... because then a parallel evolution will start, but the robots will have much more potential to evolve than we. Sooner or later, imperfect copies will cause a higher reproduction rate, and sooner or later we will compete for the same resources. The ones with the highest reproduction rate will crowd out all others over the long term. When that happens, we humans better find a role in which we are valuable to those robots. Or we will become history.
such as hold back the stick in a stall (Air France)
True, but not the cause for the crash.
Yes, the pilots were the cause for the crash. They even made remarks about the unusual attitude. The situation was obvious, and their ignorance and lack of competence was staggering. Just because the automation was switched off due to an iced probe does not mean the automation is to blame. Ask pilots why they think themselves to be indispensable, and you get some airy stuff on the line of "catch mistakes in the systems that nobody foresaw". And yet, when exactly this happens, they did actively, but unwittingly, do their utmost to crash the airplane in circumstances when continuing the flight uneventfully would have been the by far most likely outcome.
Look at the Pacific and check how big populations on remote islands have to be to stay healthy (Easter Island for example). From that, 10.000 looks much more realistic than 500.
But there is another problem which has not been addressed: Keeping or even raising the technological level of this population. Even a population of 10.000 will be very small in this respect. Evidence: The early inhabitants of Tasman Island arrived by boat and knew how to make arrows and such, but their descendants lost all that know-how. Sure, writing it down will help, but if you need to quickly expand your knowledge (for fighting new pathogens, for example), an isolated population of 10.000 humans will not be enough.
Looking things up in a book is not enough, practice is needed as well. There are plenty of skills which had been developed earlier in the last century which now have been lost for the most part (think of analogue control as an example), even in a population of 6 billion people.
It's almost as if most executives have no fucking idea what they're doing...
Very astute observation on your part. They really don't know, but they have a knack for making everyone believe they knew. A total disregard for honesty is very helpful to be effective in doing this, as is ignorance in their audience.
... and that is not so different to what the speaker is doing. Making everyone believe he knew all the secrets. And the executives are dumb enough so it works. It really is this simple.
Most of the low wage jobs have been / will be replaced by some self-service arrangement, and computerization will make it possible. Just think of the shop clerks which won't be needed when most selling is done online. Or the bank clerks - ATMs have replaced most already. Or the travel agents - online booking has made most obsolete already.
Thinking of some 1:1 replacement of a human with a human-shaped machine is too simple. The replacement will be of outdated, job-heavy business models with self-service models.
Although, to be fair, zeppelin safety has improved tremendously.
Before WW I, Zeppelins had a spotless safety record, having flown thousands of passengers in hundreds of flights. Only when the military came in did accidents happen. See Wikipedia list of airship accidents
If the same standards that grounded Zeppelins after the Hindenburg accident had been applied to aircraft, civilian heavier-than-air passenger transportation would never have taken off.
The older versions of that thing included free skydive from a fireball.
Actually, the older version of *this* thing is called Zeppelin NT and flies now for about 20 years all around the Lake Constance region. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_NT
The Hindenburg was designed for helium, but had to use hydrogen because of an US monopoly of helium in combination with an acute attack of envy which resulted in a boycott. The rest is (well known) history...
The broken dynamic is the fault of corporates and governments, not 'hackers.'
Let's be more specific. It's the fault of lawyers. There are many decent people in corps and governments, and even decent lawyers, but the bad ones poison the well for all others.
They had directed all that human effort towards making a better country for their citizens.. and making better cars..
They had not much of a choice. Remember, this was a puppet regime, closely controlled and directed by their Soviet Russian masters. In 1953, the GDR was the first of several Soviet-bloc countries to rebel (after that, in 1956 Hungary and in 1968 the Czech Republic went similarly "astray"), so control and supervision was doubled for the next decades. Only under Gorbatchev things lightened up, but by then the (by then really old) old guard was too much set in their ways to relax or reform anything.
Many subjects claim to be scientific, but few of them allow to have a base of practically settled laws which is expanded at the fringes. Look at economics: Every time there is a new "law" announced, the economy adapts and changes accordingly to disprove the "law" down the road. A generation ago the perceived wisdom was that unemployment and inflation run against each other. Now we know this is bunk. But economists are too vain to accept that their subject cannot be like Physics or Mathematics. This "real science" envy makes them claim to be scientists, which harms the concept because the public just goes " oohh, see, another scientific law has turned out to be wrong. All science must be wrong".
Contrast this with the scientific method: This can be applied widely. But do not confuse a solid body of science like in physics with something that changes when being observed. Unfortunately, envy and the limitations of language (add to this the missing understanding in much of what is published) conspire to make real science look bad in the public eye.
If it looses contact with the satellite it is pretty much just plain lost, now throw in a fairly accurate gyro and set of accelerometers and when the satellite signal goes bye bye you flip over to inertial navigation which can be made pretty accurate since given the fact that cars generally stay on known roads you can then perform path inference based upon the on board map so that if the inertial system seems to think you are driving through a building the system can correct itself by looking at where it has been and put you position back on the road where you should be.
Correct in principle, but drift will kill your signal within a few seconds when you rely on the current crop of MEMS for this. Remember, you need to integrate *twice* to get from acceleration to position, and any noise will grow the position error exponentially. If you go with aircraft grade accels, be prepared to spend more than the price of your car for a decent system. This will be precise enough to keep you on track for a few hours, but don't expect this to be part of your next car's nav system anytime soon. DARPA is looking into improved MEMS for this, but it will take many years before this trickles down to a consumer nav system.
the small world effect is possible by low cost and fast transportation. The same holds true for tourism. So the intrepid British explorers who started early in the 18th century to roam all across Europe are the first indicators of this change. Look how old Thomas Cook (the company) is (Link: http://www.thomascook.com/thomas-cook-history/)
Diversity. This was when Windows NT 3.1 was about to be released and it supported DEC Alpha as well as MIPS CPU's.
Diversity was never in favor at MS. They were forced to support DEC Alpha. The NT team had been recruited straight from DEC, and when DEC complained, MS agreed to support Alpha with their new OS. Which did not prevent DEC from wasting the opportunity they had with Alpha, but this is a different story. See http://www.bolenk.com/computer/history-of-windows-nt.php
Judges back then were chosen based on merits. Judges today are chosen based on who they know.
or maybe the are simply incapable to understand the issue. Back then, a patent had one or two pages and described a (mostly mechanical) issue in simple language. Lawyers today make sure that a patent is minimum 50 pages, and some run to more than 1000. The language is extremely formalized and very hard to read for untrained minds. And the issues are so specialized that the average judge would have to train several years in the particular field to understand what the invention is about.
Besides - most patents today have most of their innovation in the way the lawyers complicate simple issues. Sigh.
I guess he wants the people who screwed him to buy in order to keep the contents of the CD secret. Then he probably wants to settle out of court.
Will be interesting to see if there is really someone who buys before the auction ends. In effect, he/she will fund the legal campaign of his/her opponent...
Cooperation wins big time. Look at ants and bees. Only use selfishness with subject unwilling to cooperate and still, I have a hard time doing it sometimes...
Ants and bees are poor examples, being clones, not genetically diverse individuals.
Generally speaking, a small percentage of cheaters will always thrive in a cooperating group, so the selfish individuals will be suppressed, but never completely extinguished.
The consequence of technology has been that a few artists make most of the money. Unfortunately, these are not the best artists, because the winners are picked by the content oligopoly and promoted to the detriment of 99% of all other artists and all of us. When making money from art has an inherent limit on how many people can watch / listen to a performance again, we will see much more variety again and, hopefully, the quality of the art will go up again.
What is necessary for this to happen is that the wide distribution of recorded works of art will not create money for the distributors. Only then will the main source of income be live performances again, and one artist can only entertain so many people at one time. The consequence will be that many more artist will be able to live from their art again, only that any of them won't become a billionaire before turning thirty. A big loss for a lucky few, and an immense win for humanity.
You see, DRM will be one major roadblock on this future of bigger variety and quality in the arts, and therefore is bad. The posts before were all right, and now you know why.
sorry to rain on your parade, but the Wrights did not know about stability.
All their planes were instable in pitch. Without constant corrections by the pilot, all Flyers could not fly in a straight line. What did they do to correct this? Put a ballast weight in the back of the plane! This helped in so far as it increased the pitch inertia, so the pitch motion would be slower and thus more easily controllable, but it also shows that they did not understand the basics of stability. http://authors.library.caltech.edu/21217/1/CULaiaawfp84.pdf
... and a famous demonstration in Paris in 1908 (maybe 1906)...
It was in Reims, 1908. The Champagne companies sponsored a flight week there. I completely agree with the rest. The Wrights were maybe not the first in powered flight, but certainly the first aviation patent trolls in history.
Keep that in mind when you look for a partner. Better to double check and not to put all your eggs into one basket. Sure, some of that skill will also benefit your product, but we nerds can easily be dazzled by someone good at self-promotion.
Next, it will be important to select the right type of marketing person. Who are your customers? Will it be engineers at other companies, or end consumers? Depending on that you need almost completely different types. For the B2B business your partner needs to have some basic technical competence and must be good at schmoozing, especially with the purchasing department of your customers.
Most of the advice I have read here would better fit with a B2C situation.
just wait until we have the first fatalities with civilian UAVs or autonomous cars without permanent supervision. The weasels in management and politicians craving recognition will point all the way down to the poor soul who failed to write perfect code in too little time.
This discussion is similar to the one about who is responsible for shootings - shooter or gun manufacturer. Only that at some point there will not be an identifiable person holding the gun, and still people get killed.
Slashdot Mirror
... because then a parallel evolution will start, but the robots will have much more potential to evolve than we. Sooner or later, imperfect copies will cause a higher reproduction rate, and sooner or later we will compete for the same resources. The ones with the highest reproduction rate will crowd out all others over the long term. When that happens, we humans better find a role in which we are valuable to those robots. Or we will become history.
such as hold back the stick in a stall (Air France)
True, but not the cause for the crash.
Yes, the pilots were the cause for the crash. They even made remarks about the unusual attitude. The situation was obvious, and their ignorance and lack of competence was staggering. Just because the automation was switched off due to an iced probe does not mean the automation is to blame. Ask pilots why they think themselves to be indispensable, and you get some airy stuff on the line of "catch mistakes in the systems that nobody foresaw". And yet, when exactly this happens, they did actively, but unwittingly, do their utmost to crash the airplane in circumstances when continuing the flight uneventfully would have been the by far most likely outcome.
But there is another problem which has not been addressed: Keeping or even raising the technological level of this population. Even a population of 10.000 will be very small in this respect. Evidence: The early inhabitants of Tasman Island arrived by boat and knew how to make arrows and such, but their descendants lost all that know-how. Sure, writing it down will help, but if you need to quickly expand your knowledge (for fighting new pathogens, for example), an isolated population of 10.000 humans will not be enough.
Looking things up in a book is not enough, practice is needed as well. There are plenty of skills which had been developed earlier in the last century which now have been lost for the most part (think of analogue control as an example), even in a population of 6 billion people.
Better yet, how about a tiny tiny tax on each trade?
That ist exactly what needs to be done. In engineering terms: Increase damping. This will reduce oscillations and calm things down.
It's almost as if most executives have no fucking idea what they're doing...
Very astute observation on your part. They really don't know, but they have a knack for making everyone believe they knew. A total disregard for honesty is very helpful to be effective in doing this, as is ignorance in their audience.
Thinking of some 1:1 replacement of a human with a human-shaped machine is too simple. The replacement will be of outdated, job-heavy business models with self-service models.
Although, to be fair, zeppelin safety has improved tremendously.
Before WW I, Zeppelins had a spotless safety record, having flown thousands of passengers in hundreds of flights. Only when the military came in did accidents happen. See Wikipedia list of airship accidents
If the same standards that grounded Zeppelins after the Hindenburg accident had been applied to aircraft, civilian heavier-than-air passenger transportation would never have taken off.
The older versions of that thing included free skydive from a fireball .
Actually, the older version of *this* thing is called Zeppelin NT and flies now for about 20 years all around the Lake Constance region. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_NT
Ze Hindenburg in spandex . With ze helium
The Hindenburg was designed for helium, but had to use hydrogen because of an US monopoly of helium in combination with an acute attack of envy which resulted in a boycott. The rest is (well known) history ...
The broken dynamic is the fault of corporates and governments, not 'hackers.'
Let's be more specific. It's the fault of lawyers. There are many decent people in corps and governments, and even decent lawyers, but the bad ones poison the well for all others.
They had directed all that human effort towards making a better country for their citizens .. and making better cars ..
They had not much of a choice. Remember, this was a puppet regime, closely controlled and directed by their Soviet Russian masters. In 1953, the GDR was the first of several Soviet-bloc countries to rebel (after that, in 1956 Hungary and in 1968 the Czech Republic went similarly "astray"), so control and supervision was doubled for the next decades. Only under Gorbatchev things lightened up, but by then the (by then really old) old guard was too much set in their ways to relax or reform anything.
Contrast this with the scientific method: This can be applied widely. But do not confuse a solid body of science like in physics with something that changes when being observed. Unfortunately, envy and the limitations of language (add to this the missing understanding in much of what is published) conspire to make real science look bad in the public eye.
If it looses contact with the satellite it is pretty much just plain lost, now throw in a fairly accurate gyro and set of accelerometers and when the satellite signal goes bye bye you flip over to inertial navigation which can be made pretty accurate since given the fact that cars generally stay on known roads you can then perform path inference based upon the on board map so that if the inertial system seems to think you are driving through a building the system can correct itself by looking at where it has been and put you position back on the road where you should be.
Correct in principle, but drift will kill your signal within a few seconds when you rely on the current crop of MEMS for this. Remember, you need to integrate *twice* to get from acceleration to position, and any noise will grow the position error exponentially. If you go with aircraft grade accels, be prepared to spend more than the price of your car for a decent system. This will be precise enough to keep you on track for a few hours, but don't expect this to be part of your next car's nav system anytime soon. DARPA is looking into improved MEMS for this, but it will take many years before this trickles down to a consumer nav system.
the small world effect is possible by low cost and fast transportation. The same holds true for tourism. So the intrepid British explorers who started early in the 18th century to roam all across Europe are the first indicators of this change. Look how old Thomas Cook (the company) is (Link: http://www.thomascook.com/thomas-cook-history/)
Diversity. This was when Windows NT 3.1 was about to be released and it supported DEC Alpha as well as MIPS CPU's.
Diversity was never in favor at MS. They were forced to support DEC Alpha. The NT team had been recruited straight from DEC, and when DEC complained, MS agreed to support Alpha with their new OS. Which did not prevent DEC from wasting the opportunity they had with Alpha, but this is a different story. See http://www.bolenk.com/computer/history-of-windows-nt.php
Judges back then were chosen based on merits. Judges today are chosen based on who they know.
or maybe the are simply incapable to understand the issue. Back then, a patent had one or two pages and described a (mostly mechanical) issue in simple language. Lawyers today make sure that a patent is minimum 50 pages, and some run to more than 1000. The language is extremely formalized and very hard to read for untrained minds. And the issues are so specialized that the average judge would have to train several years in the particular field to understand what the invention is about.
Besides - most patents today have most of their innovation in the way the lawyers complicate simple issues. Sigh.
Will be interesting to see if there is really someone who buys before the auction ends. In effect, he/she will fund the legal campaign of his/her opponent ...
would be good for Nokia to get rid of him and Microsoft will continue it's journey into irrelevance. Double Bonus!
Cooperation wins big time. Look at ants and bees. Only use selfishness with subject unwilling to cooperate and still, I have a hard time doing it sometimes...
Ants and bees are poor examples, being clones, not genetically diverse individuals.
Generally speaking, a small percentage of cheaters will always thrive in a cooperating group, so the selfish individuals will be suppressed, but never completely extinguished.
What is necessary for this to happen is that the wide distribution of recorded works of art will not create money for the distributors. Only then will the main source of income be live performances again, and one artist can only entertain so many people at one time. The consequence will be that many more artist will be able to live from their art again, only that any of them won't become a billionaire before turning thirty. A big loss for a lucky few, and an immense win for humanity.
You see, DRM will be one major roadblock on this future of bigger variety and quality in the arts, and therefore is bad. The posts before were all right, and now you know why.
sorry to rain on your parade, but the Wrights did not know about stability. All their planes were instable in pitch. Without constant corrections by the pilot, all Flyers could not fly in a straight line. What did they do to correct this? Put a ballast weight in the back of the plane! This helped in so far as it increased the pitch inertia, so the pitch motion would be slower and thus more easily controllable, but it also shows that they did not understand the basics of stability. http://authors.library.caltech.edu/21217/1/CULaiaawfp84.pdf
It was in Reims, 1908. The Champagne companies sponsored a flight week there. I completely agree with the rest. The Wrights were maybe not the first in powered flight, but certainly the first aviation patent trolls in history.
Next, it will be important to select the right type of marketing person. Who are your customers? Will it be engineers at other companies, or end consumers? Depending on that you need almost completely different types. For the B2B business your partner needs to have some basic technical competence and must be good at schmoozing, especially with the purchasing department of your customers.
Most of the advice I have read here would better fit with a B2C situation.
just wait until we have the first fatalities with civilian UAVs or autonomous cars without permanent supervision. The weasels in management and politicians craving recognition will point all the way down to the poor soul who failed to write perfect code in too little time. This discussion is similar to the one about who is responsible for shootings - shooter or gun manufacturer. Only that at some point there will not be an identifiable person holding the gun, and still people get killed.
if you don't believe me, look it up yourself: Wikipedia Link