What if it is possible to be completely autonomous with machines? Machines that take care of your food, clothes, transportation, anything you ever need or want, but machines that require a massive amount of wealth to acquire first. What if the future of automation is the mere 1% that live in a libertarian utopia (kind of The dancers at the end of time by M. Moorcock) and the remaining 99% struggling to survive? what if the over-concentration of wealth you are observing right now is just the first step towards that kind of future?
Isn't it plausible that over-concentration of wealth is a natural consequence of automation? To me it seems intuitive that the concentration of wealth into singular points is the end goal of automation.
Stop speaking of machine learning as if it's a new kind of black magic. I know it sounds better than "using a mathematical algorithm" or "performed statistical analysis", but to me it sounds as ridiculous as the "quantum whatever" of the 90's. Seriously, ML is being hyped beyond reasonable.
This is nothing compared to the price of the house. Let the company that builds the house install them, like they install isolating windows (which are more expensive than that, btw). Or rent it from your electricity provider. Yeah it's expensive for an egoistic individual, but it is not for the entire society.
Seriously. If a car can get a 50+kwh battery in it, why can't every house have it too? That storage capacity is enough for a few days of intensive use.
You should probably take some lectures in computer vision, it would change your view on it. It's either that, or you have a misconception about what a human does when he's learning.
I'll take the Turing view on humans: big and horribly complex machine running a big and horribly complex algorithm. A part of this algorithm and its dedicated hardware is something we call "vision". Of course, it's a big an clunky part, and we even don't know its exact boundaries.
Now suppose you have a computer that does run an algorithm which is equivalent to the one of the human. Wouldn't you call it "computer vision"? I think that's a pretty good name that reflects correctly what the thing does.
Here comes the tricky part: we don't have the algorithm yet, nor do we know all the things it should do. Hell, we don't even now how to measure the equivalence with the human one!
But things are advancing and we're getting more and more pieces that seem to behave closer to the human algorithm (same inputs, same outputs). Some pieces are easy (depth estimation from calibrated stereo cameras), some are more involved but we can do it pretty well (OCR), some are really hard and we begin to do them not so badly (object recognition) and some are just so crazy nobody is even working on it (animal identification comes to my mind. Example: which of the wolves in the pack is Titus?).
I have no doubt we'll have one day a collection of algorithm that can do anything a human can do with his vision, whatever the environment. If that's close or far away is still debate though. I guess it will be much quicker than anyone expected, myself included. Will that collection be the same as the one in the human brain, i.e., will we have deciphered the human algorithm? No. That's not even a question in computer vision, that's a question of cognitive sciences. Although some parts can be inspired by what cognitive science tells us about the human mind (see, e.g., the recent developments in deep neural nets).
Suppose you now have that algorithm, wouldn't you sell it as "a complete solution comparable to a human" to quote your words? Of course you would, that's exactly what you tried to achieve from the beginning. Now, if a magazine sells it a already done while it still is being research, blame the journalist, not the scientists. It's been 50 years that journalists have sold nuclear fusion as our energy revolution coming next year, and still you wouldn't say physicists in the field are only good at marketing without strong stuff behind them.
I don't agree with you. Scientific expansion in ML is of exponential growth: what took 20 years to achieve will take only 10 to be doubly improved. When I see the state of the art in computer vision 2014, I have almost no doubt the vision problems associated with automatic cars will be solve in a fewer amount of time that anyone expected.
On the contrary, when a job is paid too much, people are doing it for the sake of money and not because they love to do it. Think of the politicians. They don't care that much about ideas, they are into opinions, and more favorably the ones that will get them the cash. That's why we get all these crappy laws.
Think of a fireworker paid a million dollars. At that rate, you'll get a bunch of real assholes that will do anything to get the job because of the money, but when the day comes they have to risk their life to save your ass, they'll just flee saying "f**k, that's not worth it".
So while I totally agree with you on the low pay justified by passion bullshit, my point is that we should not rely on high pay to expect the jobs to be done correctly. A job is done correctly iff the guy in charge is happy with his job done correctly.
That being said, it can surely be further automated in the next decade to get rid of another 1/3. How many decades until there is only one guy at your factory that is in charge of rebooting the whole system if ever it fails?
It's not that automation is bad, it's actually great for the human condition, it's our society that cannot handle such evolution.
Self-preservation. We are people, hence by social contract we (no longer) eat each other. That way each of us can feel safe that others will not consume him. We consider people who violate that rule criminals or insane and deal with them appropriately.
There is no such social contract with animals. We can eat them and they, occasionally, eat humans too.
This.
You can even extend this to why we don't eat cats and dogs. Dog owners don't want their neighbors to eat their precious family pet, and nobody want such a mess in society. These are self preserving rules of our society, and not things based on some fancy individual reasoning. Note that in not so ancient time, people did eat dogs in most Europe, but that was before dogs were common pet.
The thing is, population will continue to grow even long after the resources collapse, because it has some delay between the behavior changes and the economic situation. This just makes things even more likely to end with the nuke option.
I am a linux sysadmin, and many of the packages required for desktop use not only don't apply to me, but are pretty well useless. I would love to see a distribution where any dependency on X11 was not only stripped out - but *compiled* out. I would love to see a distribution where systemd was not getting its mitts into everything.
It's up to the distro to focus on what they want and make declination either for desktop, or servers, mobile, embedded, etc. None of this has anything to do with linux which is, you know, just a kernel.
If Putin gets Ukraine, then it's going to get even worse. Do you remember that little sentence about about "dishonor and war" 75 years ago? It's about the same situation today.
My experience (no science here, only personal encounters) is there are 2 types of racists, and both are wrong but not in the same way.
Racist theorists think we can achieve a better optimum in a society by removing bad elements. The idea is, if you remove the low values, the mean goes up. They completely fail at understanding the benefits of stochastic exploration in something as complex as a society. If evolution is so performing good it is also because of the stochastic exploration it uses introducing mutations or crossing-over.
Racists people are just mediocre guys that need to be proud of something. Now, since they never achieved something in their live, they turn onto something they did nothing for, like their country or the color of their skin. That's the old "I'm better than you", from people that in reality aren't, but cannot stand that fact. Misplaced pride, or something like that.
You miss the point. It is obvious that based on genetic criteria, people are not physically equal. Some run faster, some spring higher while others are better at abstraction or emotions. That it is not uniformly distributed among ethnicities is completely irrelevant, and hopefully you'll understand why.
The way we have to consider equality among men is by definition, like an axiom. That way, we can build rules that are much more interesting than the ones where all men are not equal. In particular, it gives you much more liberty, for we consider our society to be above arbitrariness and randomness.
Let's face it, no one chooses where, when and from whom he/she is born, it's either arbitrary (depending on whether you believe in some cosmic plan) or random. The consequences of that is that you are born with a limited amount of possibilities. Now, we can either shorten these possibilities by exploiting this arbitrariness/randomness - it's the "brave new world" scenario where you have to fit that gamma role you were born for -, or we can enlarge them by deciding not to take it into account and state that all human beings are equal. We choose the later since the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is a great choice based on logical reasoning rather than obsolete bigotry, because it takes into account its consequences. It is a choice that puts forward our capacity (as a species) to think, plan and build, which is by far our greatest ability. But it also as practical advantages for our societies, like a good mix of robustness, resilience and adaptability.
Isn't it completly overkill? I mean, the games can adjust their rendering so as to compensate the visual defects of the player. You just enter your needed correction in a parameter box et voilà. Thet clearly doesn't seem overly complicated to do.
You can think of it as a bias toward exploitation over exploration, which will inevitably leads us to a local optimum from which it will be very difficult to escape.
People do not want to work less. If it were the case, we would see massive political propositions in that sense, which is not what we observe.
In France, the legal work duration is 35h/w (remeber the crappy commercial by cadillac), and people do not like it. Sarkozy was elected on the leitmotiv "work more, earn more", and proposed a system for taxes free overtime. Hollande reintroduced the taxes, and people got mad and angry. Every single week, you can hear some french politician saying we need to move back to 40h/w, and you never hear someone proposing to lower at maybe 32h/w or even below 30h/w - such proposition would not be highly impopular.
Basically, people want more, even if it's pointless and even if it 's harmful for the entire society. Stupidity? Tragedy of the anticommons.
Slashdot Mirror
What if it is possible to be completely autonomous with machines? Machines that take care of your food, clothes, transportation, anything you ever need or want, but machines that require a massive amount of wealth to acquire first. What if the future of automation is the mere 1% that live in a libertarian utopia (kind of The dancers at the end of time by M. Moorcock) and the remaining 99% struggling to survive? what if the over-concentration of wealth you are observing right now is just the first step towards that kind of future?
Isn't it plausible that over-concentration of wealth is a natural consequence of automation? To me it seems intuitive that the concentration of wealth into singular points is the end goal of automation.
Stop speaking of machine learning as if it's a new kind of black magic. I know it sounds better than "using a mathematical algorithm" or "performed statistical analysis", but to me it sounds as ridiculous as the "quantum whatever" of the 90's. Seriously, ML is being hyped beyond reasonable.
This is nothing compared to the price of the house. Let the company that builds the house install them, like they install isolating windows (which are more expensive than that, btw). Or rent it from your electricity provider. Yeah it's expensive for an egoistic individual, but it is not for the entire society.
Seriously. If a car can get a 50+kwh battery in it, why can't every house have it too? That storage capacity is enough for a few days of intensive use.
1000 acres = 4 square kilometers or 404 hectares
You should probably take some lectures in computer vision, it would change your view on it. It's either that, or you have a misconception about what a human does when he's learning.
I'll take the Turing view on humans: big and horribly complex machine running a big and horribly complex algorithm. A part of this algorithm and its dedicated hardware is something we call "vision". Of course, it's a big an clunky part, and we even don't know its exact boundaries.
Now suppose you have a computer that does run an algorithm which is equivalent to the one of the human. Wouldn't you call it "computer vision"? I think that's a pretty good name that reflects correctly what the thing does.
Here comes the tricky part: we don't have the algorithm yet, nor do we know all the things it should do. Hell, we don't even now how to measure the equivalence with the human one!
But things are advancing and we're getting more and more pieces that seem to behave closer to the human algorithm (same inputs, same outputs). Some pieces are easy (depth estimation from calibrated stereo cameras), some are more involved but we can do it pretty well (OCR), some are really hard and we begin to do them not so badly (object recognition) and some are just so crazy nobody is even working on it (animal identification comes to my mind. Example: which of the wolves in the pack is Titus?).
I have no doubt we'll have one day a collection of algorithm that can do anything a human can do with his vision, whatever the environment. If that's close or far away is still debate though. I guess it will be much quicker than anyone expected, myself included. Will that collection be the same as the one in the human brain, i.e., will we have deciphered the human algorithm? No. That's not even a question in computer vision, that's a question of cognitive sciences. Although some parts can be inspired by what cognitive science tells us about the human mind (see, e.g., the recent developments in deep neural nets).
Suppose you now have that algorithm, wouldn't you sell it as "a complete solution comparable to a human" to quote your words? Of course you would, that's exactly what you tried to achieve from the beginning. Now, if a magazine sells it a already done while it still is being research, blame the journalist, not the scientists. It's been 50 years that journalists have sold nuclear fusion as our energy revolution coming next year, and still you wouldn't say physicists in the field are only good at marketing without strong stuff behind them.
(disclaimer: I also work in the field)
I don't agree with you. Scientific expansion in ML is of exponential growth: what took 20 years to achieve will take only 10 to be doubly improved. When I see the state of the art in computer vision 2014, I have almost no doubt the vision problems associated with automatic cars will be solve in a fewer amount of time that anyone expected.
On the contrary, when a job is paid too much, people are doing it for the sake of money and not because they love to do it. Think of the politicians. They don't care that much about ideas, they are into opinions, and more favorably the ones that will get them the cash. That's why we get all these crappy laws.
Think of a fireworker paid a million dollars. At that rate, you'll get a bunch of real assholes that will do anything to get the job because of the money, but when the day comes they have to risk their life to save your ass, they'll just flee saying "f**k, that's not worth it".
So while I totally agree with you on the low pay justified by passion bullshit, my point is that we should not rely on high pay to expect the jobs to be done correctly. A job is done correctly iff the guy in charge is happy with his job done correctly.
Exactly. Now let's speak about all that non strongly typed trendy crap too.
That being said, it can surely be further automated in the next decade to get rid of another 1/3. How many decades until there is only one guy at your factory that is in charge of rebooting the whole system if ever it fails?
It's not that automation is bad, it's actually great for the human condition, it's our society that cannot handle such evolution.
Self-preservation. We are people, hence by social contract we (no longer) eat each other. That way each of us can feel safe that others will not consume him. We consider people who violate that rule criminals or insane and deal with them appropriately.
There is no such social contract with animals. We can eat them and they, occasionally, eat humans too.
This.
You can even extend this to why we don't eat cats and dogs. Dog owners don't want their neighbors to eat their precious family pet, and nobody want such a mess in society. These are self preserving rules of our society, and not things based on some fancy individual reasoning. Note that in not so ancient time, people did eat dogs in most Europe, but that was before dogs were common pet.
The thing is, population will continue to grow even long after the resources collapse, because it has some delay between the behavior changes and the economic situation. This just makes things even more likely to end with the nuke option.
As of 2014, how do you power trucks, tractors, cargo ships, and planes on solar?
I dunno. Maybe but using the energy to synthesize some chemicals that can later on be burned in a motor, performing a closed cycle.
Using renewable energy to tap unrenewable energy... Seems not really enduring. Why not just use directly the renewable energy in first place?
I am a linux sysadmin, and many of the packages required for desktop use not only don't apply to me, but are pretty well useless. I would love to see a distribution where any dependency on X11 was not only stripped out - but *compiled* out. I would love to see a distribution where systemd was not getting its mitts into everything.
It's called gentoo.
It's up to the distro to focus on what they want and make declination either for desktop, or servers, mobile, embedded, etc. None of this has anything to do with linux which is, you know, just a kernel.
If Putin gets Ukraine, then it's going to get even worse. Do you remember that little sentence about about "dishonor and war" 75 years ago? It's about the same situation today.
The rules are simple and you can play with almost any number of people. Even people who don't like to play games often give a try.
You are grown up enough to tell the difference, kids are mostly not.
My experience (no science here, only personal encounters) is there are 2 types of racists, and both are wrong but not in the same way.
Racist theorists think we can achieve a better optimum in a society by removing bad elements. The idea is, if you remove the low values, the mean goes up. They completely fail at understanding the benefits of stochastic exploration in something as complex as a society. If evolution is so performing good it is also because of the stochastic exploration it uses introducing mutations or crossing-over.
Racists people are just mediocre guys that need to be proud of something. Now, since they never achieved something in their live, they turn onto something they did nothing for, like their country or the color of their skin. That's the old "I'm better than you", from people that in reality aren't, but cannot stand that fact. Misplaced pride, or something like that.
You miss the point. It is obvious that based on genetic criteria, people are not physically equal. Some run faster, some spring higher while others are better at abstraction or emotions. That it is not uniformly distributed among ethnicities is completely irrelevant, and hopefully you'll understand why.
The way we have to consider equality among men is by definition, like an axiom. That way, we can build rules that are much more interesting than the ones where all men are not equal. In particular, it gives you much more liberty, for we consider our society to be above arbitrariness and randomness.
Let's face it, no one chooses where, when and from whom he/she is born, it's either arbitrary (depending on whether you believe in some cosmic plan) or random. The consequences of that is that you are born with a limited amount of possibilities. Now, we can either shorten these possibilities by exploiting this arbitrariness/randomness - it's the "brave new world" scenario where you have to fit that gamma role you were born for -, or we can enlarge them by deciding not to take it into account and state that all human beings are equal. We choose the later since the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is a great choice based on logical reasoning rather than obsolete bigotry, because it takes into account its consequences. It is a choice that puts forward our capacity (as a species) to think, plan and build, which is by far our greatest ability. But it also as practical advantages for our societies, like a good mix of robustness, resilience and adaptability.
Isn't it completly overkill? I mean, the games can adjust their rendering so as to compensate the visual defects of the player. You just enter your needed correction in a parameter box et voilà. Thet clearly doesn't seem overly complicated to do.
You can think of it as a bias toward exploitation over exploration, which will inevitably leads us to a local optimum from which it will be very difficult to escape.
Where's geany? It's much better than gedit.
People do not want to work less. If it were the case, we would see massive political propositions in that sense, which is not what we observe.
In France, the legal work duration is 35h/w (remeber the crappy commercial by cadillac), and people do not like it. Sarkozy was elected on the leitmotiv "work more, earn more", and proposed a system for taxes free overtime. Hollande reintroduced the taxes, and people got mad and angry. Every single week, you can hear some french politician saying we need to move back to 40h/w, and you never hear someone proposing to lower at maybe 32h/w or even below 30h/w - such proposition would not be highly impopular.
Basically, people want more, even if it's pointless and even if it 's harmful for the entire society. Stupidity? Tragedy of the anticommons.