It matters even more what kind of scale we're talking about. Is this the kind of warmth that means a slightly warmer summer occasionally or the kind that boils the oceans and turns the Earth into baked desert wasteland? Additionally, the time frame is pretty important, is this going to happen in the next fifty years or are we talking about something that might effect us ten thousand years from now? These are important questions because they determine what kind of response we should have.
For instance, our auditing team doesn't just have to audit documents, they have to create a folder on this drive, copy a document from that drive, email a copy to this person, cc that person.
Sounds like a good automation project if I ever heard one.
The best solution is to ensure that all energy production is forced to re-internalize its costs. After that you can just let the market sort things out.
Yet, toward the end of his life, he had some odd ideas regarding megadoses of vitamin C that haven't ever been proven in clinical studies.
To be fair, I haven't seen any studies that actually tried levels of vitamin C that Linus would have considered appropriate. Yes, they tried higher than normal levels, but nothing like what he was suggesting. Is there something to what he was saying? I have no idea since as far as I can tell we haven't actually tried it yet.
This was never about self-driving cars. This was always about wiping out an entire employment sector and piping even more profit up to the top. And yes, that is a bad thing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for the truck drivers, but for society as a whole it's a net win. Keeping humans working on jobs a machine can do isn't the optimum choice and it's not something we should want. The only issue is that currently our society requires you to have money to access any resources and for most people that means working for a living, if the opportunities for work decline that causes a problem with the wealth distribution system. The answer is to fix the wealth distribution system not to keep people doing make work.
I disagree. Government is force/power/compulsion. It does not inherently seek the good of the populace. The more you hand over to the government, the less recourse you will have when faced with incompetence, corruption, and overall indifference to the needs of ordinary people.
Sure, government is never a great solution, it's just that sometimes the other solutions are even worse.
And yet a really good teacher can still be better than an adaptive system
No doubt about it, yet can they better for every student at the same time, how many students can they handle simultaneously, how expensive is a "really good teacher" and how often do we hire those? You don't need technology to be a 100% end to end solution for it to be useful. Generally you deploy a technology that meets most needs then use people to handle the oversight and edge cases. This is the same thing that has happened in nearly every other field and it's going to happen to education as well.
the base assumption is that we are dealing with human beings, not factory specifications
Certainly, and yet we automate things having to do with human beings all the time. Are we ready to fire all the teachers, and replace them with technology, of course not. That doesn't mean that we couldn't use a variety of technologies to improve both teacher productivity and student outcomes. If you think nothing is going to change in the classroom due to technology over the next fifty years then you're highly mistaken.
It justifies progressive taxation and social services from a capitalistic point of view.
If you mean that they should attempt to maximize the social value created for each dollar spent then I'd agree, though the difficulty of measuring social value (or even agreeing on what that is) would make it pretty much impossible to do on any sort of quantitative basis. People can't even agree on what the goals are let alone the best way to get there.
we should never depend on algorithms to analyze and proscribe any model of learning for any student. it is absolutely impossible for such an algorithm to do a better job than a moderately involved, competent teacher, who should be the only one involved in any decision making in any capacity for any student.
Not much point in discussing the best ways to improve education with technology if you don't believe that's even possible. Let's just say I disagree with your base assumptions and leave it there.
Either way, it does not negate the fact that by living under your means you can enter the 1% if you have an professional level income.
Not unless your definition of "professional" is restricted to specialist doctors, wall street investment bankers and lawyers who graduated from a top five school. Comfortable or well off, certainly, top 1% by wealth, no.
no AI can ever do a better job than a competent teacher.
That's a pretty bold statement considering the current factory model of education we use now. I have to disagree, though I'll be the first one to say we're not there yet.
all AI will do is hamstring a teacher's effectiveness by proscribing "solutions" according to an algorithm which cannot possibly see the status quo better than a moderately involved human being.
One of the main problems with education now is that there isn't time to give students significant individualized training. That is a problem that technology can solve. For example, take a course, algebra I for example, break it down into its component lessons, record each of the lessons and create online homework & testing for each lesson. The student watches the recorded lecture and does the homework and testing at his own pace. The teacher is there for when the student gets stuck. Does this replace teachers? No, but it allows students to do self-paced learning and it also allows a higher student : teacher ratio while also giving more time for individual assistance. This particular method doesn't even involve expert systems, it's just basic process redesign. The current live lecture method is highly inefficient and there is no reason to continue doing it that way when we have recording technology and automated testing software.
education is not a factory floor, and never will be, and trying to force it into that mold will just turn students off and they will hate learning.
Have you even been to a US school? They are explicitly designed along the Prussian model to be just like factories.
Education is a fundamental public good and no public resources should ever go to a private company to run schools.
Under the current system no. There are alternative systems where it would work just fine. For example, all schools are privatized, everyone gets an education voucher, any school that takes vouchers must have a voucher only program that meets the minimum education standards that we already expect. Any area that has no private voucher only programs gets a publicly run one until a private group moves into that area. Instant competition and accountability while still maintaining access for all.
Socialism will not work. Government should be run like a private company.
You realize this would mean they would attempt to maximize profits right? That means raising taxes and cutting services. I'm not sure I see how that's a useful behavior set.
unless we live in a society where the rich are born that way and stay that way even if they are lazy, and the poor are born that way and stay that way even if they are hard working
Wait, are you suggesting we don't live in a society like that?
And you're not even a regular policeman, you're a rich well-paid policeman who looks after a small gated community that is law-abiding, and your solution to crime is basically that everyone should be rich like these guys then there wouldn't be a problem.
Amusingly enough that's actually mostly true. A very large proportion of crime is committed due to desperation and poor circumstances. Obviously that doesn't cover crimes of passion, but that's a much smaller percentage. Find some way to fix poverty and big chunk of crime would just go away.
In any class you always have quite a bit of variation in student's abilities and learning capabilities, this means that often you have to teach something longer than the necessary for some students while moving too fast for others, both in general and for specific topics. Since we can't afford a 1:1 ratio of teachers to students, in the long run computerized teaching systems that are auto-adaptive will generate vastly better results than the current one to many lecture method. Even without strong AI this should be a fairly straightforward application of expert systems combined with micro-lessons.
Slashdot Mirror
It matters even more what kind of scale we're talking about. Is this the kind of warmth that means a slightly warmer summer occasionally or the kind that boils the oceans and turns the Earth into baked desert wasteland? Additionally, the time frame is pretty important, is this going to happen in the next fifty years or are we talking about something that might effect us ten thousand years from now? These are important questions because they determine what kind of response we should have.
So you're trying to tell me that "95 percent confidence" is the same thing as "wild speculation"? Riiiiiiiiiiiight.
That depends, do they mean that statistically or consensus wise? Scientific consensus is not nearly as reliable as it might seem.
For instance, our auditing team doesn't just have to audit documents, they have to create a folder on this drive, copy a document from that drive, email a copy to this person, cc that person.
Sounds like a good automation project if I ever heard one.
Boss promotes too many tickets at once to the same priority.
When everything is top priority you have complete freedom since you can work on whatever you want and still be doing the right thing.
We probably won't get the dinosaurs back, though.
Don't worry, thanks to research in genetic engineering we're getting closer to solving that problem. I look forward to my first bronto-burger.
The best solution is to ensure that all energy production is forced to re-internalize its costs. After that you can just let the market sort things out.
Yet, toward the end of his life, he had some odd ideas regarding megadoses of vitamin C that haven't ever been proven in clinical studies.
To be fair, I haven't seen any studies that actually tried levels of vitamin C that Linus would have considered appropriate. Yes, they tried higher than normal levels, but nothing like what he was suggesting. Is there something to what he was saying? I have no idea since as far as I can tell we haven't actually tried it yet.
Perhaps. Clothes dryers not so much.
Is there a room in India somewhere where people are driving big rigs around like drones?
There will be soon if this technology gains traction.
This was never about self-driving cars. This was always about wiping out an entire employment sector and piping even more profit up to the top. And yes, that is a bad thing.
Well, it's certainly not a good thing for the truck drivers, but for society as a whole it's a net win. Keeping humans working on jobs a machine can do isn't the optimum choice and it's not something we should want. The only issue is that currently our society requires you to have money to access any resources and for most people that means working for a living, if the opportunities for work decline that causes a problem with the wealth distribution system. The answer is to fix the wealth distribution system not to keep people doing make work.
If it needs a human in "more populated areas" it's no better than putting trailers on a train and having local drivers pick up the loads there.
Not necessarily, it might allow them to get around total driving time limits.
I disagree. Government is force/power/compulsion. It does not inherently seek the good of the populace. The more you hand over to the government, the less recourse you will have when faced with incompetence, corruption, and overall indifference to the needs of ordinary people.
Sure, government is never a great solution, it's just that sometimes the other solutions are even worse.
And yet a really good teacher can still be better than an adaptive system
No doubt about it, yet can they better for every student at the same time, how many students can they handle simultaneously, how expensive is a "really good teacher" and how often do we hire those? You don't need technology to be a 100% end to end solution for it to be useful. Generally you deploy a technology that meets most needs then use people to handle the oversight and edge cases. This is the same thing that has happened in nearly every other field and it's going to happen to education as well.
the base assumption is that we are dealing with human beings, not factory specifications
Certainly, and yet we automate things having to do with human beings all the time. Are we ready to fire all the teachers, and replace them with technology, of course not. That doesn't mean that we couldn't use a variety of technologies to improve both teacher productivity and student outcomes. If you think nothing is going to change in the classroom due to technology over the next fifty years then you're highly mistaken.
It justifies progressive taxation and social services from a capitalistic point of view.
If you mean that they should attempt to maximize the social value created for each dollar spent then I'd agree, though the difficulty of measuring social value (or even agreeing on what that is) would make it pretty much impossible to do on any sort of quantitative basis. People can't even agree on what the goals are let alone the best way to get there.
we should never depend on algorithms to analyze and proscribe any model of learning for any student. it is absolutely impossible for such an algorithm to do a better job than a moderately involved, competent teacher, who should be the only one involved in any decision making in any capacity for any student.
Not much point in discussing the best ways to improve education with technology if you don't believe that's even possible. Let's just say I disagree with your base assumptions and leave it there.
Either way, it does not negate the fact that by living under your means you can enter the 1% if you have an professional level income.
Not unless your definition of "professional" is restricted to specialist doctors, wall street investment bankers and lawyers who graduated from a top five school. Comfortable or well off, certainly, top 1% by wealth, no.
no AI can ever do a better job than a competent teacher.
That's a pretty bold statement considering the current factory model of education we use now. I have to disagree, though I'll be the first one to say we're not there yet.
all AI will do is hamstring a teacher's effectiveness by proscribing "solutions" according to an algorithm which cannot possibly see the status quo better than a moderately involved human being.
One of the main problems with education now is that there isn't time to give students significant individualized training. That is a problem that technology can solve. For example, take a course, algebra I for example, break it down into its component lessons, record each of the lessons and create online homework & testing for each lesson. The student watches the recorded lecture and does the homework and testing at his own pace. The teacher is there for when the student gets stuck. Does this replace teachers? No, but it allows students to do self-paced learning and it also allows a higher student : teacher ratio while also giving more time for individual assistance. This particular method doesn't even involve expert systems, it's just basic process redesign. The current live lecture method is highly inefficient and there is no reason to continue doing it that way when we have recording technology and automated testing software.
education is not a factory floor, and never will be, and trying to force it into that mold will just turn students off and they will hate learning.
Have you even been to a US school? They are explicitly designed along the Prussian model to be just like factories.
Education is a fundamental public good and no public resources should ever go to a private company to run schools.
Under the current system no. There are alternative systems where it would work just fine. For example, all schools are privatized, everyone gets an education voucher, any school that takes vouchers must have a voucher only program that meets the minimum education standards that we already expect. Any area that has no private voucher only programs gets a publicly run one until a private group moves into that area. Instant competition and accountability while still maintaining access for all.
Socialism will not work. Government should be run like a private company.
You realize this would mean they would attempt to maximize profits right? That means raising taxes and cutting services. I'm not sure I see how that's a useful behavior set.
The stats on wealth don't bear that out, let alone people following the advice of Mr. Money Mustache.
You mean the guy who claims to be retired while his wife works and he has a part time contracting job?
unless we live in a society where the rich are born that way and stay that way even if they are lazy, and the poor are born that way and stay that way even if they are hard working
Wait, are you suggesting we don't live in a society like that?
Or, y'know, they could just pay an appropriate level of income tax and let educational professionals decide how best to invest that money.
Conflict of interest. That's somewhat akin to letting lawyers make all the laws, oh wait, we do that now and it's not working out so well.
And you're not even a regular policeman, you're a rich well-paid policeman who looks after a small gated community that is law-abiding, and your solution to crime is basically that everyone should be rich like these guys then there wouldn't be a problem.
Amusingly enough that's actually mostly true. A very large proportion of crime is committed due to desperation and poor circumstances. Obviously that doesn't cover crimes of passion, but that's a much smaller percentage. Find some way to fix poverty and big chunk of crime would just go away.
In any class you always have quite a bit of variation in student's abilities and learning capabilities, this means that often you have to teach something longer than the necessary for some students while moving too fast for others, both in general and for specific topics. Since we can't afford a 1:1 ratio of teachers to students, in the long run computerized teaching systems that are auto-adaptive will generate vastly better results than the current one to many lecture method. Even without strong AI this should be a fairly straightforward application of expert systems combined with micro-lessons.