The pharma and business industries don't want cures. That would stifle future earnings potentials. It would be them acting against their own self interest. Such is the price for capitalist and a private healthcare environment.
Did you even read the post you replied to? It made a detailed case explaining exactly why cures are good business that big pharma should (and, quite obviously, does) want, based on capitalistic incentives for generating large profits. You reply with a flat, unsupported assertion of the opposite, ignoring all of the solid argumentation you're replying to.
What kind of thought process motivates people to post such stupidity? I suppose you at least had the sense not to sign your name to it. You made yourself look like a fool, but at least you're an anonymous fool.
If you are frequently in places that there is only one driver nearby, then you already have uncertainty. Zero is very close to one, so you must frequently be in areas where there are no drivers nearby. I suspect this is a sort of search bias at work; your definition of "nearby" ends up being defined by where the closest driver is; you stop zooming out when you see one.
If it were necessary (and I doubt it would be), your concern could be addressed by defining price limits that kick in if there are too few drivers in an area for competition to operate well. These should be relatively high, to encourage drivers to seek out underserved areas, giving riders greater certainty that they can get an Uber most anywhere, if at a higher (but not unbounded) price.
Though they got the outcome they want in this case, if I were running Uber I'd make a change in their business model to make it absolutely clear that drivers are contractors: Let drivers set their own prices. Uber uses an algorithm based on mileage and time to calculate the price, so let drivers set the parameters, and show potential riders a list of drivers with ETAs and prices, calculated according to the driver's preference.
No reasonable person is going to conclude that a driver who uses their own equipment, chooses their own hours and work location and sets their own prices is an employee. I'd argue that such a person isn't even a contractor, they're an independent business partner.
As a side benefit, this approach would address a big rider complaint about Uber: surge pricing. Surge pricing makes economic sense, and benefits riders by encouraging more drivers to be available during times of heavy demand, but it still seems artificial and subject to manipulation by Uber. Allowing drivers and riders to dynamically negotiate pricing would allow supply and demand to drive the price naturally. Uber could also track price distributions and notify drivers who are currently not working when prices rise, or when they're projected to rise, as I believe they do now with surge price times. Even if riders are unhappy with spiking prices, they'll blame drivers rather than Uber.
This is true. True random numbers will include short patterns, unpredictably.
Uniformly-distributed numbers will include short patterns, unpredictably. Random numbers can be characterized as conforming to a well-defined distribution (in fact, we almost always demand that the distribution be uniform) which in no way makes them less random.
Mathematical proofs are far more fundamental in that they are true regardless of the properties of the universe you happen to be in at the time.
This is deeply wrong.
Mathematical proofs are true if and only if the assumptions (axioms) on which they're based are true. When you apply mathematics to real things, you're making a critical unproven and unprovable assumption: That the mathematical structure maps perfectly onto the real-world structure. That this works quite well isn't surprising, because we work hard to craft mathematical structures that map as closely as we can, and because the universe appears to have consistent structure. That said, the fact that it has always worked well in no way proves that the mapping will always hold, and it says nothing about the "truth" of reality other than we observe that it consistently appears to behave according to a certain pattern.
The map is not the terrain. And when you posit a universe with a different properties (different terrain!) then there is no reason to expect the map even to be useful.
Two months, seven serious kernel vulnerabilities. In these particular months the media and Qualomm components were worse, but those come and go. The kernel vulns are there every month.
This is just so they can move all the Android devices to Fuchsia (under permissive licenses), and then slam the door shut by requiring things for new Fuchsia devices once the whole ecosystem has moved over.
Care to make a wager on that? I've got $10K that says you're wrong.
I will tell you the problem with Android bugs is not in the kernel.
Go look at the monthly Android security bulletins. It's a rare month that does not have a serious kernel vulnerability. The kernel is the biggest single source of security problems in Android. The Android security team badly wants to replace Linux.
Let's be honest, that trust is immediately debunked by 4 words.
"Donald Trump is President"
In theory, yes. In practice, so far it hasn't been too bad. Of course, if Mueller starts indicting Trumps we may suddenly find it necessary to invade, say, Syria.
There's no network technology-based need for them to do that, but if the operating system makes the data available to them they can and some do use the MAC address as a unique device identifier. The major mobile device OSes have stopped providing it.
The very reason why facebook existed from the beginning was to sell personal information.
I hate to defend Facebook, but they don't and AFAIK never have sold personal information. They use personal information to target advertisements. They also provide a platform that allows other people to write apps which may collect personal information, with user approval. The CA scandal is because they weren't sufficiently careful about ensuring that APIs didn't allow access to data about "friends" of those who used the apps.
It's totally believable that many Facebook engineers haven't scrutinized the app APIs, or don't have the security expertise to recognize the vulnerabilities, so never knew about this massive information leakage. Now they know about it, and they're bothered by it, and they feel like they don't want to be associated with it.
The assumption here is that you'll have solar panels that generate enough power to cover a big chunk of your electricity needs, and that you're using a combination of the grid and your car battery to account for differences in supply and demand, since you'll only get max solar output for a few hours a day.
In your specific case, have you looked into getting a big propane tank and periodic deliveries? That's the normal solution for northerly climes where piped natural gas isn't available. It would be a lot cheaper than electric heat (though possibly not as green, depending on how your electricity is generated).
An even better option for you would be a ground loop. If you're out in the boonies you probably have enough land that you can go shallow and broad, which is cheaper. Then your heat pump can move ~50F subterranean temperatures into your house. Much shallower gradient than whatever that air temperature you're pumping from is. You'd still be using electricity, but it would be dramatically more efficient.
These people still don't seem to have spotted that the reason you plug your car in is so that it's fully charged when you want to go somewhere
Meh. You'll configure a minimum charge level for your car, and once it's drawn down to that level you'll stop selling power. The car will have 300+ miles per range, so for most people setting it to retain ~150 miles of charge will work just fine. Those who need a bit more will set it higher.
Also, I expect that a huge part of home storage won't be the batter in your car, it will be a battery that used to be in a car. As car batteries degrade they'll get to a point where their storage capacity per weight is low enough that you no longer want to haul them around, and where they are problematic for long trips. But capacity per weight doesn't matter for home storage.
I hate ads but will also not pay up in order to avoid them.
How do you propose to fund the sites you use? All that hardware, bandwidth, development, maintenance, operations management, power, etc. cost money, and if sites can't generate revenue to cover it, they'll have to shut down.
So, assuming that they are right, and developing AI is going to end up in a super-intelligent conscience that enslaves humankind. OK. Now, what's the counter-strategy? Forbidding AI?
The counter-strategy is to figure out how to make sure that superintelligent AI is given goals that are aligned with human goals. This is very, very hard, not least because human goals are not aligned with themselves. Very, very hard isn't the same as "impossible", though, and given that our existence is on the line, it seems like a very good idea to try.
That said, I think Musk's proposals for research oversight are premature. We don't yet know enough to know what controls to put in place. We should start by funding research into that question.
It's a similar situation to global warming. You cannot do much about it, people's minds are too short-term for that.
The actions of most of the world show that you're wrong. Most of the world's nations have decided that global warming is a real problem and have begun working on it. Many are investing very heavily.
Well, in my humble opinion, we have about the same chances of altering whatever course is due now.
Most hardcore AI experts (and Musk is not one of them) don't see AGI happening any time soon.
Wrong.
If you ask "hardcore AI experts", they'll tell you they have no idea when AGI will happen. Could be tomorrow, could be next year, could be decades away, or centuries. If you make them give you their best guesses they'll say it's a few decades away, but reiterate that they're only guessing.
We just have no idea what intelligence and consciousness are.
This is correct, and it's the reason that we cannot possibly know when AGI will happen. We lack the theoretical framework to explain intelligence. When we have a solid theory of intelligence, we'll know how to build it, or at least know what we need to figure out to be able to build it. When we get that theory, then we'll be able to have a reasonable conversation about how long it will be before we create it. Until then, we don't know what we don't know.
It's possible that someone discovered the necessary theory this morning. It's possible that it'll be assembled painstakingly over the next 50 years of experimental neurophysiology and AI research. We can't know what it looks like until we have it.
What is clear is that AGI is going to happen. If you believe otherwise, you're engaging in magical thinking. It also seems extremely likely that human intelligence is not the upper limit of what is possible, which means that when AGI happens, the AI Singularity will happen soon after. And at that point, humanity will be in deep shit if we don't figure out how to make sure that the AGIs we create have goals that are aligned with our own.
> "Freedom of expression is a human right" is a moral and philosophical position, not an objective fact.
Fact is that freedom of expression is part of the declaration of human rights, which is signed by all nations that are member of the UN. So it is in fact more than a moral and philosophical position.
It's a moral and philosophical position which is such a good idea it has been formally codified by numerous governments as well as the UN. But the claim was that it's a fact independent of government endorsement, which is silly. Remove government and your right to speak is subject to whoever around you has sufficient physical force to shut you up.
Indeed, try robbing a bank and then claiming to the police that the law isn't an objective truth but a moral position and see how far you get. You'd be right, but also wrong.
The notion of rule of law is a moral and philosophical position. The enforcement of specific law is an objective fact.
The original claim was that freedom of expression was a "natural" right, not something given by government. In your analogy, that would be like claiming that the law against robbing a bank was a "natural" restriction, not something imposed by government. Those statements are equally ludicrous.
You seem to be confused. In Europe, they only pretend to give you free speech, but in reality, it doesn't exist.
Freedom of expression is a human right. Governments may stop you from exercising that right, but it is still an intrinsic right of every human.
"Freedom of expression is a human right" is a moral and philosophical position, not an objective fact.
It's a position that I think is very good, and one that I strongly suspect makes the human race objectively better off, which is why we came up with it and why it has become the default position in much of the world. But trying to claim it as some foundational truth of the universe is silly.
Once you realize this everything else makes sense.
You mean: Once you pick an ideology with which to interpret everything you see, you can easily make everything fit into your ideology. Which helps to make it feel like everything makes sense.
Protip: The world is a messy, complicated place. If everything makes sense, you're almost certainly misinterpreting and oversimplifying.
Most technology can be used for non-violent purposes that are overwhelmingly beneficial to people.
In addition, violence itself is merely another tool, one which can be put to good purpose. Military forces are important tools of public policy. They can be used to end horrific suffering and they can be used to maintain peace, by explicitly threatening anyone who would break the peace with violent consequences.
The underlying assumption of your post seems to be that military capability is an unalloyed evil. I'll grant that in an ideal world it would be completely unnecessary, but that is not the world in which we live. If we're concerned about misuse of military power, it seems to me that the armed forces already have more than enough capability to have us shaking in our boots, and it's not clear to me that adding AI to the mix (assuming the AI doesn't get out of control) significantly changes anything.
To make military forces "safe", we need to (a) ensure that they remain subject to civilian control and (b) ensure that civilian control acts responsibly. I'll grant that we seriously undermined (b) in the 2016 election, but that's a repairable problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The pharma and business industries don't want cures. That would stifle future earnings potentials. It would be them acting against their own self interest. Such is the price for capitalist and a private healthcare environment.
Did you even read the post you replied to? It made a detailed case explaining exactly why cures are good business that big pharma should (and, quite obviously, does) want, based on capitalistic incentives for generating large profits. You reply with a flat, unsupported assertion of the opposite, ignoring all of the solid argumentation you're replying to.
What kind of thought process motivates people to post such stupidity? I suppose you at least had the sense not to sign your name to it. You made yourself look like a fool, but at least you're an anonymous fool.
Meh. I don't think we do need to protect such drivers. Not for long, anyway.
If you are frequently in places that there is only one driver nearby, then you already have uncertainty. Zero is very close to one, so you must frequently be in areas where there are no drivers nearby. I suspect this is a sort of search bias at work; your definition of "nearby" ends up being defined by where the closest driver is; you stop zooming out when you see one.
If it were necessary (and I doubt it would be), your concern could be addressed by defining price limits that kick in if there are too few drivers in an area for competition to operate well. These should be relatively high, to encourage drivers to seek out underserved areas, giving riders greater certainty that they can get an Uber most anywhere, if at a higher (but not unbounded) price.
Though they got the outcome they want in this case, if I were running Uber I'd make a change in their business model to make it absolutely clear that drivers are contractors: Let drivers set their own prices. Uber uses an algorithm based on mileage and time to calculate the price, so let drivers set the parameters, and show potential riders a list of drivers with ETAs and prices, calculated according to the driver's preference.
No reasonable person is going to conclude that a driver who uses their own equipment, chooses their own hours and work location and sets their own prices is an employee. I'd argue that such a person isn't even a contractor, they're an independent business partner.
As a side benefit, this approach would address a big rider complaint about Uber: surge pricing. Surge pricing makes economic sense, and benefits riders by encouraging more drivers to be available during times of heavy demand, but it still seems artificial and subject to manipulation by Uber. Allowing drivers and riders to dynamically negotiate pricing would allow supply and demand to drive the price naturally. Uber could also track price distributions and notify drivers who are currently not working when prices rise, or when they're projected to rise, as I believe they do now with surge price times. Even if riders are unhappy with spiking prices, they'll blame drivers rather than Uber.
Random means without cause. That's it. It doesn't mean anything with regards to distribution, homogeneity, uniformity, etc.
Per your definition, does randomness actually exist? Can you point to some process you consider to be random?
This is true. True random numbers will include short patterns, unpredictably.
Uniformly-distributed numbers will include short patterns, unpredictably. Random numbers can be characterized as conforming to a well-defined distribution (in fact, we almost always demand that the distribution be uniform) which in no way makes them less random.
Mathematical proofs are far more fundamental in that they are true regardless of the properties of the universe you happen to be in at the time.
This is deeply wrong.
Mathematical proofs are true if and only if the assumptions (axioms) on which they're based are true. When you apply mathematics to real things, you're making a critical unproven and unprovable assumption: That the mathematical structure maps perfectly onto the real-world structure. That this works quite well isn't surprising, because we work hard to craft mathematical structures that map as closely as we can, and because the universe appears to have consistent structure. That said, the fact that it has always worked well in no way proves that the mapping will always hold, and it says nothing about the "truth" of reality other than we observe that it consistently appears to behave according to a certain pattern.
The map is not the terrain. And when you posit a universe with a different properties (different terrain!) then there is no reason to expect the map even to be useful.
Two months, seven serious kernel vulnerabilities. In these particular months the media and Qualomm components were worse, but those come and go. The kernel vulns are there every month.
This is just so they can move all the Android devices to Fuchsia (under permissive licenses), and then slam the door shut by requiring things for new Fuchsia devices once the whole ecosystem has moved over.
Care to make a wager on that? I've got $10K that says you're wrong.
I will tell you the problem with Android bugs is not in the kernel.
Go look at the monthly Android security bulletins. It's a rare month that does not have a serious kernel vulnerability. The kernel is the biggest single source of security problems in Android. The Android security team badly wants to replace Linux.
Let's be honest, that trust is immediately debunked by 4 words.
"Donald Trump is President"
In theory, yes. In practice, so far it hasn't been too bad. Of course, if Mueller starts indicting Trumps we may suddenly find it necessary to invade, say, Syria.
Either infinite or not. If not infinite, then not "semi-infinite" either. As physical and real, not infinite.
Bah.
Yeah, it's imprecise use of language, but it's quite clear that what they mean is "more than we're ever likely to need".
They're not supposed to do that!
There's no network technology-based need for them to do that, but if the operating system makes the data available to them they can and some do use the MAC address as a unique device identifier. The major mobile device OSes have stopped providing it.
The very reason why facebook existed from the beginning was to sell personal information.
I hate to defend Facebook, but they don't and AFAIK never have sold personal information. They use personal information to target advertisements. They also provide a platform that allows other people to write apps which may collect personal information, with user approval. The CA scandal is because they weren't sufficiently careful about ensuring that APIs didn't allow access to data about "friends" of those who used the apps.
It's totally believable that many Facebook engineers haven't scrutinized the app APIs, or don't have the security expertise to recognize the vulnerabilities, so never knew about this massive information leakage. Now they know about it, and they're bothered by it, and they feel like they don't want to be associated with it.
The assumption here is that you'll have solar panels that generate enough power to cover a big chunk of your electricity needs, and that you're using a combination of the grid and your car battery to account for differences in supply and demand, since you'll only get max solar output for a few hours a day.
In your specific case, have you looked into getting a big propane tank and periodic deliveries? That's the normal solution for northerly climes where piped natural gas isn't available. It would be a lot cheaper than electric heat (though possibly not as green, depending on how your electricity is generated).
An even better option for you would be a ground loop. If you're out in the boonies you probably have enough land that you can go shallow and broad, which is cheaper. Then your heat pump can move ~50F subterranean temperatures into your house. Much shallower gradient than whatever that air temperature you're pumping from is. You'd still be using electricity, but it would be dramatically more efficient.
These people still don't seem to have spotted that the reason you plug your car in is so that it's fully charged when you want to go somewhere
Meh. You'll configure a minimum charge level for your car, and once it's drawn down to that level you'll stop selling power. The car will have 300+ miles per range, so for most people setting it to retain ~150 miles of charge will work just fine. Those who need a bit more will set it higher.
Also, I expect that a huge part of home storage won't be the batter in your car, it will be a battery that used to be in a car. As car batteries degrade they'll get to a point where their storage capacity per weight is low enough that you no longer want to haul them around, and where they are problematic for long trips. But capacity per weight doesn't matter for home storage.
I hate ads but will also not pay up in order to avoid them.
How do you propose to fund the sites you use? All that hardware, bandwidth, development, maintenance, operations management, power, etc. cost money, and if sites can't generate revenue to cover it, they'll have to shut down.
So, assuming that they are right, and developing AI is going to end up in a super-intelligent conscience that enslaves humankind. OK. Now, what's the counter-strategy? Forbidding AI?
The counter-strategy is to figure out how to make sure that superintelligent AI is given goals that are aligned with human goals. This is very, very hard, not least because human goals are not aligned with themselves. Very, very hard isn't the same as "impossible", though, and given that our existence is on the line, it seems like a very good idea to try.
That said, I think Musk's proposals for research oversight are premature. We don't yet know enough to know what controls to put in place. We should start by funding research into that question.
It's a similar situation to global warming. You cannot do much about it, people's minds are too short-term for that.
The actions of most of the world show that you're wrong. Most of the world's nations have decided that global warming is a real problem and have begun working on it. Many are investing very heavily.
Well, in my humble opinion, we have about the same chances of altering whatever course is due now.
Ah, the ostrich strategy.
Most hardcore AI experts (and Musk is not one of them) don't see AGI happening any time soon.
Wrong.
If you ask "hardcore AI experts", they'll tell you they have no idea when AGI will happen. Could be tomorrow, could be next year, could be decades away, or centuries. If you make them give you their best guesses they'll say it's a few decades away, but reiterate that they're only guessing.
We just have no idea what intelligence and consciousness are.
This is correct, and it's the reason that we cannot possibly know when AGI will happen. We lack the theoretical framework to explain intelligence. When we have a solid theory of intelligence, we'll know how to build it, or at least know what we need to figure out to be able to build it. When we get that theory, then we'll be able to have a reasonable conversation about how long it will be before we create it. Until then, we don't know what we don't know.
It's possible that someone discovered the necessary theory this morning. It's possible that it'll be assembled painstakingly over the next 50 years of experimental neurophysiology and AI research. We can't know what it looks like until we have it.
What is clear is that AGI is going to happen. If you believe otherwise, you're engaging in magical thinking. It also seems extremely likely that human intelligence is not the upper limit of what is possible, which means that when AGI happens, the AI Singularity will happen soon after. And at that point, humanity will be in deep shit if we don't figure out how to make sure that the AGIs we create have goals that are aligned with our own.
> "Freedom of expression is a human right" is a moral and philosophical position, not an objective fact.
Fact is that freedom of expression is part of the declaration of human rights, which is signed by all nations that are member of the UN. So it is in fact more than a moral and philosophical position.
It's a moral and philosophical position which is such a good idea it has been formally codified by numerous governments as well as the UN. But the claim was that it's a fact independent of government endorsement, which is silly. Remove government and your right to speak is subject to whoever around you has sufficient physical force to shut you up.
Indeed, try robbing a bank and then claiming to the police that the law isn't an objective truth but a moral position and see how far you get. You'd be right, but also wrong.
The notion of rule of law is a moral and philosophical position. The enforcement of specific law is an objective fact.
The original claim was that freedom of expression was a "natural" right, not something given by government. In your analogy, that would be like claiming that the law against robbing a bank was a "natural" restriction, not something imposed by government. Those statements are equally ludicrous.
You seem to be confused. In Europe, they only pretend to give you free speech, but in reality, it doesn't exist.
Freedom of expression is a human right. Governments may stop you from exercising that right, but it is still an intrinsic right of every human.
"Freedom of expression is a human right" is a moral and philosophical position, not an objective fact.
It's a position that I think is very good, and one that I strongly suspect makes the human race objectively better off, which is why we came up with it and why it has become the default position in much of the world. But trying to claim it as some foundational truth of the universe is silly.
Once you realize this everything else makes sense.
You mean: Once you pick an ideology with which to interpret everything you see, you can easily make everything fit into your ideology. Which helps to make it feel like everything makes sense.
Protip: The world is a messy, complicated place. If everything makes sense, you're almost certainly misinterpreting and oversimplifying.
Most technology can be used for non-violent purposes that are overwhelmingly beneficial to people.
In addition, violence itself is merely another tool, one which can be put to good purpose. Military forces are important tools of public policy. They can be used to end horrific suffering and they can be used to maintain peace, by explicitly threatening anyone who would break the peace with violent consequences.
The underlying assumption of your post seems to be that military capability is an unalloyed evil. I'll grant that in an ideal world it would be completely unnecessary, but that is not the world in which we live. If we're concerned about misuse of military power, it seems to me that the armed forces already have more than enough capability to have us shaking in our boots, and it's not clear to me that adding AI to the mix (assuming the AI doesn't get out of control) significantly changes anything.
To make military forces "safe", we need to (a) ensure that they remain subject to civilian control and (b) ensure that civilian control acts responsibly. I'll grant that we seriously undermined (b) in the 2016 election, but that's a repairable problem.
Well, I wasn't stepping up to WMDs. But, yes, clearly, there's another whole level up there.