy to sustain a population of 24 trillion billion humans at present rates of consumption). As such, I have no doubt that we will one day be able to meet our basic needs using solar power. It would be conservative to predict that eventually we will be drawing in massively more energy from solar power than we consume today from all sources.
In particular though, solar is the most direct and efficient power source that does not suffer from Jevons Paradox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox If we perfected fission and fusion power, we'd simply amp up our power usage massively. Cheaper energy means we can afford to do more with it. Suborbital commuter flights? Launching city-sized spacecraft? Colonizing the solar system and maintaining the colonies with regular shipments of supplies? Not a problem...but with such massive energy consumption, we'd eventually face yet another energy crisis. Although it may seem rediculous now, supplies of easily obtainable, high yield fusion and fission fuel would probably be depleted to worrying levels within the timeframe of a human lifetime.
This doesn't apply to the sun. You can't mine the sun, it's simply too hot. Plus, it's already a fantastic fusion power plant, so there's no need to try it. The only "downside" is that the sun has a production limit, which is fairly stable and not easily increased. However, this is really a blessing in the long run as we can't consume more than what the sun gives off in a given time period, leading to long-term stability. Therefore solar is the only notable power source in the long run.
That said, non-solar nuclear still has an important place. In the short term, fission can help reduce our reliance on coal during the gap between fossil fuels and solar. In the medium term, nuclear has an important place in space colonization and turning the sun into a giant fusion power plant. In the long run, it may still have a place as a high-density energy storage medium. The point here is that the energy we use doesn't just vanish. What we make out of it can have a big impact. We wouldn't have gotten to the point where we could make the leap to nuclear and solar without fossil fuels...or at the very least it would have taken much longer to get where we are now. The use of "consumable" nuclear power will jumpstart our next big push.
The biggest problem with developing software is that any non-trivial system takes time to deliver regardless of the methodology, You can take time to properly spec out and design a bridge over a river because it'll be good for 50 years. But the world of software changes so fast that any system is obsolescent by the time it's done, and if you spend a few months specing/designing it's time for a redesign before you even start writing the code.
This is true most of the time, but there are a few shockingly old systems in places where high reliability is required. They tend to show up as controllers for things that last a long time (like nuclear power plants or airplanes), in work environments with a highly conservative culture (hospitals), or in places where uptime trumps many other concerns (financial backend or power grid calculations). In these cases, it's critical to treat software similarly to building a bridge you expect to last 50+ years, because you really have no idea how long someone is going to keep using it (and anyway, you really don't want it to fail even if it is new).
Of course, this kind of software represents a tiny percentage of all software. In most cases today, you're right. It certainly doesn't make sense to ensure that a new video game or office productivity feature is perfect if by cutting down on quality a bit we can get it to market faster. That said, you never know when your non-critical software might be used to make this kind of critical software. OSes and libraries are particularly likely to be pulled into such a project. Furthermore, the amount of critical software is likely to expand in the near future. A good example from the recent past is that back in the really olden days there weren't computers small, light, and cheap enough to put into aircraft to control their flight, but nowadays fly-by-wire is common. There aren't any 50 year old fly-by-wire aircraft because the first ones were built 40 years ago. How long will some people hold on to their early model self-driving cars? As computers become more cheap and ubiquitous, these issues will become more widespread.
Durability and reliability requirements are important to consider early in any project, and different answers will lead to the need for totally different approaches to developing the software.
I'm a different guy, readin's argument probably hasn't changed.
Nobody is perfect and neither are governments composed of imperfect people. People make mistakes, people do selfish and even evil things, and people are behind all of the decisions made by governments. Sometimes this is pretty direct (Stalin led the USSR pretty much directly during his reign) and other times this is filtered through lots of other people and laws (made by imperfect people).
For a large government, small imperfections are often magnified a million times and on the small scale will seem overwhelmingly massive. This isn't made any easier by the fact that large governments have to deal with *all* of the most ridiculous people and governments out there. For instance, the US can't just ignore North Korea. If we took a neutral stance towards NK, then we'd soon have American citizens (and others) trading with NK. Then soon we'd have US civilian hostages and a revitalized NK. What do we do to rescue those hostages? A more powerful NK would lead to NK's neighbors reacting. SK might consider a pre-emptive invasion and it might start its own nuclear program over fears that NK will have nukes and they won't. Japan would also likely decide that it can't rely on the US anymore and militarize. They would likely have nuclear weapons within a year. Who knows how China might react, as they've been allies with NK for a long time but they also seem tired of NK's BS and the reactions of SK and Japan will have a profound impact on their new stance. A big war between NK and somebody else is almost inevitable and the region might even spiral into a much bigger bloodier war between nuclear armed nations. Who's to blame? The US. What did we do? Nothing!
The US can't ignore the world like a small country can because our residual influence is so massive. This isn't unique to the US either, it applies to all really huge nations and nation blocs. We have to make choices, and some of them will be hard and the imperfect people making these hard decisions will inevitably mess things up.
The best we can hope for is high quality and ethical decisions more often. I think the US has a pretty decent track record in that regard compared to those with comparable influence. The Soviets and Chinese each outright murdered tens of millions, and we don't know how much more they quietly swept under the rug. The Axis powers did so much evil and killed so many people, they seem more like comic book villains than something real. The British Empire starved millions in the late 19th century (when there were a lot fewer people). The Mongol empire obliterated Baghdad and turned the whole region into a desert. The Roman republic and empire was built on slavery. etc. etc. It doesn't matter where you look, if there's a major power there's blood, corruption, exploitation...and lots of it.
When you make historical comparisons, the US isn't really so bad.
it didn't enter World War 2 because they need to stop the Nazi's, they did so because they were attacked by Japan, hell, the US didn't even declare war on Germany! Germany declared war on the US.
This still doesn't explain why the US spent the resources they did against the Nazis. Just because some far away country declares war on you doesn't mean you have to respond beyond protecting your borders. The US threw more resources into defeating the Nazis than the Japanese who they were worried might start knocking on their doorstep. It also does nothing to explain the lend-lease program. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-lease It's pretty clear that the US administration of the time had its sights set on the Nazis well before Pearl Harbor, and that attack simply gave them the excuse they needed to pull out the stops.
It is only by examining history can the US realise they can't use force to overthrow governments, they will only be fragi
Though I disagree with you in many ways, here's some help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties
Yeah, the US arguably has millions of deaths on its hands from the cold war era.
That said, the communists topped the US over and over again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decossackization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes
If you want puppet states and economic corruption, there was plenty to go around:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_states
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_of_Germans_in_the_Soviet_Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_republics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blat_(term)
In my opinion though, we shouldn't care so much about the sins of the past. Even an 18 year old in 1970 would be 60 today, and the vast majority of the people who made these decisions are dead or dying today. The USSR doesn't even exist anymore. Learning history is important because we don't want to repeat the bad parts, but we do a terrible disservice to ourselves when we use the past to excuse our present positions and actions.
I don't want to sound too negative, but your plan boils down to:
A: Solve the problem of AI
B: Program a visual cortex for your AI
C: Give your AI a body
Getting past that first step is the tricky bit.
I suppose this is due to having practically zero time to explain yourself, but your ethics seems almost arbitrary. I can see one wanting to avoid military work due to the possibility that your work might kill people, but what's wrong with finance and medicine? Several other people in the thread have brought up medicine, but I haven't seen any defense of finance.
Now yes, I know that much finance work out there today is pretty nasty, especially stuff like HFT. That said, finance doesn't have to be unethical. It's not an inherently bad thing. At its core, finance is about bringing people together so they can do more together than they could do apart. Good investment changes lives for the better, and is much more reliable than charity because there are many more people willing to lend money than give it outright.
For instance, my mother is a small business owner, doing what she loves for a living. Without enough capital to have started her business, she never would have gotten off the ground and thus would be stuck in some dead end job she hates, and at this point we would have lost our home as my father's income fell dramatically soon after we moved here.
Not all finance work is unethical, it's just a matter of finding a financial institution that tries to do ethical work. I've heard some good things about the field of microfinance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfinance I'm not sure how HPC fits into that particular subfield, but I'd imagine the various microfinance players can use algorithmic work just like any other financial institution.
By the way...you will never find a job where you are not hurting people in some way. Military kills. Medicine has errors and experimentation. Finance must be hard on hopeless cases so others in need may be helped with limited resources and they need to support themselves somehow. Entertainment saps peoples' time and money. Engineering has failures, like bridge collapses and airplane crashes. Mining involves worker deaths, environmental damage, and often exploitation of locals. Agriculture massacres animals, puts bad things into peoples' bodies, and causes environmental damage. Academia comes pretty close to being harmless, but the things you think up may have massive implications (after all, atomic bombs came out of academia) and the resources you consume could help elsewhere. Even charities have administrative waste and need to constantly find people to extract money out of. It doesn't matter what the field is, you'll be doing harm to someone in some way. In this kind of situation, you can't focus excessively on the negatives...you have to look at the balance between the good you are doing and the bad you are doing. Ethically you should strive to have the most positive impact when both good and bad are taken into consideration.
One last thing, you also need to keep in mind that people naturally get paid better when they do unethical work for someone. Doing clearly unethical things is a downside for most people, so the market price for such work is higher in much the same way that the market price is higher for work that is undesirable for other reasons (like jobs where one is in danger or away from home for extended time periods). Lower worker supply drives up the price of labor. So don't look at the high wages given by those need you to do unethical things for them and think you can get paid the same for ethical work. Look for someone doing ethical work that can use your skills first and deal with wages later...they will be lower. If ethics are really important to you then you will be happier in such a job even at a lower wage. The feel-good of doing ethical work is part of your compensation.
In any case, if my argument didn't change your mind...what about working for one of the national laboratories? I was considering working for ORNL due to academic connections I had and they seem to pay a lot better than ordinary academia while doing lots of academic-type work. They also have amazing
I do agree it's mostly a PR bid, but...
While it may not be a advance in AI, it's still pretty amazing what they've managed to do with it. It's much like seeing the airplane advance from the Wright flyer to an early practical biplane. It may not be really new and it's not quite to the point where it starts really changing most lives, but it's a visible sign of what's to come in the near future.
I guess my point is that it takes time and effort to move from revolutionary ideas to practical demonstrations to products and Watson is a highly visible sign that we've made progress in this regard. Furthermore, that progress actually means something, as the work IBM has done on Watson is valuable in that they have certainly discovered many practical issues while creating Watson and their code can be reused in new systems that can make use of their approach. We don't yet know exactly what areas will find their approach valuable, but some areas do look promising. We'll see.
Similar to Watson but likely with a more noticeable and immediate impact is Google's self-driving car. I'm not entirely sure what AI is behind that project, but the practical things they've been able to do with it are simply amazing. Who would have expected that we'd have a working example of a self-driving car that could handle difficult conditions and share the road with human drivers 10 years ago?
I know that weak AI like this won't replace humans completely, as at the very least someone has to program them and set up their environment reasonably. However, AIs like Watson and Google's self-driving car demonstrate that this newest batch of AI can deal with far less structure than previously and this may be enough to replace a large number of human workers doing routine work today. Could the self-driving car replace millions of drivers? Could Watson-like systems replace many low-end information worker jobs? What other routine jobs might be on the chopping block in a few years once weak AI systems are developed for them? Most humans have routine jobs, so this could be a huge social and economic issue in the near future. AI advances could potentially put tens of millions out of work in the space of a decade or two, and this kind of rapid change would put enormous strain on our economy and society.
As for strong AI, I don't know how far away from it we are. We will definitely need some major AI breakthroughs to get there, so it could take quite some time. That said, it may be shockingly soon. For instance, if the Blue Brain project succeeds then we will have a strong AI of a sort by 2023. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_brain Furthermore, if we can realistically make a molecular-scale model of the human brain by then...then we'll have grossly more computing resources than required to make strong AI with other more efficient techniques. At that point, the real question is *when* we make the requisite AI breakthrough. The adoption of strong AI will make the issues surrounding weak AI look minor by comparison...
By the way, I don't think that human-level AIs need to be just like us. Something that is very different from us would be hard to understand and have a hard time understanding us, but I think it could have intelligence on par with our own or even superior to ours. I think such an AI could even interact, understand, and possibly even relate to us in some way without having our characteristics. As an example, humans relate to cats and dogs and vice versa despite some serious differences between our species. We can't even "see" the world in the same way as them, as our senses differ dramatically. Yet even though we don't share certain characteristics with our pets, most pet owners come to understand their differences and make accommodations vice versa. That said, I don't think we will be too interested in developing AIs that are too alien, as they will freak us out and seem dangerous, so our AIs will carry on many of our characteristics...and pass them on to their AIs and so on.
Rodney Brooks' approach to AI is interesting, and I'll be interested to see what emerges from it in the near future.
You're right that Watson by itself isn't going to replace humans, and we're currently not that close to doing so, but despite everything you're saying Watson still represents a major accomplishment. An AI was able to answer a wide variety of natural language queries with an impressive success rate. Would this have even been possible 10 years ago? What new kinds of work will this lead to the automation of? It's not like you need full human generality for all jobs.
More important than the specific accomplishment though is the overall progress it represents. What goalposts will AI surpass next? Is there anything we can say for certain that an AI can't do?
By the way, why do you think that all AIs will always suffer from the frame problem? What makes humans so special? In particular, what if one made an AI by scanning a human brain and simulating it on a computer? Such a simulation would be an intelligent computer program. If this is possible, then why couldn't we develop an AI that avoids the frame problem? Sure, it might be very different from present-day AIs, but it should be possible. If this is not possible, then why not?