No one has tried such a thing - indeed it wouldn't work today. You missed this section of my post:
"once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies"
The time will come when machines can organise things better than people can. That's already the case in some situations, and it will become more and more common (as in the frequently referenced "Manna" story, by Marshall Brain). When this happens, a lot of the population will not be economically useful. As in, way more than half. At the same time, production efficiency will be high enough that they could be supported to an ever higher standard. I'm suggesting that that ought to happen.
Warning! - Socialism ahead.
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Historically, technological revolutions have eliminated large categories of jobs. Many manual jobs are now performed by machines, even skilled manual jobs. An economist might say that these former manual workers are now free to retrain, and do other things - (or just grow old and die, and be replaced by youngsters who have never known the old way, and have learnt the right skills to get along in this new world whilst growing up).
The question is, what happens when literally everything of economic value that a person is capable of doing, can be accomplish more efficiently by a machine? More and more resources come under the complete control of fewer and fewer people, and for the rest of the population, what is left?
I believe that once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies, a form of democratic socialism will become the preferred way to run society. Resources owned collectively, with broad decisions made democratically, but organisational details left to machines to optimise and execute. People would be provided for, because it is easy to produce enough to do it.
As you say, headers are useful when using libraries. But why not have the compiler generate the headers itself, or perhaps the library creation utility? IMHO if something is a deterministic one to one copy of something else, then there's no reason to force a human to copy it out by hand.
I don't disagree with you that we will ultimately be better off as a society - but to get there, we'll need to rethink some basic tenets of society. Fewer people will be economic contributors. The social safety net, which has steadily expanded over the last hundred years, will need to expand much more. However, hopefully the enhanced production that new technology allows will enable us to afford it.
Once they can pass a Turing test, they can do anyone's job. They don't need to be able to do anything close to that in order to render a large swathe of the lesser skilled members of the workforce unemployable.
They don't care about being virtuous, I can promise you that. They're angry, and they're jealous. Now I grant you, those aren't particularly admirable emotions, but if people like them stop your corporate bus one day, I don't think sneering will get you very far.
But what happens when it transpires that the "labour saving devices" are better than you at literally everything that has economic value? What do you do then?
We don't know who these people are, or their backgrounds - so it seems rather trite to sneer at their protest.The earning power of Google's brilliant tech professionals has swept them aside. Is it surprising they have something to say about it? And they are only the first small drops from the stormclouds. Robotics and automation constitute a rising tide that will engulf more and more low-skill jobs - and not just those either. What will most people do when there is no prospect of them getting any employment?
You're quite right, though it doesn't surprise me you've been modded down.
I don't think the illusion of strength is confined to the internet however. Capitalism itself beguiles people into thinking they matter, and have power, when, in the grand scheme of things, they may well not have lived at all. The internet is just the latest, most fashionable medium through which to express it.
We worry about corruption in the corridors of power, but we are just as easily bribed. Turn a blind eye to slavery in the far east, in return for this glittery new phone, or some such gewgaw. With every purchase, we betray our fellow man across the globe, and yet we still assume the moral high ground - which itself is just another leisure activity. Western governments know very well that we won't overthrow them while we're as comfortable, and as corruptible as we are.
Still, I thank god I'm on our side of the coin, rather than the other.
You're right to mock that, although in the late 1990's I worked at a London post production agency. We developed a human hair / fur system for Softimage and Mental Ray, which was quite advanced for the time. So we took it to Siggraph and showed it around different stands, trying to drum up some interest. However when we came to a company that had developed a similar product, initially they refused to talk to us. They saw our badges, literally cried out "Aaah, The Enemy!", and retreated back into the rear of their stand. It sounds crazy, and we became friendly after we talked them round - but they genuinely thought we were somehow trying to steal their secrets, or something.
So it can happen, though as you say, it's certainly not the norm.
I know what you mean, I think that c++ is way too complicated. It doesn't have to be like that, but all too often people can't help themselves, and their project develops an enormous templated husk, around what is a small kernel of useful code. The worst offender for me is cout's double arrow printf replacement syntax.That is among the least intuitive things I've seen. Classes are surely a good thing though, and new / delete is definitely better than malloc.
This may sound lame, but I've long wished for a native-code-generating language along the lines of Actionscript 3. The closest I've seen is the D language. It's pretty good, with concurrency and parallelism built in. I wish it would get more attention (and especially a fully implemented GUI library).
I'm pretty sure that getting drunk *IS* the primary reason alcohol is as popular as it is. The (lovely) taste of certain drinks is a real attraction for sure, but if it wasn't for the alcohol, no-one would have bothered spending lifetimes honing the recipes to such perfection.
Indeed - though to be honest, I think this is qualifies as borderline trolling on the UK government's part. Take a look at the article's comments section - no-one's buying it over there, either, and the Telegraph is a right wing paper.
I heartily agree re: Picard dune. I loved that film, mainly for the awesomely surreal visual atmosphere. "Far off, in the control rooms of spice gas, travelling without moving."
Guy Fawkes did fail, but Anonymous's mask design originates directly from the film "V for Vendetta", in which **probably unnecessary spoiler alert** parliament was successfully blown up.
If you're protesting about a corporation's activities (Don't buy Nestle Products, Monsanto GM corn etc.) then you are working within the system, protesting to raise awareness of your issue, and Western states typically allow this (note the use of the word "allow"). However, if the object of your protest is the government itself, then sooner or later you will inevitably need to break their "rules of protest". No government is going to submit to a revolution without a fight.
So, to paraphrase quite a few comments on this article:
"Duh, Los alamos are so stupid - less material in contact, less force, just like friction. I can't believe they only just worked that out. I mean DUH, they could've asked me THAT. Oh, and they make nukes. Eurgh, I hate them!"
Really? You seriously think that's all there is to it? I only read the abstract, and it states that the decrease in the Casimir force is far beyond theoretical predictions. But pffth, they probably got that wrong too, right?
I dunno, the misplaced arrogance I read on here sometimes really depresses me.
Take off your reductionist blinkers for a moment my friend. What is a soul? You seem very sure it doesn't exist, but what is it?
Firstly, I'm not talking about religious interpretation of "immortal souls", but I'm asking you consider whether the brain is really a mere computer - able to be "decompiled and reimplemented" as you say. I've previously argued that it is, but recently I've become a LOT less certain - and I can tell you exactly what it was that caused me to lose my faith.
I read an science article on photosynthesis research. To the extent I'd ever thought about it, I'd assumed that photosynthesis was well understood, but apparently humans have NO CLUE how photosynthesis works as efficiently as it does. It's just a mystery. So recently there was some research which highlighted a not-at-all-understood quantum mechanical process at the heart of photosynthesis. And by not-at-all-understood, I mean it ought to be impossible, going by our current understanding of QM. The article mentioned great implication for quantum computing for example. From a leaf.
So - if it happens there, who's to say it doesn't happen in the brain? Nature has demonstrably evolved systems that use QM far more effectively than our understanding can account for in "mere" leaves - but our brain, the most sophisticated thing we know of - NAH, that's definitely just like a computer with wires and stuff.
The truth is we have no idea. If the brain IS using something more than the biological version of wires and logic gates, then how do we know there isn't a "soul", or some ghost in the machine?
I tried your vortex cortex a-life thing. It was interesting - though I got the feeling the creatures co-evolved to efficiently cover space (thus finding all the dots) rather than evolving to hunt down the dots explicitly. It reminded me of the rat running experiment from Richard Feynman's Cargo Cult Science essay - how hard it is to know what is REALLY going on with a complex system.
Nice app though - you could try adding some obstacles to the environment, might focus the creatures minds:-)
I agree with you that a mission to Europa is DEVOUTLY to be desired - let us hope that Europa Clipper goes ahead! However, that surely doesn't make film of an extraterrestrial moonrise any less awe inspiring - and for what it is, not how it appears.
Hardly relevant. The point is, that in a "mobile ground based remotely-controlled-by-humans camera" scale, it most definitely IS distant.
I'm not sure what is more annoying - dismissing the video because it doesn't look impressive enough, or dismissing it because it's not much of an achievement anyway. All I know is, anyone not impressed / moved by this does not understand it.
The mission isn't supposed to find out anything new about Mars. It's about the problems associated with the trip itself. That's enough to be going on with. After the mission, I can practically guarantee there will be a succession of scientists and engineers giving presentations, saying "It turns out that...". There's no substitute for actually doing it - and if we want to reach the stage where we're regularly sending colony ships full of people to Mars, sending the first one just to loop round is in no way "a waste".
Climbing mount Everest vs. walking round it is a bad analogy. Walking around a mountain is something that many people could do easily. Sending a manned spaceship to loop around Mars, then travel safely back to Earth is most definitely not. I imagine such a mission will teach us a great deal about what is required to make such trips reliably and routinely. Then with a few such trips under humanity's belt, we start thinking about landings.
Slashdot Mirror
No one has tried such a thing - indeed it wouldn't work today. You missed this section of my post:
"once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies"
The time will come when machines can organise things better than people can. That's already the case in some situations, and it will become more and more common (as in the frequently referenced "Manna" story, by Marshall Brain). When this happens, a lot of the population will not be economically useful. As in, way more than half. At the same time, production efficiency will be high enough that they could be supported to an ever higher standard. I'm suggesting that that ought to happen.
Historically, technological revolutions have eliminated large categories of jobs. Many manual jobs are now performed by machines, even skilled manual jobs. An economist might say that these former manual workers are now free to retrain, and do other things - (or just grow old and die, and be replaced by youngsters who have never known the old way, and have learnt the right skills to get along in this new world whilst growing up).
The question is, what happens when literally everything of economic value that a person is capable of doing, can be accomplish more efficiently by a machine? More and more resources come under the complete control of fewer and fewer people, and for the rest of the population, what is left?
I believe that once machines obviate the need for large human organisations, with their attendant inefficiencies, a form of democratic socialism will become the preferred way to run society. Resources owned collectively, with broad decisions made democratically, but organisational details left to machines to optimise and execute. People would be provided for, because it is easy to produce enough to do it.
As you say, headers are useful when using libraries. But why not have the compiler generate the headers itself, or perhaps the library creation utility? IMHO if something is a deterministic one to one copy of something else, then there's no reason to force a human to copy it out by hand.
I don't disagree with you that we will ultimately be better off as a society - but to get there, we'll need to rethink some basic tenets of society. Fewer people will be economic contributors. The social safety net, which has steadily expanded over the last hundred years, will need to expand much more. However, hopefully the enhanced production that new technology allows will enable us to afford it.
Once they can pass a Turing test, they can do anyone's job. They don't need to be able to do anything close to that in order to render a large swathe of the lesser skilled members of the workforce unemployable.
This obstruction isn't in an area historically known as "Hobb's end" is it?
They don't care about being virtuous, I can promise you that. They're angry, and they're jealous. Now I grant you, those aren't particularly admirable emotions, but if people like them stop your corporate bus one day, I don't think sneering will get you very far.
But what happens when it transpires that the "labour saving devices" are better than you at literally everything that has economic value? What do you do then?
We don't know who these people are, or their backgrounds - so it seems rather trite to sneer at their protest.The earning power of Google's brilliant tech professionals has swept them aside. Is it surprising they have something to say about it? And they are only the first small drops from the stormclouds. Robotics and automation constitute a rising tide that will engulf more and more low-skill jobs - and not just those either. What will most people do when there is no prospect of them getting any employment?
Which is ironic, when you consider that measuring where people's nose begins is part of the problem.
You're quite right, though it doesn't surprise me you've been modded down.
I don't think the illusion of strength is confined to the internet however. Capitalism itself beguiles people into thinking they matter, and have power, when, in the grand scheme of things, they may well not have lived at all. The internet is just the latest, most fashionable medium through which to express it.
We worry about corruption in the corridors of power, but we are just as easily bribed. Turn a blind eye to slavery in the far east, in return for this glittery new phone, or some such gewgaw. With every purchase, we betray our fellow man across the globe, and yet we still assume the moral high ground - which itself is just another leisure activity. Western governments know very well that we won't overthrow them while we're as comfortable, and as corruptible as we are.
Still, I thank god I'm on our side of the coin, rather than the other.
You're right to mock that, although in the late 1990's I worked at a London post production agency. We developed a human hair / fur system for Softimage and Mental Ray, which was quite advanced for the time. So we took it to Siggraph and showed it around different stands, trying to drum up some interest. However when we came to a company that had developed a similar product, initially they refused to talk to us. They saw our badges, literally cried out "Aaah, The Enemy!", and retreated back into the rear of their stand. It sounds crazy, and we became friendly after we talked them round - but they genuinely thought we were somehow trying to steal their secrets, or something.
So it can happen, though as you say, it's certainly not the norm.
I know what you mean, I think that c++ is way too complicated. It doesn't have to be like that, but all too often people can't help themselves, and their project develops an enormous templated husk, around what is a small kernel of useful code. The worst offender for me is cout's double arrow printf replacement syntax.That is among the least intuitive things I've seen. Classes are surely a good thing though, and new / delete is definitely better than malloc.
This may sound lame, but I've long wished for a native-code-generating language along the lines of Actionscript 3. The closest I've seen is the D language. It's pretty good, with concurrency and parallelism built in. I wish it would get more attention (and especially a fully implemented GUI library).
I'm pretty sure that getting drunk *IS* the primary reason alcohol is as popular as it is. The (lovely) taste of certain drinks is a real attraction for sure, but if it wasn't for the alcohol, no-one would have bothered spending lifetimes honing the recipes to such perfection.
Indeed - though to be honest, I think this is qualifies as borderline trolling on the UK government's part. Take a look at the article's comments section - no-one's buying it over there, either, and the Telegraph is a right wing paper.
I heartily agree re: Picard dune. I loved that film, mainly for the awesomely surreal visual atmosphere. "Far off, in the control rooms of spice gas, travelling without moving."
Guy Fawkes did fail, but Anonymous's mask design originates directly from the film "V for Vendetta", in which **probably unnecessary spoiler alert** parliament was successfully blown up.
If you're protesting about a corporation's activities (Don't buy Nestle Products, Monsanto GM corn etc.) then you are working within the system, protesting to raise awareness of your issue, and Western states typically allow this (note the use of the word "allow"). However, if the object of your protest is the government itself, then sooner or later you will inevitably need to break their "rules of protest". No government is going to submit to a revolution without a fight.
So, to paraphrase quite a few comments on this article:
"Duh, Los alamos are so stupid - less material in contact, less force, just like friction. I can't believe they only just worked that out. I mean DUH, they could've asked me THAT. Oh, and they make nukes. Eurgh, I hate them!"
Really? You seriously think that's all there is to it? I only read the abstract, and it states that the decrease in the Casimir force is far beyond theoretical predictions. But pffth, they probably got that wrong too, right?
I dunno, the misplaced arrogance I read on here sometimes really depresses me.
Take off your reductionist blinkers for a moment my friend. What is a soul? You seem very sure it doesn't exist, but what is it?
Firstly, I'm not talking about religious interpretation of "immortal souls", but I'm asking you consider whether the brain is really a mere computer - able to be "decompiled and reimplemented" as you say. I've previously argued that it is, but recently I've become a LOT less certain - and I can tell you exactly what it was that caused me to lose my faith.
I read an science article on photosynthesis research. To the extent I'd ever thought about it, I'd assumed that photosynthesis was well understood, but apparently humans have NO CLUE how photosynthesis works as efficiently as it does. It's just a mystery. So recently there was some research which highlighted a not-at-all-understood quantum mechanical process at the heart of photosynthesis. And by not-at-all-understood, I mean it ought to be impossible, going by our current understanding of QM. The article mentioned great implication for quantum computing for example. From a leaf.
So - if it happens there, who's to say it doesn't happen in the brain? Nature has demonstrably evolved systems that use QM far more effectively than our understanding can account for in "mere" leaves - but our brain, the most sophisticated thing we know of - NAH, that's definitely just like a computer with wires and stuff.
The truth is we have no idea. If the brain IS using something more than the biological version of wires and logic gates, then how do we know there isn't a "soul", or some ghost in the machine?
Hi
I tried your vortex cortex a-life thing. It was interesting - though I got the feeling the creatures co-evolved to efficiently cover space (thus finding all the dots) rather than evolving to hunt down the dots explicitly. It reminded me of the rat running experiment from Richard Feynman's Cargo Cult Science essay - how hard it is to know what is REALLY going on with a complex system.
Nice app though - you could try adding some obstacles to the environment, might focus the creatures minds :-)
Matt
I agree with you that a mission to Europa is DEVOUTLY to be desired - let us hope that Europa Clipper goes ahead! However, that surely doesn't make film of an extraterrestrial moonrise any less awe inspiring - and for what it is, not how it appears.
In an astronomical scale Mars is hardly 'distant'
Hardly relevant. The point is, that in a "mobile ground based remotely-controlled-by-humans camera" scale, it most definitely IS distant.
I'm not sure what is more annoying - dismissing the video because it doesn't look impressive enough, or dismissing it because it's not much of an achievement anyway. All I know is, anyone not impressed / moved by this does not understand it.
The mission isn't supposed to find out anything new about Mars. It's about the problems associated with the trip itself. That's enough to be going on with. After the mission, I can practically guarantee there will be a succession of scientists and engineers giving presentations, saying "It turns out that...". There's no substitute for actually doing it - and if we want to reach the stage where we're regularly sending colony ships full of people to Mars, sending the first one just to loop round is in no way "a waste".
Climbing mount Everest vs. walking round it is a bad analogy. Walking around a mountain is something that many people could do easily. Sending a manned spaceship to loop around Mars, then travel safely back to Earth is most definitely not. I imagine such a mission will teach us a great deal about what is required to make such trips reliably and routinely. Then with a few such trips under humanity's belt, we start thinking about landings.