All sides in this are acting like pigs, the Russians, Ukrainians and the Ukrainian separatists. The Russians are and the separatists are throwing around unsubstantiated accusations. Even the Ukrainians are not releasing the volumes of radar (including military radar) and air traffic control data that surely exist. The worst ones are of course the ones who shot at the plane. Since they are hiding and spewing misinformation, it's obvious they are not even a tiny bit sorry for accidentally shooting down a civilian plane. Their behavior makes it look like the plane was deliberately targeted, truly a work of evil.
The people talking in the background say that the plane exploded in the air (big explosion) and debris was still raining down as the smoke was just starting to come up from the ground. They also mentioned "it's a good thing they brought it," pretty obviously referring to an anti-aircraft missile system.
Can you speculate why you think space might be competitive? Space resources are mind-bogglingly plentiful. Just the main belt asteroids have enough to support 10 quadrillion people. Imagine dismantling moons or even Mars-sized planets for raw materials. You can sustain unimaginably huge civilizations. Why would there be a need to fight for resources?
In this case the relationship is not necessarily directly causal. If you can bring in the grant money, you can get a career. The quantity of papers may simply be a consequence of running a successful research program.
NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission seems to be the only serious effort in this area. I applaud them for their ambition. While this mission is being marketed as a stepping stone for a manned Mars mission, it also happens to be a very good way to get started with in-situ space resource utilization. Anyone have any insight on how the plans for this mission are progressing?
I'm curious how automated cars will handle heavy traffic. It's often hard to find an opening to merge into a busy lane, or make a left turn through heavy traffic. Would the automated car wait 10 minutes for an opening? Would it be able to drive aggressively to avoid wasting time like this?
It would be interesting to add a feature that would allow filtering comments based on their number of mods overall. Both upmods and downmods would count the same. The more controversial comments would really stick out. A good compromise between troll filtering and making unpopular opinions visible might be at least a score of 3 OR at least 3 mods total.
Some of these can be answered somewhat rationally.
For example would a moral robot have refused to function in the Vietnam War?
The decision whether to fight in the Vietnam War is political. A robot does not have a vote, so should not participate in politics at all.
Would a drone take out an enemy in Somalia knowing that that terrorist was a US citizen?
If the enemy is judged to be seriously threatening US interests, the drone should take him out, just as a police officer would take out a dangerous criminal.
How many innocent deaths are permissible if a valuable target can be destroyed?
In this case the drone should weigh human lives against other human lives. Can it be estimated how many human lives are at risk if the valuable target remains intact? Not just the numbers but the probability of harm should be taken into account. This type of decision is usually up to the higher level commanders that have more information on hand.
If a robot acts as a fair player could it use high tech weapons against an enemy that had only rifles that were made prior to WWII?
There is no ethical issue here. Use the most effective weapons. Minimize losses on your side. Try to make the enemy surrender with minimal losses on their side (i.e. don't nuke them).
If many troops are injured should a medical robot save two enemy or one US soldier who will take all of the robot's attention and time?
The robot must assume that we will fight until we win. Treating a US soldier contributes to the success of the war campaign, potentially saving many lives in the future. Treating injured enemy soldiers may actually cause losses because the enemies may fight again (if they can't be taken into custody). When including the probability of future losses of human lives, the choice is clear: treat the US soldier.
When it comes to moral issues and behaviors there are often no points of agreement by humans so just how does one program a robot to deal with moral conflicts?
Use utilitarian ethics. Not many rules are required. When estimating potential future human lives lost, assume your side is going to win. Do not venture into politics. (Of course there could be something terribly wrong with this reasoning, so fire away.)
The article authors say that most of the dangerous asteroids are already being tracked (additional tracking efforts under way), and can potentially be deflected since collisions can be predicted decades into the future. That's only a half-truth. Comets in the outer solar system are too dark to detect in their present locations, but can arrive at Earth very quickly. There will not be enough time to deflect them... Statistically, what percentage of impacts are from objects originating in the outer solar system? Is that even possible to determine?
Most of the content of the website is user-generated. The main costs are for hosting. There are free accounts and paid accounts. The paid accounts bring in the majority of the revenue. They differ from free accounts by relatively minor, but convenient perks, like greater bandwidth from the server, or ability to post more often. Free account holders still have access to all the content. People eventually value your service enough to pay a small monthly fee and get the perks. There are no ads, period.
This model can work for Slashdot, Facebook, YouTube and many others.
This discussion turned out mostly useless because the concept of "settled" was not well defined. Taking the definition to be "completely describes reality", all evidence points to this being impossible. My question is why is this so? Is this a fundamental property of nature? Has this property itself been studied?
The radiation environment around Europa most likely breaks apart any complex molecules that came from the ocean. The best possibility is a lander that would dig into the regolith. Unfortunately, looks like the Juno mission will not help even with locating landing spots on Europa. Its camera is too wide-angle.
Don't forget that oil/gas and food subsidies are a military strategy. We don't want to be too dependent on imports of these strategically important commodities. Solar panels, however, hardly qualify as strategically important.
To eliminate the wire-like or metallic nanotubes, the Stanford team switched off all the good CNTs. Then they pumped the semiconductor circuit full of electricity. All of that electricity concentrated in the metallic nanotubes, which grew so hot that they burned up and literally vaporized into tiny puffs of carbon dioxide. This sophisticated technique was able to eliminate virtually all of the metallic CNTs in the circuit at once.
Bypassing the misaligned nanotubes required even greater subtlety.
The problem is heat. Simple as that. Currently there are no technologies more power efficient than CMOS. Therefore there are no technologies that can produce more powerful computers than CMOS. If a significantly more power-efficient technology is found, the semiconductor manufacturers will absolutely attempt to use it.
I would suggest that such aliens have something better than radio to use.
I'm curious what can we imagine the aliens could use to communicate. I found this bit on neutrino communication. It also mentions axions (which might not even exist). Gravitational waves are suggested in the comments. Are there any other potential communication technologies we can read about?
NVIDIA seems behind AMD in moving to 512-bit wide GDDR5: this K40 still has 384-bit. Also worrying is whether significant performance improvements will really be possible beyond that point. GPU code is notorious for easily becoming DRAM bandwidth limited. Cache on the GPU is very small compared to the computing resources.
You are correct. This technology smells unethical and might need to be banned. We need statistics on whether these devices really decrease accident rates, and over the long term too. Trying to discipline the drivers by encouraging fewer hard stops may have an effect on accident rates, but that effect might be the opposite of expected. Why? People drive mostly in "autopilot" mode: basically letting learned reflexes control the car. If the driver tries to constantly think about the quality of his driving, his reaction time may become actually worse. This is something that is worth studying statistically.
Don't forget to look at the ethical implications of this technology. If it does not lower the accident rates, it is unethical. Why? If accident rates stay the same, the insurance premiums will also stay the same in aggregate (or average). The only effect of this technology for the society is that some people lose some privacy due to the monitoring device. This is a net negative effect. We need the data on whether this technology really does decrease accident rates. Then we need to make a value judgement on whether the reduced accident rates (and insurance premiums) are worth the loss of privacy. It might actually make sense to ban this technology if statistically significant accident rate reduction cannot be observed.
I was hoping for strong counterarguments. Most people decide to allocate their donations themselves, so my argument must be really weak. (Perhaps weak enough for people just to ignore it..)
Here are some of the weaker counters I can think of:
"The government will squander your money. They are a bunch of corrupt fucks." Yeah, this is mostly true. But government spending is mostly recurring expenses that are not decided on a whim. Some of your money will go to finance science, infrastructure, the justice system, defense, and many other essential things we almost take for granted. Also, donations are tax deductible, so you are taking some money away from the government when allocating your donations yourself.
"Allocating our public spending yourself gives you a real voice in how the money is spent, whereas the government are a bunch of puppets of the ruling elite and do not care about you very much." Yeah, this is also mostly true. However, democracy is usually loosely understood as "one man, one vote." If you make an average amount of money, your public donations are more-or-less democratic. If you are a billionaire like Bill Gates, suddenly you have a much greater amount of votes in this "democracy." Not that our actual government is very different from this..
Don't get me wrong, people are waking up. I'm just not confident enough will be awake in time to prevent some very very bad things from happening in a very short time.
Many people have woken up (and not recently either) and understand that they are realistically no longer in control of their government. They just don't know what to do about it. Can we keep this discussion going: What CAN we do about this situation?
Ideas like vote third party, organize protests, write your representative, seem too feeble and toothless. We need massive protests to get even a tiny impact. The closest thing to this was the occupy movement, and it failed miserably. Voting seems almost pointless now. It's almost impossible to get even 1 third party seat in Congress. Both major parties seem beyond hope of rehabilitation. Perhaps a large third party vote percentage would make the rounds on the media and draw some attention. The other problem is that people can't agree which third party to vote for. All those parties seem to be extremists, not aligned with even 10% of the population. Writing your representative also seems pointless since he's most likely a corrupt career politician voting the party line.
Thanks for your replies. I can't agree with you on everything, but that's fine. The government we currently have is mainly a function of what the people have voted for over the centuries. It is a bit pointless to argue about what it was designed to do at the very beginning. The people living today are the ones responsible for their government.
Clearly there is a difference between how the US government and most European governments are structured. Europeans tend to get better representation of the people in their governments. Perhaps it is due to proportional representation or other differences in the way elections are conducted. The US electoral system does seem outdated in comparison (but really hard to change). And the Europeans also tend to have large governments financing social safety nets, while still managing to keep corruption low. I'm guessing your opinion is that the Europeans are better educated, and so able to construct better governments. I can't really argue against that. I think it is more or less true that the people get the government they deserve.
That point, I very much agree with you on though I don't perceive the person you responded to was joking.
Yeah, the wording was not historically accurate, nor 100% serious either. I was trying to make a point that government is not working well because it relies too much on the people in it being ethical. My opinion is that the type of government we currently have is not necessarily a total failure. Instead of drastically downsizing it and cutting social programs, we should consider introducing more checks against corruption. I kind of know what to expect from the libertarians here on Slashdot, so I'm not eagerly awaiting the alternative opinion (or more flame). That path has been tread many times before on this site.
So your suggestion is to educate everyone to be more ethical and less susceptible to corruption, right? This might be doable, but it is very difficult. A large number of poor people lead very difficult lives. They would be very difficult to persuade into purely ethical behavior, when they perceive lots of injustice being done to them by the ruling class. Athenians might have had a more ethical citizen body because not everyone was allowed to be a citizen. We do not have that luxury. Also, any system relying on trust in ethical behavior is unstable and susceptible to subversion. Basically, a smart unethical actor has an advantage over a large number of ethical ones. Anyway, this is an interesting topic.. I wish more people participated.
I'm guessing the line "unethical behavior is fair game if you can get away with it" set off this response. I do not want to say that unethical behavior is OK, but rather that it is an instinct. It is foolish to expect everyone (especially those in power) to grow beyond their primal instincts and act ethically. Personally, I do not condone unethical behavior.
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All sides in this are acting like pigs, the Russians, Ukrainians and the Ukrainian separatists. The Russians are and the separatists are throwing around unsubstantiated accusations. Even the Ukrainians are not releasing the volumes of radar (including military radar) and air traffic control data that surely exist. The worst ones are of course the ones who shot at the plane. Since they are hiding and spewing misinformation, it's obvious they are not even a tiny bit sorry for accidentally shooting down a civilian plane. Their behavior makes it look like the plane was deliberately targeted, truly a work of evil.
The people talking in the background say that the plane exploded in the air (big explosion) and debris was still raining down as the smoke was just starting to come up from the ground. They also mentioned "it's a good thing they brought it," pretty obviously referring to an anti-aircraft missile system.
Can you speculate why you think space might be competitive? Space resources are mind-bogglingly plentiful. Just the main belt asteroids have enough to support 10 quadrillion people. Imagine dismantling moons or even Mars-sized planets for raw materials. You can sustain unimaginably huge civilizations. Why would there be a need to fight for resources?
In this case the relationship is not necessarily directly causal. If you can bring in the grant money, you can get a career. The quantity of papers may simply be a consequence of running a successful research program.
NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission seems to be the only serious effort in this area. I applaud them for their ambition. While this mission is being marketed as a stepping stone for a manned Mars mission, it also happens to be a very good way to get started with in-situ space resource utilization. Anyone have any insight on how the plans for this mission are progressing?
I'm curious how automated cars will handle heavy traffic. It's often hard to find an opening to merge into a busy lane, or make a left turn through heavy traffic. Would the automated car wait 10 minutes for an opening? Would it be able to drive aggressively to avoid wasting time like this?
It would be interesting to add a feature that would allow filtering comments based on their number of mods overall. Both upmods and downmods would count the same. The more controversial comments would really stick out. A good compromise between troll filtering and making unpopular opinions visible might be at least a score of 3 OR at least 3 mods total.
For example would a moral robot have refused to function in the Vietnam War?
The decision whether to fight in the Vietnam War is political. A robot does not have a vote, so should not participate in politics at all.
Would a drone take out an enemy in Somalia knowing that that terrorist was a US citizen?
If the enemy is judged to be seriously threatening US interests, the drone should take him out, just as a police officer would take out a dangerous criminal.
How many innocent deaths are permissible if a valuable target can be destroyed?
In this case the drone should weigh human lives against other human lives. Can it be estimated how many human lives are at risk if the valuable target remains intact? Not just the numbers but the probability of harm should be taken into account. This type of decision is usually up to the higher level commanders that have more information on hand.
If a robot acts as a fair player could it use high tech weapons against an enemy that had only rifles that were made prior to WWII?
There is no ethical issue here. Use the most effective weapons. Minimize losses on your side. Try to make the enemy surrender with minimal losses on their side (i.e. don't nuke them).
If many troops are injured should a medical robot save two enemy or one US soldier who will take all of the robot's attention and time?
The robot must assume that we will fight until we win. Treating a US soldier contributes to the success of the war campaign, potentially saving many lives in the future. Treating injured enemy soldiers may actually cause losses because the enemies may fight again (if they can't be taken into custody). When including the probability of future losses of human lives, the choice is clear: treat the US soldier.
When it comes to moral issues and behaviors there are often no points of agreement by humans so just how does one program a robot to deal with moral conflicts?
Use utilitarian ethics. Not many rules are required. When estimating potential future human lives lost, assume your side is going to win. Do not venture into politics. (Of course there could be something terribly wrong with this reasoning, so fire away.)
The article authors say that most of the dangerous asteroids are already being tracked (additional tracking efforts under way), and can potentially be deflected since collisions can be predicted decades into the future. That's only a half-truth. Comets in the outer solar system are too dark to detect in their present locations, but can arrive at Earth very quickly. There will not be enough time to deflect them... Statistically, what percentage of impacts are from objects originating in the outer solar system? Is that even possible to determine?
There is potentially a Scenario 4:
Most of the content of the website is user-generated. The main costs are for hosting. There are free accounts and paid accounts. The paid accounts bring in the majority of the revenue. They differ from free accounts by relatively minor, but convenient perks, like greater bandwidth from the server, or ability to post more often. Free account holders still have access to all the content. People eventually value your service enough to pay a small monthly fee and get the perks. There are no ads, period.
This model can work for Slashdot, Facebook, YouTube and many others.
This discussion turned out mostly useless because the concept of "settled" was not well defined. Taking the definition to be "completely describes reality", all evidence points to this being impossible. My question is why is this so? Is this a fundamental property of nature? Has this property itself been studied?
The radiation environment around Europa most likely breaks apart any complex molecules that came from the ocean. The best possibility is a lander that would dig into the regolith. Unfortunately, looks like the Juno mission will not help even with locating landing spots on Europa. Its camera is too wide-angle.
Don't forget that oil/gas and food subsidies are a military strategy. We don't want to be too dependent on imports of these strategically important commodities. Solar panels, however, hardly qualify as strategically important.
To eliminate the wire-like or metallic nanotubes, the Stanford team switched off all the good CNTs. Then they pumped the semiconductor circuit full of electricity. All of that electricity concentrated in the metallic nanotubes, which grew so hot that they burned up and literally vaporized into tiny puffs of carbon dioxide. This sophisticated technique was able to eliminate virtually all of the metallic CNTs in the circuit at once.
Bypassing the misaligned nanotubes required even greater subtlety.
......
The problem is heat. Simple as that. Currently there are no technologies more power efficient than CMOS. Therefore there are no technologies that can produce more powerful computers than CMOS. If a significantly more power-efficient technology is found, the semiconductor manufacturers will absolutely attempt to use it.
I would suggest that such aliens have something better than radio to use.
I'm curious what can we imagine the aliens could use to communicate. I found this bit on neutrino communication. It also mentions axions (which might not even exist). Gravitational waves are suggested in the comments. Are there any other potential communication technologies we can read about?
NVIDIA seems behind AMD in moving to 512-bit wide GDDR5: this K40 still has 384-bit. Also worrying is whether significant performance improvements will really be possible beyond that point. GPU code is notorious for easily becoming DRAM bandwidth limited. Cache on the GPU is very small compared to the computing resources.
You are correct. This technology smells unethical and might need to be banned. We need statistics on whether these devices really decrease accident rates, and over the long term too. Trying to discipline the drivers by encouraging fewer hard stops may have an effect on accident rates, but that effect might be the opposite of expected. Why? People drive mostly in "autopilot" mode: basically letting learned reflexes control the car. If the driver tries to constantly think about the quality of his driving, his reaction time may become actually worse. This is something that is worth studying statistically.
Don't forget to look at the ethical implications of this technology. If it does not lower the accident rates, it is unethical. Why? If accident rates stay the same, the insurance premiums will also stay the same in aggregate (or average). The only effect of this technology for the society is that some people lose some privacy due to the monitoring device. This is a net negative effect. We need the data on whether this technology really does decrease accident rates. Then we need to make a value judgement on whether the reduced accident rates (and insurance premiums) are worth the loss of privacy. It might actually make sense to ban this technology if statistically significant accident rate reduction cannot be observed.
I was hoping for strong counterarguments. Most people decide to allocate their donations themselves, so my argument must be really weak. (Perhaps weak enough for people just to ignore it..)
Here are some of the weaker counters I can think of:
"The government will squander your money. They are a bunch of corrupt fucks." Yeah, this is mostly true. But government spending is mostly recurring expenses that are not decided on a whim. Some of your money will go to finance science, infrastructure, the justice system, defense, and many other essential things we almost take for granted. Also, donations are tax deductible, so you are taking some money away from the government when allocating your donations yourself.
"Allocating our public spending yourself gives you a real voice in how the money is spent, whereas the government are a bunch of puppets of the ruling elite and do not care about you very much." Yeah, this is also mostly true. However, democracy is usually loosely understood as "one man, one vote." If you make an average amount of money, your public donations are more-or-less democratic. If you are a billionaire like Bill Gates, suddenly you have a much greater amount of votes in this "democracy." Not that our actual government is very different from this..
Any other points one way or the other?
Don't get me wrong, people are waking up. I'm just not confident enough will be awake in time to prevent some very very bad things from happening in a very short time.
Many people have woken up (and not recently either) and understand that they are realistically no longer in control of their government. They just don't know what to do about it. Can we keep this discussion going: What CAN we do about this situation?
Ideas like vote third party, organize protests, write your representative, seem too feeble and toothless. We need massive protests to get even a tiny impact. The closest thing to this was the occupy movement, and it failed miserably. Voting seems almost pointless now. It's almost impossible to get even 1 third party seat in Congress. Both major parties seem beyond hope of rehabilitation. Perhaps a large third party vote percentage would make the rounds on the media and draw some attention. The other problem is that people can't agree which third party to vote for. All those parties seem to be extremists, not aligned with even 10% of the population. Writing your representative also seems pointless since he's most likely a corrupt career politician voting the party line.
Thanks for your replies. I can't agree with you on everything, but that's fine. The government we currently have is mainly a function of what the people have voted for over the centuries. It is a bit pointless to argue about what it was designed to do at the very beginning. The people living today are the ones responsible for their government.
Clearly there is a difference between how the US government and most European governments are structured. Europeans tend to get better representation of the people in their governments. Perhaps it is due to proportional representation or other differences in the way elections are conducted. The US electoral system does seem outdated in comparison (but really hard to change). And the Europeans also tend to have large governments financing social safety nets, while still managing to keep corruption low. I'm guessing your opinion is that the Europeans are better educated, and so able to construct better governments. I can't really argue against that. I think it is more or less true that the people get the government they deserve.
That point, I very much agree with you on though I don't perceive the person you responded to was joking.
Yeah, the wording was not historically accurate, nor 100% serious either. I was trying to make a point that government is not working well because it relies too much on the people in it being ethical. My opinion is that the type of government we currently have is not necessarily a total failure. Instead of drastically downsizing it and cutting social programs, we should consider introducing more checks against corruption. I kind of know what to expect from the libertarians here on Slashdot, so I'm not eagerly awaiting the alternative opinion (or more flame). That path has been tread many times before on this site.
So your suggestion is to educate everyone to be more ethical and less susceptible to corruption, right? This might be doable, but it is very difficult. A large number of poor people lead very difficult lives. They would be very difficult to persuade into purely ethical behavior, when they perceive lots of injustice being done to them by the ruling class. Athenians might have had a more ethical citizen body because not everyone was allowed to be a citizen. We do not have that luxury. Also, any system relying on trust in ethical behavior is unstable and susceptible to subversion. Basically, a smart unethical actor has an advantage over a large number of ethical ones. Anyway, this is an interesting topic.. I wish more people participated.
I'm guessing the line "unethical behavior is fair game if you can get away with it" set off this response. I do not want to say that unethical behavior is OK, but rather that it is an instinct. It is foolish to expect everyone (especially those in power) to grow beyond their primal instincts and act ethically. Personally, I do not condone unethical behavior.