Teamsters aren't above using, ahem, "persuasive" techniques on human drivers who don't toe the line. Don't be surprised to see a lot of slashed tires, cut brake lines, etc. on these new robotic rigs.
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Although in Florida, they've been closing rest stops down over the years.
A variation of that might be the truck weighing stations. Because they're not handling automotive traffic, there would be less of an issue with other vehicles.
Unfortunately, the functionality that's missing is what's missing from the human drivers.
Merging can be a smooth operation, just like operating a zipper. But too often a dick jams it up.
Take, for example, some clueless person coming on the highway who cannot make up their mind to speed up and go ahead of you or slow down and drop in behind you. Then there's the idiots who take it as a personal insult if anyone should be ahead of their supreme greatness and drop in from the fast line right ahead of you just so they can get off one car length sooner, even if you yourself weren't exiting.
That's even before you get to the distracted drivers.
So instead of a seamless progression of vehicles politely making small adjustments to keep everything flowing evenly, you have clots of Goofy-on-the-highway and the inevitable accidents.
There are actually likely to be some effective algorithms that can help with this, but it's not something done lightly.
The possibility exits that this is a test of capability/public demonstration. "You saw what we did to him, now either pay up/write what we tell you, or your site will go down and stay down." Too Tom Clancy-ish?
I dunno. Can we have some people leaping through doors ahead of flaming explosions?
A lot of this stuff is consumer electronics, so there isn't any "tech support", just little Jimmy from down the block, who's the only one who ever bothered to read the instructions at all.
And a frighteningly large amount of these devices "phone home" to some master server on the Internet, so they're not exactly cut off from the world.
Teach a man to fish and slowly bleed him to death since you own the lake, the boats, the dock, the bait and tackle shop, the poles, and oh yes, the forests so he can't cut his own pole and he has to pay you for any and all of the above.
Oh, and the transportation lines, so even moving away isn't an option. Plus, of course, there's arrears on rent that have to be paid first.
The Real World isn't quite as simple as the soundbites make it out to be.
Jupiter three times a day, meh. What about the Kessel Run?
And computers can now fit on a single floor of an office building and consume less than 100KW/hr.
Seriously, we have a group of people who think that on the one hand you can lay off people ad infinitium and new jobs will magically appear for them all just because that's the way it's always happened and on the other, we have cynics who think that every new discovery counts for naught.
It might be well to recall that for probably 20 years, the laser was described as a solution looking for a problem, and now almost no home is without at least one doing something useful. Not everything comes in straight lines or simple curves. Sometimes it's one snowflake at a time, followed by an avalanche.
DNA testing is inherently racist, as genetic traits are heritable and are associated with your ethnic/genetic background.
And the genes that determine your "race" are not the same genes that determine your probable job aptitudes.
Or are we going to only hire people with high-melanin skin genes to do outside work and unemploy all the rednecks? It'd reduce skin-cancer insurance claims, after all.
The problem with Gattaca - aside from the absurdity that one's genes could control lifespan to within months (too many other factors contribute) - is that presuming the central thesis is true, you have a person recklessly putting an entire spacecraft full of people in certain danger just to satisfy his own ego. Even Ayn Rand would have probably thought twice about creating a "hero" like that.
Genes for high intelligence don't mean squat if the person in question was oxygen-deprived, lobotomized, or otherwise brain-damaged. And considering what traits contribute to leadership, the question is, do you make them CEOs or put them in jail before they turn out to be mass-murderers?
How do you get 100% accurate translation anyway? These things are up to interpretation, not all words have an exact translation, meaning is more important than the actual correct words. Language is ambiguous.
Also every error is not necessarily equal, some errors are irrelevant, while some are more important, e,g. the quick car, or the fast car, mean the same thing.
Who gave you free reign to make such assertions? You need to tow the line or we'll see to it that you loose your posting privileges here!
I've begun to suspect that YouTube is often used by the lazy and illiterate to to avoid actually taking the effort to type and format what should realistically have been text articles.
Based on Spanish-language soundtracks, there's no doubt that some CC is human-generated. On my Stargate discs, the foreign-language captions aren't even saying the same sentences as the alternate-language voices.
"A couple of hours" isn't multi-tasking. After a couple of hours, you should take a break, specifically to allow you to recover, forget the dead-ends and be capable of resuming later with only the best of what you did earlier.
What business wants as multi-tasking is to be simultaneously writing a business proposal, carrying on a phone conversation, responding to emails and tracking 3 different online text conversations. While re-wiring a network.
Retired people can and do live in expensive parts of the country on a fixed, guaranteed income already. Sure, they could move to Florida or Arizona or somewhere else cheap, and many do. But it's their choice.
2. This whole GDP/plunder-the-rich argument sounds specious. True, if the world ganged up on Bill Gates in a dark alley, took every penny he had and parceled it out equally, you'd end up with about 2 days pay for much of the world and then end of story. But Bill Gates doesn't live off a fixed sum so why should the world? Why eat a steak once when you can milk a cow over and over again? Bill's income is a continuous stream and it's large enough that with his present expense level, it's self-replenishing. But admittedly, if you had 300+million people tapping into it things would be different. Still, the point is that there are different ways to "soak the rich" and it's not unreasonable that there may exist one or more ways to do do without bankrupting them.
The GDP thing doesn't smell right. Up until 1960, we managed to maintain a GDP pretty well despite millions of employees sapping profitability by receiving paychecks. Starting around 1980, give or take 20 years, productivity gains became high enough that GDP has skyrocketed even as fewer and fewer people are required to actually get things done. Which is why the whole BI concept became prominent to begin with.
So, did people know something back when Eisenhower was president that we don't know now, or is it just possible that there's more to the equation than GDP?
3. People will always mis-spend money. Get over it. It's their money and having the government tell recipients where to spend it is arguably no better than having a private-sector employer doing so. Why is is that the people who cry loudest about freedom of choice are the ones who most want to control what other do?
Trying to force people to spend money the "right" way is one of the more expensive and probably less-successful parts of our current welfare system. BI removes constraints. If you don't have a bunch of government busybodies worrying about your marital status, addictions, subsidized childbirth, and other stuff, then many of the current welfare considerations become as meaningful as building jails for potheads in Colorado. And you can lay off the busybodies, put them on BI, and worry about how they spend their money.
The problem is UBI is money not goods and services.
Unless UBI is essentially the government saying "X% of all production is to be distributed equally to all the population" then it's pointless - so essentially, UBI must be fractional (and a significant fraction at that) nationalization of all productive resources.
If it's not implemented that way, then the inevitable result of UBI is simply inflation.
The alternative being that the government distributes goods and services without the option as to what goods and services you receive? Now THAT sounds like Soviet-style Communism, not socialism or anything that the USA would find even remotely palatable.
I never cared for the Thanksgiving gift voucher from my employer good for 1 turkey at Wal-Mart. I don't eat turkey and the only way to get me inside a Wal-Mart is practically at gunpoint.
As our Libertarian friends would cry, "It's all about Choice!" Money is the purest form of choice.
I don't buy into the inflationary spiral idea. Money has no intrinsic value. It's worth what people believe it's worth. If you chase inflation ever upwards, all you have is a zero-sum game and you might as well not bother.
The point of UBI isn't to make something that's worthless appear as though it's worth something, it's to provide a level surface that anyone can live decently on. while not denying them the possibility of aiming higher on their own accord if they so desire. Inflation would only happen if suppliers attempted to exploit this comfort level by raising prices for no other reason. That's basically profiteering, often falls afoul of even our existing (presumably non-Socialist) laws, and assuming that we still have some sort of Free Market, you'd no more expect that suppliers would arbitrarily jack up prices based on income any more that they presently do for, say, TV sets, whose prices are probably a lot lower than they would be if people's ability to pay was the only determining factor in pricing.
UBI cannot work in a scarce economy, because it would require moving essential assets from one place to another. The reason UBI is coming to the forefront now is because we have so many non-essential assets. Corporate executives can accumulate vast sums even without working their employees into the grave (although ironically, these days, the employees are more likely to work themselves there due to job insecurity). Productivity gains are such that a minimum number of people can produce a product, thereby reducing the overall labor requirements.
And quite frankly, even if you are the type to become an entrepreneur, it's extremely difficult to start a new venture if the choices are working for free or eating. So to a degree, UBI could actually reinforce the American dream of building your own business.
... But don't worry, I'm sure it'll show up on a TV show or movie soon enough, and it'll probably have a single card load an entire A.I. infiltration and control backdoor suite as well. (Hollywood isn't exactly realistic, and that's on a good day.)
And if you scan it wrong, an enormous explosion will occur and people will go flying out the door miraculously just ahead of a supersonic 1500-degree fireball as random chunks of concrete and twisted metal rain down on both sides.
I was thinking more like storing encryption keys or something like bitcoins on them myself. What does it say about me that that though occurred before even considering that gift cards store "money?"
Technology isn't a commodity that you can keep grinding the same old product year after year. A company that intends to be a company as an ongoing proposition looks beyond the next quarterly figures, looks towards new markets and works on how to leverage their assets to exploit those markets. And 4000 people is a pretty large asset.
The problem is that bean-counters think of "Our People are our Greatest Asset" as some sort of cutesy slogan and that in reality their people are only assets to be liquidated if they are "non-performing". Meaning considered only as what they cost and not what they can do for profits beyond the next 3 months.
It takes a lot of work and money to hire and acclimatize new people as opposed to re-purposing existing staff. It would seem more efficient to leverage those assets instead of turning over staff as product lines go obsolete and are replaced.
But then again, I'm assuming a company that intends to remain a major player and not just downsize their way to greatness, scraping cash from its dying carcass.
A job is merely a means to a greater end - but for many that end is not starving.
For a fortunate few, it's a way to pile success tokens on the game board and usually "success tokens" are dollars, pounds, euros, and so forth and what they can purchase.
But historically, automation has eliminated jobs from the bottom up, making room at higher levels for those sufficiently skilled and intelligent. Not for much longer, though. AI's are now capable of eliminating jobs from the top down. Decision-making is already being done by automata for many financially-critical deals. The last holdout is going to be jobs which involve creativity, and even that is in the cross-hairs.
We are ultimately going to have to deal with the question of whether or not it's more important to be efficient or to be employed and if the former, we're definitely going to have to come up with a way to keep everyone fed when the entire human race becomes redundant.
Slashdot Mirror
Teamsters aren't above using, ahem, "persuasive" techniques on human drivers who don't toe the line. Don't be surprised to see a lot of slashed tires, cut brake lines, etc. on these new robotic rigs.
We saw how well that worked for the Luddites.
Let's do something nice on Slashdot for a change.
This goes against everything Slashdot stands for.
This goes against everything the Internet stands for.
Actually, that's not a bad idea. Although in Florida, they've been closing rest stops down over the years.
A variation of that might be the truck weighing stations. Because they're not handling automotive traffic, there would be less of an issue with other vehicles.
Why not? That's what human drivers do.
Touché!
Unfortunately, the functionality that's missing is what's missing from the human drivers.
Merging can be a smooth operation, just like operating a zipper. But too often a dick jams it up.
Take, for example, some clueless person coming on the highway who cannot make up their mind to speed up and go ahead of you or slow down and drop in behind you. Then there's the idiots who take it as a personal insult if anyone should be ahead of their supreme greatness and drop in from the fast line right ahead of you just so they can get off one car length sooner, even if you yourself weren't exiting.
That's even before you get to the distracted drivers.
So instead of a seamless progression of vehicles politely making small adjustments to keep everything flowing evenly, you have clots of Goofy-on-the-highway and the inevitable accidents.
There are actually likely to be some effective algorithms that can help with this, but it's not something done lightly.
The possibility exits that this is a test of capability/public demonstration. "You saw what we did to him, now either pay up/write what we tell you, or your site will go down and stay down." Too Tom Clancy-ish?
I dunno. Can we have some people leaping through doors ahead of flaming explosions?
A lot of this stuff is consumer electronics, so there isn't any "tech support", just little Jimmy from down the block, who's the only one who ever bothered to read the instructions at all.
And a frighteningly large amount of these devices "phone home" to some master server on the Internet, so they're not exactly cut off from the world.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and slowly bleed him to death since you own the lake, the boats, the dock, the bait and tackle shop, the poles, and oh yes, the forests so he can't cut his own pole and he has to pay you for any and all of the above.
Oh, and the transportation lines, so even moving away isn't an option. Plus, of course, there's arrears on rent that have to be paid first.
The Real World isn't quite as simple as the soundbites make it out to be.
Jupiter three times a day, meh. What about the Kessel Run?
And computers can now fit on a single floor of an office building and consume less than 100KW/hr.
Seriously, we have a group of people who think that on the one hand you can lay off people ad infinitium and new jobs will magically appear for them all just because that's the way it's always happened and on the other, we have cynics who think that every new discovery counts for naught.
It might be well to recall that for probably 20 years, the laser was described as a solution looking for a problem, and now almost no home is without at least one doing something useful. Not everything comes in straight lines or simple curves. Sometimes it's one snowflake at a time, followed by an avalanche.
Dick Cheney says you're a puling Liberal. He and his friends get far too much income from oil and bombs to listen to that kind of commie talk.
Florida may call itself the Sunshine State, but it's not one of the top states for uninterrupted sunshine.
Good thing, too, since it gets hot enough without those summer-afternoon rainstorms.
DNA testing is inherently racist, as genetic traits are heritable and are associated with your ethnic/genetic background.
And the genes that determine your "race" are not the same genes that determine your probable job aptitudes.
Or are we going to only hire people with high-melanin skin genes to do outside work and unemploy all the rednecks? It'd reduce skin-cancer insurance claims, after all.
The problem with Gattaca - aside from the absurdity that one's genes could control lifespan to within months (too many other factors contribute) - is that presuming the central thesis is true, you have a person recklessly putting an entire spacecraft full of people in certain danger just to satisfy his own ego. Even Ayn Rand would have probably thought twice about creating a "hero" like that.
Genes for high intelligence don't mean squat if the person in question was oxygen-deprived, lobotomized, or otherwise brain-damaged. And considering what traits contribute to leadership, the question is, do you make them CEOs or put them in jail before they turn out to be mass-murderers?
How do you get 100% accurate translation anyway? These things are up to interpretation, not all words have an exact translation, meaning is more important than the actual correct words. Language is ambiguous.
Also every error is not necessarily equal, some errors are irrelevant, while some are more important, e,g. the quick car, or the fast car, mean the same thing.
Who gave you free reign to make such assertions? You need to tow the line or we'll see to it that you loose your posting privileges here!
I've begun to suspect that YouTube is often used by the lazy and illiterate to to avoid actually taking the effort to type and format what should realistically have been text articles.
Based on Spanish-language soundtracks, there's no doubt that some CC is human-generated. On my Stargate discs, the foreign-language captions aren't even saying the same sentences as the alternate-language voices.
"A couple of hours" isn't multi-tasking. After a couple of hours, you should take a break, specifically to allow you to recover, forget the dead-ends and be capable of resuming later with only the best of what you did earlier.
What business wants as multi-tasking is to be simultaneously writing a business proposal, carrying on a phone conversation, responding to emails and tracking 3 different online text conversations. While re-wiring a network.
1. Two words + acronym: Social Security, COLA.
Retired people can and do live in expensive parts of the country on a fixed, guaranteed income already. Sure, they could move to Florida or Arizona or somewhere else cheap, and many do. But it's their choice.
2. This whole GDP/plunder-the-rich argument sounds specious. True, if the world ganged up on Bill Gates in a dark alley, took every penny he had and parceled it out equally, you'd end up with about 2 days pay for much of the world and then end of story. But Bill Gates doesn't live off a fixed sum so why should the world? Why eat a steak once when you can milk a cow over and over again? Bill's income is a continuous stream and it's large enough that with his present expense level, it's self-replenishing. But admittedly, if you had 300+million people tapping into it things would be different. Still, the point is that there are different ways to "soak the rich" and it's not unreasonable that there may exist one or more ways to do do without bankrupting them.
The GDP thing doesn't smell right. Up until 1960, we managed to maintain a GDP pretty well despite millions of employees sapping profitability by receiving paychecks. Starting around 1980, give or take 20 years, productivity gains became high enough that GDP has skyrocketed even as fewer and fewer people are required to actually get things done. Which is why the whole BI concept became prominent to begin with.
So, did people know something back when Eisenhower was president that we don't know now, or is it just possible that there's more to the equation than GDP?
3. People will always mis-spend money. Get over it. It's their money and having the government tell recipients where to spend it is arguably no better than having a private-sector employer doing so. Why is is that the people who cry loudest about freedom of choice are the ones who most want to control what other do?
Trying to force people to spend money the "right" way is one of the more expensive and probably less-successful parts of our current welfare system. BI removes constraints. If you don't have a bunch of government busybodies worrying about your marital status, addictions, subsidized childbirth, and other stuff, then many of the current welfare considerations become as meaningful as building jails for potheads in Colorado. And you can lay off the busybodies, put them on BI, and worry about how they spend their money.
The problem is UBI is money not goods and services.
Unless UBI is essentially the government saying "X% of all production is to be distributed equally to all the population" then it's pointless - so essentially, UBI must be fractional (and a significant fraction at that) nationalization of all productive resources.
If it's not implemented that way, then the inevitable result of UBI is simply inflation.
The alternative being that the government distributes goods and services without the option as to what goods and services you receive? Now THAT sounds like Soviet-style Communism, not socialism or anything that the USA would find even remotely palatable.
I never cared for the Thanksgiving gift voucher from my employer good for 1 turkey at Wal-Mart. I don't eat turkey and the only way to get me inside a Wal-Mart is practically at gunpoint.
As our Libertarian friends would cry, "It's all about Choice!" Money is the purest form of choice.
I don't buy into the inflationary spiral idea. Money has no intrinsic value. It's worth what people believe it's worth. If you chase inflation ever upwards, all you have is a zero-sum game and you might as well not bother.
The point of UBI isn't to make something that's worthless appear as though it's worth something, it's to provide a level surface that anyone can live decently on. while not denying them the possibility of aiming higher on their own accord if they so desire. Inflation would only happen if suppliers attempted to exploit this comfort level by raising prices for no other reason. That's basically profiteering, often falls afoul of even our existing (presumably non-Socialist) laws, and assuming that we still have some sort of Free Market, you'd no more expect that suppliers would arbitrarily jack up prices based on income any more that they presently do for, say, TV sets, whose prices are probably a lot lower than they would be if people's ability to pay was the only determining factor in pricing.
UBI cannot work in a scarce economy, because it would require moving essential assets from one place to another. The reason UBI is coming to the forefront now is because we have so many non-essential assets. Corporate executives can accumulate vast sums even without working their employees into the grave (although ironically, these days, the employees are more likely to work themselves there due to job insecurity). Productivity gains are such that a minimum number of people can produce a product, thereby reducing the overall labor requirements.
And quite frankly, even if you are the type to become an entrepreneur, it's extremely difficult to start a new venture if the choices are working for free or eating. So to a degree, UBI could actually reinforce the American dream of building your own business.
...
But don't worry, I'm sure it'll show up on a TV show or movie soon enough, and it'll probably have a single card load an entire A.I. infiltration and control backdoor suite as well. (Hollywood isn't exactly realistic, and that's on a good day.)
And if you scan it wrong, an enormous explosion will occur and people will go flying out the door miraculously just ahead of a supersonic 1500-degree fireball as random chunks of concrete and twisted metal rain down on both sides.
I was thinking more like storing encryption keys or something like bitcoins on them myself. What does it say about me that that though occurred before even considering that gift cards store "money?"
What is dying is HP's ingenuity.
Technology isn't a commodity that you can keep grinding the same old product year after year. A company that intends to be a company as an ongoing proposition looks beyond the next quarterly figures, looks towards new markets and works on how to leverage their assets to exploit those markets. And 4000 people is a pretty large asset.
The problem is that bean-counters think of "Our People are our Greatest Asset" as some sort of cutesy slogan and that in reality their people are only assets to be liquidated if they are "non-performing". Meaning considered only as what they cost and not what they can do for profits beyond the next 3 months.
It takes a lot of work and money to hire and acclimatize new people as opposed to re-purposing existing staff. It would seem more efficient to leverage those assets instead of turning over staff as product lines go obsolete and are replaced.
But then again, I'm assuming a company that intends to remain a major player and not just downsize their way to greatness, scraping cash from its dying carcass.
Even the best of parents have the occasional child that turns out evil.
Never underestimate perversity.
A job is merely a means to a greater end - but for many that end is not starving.
For a fortunate few, it's a way to pile success tokens on the game board and usually "success tokens" are dollars, pounds, euros, and so forth and what they can purchase.
But historically, automation has eliminated jobs from the bottom up, making room at higher levels for those sufficiently skilled and intelligent. Not for much longer, though. AI's are now capable of eliminating jobs from the top down. Decision-making is already being done by automata for many financially-critical deals. The last holdout is going to be jobs which involve creativity, and even that is in the cross-hairs.
We are ultimately going to have to deal with the question of whether or not it's more important to be efficient or to be employed and if the former, we're definitely going to have to come up with a way to keep everyone fed when the entire human race becomes redundant.
What can our modern 'AI' do? Deep Mind isn't even turing complete.
Trade securities as fast as the network latencies allow, as they have been doing for several years now.
Sluggish humans can only trail along distantly in their wake.
Wally would be the more likely to get promoted because, being a slacker, he had more opportunity to have "face time" with the managers.
True.
Of course, only one of them may actually be presenting their face.