You're going to have to define both depression and what you mean by resolving itself if you want me to agree on that one. Otherwise I'm going to maintain that an actual diagnosed as a serious problem by a medical professional kind of depression isn't going to resolve itself without specific actions on the part of the individual and/or said professional to resolve it. I'll grant you that actions on the part of the individual might come naturally to them in the same way that one naturally favors a sprained foot, but this stuff doesn't just magically go away (unless we're including depression caused by some specific event, which is why you'll need to define the scope for this discussion to be useful).
People are quick to say "that won't solve every problem," and they're right.
I'm not saying it won't solve every problem, I'm saying it won't solve the vast majority of actual problems involving real depression/bipolar/BPD/schizophrenia/etc.
But reducing impulsive suicide is still justifiable and worthwhile.
But what specific actions are justifiable at what cost? I've often seen people justify things with "if it saves just one life it's worth it", but by that logic dogs and backyard swimming pools should be illegal.
Maybe (not that it would ever happen) there could be a govt sanctioned 'suicide wait list' where you sign on and after three months of counselling and intervention if you're not taken yourself off it, it'd get done painlessly and privately.
At least that would curb the public messes. Maybe...
Interesting idea. Though I think a lot would hinge on how well the counseling and intervention worked.
It may not fix the cause, but it may give enough time to heal.
Just curious, you're also against DNRs and various end of life things for terminal patients with painful diseases right? I don't care to argue about those one way or the other, but for the sake of understanding I'm kind of curious.
Not everyone needs treatment -- some (most?) depression resolves itself over time, much like physical wounds heal on their own
This is only true for the "oh I don't want to do anything today and my life sucks, I must be depressed" kinds of depression you see people post on facebook. Actual clinical depression is serious, and for the most part won't resolve itself. It's also a symptom of other mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc. Those illnesses also won't just resolve themselves over time.
At one point I used to think a lot like you in that I assumed mental illness was one of those things where someone could just suck it up and get over it. The best explanation I heard that got me on the path to understanding it was something along the lines of "telling someone with clinical depression to "just get over it" is like telling someone with their Humerus snapped clean in half to lift something with that arm. It's physically impossible for them to do". Only in this case the damage is in software, so it's harder to observe from an outside point of view. Since we don't have direct access into the human brain to reprogram it and fix the problem, we have to rely on things such as medications and therapy in an attempt to get the brain to reprogram itself. This often gives the illusion that someone just "sucked it up and got over it" when that isn't really the case. To continue with the broken arm analogy, there might be a few people who can "tough it out", set the bone properly themselves, and then lay motionless for a few weeks so it can heal without a cast. Then there are the rest of the people who go to the doctor, get it x-rayed, set, and put in a cast. Then there are the people who tried to just "tough it out and get over it" who walked around with their arm dangling by the skin and lived a painful last few weeks until infection killed them.
Also the pile of anti-discrimination themed hiring laws.
Whether or not a company is trying to avoid being shaken down Americans with Disabilities Act style, or actually a bunch of racist assholes, turning down someone who falls into a protected category is always going to be risky. That person could turn around and cause a lot of legal headache and expense (not to mention bad PR) if they start claiming you didn't hire them because of discrimination. List a bunch of requirements that no one can possibly fulfill and now you've got an out if someone applies who you don't really want. Once someone applies who you really like and want on your team, just make an exception and you're good to go.
Lasers aren't quite as infinite as you make them out to be. There's still the matter of upkeep (all that supporting hardware is much more delicate and complex than a big gun), and often the optics and/or bits of the cooling system are expected to be replaced as wear items.
The trick is keeping it on target for long enough to do damage. A glancing hit or two from the cannon of an A10 is going to do a lot more damage than a glancing hit or two from a laser that takes a few seconds to heat up the target to damaging levels.
Ringworld would make for a pretty amazing movie if they paid as much attention to correctly representing the physics, engineering, and scale as Niven did in the books.
I'd also love to see some of the Pournelle books done properly. Janissaries or King David's Spaceship would make for a great movie (mixing technologies like that makes for some really fun settings), and Falkenbergs Legion has a lot of potential to make a pretty awesome miniseries or TV show.
Who says he was really abducted? If I was going to go work for a drug cartel, staging an abduction could give me some plausible deniability if the cartel gets busted or I need to go back to normal life for some reason.
The next time, some jackass will create social networking profiles with breadcrumbs leading back to their real target, and with minimal effort will get a Curt Schilling to do the dirty work, and bear the legal liability, for them.
Yep. Everyone loves a good false flag operation. To be honest I'm kind of surprised that it hasn't happened more already.
Most kids eventually discover that the only way to actually make that stop is to, completely out of the blue and unexpectedly, knock the teaser's front teeth out... and that's basically what Schilling did.
To be fair, it really depends on the specific teaser and their motivations. The ones who do a half-assed job of it and are easily bored will usually move on if you ignore them. The ones who are more tenacious probably do need a kick in the teeth to get the message. Then there are the ones who are both tenacious and actively malicious, those are the ones that it's not a good idea to escalate with unless you're really prepared to follow through as far as it takes.
I still don't understand why you'd hide it from them even if they were a moron. No harm in seeing it, and they might even one day wonder why there are those weird 3 letters on the ends of all their files and take some initiative to learn something.
It doesn't matter who made the exploit or who their targets are. Once the exploit is out there, it's there for anyone to take control of. The NSA may very well only be interested in a few high value machines, and could even be the most trustworthy people on the planet (lol), but there's no reason someone else couldn't stumble across the NSAs backdoor (I'm sure that just like how we saw stuxnet infect thousands of non-target machines, it won't be limited to just the handful of targeted computers) and start using it for their own ends.
It's one of the reasons it's so annoying when people pull the "well what use is my data to [entity collecting it]? It's not like they're going to do anything nefarious with it". The problem isn't the trustworthiness of the people collecting it, the problem is that now you've effectively doubled the risk of that data being stolen by a random hacker
It seems sort of odd to me that that's even brought up as a negative. I mean, in the first instant of thinking about it sure, but my thought immediately after that was "nah, those places that do your taxes brag about how they hire former IRS employees, isn't this kind of like the same thing?".
I'd be really curious to find out for sure where that TV antenna based energy harvesting circuit is actually harvesting the energy from. Power levels that low can be created through static charge, or even the difference between two ground points a few meters away from each other (e.g. if the antenna is on the roof and the clock is on your workbench).
Have you tried putting it inside a large faraday cage and seeing if the energy levels remain the same?
Yeah, when I was a student my natural rhythm would slowly creep out to a 25 hour day. Especially in the winter when there wasn't as much pesky sun reminding me of what time it was. It would be fine for a while until eventually I rotated around such that my sleep schedule intersected with my class schedule and I'd have to spend a few days as a zombie resetting my sleep schedule again.
These people were trying to adjust to a martian day while still living on earth and seeing the sun still operate on a 24 hour day, so of course they're going to have problems. I'd like to see this tried while keeping the people underground with the lights cycling to actually simulate a martian day.
Stop it. You're making it hard for us to make progress.
Maybe it's stupid. How is it hampering progress, though?
Because it's giving people false expectations about how an AI will actually work. It also turns the term AI into sensationalist marketingspeak very analogous to the way other concepts in technology have been abused (e.g. "the cloud"). This then makes it harder to get funding for an AI research project ("oh, you're one of those AI people? How do you know your robots aren't going to turn into skynet? And where's my flying car?").
And you are that wealthy man! You are most likely well within the 1% circle of privileged individuals on this planet. Not to mention Jesus allegedly repeated this command over and over... for example Luke 12:33 and Luke 14:33 and via parables such as the Pearl of Great Price or the Lazarus and the Rich man.
Yep, which is why people who claim to be christians but who don't tithe and/or donate to charity and/or volunteer (10% was the biblical bare minimum!) kind of piss me off.
Either you're playing dumb or you lack critical reading skills. Lets add some context here.
"Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me" -- Mark 10:21
Cite the whole story, Mark 10:17 - 10:29. It becomes pretty clear that what you imply with your cherry picked single verse is inaccurate at best. In context, the person being talked to is a well off influential rich kid who sees the following that Jesus has and is trying to jump on the popularity bandwagon. Jesus recognizes this, and rather than say "lol no", he gives him a task that illustrates that the guy wants in for the wrong reasons. The guy was probably expecting to be asked to pay a "donation" or maybe introduce Jesus to some influential people in exchange for some lessons on charismatic speaking. Had Jesus given the guy some other task (e.g. "volunteer 100 hours at the soup kitchen" or "go knock on 100 doors and ask for donations"), the guy probably would have agreed and then sent an intern to do it for him or something and the lesson would have been lost on the crowd.
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." -- Luke 14:26
How about you include the rest of the context? Keeping in mind that in the previous chapter he'd just fed 5000 people:
Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
It should be pretty clear from that that this is a crowd of people hoping to see more miracles. They want to jump in on the popularity train, be entertained, and get some free food out of it. In this context, it's pretty clear that he's warning these people that life following him isn't going to be an all you can eat buffet of fish, bread, and inspirational speeches. In fact, it's going to really suck to the point that you'd have to hate your family to want to do it (which, if you follow the endings of the rest of the disciples, later turns out to be pretty true).
"Permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent." -- 1 Timothy 2:12
Look at the entire chapter (or even book, 1st timothy is shorter than some slashdot summaries). This is referring to roles within the church, and it assigns some equally important (though less public facing) roles to women.
"Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle, but also those who are harsh." -- 1 Peter 2:18
Good cherry picking and leaving out the passage in front of that:
Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors, as to those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men— as free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God. Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king.
This is clearly talking about not running around telling the civil authority to go fuck themselves because god said so. In fact, I could make the argument that the spirit of this is basically attempting to separate matters of church from matters of government. e.g. if you want to go burn some people because you're pretty sure that they're a witch, but the government says no, you do what the government says.
Another thing you're either intentionally leaving out or otherwise ignorant of is what slavery looked like at that time in history. It was both ubiquitous and also about as far from the image that comes to most peoples minds when you say "slave" as you can get. A much better translation in modern language would be "servant" or "indentured servant".
Given that this ideal world is completely imaginary, and the things that the free market is supposed to do in it never actually happen in the real world, why imagine a world where it's specifically free markets that have these magical powers?
Because it's often helpful to model the ideal behavior of a complex system first and see how well it lines up with what's being observed. That ideal model can then be used as a baseline to measure the real system and then changes made to either the model or the system in order to bring the operation closer in line with each other.
We do this in other fields all the time. Most engineering models assume a simple system (e.g. the standard frictionless vacuum in physics) first, and then begin adding in factors to account for other things until the model matches the observations to a close enough degree.
I was going to post a big point by point rebuttal but it was getting too large. You're making several flawed assumptions though
Firstly, just throwing more processing power at it isn't going to generate an AI. There's a lot of work elsewhere from designing specialized hardware to maintaining the infrastructure to designing the software to making sure all of the individual components integrate with each other. Also keep in mind that as I said earlier, machine learning in general (and neural nets in particular) tends to be extremely non-linear in complexity.
This fits into my next point: once we have an AI that's as "smart" as a human, we now have one more human to think about the problem. Only this one cost billions of dollars in development, costs millions per day in upkeep, and has now attracted a small army of people protesting the ethics of the whole thing. Totally worth it right?
Assuming that despite all of this people decide that it's somehow worth having multiple AIs with the IQ of einstein and access to all current human knowledge, what happens when the knowledge they're given is wrong? Even the best peer reviewed journals are full of errors. Also, it takes time to search it. And assuming this AI doesn't have the magical power of loading a few textbooks into memory and instantly becoming an expert, it's going to take it time to process and comprehend (index) the material for access.
It took Einstein a lifetime to make the contributions he made. Cut that in half because the AIs don't need to sleep, we're still looking at 10's of years (and billions of dollars keeping the system up and running all that time) for them to come up with something that may or may not be directly useful.
As far as an AI being able to look at sensory data from everywhere, what makes you think it'll be able to do that? The best humans can split their attention between a handful of tasks at best before we start to hit limits in our own processing power. So now for every human brain equivalent you can cram into an AI (keeping in mind these are going to be entire power hungry buildings full of parallel processors no matter how you slice it), it can watch another 10 webcams and correlate them to weather data. You could have just hired a handful of interns to do that for a billionth of the cost.
In reality, I think what we'll see is the cost and complexity of making small fast computer clusters go down, and an increase in the number of people specializing in machine learning algorithms. Businesses will begin using these people along with plug n play style computing clusters (I'm talking like a handful of networked GPUs worth of power here) to solve niche problems such as "what part in this car needs replacing in order to make the funny noise go away". But it won't be some sort of magical AI solving it, it'll be a team of people who set up the IT infrastructure working with a team of people who programmed some learning algorithms working with a team of people who collected and massaged the data so that it was computer readable. It won't necessarily be faster or cheaper than having a good mechanic look at it, but it'll be extremely repeatable (at least until the next model car comes along) and work from anywhere in the world as long as you can give it a recording from a properly positioned microphone.
I think that cat5 analogy is exactly what I said wasn't it? If you move a cat5 from one server to another, the switch port associated with server1 is now associated with server2 and you're going to have confusion until the MAC table on the switch updates.
My understanding of how the brain works is that there's a spiral shaped region where most of the upper motor neurons run to and each location where one terminates is mapped to some location on the body. Without brain surgery, what was formerly the "toe" neurons would now be the ones operating the fingers after transplanting the nerve endings. Without enough biofeedback the brain would obviously come to recognize them as "fingers" instead of "toes", but I'd imagine the process is far slower than updating the MAC table on a network switch.
Star wars is a terrible analogy anyway. The movie depicts a direct replacement for an amputated limb, which isn't quite what's going on here. If you read TFA, what these are being used for are people with nerve damage that basically amputates the limb internally while still leaving an intact limb. They repurpose nerves from elsewhere to replace the function of the damaged ones, then amputate the useless limb and replace with a mechanical one hooked up to the repurposed nerve groups. Presumably the amputee then moves the fingers of the limb via imagining flexing their toes or something.
How do you keep the queen confined though? Beekeeping is one of those subjects I've always wanted to know more about but was never really able to find any decent online sources for info.
Slashdot Mirror
Most depression resolves itself -- we know this
You're going to have to define both depression and what you mean by resolving itself if you want me to agree on that one. Otherwise I'm going to maintain that an actual diagnosed as a serious problem by a medical professional kind of depression isn't going to resolve itself without specific actions on the part of the individual and/or said professional to resolve it. I'll grant you that actions on the part of the individual might come naturally to them in the same way that one naturally favors a sprained foot, but this stuff doesn't just magically go away (unless we're including depression caused by some specific event, which is why you'll need to define the scope for this discussion to be useful).
People are quick to say "that won't solve every problem," and they're right.
I'm not saying it won't solve every problem, I'm saying it won't solve the vast majority of actual problems involving real depression/bipolar/BPD/schizophrenia/etc.
But reducing impulsive suicide is still justifiable and worthwhile.
But what specific actions are justifiable at what cost? I've often seen people justify things with "if it saves just one life it's worth it", but by that logic dogs and backyard swimming pools should be illegal.
Maybe (not that it would ever happen) there could be a govt sanctioned 'suicide wait list' where you sign on and after three months of counselling and intervention if you're not taken yourself off it, it'd get done painlessly and privately.
At least that would curb the public messes. Maybe...
Interesting idea. Though I think a lot would hinge on how well the counseling and intervention worked.
It may not fix the cause, but it may give enough time to heal.
Just curious, you're also against DNRs and various end of life things for terminal patients with painful diseases right? I don't care to argue about those one way or the other, but for the sake of understanding I'm kind of curious.
Not everyone needs treatment -- some (most?) depression resolves itself over time, much like physical wounds heal on their own
This is only true for the "oh I don't want to do anything today and my life sucks, I must be depressed" kinds of depression you see people post on facebook. Actual clinical depression is serious, and for the most part won't resolve itself. It's also a symptom of other mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, etc. Those illnesses also won't just resolve themselves over time.
At one point I used to think a lot like you in that I assumed mental illness was one of those things where someone could just suck it up and get over it. The best explanation I heard that got me on the path to understanding it was something along the lines of "telling someone with clinical depression to "just get over it" is like telling someone with their Humerus snapped clean in half to lift something with that arm. It's physically impossible for them to do". Only in this case the damage is in software, so it's harder to observe from an outside point of view. Since we don't have direct access into the human brain to reprogram it and fix the problem, we have to rely on things such as medications and therapy in an attempt to get the brain to reprogram itself. This often gives the illusion that someone just "sucked it up and got over it" when that isn't really the case. To continue with the broken arm analogy, there might be a few people who can "tough it out", set the bone properly themselves, and then lay motionless for a few weeks so it can heal without a cast. Then there are the rest of the people who go to the doctor, get it x-rayed, set, and put in a cast. Then there are the people who tried to just "tough it out and get over it" who walked around with their arm dangling by the skin and lived a painful last few weeks until infection killed them.
Also the pile of anti-discrimination themed hiring laws.
Whether or not a company is trying to avoid being shaken down Americans with Disabilities Act style, or actually a bunch of racist assholes, turning down someone who falls into a protected category is always going to be risky. That person could turn around and cause a lot of legal headache and expense (not to mention bad PR) if they start claiming you didn't hire them because of discrimination. List a bunch of requirements that no one can possibly fulfill and now you've got an out if someone applies who you don't really want. Once someone applies who you really like and want on your team, just make an exception and you're good to go.
Lasers aren't quite as infinite as you make them out to be. There's still the matter of upkeep (all that supporting hardware is much more delicate and complex than a big gun), and often the optics and/or bits of the cooling system are expected to be replaced as wear items.
The trick is keeping it on target for long enough to do damage. A glancing hit or two from the cannon of an A10 is going to do a lot more damage than a glancing hit or two from a laser that takes a few seconds to heat up the target to damaging levels.
Ringworld would make for a pretty amazing movie if they paid as much attention to correctly representing the physics, engineering, and scale as Niven did in the books.
I'd also love to see some of the Pournelle books done properly. Janissaries or King David's Spaceship would make for a great movie (mixing technologies like that makes for some really fun settings), and Falkenbergs Legion has a lot of potential to make a pretty awesome miniseries or TV show.
Why abduct a guy and force him to do IT work.
Who says he was really abducted? If I was going to go work for a drug cartel, staging an abduction could give me some plausible deniability if the cartel gets busted or I need to go back to normal life for some reason.
The next time, some jackass will create social networking profiles with breadcrumbs leading back to their real target, and with minimal effort will get a Curt Schilling to do the dirty work, and bear the legal liability, for them.
Yep. Everyone loves a good false flag operation. To be honest I'm kind of surprised that it hasn't happened more already.
Most kids eventually discover that the only way to actually make that stop is to, completely out of the blue and unexpectedly, knock the teaser's front teeth out... and that's basically what Schilling did.
To be fair, it really depends on the specific teaser and their motivations. The ones who do a half-assed job of it and are easily bored will usually move on if you ignore them. The ones who are more tenacious probably do need a kick in the teeth to get the message. Then there are the ones who are both tenacious and actively malicious, those are the ones that it's not a good idea to escalate with unless you're really prepared to follow through as far as it takes.
I still don't understand why you'd hide it from them even if they were a moron. No harm in seeing it, and they might even one day wonder why there are those weird 3 letters on the ends of all their files and take some initiative to learn something.
It doesn't matter who made the exploit or who their targets are. Once the exploit is out there, it's there for anyone to take control of. The NSA may very well only be interested in a few high value machines, and could even be the most trustworthy people on the planet (lol), but there's no reason someone else couldn't stumble across the NSAs backdoor (I'm sure that just like how we saw stuxnet infect thousands of non-target machines, it won't be limited to just the handful of targeted computers) and start using it for their own ends.
It's one of the reasons it's so annoying when people pull the "well what use is my data to [entity collecting it]? It's not like they're going to do anything nefarious with it". The problem isn't the trustworthiness of the people collecting it, the problem is that now you've effectively doubled the risk of that data being stolen by a random hacker
It seems sort of odd to me that that's even brought up as a negative. I mean, in the first instant of thinking about it sure, but my thought immediately after that was "nah, those places that do your taxes brag about how they hire former IRS employees, isn't this kind of like the same thing?".
I'd be really curious to find out for sure where that TV antenna based energy harvesting circuit is actually harvesting the energy from. Power levels that low can be created through static charge, or even the difference between two ground points a few meters away from each other (e.g. if the antenna is on the roof and the clock is on your workbench).
Have you tried putting it inside a large faraday cage and seeing if the energy levels remain the same?
Yeah, when I was a student my natural rhythm would slowly creep out to a 25 hour day. Especially in the winter when there wasn't as much pesky sun reminding me of what time it was. It would be fine for a while until eventually I rotated around such that my sleep schedule intersected with my class schedule and I'd have to spend a few days as a zombie resetting my sleep schedule again.
These people were trying to adjust to a martian day while still living on earth and seeing the sun still operate on a 24 hour day, so of course they're going to have problems. I'd like to see this tried while keeping the people underground with the lights cycling to actually simulate a martian day.
Stop it. You're making it hard for us to make progress.
Maybe it's stupid. How is it hampering progress, though?
Because it's giving people false expectations about how an AI will actually work. It also turns the term AI into sensationalist marketingspeak very analogous to the way other concepts in technology have been abused (e.g. "the cloud"). This then makes it harder to get funding for an AI research project ("oh, you're one of those AI people? How do you know your robots aren't going to turn into skynet? And where's my flying car?").
And you are that wealthy man! You are most likely well within the 1% circle of privileged individuals on this planet. Not to mention Jesus allegedly repeated this command over and over... for example Luke 12:33 and Luke 14:33 and via parables such as the Pearl of Great Price or the Lazarus and the Rich man.
Yep, which is why people who claim to be christians but who don't tithe and/or donate to charity and/or volunteer (10% was the biblical bare minimum!) kind of piss me off.
"Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me" -- Mark 10:21
Cite the whole story, Mark 10:17 - 10:29. It becomes pretty clear that what you imply with your cherry picked single verse is inaccurate at best. In context, the person being talked to is a well off influential rich kid who sees the following that Jesus has and is trying to jump on the popularity bandwagon. Jesus recognizes this, and rather than say "lol no", he gives him a task that illustrates that the guy wants in for the wrong reasons. The guy was probably expecting to be asked to pay a "donation" or maybe introduce Jesus to some influential people in exchange for some lessons on charismatic speaking. Had Jesus given the guy some other task (e.g. "volunteer 100 hours at the soup kitchen" or "go knock on 100 doors and ask for donations"), the guy probably would have agreed and then sent an intern to do it for him or something and the lesson would have been lost on the crowd.
"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." -- Luke 14:26
How about you include the rest of the context? Keeping in mind that in the previous chapter he'd just fed 5000 people:
Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple. And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.
It should be pretty clear from that that this is a crowd of people hoping to see more miracles. They want to jump in on the popularity train, be entertained, and get some free food out of it. In this context, it's pretty clear that he's warning these people that life following him isn't going to be an all you can eat buffet of fish, bread, and inspirational speeches. In fact, it's going to really suck to the point that you'd have to hate your family to want to do it (which, if you follow the endings of the rest of the disciples, later turns out to be pretty true).
"Permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent." -- 1 Timothy 2:12
Look at the entire chapter (or even book, 1st timothy is shorter than some slashdot summaries). This is referring to roles within the church, and it assigns some equally important (though less public facing) roles to women.
"Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle, but also those who are harsh." -- 1 Peter 2:18
Good cherry picking and leaving out the passage in front of that:
Therefore submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake, whether to the king as supreme, or to governors, as to those who are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of those who do good. For this is the will of God, that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men— as free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God. Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king.
This is clearly talking about not running around telling the civil authority to go fuck themselves because god said so. In fact, I could make the argument that the spirit of this is basically attempting to separate matters of church from matters of government. e.g. if you want to go burn some people because you're pretty sure that they're a witch, but the government says no, you do what the government says.
Another thing you're either intentionally leaving out or otherwise ignorant of is what slavery looked like at that time in history. It was both ubiquitous and also about as far from the image that comes to most peoples minds when you say "slave" as you can get. A much better translation in modern language would be "servant" or "indentured servant".
Given that this ideal world is completely imaginary, and the things that the free market is supposed to do in it never actually happen in the real world, why imagine a world where it's specifically free markets that have these magical powers?
Because it's often helpful to model the ideal behavior of a complex system first and see how well it lines up with what's being observed. That ideal model can then be used as a baseline to measure the real system and then changes made to either the model or the system in order to bring the operation closer in line with each other.
We do this in other fields all the time. Most engineering models assume a simple system (e.g. the standard frictionless vacuum in physics) first, and then begin adding in factors to account for other things until the model matches the observations to a close enough degree.
I was going to post a big point by point rebuttal but it was getting too large. You're making several flawed assumptions though
Firstly, just throwing more processing power at it isn't going to generate an AI. There's a lot of work elsewhere from designing specialized hardware to maintaining the infrastructure to designing the software to making sure all of the individual components integrate with each other. Also keep in mind that as I said earlier, machine learning in general (and neural nets in particular) tends to be extremely non-linear in complexity.
This fits into my next point: once we have an AI that's as "smart" as a human, we now have one more human to think about the problem. Only this one cost billions of dollars in development, costs millions per day in upkeep, and has now attracted a small army of people protesting the ethics of the whole thing. Totally worth it right?
Assuming that despite all of this people decide that it's somehow worth having multiple AIs with the IQ of einstein and access to all current human knowledge, what happens when the knowledge they're given is wrong? Even the best peer reviewed journals are full of errors. Also, it takes time to search it. And assuming this AI doesn't have the magical power of loading a few textbooks into memory and instantly becoming an expert, it's going to take it time to process and comprehend (index) the material for access.
It took Einstein a lifetime to make the contributions he made. Cut that in half because the AIs don't need to sleep, we're still looking at 10's of years (and billions of dollars keeping the system up and running all that time) for them to come up with something that may or may not be directly useful.
As far as an AI being able to look at sensory data from everywhere, what makes you think it'll be able to do that? The best humans can split their attention between a handful of tasks at best before we start to hit limits in our own processing power. So now for every human brain equivalent you can cram into an AI (keeping in mind these are going to be entire power hungry buildings full of parallel processors no matter how you slice it), it can watch another 10 webcams and correlate them to weather data. You could have just hired a handful of interns to do that for a billionth of the cost.
In reality, I think what we'll see is the cost and complexity of making small fast computer clusters go down, and an increase in the number of people specializing in machine learning algorithms. Businesses will begin using these people along with plug n play style computing clusters (I'm talking like a handful of networked GPUs worth of power here) to solve niche problems such as "what part in this car needs replacing in order to make the funny noise go away". But it won't be some sort of magical AI solving it, it'll be a team of people who set up the IT infrastructure working with a team of people who programmed some learning algorithms working with a team of people who collected and massaged the data so that it was computer readable. It won't necessarily be faster or cheaper than having a good mechanic look at it, but it'll be extremely repeatable (at least until the next model car comes along) and work from anywhere in the world as long as you can give it a recording from a properly positioned microphone.
Wait.. so how would he play then? Using his sense of smell or something?
I think that cat5 analogy is exactly what I said wasn't it? If you move a cat5 from one server to another, the switch port associated with server1 is now associated with server2 and you're going to have confusion until the MAC table on the switch updates.
My understanding of how the brain works is that there's a spiral shaped region where most of the upper motor neurons run to and each location where one terminates is mapped to some location on the body. Without brain surgery, what was formerly the "toe" neurons would now be the ones operating the fingers after transplanting the nerve endings. Without enough biofeedback the brain would obviously come to recognize them as "fingers" instead of "toes", but I'd imagine the process is far slower than updating the MAC table on a network switch.
Star wars is a terrible analogy anyway. The movie depicts a direct replacement for an amputated limb, which isn't quite what's going on here. If you read TFA, what these are being used for are people with nerve damage that basically amputates the limb internally while still leaving an intact limb. They repurpose nerves from elsewhere to replace the function of the damaged ones, then amputate the useless limb and replace with a mechanical one hooked up to the repurposed nerve groups. Presumably the amputee then moves the fingers of the limb via imagining flexing their toes or something.
How do you keep the queen confined though? Beekeeping is one of those subjects I've always wanted to know more about but was never really able to find any decent online sources for info.