First possibility: Measuring their driving habits doesn't change anyone's driving habits. In that case, the cost of reducing premiums for safe drivers is transferred to the less safe drivers, who pay more for insurance because they are proactively identified as less safe.
Second possibility: Measuring their driving habits actually improves their driving habits because now they have objective feedback and the desire and knowledge of how to improve. That would actually make driving safer and enable an overall reduction of premiums for everybody because of less accidents.
I'll have to wonder if we've just ventured back into slavery, and won't have the time to ask the robot, because he'll be too busy debating the existence of God, or whether to use VI or Emacs, or which is better C or Java, and whether he should run his C or Java on a PC or a MAC.
Thus beganneth the great Robot holy wars of 2034, that will bringeth the almighty Singularity and the extinction of humankind, Amen. But you're wrong... VI is clearly better than Emacs, as every human already knows. I have to ask.. are you an AI?;-)
It looks like there are some minor business applications in the area of language recognition and expert systems. See their http://www.cyc.com/enterprise-solutions/success-stories page. The idea that some general, hand-coded knowledge base will start an AI revolution is naive and has been successfully refuted, in my opinion; I think robotics offers a better foundation for general purpose AI because it allows machines to interact directly with the world in a 3-D, realtime environment and receive the kind of feedback that is critical for self-improvement. I think the Cyc approach complements that, however, and could be a useful addition to some future intellgent robotic agent.
It is easy to imagine that the Cyc database would be very much improved once robots can start extending it automatically based on their own experience. Imagine the knowledge explosion that could take place then, because robots tend to see things differently than people and would probably find knowledge derived from other robots more tractable and useful than human observations.
It's not mainframes. A mainframe is a single large machine that hosts dumb terminals for a single large organization on their private network. Cloud computing is a collection of many server machines hosting PC clients for many clients as a service across the Internet. The only things they have in common are large computational power and the client server model, and of course you could have rented time on a mainframe like you rent time on the cloud. But the technology is different; distributed multi-server computing is not mainframe computing -- it's much more difficult to coordinate.
Car analogy: A mainframe would be like a monolithic large truck making deliveries for a corporation. The cloud is like a self-assembling fleet of small trucks providing delivery like UPS or the postal service, aka delivery as a service (or in this case, software as a service).
That's a sensible counterargument, which seems true unless the camera depends on catching them at a good angle, in which case multiple camera perspectives would provide some additional error reduction.
Your math appears to be correct for one camera. But what if the cameras are everywhere, and the same people are passing in front of the cameras, and they correlate the results? They can increase their certainty and filter out many of the false positives. In addition, for airports, since they have a known list of travelers, they can use this information to reduce the false positives still more. Finally, they can introduce secondary technology such as a 3-D body scan like a Kinect to reduce error still more. With multiple sources of information and technologies, the system becomes viable.
That's a sensible approach. I would also want the ability to take over manually if the self-driving car gets into trouble (software bug, confusing driving conditions, policeman directing traffic, etc.) Sleeping behind the wheel would really be out of the question and probably should be illegal.
It occurs to me that the self-driving car could also be used to evaluate the skill of its human driver and could function as an effective driving test. When your car is equipped with a self-driving feature and you are not using it, it could constantly evaluate your performance. If your skill falls below a certain level, your license could be revoked or limited to daytime driving or whatever.
I found an article dated 2012 that said, "There are still many problems to solve. Google in a recent blog said it needs to build its ability to self-drive when snow covers road markings. The same would hold for fog and heavy rain. Not to mention highways with worn-out pavement markers. Negative terrain (a cliff next to a mountain road) remains difficult to sense. It’s much harder to drive on city streets and deal with cars pulling out of driveways, bicyclists, pedestrians jaywalking, traffic lights, and road restriction signs (no left turn 4-6pm)." (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134262-self-driving-google-cars-300000-miles-0-crashes-if-only-your-pc-was-as-stable) Can't find the blog post, though.
It appears that the cost of schooling in your examples includes only the cost of educational materials for the homeschooled, but also includes the cost of building (the school house), labor (teaching), and administrative overhead in the other case. That's how the home schooler appears to only spend $900. But if you think about it, the home schooler has the advantage of a very low teacher/pupil ratio (1:1? 1:2?) and a dedicated comfortable classroom (the home), plus they don't waste time commuting back and forth. If you count the actual labor cost of home schooling alone, the value of having a dedicated teacher would be far greater than the $9,000/pupil spent by the public school.
Cheating still counts as a win if you find the experience amusing. Imagine a magician with robot speed and dexterity. Sure it's just tricks, but imagine the fun you will have trying to figure them out when the hand is truly MUCH quicker than the eye...
You don't seem to have read the article. The software is not going to supply extra error correction when the hardware has errors. It's going to allow the programmer to specify code operations that can tolerate more errors, which the compiler can then move to the lower-quality hardware. Some software operations, like audio or video playback, can allow errors and still work OK, which allows you to use lower-energy less-quality hardware for those operations.
If they did as you suggest, and tried to fix hardware errors in the software, that would cause the software to take more energy to correct the errors and be more complex besides, which would seem to negate the benefits of the new hardware.
This is not unprecedented since various applications (audio CDs, hearing aids, etc.) already use a lesser standard of error correction.
Just encode them as illiterate, incoherent, childish ramblings and post them to Slashdot. No one will ever find them there... like looking for a needle in a haystack!
Slashdot Mirror
There are at least two possible outcomes.
First possibility: Measuring their driving habits doesn't change anyone's driving habits. In that case, the cost of reducing premiums for safe drivers is transferred to the less safe drivers, who pay more for insurance because they are proactively identified as less safe.
Second possibility: Measuring their driving habits actually improves their driving habits because now they have objective feedback and the desire and knowledge of how to improve. That would actually make driving safer and enable an overall reduction of premiums for everybody because of less accidents.
Don't forget that sending a signal to bad drivers that they are bad and need to improve might actually help keep them alive.
I'll have to wonder if we've just ventured back into slavery, and won't have the time to ask the robot, because he'll be too busy debating the existence of God, or whether to use VI or Emacs, or which is better C or Java, and whether he should run his C or Java on a PC or a MAC.
Thus beganneth the great Robot holy wars of 2034, that will bringeth the almighty Singularity and the extinction of humankind, Amen. But you're wrong... VI is clearly better than Emacs, as every human already knows. I have to ask.. are you an AI? ;-)
It looks like there are some minor business applications in the area of language recognition and expert systems. See their http://www.cyc.com/enterprise-solutions/success-stories page. The idea that some general, hand-coded knowledge base will start an AI revolution is naive and has been successfully refuted, in my opinion; I think robotics offers a better foundation for general purpose AI because it allows machines to interact directly with the world in a 3-D, realtime environment and receive the kind of feedback that is critical for self-improvement. I think the Cyc approach complements that, however, and could be a useful addition to some future intellgent robotic agent.
It is easy to imagine that the Cyc database would be very much improved once robots can start extending it automatically based on their own experience. Imagine the knowledge explosion that could take place then, because robots tend to see things differently than people and would probably find knowledge derived from other robots more tractable and useful than human observations.
It's not mainframes. A mainframe is a single large machine that hosts dumb terminals for a single large organization on their private network. Cloud computing is a collection of many server machines hosting PC clients for many clients as a service across the Internet. The only things they have in common are large computational power and the client server model, and of course you could have rented time on a mainframe like you rent time on the cloud. But the technology is different; distributed multi-server computing is not mainframe computing -- it's much more difficult to coordinate.
Car analogy: A mainframe would be like a monolithic large truck making deliveries for a corporation. The cloud is like a self-assembling fleet of small trucks providing delivery like UPS or the postal service, aka delivery as a service (or in this case, software as a service).
That's a sensible counterargument, which seems true unless the camera depends on catching them at a good angle, in which case multiple camera perspectives would provide some additional error reduction.
Your math appears to be correct for one camera. But what if the cameras are everywhere, and the same people are passing in front of the cameras, and they correlate the results? They can increase their certainty and filter out many of the false positives. In addition, for airports, since they have a known list of travelers, they can use this information to reduce the false positives still more. Finally, they can introduce secondary technology such as a 3-D body scan like a Kinect to reduce error still more. With multiple sources of information and technologies, the system becomes viable.
That's a sensible approach. I would also want the ability to take over manually if the self-driving car gets into trouble (software bug, confusing driving conditions, policeman directing traffic, etc.) Sleeping behind the wheel would really be out of the question and probably should be illegal.
It occurs to me that the self-driving car could also be used to evaluate the skill of its human driver and could function as an effective driving test. When your car is equipped with a self-driving feature and you are not using it, it could constantly evaluate your performance. If your skill falls below a certain level, your license could be revoked or limited to daytime driving or whatever.
I found an article dated 2012 that said, "There are still many problems to solve. Google in a recent blog said it needs to build its ability to self-drive when snow covers road markings. The same would hold for fog and heavy rain. Not to mention highways with worn-out pavement markers. Negative terrain (a cliff next to a mountain road) remains difficult to sense. It’s much harder to drive on city streets and deal with cars pulling out of driveways, bicyclists, pedestrians jaywalking, traffic lights, and road restriction signs (no left turn 4-6pm)." (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134262-self-driving-google-cars-300000-miles-0-crashes-if-only-your-pc-was-as-stable) Can't find the blog post, though.
It's not unusual. I used to beat my sister every month or two as well.
It appears that the cost of schooling in your examples includes only the cost of educational materials for the homeschooled, but also includes the cost of building (the school house), labor (teaching), and administrative overhead in the other case. That's how the home schooler appears to only spend $900. But if you think about it, the home schooler has the advantage of a very low teacher/pupil ratio (1:1? 1:2?) and a dedicated comfortable classroom (the home), plus they don't waste time commuting back and forth. If you count the actual labor cost of home schooling alone, the value of having a dedicated teacher would be far greater than the $9,000/pupil spent by the public school.
Cheating still counts as a win if you find the experience amusing. Imagine a magician with robot speed and dexterity. Sure it's just tricks, but imagine the fun you will have trying to figure them out when the hand is truly MUCH quicker than the eye...
You don't seem to have read the article. The software is not going to supply extra error correction when the hardware has errors. It's going to allow the programmer to specify code operations that can tolerate more errors, which the compiler can then move to the lower-quality hardware. Some software operations, like audio or video playback, can allow errors and still work OK, which allows you to use lower-energy less-quality hardware for those operations. If they did as you suggest, and tried to fix hardware errors in the software, that would cause the software to take more energy to correct the errors and be more complex besides, which would seem to negate the benefits of the new hardware. This is not unprecedented since various applications (audio CDs, hearing aids, etc.) already use a lesser standard of error correction.
Just encode them as illiterate, incoherent, childish ramblings and post them to Slashdot. No one will ever find them there... like looking for a needle in a haystack!
I like to get drunk and pretend I'm not a zombie.