Errr, no. Identifying your assumptions was a step towards understanding your perspective. That we disagree at all is due to different assumptions. Identifying those is necessary to understanding.
Perhaps if it hadn't come right after your statement that I had never shown any understanding I wouldn't have taken it that way.
You're the one who's predicting the future. I'm pointing out factors that make your prediction inaccurate.
We're both predicting the future. You're dancing around saying "impossible" by saying "inaccurate", but you're predicting a future that you insist _cannot_ contain the scenario I've put forward.
Based on your inability to grasp my points, I'm concluding that your prediction does not consider the factors I'm bringing up, and so the future will not happen as you say.
As much as you would like to redefine my disagreeing with your points as an intellectual failure to understand you, saying it doesn't make it so. The factors you're talking about seem to mostly consist of your absurdly simplistic complexity rule and your few historical examples which only really hold in their historical context and weren't really as rosy underneath as you seem to think. I conclude that your objections make little difference to the possibility of my scenario. There are no magic rules that prevent joblessness and suffering, if they just automatically cut in to prevent these things from happening, then we wouldn't be arguing about them, because I wouldn't even be aware of the concepts of unemployment or poverty.
What I'm doing isn't extraordinary at all. I'm applying skepticism. That is an extraordinary claim. Claiming that skepticism is an extraordinary claim is itself an extraordinary claim.
Yes yes. Black is white, white is black. Adherents of mysticism can go around all day calling themselves skeptics of rationality. Uninformed dullards can call themselves skeptics of carefully considered science. We can both call ourselves skeptics of each others claims. The point is that I'm talking about a possible future and you're insisting that it's impossible without demonstrating any valid principle that makes it so.
(The "extraordinary claim" rule is stupid anyways - who decides what's "ordinary"?)
Well, that's not always easy to define. One example of something that's "ordinary" is large numbers of people becoming disenfranchised in some way and failing to survive on a pretty steady basis. That never happening again would be a good example of something extraordinary.
You claimed that the relationship between complexity and failure doesn't exist. Which is why everyone tries to build as complex a widget as they can, because it obviously has not effect on the end result.
I never said the relationship doesn't exist, I just said that your model of it was ridiculous, and it is. People don't try to build as complex a widget as they can, but they certainly add parts to their designs all the time that make them more reliable. I've given plenty of examples that are obvious exceptions to your stated rule. In the face of obvious exceptions to your theory, you either need to demonstrate that the exceptions somehow aren't really exceptions, or you have to modify your theory to account for them, or you need to scrap the theory and try a new one, or you could narrow the scope of the theory, keeping it valid, but only for a certain class of problems.
Strawman. At most, I claimed that technology does not contribute to structural unemployment. The existence of the computing industry supports that claim.
I don't remember you claiming that. I had thought you were claiming that structural unemployment from changing technology was brief and followed by new job growth. That wasn't really all that out there, except for the way you were positive that there was some unnamed f
You are being purposefully obtuse. Adding two numbers together is simple; adding two numbers build from a thousand previous mathematical operations is not simple.
I'm not being purposefully obtuse, we just seem to have different ideas about what constitutes complexity. In my book, sheer volume is not all it takes.
It is for a machine but the trick is getting the machine to do it and that is not simple
And for that reason, actually building the electronics that performs matrix math on two large blocks of memory efficiently may be worthy of being called an invention. Telling the machine to execute the instruction that performs matrix math on two large blocks of memory isn't.
No human is converting a modern programming language into machine code let alone the mathematical operations those instructions tell the CPU to perform. It is beyond the capability of a human mind and is in no way trivial.
As far as machine code goes, students who can't do it given the relevant resource materials probably aren't worthy of graduating from any decent CS program. As for "the mathematical operations those instructions tell the CPU to perform", that's a little fuzzy. Fair enough, just about anything could be going on after you get to the machine code. There's a lot of magic that goes on in a modern CPU. But, given the machine code and a reference for the CPU instruction set, a graduating CS student should be able to construct a logical model of a CPU that can handle all of the most important ones. For all but the most trivial programs it's far too much _work_ to force a student to do. It would be tedious and would take far too long but, unless you're expecting the human mind in question to do it without the benefit of pen and paper and remember everything, it is in no way beyond the capability of a human mind.
Yes it is math but getting that math to do what you want is what is being patented.
And once that "what you want" is patented, all methods of doing it are also covered.
The problem with software patents isn't really math. It's that they're either patenting a broad idea or are too exact and trivially worked around and covered by copyright anyway. No legislator is going to listen to "It's just math! See A+B and then add a billion transistors".
Right, no (or at least very few) legislators are going to listen to it. I agreed with that. It's just math is really just shorthand to people who actually know a thing or to about math that it's just patenting broad ideas. It's implicitly understood in that case. Legislators are just going to stand there issuing empty platitudes and hints that large campaign contributions might encourage them to see it your way even if they don't understand.
The three laws of motion are pretty spot on in the macro, non-relativistic speed world (the one we usually interact with). Our measurements may not be exact but the macro world has proven to be quite deterministic. I understand that they are fundamentally different. If software is unfit for a patent because it is math then is everything unfit for a patent because it can be simulated by a computer and thus be defined using math?
On unfitness in general: I've pretty much come around to the idea that pretty much everything is unfit for a patent, actually. The vast, vast majority of patents issued (even when you ignore the abomination that is "design" patents) are outright abuse of the system. The whole system is a quagmire, true inventors are very seldom rewarded for it, and the actual important implementation details, which are supposed to be the core reason patents exist in the first place, are seldom actually to be found in the patent as they're intentionally obfuscated or omitted. The modern patent system is just a somewhat democratized version of an old system of cronyism where corrupt leaders would grant business monopol
Hmmm. Interesting problem though. Even if it's only a small percentage of intersections where it doesn't, how do you tell if it's an intersection where it does? And we're back around to needing pre-cognitive powers.
The roads are put together by committees who are sometimes excellent, but often don't really seem to know what they're doing, and sometimes don't even care and have ulterior motives. I'm a very careful driver. I plan ahead and think about other traffic, and actively calculate things like points of no return after which it's unsafe to brake when I approach lights. I tend to notice when I'm passing through a situation where, just for a moment, certainty about how to proceed vanishes and you just have to keep going and hope that the timing works out in your favor. There are enough of them that it bothers me. Then, aside from those little things, there are intersections and other that are just unholy messes. For example, one not too far from me, exits from toll roads that simultaneously condense about 15 lanes of toll booths down to two lanes after the toll booths, with traffic entering from the right immediately after the tolls as well and also traffic _exiting_ on the right immediately after the traffic entering on the right. It's been that way for decades and it's always been a disastrous, messy, dangerous free for all, and someone designed it that way.
In the long run, you have to do the best you can and the reality is that every now and then, you'll be forced to choose between doing something incredibly dangerous or something you could get a ticket for. Unless, of course, you can see the future. Of course, your pre-cognitive powers might tell you not to even bother getting into your car.
Of course, municipality after municipality have been caught reducing the length of their yellow lights to drive up infractions. That's the problem: you really have no idea how long the yellow will last without precognitive powers. There are actually plenty of intersections where, unless you're speeding, if the light turns yellow after you've passed the point where you can safely brake and stop before the stop line, you won't cross the intersection before the light turns red.
It ceases to be simple every day math when millions of operations are required to do anything useful.
A one line for loop can translate to a lot more than millions of operations. Meanwhile, an incredibly complex and difficult to create program might not end up evaluating to that many operations at all. Indeed, getting the program to use fewer operations is the _hard_ part, as you surely must know.
If you could write a piece of software using nothing but nand operations it would (hopefully) not pass the triviality requirement for a patent. Software is rarely written using math; it is written with high level abstractions for a reason.
Those high level abstractions don't make the underpinnings not math. Lots and lots and lots of simple math is still simple math, it's just lots and lots of it. Also, do you mean _non_-triviality requirement? I'm not aware of any rule requiring patents to be trivial, though many of them are. Anyway, the high level abstractions are there to make things easy for programmers, but that doesn't change what the programs are actually doing underneath. The fact is that, as long as the same output is produced for the same input, any two programs are mathematically equivalent. Doesn't matter if they use iterative or recursive techniques or whether they're created using representative objects on a three-dimensional holographic display or by manually punching paper tape. If patents on programs are allowed that don't distinctly describe things in terms of a precise algorithm, then they're being granted on the idea of what the program accomplishes and leaving the implementation details entirely up to the person skilled in the art that the program isn't supposed to be obvious to.
I still assert that is it asinine to decompose software to that level.
In this context, it's the only thing that makes sense. Think about it, what are you patenting in a software patent? Are you patenting the particular instructions used in a high-level implementation of the idea? That would be crazy because the patent would be completely worthless as anyone could just implement it in a different language. The other extreme is patenting the results of the software, which is what most software patents seem to do. This generates patents that are completely worthless because they cover _every_ possible method of generating the result. It doesn't matter how it's programmed in the high level language, the courts will determine that the methods are infringing because they achieve the same result. This is also crazy, and you won't find a lot of middle ground between the two types of crazy. In patents for physical, mechanical devices, a cage trap for mice and a magnetic levitation mouse-scoop are clearly different inventions. In software patent-land, such dis-similar approaches to the same problem would be considered the same, with one infringing on the patent of the other, because they achieve the same goal.
I understand quite well how software translates to math but it is not trivially reduced to math. It is a very difficult problem and one we've spent the last several decades improving and learning on.
Mileage may vary on the definition of trivial there. It depends on the high level language but, for most of them, you could sit there and relatively easily convert the instructions to machine language. It would be tedious and time-consuming, but it would be trivial. Of course, that depends on your definition of trivial. Going by my professors when they said things like "it is trivial to see this, so I won't explain it", _their_ definition of trivial would certainly include such conversions.
You can just as easily define anything physical as an arrangement of the three laws of motion to convert what ever input to desired output. It still involves human ingenuity.
This is nonsense. Computer science produces concrete mathematical results. Physics
There are relatively few links between the layers, though. The idea here would be to go from a multi-core processor that's, for example, basically just 8 flat processors sitting one on top of the other with some shared components here and there to a multi-core processor where the 8 individual processors are arranged more like eight spheres clumped together with shared components filling in the gaps. Moving from 2D to 3D could mean packing all the actual components a lot closer to one another, allowing signals to travel shorter distances and, therefore, faster. That's the hope, anyway.
The difference is that algorithms are about taking a mathematical input and producing a mathematical output. It matters in a practical sense what the underlying hardware performing the calculations is, but not in any theoretical sense. The input and output are always math, which usually means 1's and 0's, but it could be anything numerical (which all boils down to the same thing). In _practice_ the results of computer science do run on real hardware, and it can matter what that hardware is: spinning drives or tapes vs. random access memory is probably the best example of this. The actual algorithms, however, are still mathematical abstractions operating in their own world of pure math.
You could say that theoretical physics is like that, but experimental physics isn't. In experimental physics, the outputs may be math, but the inputs are not. You can argue that the input from the physical experiments gets quantized into math, but that falls flat because it matters where the inputs come from in physics. If they're not coming from a physical experiment, then it's not experimental physics. Ultimately, theoretical physics is just a variety of experimental physics that's further removed from the original experimental results.
Chemistry and engineering may sort of boil down to physics, but the relationship isn't the same as with computer science. In computer science, you design the hardware (using physics, engineering and chemistry) to perform the math. In physics, chemistry, and engineering, you use the math to predict and interpret the experiment/construction/device/chemical formula, etc. The math doesn't really control it, the math is an attempt to understand it. You can't just swap out the underlying physical situation and have the physics be the same (unless you're including computer science as physics, in which case, some of the physics are the same, but not all of the physics are the same).
Last things first: "show me how simple every day math creates complex software.".
0 nor 0 = 1 0 nor 1 = 0 1 nor 0 = 0 1 nor 1 = 0
A = 0; A nor A = 1 = not 0 A = 1; A nor A = 0 = not 1
not (0 nor 0) = 0 = 0 or 0 not (0 nor 1) = 1 = 0 or 1 not (1 nor 0) = 1 = 1 or 0 not (1 nor 1) = 1 = 1 or 1
A = 0, B = 0; (A nor A) nor (B nor B) = 1 nor 1 = 0 = A and A A = 0, B = 1; (A nor A) nor (B nor B) = 1 nor 0 = 0 = A and A A = 1, B = 0; (A nor A) nor (B nor B) = 0 nor 1 = 0 = A and A A = 1, B = 1; (A nor A) nor (B nor B) = 0 nor 0 = 1 = A and A
A = 0, B = 0; (A or B) and (not(A and B)) = 0 = A xor A A = 0, B = 1; (A or B) and (not(A and B)) = 1 = A xor A A = 1, B = 0; (A or B) and (not(A and B)) = 1 = A xor A A = 1, B = 1; (A or B) and (not(A and B)) = 0 = A xor A
A nand B = not (A and B)
A xnor B = not (A xor B)
That gives us nor, not, and, or, xor, nand and xnor.
From those, you can construct flip-flops and latches for data storage. You can also construct adders. From adders, you can also subtract. From addition and subtraction you can perform multiplication and division. The storage you created out of flip-flops and latches you set up to be addressable. Using the math operations you can work with those addresses. You can create a special register address (or several) to store a number representing another address which an adder increments sequentially. In the memory address stored in the register(s), you can have a number which represents an instruction. You have set number of instructions you implement using components made out of logic gates. Whatever instruction is in the memory address being pointed to is executed. That instruction may be a jump instruction, which makes the register address pointing to the current instruction to execute jump to a different address than it would normally have jumped to sequentially on the next cycle. Otherwise it could be a read instruction, taking data from a memory location and dumping it into a special memory location called a register. Or a write operation doing the same thing in reverse.
I haven't changed my perspective because you never showed any understanding.
Well, at least you had the good grace to modify this in a short follow up. I certainly don't think you showed any superior understanding of the problem either, but simple fact of doing a lot of thinking about a problem can broaden ones perspective (it's also possible for it to wear ruts into patterns of thought, however). It's a pity the discussion hasn't broadened yours.
I think I have successfully identified the assumptions you are operating under, and furthermore have identified how these assumptions assume away relevant counter-forces.
The way you put this strongly applies that you're only evaluating my arguments with the goal of confirming your own biases. You start by assuming that my opinion, which differs from yours, must differ due to some incorrect assumption. Your underlying assumption, of course, appears to be that you are never wrong.
You insist that they do not apply, when I have to deal with them as part of my job. Insisting that your theory of the world trumps my reality is simply unpersuasive.
I'm sorry, when you said you were an engineer, I just figured electrical, or civil, or mechanical, or maybe train. I hadn't realized you were actually involved in temporal engineering and worked daily with parallel universes and looking into the future. Seriously though, I'm not quite sure how social reactions to technology change is a force that a typical engineer would make use of in their job.
And, once again, you're the one making the extraordinary claim that your theory of the world trumps _ALL_ and that alternatives are impossible. If you're the kind of civil engineer who believes in things like 100 year flood lines as static and doesn't understand that all that wonderful drainage that you and your fellow engineers have put in changes that flood level, it makes things a lot more clear.
Rather than insisting the non-existence of something that plainly exists, you should have been approximating the magnitude of the forces involved, and providing a mechanism by which negative feedback is dwarfed by the positive feedback. That you don't seem to understand these concepts tells me that you don't have the level of technical training or experience I have on these subjects.
You really do come off as lacking significant self awareness, you know? What that plainly exists am I insisting on the non-existance of? You seem to be the one insisting on the non-existence of things such as historical widespread suffering due to structural unemployment. Except for absolutely linear properties for things such as job growth and technological development, I can't think of anything that I'm saying does not exist in this discussion. I have considered the forces involved, and my approximation of them doesn't seem to lead to a good place for a lot of people. I understand these concepts just fine. It seems to be a bit of an arrogant streak that causes you to think that I don't.
Assume a naked human being on the moon. What happens next? He suffocates and die.
Is it impossible for a naked human being to end up on the moon? Not quite - but there's absolutely no economic reason why anyone would spend that much money to do it. Politically, there's not much reason either. Is it a likely scenario that humanity needs to derive an answer for? Nope. Is there a chance? Sure, if you want to put it that way.
Errr... Is this another strawman^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h analogy? How does this properly relate to either of our positions? The scenario I'm talking about isn't like a naked human on the moon. First of all, there's no mystery cause for my scenario. For non-mystery causes, for your analogy, a large organization would have to spend a large amount of effort and resources to do it for no good reason whatsoever. The effort and resources for developing robot labour would have
I think you're missing the point. It may be "tied to hardware" but, firstly, the definition of "hardware" in this context is incredibly broad as long as it satisfies certain constraints. Those constraints are based on terms such as "processor" and "touchscreen". Those terms exist because those are already things that exist completely independent of the "invention" in this patent. The "inventor" in this case did not invent those things, and are not claiming to, they only claim to have "invented" the subject matter of the patent, which is a software method.
This patent explicitly requires a touch screen and a processor. It would not cover thinking about the idea, writing the idea down on a pad of paper, using a pad of paper to write out pseudocode to perform the functions, etc. While the patent may include math, it also includes specific hardware elements and is therefore not just math or just an idea.
But it covers any implemention the idea on any hardware fitting the loose constraints, no matter how it's implemented. A patent is meant to be on a specific implementation, not on the idea itself. Arguing that allowing a patent on all possible implementations of an idea is not a patent on the idea itself is as disingenuous as, for example, arguing that indefinite (and retroactive) extension of a term is the same thing as a "limited term".
Aside from that, the patent in question fails in terms of originality and non-obviousness. It also fails to properly describe the "invention" since it fails to go into specific implementation details. It's true that anyone "skilled in the art" could implement it based on the description in the patent, but they could also implement it without the description in the patent, and the parts that they would be improvising based on their own knowledge rather than what's described in the patent would constitute the whole of the implementation.
The author of the patent has not described an invention, just a general idea for unlocking using touch screens on pre-existing hardware types. There is no legitimately patentable material there even by definitions of legitimately patentable material that allow algorithms.
I've never subscribed to the argument that all computing is math, because as much as it affects how efficient your algorithms are, software is not mathematics.
All software, regardless of how high level, eventually gets boiled down to machine code. The machine code itself is all implemented as collections of logic gates. Mathematical logic is math.
You're right, however, that there isn't some mathematical formula for swipe to unlock. If there actually were one defined by the patent, things would be a little better. There isn't, however, so, we're stuck with the patent covering the implementation details of any possible variant of the idea of swipe to unlock. Any particular variant actually does have a mathematical function that defines it. Rather, it has an infinite number of mathematical functions that defines it and they are all mathematically equivalent and covered by the patent and, consequently, there are an infinite number of algorithms covered by the patent. The patent is on the idea of the "device" rather than on the device itself.
But it doesn't require particular hardware, any general purpose computing hardware with an appropriate display and sensors will do. It doesn't matter how they're implemented or what they're made of. The hardware could be made of condensed dark matter with darkenergytronic circuits and this patent would still apply. This patent covers math, and not just math, but an idea.
Really? What gets patented is ideas, not math (because you can't actually patent that).
Of course, you can't patent ideas either (de jurem, that is, de facto you can, because of the ridiculously lax system that allows software patents, business patents, and other ridiculous process patents like swinging on a swing to pass through).
software isn't "just" math. that's like saying you can't patent a can opener because can openers are "just" atoms of iron and "you can't patent iron!".
No, it's more like saying that you can't patent a can-opener and then have patent control over all methods of using cans regardless of what they're made of. Computation is an abstraction. An algorithm is essentially a function. A function assigns, to each element in one set, an element from another set. Any function which will assign the same the same elements from the two sets to each other is mathematically equivalent to any other function that does the same thing. An algorithm is a function from the set of possible inputs to the set of possible outputs. The big consideration in computation that isn't present with functions is the number of steps an algorithm will require to produce a result and how the number of steps may grow with more complex inputs. Typically, that isn't a concern for a software patent.
The actual computer running the process can be a group of people with slide-rules, a purely mechanical computing device, an electronic computer, a complex set of chemical reactions (such as dna computers), an optical computer, something based on the weak or strong nuclear forces, some sort of device made of exotic forms of matter or energy or things that aren't matter or energy should such things exist.
So, a software patent on achieving a result is a patent on any process whatsoever, in the entire universe, that achieves the same result. So, essentially, a software patent is not only a complete monopoly on any equivalent mathematical process that does the same thing, it's also a patent on the idea itself, which is expressly forbidden.
Consider the slide to unlock patent. If you're a programmer or an EE, consider the number of possible ways there are to implement it in both software and hardware. This patent covers all of them. You could come up with some completely novel way to do it involving manipulation of vacuum energy and time and it would violate this patent.
Thank you. *Something* got through, if only that the robotic dystopia isn't as "obvious" as you think it is.
It would be nice if something had gotten through on your end as well, but I get the impression that you're still being pretty close-minded about the possibilities. In the end, I can't not recommend contingency planning for different possible scenarios. Assuming a perfectly smooth "natural" transition during a massive paradigm shift just because it's always happened that way in the past seems short-sighted. It seems especially short-sighted when it hasn't really happened all that smoothly before in the past.
Then again, you won because you assumed away everything that might threaten your conclusions, so there's not much to be proud of there. Come to think of it, that type of behavior is "denialism", isn't it?
I suppose you could say that I "assumed away" non-existent laws of nature and complexity that you more or less made up. The only thing I'm really denying is that my scenario is impossible.
He did have the advantage of being rich enough to buy medical treatment and a transplant organ that most people in his situation could expect. Even with all that, he wasn't particularly far outside the statistical norms.
In any case, whether Steve Jobs possessed amazing marketing/business acumen, or just a cult of personality, Apple's fortunes seem to have risen and fallen based on whether or not he was at the helm. As he's no longer at the helm, Apple could potentially be in trouble in the mid to long term. They could always bring back Gil Amelio...
Errr. Actually it does radiate off on its own. Without conduction or convection, radiation is generally the only way to dump it unless you want to jettison some mass. Typically, to get rid of the heat faster, a heat pump of some kind will be used to pump heat to a radiator out on a boom. The idea is to get the radiator as hot as possible so that it will radiate as much of the heat away as fast as possible. With a solar generation in space, I don't know if radiation of excess heat will be necessary. For a given distance from the sun, and a given orientation, the panels should produce a very predictable amount of heat. The amount of heat radiated as they heat up will increase, so they will reach a stable temperature. As long as they're designed to withstand that temperature, no active cooling of the panels will be required.
Technology change is driven by human ingenuity. The system's ability to adapt is driven by human ingenuity. Claiming that humans can drive technological change faster than humans can adapt to it is questionable
Ingenuity is not homogeneous across the entire human population. Some people have a lot more of it than other people, and there are all sorts of preconditions to exercising it. Change of all sorts, including the technological variety, is constantly outpacing people's ability to adapt to it. Collectively, we catch up in the end, but that ignores the actual individuals who get left behind.
if humans start failing to adapt, the economic and political systems become unstable, which slows down technological change.
Yes, exactly. The economic and political systems become unstable. That's more or less re-iterating my point again. You seem to be looking at this from an eagle eye view and seeing smooth curves on a graph, abstracting out all the actual human details.
There are negative feedback loops that make this system stabler than you imagined.
And there are human-level details of this feedback that make this stability less placid than you imagine.
An extreme change that you had to assume. I'll admit that if you want to imagine a fantasy world, reality does not apply. But if you want to treat the fantasy world as a possible future of our reality, you must deal with reality's factors.
The assumptions you require are more extreme than those required for my scenario. You've argued for historical precedent, but the historical precedent seems to be accelerating technological change. Even steady technological growth could lead to my scenario. All that needs to happen is for job-replacing technological growth to outpace the social and economic changes required to support the population under the new conditions. My _opinion_ is that humans are messed up enough that we stand a good chance of blindsiding ourselves, but I don't require it as some absolute law of reality. Your view that my concerns are completely impossible contains the most extreme assumptions of our two differing opinions.
We both know you're not arguing there is such a thing as a light speed car, we're discussing a robotic dystopia. Treating your robotic dystopia as a "light speed car" is a metaphor, which is analogy.
It's an analogy when you're using it to actually illustrate your perspective. When you start saying that I'm arguing X about it while you're arguing Y and you haven't even provided any actual details on how your analogy actually is analogous to the topic at hand, it veers off into straw man territory.
Calling my metaphor a strawman argument is wrong categorization, because no one is going to confuse a light speed car for a robotic dystopia. Strawmans are misdirection, arguing against what you did not say, and confusing you or the audience as to what your argument is. A clear analogy is misdirection only if you have no clue what you're arguing about. If the analogy is inapplicable, it's a false analogy, not a strawman. Using the wrong label is a wrong understanding.
That's at least a semi-convincing argument, that the example is so ridiculously far from what we're discussing and so irrelevant to the conversation that there can't be any confusion. Of course, most straw man arguments actually are like that (not so extreme, but often so blatantly obvious that they should never work and cause immediate disgust with the person using the argument), and the seem to work well enough that people keep using them. I admit that I tend to have a knee-jerk response to anything that looks like a straw man argument as a result.
Use of AKA was wrong. My bad. I should have used IOW or e.g.
Fair enough. Attacking it was admittedly overzealous pedantry on my part.
Ditto for Java back in the day. Even James Gosling didn't have enough Java experience for many of those job ads. Of course, I've heard claims that job ads like that are actually posted when they don't really want to fill the position (or at least don't want to fill the position with the people who will see the ad). I'm not sure which would be worse: hiring managers being that ignorant, or hiring managers being that hostile.
Yeah, but then the "loonie" could say "Dudes, some loonies in a military helicopter were shooting at me!" Seems like a pretty valid self-defense claim. Of course, if they published their plans for a military exercise in a disused lavatory, with a "beware of the leopard" sign, in a dark basement with no stairs somewhere, they could make the claim that the exercise was public knowledge and he must have known. You know, the same way that people walking home from work while there's a protest on are meant to know that the crowd has been ordered to disperse by a police announcement over a bullhorn half a mile away and ten minutes before they actually left work.
Seriously though, this whole thing is just a terrible mess.
Does robotics even make this political system more likely? Because that's yet another hidden assumption you've snuck into this discussion. (assuming the rise of a political system that imposes artificial scarcity)
Once again, rather than arising: "persisting from the current day without adapting to changing circumstances". In other words, we already live in a system adjusted to current circumstances. If circumstances, such as labour-saving technology, change faster than the system can adapt, no new system is required for there to be problems. It's not a hidden assumption I've snuck into the discussion, it's what I've been saying the entire time since I wrote: "we are in danger of transitioning to post-scarcity technology without transitioning to a post-scarcity economy" in my first post in this thread.
I pointed out that robotic automation is 80 years old, and it's "not relevant"? If robotic automation is not relevant to robotics, what is?
They weren't particularly relevant because we're talking about a potential future, not the past, and those examples don't include changes as extreme as our hypothetical example. They are relevant to the overall discussion of structural unemployment though.
1. A strawman fallacy is one where I make up an argument and claim that it is your argument. When it happens, it means I misrepresented what you claimed. I made an analogy, whether good or bad, it's not a strawman. Categorical error.
It certainly seemed like that was what you were doing when you wrote:
You're looking at a falling object and concluding that it will achieve escape velocity (aka going up)... somehow.
and
you're performing static analysis on a dynamic problem. If you ignore friction and air resistance, a car with constant acceleration can approach light speed. In reality, friction and air resistance prevent a car from getting anywhere close to light speed.
it seemed a lot like you were trying to present your analogy, then act as if I were arguing against that analogy rather than what we're actually arguing about. The analogies were completely superfluous. Stating that I didn't understand the examples in your analogies was just insulting. I understand them fine, I don't understand what contorted logic actually makes them analogous to the discussion at hand. Maybe if you could explain that in some satisfactory manner, I wouldn't think that they were just straw men.
2. "Going up" was meant to clarify that the escape velocity vector was in the opposite direction of "falling down". Are you trying to say that the analogy doesn't make any sense, or are you trying to say that it isn't applicable to your argument? I'm going to assume the latter, but you criticized an irrelevant aspect of my analogy, which does not demonstrate understanding.
I'm certainly not going to argue with you that "going up" vs "escape velocity" was an irrelevant part of your analogy. Trouble is, I think your entire analogy is irrelevant. If you could clarify what parts of our argument is the "falling object", what "falling" means in this context, and what the "escape velocity" means in the argument. Just so you know, "aka" is short for "also know as". Escape velocity is not "also known as" "going up", but that's a really minor nitpick compared to the silly analogy.
3. If you are good at accounting for different forces, you have not demonstrated it in our discussion. For example, you said increased complexity increasing failure rates was fallacious. It is not - unless you want to claim that simple systems are more likely to fail than complex systems.
Your example of ball bearings compared different technologies; the new technology provided the reliability increase, not the complexity of the system. Complexity in of itself is not a desirable thing, it means more pre-re
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Errr, no. Identifying your assumptions was a step towards understanding your perspective. That we disagree at all is due to different assumptions. Identifying those is necessary to understanding.
Perhaps if it hadn't come right after your statement that I had never shown any understanding I wouldn't have taken it that way.
You're the one who's predicting the future. I'm pointing out factors that make your prediction inaccurate.
We're both predicting the future. You're dancing around saying "impossible" by saying "inaccurate", but you're predicting a future that you insist _cannot_ contain the scenario I've put forward.
Based on your inability to grasp my points, I'm concluding that your prediction does not consider the factors I'm bringing up, and so the future will not happen as you say.
As much as you would like to redefine my disagreeing with your points as an intellectual failure to understand you, saying it doesn't make it so. The factors you're talking about seem to mostly consist of your absurdly simplistic complexity rule and your few historical examples which only really hold in their historical context and weren't really as rosy underneath as you seem to think. I conclude that your objections make little difference to the possibility of my scenario. There are no magic rules that prevent joblessness and suffering, if they just automatically cut in to prevent these things from happening, then we wouldn't be arguing about them, because I wouldn't even be aware of the concepts of unemployment or poverty.
What I'm doing isn't extraordinary at all. I'm applying skepticism. That is an extraordinary claim. Claiming that skepticism is an extraordinary claim is itself an extraordinary claim.
Yes yes. Black is white, white is black. Adherents of mysticism can go around all day calling themselves skeptics of rationality. Uninformed dullards can call themselves skeptics of carefully considered science. We can both call ourselves skeptics of each others claims. The point is that I'm talking about a possible future and you're insisting that it's impossible without demonstrating any valid principle that makes it so.
(The "extraordinary claim" rule is stupid anyways - who decides what's "ordinary"?)
Well, that's not always easy to define. One example of something that's "ordinary" is large numbers of people becoming disenfranchised in some way and failing to survive on a pretty steady basis. That never happening again would be a good example of something extraordinary.
You claimed that the relationship between complexity and failure doesn't exist. Which is why everyone tries to build as complex a widget as they can, because it obviously has not effect on the end result.
I never said the relationship doesn't exist, I just said that your model of it was ridiculous, and it is. People don't try to build as complex a widget as they can, but they certainly add parts to their designs all the time that make them more reliable. I've given plenty of examples that are obvious exceptions to your stated rule. In the face of obvious exceptions to your theory, you either need to demonstrate that the exceptions somehow aren't really exceptions, or you have to modify your theory to account for them, or you need to scrap the theory and try a new one, or you could narrow the scope of the theory, keeping it valid, but only for a certain class of problems.
Strawman. At most, I claimed that technology does not contribute to structural unemployment. The existence of the computing industry supports that claim.
I don't remember you claiming that. I had thought you were claiming that structural unemployment from changing technology was brief and followed by new job growth. That wasn't really all that out there, except for the way you were positive that there was some unnamed f
You are being purposefully obtuse. Adding two numbers together is simple; adding two numbers build from a thousand previous mathematical operations is not simple.
I'm not being purposefully obtuse, we just seem to have different ideas about what constitutes complexity. In my book, sheer volume is not all it takes.
It is for a machine but the trick is getting the machine to do it and that is not simple
And for that reason, actually building the electronics that performs matrix math on two large blocks of memory efficiently may be worthy of being called an invention. Telling the machine to execute the instruction that performs matrix math on two large blocks of memory isn't.
No human is converting a modern programming language into machine code let alone the mathematical operations those instructions tell the CPU to perform. It is beyond the capability of a human mind and is in no way trivial.
As far as machine code goes, students who can't do it given the relevant resource materials probably aren't worthy of graduating from any decent CS program. As for "the mathematical operations those instructions tell the CPU to perform", that's a little fuzzy. Fair enough, just about anything could be going on after you get to the machine code. There's a lot of magic that goes on in a modern CPU. But, given the machine code and a reference for the CPU instruction set, a graduating CS student should be able to construct a logical model of a CPU that can handle all of the most important ones. For all but the most trivial programs it's far too much _work_ to force a student to do. It would be tedious and would take far too long but, unless you're expecting the human mind in question to do it without the benefit of pen and paper and remember everything, it is in no way beyond the capability of a human mind.
Yes it is math but getting that math to do what you want is what is being patented.
And once that "what you want" is patented, all methods of doing it are also covered.
The problem with software patents isn't really math. It's that they're either patenting a broad idea or are too exact and trivially worked around and covered by copyright anyway. No legislator is going to listen to "It's just math! See A+B and then add a billion transistors".
Right, no (or at least very few) legislators are going to listen to it. I agreed with that. It's just math is really just shorthand to people who actually know a thing or to about math that it's just patenting broad ideas. It's implicitly understood in that case. Legislators are just going to stand there issuing empty platitudes and hints that large campaign contributions might encourage them to see it your way even if they don't understand.
The three laws of motion are pretty spot on in the macro, non-relativistic speed world (the one we usually interact with). Our measurements may not be exact but the macro world has proven to be quite deterministic. I understand that they are fundamentally different. If software is unfit for a patent because it is math then is everything unfit for a patent because it can be simulated by a computer and thus be defined using math?
On unfitness in general:
I've pretty much come around to the idea that pretty much everything is unfit for a patent, actually. The vast, vast majority of patents issued (even when you ignore the abomination that is "design" patents) are outright abuse of the system. The whole system is a quagmire, true inventors are very seldom rewarded for it, and the actual important implementation details, which are supposed to be the core reason patents exist in the first place, are seldom actually to be found in the patent as they're intentionally obfuscated or omitted. The modern patent system is just a somewhat democratized version of an old system of cronyism where corrupt leaders would grant business monopol
Hmmm. Interesting problem though. Even if it's only a small percentage of intersections where it doesn't, how do you tell if it's an intersection where it does? And we're back around to needing pre-cognitive powers.
The roads are put together by committees who are sometimes excellent, but often don't really seem to know what they're doing, and sometimes don't even care and have ulterior motives. I'm a very careful driver. I plan ahead and think about other traffic, and actively calculate things like points of no return after which it's unsafe to brake when I approach lights. I tend to notice when I'm passing through a situation where, just for a moment, certainty about how to proceed vanishes and you just have to keep going and hope that the timing works out in your favor. There are enough of them that it bothers me. Then, aside from those little things, there are intersections and other that are just unholy messes. For example, one not too far from me, exits from toll roads that simultaneously condense about 15 lanes of toll booths down to two lanes after the toll booths, with traffic entering from the right immediately after the tolls as well and also traffic _exiting_ on the right immediately after the traffic entering on the right. It's been that way for decades and it's always been a disastrous, messy, dangerous free for all, and someone designed it that way.
In the long run, you have to do the best you can and the reality is that every now and then, you'll be forced to choose between doing something incredibly dangerous or something you could get a ticket for. Unless, of course, you can see the future. Of course, your pre-cognitive powers might tell you not to even bother getting into your car.
Of course, municipality after municipality have been caught reducing the length of their yellow lights to drive up infractions. That's the problem: you really have no idea how long the yellow will last without precognitive powers. There are actually plenty of intersections where, unless you're speeding, if the light turns yellow after you've passed the point where you can safely brake and stop before the stop line, you won't cross the intersection before the light turns red.
Wouldn't that require pre-cognitive powers?
It ceases to be simple every day math when millions of operations are required to do anything useful.
A one line for loop can translate to a lot more than millions of operations. Meanwhile, an incredibly complex and difficult to create program might not end up evaluating to that many operations at all. Indeed, getting the program to use fewer operations is the _hard_ part, as you surely must know.
If you could write a piece of software using nothing but nand operations it would (hopefully) not pass the triviality requirement for a patent. Software is rarely written using math; it is written with high level abstractions for a reason.
Those high level abstractions don't make the underpinnings not math. Lots and lots and lots of simple math is still simple math, it's just lots and lots of it. Also, do you mean _non_-triviality requirement? I'm not aware of any rule requiring patents to be trivial, though many of them are. Anyway, the high level abstractions are there to make things easy for programmers, but that doesn't change what the programs are actually doing underneath. The fact is that, as long as the same output is produced for the same input, any two programs are mathematically equivalent. Doesn't matter if they use iterative or recursive techniques or whether they're created using representative objects on a three-dimensional holographic display or by manually punching paper tape. If patents on programs are allowed that don't distinctly describe things in terms of a precise algorithm, then they're being granted on the idea of what the program accomplishes and leaving the implementation details entirely up to the person skilled in the art that the program isn't supposed to be obvious to.
I still assert that is it asinine to decompose software to that level.
In this context, it's the only thing that makes sense. Think about it, what are you patenting in a software patent? Are you patenting the particular instructions used in a high-level implementation of the idea? That would be crazy because the patent would be completely worthless as anyone could just implement it in a different language. The other extreme is patenting the results of the software, which is what most software patents seem to do. This generates patents that are completely worthless because they cover _every_ possible method of generating the result. It doesn't matter how it's programmed in the high level language, the courts will determine that the methods are infringing because they achieve the same result. This is also crazy, and you won't find a lot of middle ground between the two types of crazy. In patents for physical, mechanical devices, a cage trap for mice and a magnetic levitation mouse-scoop are clearly different inventions. In software patent-land, such dis-similar approaches to the same problem would be considered the same, with one infringing on the patent of the other, because they achieve the same goal.
I understand quite well how software translates to math but it is not trivially reduced to math. It is a very difficult problem and one we've spent the last several decades improving and learning on.
Mileage may vary on the definition of trivial there. It depends on the high level language but, for most of them, you could sit there and relatively easily convert the instructions to machine language. It would be tedious and time-consuming, but it would be trivial. Of course, that depends on your definition of trivial. Going by my professors when they said things like "it is trivial to see this, so I won't explain it", _their_ definition of trivial would certainly include such conversions.
You can just as easily define anything physical as an arrangement of the three laws of motion to convert what ever input to desired output. It still involves human ingenuity.
This is nonsense. Computer science produces concrete mathematical results. Physics
There are relatively few links between the layers, though. The idea here would be to go from a multi-core processor that's, for example, basically just 8 flat processors sitting one on top of the other with some shared components here and there to a multi-core processor where the 8 individual processors are arranged more like eight spheres clumped together with shared components filling in the gaps. Moving from 2D to 3D could mean packing all the actual components a lot closer to one another, allowing signals to travel shorter distances and, therefore, faster. That's the hope, anyway.
As ironic as ra-a-a-iane on your wedding day.
The difference is that algorithms are about taking a mathematical input and producing a mathematical output. It matters in a practical sense what the underlying hardware performing the calculations is, but not in any theoretical sense. The input and output are always math, which usually means 1's and 0's, but it could be anything numerical (which all boils down to the same thing). In _practice_ the results of computer science do run on real hardware, and it can matter what that hardware is: spinning drives or tapes vs. random access memory is probably the best example of this. The actual algorithms, however, are still mathematical abstractions operating in their own world of pure math.
You could say that theoretical physics is like that, but experimental physics isn't. In experimental physics, the outputs may be math, but the inputs are not. You can argue that the input from the physical experiments gets quantized into math, but that falls flat because it matters where the inputs come from in physics. If they're not coming from a physical experiment, then it's not experimental physics. Ultimately, theoretical physics is just a variety of experimental physics that's further removed from the original experimental results.
Chemistry and engineering may sort of boil down to physics, but the relationship isn't the same as with computer science. In computer science, you design the hardware (using physics, engineering and chemistry) to perform the math. In physics, chemistry, and engineering, you use the math to predict and interpret the experiment/construction/device/chemical formula, etc. The math doesn't really control it, the math is an attempt to understand it. You can't just swap out the underlying physical situation and have the physics be the same (unless you're including computer science as physics, in which case, some of the physics are the same, but not all of the physics are the same).
Last things first: "show me how simple every day math creates complex software.".
0 nor 0 = 1
0 nor 1 = 0
1 nor 0 = 0
1 nor 1 = 0
A = 0; A nor A = 1 = not 0
A = 1; A nor A = 0 = not 1
not (0 nor 0) = 0 = 0 or 0
not (0 nor 1) = 1 = 0 or 1
not (1 nor 0) = 1 = 1 or 0
not (1 nor 1) = 1 = 1 or 1
A = 0, B = 0; (A nor A) nor (B nor B) = 1 nor 1 = 0 = A and A
A = 0, B = 1; (A nor A) nor (B nor B) = 1 nor 0 = 0 = A and A
A = 1, B = 0; (A nor A) nor (B nor B) = 0 nor 1 = 0 = A and A
A = 1, B = 1; (A nor A) nor (B nor B) = 0 nor 0 = 1 = A and A
A = 0, B = 0; (A or B) and (not(A and B)) = 0 = A xor A
A = 0, B = 1; (A or B) and (not(A and B)) = 1 = A xor A
A = 1, B = 0; (A or B) and (not(A and B)) = 1 = A xor A
A = 1, B = 1; (A or B) and (not(A and B)) = 0 = A xor A
A nand B = not (A and B)
A xnor B = not (A xor B)
That gives us nor, not, and, or, xor, nand and xnor.
From those, you can construct flip-flops and latches for data storage. You can also construct adders. From adders, you can also subtract. From addition and subtraction you can perform multiplication and division. The storage you created out of flip-flops and latches you set up to be addressable. Using the math operations you can work with those addresses. You can create a special register address (or several) to store a number representing another address which an adder increments sequentially. In the memory address stored in the register(s), you can have a number which represents an instruction. You have set number of instructions you implement using components made out of logic gates. Whatever instruction is in the memory address being pointed to is executed. That instruction may be a jump instruction, which makes the register address pointing to the current instruction to execute jump to a different address than it would normally have jumped to sequentially on the next cycle. Otherwise it could be a read instruction, taking data from a memory location and dumping it into a special memory location called a register. Or a write operation doing the same thing in reverse.
I haven't changed my perspective because you never showed any understanding.
Well, at least you had the good grace to modify this in a short follow up. I certainly don't think you showed any superior understanding of the problem either, but simple fact of doing a lot of thinking about a problem can broaden ones perspective (it's also possible for it to wear ruts into patterns of thought, however). It's a pity the discussion hasn't broadened yours.
I think I have successfully identified the assumptions you are operating under, and furthermore have identified how these assumptions assume away relevant counter-forces.
The way you put this strongly applies that you're only evaluating my arguments with the goal of confirming your own biases. You start by assuming that my opinion, which differs from yours, must differ due to some incorrect assumption. Your underlying assumption, of course, appears to be that you are never wrong.
You insist that they do not apply, when I have to deal with them as part of my job. Insisting that your theory of the world trumps my reality is simply unpersuasive.
I'm sorry, when you said you were an engineer, I just figured electrical, or civil, or mechanical, or maybe train. I hadn't realized you were actually involved in temporal engineering and worked daily with parallel universes and looking into the future. Seriously though, I'm not quite sure how social reactions to technology change is a force that a typical engineer would make use of in their job.
And, once again, you're the one making the extraordinary claim that your theory of the world trumps _ALL_ and that alternatives are impossible. If you're the kind of civil engineer who believes in things like 100 year flood lines as static and doesn't understand that all that wonderful drainage that you and your fellow engineers have put in changes that flood level, it makes things a lot more clear.
Rather than insisting the non-existence of something that plainly exists, you should have been approximating the magnitude of the forces involved, and providing a mechanism by which negative feedback is dwarfed by the positive feedback. That you don't seem to understand these concepts tells me that you don't have the level of technical training or experience I have on these subjects.
You really do come off as lacking significant self awareness, you know? What that plainly exists am I insisting on the non-existance of? You seem to be the one insisting on the non-existence of things such as historical widespread suffering due to structural unemployment. Except for absolutely linear properties for things such as job growth and technological development, I can't think of anything that I'm saying does not exist in this discussion. I have considered the forces involved, and my approximation of them doesn't seem to lead to a good place for a lot of people. I understand these concepts just fine. It seems to be a bit of an arrogant streak that causes you to think that I don't.
Assume a naked human being on the moon. What happens next? He suffocates and die.
Is it impossible for a naked human being to end up on the moon? Not quite - but there's absolutely no economic reason why anyone would spend that much money to do it. Politically, there's not much reason either. Is it a likely scenario that humanity needs to derive an answer for? Nope. Is there a chance? Sure, if you want to put it that way.
Errr... Is this another strawman^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h analogy? How does this properly relate to either of our positions? The scenario I'm talking about isn't like a naked human on the moon. First of all, there's no mystery cause for my scenario. For non-mystery causes, for your analogy, a large organization would have to spend a large amount of effort and resources to do it for no good reason whatsoever. The effort and resources for developing robot labour would have
I think you're missing the point. It may be "tied to hardware" but, firstly, the definition of "hardware" in this context is incredibly broad as long as it satisfies certain constraints. Those constraints are based on terms such as "processor" and "touchscreen". Those terms exist because those are already things that exist completely independent of the "invention" in this patent. The "inventor" in this case did not invent those things, and are not claiming to, they only claim to have "invented" the subject matter of the patent, which is a software method.
This patent explicitly requires a touch screen and a processor. It would not cover thinking about the idea, writing the idea down on a pad of paper, using a pad of paper to write out pseudocode to perform the functions, etc. While the patent may include math, it also includes specific hardware elements and is therefore not just math or just an idea.
But it covers any implemention the idea on any hardware fitting the loose constraints, no matter how it's implemented. A patent is meant to be on a specific implementation, not on the idea itself. Arguing that allowing a patent on all possible implementations of an idea is not a patent on the idea itself is as disingenuous as, for example, arguing that indefinite (and retroactive) extension of a term is the same thing as a "limited term".
Aside from that, the patent in question fails in terms of originality and non-obviousness. It also fails to properly describe the "invention" since it fails to go into specific implementation details. It's true that anyone "skilled in the art" could implement it based on the description in the patent, but they could also implement it without the description in the patent, and the parts that they would be improvising based on their own knowledge rather than what's described in the patent would constitute the whole of the implementation.
The author of the patent has not described an invention, just a general idea for unlocking using touch screens on pre-existing hardware types. There is no legitimately patentable material there even by definitions of legitimately patentable material that allow algorithms.
Or, at least, you never run out of Dwarf Bread.
You're probably out of luck on the first one. The second one exists though: MBA Gyrojet
.
I've never subscribed to the argument that all computing is math, because as much as it affects how efficient your algorithms are, software is not mathematics.
All software, regardless of how high level, eventually gets boiled down to machine code. The machine code itself is all implemented as collections of logic gates. Mathematical logic is math.
You're right, however, that there isn't some mathematical formula for swipe to unlock. If there actually were one defined by the patent, things would be a little better. There isn't, however, so, we're stuck with the patent covering the implementation details of any possible variant of the idea of swipe to unlock. Any particular variant actually does have a mathematical function that defines it. Rather, it has an infinite number of mathematical functions that defines it and they are all mathematically equivalent and covered by the patent and, consequently, there are an infinite number of algorithms covered by the patent. The patent is on the idea of the "device" rather than on the device itself.
But it doesn't require particular hardware, any general purpose computing hardware with an appropriate display and sensors will do. It doesn't matter how they're implemented or what they're made of. The hardware could be made of condensed dark matter with darkenergytronic circuits and this patent would still apply. This patent covers math, and not just math, but an idea.
Really? What gets patented is ideas, not math (because you can't actually patent that).
Of course, you can't patent ideas either (de jurem, that is, de facto you can, because of the ridiculously lax system that allows software patents, business patents, and other ridiculous process patents like swinging on a swing to pass through).
software isn't "just" math. that's like saying you can't patent a can opener because can openers are "just" atoms of iron and "you can't patent iron!".
No, it's more like saying that you can't patent a can-opener and then have patent control over all methods of using cans regardless of what they're made of. Computation is an abstraction. An algorithm is essentially a function. A function assigns, to each element in one set, an element from another set. Any function which will assign the same the same elements from the two sets to each other is mathematically equivalent to any other function that does the same thing. An algorithm is a function from the set of possible inputs to the set of possible outputs. The big consideration in computation that isn't present with functions is the number of steps an algorithm will require to produce a result and how the number of steps may grow with more complex inputs. Typically, that isn't a concern for a software patent.
The actual computer running the process can be a group of people with slide-rules, a purely mechanical computing device, an electronic computer, a complex set of chemical reactions (such as dna computers), an optical computer, something based on the weak or strong nuclear forces, some sort of device made of exotic forms of matter or energy or things that aren't matter or energy should such things exist.
So, a software patent on achieving a result is a patent on any process whatsoever, in the entire universe, that achieves the same result. So, essentially, a software patent is not only a complete monopoly on any equivalent mathematical process that does the same thing, it's also a patent on the idea itself, which is expressly forbidden.
Consider the slide to unlock patent. If you're a programmer or an EE, consider the number of possible ways there are to implement it in both software and hardware. This patent covers all of them. You could come up with some completely novel way to do it involving manipulation of vacuum energy and time and it would violate this patent.
So it's the hostile option then.
Thank you. *Something* got through, if only that the robotic dystopia isn't as "obvious" as you think it is.
It would be nice if something had gotten through on your end as well, but I get the impression that you're still being pretty close-minded about the possibilities. In the end, I can't not recommend contingency planning for different possible scenarios. Assuming a perfectly smooth "natural" transition during a massive paradigm shift just because it's always happened that way in the past seems short-sighted. It seems especially short-sighted when it hasn't really happened all that smoothly before in the past.
Then again, you won because you assumed away everything that might threaten your conclusions, so there's not much to be proud of there. Come to think of it, that type of behavior is "denialism", isn't it?
I suppose you could say that I "assumed away" non-existent laws of nature and complexity that you more or less made up. The only thing I'm really denying is that my scenario is impossible.
He did have the advantage of being rich enough to buy medical treatment and a transplant organ that most people in his situation could expect. Even with all that, he wasn't particularly far outside the statistical norms.
In any case, whether Steve Jobs possessed amazing marketing/business acumen, or just a cult of personality, Apple's fortunes seem to have risen and fallen based on whether or not he was at the helm. As he's no longer at the helm, Apple could potentially be in trouble in the mid to long term. They could always bring back Gil Amelio...
Errr. Actually it does radiate off on its own. Without conduction or convection, radiation is generally the only way to dump it unless you want to jettison some mass. Typically, to get rid of the heat faster, a heat pump of some kind will be used to pump heat to a radiator out on a boom. The idea is to get the radiator as hot as possible so that it will radiate as much of the heat away as fast as possible. With a solar generation in space, I don't know if radiation of excess heat will be necessary. For a given distance from the sun, and a given orientation, the panels should produce a very predictable amount of heat. The amount of heat radiated as they heat up will increase, so they will reach a stable temperature. As long as they're designed to withstand that temperature, no active cooling of the panels will be required.
Technology change is driven by human ingenuity. The system's ability to adapt is driven by human ingenuity. Claiming that humans can drive technological change faster than humans can adapt to it is questionable
Ingenuity is not homogeneous across the entire human population. Some people have a lot more of it than other people, and there are all sorts of preconditions to exercising it. Change of all sorts, including the technological variety, is constantly outpacing people's ability to adapt to it. Collectively, we catch up in the end, but that ignores the actual individuals who get left behind.
if humans start failing to adapt, the economic and political systems become unstable, which slows down technological change.
Yes, exactly. The economic and political systems become unstable. That's more or less re-iterating my point again. You seem to be looking at this from an eagle eye view and seeing smooth curves on a graph, abstracting out all the actual human details.
There are negative feedback loops that make this system stabler than you imagined.
And there are human-level details of this feedback that make this stability less placid than you imagine.
An extreme change that you had to assume. I'll admit that if you want to imagine a fantasy world, reality does not apply. But if you want to treat the fantasy world as a possible future of our reality, you must deal with reality's factors.
The assumptions you require are more extreme than those required for my scenario. You've argued for historical precedent, but the historical precedent seems to be accelerating technological change. Even steady technological growth could lead to my scenario. All that needs to happen is for job-replacing technological growth to outpace the social and economic changes required to support the population under the new conditions. My _opinion_ is that humans are messed up enough that we stand a good chance of blindsiding ourselves, but I don't require it as some absolute law of reality. Your view that my concerns are completely impossible contains the most extreme assumptions of our two differing opinions.
We both know you're not arguing there is such a thing as a light speed car, we're discussing a robotic dystopia. Treating your robotic dystopia as a "light speed car" is a metaphor, which is analogy.
It's an analogy when you're using it to actually illustrate your perspective. When you start saying that I'm arguing X about it while you're arguing Y and you haven't even provided any actual details on how your analogy actually is analogous to the topic at hand, it veers off into straw man territory.
Calling my metaphor a strawman argument is wrong categorization, because no one is going to confuse a light speed car for a robotic dystopia. Strawmans are misdirection, arguing against what you did not say, and confusing you or the audience as to what your argument is. A clear analogy is misdirection only if you have no clue what you're arguing about. If the analogy is inapplicable, it's a false analogy, not a strawman. Using the wrong label is a wrong understanding.
That's at least a semi-convincing argument, that the example is so ridiculously far from what we're discussing and so irrelevant to the conversation that there can't be any confusion. Of course, most straw man arguments actually are like that (not so extreme, but often so blatantly obvious that they should never work and cause immediate disgust with the person using the argument), and the seem to work well enough that people keep using them. I admit that I tend to have a knee-jerk response to anything that looks like a straw man argument as a result.
Use of AKA was wrong. My bad. I should have used IOW or e.g.
Fair enough. Attacking it was admittedly overzealous pedantry on my part.
F
Ditto for Java back in the day. Even James Gosling didn't have enough Java experience for many of those job ads. Of course, I've heard claims that job ads like that are actually posted when they don't really want to fill the position (or at least don't want to fill the position with the people who will see the ad). I'm not sure which would be worse: hiring managers being that ignorant, or hiring managers being that hostile.
Yeah, but then the "loonie" could say "Dudes, some loonies in a military helicopter were shooting at me!" Seems like a pretty valid self-defense claim. Of course, if they published their plans for a military exercise in a disused lavatory, with a "beware of the leopard" sign, in a dark basement with no stairs somewhere, they could make the claim that the exercise was public knowledge and he must have known. You know, the same way that people walking home from work while there's a protest on are meant to know that the crowd has been ordered to disperse by a police announcement over a bullhorn half a mile away and ten minutes before they actually left work.
Seriously though, this whole thing is just a terrible mess.
Does robotics even make this political system more likely? Because that's yet another hidden assumption you've snuck into this discussion. (assuming the rise of a political system that imposes artificial scarcity)
Once again, rather than arising: "persisting from the current day without adapting to changing circumstances". In other words, we already live in a system adjusted to current circumstances. If circumstances, such as labour-saving technology, change faster than the system can adapt, no new system is required for there to be problems. It's not a hidden assumption I've snuck into the discussion, it's what I've been saying the entire time since I wrote: "we are in danger of transitioning to post-scarcity technology without transitioning to a post-scarcity economy" in my first post in this thread.
I pointed out that robotic automation is 80 years old, and it's "not relevant"? If robotic automation is not relevant to robotics, what is?
They weren't particularly relevant because we're talking about a potential future, not the past, and those examples don't include changes as extreme as our hypothetical example. They are relevant to the overall discussion of structural unemployment though.
1. A strawman fallacy is one where I make up an argument and claim that it is your argument. When it happens, it means I misrepresented what you claimed. I made an analogy, whether good or bad, it's not a strawman. Categorical error.
It certainly seemed like that was what you were doing when you wrote:
You're looking at a falling object and concluding that it will achieve escape velocity (aka going up) ... somehow.
and
you're performing static analysis on a dynamic problem. If you ignore friction and air resistance, a car with constant acceleration can approach light speed. In reality, friction and air resistance prevent a car from getting anywhere close to light speed.
it seemed a lot like you were trying to present your analogy, then act as if I were arguing against that analogy rather than what we're actually arguing about. The analogies were completely superfluous. Stating that I didn't understand the examples in your analogies was just insulting. I understand them fine, I don't understand what contorted logic actually makes them analogous to the discussion at hand. Maybe if you could explain that in some satisfactory manner, I wouldn't think that they were just straw men.
2. "Going up" was meant to clarify that the escape velocity vector was in the opposite direction of "falling down". Are you trying to say that the analogy doesn't make any sense, or are you trying to say that it isn't applicable to your argument? I'm going to assume the latter, but you criticized an irrelevant aspect of my analogy, which does not demonstrate understanding.
I'm certainly not going to argue with you that "going up" vs "escape velocity" was an irrelevant part of your analogy. Trouble is, I think your entire analogy is irrelevant. If you could clarify what parts of our argument is the "falling object", what "falling" means in this context, and what the "escape velocity" means in the argument. Just so you know, "aka" is short for "also know as". Escape velocity is not "also known as" "going up", but that's a really minor nitpick compared to the silly analogy.
3. If you are good at accounting for different forces, you have not demonstrated it in our discussion. For example, you said increased complexity increasing failure rates was fallacious. It is not - unless you want to claim that simple systems are more likely to fail than complex systems.
Your example of ball bearings compared different technologies; the new technology provided the reliability increase, not the complexity of the system. Complexity in of itself is not a desirable thing, it means more pre-re