Yes, AI is just strange enough to us that defining it really is an issue in itself. It is similar to quantum events in that we can observe things that seem almost diabolically anti logical. As machines become more and more able to design even more advanced machines we will be in a position of not knowing at all why or how a device works. We surely will value the output of such devices but many people will be frigtened half to death of devices that are clearly far more mentally able than humans can hope to be.
NO way ! We have reached a toggle point. Huge changes will now rapidly take place. And yes, some high tech jobs will be created in the short run but the very nature of AI and automation spells the doom of those high tech jobs as well. The construction industry is beginning to take the hit already. Many jobs for lawyers no longer exist due to computers. Robotics is poised to eliminate many doctors and surgeons. There has been work done on machines that create computer programs on their own. The notion that we will destroy a trade and then be able to train the workers for other trades is a dullards dream. We will see shrinkage in all trades. And then there are the pay issues. A power company employee may be well paid and secure. But a bunch of guys quickly shown how to install solar panels on roofs is not the type of position that will require high pay for the workers. So we are converting jobs that can support a man or family into jobs that will pay so low that the man will need food stamps to survive. The really vital point is whether society will change enough to provide high quality income for those who no longer work. Can basic human beliefs change enough to cope with what is happening now? Or will it be like global warming which has numerous people swimming in denial and ignoring the obvious truth. Maybe we can pray for an ice age such that the warming is offset by nature.
Defining thought and original thought is a very complex issue. But to give a very simple example a common chess machine can be overwhelming against human players. And yes the program functions with a list of rules and values. But the telling point is that machine may well play a unique, winning game. To my way of thinking that is original thought and intelligence. There are alos electronic circuits that have been created by computers that are totally inscrutable to humans.
When a company can not compete the expectation is that they go under. I suspect that the typical failure in industry these days is because a company failed to automate properly. No longer can the price of labor be a valid excuse. Sometimes older company leaders resist new ways and that kills the company. But more often it is the price or difficulty of getting enough money to properly set up a company as changes are expensive. The poor workers suffer while the owners simply move their investment money to a more profitable investment. If anything we need financial programs to support displaced workers and i do not mean get by types of funding them but real, livable wages for all workers whether they are working or not.
Unless things have changed it is US law that forced GPS units to be somewhat inaccurate as the potential to attach such a GPS to a weapon for guidance was perceived as a threat. So I wonder if the US will get such phones. And just why should we need accurate GPS. There are some narrow ocean inlets that are not lighted at night and being off twenty feet can kill you or cause you to sink your boat. Then there is the surveyor expense issue. if you buy land in remote areas getting boundary markers can get very expensive. With accurate GPS you can locate your own property lines and save a fortune. On top of all of that it is quite likely that a foreign nation intending to send a missile would have guidance technologies that did not need GPS systems at all. the entire issue strikes me as a wasteful and ongoing morass of laws, regulations and so-call dangers that probably do not even exist. some where someone made money on this nonsense.
Yep, anyone with a good fifth grade education can build a bomb. There is only one answer ! Absolute ignorance. somewhere around the fifth grade bright students are able to put together various facts that enable bomb building and frankly they don't even have to buy anything suspicious. And Lord help you if you have an eighth grader with a strong interest in chemistry. The only answer is to keep all people in absolute ignorance and spy on them in their homes relentlessly.
There is a certain crossover point that is hard to ignore. The U.S. Supreme Court has already given corporations the same rights as humans. An AI CEO and complete AI ownership should now be possible. That means no stockholders to pay off. As profits occur the AI can now expand its hardware and software or invest in other corporations or even real estate. The AI business now exists to serve only itself. That should give a huge advantage over corporations using human ownership and management. It could get to the point that no human operated business could ever hope to compete. It is like a mirror for what is occurring in the human labor market. One machine replaces 500 miners. A cell phone system eliminates almost all operators. Accountants being slaughtered by bookkeeping software. Drivers being eliminated by self driving cars. I am not one bit against this technology but I am angry at a system too stupid to prepare for the inevitable end of human employment.
Maximum sustained means very little when gists or tornadoes inside the hurricane reach 300 mph. Twelve years ago you should have seen the twisted steel I beams looking like a giants soda straw all bent and twisted from a storm that was a class three in Stuart,Fl.. Some places looked like a bombing raid had smacked them head on. Some people were mumbling while standing where there home was now completely absent. And even wind speed is not where it is at. Imagine a Cadillac getting airborne at 200mph and hitting your living room wall at that speed? Sometimes its a nice heavy yacht that lands on your home or penetrates the walls. those wonderful hurricane shutters can act like an umbrella, turn inside out and become an arrow head going through you glass windows.
OK so a Jew is traveling and wants his search engine to find the nearest synagogue for services. Being able to find every synagogue within 30 miles in a search engine would be a huge aid to race haters. (I am aware that Jews are not a race.) But if you start eliminating information that could be very useful for innocent users you are making a huge mistake. Let the loonies rant and rave. Let them march about in their weird choice of costumes. it makes it so easy to follow them home and pay special attention to them later.
Free speech includes ignorant speech, idiotic ideas and even speech designed to flame the fan of hatred. Trying to limit free speech is expensive, troublesome and almost a total failure. The centuries old fight against pornography is a great example. Today we have more access to a huge variety in porn than ever before. About the only item that has been beaten down is child porn simply because almost all people hate child molesters. and even when we put the sick types in prison or other facility we spend a huge sum getting the job done. It is a legitimate question to ask what would happen if we let the child porn industry run full throttle and use the money that we would have used squashing child porn and put that sum into cancer or heart disease cures? How many lives would be saved? how many children would actually be harmed if we change policies. Can we even get dollar amounts on the money used to stop child porn? My guess it is in the billions per year. It is similar to looking at the money used to fight prostitution. Being that some people only get by in life as sexual providers and would do far worse if they could not rent their bodies to the public and the money spent for cops, jails and the like for these people does legal restraint do anything more than cause great harm to the public. When the enemy is at the beach head and one needs tanks and guns and troops just how does spending money fighting porn and hooking count for anything if you can't afford a winning military?
I seriously doubt that enough batteries can be produced to power 1,000,000 electric cars in less than two years.Simply building the factories to make the batteries will take several years. It is a wonderful idea but the time table is not based upon reality. These cars would also need to be affordable and the population of India is not known for being rich.
That which can be seen is public, not private. It really is that simple. Feelings are another issue. Many people want to be covert for a host of reasons and feel that even a license plate on their car somehow robs them of their privacy. It is 100% nonsense. The very real question is whether humans can exist in an honest world. I suspect that they can not. there is so much secretive nonsense in so may peoples' lives that society might become completely unhinged if we really know each other.
Trump is aware that ending the dreamers act will create a lot of rage, anger and resentment. He does not want that rage dumped upon him so he passed the hot potato to congress. It is an all republican house and senate so if they say no then the rage will fall upon the republican party. So they have a motive to pass a law enabling the dreamers to stay. But if they pass the hot potato back to Trump then he can claim that he can not over ride the will of congress and deport the dreamers. As usual Trump could care less about the 800,000 dreamers, their relatives, friends and spouses. All he seeks is not to take the political hit that such a rat bastard policy will surely cause, The man would ruin millions of lives just to stroke his sick ego.
There is one reason for technology. Technology exists to eliminate human effort. We are now just at the point at which technology is reaching its objective. Soon there will be almost zero need for any human workers. That also implies that owners have a huge problem as well as they need buyers with spendable incomes. Ultimately the pay will have to come from government and the taxes will have to be levied upon the people who own businesses.
No ! Companies do not have to hire more employees due to more products being sold. They simply need more automation and also need to get rid of employees as human workers are cost negative. Further, when the company makes more money that have no reason at all to spend or invest it in the US.. In other words the notion of trickle down economics is a sick joke.
Hurricanes seem to come in two types. There are storms in which wind is the problem and storms in which rain is the real enemy and the winds quite tolerable. What happened to Houston was a wet storm that will cause massive property damage and very few deaths. Katrina was a wind storm that force the damns and levies to fail causing huge numbers of deaths. Irma is a wind storm and more so it is hell on a stick. If that storm strikes Miami I would expect almost all homes and buildings to be leveled. Winds of 185 mph. with gusts at 225 mph are sever enough to pretty much erase a city from the face of the Earth. there are about two million people in Miami. Evacuation is impossible. I am 110 miles north of Miami and a potential victim of this storm. God help Houston if this storm happens to strike them. Now I see on the radar that there are two more hurricanes trailing Irma. Now every right winger should shout at once "There is no global warming." That way when they open their pie hole I can shove a brick down their throats.
In court Fox News has argued that they are an entertainment organization and not a news service. It is their view that they can lie as part of the entertainment. They seek ignorant viewers who get great pleasure in someone seeming to agree with their beliefs. their viewers are brainwashed and very hard to rescue.
If the government has data I feel as if i should have access to that data. After all, the public pays for that data to be collected. And yes, I can see how that data could easily be misused to plan or commit crimes. On the other hand maybe i need to know where my teenage kids go or perhaps a wife might be straying. My neighbor may seem a bit off and i may want to see where he goes and if he really works at the job he claims to do. I even question whether anyone has a legitimate reason to have any secrets or privacy at all. In today's America I am willing to bet that the underground and black market economies are as large as the official economies. It is a sick state of affairs when any individual needs to have off the books income and the like. How can we correct that situation if we can not focus on individuals and drag the reality, kicking and screaming, into the light of day. Today quite a few young men will ask girls to marry them. Some of those girls have a serious history of really radical behaviors and they hide it well. Wouldn't it be nice to see where she parked he car three years ago? And in turn she could check you out as well. If the Truth is to set us free should we not encourage the truths to be known to all?
We have had several decades of noise over the pay of American workers vs. the pay rates of foreign workers ruining the US ability to export goods. Poof ! There goes that issue right down the toilet. Now the issue becomes whether my robot can work faster, cheaper or better than their robot. The price of labor now is out of the equation. But will the product be less expensive for the public? Hell no! Compare it to the coal industry. One machine can easily replace one hundred coal miners. Now look at the price of coal decade by decade and it has dome nothing but rise sharply. Or how about baseball bats. When i was a kid a bat was a trivial expense. Now highly automated machines make those bats far, far faster than human labor ever could. Now go price the bats. Does $150.00 for a bat surprise you?
In 1952 I got a brand new, good quality trombone for about $100.. Today a similar trombone would go for $2,000. Part of the reason for the inflation that is behind this all is the ongoing cost of wars. The many billions we burned up fighting wars are still being paid off and inflation is one trick the government can use to dump national debt. If a dollar becomes worth one penny then we are only paying back 1% of our war debts and other national debts as well.
Perhaps we could give cash rewards to parents of students who excel in schools and thus make parents more likely to push their kids to do well in school, Government needs to figure out how to give more to the people rather than dreaming up ways to take money from people. Worse yet our government has programs that work in opposition to other programs. For example we have had decades of government begging us to drive less or use less gas. Now there are states that tax bicycle trailers. People have bicycle trailers to go for groceries rather than use their cars. So some states decided to tax bicycle trailers and requite a license plate for the trailers. That is enough to keep quite a few people in their cars rather than on a bicycle. Instead of that nonsense why do we not have a tax on gas guzzlers? How about the states that tax hybrid cars claiming that they don't burn enough gas and therefore must pay more taxes?
Right now people ignore serious issues as they assume science and technology will save them. For example we have a world food shortage and a quickly growing population. The public assume that some sort of magical farm science will enable the massive increase in food production that is already needed and increases every day. Science is not a savior. It is foolish to simply assume that many problems will be solved or controlled. The reverse psychology needs to be in play. For example we probably can not feed 14 billion souls and therefore must limit reproduction until such time that we can feed and house that many people. So yes, fund science big time, encourage science, teach science. But make the public very aware that many goals may never be reached. Problems that occur with technology are rarely noticed. For example most people feel some concern about self driving cars crashing. But how many of those same people take into account that traffic driving offenses would cease to exist. The police departments live over the fines they collect. In essence self driving cars might mean the loss of police departments. Or it may mean that a new tax must be placed upon the people to replace the traffic fine income. The punishment we used to apply to guilty drivers would then be paid by innocent people as well.
The roof of a large trailer looks like an ideal place to have a huge bank of solar cells. Large trucks could lead the way in going to electric vehicles.
I believe that any large software company has agents inside it whether they know it or not. I could be wrong but governments seem to feel compelled to get involved in any form of conversation.
Brick is such an inferior building method that i am surprised that it is legal to use and more shocked that a buyer would spend money on a brick home or office building. Brick fails too easily. An earthquake, nearby explosion or even a serious wind storm can bring down a brick building and it also does not do well in a fire. To me bringing in high tech robotics to build with brick is ludicrous.
Rapid change is upon us. In the past a good school record implied one would have a decent life. That is no longer true. These days there are less job opportunities for jobs that do not involve a lot of misery. College has also gone over the top in expense and incurring debts large enough to get a degree may be a seriously bad idea. We have already seen a large number of people dropping out of the workforce. I wonder if we are not also seeing young people sort of dropping out of education even though they may still go to school. Quite a few people now make a living in such a way that the system scarcely knows that they exist. There are plenty of people who drive about picking up scrap metal that is listed on Craigs for free. We also have people who pick up wood pallets and firewood and sell what they haul. There are even people making a living with metal detectors and even people that create gold jewelry in their homes, all without any paper trail at all. I wonder how many people earn a living simply selling small amounts of pot. Perhaps one third of US wages are in an underground that remains occult and is rarely detected. Electronic money could change all of that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, AI is just strange enough to us that defining it really is an issue in itself. It is similar to quantum events in that we can observe things that seem almost diabolically anti logical. As machines become more and more able to design even more advanced machines we will be in a position of not knowing at all why or how a device works. We surely will value the output of such devices but many people will be frigtened half to death of devices that are clearly far more mentally able than humans can hope to be.
NO way ! We have reached a toggle point. Huge changes will now rapidly take place. And yes, some high tech jobs will be created in the short run but the very nature of AI and automation spells the doom of those high tech jobs as well. The construction industry is beginning to take the hit already. Many jobs for lawyers no longer exist due to computers. Robotics is poised to eliminate many doctors and surgeons. There has been work done on machines that create computer programs on their own. The notion that we will destroy a trade and then be able to train the workers for other trades is a dullards dream. We will see shrinkage in all trades. And then there are the pay issues. A power company employee may be well paid and secure. But a bunch of guys quickly shown how to install solar panels on roofs is not the type of position that will require high pay for the workers. So we are converting jobs that can support a man or family into jobs that will pay so low that the man will need food stamps to survive. The really vital point is whether society will change enough to provide high quality income for those who no longer work. Can basic human beliefs change enough to cope with what is happening now? Or will it be like global warming which has numerous people swimming in denial and ignoring the obvious truth. Maybe we can pray for an ice age such that the warming is offset by nature.
Defining thought and original thought is a very complex issue. But to give a very simple example a common chess machine can be overwhelming against human players. And yes the program functions with a list of rules and values. But the telling point is that machine may well play a unique, winning game. To my way of thinking that is original thought and intelligence. There are alos electronic circuits that have been created by computers that are totally inscrutable to humans.
When a company can not compete the expectation is that they go under. I suspect that the typical failure in industry these days is because a company failed to automate properly. No longer can the price of labor be a valid excuse. Sometimes older company leaders resist new ways and that kills the company. But more often it is the price or difficulty of getting enough money to properly set up a company as changes are expensive. The poor workers suffer while the owners simply move their investment money to a more profitable investment. If anything we need financial programs to support displaced workers and i do not mean get by types of funding them but real, livable wages for all workers whether they are working or not.
Unless things have changed it is US law that forced GPS units to be somewhat inaccurate as the potential to attach such a GPS to a weapon for guidance was perceived as a threat. So I wonder if the US will get such phones. And just why should we need accurate GPS. There are some narrow ocean inlets that are not lighted at night and being off twenty feet can kill you or cause you to sink your boat. Then there is the surveyor expense issue. if you buy land in remote areas getting boundary markers can get very expensive. With accurate GPS you can locate your own property lines and save a fortune. On top of all of that it is quite likely that a foreign nation intending to send a missile would have guidance technologies that did not need GPS systems at all. the entire issue strikes me as a wasteful and ongoing morass of laws, regulations and so-call dangers that probably do not even exist. some where someone made money on this nonsense.
Yep, anyone with a good fifth grade education can build a bomb. There is only one answer ! Absolute ignorance. somewhere around the fifth grade bright students are able to put together various facts that enable bomb building and frankly they don't even have to buy anything suspicious. And Lord help you if you have an eighth grader with a strong interest in chemistry. The only answer is to keep all people in absolute ignorance and spy on them in their homes relentlessly.
There is a certain crossover point that is hard to ignore. The U.S. Supreme Court has already given corporations the same rights as humans. An AI CEO and complete AI ownership should now be possible. That means no stockholders to pay off. As profits occur the AI can now expand its hardware and software or invest in other corporations or even real estate. The AI business now exists to serve only itself. That should give a huge advantage over corporations using human ownership and management. It could get to the point that no human operated business could ever hope to compete. It is like a mirror for what is occurring in the human labor market. One machine replaces 500 miners. A cell phone system eliminates almost all operators. Accountants being slaughtered by bookkeeping software. Drivers being eliminated by self driving cars. I am not one bit against this technology but I am angry at a system too stupid to prepare for the inevitable end of human employment.
Maximum sustained means very little when gists or tornadoes inside the hurricane reach 300 mph. Twelve years ago you should have seen the twisted steel I beams looking like a giants soda straw all bent and twisted from a storm that was a class three in Stuart,Fl.. Some places looked like a bombing raid had smacked them head on. Some people were mumbling while standing where there home was now completely absent. And even wind speed is not where it is at. Imagine a Cadillac getting airborne at 200mph and hitting your living room wall at that speed? Sometimes its a nice heavy yacht that lands on your home or penetrates the walls. those wonderful hurricane shutters can act like an umbrella, turn inside out and become an arrow head going through you glass windows.
OK so a Jew is traveling and wants his search engine to find the nearest synagogue for services. Being able to find every synagogue within 30 miles in a search engine would be a huge aid to race haters. (I am aware that Jews are not a race.) But if you start eliminating information that could be very useful for innocent users you are making a huge mistake. Let the loonies rant and rave. Let them march about in their weird choice of costumes. it makes it so easy to follow them home and pay special attention to them later.
Free speech includes ignorant speech, idiotic ideas and even speech designed to flame the fan of hatred. Trying to limit free speech is expensive, troublesome and almost a total failure. The centuries old fight against pornography is a great example. Today we have more access to a huge variety in porn than ever before. About the only item that has been beaten down is child porn simply because almost all people hate child molesters. and even when we put the sick types in prison or other facility we spend a huge sum getting the job done. It is a legitimate question to ask what would happen if we let the child porn industry run full throttle and use the money that we would have used squashing child porn and put that sum into cancer or heart disease cures? How many lives would be saved? how many children would actually be harmed if we change policies. Can we even get dollar amounts on the money used to stop child porn? My guess it is in the billions per year. It is similar to looking at the money used to fight prostitution. Being that some people only get by in life as sexual providers and would do far worse if they could not rent their bodies to the public and the money spent for cops, jails and the like for these people does legal restraint do anything more than cause great harm to the public. When the enemy is at the beach head and one needs tanks and guns and troops just how does spending money fighting porn and hooking count for anything if you can't afford a winning military?
I seriously doubt that enough batteries can be produced to power 1,000,000 electric cars in less than two years.Simply building the factories to make the batteries will take several years. It is a wonderful idea but the time table is not based upon reality. These cars would also need to be affordable and the population of India is not known for being rich.
That which can be seen is public, not private. It really is that simple. Feelings are another issue. Many people want to be covert for a host of reasons and feel that even a license plate on their car somehow robs them of their privacy. It is 100% nonsense. The very real question is whether humans can exist in an honest world. I suspect that they can not. there is so much secretive nonsense in so may peoples' lives that society might become completely unhinged if we really know each other.
Trump is aware that ending the dreamers act will create a lot of rage, anger and resentment. He does not want that rage dumped upon him so he passed the hot potato to congress. It is an all republican house and senate so if they say no then the rage will fall upon the republican party. So they have a motive to pass a law enabling the dreamers to stay. But if they pass the hot potato back to Trump then he can claim that he can not over ride the will of congress and deport the dreamers. As usual Trump could care less about the 800,000 dreamers, their relatives, friends and spouses. All he seeks is not to take the political hit that such a rat bastard policy will surely cause, The man would ruin millions of lives just to stroke his sick ego.
There is one reason for technology. Technology exists to eliminate human effort. We are now just at the point at which technology is reaching its objective. Soon there will be almost zero need for any human workers. That also implies that owners have a huge problem as well as they need buyers with spendable incomes. Ultimately the pay will have to come from government and the taxes will have to be levied upon the people who own businesses.
No ! Companies do not have to hire more employees due to more products being sold. They simply need more automation and also need to get rid of employees as human workers are cost negative. Further, when the company makes more money that have no reason at all to spend or invest it in the US.. In other words the notion of trickle down economics is a sick joke.
Hurricanes seem to come in two types. There are storms in which wind is the problem and storms in which rain is the real enemy and the winds quite tolerable. What happened to Houston was a wet storm that will cause massive property damage and very few deaths. Katrina was a wind storm that force the damns and levies to fail causing huge numbers of deaths. Irma is a wind storm and more so it is hell on a stick. If that storm strikes Miami I would expect almost all homes and buildings to be leveled. Winds of 185 mph. with gusts at 225 mph are sever enough to pretty much erase a city from the face of the Earth. there are about two million people in Miami. Evacuation is impossible. I am 110 miles north of Miami and a potential victim of this storm. God help Houston if this storm happens to strike them. Now I see on the radar that there are two more hurricanes trailing Irma. Now every right winger should shout at once "There is no global warming." That way when they open their pie hole I can shove a brick down their throats.
In court Fox News has argued that they are an entertainment organization and not a news service. It is their view that they can lie as part of the entertainment. They seek ignorant viewers who get great pleasure in someone seeming to agree with their beliefs. their viewers are brainwashed and very hard to rescue.
If the government has data I feel as if i should have access to that data. After all, the public pays for that data to be collected. And yes, I can see how that data could easily be misused to plan or commit crimes. On the other hand maybe i need to know where my teenage kids go or perhaps a wife might be straying. My neighbor may seem a bit off and i may want to see where he goes and if he really works at the job he claims to do. I even question whether anyone has a legitimate reason to have any secrets or privacy at all. In today's America I am willing to bet that the underground and black market economies are as large as the official economies. It is a sick state of affairs when any individual needs to have off the books income and the like. How can we correct that situation if we can not focus on individuals and drag the reality, kicking and screaming, into the light of day. Today quite a few young men will ask girls to marry them. Some of those girls have a serious history of really radical behaviors and they hide it well. Wouldn't it be nice to see where she parked he car three years ago? And in turn she could check you out as well. If the Truth is to set us free should we not encourage the truths to be known to all?
We have had several decades of noise over the pay of American workers vs. the pay rates of foreign workers ruining the US ability to export goods. Poof ! There goes that issue right down the toilet. Now the issue becomes whether my robot can work faster, cheaper or better than their robot. The price of labor now is out of the equation. But will the product be less expensive for the public? Hell no! Compare it to the coal industry. One machine can easily replace one hundred coal miners. Now look at the price of coal decade by decade and it has dome nothing but rise sharply. Or how about baseball bats. When i was a kid a bat was a trivial expense. Now highly automated machines make those bats far, far faster than human labor ever could. Now go price the bats. Does $150.00 for a bat surprise you? In 1952 I got a brand new, good quality trombone for about $100.. Today a similar trombone would go for $2,000. Part of the reason for the inflation that is behind this all is the ongoing cost of wars. The many billions we burned up fighting wars are still being paid off and inflation is one trick the government can use to dump national debt. If a dollar becomes worth one penny then we are only paying back 1% of our war debts and other national debts as well.
Perhaps we could give cash rewards to parents of students who excel in schools and thus make parents more likely to push their kids to do well in school, Government needs to figure out how to give more to the people rather than dreaming up ways to take money from people. Worse yet our government has programs that work in opposition to other programs. For example we have had decades of government begging us to drive less or use less gas. Now there are states that tax bicycle trailers. People have bicycle trailers to go for groceries rather than use their cars. So some states decided to tax bicycle trailers and requite a license plate for the trailers. That is enough to keep quite a few people in their cars rather than on a bicycle. Instead of that nonsense why do we not have a tax on gas guzzlers? How about the states that tax hybrid cars claiming that they don't burn enough gas and therefore must pay more taxes?
Right now people ignore serious issues as they assume science and technology will save them. For example we have a world food shortage and a quickly growing population. The public assume that some sort of magical farm science will enable the massive increase in food production that is already needed and increases every day. Science is not a savior. It is foolish to simply assume that many problems will be solved or controlled. The reverse psychology needs to be in play. For example we probably can not feed 14 billion souls and therefore must limit reproduction until such time that we can feed and house that many people. So yes, fund science big time, encourage science, teach science. But make the public very aware that many goals may never be reached. Problems that occur with technology are rarely noticed. For example most people feel some concern about self driving cars crashing. But how many of those same people take into account that traffic driving offenses would cease to exist. The police departments live over the fines they collect. In essence self driving cars might mean the loss of police departments. Or it may mean that a new tax must be placed upon the people to replace the traffic fine income. The punishment we used to apply to guilty drivers would then be paid by innocent people as well.
The roof of a large trailer looks like an ideal place to have a huge bank of solar cells. Large trucks could lead the way in going to electric vehicles.
I believe that any large software company has agents inside it whether they know it or not. I could be wrong but governments seem to feel compelled to get involved in any form of conversation.
Brick is such an inferior building method that i am surprised that it is legal to use and more shocked that a buyer would spend money on a brick home or office building. Brick fails too easily. An earthquake, nearby explosion or even a serious wind storm can bring down a brick building and it also does not do well in a fire. To me bringing in high tech robotics to build with brick is ludicrous.
Rapid change is upon us. In the past a good school record implied one would have a decent life. That is no longer true. These days there are less job opportunities for jobs that do not involve a lot of misery. College has also gone over the top in expense and incurring debts large enough to get a degree may be a seriously bad idea. We have already seen a large number of people dropping out of the workforce. I wonder if we are not also seeing young people sort of dropping out of education even though they may still go to school. Quite a few people now make a living in such a way that the system scarcely knows that they exist. There are plenty of people who drive about picking up scrap metal that is listed on Craigs for free. We also have people who pick up wood pallets and firewood and sell what they haul. There are even people making a living with metal detectors and even people that create gold jewelry in their homes, all without any paper trail at all. I wonder how many people earn a living simply selling small amounts of pot. Perhaps one third of US wages are in an underground that remains occult and is rarely detected. Electronic money could change all of that.