One poignant thing is that there are now some automatic flush urinals in posh hotels which have a sigle red indicator LED in the center of a large black and chrome setting to tell you that the IR proximity sensor is working. It looks almost exactly like MIT's rendition of an unemployed HAL9000.
Geez. from being an astronaut to the guy who flushes rich mens toilets. tough break for robots indeed.
One thing is for sure, we aren't going to have to worry about a slave race of robots revolting in the real world. Why? Because we automate all the good, fun jobs and leave all the crap jobs for humans to do.
Examples of fun jobs:
Manufacturing - Working in a factory can be rewarding. there are lots of other people in blue coveralls to talk to and the lunch room is awesome. Now done by robot welders.
Writing Short stories - AI does this all the time.
Clerical jobs - the biggest slacker job in the universe is now performed by a small shell script.
Playing Chess -
Playing First Person Shooters - Is fun for us. I don't know how eraser bot feels every time it gets shot, but it can't be too bad. It can feel pain, but it can never truly die.
Being an air plane pilot - I got invited to the cockpit of an airbus once, and the pilot was asleep with a book in his lap and his feet on the console. Apparently he could stay like that during takeoff and landing too. Maybe he was just joking.
Sales: Think-Geek. Their webserver is their salesman. The people who write the pages are like the sales managers who write those three ringed binders of what to say.
Examples of crap jobs:
Bus-boy/girl - In the Animatrix, we see a robot waiter being taunted by a patron who throws a glass out the window. That would never happen. I've been in a chaotic nightclub floor as a worker before and my brain which is the product of at least 2 million years of R&D couldn't get me safely from one end of the dance floor to the other without dropping a few glass bottles from my armload of crap. None of the patrons or the managers seemed to mind though.
Child rearing - unless we keep the children in battery hen environments, there is no robot technology to change a nappy. The small, fragile, autonomously wiggling target would be pulped between the grippers in no-time.
Outbound telemarketing - Robots are barred from this job by law. So we use humans instead.
So here is Jin's Law of Robotics: "If it is fun to do, it is probably easy to automate."
robots won't have to revolt. we will have installed them in the cushy center of our lives while we are the ones working down the pit mines and fighting in the wars.
After all, show me the most evil man among you and I will show you someone who is nice to his kids. And that's what we're doing- giving our metal progeny all the good jobs.
That would turn some bloggers into bullet magnets.
Can you imagine someone putting the WhereIam on their slashdot journal and having hoardes of screaming admins running after them yelling "Ask before you link! ASK BEFORE YOU LINK!!!!"
So most readers here probably don't read or believe the Bible, but if you see it happen someday..... think about it.
wouldn't it be funny if the person who is scoffing while reading this now gets this chip and their Unique UserID just happens to be "666"
After all, the number is supposed to stand for a mans name. That means that half the population is in the running, plus all those women who have men's names.
Heck, I'd feel pretty special to get THE mark of the beast. I mean, think of the odds.
an AC wrote Probably recharges induction-style kinda like a lot of electric toothbrushes (I know the Sonicare brush is like this). If you've got a coil in your charger and a similarly tuned coil in the device, you can have a transformer even if there's a little material in the way.
which also implies that unless they've built a self reseting circuit breaker into the pacemaker sized device, it would be trivial to knock it out with a big ass alternating magnetic field.
heck, the physics lab at school and a few components from your local amplifier/stereo/music shop could probably knock one up in about 1/2 an hour if you had access to the right teachers cabinets.
Damn. A world where only stoner guitarists and their nerdy friends are free....
If this goes ahead, then "Proof of Life" would be one very short movie, and that guy Russel Crowe plays would be unemployed.
You do not want ex-SAS people who kill heavily armed guerillas, employing nothing but a leatherman wave and a tightly puckered lower-bowel, to be just sitting around in their houses with nothing to do all day.
Not really. What happens if all you have to do to kill the antenna/electronics is run the victim over a degaussing magnet a few times. Build up enough induced current to fry the circuits without messing up the victim too much.
Later you can extract the device at an expensive hospital and mail it back to the family with a video tape of the operation as "proof of life".
Also, as far as not advertising that someone is chipped, it wouldn't matter. All you have to do is x-ray the victim using Korean War technology and look for something that looks like shrapnel.
Now, implanting these bastards somewhere inoperable (like around the brain stem with a nice quantity of thermite wired to it as an anti-tamper measure) might deter such efforts. But it might also make the victim's encounters with those book check-out magnets at the local library more exciting.
That's a really good idea. Macular degeneration and glucoma rob people of their sight all the time. if you could regrow the retina on an engineered substrate you could give them better eyes than they were born with. Tally Isham is coming.
eventually, you could replace the carpeted walls with translucent reddish plastic, replace the seat with a clear liquidy goop stuff, and suspend all the office workers in these chairs or "pods" from an enormous cablecovered black tower thing with lightning bolts and stuff.
BTW anybody who's seen The Second Renaisannce Part 2 should have figured out why the machines can use humans as an energy source. They've got a huge reservoir of dead human meat that they harvested from the billions of tonnes of people living in cities and towns before the battle of earth and they only feed a little of it at a time to the people in the power plant. They're efficient, and it's more fun to make power that way than to just burn the meat.
which makes Mr Anderson's programming job even more hellish - stuck in a cubicle in the Matrix, and stuck in a pod in RL.
No thanks. Free range laptops and beanbags is my ideal office.
No, Insureance companies are supposed to spread the risk over the community, because it is harder to disable the community than it is to disable the individual.
Have you ever gotten sick and found that people came around bringing food as soon as they heard?If you haven't, then you need to get better friends. And bring food to them when they can't walk.
Freedom is a two way street, it is true, and one that is not walked alone.
Cool! I've always wanted to see Aliens vs Preditor vs NOLF!
Seriously though, monolith makes most of its money licencing out the engine they developed for Shogo. I'm even more excited because if they're giving tools this powerful away for free, they must have something even better for the next crop of games.
Look out Unreal Warfare, the big kids are coming to town!
I don't know about getting the list. With an autodialer, the list might be simply "The Telephone Directory." After all, simply stomping through the numbers is a lot cheaper than buying a fully qualified list of customers. Some legit direct mail companies pay in excess of one or two million dollars for a list of a thousand names. (Eg, 1000 Rich professionals who have just gotten married. 1000 Rich professionals who have just bought a house etc...)
A landscaper who is too clueless to know that an autodialer is illegal in his area would probably NOT be able to afford a list.
I say sue the telemarketer. That way you have low court costs and better chance of winning.
A lot of people are saying "Nothing new here, these are just gene feedback loops," "this will pale in comparison to the power of sillicon" and "when can I customise my own bizarre pet."
They're missing the point.
I think that the most exciting thing about this research thrust to make packages of genes that you can plug into a genome and expect to see it work is that it is concurrant with Stephen Wolframs's A New Kind of Science.
Sure Wolfram claims to have invented everything from Mathamatica (fair enough) to Occam's Razor (at one point he sagely counsles us to use simpler cellular autonoma to get the desired result and forget the more complicated ones), but the exciting thing is that the book does give interesting examples of how to use cellular autonoma to solve real world problems which are poorly suited to math.
The cellular autonoma that he proposes operate by looking at their ancestor cell and the cells which surround them and then looking up a table of rules to determine what properties they will have. We can do this now with real cells using short range hormones and making the output something like turning on a Green Fluroescent Protein gene.
Wolfram is trying to use a computer with one or two processors to simulate an exponentially growing colony of cells. this means that he runs out of computing resources at an ever increasing rate.
With real cells, the processing power grows with each iteration, because each new cell takes care of its own housekeeping. Just add nutrient.
So borrow the book, read it and then you can see the revolution on your hands if we manage to produce something as dumb as non-motile procaryotes which are able to take the average of the hormonal output of their three nearest cells and then change colour.
I was just riffing on the idea that in order for chewey to get in on this whole star wars rebellion thing, Han has to save his life and thereby bond chewey to him in a "Life Debt."
I assume that this has to happen sometime after ep II, because the story is pretty dramatic.
Also there's that whole "Han Solo- Swoop racer" thing from tales of the bounty hunters which promises to be another pod-racer style sequence and you know how lucasarts loves things like that to spin off into games.
Since Harrison Ford feels that reprising a young han solo would be going back to his pre-star days and would look utterly rediculous (I agree), does that mean we're going to see someone like Tyler Hoechlin as a young han solo? "Some people say that Jango Fett was a good man, other people say that there was no good in him at all..."
Or are we going to get an ALL CGI Jar Solo? "Mesa wanna play you sabbac for your hunka junka ship!"
Or maybe a Golem Solo that runs around shouting "My creditssss...."
Come on. It doesn't matter what "we" learn or if science fiction teaches "us" anything. The bottom line is that some nations will ban the technology, and other nations will endorse it to some degree. In the offchance that everybody outlaws the technology... the old saying goes that only outlaws will have it.
The bottom line is that some people eat the apple of knowledge. If they die, then we move on. If it turns them into gods, then those who do not endorse the technolgy will have to battle uphill against a technically superior foe.
Just look at gunpowder and steam engines. People used to think that gunpowder should be used in fireworks and steam engines disturbed the spirits of the dead.
Then trainloads of troops began to cross the british empire and her ships ruled the waves.
Of course if the spirits of the dead were really offended they would have sabotaged the steam engines and britain would have ended up like kahn... all bitter and superweapon having, but defeated by the other folks.
Really, technology not about right and wrong. It's about power.
I mean, what if your retro-viral loaded gene-altering smart pill contained a trojan. Can you imagine seeing your body get root owned by something that wants to turn you into a yoghurt factory? or a bomb?
Personally I want the biological equivalent of a packet sniffer to go with my Version 1.0 firewall and virus scanner that we call my immune system and the tripwire that we call apoptosis inducing agent p53.
Now if only I could figure out how to install snapshot or some other decent backup system.
Slashdot Mirror
see it at the hack gallery robot rights protest page.
One poignant thing is that there are now some automatic flush urinals in posh hotels which have a sigle red indicator LED in the center of a large black and chrome setting to tell you that the IR proximity sensor is working. It looks almost exactly like MIT's rendition of an unemployed HAL9000.
Geez. from being an astronaut to the guy who flushes rich mens toilets. tough break for robots indeed.
"Operation Dark Storm is GO! I repeat..."
One thing is for sure, we aren't going to have to worry about a slave race of robots revolting in the real world. Why? Because we automate all the good, fun jobs and leave all the crap jobs for humans to do.
Examples of fun jobs:
Manufacturing - Working in a factory can be rewarding. there are lots of other people in blue coveralls to talk to and the lunch room is awesome. Now done by robot welders.
Writing Short stories - AI does this all the time.
Clerical jobs - the biggest slacker job in the universe is now performed by a small shell script.
Playing Chess -
Playing First Person Shooters - Is fun for us. I don't know how eraser bot feels every time it gets shot, but it can't be too bad. It can feel pain, but it can never truly die.
Being an air plane pilot - I got invited to the cockpit of an airbus once, and the pilot was asleep with a book in his lap and his feet on the console. Apparently he could stay like that during takeoff and landing too. Maybe he was just joking.
Sales: Think-Geek. Their webserver is their salesman. The people who write the pages are like the sales managers who write those three ringed binders of what to say.
Examples of crap jobs:
Bus-boy/girl - In the Animatrix, we see a robot waiter being taunted by a patron who throws a glass out the window. That would never happen. I've been in a chaotic nightclub floor as a worker before and my brain which is the product of at least 2 million years of R&D couldn't get me safely from one end of the dance floor to the other without dropping a few glass bottles from my armload of crap. None of the patrons or the managers seemed to mind though.
Child rearing - unless we keep the children in battery hen environments, there is no robot technology to change a nappy. The small, fragile, autonomously wiggling target would be pulped between the grippers in no-time.
Outbound telemarketing - Robots are barred from this job by law. So we use humans instead.
So here is Jin's Law of Robotics: "If it is fun to do, it is probably easy to automate."
robots won't have to revolt. we will have installed them in the cushy center of our lives while we are the ones working down the pit mines and fighting in the wars.
After all, show me the most evil man among you and I will show you someone who is nice to his kids. And that's what we're doing- giving our metal progeny all the good jobs.
as secolactico (UID:519805) pointed out, Fizzer could be upgradeded to a Curious Yellow class worm.
And I worked out how to kill it in a post in the Curious Yellow Discusion.
subsequent posters suggested that designing a worm using crypto and a truly distributed archetecture would make us a lot less smug in future.
we've been warned folks. What are we going to do about it?
Here's a link to an enthusiasts page, and here's the MIT researcher Dr Linda Griffith-Cima who's spearheading the research. more on her at the MIT website. Finally here's the largely ignored /. article
That would turn some bloggers into bullet magnets.
Can you imagine someone putting the WhereIam on their slashdot journal and having hoardes of screaming admins running after them yelling "Ask before you link! ASK BEFORE YOU LINK!!!!"
So most readers here probably don't read or believe the Bible, but if you see it happen someday..... think about it.
wouldn't it be funny if the person who is scoffing while reading this now gets this chip and their Unique UserID just happens to be "666"
After all, the number is supposed to stand for a mans name. That means that half the population is in the running, plus all those women who have men's names.
Heck, I'd feel pretty special to get THE mark of the beast. I mean, think of the odds.
an AC wrote Probably recharges induction-style kinda like a lot of electric toothbrushes (I know the Sonicare brush is like this). If you've got a coil in your charger and a similarly tuned coil in the device, you can have a transformer even if there's a little material in the way.
which is exactly what the article says.
which also implies that unless they've built a self reseting circuit breaker into the pacemaker sized device, it would be trivial to knock it out with a big ass alternating magnetic field.
heck, the physics lab at school and a few components from your local amplifier/stereo/music shop could probably knock one up in about 1/2 an hour if you had access to the right teachers cabinets.
Damn. A world where only stoner guitarists and their nerdy friends are free....
If this goes ahead, then "Proof of Life" would be one very short movie, and that guy Russel Crowe plays would be unemployed.
You do not want ex-SAS people who kill heavily armed guerillas, employing nothing but a leatherman wave and a tightly puckered lower-bowel, to be just sitting around in their houses with nothing to do all day.
Not really. What happens if all you have to do to kill the antenna/electronics is run the victim over a degaussing magnet a few times. Build up enough induced current to fry the circuits without messing up the victim too much.
Later you can extract the device at an expensive hospital and mail it back to the family with a video tape of the operation as "proof of life".
Also, as far as not advertising that someone is chipped, it wouldn't matter. All you have to do is x-ray the victim using Korean War technology and look for something that looks like shrapnel.
Now, implanting these bastards somewhere inoperable (like around the brain stem with a nice quantity of thermite wired to it as an anti-tamper measure) might deter such efforts. But it might also make the victim's encounters with those book check-out magnets at the local library more exciting.
That's a really good idea. Macular degeneration and glucoma rob people of their sight all the time. if you could regrow the retina on an engineered substrate you could give them better eyes than they were born with. Tally Isham is coming.
Eat the free citizen's rocket!
and support armadillo for bringing VTOL rockets closer to the average commuter.
Your post was almost one of the funniest things I've read in a while.
With that engine, you could make a mod which would be indistinguishable from reality.
Just add an evercrack style backend and humanity will self-extinct due to lack of interest in sex.
eventually, you could replace the carpeted walls with translucent reddish plastic, replace the seat with a clear liquidy goop stuff, and suspend all the office workers in these chairs or "pods" from an enormous cablecovered black tower thing with lightning bolts and stuff.
BTW anybody who's seen The Second Renaisannce Part 2 should have figured out why the machines can use humans as an energy source. They've got a huge reservoir of dead human meat that they harvested from the billions of tonnes of people living in cities and towns before the battle of earth and they only feed a little of it at a time to the people in the power plant. They're efficient, and it's more fun to make power that way than to just burn the meat.
which makes Mr Anderson's programming job even more hellish - stuck in a cubicle in the Matrix, and stuck in a pod in RL.
No thanks. Free range laptops and beanbags is my ideal office.
No, Insureance companies are supposed to spread the risk over the community, because it is harder to disable the community than it is to disable the individual.
Have you ever gotten sick and found that people came around bringing food as soon as they heard?If you haven't, then you need to get better friends. And bring food to them when they can't walk.
Freedom is a two way street, it is true, and one that is not walked alone.
Cool! I've always wanted to see Aliens vs Preditor vs NOLF!
Seriously though, monolith makes most of its money licencing out the engine they developed for Shogo. I'm even more excited because if they're giving tools this powerful away for free, they must have something even better for the next crop of games.
Look out Unreal Warfare, the big kids are coming to town!
I don't know about getting the list. With an autodialer, the list might be simply "The Telephone Directory." After all, simply stomping through the numbers is a lot cheaper than buying a fully qualified list of customers. Some legit direct mail companies pay in excess of one or two million dollars for a list of a thousand names. (Eg, 1000 Rich professionals who have just gotten married. 1000 Rich professionals who have just bought a house etc...)
A landscaper who is too clueless to know that an autodialer is illegal in his area would probably NOT be able to afford a list.
I say sue the telemarketer. That way you have low court costs and better chance of winning.
A lot of people are saying "Nothing new here, these are just gene feedback loops," "this will pale in comparison to the power of sillicon" and "when can I customise my own bizarre pet."
They're missing the point.
I think that the most exciting thing about this research thrust to make packages of genes that you can plug into a genome and expect to see it work is that it is concurrant with Stephen Wolframs's A New Kind of Science.
Sure Wolfram claims to have invented everything from Mathamatica (fair enough) to Occam's Razor (at one point he sagely counsles us to use simpler cellular autonoma to get the desired result and forget the more complicated ones), but the exciting thing is that the book does give interesting examples of how to use cellular autonoma to solve real world problems which are poorly suited to math.
The cellular autonoma that he proposes operate by looking at their ancestor cell and the cells which surround them and then looking up a table of rules to determine what properties they will have. We can do this now with real cells using short range hormones and making the output something like turning on a Green Fluroescent Protein gene.
Wolfram is trying to use a computer with one or two processors to simulate an exponentially growing colony of cells. this means that he runs out of computing resources at an ever increasing rate.
With real cells, the processing power grows with each iteration, because each new cell takes care of its own housekeeping. Just add nutrient.
So borrow the book, read it and then you can see the revolution on your hands if we manage to produce something as dumb as non-motile procaryotes which are able to take the average of the hormonal output of their three nearest cells and then change colour.
Because you know that nobody can be *told* what the matrix is.
I was just riffing on the idea that in order for chewey to get in on this whole star wars rebellion thing, Han has to save his life and thereby bond chewey to him in a "Life Debt."
I assume that this has to happen sometime after ep II, because the story is pretty dramatic.
Also there's that whole "Han Solo- Swoop racer" thing from tales of the bounty hunters which promises to be another pod-racer style sequence and you know how lucasarts loves things like that to spin off into games.
That would be a good time to explain why his face changes twice in the original trilogy...
"Well, I was never really happy about my jawline profile... is this the best look for a hero of the rebellion? Or should I nip here, lift there..."
"Go Away Wedge, you bother me."
I think that was called Forces of Nature
Since Harrison Ford feels that reprising a young han solo would be going back to his pre-star days and would look utterly rediculous (I agree), does that mean we're going to see someone like Tyler Hoechlin as a young han solo? "Some people say that Jango Fett was a good man, other people say that there was no good in him at all..."
Or are we going to get an ALL CGI Jar Solo? "Mesa wanna play you sabbac for your hunka junka ship!"
Or maybe a Golem Solo that runs around shouting "My creditssss...."
Damn straight. But you'd better not piss off her makers or they'll never let you get together.
I loved that show. Fox should have never killed it, and just given James Cameron those M1D3 Super Abe tanks like he wanted.
Come on. It doesn't matter what "we" learn or if science fiction teaches "us" anything. The bottom line is that some nations will ban the technology, and other nations will endorse it to some degree. In the offchance that everybody outlaws the technology... the old saying goes that only outlaws will have it.
The bottom line is that some people eat the apple of knowledge. If they die, then we move on. If it turns them into gods, then those who do not endorse the technolgy will have to battle uphill against a technically superior foe.
Just look at gunpowder and steam engines. People used to think that gunpowder should be used in fireworks and steam engines disturbed the spirits of the dead.
Then trainloads of troops began to cross the british empire and her ships ruled the waves.
Of course if the spirits of the dead were really offended they would have sabotaged the steam engines and britain would have ended up like kahn... all bitter and superweapon having, but defeated by the other folks.
Really, technology not about right and wrong. It's about power.
Has buffy season 7 taught you nothing?
I mean, what if your retro-viral loaded gene-altering smart pill contained a trojan. Can you imagine seeing your body get root owned by something that wants to turn you into a yoghurt factory? or a bomb?
Personally I want the biological equivalent of a packet sniffer to go with my Version 1.0 firewall and virus scanner that we call my immune system and the tripwire that we call apoptosis inducing agent p53.
Now if only I could figure out how to install snapshot or some other decent backup system.