The health insurance companies. Since no matter how hard they try, they can't always dodge the bill for all those drugs, they win if the vaccine works and is approved.
However, I can say that your claim that "machines by definition cannot be intelligent" will most likely, if you use a definition that allows humans to be intelligent, fall. Also, notice for yourself: You refused to answer the question. You refused to do the definitions.
Of course I refused to define the terms. Terms from ordinary language, like "think," "intelligent" and "machine," do not derive their meaning from definitions. They derive their meaning from the role they play in various interactions in our culture.
If you ask an ordinary language question like "Can a machine think?", you can't claim to have answered that question if you provide a technical answer that relies on technical definitions of the terms.
Of course I don't think that something supernatural goes on in people's heads. But my point is that the whole debate about whether a machine can think isn't an empirical one about whether you can build a machine that can do anything that a person can. It's a cosmological and cultural debate about what kind of things peoples and machines are, and what sort of relationship do they stand in to each other.
Ask yourself: Is this fair towards yourself and knowledge? Can you be sure that you are right unless you actually go in and look at the question *with hard edges*? Do you feel reasonable when you refuse to look at the question in depth? And how would your thoughts be if you just dropped the assertion and looked carefully at the actual behaviour here? Might it not be just as true that intelligence may occur in machines, if you just try this on properly, losing that single assumption?
There's two problems here:
Once you've provided a definition of the terms, you've changed the question.
Understanding requires abandoning old ways of looking at things. Just because one particular question motivated a course of investigation, that doesn't mean that the result of the investigation must be an answer to the question that prompted it. The research may well outgrow the original question. (My favorite example: the whole "What is Pluto?" controversy is stupid, because all it shows is that astronomy has outgrown the distinction between "star" and "planet," inherited from antiquity.)
As for "arbiter of culture", the culture we have use intelligence as a term to refer to humans. I'm referring to that, and I say that a definition of "intelligence" that disagree with this is, in my estimation, unlikely to match anything, and it is unlikely to be useful. You are the one that tries to go away from the common culture in this usage.
Yes, but the point was that how our contemporary culture uses the term is a historically contingent fact. "Humans are intelligent" is not an obvious, timeless truth, regardless of whatever attitude you and I may take toward it.
Another thing that the AI discussion misses: the moral dimension of "intelligence." 20th century psychology has framed the term "intelligence" in terms of cognition and cognitive skills. However, another traditional component of the concept is moral agency; being "intelligent" means that you are entitled to full enjoyments of the rights that befit your membership in your community, with all the concomitant responsibilities. (It is no accident that the historical periods where people denied that some ethnicities, women and children were "intelligent" also correspondingly denied some corresponding rights to them, like the right to vote, or to own property; or likewise, being exempted from certain responsibilities, by holding them not to be criminally or civilly liable for some acts.)
This sort of thing, if you ask me, is way more important than the silly question whether a "machine" can "think" (framed in terms of cognitive abilities). Why so? Because it gets to what I think is the real, cosmological heart of the matter: what are people,
You're assuming that humans aren't machines - in this context, that's actually a matter of faith.
Yup, just like I assume that airplanes fly, but submarines don't swim. There is no substantive issue of whether a machine can think. There is just an ideological and cosmological dispute about what people are, where too many participants like to cast their positions as science.
Human intelligence may be a result of "machine processes" - ie, direct physical processes.
You're equivocating over the term "machine." The range of meanings it has in our language is much richer than that; you can only continue this argument by arbitrarily focusing on some of them. To do this while claiming the authority of science is no more and no less than what I described above: framing as a scientific hypothesis a position in an ideological dispute.
If we assume that humans are intelligent - otherwise, the term seems sort of useless [...]
Actually, I don't allow this assumption to be taken for granted. Not 100 years ago, it was still common among educated people and scientists in the Western world to believe that non-"white" people, women and children were not in fact "intelligent."
Usage of the word has changed since (without the sort of belief in question dying out, as evidenced by The Bell Curve; it's just reformulated in other terms). Strong AI folks want the general usage to change again. The problem is that (a) nobody appointed them as general arbitrers of our culture, (b) they like to disguise their preference for certain way of using the term as scientific conclusions.
(And I believe such a definition would probably be counter-productive when it comes to the matter of defining intelligence.)
You can go ahead and "define" intelligence as much as you like. What do you think that accomplishes? You don't have a power to decide how other people are going to use the term "intelligence," nor the term "machine."
Old systems didn't have bloat because characters were bytes and graphical entities were flat bitmaps. Nowadays we have jpeg encoded resources and double byte strings and all sorts of other magical crap. Programs were (mostly) written for one language and didn't need to adapt themselves to multiple systems.
You're forgetting something important: new systems have orders of magnitude more processing power and I/O throughput.
The point of having end-user software be very highly concurrent isn't necessarily to make it have very high performance according to some absolute metric. You can use concurrency to make the software have a very responsive feel to the end-user. In fact, it's very often acceptable to make a program be slower overall in the absolute sense, just to make it respond faster to the end-user.
All this means is that just like a machine that can perform arithmetic isn't "intelligent," neither is one that can compress Wikipedia down to 1.319 bits per character. (And the reason it's not "intelligent," of course, is nothing more and nothing less than the fact that it is a machine.)
Has anyone used the PostgreSQL open source to refactor the DB to support just a subset of SQL and features (the most popular stuff that eg. "LAMP" uses), then benchmarked it vs the default distro, to show higher performance?
You talk as if this were a trivial thing to do just because you have access to the sources.
I believe the author's point isn't that you don't need to know any mathematics, or that it doesn't have an important role to play in CS. He's simply arguing that some of the main issues in computer science are not fundamentally mathematical problems (even if they require some mathematics).
The way I read TFA is that the guy thinks computer science is more about logic than about mathematics. Study logic seriously, and you'll find that very much of it is about "expressional possibilities," as TFA puts it.
Did you read the part that more than half of any communication giants records come from other company's that went belly up due to poor record keeping? I'm guessing not....or you may have thought more about that.
How is that relevant at all? It doesn't excuse your company from fulfilling the responsibilities that it inherited by acquiring the other companies. Which, perhaps, these problems argue that it wasn't as good of a deal as your company's management thought; they might've underestimated the support costs for the new customers.
But anyway, the point is that you're making excuses.
We are not talking about a carton of eggs here, we are talking internet service. Someone with the equipment and interest to utilize broadband service should be able to read a number off the bottom of a modem for crying out load. I mean its not like they need to understand what that number is used for or means or anything like that they just need to be able to FIND the number and read it off.
Here's a little story that comes to mind. Some 5 years ago, a bunch of pranksters here in Slashdot registered accounts with names such as "Hëmos," "Hêmos," "CmdrTáco" and so on, and started posting comments to stories. A prodigious amount of people fell for, thinking it really was CmdrTaco and Hemos.
How could this happen, when it was supposedly plainly visible that these were different account names? Because if the only language you read is English, which doesn't use diacritical marks on letters, if you are a fluent reader you will tune out such marks if they are placed there. If the comment author field says "CmdrTäco," you won't wont even notice the umlaut over the "a," because it doesn't serve to discriminate between multiple possible written English words.
Now, apply this to "8" vs. "B." Unless the customer changes their whole set of ingrained, unconscious expectations about what can count as a "number" or a "digit," you must expect a high error rate in having them read a hexadecimal number to you, period. This is not because of "stupidity," as you'd have it, but rather, because of intelligence run amok in an unfamiliar setting. The customer is following their usual methods for tuning out irrelevant detail when reading a number, but this usual method misfires when dealing with hex.
And I've not gone into problems when the hex number is printed in small type.
Solutions: (a) train your phone reps to always double check whether an "8" don't use hex numbers at all; (b) try not to rely on identifying customers using coding schemes that will be unfamiliar to customers, like hex numbers.
The idea is based on the philosophy that numbers do not exist in isolation. It is possible to speak of, e.g., the number 5 as an abstract entity unto its own, but that should be rare. Most of the time, "5" refers to the ratio "5:1", where the "1" refers to something tangible. In science, the "1" is denoted with units.
You're missing something more basic: magnitudes form the basis of an algebra that's isomorphic to algebra on the real numbers. That's the whole reason that it's possible to use operations on numbers as a surrogate for operations with magnitudes: e.g., you can find out how long two pieces of wood placed end-to-end would be by adding numbers that stand in the correct relation to the magnitude of their lengths.
The number 1 doesn't have any special properties in this connection. It's just another real number. (0 is another story, of course, because it's the identity.)
Compilers should be doing dimensional analysis at compile-time. I had originally hoped to create C++ templates -- which are evaluated at compile-time -- to do this, but I couldn't quite see how to get them to handle all the possible permutations of unit combinations and conversions -- at least not easily. It really needs to be built into the language.
An ED is a security that gives its holder ownership interest on a dollar in some account that the ED issuer owns, without allowing the issuer to use or dispose of the dollar in any other way than paying the ED holder. If you own an ED, you indirectly own the dollar that backs that ED, period. If you come to own a dollar you didn't own before, that's called "income."
EDs already exist, and they're called dollars. This ED scheme is no different than if you had a dollar-denominated account at the exchange, and dividends simply credited your account with a USD amount, which you could cash out at will or have it credited to any debts you incurred with the exchange.
Or to put it another way: dollars, in the general case, exist as credits to accounts. You don't have to be given actual dollar bills for that to count as income; it is sufficient that some account that you own be credited for some amount. Giving you an ED nothing more than crediting one dollar to your account.
To make the example interesting, the EDs simply can't have the exact same value, liquidity and lack of risk as dollars, a condition that can't hold as long as each ED is backed by one dollar. Institute limited supply and a floating exchange rate, and then things start getting interesting. You get something like forex trading, in which you are indeed taxed when you convert your gains to USD.
Going in a straight line down into the earth would be moving north of the pole.
By this logic, you can never head north along the surface of the sphere. True north is always a direction that points inside the sphere. The most you can do along the surface of the sphere is head in a direction that, while not true north (because you're not burrowing into the earth), at least does not have an east-west component.
The problem is that it's perfectly ordinary to refer to such motions along the surface of the sphere as going "north," and that it is just as ordinary to mathematically represent such motions as two-dimensional vectors over a spherical surface. The alternative representation that you have in mind, where there's a three-dimensional vector, is the unconventional one. You can come up with an odd interpretation to claim that you can "move north" when you're at the pole, but that tells us more about your imagination and your resourcefulness than about the meaning the term "north" has in use.
There's another issue: you're identifying "north" with the magnetic north pole, and using the compass as the instrument that determines which direction is north. However, that model simply can't explain how it makes sense to talk of the geographic north pole as being a pole, since we do not have an instrument that points down when placed at the geographic north pole.
Michael has been one of the top ten most popular male names for over fifty years. Why is it so hard for some people to spell correctly?
Why do you think the popularity of the name should make it any less likely to be misspelled? People routinely and systematically misspell expressions that occur vastly more frequently in text (e.g., would of).
You can't say this is a "typical argument in Abrahamic religious traditions" and then claim that it is a STRAW MAN!
Yes I can. The GP has done no work at all to figure out in any detail what the people he's criticizing actually believe in regards to the argument he is making. Also, he makes no effort to be charitable and consider the best possible refinements of the positions he attributes to his intellectual adversaries. Instead, he attributes beliefs to them at his convenience. That is a strawman argument.
ID is unique (I'm not talking about young earth crap) because it really is not straight philosophy as it has too many ties to empirical data, it shouldn't be religion because (at least the reasonable arguments) don't actually argue for a "God," and yet it doesn't fit very nicely into the current definitions of "science."
ID is politics, plain and simple. It's part of a power struggle between ideological groups that subscribe to two broad families of philosophies: a Christian worldview that we inherit from the Middle Ages, and a secular one that's been constantly displacing it since the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
The lines aren't at the obvious place (between religious groups in general and science), because nowadays we have a lot of religious groups that have been strongly secularized. The lines really are between fundamentalist religion and the rest of the culture. Religious fundamentalism, far from being "true religion," is a reaction to the secularization of much of mainstream religion. When significant segments of the religious world weren't as secularized as they are now, fundamentalism didn't exsit, and readings of the Bible (or Koran, for that matter) as literal as many that are espoused today would have been laughed out.
Public education in the USA and Western Europe is a secular enterprise. The attempt to get ID into public education is nothing more than an attack on the secular nature of mainstream institutions, and is of a species with things like whether "under God" should be in the Pledge of Allegiance.
God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith. If you see something that you think is proof of God's existence, you're wrong. He's ineffable. That means you can't effing figure him out.
This is typical Abrahamic religion thought, and not common to all religions. And to make it worse, the fact that it's a typical argument in Abrahamic religious traditions, doesn't make it an essential feature of them.
Which means that you're carrying out a strawman argument, since you're not engaging the actual claims and beliefs of any actual adversary, only those you project onto an imagined one, and which just happen to be very conveniently weak.
The paper lacks citations, makes broad-sweeping overgeneralizations, and doesn't bother with talking to anybody on either facebook nor on myspace to back up its claims.
The piece has been taken out of context. It's an academic brainstorm, put up in a blog for comment. It's not a finished, polished paper.
Now please stop looking silly by acting as if it was otherwise.
You know, this paper could be extended into many different areas. As this paper says, class is very hard to define in America - in the United States, class can be more about culture and lifestyle than income or job description.
Yes. If you're interested in this, however, this little informal paper is not the best place to direct your attention. There's a lot of published work about social class in the USA, a lot of which I suspect will make you go "aha!" (I'm not a social scientist, so sadly enough, I can't give you many good pointers; I did enjoy reading Jocks and Burnouts, which is very much around this topic.)
A few things I will mention: (a) nobody who's serious about the topic believes that class is just a matter of income; (b) "live-to-work" vs. "work-to-live" is a major class attitude distinction in the USA; (c) there exist professions, like contractor, that exist largely to bridge social gaps (a contractor is somebody that middle class people pay in order to have access to his social network of skilled working class laborers), and as such, rely on building social networks that span the class boundary.
You're assuming, in effect, that Marx's theory of class is true or helpful in research, and using that assumption, claiming that TFA's treatment of class is wrong. Well, Marx's theory of class is very much under dispute, so your argument is completely out of place in context. It's easy to "win" arguments if you assume the points of contention.
But anyway, you got TFA's notion of class wrong:
Class isn't about how much money you make or your ethnicity.
Indeed, and TFA indeed claimed that class isnt' about how much money you make, but rather about social networks (in the sociological sense, not the technological SNS sense).
At least the author acknowledges that there isn't sufficient data to say anything truly authoritative on the subject.
Dude, you're missing something important. It's an early draft proposal for further research. And here you are, judging it by the standards of finished work. Tsk, tsk.
Slashdot Mirror
The health insurance companies. Since no matter how hard they try, they can't always dodge the bill for all those drugs, they win if the vaccine works and is approved.
Of course I refused to define the terms. Terms from ordinary language, like "think," "intelligent" and "machine," do not derive their meaning from definitions. They derive their meaning from the role they play in various interactions in our culture.
If you ask an ordinary language question like "Can a machine think?", you can't claim to have answered that question if you provide a technical answer that relies on technical definitions of the terms.
Of course I don't think that something supernatural goes on in people's heads. But my point is that the whole debate about whether a machine can think isn't an empirical one about whether you can build a machine that can do anything that a person can. It's a cosmological and cultural debate about what kind of things peoples and machines are, and what sort of relationship do they stand in to each other.
There's two problems here:
Yes, but the point was that how our contemporary culture uses the term is a historically contingent fact. "Humans are intelligent" is not an obvious, timeless truth, regardless of whatever attitude you and I may take toward it.
Another thing that the AI discussion misses: the moral dimension of "intelligence." 20th century psychology has framed the term "intelligence" in terms of cognition and cognitive skills. However, another traditional component of the concept is moral agency; being "intelligent" means that you are entitled to full enjoyments of the rights that befit your membership in your community, with all the concomitant responsibilities. (It is no accident that the historical periods where people denied that some ethnicities, women and children were "intelligent" also correspondingly denied some corresponding rights to them, like the right to vote, or to own property; or likewise, being exempted from certain responsibilities, by holding them not to be criminally or civilly liable for some acts.)
This sort of thing, if you ask me, is way more important than the silly question whether a "machine" can "think" (framed in terms of cognitive abilities). Why so? Because it gets to what I think is the real, cosmological heart of the matter: what are people,
There are problems with the term "innate," but there are certainly some specific fears that one can observe in newborns. IIRC, fear of spiders is one.
Yup, just like I assume that airplanes fly, but submarines don't swim. There is no substantive issue of whether a machine can think. There is just an ideological and cosmological dispute about what people are, where too many participants like to cast their positions as science.
You're equivocating over the term "machine." The range of meanings it has in our language is much richer than that; you can only continue this argument by arbitrarily focusing on some of them. To do this while claiming the authority of science is no more and no less than what I described above: framing as a scientific hypothesis a position in an ideological dispute.
Actually, I don't allow this assumption to be taken for granted. Not 100 years ago, it was still common among educated people and scientists in the Western world to believe that non-"white" people, women and children were not in fact "intelligent."
Usage of the word has changed since (without the sort of belief in question dying out, as evidenced by The Bell Curve; it's just reformulated in other terms). Strong AI folks want the general usage to change again. The problem is that (a) nobody appointed them as general arbitrers of our culture, (b) they like to disguise their preference for certain way of using the term as scientific conclusions.
You can go ahead and "define" intelligence as much as you like. What do you think that accomplishes? You don't have a power to decide how other people are going to use the term "intelligence," nor the term "machine."
The point of having end-user software be very highly concurrent isn't necessarily to make it have very high performance according to some absolute metric. You can use concurrency to make the software have a very responsive feel to the end-user. In fact, it's very often acceptable to make a program be slower overall in the absolute sense, just to make it respond faster to the end-user.
All this means is that just like a machine that can perform arithmetic isn't "intelligent," neither is one that can compress Wikipedia down to 1.319 bits per character. (And the reason it's not "intelligent," of course, is nothing more and nothing less than the fact that it is a machine.)
You talk as if this were a trivial thing to do just because you have access to the sources.
The way I read TFA is that the guy thinks computer science is more about logic than about mathematics. Study logic seriously, and you'll find that very much of it is about "expressional possibilities," as TFA puts it.
How is that relevant at all? It doesn't excuse your company from fulfilling the responsibilities that it inherited by acquiring the other companies. Which, perhaps, these problems argue that it wasn't as good of a deal as your company's management thought; they might've underestimated the support costs for the new customers.
But anyway, the point is that you're making excuses.
Here's a little story that comes to mind. Some 5 years ago, a bunch of pranksters here in Slashdot registered accounts with names such as "Hëmos," "Hêmos," "CmdrTáco" and so on, and started posting comments to stories. A prodigious amount of people fell for, thinking it really was CmdrTaco and Hemos.
How could this happen, when it was supposedly plainly visible that these were different account names? Because if the only language you read is English, which doesn't use diacritical marks on letters, if you are a fluent reader you will tune out such marks if they are placed there. If the comment author field says "CmdrTäco," you won't wont even notice the umlaut over the "a," because it doesn't serve to discriminate between multiple possible written English words.
Now, apply this to "8" vs. "B." Unless the customer changes their whole set of ingrained, unconscious expectations about what can count as a "number" or a "digit," you must expect a high error rate in having them read a hexadecimal number to you, period. This is not because of "stupidity," as you'd have it, but rather, because of intelligence run amok in an unfamiliar setting. The customer is following their usual methods for tuning out irrelevant detail when reading a number, but this usual method misfires when dealing with hex.
And I've not gone into problems when the hex number is printed in small type.
Solutions: (a) train your phone reps to always double check whether an "8" don't use hex numbers at all; (b) try not to rely on identifying customers using coding schemes that will be unfamiliar to customers, like hex numbers.
You're missing something more basic: magnitudes form the basis of an algebra that's isomorphic to algebra on the real numbers. That's the whole reason that it's possible to use operations on numbers as a surrogate for operations with magnitudes: e.g., you can find out how long two pieces of wood placed end-to-end would be by adding numbers that stand in the correct relation to the magnitude of their lengths.
The number 1 doesn't have any special properties in this connection. It's just another real number. (0 is another story, of course, because it's the identity.)
This is really a static type analysis problem. It's possible to do some of this in languages with really powerful type systems, like Haskell; here is a link to a Haskell library that performs compile-time dimensional checking.
Yes.
An ED is a security that gives its holder ownership interest on a dollar in some account that the ED issuer owns, without allowing the issuer to use or dispose of the dollar in any other way than paying the ED holder. If you own an ED, you indirectly own the dollar that backs that ED, period. If you come to own a dollar you didn't own before, that's called "income."
EDs already exist, and they're called dollars. This ED scheme is no different than if you had a dollar-denominated account at the exchange, and dividends simply credited your account with a USD amount, which you could cash out at will or have it credited to any debts you incurred with the exchange.
Or to put it another way: dollars, in the general case, exist as credits to accounts. You don't have to be given actual dollar bills for that to count as income; it is sufficient that some account that you own be credited for some amount. Giving you an ED nothing more than crediting one dollar to your account.
To make the example interesting, the EDs simply can't have the exact same value, liquidity and lack of risk as dollars, a condition that can't hold as long as each ED is backed by one dollar. Institute limited supply and a floating exchange rate, and then things start getting interesting. You get something like forex trading, in which you are indeed taxed when you convert your gains to USD.
By this logic, you can never head north along the surface of the sphere. True north is always a direction that points inside the sphere. The most you can do along the surface of the sphere is head in a direction that, while not true north (because you're not burrowing into the earth), at least does not have an east-west component.
The problem is that it's perfectly ordinary to refer to such motions along the surface of the sphere as going "north," and that it is just as ordinary to mathematically represent such motions as two-dimensional vectors over a spherical surface. The alternative representation that you have in mind, where there's a three-dimensional vector, is the unconventional one. You can come up with an odd interpretation to claim that you can "move north" when you're at the pole, but that tells us more about your imagination and your resourcefulness than about the meaning the term "north" has in use.
There's another issue: you're identifying "north" with the magnetic north pole, and using the compass as the instrument that determines which direction is north. However, that model simply can't explain how it makes sense to talk of the geographic north pole as being a pole, since we do not have an instrument that points down when placed at the geographic north pole.
Why do you think the popularity of the name should make it any less likely to be misspelled? People routinely and systematically misspell expressions that occur vastly more frequently in text (e.g., would of).
Yes I can. The GP has done no work at all to figure out in any detail what the people he's criticizing actually believe in regards to the argument he is making. Also, he makes no effort to be charitable and consider the best possible refinements of the positions he attributes to his intellectual adversaries. Instead, he attributes beliefs to them at his convenience. That is a strawman argument.
ID is politics, plain and simple. It's part of a power struggle between ideological groups that subscribe to two broad families of philosophies: a Christian worldview that we inherit from the Middle Ages, and a secular one that's been constantly displacing it since the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
The lines aren't at the obvious place (between religious groups in general and science), because nowadays we have a lot of religious groups that have been strongly secularized. The lines really are between fundamentalist religion and the rest of the culture. Religious fundamentalism, far from being "true religion," is a reaction to the secularization of much of mainstream religion. When significant segments of the religious world weren't as secularized as they are now, fundamentalism didn't exsit, and readings of the Bible (or Koran, for that matter) as literal as many that are espoused today would have been laughed out.
Public education in the USA and Western Europe is a secular enterprise. The attempt to get ID into public education is nothing more than an attack on the secular nature of mainstream institutions, and is of a species with things like whether "under God" should be in the Pledge of Allegiance.
This is typical Abrahamic religion thought, and not common to all religions. And to make it worse, the fact that it's a typical argument in Abrahamic religious traditions, doesn't make it an essential feature of them.
Which means that you're carrying out a strawman argument, since you're not engaging the actual claims and beliefs of any actual adversary, only those you project onto an imagined one, and which just happen to be very conveniently weak.
The piece has been taken out of context. It's an academic brainstorm, put up in a blog for comment. It's not a finished, polished paper.
Now please stop looking silly by acting as if it was otherwise.
Yes. If you're interested in this, however, this little informal paper is not the best place to direct your attention. There's a lot of published work about social class in the USA, a lot of which I suspect will make you go "aha!" (I'm not a social scientist, so sadly enough, I can't give you many good pointers; I did enjoy reading Jocks and Burnouts, which is very much around this topic.)
A few things I will mention: (a) nobody who's serious about the topic believes that class is just a matter of income; (b) "live-to-work" vs. "work-to-live" is a major class attitude distinction in the USA; (c) there exist professions, like contractor, that exist largely to bridge social gaps (a contractor is somebody that middle class people pay in order to have access to his social network of skilled working class laborers), and as such, rely on building social networks that span the class boundary.
You're assuming, in effect, that Marx's theory of class is true or helpful in research, and using that assumption, claiming that TFA's treatment of class is wrong. Well, Marx's theory of class is very much under dispute, so your argument is completely out of place in context. It's easy to "win" arguments if you assume the points of contention.
But anyway, you got TFA's notion of class wrong:
Indeed, and TFA indeed claimed that class isnt' about how much money you make, but rather about social networks (in the sociological sense, not the technological SNS sense).
Dude, you're missing something important. It's an early draft proposal for further research. And here you are, judging it by the standards of finished work. Tsk, tsk.