Technically, "copyright theft" would require stealing someone's unpublished manuscript or music, and then registering the copyright under your own name.
I tried it once. I'm now the proud owner of the Dutch translation of "The Langoliers."
It seems like the music industry is dying because it has vastly overestimated the value of the product it sells.
When CDs first came out, they were about the coolest way to spend money. There were no DVDs, movies came on cumbersome magnetic tapes which degraded quickly, and the software of the day just wasn't compelling to most people (and also came on cumbersome magnetic media).
The prices for CDs have hardly fallen since.
Today, you can spend $20 on a DVD. Technically, it's also just a piece of plastic, but it carries a couple of hours of data for the eyes as well as the ears. Or you can buy a video game for $35-$50 that lets you actively participate in the entertainment. Being non-linear, a video game could provide anywhere from 0 to thousands of hours of entertainment. Then there is cable TV, where for the price of a couple CDs a month, you get 24-hour access to lots of different crap.
With a CD, you get about an hour worth of music (I've seen some go as low as 40 mintues), and even if you really like all the songs, it only engages your ears. Hence, on average, CDs are less entertaining.
Nor is the CD a convenient format for anything but home use. Keep your CDs in your car, and they inevitably get ruined or stolen. So for your convenience you burn yourself a copy for your car, making it more valuable to you. But the industry isn't simply failing to increase the value of its product, it's trying to interfere with the ripping and burning that could make the content more convenient (and hence more valuable).
I'm really not sure what you're trying to get across here, but I'm interested. Could you give some examples of books/movies/stories which succumb to this "amoral jerkiness" trend?
So maybe the battery thing turns out to be a major gaffe, and it would have made more scientific sense to use some other pretense for captivity. I still don't see where the parent gets off claiming that this fact makes "The Matrix" fantasy rather than sci-fi.
Is Star Trek no longer sci-fi because, in one episode, the Voyager crew had to brave a "demon planet" in order to collect precious deuterium (the second most common substance in the universe)? Is Paul Hogan's "Anguished Dawn" not sci-fi because it seems to have accepted the rantings of Immanuel Velikovsky at face value? Even if you argue that the science has to be sound before something can be great sci-fi, sci-fi with bad science doesn't suddenly become "fantasy."
There are some similarities here, but as I pointed out in another post, proper Bayesian filtering is a bit simpler than you imply.
Bayesian filters don't care about proper grammar. After all, "You can enlarge your penis and please the ladies" is proper grammar. Bayesian filters work strictly on word count.
Essay-grading software would use more sophisticated algorithms, but would still be prone to the sort of text you mentioned.
I've seen some of these spams, and I keep wondering just what the point is. After you spend a full minute trying to figure out what they're trying to sell, there is no way it can be an effective sales pitch. All it does is give the spammer another "successfully sent" message to bill the customer for.
Let me see if I understand the situation. These kids "got bored" and decided to go shoot up trucks on the highway. Now, are we supposed to believe that the kids were too stupid to come up with the idea on their own? Or that they were too stupid to recognize that just because violence on a screen can be entertaining, it doesn't necessarily mean that the same violence is entertaining in real life?
Personally, I hate the entire GTA series. I think the glorification of violence is a bad idea, and that the game makers show a lack of social conscience. But I respect their right to make the games. Further, I believe that if we were to hold game makers responsible for the effects of their games on the people who buy them, it would have a profund chilling effect on free speech. That is unacceptable.
You know it and I know it: these kids were severely disturbed long before they ever got their hands on GTA. Hundreds of millions of people play video games, why aren't at least a few million of us out there emulating them? Because the vast, vast majority of us have too firm a grip on reality. We also share an ability to empathize with others and accept that their feelings are important. These kids, somewhere along the line, lost that ability.
Even if we accept that there is a small subset of humanity who--for whatever psycho/neuro/sociological reason--can be affected by video games in this way, that is not sufficient reason to stop creating the games. It doesn't make sense any more than it makes sense to stop making peanut butter just because a few of us are violently allergic to peanuts. The focus should be on finding these broken people and trying to fix them, because making the world safe for them is impossible.
If we assume that our writing program has access to the algorithm used to grade it, probably not hard at all. I can just imagine it writing the thing on a sentence-by-sentence basis. First, feed the essay-writing software a bunch of good papers, and store the relationships between words in a Markov chain. This gives it a rough idea of what words are likely to follow a given word.
Using that information, spit out a semi-random sentence. Run the sentence through the grading algorithm, and see if it chokes. If the algorithm doesn't like it, swap the order of a couple of words and see if that improves it. If a hundred different permutations fail to get an acceptable score, dump the sentence and try again with a new one.
Once you have a large enough number of high-scoring sentences, put them into paragraph form and run the entire essay through the system and see how you score.
It would also be possible--and most likely more effective--to write a sentence creator that understood the rules of grammar, and just threw in random adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Sort of a "Mad Libs" essay writer. I saw a pretty convincing one in "Godel, Escher, Bach." But the point is, given access to the algorithm used to grade the essay, you could theoretically write the essay just by piping/dev/urandom through it and keeping the good stuff. I don't suggest using this technique if you have a slow computer or a short deadline.
Bayesian filtering is too simple a thing. It works by counting the frequency of various words and comparing the result to the frequency with which the words are used in collections of known material.
While it may be possible that some words are used more frequently in good essays ("vacuous," "intrepid," "ratiocination") and other words occur more frequently in poor essays ("wanna," "ain't," "JLo," "Coulter") the filter couldn't tell the difference between:
"This sentence is free from grammatical and spelling errors."
and
"Errors grammatical and sentence free this from is spelling from."
A student could turn in word salad and get an A, so long as the salad had the right ingredients.
Seriously, though. It's hard to make any case for the superiority of our honored dead. The pyramids were an incredible feat at the time, and nobody today bothers to build piles of rubble anywhere near that big. But from the standpoint of resources used, material moved, and total work done (by the proper physics definition, rather than man hours) the whole system of pyramids probably has nothing on the Interstate Highway system of the U.S. Now that was a mammoth project, of the sort that the pharoahs could only imagine.
Then there was the Manhattan Project. Despite the fallout from the project--in both the figurative and literal sense--it was a huge scientific undertaking. Or the Apollo program, which if I recall correctly cost in the hundreds of billions range.
Now, if we went by percentage of the total economy dedicated to a single project, we don't do anything as big as the pyramids. We would probably have to do something utterly astounding, like put a million person colony on the Moon, using a metric like that. But such huge projects are usually wasteful.
But what about people? Where are the Michaelangelos? The Newtons? The Homers? The Shakespeares? My theory is that they're all around us, but it's hard to put their accomplishments into perspective.
It can't be that we've suddenly gotten stupider (though we do have television now). Think about this: more people are alive than at any time in human history. Education is more accessible--and more vital--than at any point in human history.
The result: scientific progress has never been so rapid as in the last hundred years, and it only seems to get faster. There is a greater demand for plays, music, literature, pr0n, poetry, paintings, and sculptures than ever before (and more people than ever are working to fill the demand). So much is being accomplished and produced right now, it's going to take centuries for us to figure out which of it was the most important.
What I can say with absolute certainty is that we are in an era of greater squandering of potential than mankind has ever seen. Sometimes it's like we're not even trying.
"[we provide] consulting services during the review process of a poorly founded negative piece on a vendor or its products and, should it be needed, showcases the research errors, statistical mistakes, and unfounded conclusions that often define such a piece."
My impression is that his entire business is to funnel corporate PR through him, to give it the illusion of neutrality. I've run across a few choice quotes about him, calling him "the Arthur Andersen of journalism" and "a quote mill." I'm inclined to believe it.
1) A government doesn't have a GDP. A country has a GDP.
2) The government has many, many things to do besides develop software. The money actually being earmarked for this project is the sort of amount that Microsoft could spend without noticeably affecting the balance sheets.
3) The fact is, the software Microsoft produces can never be adequate for the needs of foreign governments. Even if MS software functions perfectly, and is apparently immune to hackers, there is no way for the governments to assure themselves that the U.S. hasn't built backdoors and other spyware into it. Nor can they be sure that they will be able to support themselves in the event that Microsoft drops support. With a Linux-based OS, they can maintain it themselves, and run security audits to their hearts' content.
4) If no private entity makes a product that suits a government's needs, there is nothing wrong with them building it themselves.
5) If nobody is paying for Microsoft software over there anyways, why should Microsoft complain when the government decides to create an alternative? Perhaps because people pirating their software is better for them than people using non-Microsoft products.
No, it would be more like the Pentagon announcing that it would only use USA-developed software, and also earmarking millions of dollars to support the development of that software. That is what makes this wrong and underhanded.
File sharing dropped 22%, even as sales of CDs continued to plummet. Now, even if we assume that both statistics are accurate and relevant (the file sharing stat only covers a few weeks), it's possible that both are a result of less interest in music from the major labels. That could be because fewer "high demand" CDs are being released at the moment, or because some of us found other things to do with our time, or because new networks are emerging that are more difficult to monitor (WASTE, et. al).
We can't necessarily attribute the file sharing drop to RIAA fear by file sharers. The statistic itself seems pretty easy to manipulate. Nor can we assume that CD sales continue to decline because the RIAA has alienated its customer base. Though if someone has found a way to blame Microsoft, I'm willing to listen.
I must strenously disagree. Why must software always be treated as some foreign concept that must not follow the business models of other industries? You don't see cybercafe's growing and milling their own wheat, so why should you expect them to code their own software?
So many of the problems we see come about precisely because the software industry tries to mimic the business models of other industries. Faulty anti-piracy "protections," incompatable implementations and software that breaks standards, vendor lock-in, Microsoft. We keep clamoring for the idea that software is fundamentally different from other industries for one simple reason: It is. If you build a useful car, you can't give it to your neighbor down the street without losing your own ability to use it.
Someone needs to write that software for the cybercafe. But why does it have to be their chef? Surely a professional programmer would create the better software, but if he can't cook, are you going to fire him once he finishes writing it?
Huh?
You don't see people assembling their own automobiles. Instead you see a specialized industry devoted to automobiles. You rarely see businesses hiring an automotive technician, but instead you see them going to a specialized shop.
One difference is, you can't set up a custom auto shop for the price of a $700 computer and a couple of Mandrake CDs. Come to think of it, you couldn't do it if you spent the $700 on car tools either.
If you don't get the point, let me translate your opening statement for the automotive industry: "Perhaps we shouldn't be trying to commercialise automobiles. Perhaps we should be trying to commercialise the businesses and products/services which rely on automobiles."
If somebody could make Ford F-150s available to millions just by posting one to an FTP server, that would be a very reasonable analysis.
Yes, I know you're not an economist. If you were, you would realize the answer: let the market decide, since they're the ones who need the software in the first place.
I believe he said "an economist," not "Walter E. Williams." Some economists recognize that "letting the market decide" doesn't invariably lead to ideal outcomes.
In a free market of software there will be room for many different models. Traditionally it has been a "software-as-product" model coupled with restrictive licensing. But that is changing even today. I suspect that a balance will be reached between proprietary and open source software. I don't know what that balance is, but I'm pretty darned sure it isn't going to be zero to one. I also strongly suspect that there will be different business models for different categories of software.
Thank you for that blinding flash of obvious. Even firebrand Open Source proponents like ESR admit that there are times when it just doesn't make sense to open source an already successful commercial product. For example, probably half of all software would have zero open source value, because it is written to solve a problem that nobody else needs solved.
Other software (tax prep software, for example) contains data which is expensive and time-consuming to collect. Without being compensated for keeping that software up to date, it just isn't economically viable. But look at the situation more carefully. What is really being sold here? Because the data is what matters, a perfectly valid solution would be to open source the application framework, while keeping the tax code data to yourself. The framework is common, which lowers development costs, and allows the company to focus on doing what is most relevant: making sure that the data they sell is up to date.
However, if your core competency is wrapping crap data into a pretty interface, I
I really wasn't thinking about our current wealth of media. While the modern library may be slowly dying in vaults across the world, I was thinking more about the sheer volume that would be produced if everyone received artistic grants. Ninety percent of it would be crap (which is par for any human endeavor), but there will still be enough excellent stuff to crowd the market.
I don't want to be stuck as a mere consumer either. It would suck not to feel like I was doing something meaningful with my life. Come to think of it, it already sucks not to feel like I'm doing something meaningful with my life.
Honest work? I like the sound of it. Too much of what drives the economy these days is dishonest work. Telemarketers do nothing but annoy people, while artificially inflating sales with strongarm tactics. Beanie babies and Pokemon cards are just silly novelties that give artificial meaning to empty lives. Crime prevention is a huge expense which we can't eliminate only because stupid people make shortsighted decisions. Ninety percent of all lawsuits are either some scumbucket trying to screw somebody, or somebody protecting himself from some scumbag trying to screw him. If everyone would just recognize the value of playing fair and playing by the rules, the entire legal industry would collapse. And don't even get me started on $150 dollar a plate restaurants.
If you ever start building that rocket, give me a buzz. I'm sick of this place.
It sounds like we basically agree. I think machines will reach parity with human intelligence within fifty years, but that doesn't matter. Long, long before that happens, robots will be smart enough to take 50% of our jobs.
The simple fact is, humans were designed as general purpose machines. They had to be able to adapt to almost any environment Mama Nature could throw at them. Robots have the luxury of being specialized. When we drive down the highway, probably 90% of our brain is involved with something else, like trying to come up with a cure for cancer or analyzing the deep and lasting significance of Britney Spears' lyrics. A robot could do the job far more reliably with far less than ten percent of the processing power of the human brain.
Seriously, there are some people who will never make worthwhile contributions to any creative endeavor. Throughout this discussion, I've been racking my brain trying to think of what to do with them. What do we owe people, just for being people? We can't shoot them, or let them die on the streets. And yet they would no longer be useful for anything.
I also shudder to think of the sort of cultural contributions which will be made by people who just want to earn the blasted grant money and be done with it. I'm thinking of the literary equivalent of the book reports I wrote for seventh grade English. Even if a great number of the works produced are of exceptional quality, how valuable are they if there are already a lifetime worth of good books, music, and movies already produced, waiting to be consumed?
Short version: What the hell are we going to do with ourselves? What are we going to do with each other?
I would point out that a university-level education is already available to anyone with ambition and a library card. You just don't get the degree. The sheer cheapness of information these days is staggering.
Price inflation destroys the wealth of the poor. It's the fixed income people (retired, on the dole, or minimum wage) that get the new money last. The folks who are buddies with the government handing out the money get the new, inflated, money first, and the prices rise. The fixed income folks get the new money last.
Right. So how is that any different from the current system?
The thing is, the poor--by definition--have no wealth to destroy.
In the modern world, when the government starts printing money like crazy, there are more than enough bad effects to go around. But in the future, when there is no way an unskilled person can find a way to earn money (remember, robots can do any unskilled job more efficiently), it's a different story. If the government goes around giving money to the unemployable, the unemployable can only benefit.
Yes, existing debts would be paid off rather quickly. Unless the banks got the government to declare bank holidays and other devices so they wouldn't go bankrupt. Oh, and interest rates would go through the roof! Try buying a house, then. Or even paying off a credit card. This is a textbook recipe for hyperinflation.
I know that it causes hyperinflation. I'm just asking who takes the brunt of the ill effects.
In the world today it is the governments that are the Bigasse Corp that pollutes. The Eastern Bloc had terrible environmental conditions, and in the U.S. the Federal Government is the biggest polluter. Regulations don't restrict the regulators very much.
The Federal Government is a bigger polluter than any corporation? Hmm, I wonder if that's because it's about a hundred times bigger. No, it has to be evil incompetence, because as we all know only the government can be evil and incompetent. Corporations are always competent and efficient, while staying well within the law.
Show me statistics that say the Feds pollute more than the entire private sector, and then maybe I'll be impressed.
What I do agree with you is that there are places where capitalism does not work. And that place is where there is no protection of private property, and no rule of law.
You've gone and redefined "work" here. You use it to mean "a capitalist system cannot exist." I agree, protection of private property is necessary in order for capitalism to work at all.
But when I say there are situations where capitalism doesn't work, what I mean is that (despite what some Walter Williams worshipping Limbaugh addicts claim) there are situations where, if not reined in, a capitalistic system cannot create even remotely equitable outcomes. Monopolies break the system. Situations where a person can reap the benefits of an action without incurring the costs of the action break the system. Finally, in the world the article discusses, extreme automation breaks the system.
The simple fact is, a corporation wouldn't have to pay robot workers, because they're robots. Nor would they have to pay human workers, because hey, all the work is being done by robots. Without some check on pure capitalism, the future era of unlimited wealth will find most of us living on the streets.
Actually, I was just thinking about the effects of a one time payment. Though if this doubling happened every year, the same thing would happen each time.
Huh? The reality of inflation from an employee standpoint is that each week his paycheck will buy him less and less in terms of goods. Are you assuming that the employee has negotiated a wage that takes hyper-inflation into account and rises by a certain percent each week? You do seem to be implying this in your example of a 10k wage increasing to 35k.
No. Read the article. I'm assuming that this "employee" was actually unemployed, because there are robots out there creating wealth far more efficiently than he ever could. Robots whose labor is wholly owned by a corporation. A corporation which will no longer be automatically rewarded for sharing the wealth with the "employee" as it was back when it could find something useful for him to do.
The $10,000 he is "earning" comes in the form of food and discarded clothing he found while dumpster diving behind the homes of the wealthy (while avoiding their security robots). So, no, he didn't negotiate an inflationary contract with his employer. He gets the money straight from the government because, in this world of nearly unlimited wealth we're envisioning, he shouldn't have to be scrounging in the dumps.
Read the friggin' article. We're already assuming that his current paycheck is worth zero.
In a world of digital cash, hyperinflation could continue indefinitely. In the old days, hyperinflation would destroy the whole money system for a simple reason: It suddenly became impossible to print it fast enough. But creating a 4096 bit RSA key for a trillion dollar "bill" is as easy as creating the same key for a penny. Until you overflow a 64-bit unsigned integer, and then things get a bit hairy.
Hell, you could even come up with a new currency that just assumed 20% daily inflation and indexed according to that. So your hyperdollar would represent 20% more dollars tomorrow, but still just be one hyperdollar. If the regular dollars don't inflate at a 20% rate, you get deflation. Or a currency that simply represents a fraction of the total wealth of the country/world/corporation/whateverisrunningthings.
If it gets to the point where nobody wants to use money anymore, the government might have to start directly taxing production. But even then, we're still better off than we would be under a system where we simply let the corporations keep what they earn.
A) These countries are facing the same unemployment boom being faced by the U.S.
B) These countries are not facing the same boom, because they haven't invested in robotics.
In the first case, the countries will be under the same pressures to redistribute wealth. In the second case, it doesn't matter what they think of our monetary policy. Robot labor (which we have and they don't) becomes a much more reliable indicator of wealth than greenbacks ever were.
The money in various banks around the world represent goods and services that we owe them. We could announce that the dollar is no longer worth anything, and that we were switching to a computerized form of the barter system. The value of the foreign holdings would go to zero, and the economy would putter along as normal. Of course it would be better to make good on the debts somehow.
Money is all about symbolism, and if the predictions of the article are correct, we have to start seriously rethinking what we want it to symbolize. Further, we would need to rethink the merits of the whole capitalistic system, because if we don't, then the owners of capital will just continue to build better robots, cutting more and more people off from any vocation which could provide a reasonable standard of living.
I highly doubt that things would be set up so there was a huge financial incentive to make more people. The whole point of this exercise is to imagine a world where much of what we do is now obsolete. Focus should be shifting towards providing a standard of living for the current population. Why would a society reward superfluous breeding at a time when we would be racking our brains for things for people to do?
It doesn't cost $25,000 a year to raise a baby, and you wouldn't be getting $25,000 a year for the baby. More likely, you would get a little extra for each kid, but not enough to provide a monetary incentive. Unless you're really bad at math. Though given the amount of time you say you'll be spending in front of the television, that may become a very real possibility.
How do you maintain a system based on private ownership of the means of production when it leads to immense poverty, and that poverty isn't "needed" because of scarcity?
Guns. Lots and lots of big honkin' guns.
Now, you claim that cost-cutting inevitably results in paying out less to other people. But try looking at it a different way. When you cut costs, you're freeing up resources for use by others. With more resources available for these other purposes, the cost of those things goes down as well. It's simply a matter of making the system as a whole able to do more with less.
I'm not saying that capitalism is always the good guy, just that Marx may not have been looking at this issue in the proper light.
I defy you to prove that "Daredevil" was written by a human being, rather than a Markov chain-based movie script generator.
Seriously, I expect to see at least some creative pursuits go the same route as unskilled labor. Computers can already write passable music and play killer chess. Also, robots will be able to kick our butts when it comes to the replication of art. If you want a mural of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" on your building, you could hire a local artist to do it, or the Paint-o-matic 3000. A really good artist could easily outperform the Paint-o-matic (it would take three times as long), but a mediocre one couldn't.
Even if this Marshall guy's dystopian, "ninety percent of everybody thrown out on the street" world never pans out, I'm still left with the vague worry that there won't be anything useful and constructive for many of us to do. Posting to/. will skyrocket.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, "copyright theft" would require stealing someone's unpublished manuscript or music, and then registering the copyright under your own name.
I tried it once. I'm now the proud owner of the Dutch translation of "The Langoliers."
It seems like the music industry is dying because it has vastly overestimated the value of the product it sells.
When CDs first came out, they were about the coolest way to spend money. There were no DVDs, movies came on cumbersome magnetic tapes which degraded quickly, and the software of the day just wasn't compelling to most people (and also came on cumbersome magnetic media).
The prices for CDs have hardly fallen since.
Today, you can spend $20 on a DVD. Technically, it's also just a piece of plastic, but it carries a couple of hours of data for the eyes as well as the ears. Or you can buy a video game for $35-$50 that lets you actively participate in the entertainment. Being non-linear, a video game could provide anywhere from 0 to thousands of hours of entertainment. Then there is cable TV, where for the price of a couple CDs a month, you get 24-hour access to lots of different crap.
With a CD, you get about an hour worth of music (I've seen some go as low as 40 mintues), and even if you really like all the songs, it only engages your ears. Hence, on average, CDs are less entertaining.
Nor is the CD a convenient format for anything but home use. Keep your CDs in your car, and they inevitably get ruined or stolen. So for your convenience you burn yourself a copy for your car, making it more valuable to you. But the industry isn't simply failing to increase the value of its product, it's trying to interfere with the ripping and burning that could make the content more convenient (and hence more valuable).
I'm really not sure what you're trying to get across here, but I'm interested. Could you give some examples of books/movies/stories which succumb to this "amoral jerkiness" trend?
So maybe the battery thing turns out to be a major gaffe, and it would have made more scientific sense to use some other pretense for captivity. I still don't see where the parent gets off claiming that this fact makes "The Matrix" fantasy rather than sci-fi.
Is Star Trek no longer sci-fi because, in one episode, the Voyager crew had to brave a "demon planet" in order to collect precious deuterium (the second most common substance in the universe)? Is Paul Hogan's "Anguished Dawn" not sci-fi because it seems to have accepted the rantings of Immanuel Velikovsky at face value? Even if you argue that the science has to be sound before something can be great sci-fi, sci-fi with bad science doesn't suddenly become "fantasy."
There are some similarities here, but as I pointed out in another post, proper Bayesian filtering is a bit simpler than you imply.
Bayesian filters don't care about proper grammar. After all, "You can enlarge your penis and please the ladies" is proper grammar. Bayesian filters work strictly on word count.
Essay-grading software would use more sophisticated algorithms, but would still be prone to the sort of text you mentioned.
I've seen some of these spams, and I keep wondering just what the point is. After you spend a full minute trying to figure out what they're trying to sell, there is no way it can be an effective sales pitch. All it does is give the spammer another "successfully sent" message to bill the customer for.
Which, now that I think about it, is the point.
Let me see if I understand the situation. These kids "got bored" and decided to go shoot up trucks on the highway. Now, are we supposed to believe that the kids were too stupid to come up with the idea on their own? Or that they were too stupid to recognize that just because violence on a screen can be entertaining, it doesn't necessarily mean that the same violence is entertaining in real life?
Personally, I hate the entire GTA series. I think the glorification of violence is a bad idea, and that the game makers show a lack of social conscience. But I respect their right to make the games. Further, I believe that if we were to hold game makers responsible for the effects of their games on the people who buy them, it would have a profund chilling effect on free speech. That is unacceptable.
You know it and I know it: these kids were severely disturbed long before they ever got their hands on GTA. Hundreds of millions of people play video games, why aren't at least a few million of us out there emulating them? Because the vast, vast majority of us have too firm a grip on reality. We also share an ability to empathize with others and accept that their feelings are important. These kids, somewhere along the line, lost that ability.
Even if we accept that there is a small subset of humanity who--for whatever psycho/neuro/sociological reason--can be affected by video games in this way, that is not sufficient reason to stop creating the games. It doesn't make sense any more than it makes sense to stop making peanut butter just because a few of us are violently allergic to peanuts. The focus should be on finding these broken people and trying to fix them, because making the world safe for them is impossible.
If we assume that our writing program has access to the algorithm used to grade it, probably not hard at all. I can just imagine it writing the thing on a sentence-by-sentence basis. First, feed the essay-writing software a bunch of good papers, and store the relationships between words in a Markov chain. This gives it a rough idea of what words are likely to follow a given word.
/dev/urandom through it and keeping the good stuff. I don't suggest using this technique if you have a slow computer or a short deadline.
Using that information, spit out a semi-random sentence. Run the sentence through the grading algorithm, and see if it chokes. If the algorithm doesn't like it, swap the order of a couple of words and see if that improves it. If a hundred different permutations fail to get an acceptable score, dump the sentence and try again with a new one.
Once you have a large enough number of high-scoring sentences, put them into paragraph form and run the entire essay through the system and see how you score.
It would also be possible--and most likely more effective--to write a sentence creator that understood the rules of grammar, and just threw in random adjectives, nouns, and verbs. Sort of a "Mad Libs" essay writer. I saw a pretty convincing one in "Godel, Escher, Bach." But the point is, given access to the algorithm used to grade the essay, you could theoretically write the essay just by piping
Sorry, but it would never work.
Bayesian filtering is too simple a thing. It works by counting the frequency of various words and comparing the result to the frequency with which the words are used in collections of known material.
While it may be possible that some words are used more frequently in good essays ("vacuous," "intrepid," "ratiocination") and other words occur more frequently in poor essays ("wanna," "ain't," "JLo," "Coulter") the filter couldn't tell the difference between:
"This sentence is free from grammatical and spelling errors."
and
"Errors grammatical and sentence free this from is spelling from."
A student could turn in word salad and get an A, so long as the salad had the right ingredients.
Bah! And triple bah! Bah again, I say!
Seriously, though. It's hard to make any case for the superiority of our honored dead. The pyramids were an incredible feat at the time, and nobody today bothers to build piles of rubble anywhere near that big. But from the standpoint of resources used, material moved, and total work done (by the proper physics definition, rather than man hours) the whole system of pyramids probably has nothing on the Interstate Highway system of the U.S. Now that was a mammoth project, of the sort that the pharoahs could only imagine.
Then there was the Manhattan Project. Despite the fallout from the project--in both the figurative and literal sense--it was a huge scientific undertaking. Or the Apollo program, which if I recall correctly cost in the hundreds of billions range.
Now, if we went by percentage of the total economy dedicated to a single project, we don't do anything as big as the pyramids. We would probably have to do something utterly astounding, like put a million person colony on the Moon, using a metric like that. But such huge projects are usually wasteful.
But what about people? Where are the Michaelangelos? The Newtons? The Homers? The Shakespeares? My theory is that they're all around us, but it's hard to put their accomplishments into perspective.
It can't be that we've suddenly gotten stupider (though we do have television now). Think about this: more people are alive than at any time in human history. Education is more accessible--and more vital--than at any point in human history.
The result: scientific progress has never been so rapid as in the last hundred years, and it only seems to get faster. There is a greater demand for plays, music, literature, pr0n, poetry, paintings, and sculptures than ever before (and more people than ever are working to fill the demand). So much is being accomplished and produced right now, it's going to take centuries for us to figure out which of it was the most important.
What I can say with absolute certainty is that we are in an era of greater squandering of potential than mankind has ever seen. Sometimes it's like we're not even trying.
From his website:My impression is that his entire business is to funnel corporate PR through him, to give it the illusion of neutrality. I've run across a few choice quotes about him, calling him "the Arthur Andersen of journalism" and "a quote mill." I'm inclined to believe it.
1) A government doesn't have a GDP. A country has a GDP.
2) The government has many, many things to do besides develop software. The money actually being earmarked for this project is the sort of amount that Microsoft could spend without noticeably affecting the balance sheets.
3) The fact is, the software Microsoft produces can never be adequate for the needs of foreign governments. Even if MS software functions perfectly, and is apparently immune to hackers, there is no way for the governments to assure themselves that the U.S. hasn't built backdoors and other spyware into it. Nor can they be sure that they will be able to support themselves in the event that Microsoft drops support. With a Linux-based OS, they can maintain it themselves, and run security audits to their hearts' content.
4) If no private entity makes a product that suits a government's needs, there is nothing wrong with them building it themselves.
5) If nobody is paying for Microsoft software over there anyways, why should Microsoft complain when the government decides to create an alternative? Perhaps because people pirating their software is better for them than people using non-Microsoft products.
No, it would be more like the Pentagon announcing that it would only use USA-developed software, and also earmarking millions of dollars to support the development of that software. That is what makes this wrong and underhanded.
Er, wait. No it doesn't.
File sharing dropped 22%, even as sales of CDs continued to plummet. Now, even if we assume that both statistics are accurate and relevant (the file sharing stat only covers a few weeks), it's possible that both are a result of less interest in music from the major labels. That could be because fewer "high demand" CDs are being released at the moment, or because some of us found other things to do with our time, or because new networks are emerging that are more difficult to monitor (WASTE, et. al).
We can't necessarily attribute the file sharing drop to RIAA fear by file sharers. The statistic itself seems pretty easy to manipulate. Nor can we assume that CD sales continue to decline because the RIAA has alienated its customer base. Though if someone has found a way to blame Microsoft, I'm willing to listen.
So many of the problems we see come about precisely because the software industry tries to mimic the business models of other industries. Faulty anti-piracy "protections," incompatable implementations and software that breaks standards, vendor lock-in, Microsoft. We keep clamoring for the idea that software is fundamentally different from other industries for one simple reason: It is. If you build a useful car, you can't give it to your neighbor down the street without losing your own ability to use it.
Huh?
One difference is, you can't set up a custom auto shop for the price of a $700 computer and a couple of Mandrake CDs. Come to think of it, you couldn't do it if you spent the $700 on car tools either.
If somebody could make Ford F-150s available to millions just by posting one to an FTP server, that would be a very reasonable analysis.
I believe he said "an economist," not "Walter E. Williams." Some economists recognize that "letting the market decide" doesn't invariably lead to ideal outcomes.
Thank you for that blinding flash of obvious. Even firebrand Open Source proponents like ESR admit that there are times when it just doesn't make sense to open source an already successful commercial product. For example, probably half of all software would have zero open source value, because it is written to solve a problem that nobody else needs solved.
Other software (tax prep software, for example) contains data which is expensive and time-consuming to collect. Without being compensated for keeping that software up to date, it just isn't economically viable. But look at the situation more carefully. What is really being sold here? Because the data is what matters, a perfectly valid solution would be to open source the application framework, while keeping the tax code data to yourself. The framework is common, which lowers development costs, and allows the company to focus on doing what is most relevant: making sure that the data they sell is up to date.
However, if your core competency is wrapping crap data into a pretty interface, I
I really wasn't thinking about our current wealth of media. While the modern library may be slowly dying in vaults across the world, I was thinking more about the sheer volume that would be produced if everyone received artistic grants. Ninety percent of it would be crap (which is par for any human endeavor), but there will still be enough excellent stuff to crowd the market.
I don't want to be stuck as a mere consumer either. It would suck not to feel like I was doing something meaningful with my life. Come to think of it, it already sucks not to feel like I'm doing something meaningful with my life.
Honest work? I like the sound of it. Too much of what drives the economy these days is dishonest work. Telemarketers do nothing but annoy people, while artificially inflating sales with strongarm tactics. Beanie babies and Pokemon cards are just silly novelties that give artificial meaning to empty lives. Crime prevention is a huge expense which we can't eliminate only because stupid people make shortsighted decisions. Ninety percent of all lawsuits are either some scumbucket trying to screw somebody, or somebody protecting himself from some scumbag trying to screw him. If everyone would just recognize the value of playing fair and playing by the rules, the entire legal industry would collapse. And don't even get me started on $150 dollar a plate restaurants.
If you ever start building that rocket, give me a buzz. I'm sick of this place.
Last one, then I'm going to sleep.
It sounds like we basically agree. I think machines will reach parity with human intelligence within fifty years, but that doesn't matter. Long, long before that happens, robots will be smart enough to take 50% of our jobs.
The simple fact is, humans were designed as general purpose machines. They had to be able to adapt to almost any environment Mama Nature could throw at them. Robots have the luxury of being specialized. When we drive down the highway, probably 90% of our brain is involved with something else, like trying to come up with a cure for cancer or analyzing the deep and lasting significance of Britney Spears' lyrics. A robot could do the job far more reliably with far less than ten percent of the processing power of the human brain.
But what if my only skill is making jello salad?
Seriously, there are some people who will never make worthwhile contributions to any creative endeavor. Throughout this discussion, I've been racking my brain trying to think of what to do with them. What do we owe people, just for being people? We can't shoot them, or let them die on the streets. And yet they would no longer be useful for anything.
I also shudder to think of the sort of cultural contributions which will be made by people who just want to earn the blasted grant money and be done with it. I'm thinking of the literary equivalent of the book reports I wrote for seventh grade English. Even if a great number of the works produced are of exceptional quality, how valuable are they if there are already a lifetime worth of good books, music, and movies already produced, waiting to be consumed?
Short version: What the hell are we going to do with ourselves? What are we going to do with each other?
I would point out that a university-level education is already available to anyone with ambition and a library card. You just don't get the degree. The sheer cheapness of information these days is staggering.
If someone sends me $1M worth of cheap booze, I promise never to post to Slashdot again.
The thing is, the poor--by definition--have no wealth to destroy.
In the modern world, when the government starts printing money like crazy, there are more than enough bad effects to go around. But in the future, when there is no way an unskilled person can find a way to earn money (remember, robots can do any unskilled job more efficiently), it's a different story. If the government goes around giving money to the unemployable, the unemployable can only benefit.
I know that it causes hyperinflation. I'm just asking who takes the brunt of the ill effects.
The Federal Government is a bigger polluter than any corporation? Hmm, I wonder if that's because it's about a hundred times bigger. No, it has to be evil incompetence, because as we all know only the government can be evil and incompetent. Corporations are always competent and efficient, while staying well within the law.
Show me statistics that say the Feds pollute more than the entire private sector, and then maybe I'll be impressed.
You've gone and redefined "work" here. You use it to mean "a capitalist system cannot exist." I agree, protection of private property is necessary in order for capitalism to work at all.
But when I say there are situations where capitalism doesn't work, what I mean is that (despite what some Walter Williams worshipping Limbaugh addicts claim) there are situations where, if not reined in, a capitalistic system cannot create even remotely equitable outcomes. Monopolies break the system. Situations where a person can reap the benefits of an action without incurring the costs of the action break the system. Finally, in the world the article discusses, extreme automation breaks the system.
The simple fact is, a corporation wouldn't have to pay robot workers, because they're robots. Nor would they have to pay human workers, because hey, all the work is being done by robots. Without some check on pure capitalism, the future era of unlimited wealth will find most of us living on the streets.
No. Read the article. I'm assuming that this "employee" was actually unemployed, because there are robots out there creating wealth far more efficiently than he ever could. Robots whose labor is wholly owned by a corporation. A corporation which will no longer be automatically rewarded for sharing the wealth with the "employee" as it was back when it could find something useful for him to do.
The $10,000 he is "earning" comes in the form of food and discarded clothing he found while dumpster diving behind the homes of the wealthy (while avoiding their security robots). So, no, he didn't negotiate an inflationary contract with his employer. He gets the money straight from the government because, in this world of nearly unlimited wealth we're envisioning, he shouldn't have to be scrounging in the dumps.
Read the friggin' article. We're already assuming that his current paycheck is worth zero.
In a world of digital cash, hyperinflation could continue indefinitely. In the old days, hyperinflation would destroy the whole money system for a simple reason: It suddenly became impossible to print it fast enough. But creating a 4096 bit RSA key for a trillion dollar "bill" is as easy as creating the same key for a penny. Until you overflow a 64-bit unsigned integer, and then things get a bit hairy.
Hell, you could even come up with a new currency that just assumed 20% daily inflation and indexed according to that. So your hyperdollar would represent 20% more dollars tomorrow, but still just be one hyperdollar. If the regular dollars don't inflate at a 20% rate, you get deflation. Or a currency that simply represents a fraction of the total wealth of the country/world/corporation/whateverisrunningthings
If it gets to the point where nobody wants to use money anymore, the government might have to start directly taxing production. But even then, we're still better off than we would be under a system where we simply let the corporations keep what they earn.
Under this scenario, there are two possibilities:
A) These countries are facing the same unemployment boom being faced by the U.S.
B) These countries are not facing the same boom, because they haven't invested in robotics.
In the first case, the countries will be under the same pressures to redistribute wealth. In the second case, it doesn't matter what they think of our monetary policy. Robot labor (which we have and they don't) becomes a much more reliable indicator of wealth than greenbacks ever were.
The money in various banks around the world represent goods and services that we owe them. We could announce that the dollar is no longer worth anything, and that we were switching to a computerized form of the barter system. The value of the foreign holdings would go to zero, and the economy would putter along as normal. Of course it would be better to make good on the debts somehow.
Money is all about symbolism, and if the predictions of the article are correct, we have to start seriously rethinking what we want it to symbolize. Further, we would need to rethink the merits of the whole capitalistic system, because if we don't, then the owners of capital will just continue to build better robots, cutting more and more people off from any vocation which could provide a reasonable standard of living.
Even without robots, it's already happening.
I highly doubt that things would be set up so there was a huge financial incentive to make more people. The whole point of this exercise is to imagine a world where much of what we do is now obsolete. Focus should be shifting towards providing a standard of living for the current population. Why would a society reward superfluous breeding at a time when we would be racking our brains for things for people to do?
It doesn't cost $25,000 a year to raise a baby, and you wouldn't be getting $25,000 a year for the baby. More likely, you would get a little extra for each kid, but not enough to provide a monetary incentive. Unless you're really bad at math. Though given the amount of time you say you'll be spending in front of the television, that may become a very real possibility.
Now, you claim that cost-cutting inevitably results in paying out less to other people. But try looking at it a different way. When you cut costs, you're freeing up resources for use by others. With more resources available for these other purposes, the cost of those things goes down as well. It's simply a matter of making the system as a whole able to do more with less.
I'm not saying that capitalism is always the good guy, just that Marx may not have been looking at this issue in the proper light.
So, um, what you're saying is I can stay home tomorrow?
Done.
I defy you to prove that "Daredevil" was written by a human being, rather than a Markov chain-based movie script generator.
/. will skyrocket.
Seriously, I expect to see at least some creative pursuits go the same route as unskilled labor. Computers can already write passable music and play killer chess. Also, robots will be able to kick our butts when it comes to the replication of art. If you want a mural of Van Gogh's "Starry Night" on your building, you could hire a local artist to do it, or the Paint-o-matic 3000. A really good artist could easily outperform the Paint-o-matic (it would take three times as long), but a mediocre one couldn't.
Even if this Marshall guy's dystopian, "ninety percent of everybody thrown out on the street" world never pans out, I'm still left with the vague worry that there won't be anything useful and constructive for many of us to do. Posting to