But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual.
I never realized people in prison are forced to do things against their will. Are they forced to be there against their will too?
This very well may break many laws prisons need to follow, but forcing inmates to do things against their will seems to be built into the concept of a prison.
Despite repeated warnings by sci-fi authors, video games, and movie producers, scientists insist that this must happen. Even though we all know AI would probably at least rule us, at worst kill us, they keep running their experiments. Why do people who are allegedly so smart want to do something so reckless?
1. The creators believe they will profit from the work in the short term. Sure it might wipe out humanity in the long term, but at least I can get funding for my work now. If they believe their great grand kids won't be affected then at least no human they'll ever care about will be harmed. 2. There is the belief that anything which can be invented with current technology will be invented by someone, so you better have similar capabilities in your economy / military or you will fall woefully behind. 3. Similar to #2, those with who are worried others would be reckless with the technology may want to develop it themselves so it can be done in a more responsible way. Even if not having the technology at all may be most responsible, they feel that is not a realistic option so they go with the second best option (responsible parties having the tech first).
How can you use something that you can't even define? Flumbo is good for you, Flumbo will make you big, strong and wow! Wtf?
There are plenty of definitions within the AI field. Machine learning, deep neural nets, decision trees, etc. A set of terminology is obviously necessary to do anything in the field.
But worrying about a general definition of AI is kind of like trying to define what consciousness truly is. Still a useful endeavor, but not that useful to the doctor trying to revive an unconscious patient.
Patent-count is not a measure of leadership. It is a measure of ego, greed and lack of ethics. In that, China may indeed have overtaken the US.
It is basically a measure of investment. You aren't going to invest significant money in research without protecting that investment with patents. Not unless you just consider the investment to be a donation to the common good.
That said, it is a very imprecise measurement because not all investment leads to significant returns. Coca-Cola investment millions in creating "New Coke" decades ago, and all of that investment was lost. Any patent on the New-Coke formula is essentially worthless. But taken in the aggregate, such as the patent portfolio of an entire country, it is probably a very good proxy of total R&D spend and the return on that investment in the industry of AI.
They hold the most patents. That's all. We're still a far cry from answering the all important question: What does "AI" mean anyway?
Very few people are wasting their time on that question. They are finding real world uses for modern AI techniques, and expanding on that toolbox of techniques, not wasting their time on pedantic argument like whether or not this will help lead to strong/general AI.
It is still one of many important questions in the field of AI, but it is irrelevant to nearly all of the many uses AI has for us right now.
It doesn't matter what designs a person or an AI comes up with, because people will always want something new.
In addition to the novelty factor, new products also depend on new scientific advances such as in materials science. Without today's batteries, LCD screens, processors, etc. you could not build a modern smartphone in 1990. The same goes for cars, TVs, refrigerators, etc.
If you look at things with little to no scientific advances, there is less need for new products. The wood furniture in my house does not look that much different than what my parents had, and in many cases were picked up at high end estate sales so they really are decades old. But then again there is still the novelty factor for many/most people, which creates fads in probably every industry.
No, because it implies all investment is worthless and only labor is worth anything. It really is a horrible analogy. In such a world capital would be worth next to nothing.
Your analogy sucks balls. Hopefully you knew that because if not you are one dumb fuck.
The OP implied movie investors should not get paid royalties because they aren't doing any actual work after the movie is produced. I compared that to the dividends and other returns you would get from your 401k, in which the 401k investment is analogous to the investment of producing a movie.
How exactly does the analogy fall apart? If you don't think movie producers should continue to make money on their investment for years/decades after their initial investment, why should a 401k investor?
You missed the point. The OP was implying that movie studios and other investors in movies shouldn't get royalties and other ongoing payments because they aren't performing any actual work after the movie is created. This is essentially the same as saying you shouldn't get dividends from stock you own because you aren't performing any actual work.
So if this is how the world worked, the artist could put money in a 401k but it wouldn't matter because capital is worthless. Only labor would be worth anything. I know it is ridiculous, just like thinking movie studios should get paid royalties on existing work.
Just like a plumber gets $1 every time a toilet he installed gets flushed and electricians get 10 cents every time a circuit they installed is used. What? No? Weird. Some people have to continue to work to get paid? Unreal.
I wonder if after you retire you would be happy if your 401k went to $0 and/or your pension vanished. Because that is what would happen in a world where previous investment was worthless and continued work was the only way to make income.
Most of his edits are very minor, like updating "1911-12" to "1911–12" (notice the difference?). He made 16 edits in a 2 minute period earlier this morning mostly with a script updating dashes and changing article categories from "Sports Events" to "Sports Events in Europe".
I have no idea how impactful his bigger edits are, and TFA and other articles written recently have shown pages he did considerable work on, but I would assume the vast majority (99%+ possibly) are very minor edits. Granted even minor changes can be helpful; perhaps it will be easier to search for those soccer games now that they are labelled as occurring in Europe (I doubt it, but I don't know for sure).
You could just look at his edit history if you want to see what those 3 million edits consist of. It appears that many of the edits are very small, and so far today he mostly added and edited categories on a few dozen articles. For instance he edited four soccer game articles and changed the category from "August 19xx sports events" to "August 19xx sports event in Europe". That consisted of 6 edits in 6 articles within 2 minutes. Another half dozen edits were editing dashes on various articles he had previously edited using a script (changing "1911-12" to "1911–12").
I have only looked at 20 of his edits which mostly took place in a 10 minute period, but it at least shows how his total edit count can get so high after only 13 years. He made 15 edits in a 6 minute period earlier this morning.
You have an odd view of what democratic means. Just because I'm disappointed that an increasing number of articles are decreasingly technical, doesn't behoove me to post articles more to my liking. And, if by democracy you mean a right to free speech, then I have just as much right to complain about what I read.
I think he meant Democracy as in each citizen has a duty in participating and maintaining the democratic institution. So if you don't like the quality of the discussion, participate. If you don't like the quality of the article submissions, participate. You certainly have the right to complain even if you aren't taking on any personal responsibility to do anything about it, but people will be less likely to care about your ranting.
You pointed out a good reason to leave equipment, but the original post said anyone buying equipment is "doing it wrong". This is simply false. If anything the companies who cannot afford computers up front are doing something wrong.
If you leave anything, you are giving additional profit to a financing company. Maybe the opportunity costs are high enough to lease the equipment, sometimes they aren't. Either way no one can make a blanket statement that it is always better to either lease or buy equipment.
The benefits of keeping jobs in our own country fall disproportionately on our working class. Screw efficiency, we're talking about people's lives here.
It won't be the working class who benefits from most of the manufacturing jobs which are reshored back to the USA. It will be the robotics engineers, marketing staff, and sales departments. This is the biggest problem in this debate, IMHO - we don't even know what we are debating about. Increasing manufacturing in the USA is no longer about bringing back $60k/yr jobs with pensions for people with no college degrees.
Jobs for the working class are now in sectors like customer service and retail. Since these do not pay nearly as much, we need to find ways to help them live a good life regardless of their economic value to society. I personally am a proponent of a universal basic income, but there are plenty of options. They all likely require increased progressive taxation, however, and the very politicians claiming to focus on the working class are the ones fighting against the programs which would actually help them.
Yeah, I should have just passed by your original troll comment without giving it a second thought. Nothing valuable will come from further discussion with a person like you. My bad.
You're ignorant comments at the end hid an insightful post in the beginning.
For decades our economy (and environment) benefited from moving entire sectors of the manufacturing industry overseas. The USA has remained a manufacturing giant overall (in 2005 China was 20% of global manufacturing while USA was 18%) but this article illustrates the USA lost key capabilities in many sectors of manufacturing. This is not necessarily a bad thing since we gain significantly from our partnership with developing countries, but it is certainly a concern we should address.
About 10 years ago, as the economy was recovering from the financial crisis, manufacturing jobs starting "reshoring" back to the US. We went from 11.4 million manufacturing jobs in 2010 to 12.4 million jobs in 2016, and is now at about 12.8 million. The trend line for the past 8 years is pretty constant except for a bad year in 2016.
Unfortunately now we have a President who cares more about his talking points than actual progress. Creating artificial reasons to reshore manufacturing (like the trade war) instead of real market-based reasons only damages our economy overall while other developed economies take advantage of our foolishness. Being economically inefficient on purpose is not a great strategy.
Slashdot, where obvious truths are modded down and the poster flamed by a bunch of panty-waste, communist trash. I see it was your turn to get this maltreatment.
Everything he said up until the "fixing all of the destruction Bush and Obama inflicted on America" part was insightful, but then it took a turn for the worst. The post is correctly labeled as a Troll.
My laptop is a Lenovo running Windows, and it is over $2k. Macbooks are pretty expensive, but they also use top quality parts throughout. The same goes for other flagship machines such as Surface Pro/Book laptops and the Thinkpad P52 (what I have). I am having trouble finding configurations for a 17" 4k Dell with H series processors and all the other bells and whistles, but I bet it would be over $2k as well.
The Mac tax on laptops is not that high. Comparable Windows laptops are almost as much, as long as you are really looking at comparable machines. I still built my own desktop though since you can easily save $1-2k on a top of the line build. I can't build my own laptop though.
While a half dozen people have already pointed out the Mac Pro is not a laptop, no one mentioned there are still reasons to buy a $3k laptop. Laptops which act more like mobile workstations than a laptop often have very powerful processors, large high resolution screens, lots of RAM, large SSD hard drives, powerful video cards, and large batteries. I use a similar machine at work (closer to $2k because I don't need a good video card), and while my company could save $500 or more by getting me a desktop having a mobile work computer provides a lot of freedom. I can bring my computer to meetings, work from home (compliance requires I use a work machine at home), and work while on work trips.
When you have employees costing the company $100k-$200k per year, a 1% productivity enhancement from a better machine can pay for a $1k more expensive laptop in under a year.
Just because most people can do their jobs on 13" ultra slim laptops, doesn't mean everyone can.
Not even close to the same thing. I work at a small under 1000 employee financial institution, and we perform multiple audits per year on our vendors and have dozens of audits performed on us each year. No breach of our clients' data would ever just be our vendor's fault. We could certainly share blame, and sue our vendor for damages, but the lose of trust from our clients would be by far the worst outcome.
If the point is to show that the AI is better at making strategic decisions, then yes, you must limit it so that it works under the same constraints as a human.
Not necessarily. Even two humans generally approach strategic decisions in different ways. Some may focus on high level concepts while others focus on certain details and work their way up. Showing that an AI can make strategic decisions is far more important than the AI making those decisions in the same way a human would. The decisions being made are what is important.
Anyone bringing up general AI in these discussions just likes hearing themselves talk (or type in this case). It is a meaningless argumentative discussion. I doubt anyone working on Alphastar would say their goal is to get closer to general AI. Their goal is more likely to push the boundaries of what decisions we can start to offload to AI, and are using games to do it.
Mostly this just illustrates the shifting definition of being a millionaire. The still most common definition is someone with a million dollars in assets, but as you have pointed out that is no longer a significant amount of money. It represents about $30-40k per year in retirement income (increasing with inflation). But the term is more frequently being used to describe someone who consistently makes $1 million per year in income. This requires either a very high paying job or over $25 million in assets. It probably won't be long until the latter definition is more common, because it more accurately reflects what people have in mind when using the term millionaire.
In 2007, the crash was the result of repackaged bad mortgage debt traded like it was good debt.
There are many more scenarios than just a debt crisis which could cause our next recession. Inflation hasn't been a problem even with significant stimulus, but the causes of inflation tend to lag and can be hard to fight so runaway inflation is still a legitimate concern. Corporate debt is over 50% higher as a percentage of GDP today than it was in 2007, caused by incredibly cheap interest rates, which can certainly cause small dips in the economy to have much larger ripple effects. Higher inflation which is generally combated with higher interest rates would exacerbate this problem. And then there are always trade wars, which we are already seeing on a very small scale without many responsible parties in power to combat if it gets out of control.
I'm not saying I think another great recession is likely, but there are certainly many potential causes of one on the horizon.
These tech companies are starting to feel significant push back from consumers on data privacy issues, but they risk losing competitive advantage if they are the first to budge. The data is just to valuable. The government setting up laws which help protect privacy while creating a competitive environment where everyone is following the same rules is perhaps the only good option. They certainly aren't capable of governing themselves in a way which protects consumers (not that any other industry has ever been able to do that without government intervention).
Slashdot Mirror
But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual.
I never realized people in prison are forced to do things against their will. Are they forced to be there against their will too?
This very well may break many laws prisons need to follow, but forcing inmates to do things against their will seems to be built into the concept of a prison.
Despite repeated warnings by sci-fi authors, video games, and movie producers, scientists insist that this must happen. Even though we all know AI would probably at least rule us, at worst kill us, they keep running their experiments. Why do people who are allegedly so smart want to do something so reckless?
1. The creators believe they will profit from the work in the short term. Sure it might wipe out humanity in the long term, but at least I can get funding for my work now. If they believe their great grand kids won't be affected then at least no human they'll ever care about will be harmed.
2. There is the belief that anything which can be invented with current technology will be invented by someone, so you better have similar capabilities in your economy / military or you will fall woefully behind.
3. Similar to #2, those with who are worried others would be reckless with the technology may want to develop it themselves so it can be done in a more responsible way. Even if not having the technology at all may be most responsible, they feel that is not a realistic option so they go with the second best option (responsible parties having the tech first).
Those are just three off the top of my head.
How can you use something that you can't even define? Flumbo is good for you, Flumbo will make you big, strong and wow! Wtf?
There are plenty of definitions within the AI field. Machine learning, deep neural nets, decision trees, etc. A set of terminology is obviously necessary to do anything in the field.
But worrying about a general definition of AI is kind of like trying to define what consciousness truly is. Still a useful endeavor, but not that useful to the doctor trying to revive an unconscious patient.
Patent-count is not a measure of leadership. It is a measure of ego, greed and lack of ethics. In that, China may indeed have overtaken the US.
It is basically a measure of investment. You aren't going to invest significant money in research without protecting that investment with patents. Not unless you just consider the investment to be a donation to the common good.
That said, it is a very imprecise measurement because not all investment leads to significant returns. Coca-Cola investment millions in creating "New Coke" decades ago, and all of that investment was lost. Any patent on the New-Coke formula is essentially worthless. But taken in the aggregate, such as the patent portfolio of an entire country, it is probably a very good proxy of total R&D spend and the return on that investment in the industry of AI.
They hold the most patents. That's all. We're still a far cry from answering the all important question: What does "AI" mean anyway?
Very few people are wasting their time on that question. They are finding real world uses for modern AI techniques, and expanding on that toolbox of techniques, not wasting their time on pedantic argument like whether or not this will help lead to strong/general AI.
It is still one of many important questions in the field of AI, but it is irrelevant to nearly all of the many uses AI has for us right now.
It doesn't matter what designs a person or an AI comes up with, because people will always want something new.
In addition to the novelty factor, new products also depend on new scientific advances such as in materials science. Without today's batteries, LCD screens, processors, etc. you could not build a modern smartphone in 1990. The same goes for cars, TVs, refrigerators, etc.
If you look at things with little to no scientific advances, there is less need for new products. The wood furniture in my house does not look that much different than what my parents had, and in many cases were picked up at high end estate sales so they really are decades old. But then again there is still the novelty factor for many/most people, which creates fads in probably every industry.
No, because it implies all investment is worthless and only labor is worth anything. It really is a horrible analogy. In such a world capital would be worth next to nothing.
Your analogy sucks balls. Hopefully you knew that because if not you are one dumb fuck.
The OP implied movie investors should not get paid royalties because they aren't doing any actual work after the movie is produced.
I compared that to the dividends and other returns you would get from your 401k, in which the 401k investment is analogous to the investment of producing a movie.
How exactly does the analogy fall apart? If you don't think movie producers should continue to make money on their investment for years/decades after their initial investment, why should a 401k investor?
Because artists can't put money in a 401K?
You missed the point. The OP was implying that movie studios and other investors in movies shouldn't get royalties and other ongoing payments because they aren't performing any actual work after the movie is created. This is essentially the same as saying you shouldn't get dividends from stock you own because you aren't performing any actual work.
So if this is how the world worked, the artist could put money in a 401k but it wouldn't matter because capital is worthless. Only labor would be worth anything. I know it is ridiculous, just like thinking movie studios should get paid royalties on existing work.
Just like a plumber gets $1 every time a toilet he installed gets flushed and electricians get 10 cents every time a circuit they installed is used. What? No? Weird. Some people have to continue to work to get paid? Unreal.
I wonder if after you retire you would be happy if your 401k went to $0 and/or your pension vanished. Because that is what would happen in a world where previous investment was worthless and continued work was the only way to make income.
Most of his edits are very minor, like updating "1911-12" to "1911–12" (notice the difference?). He made 16 edits in a 2 minute period earlier this morning mostly with a script updating dashes and changing article categories from "Sports Events" to "Sports Events in Europe".
I have no idea how impactful his bigger edits are, and TFA and other articles written recently have shown pages he did considerable work on, but I would assume the vast majority (99%+ possibly) are very minor edits. Granted even minor changes can be helpful; perhaps it will be easier to search for those soccer games now that they are labelled as occurring in Europe (I doubt it, but I don't know for sure).
You could just look at his edit history if you want to see what those 3 million edits consist of. It appears that many of the edits are very small, and so far today he mostly added and edited categories on a few dozen articles. For instance he edited four soccer game articles and changed the category from "August 19xx sports events" to "August 19xx sports event in Europe". That consisted of 6 edits in 6 articles within 2 minutes. Another half dozen edits were editing dashes on various articles he had previously edited using a script (changing "1911-12" to "1911–12").
I have only looked at 20 of his edits which mostly took place in a 10 minute period, but it at least shows how his total edit count can get so high after only 13 years. He made 15 edits in a 6 minute period earlier this morning.
You have an odd view of what democratic means. Just because I'm disappointed that an increasing number of articles are decreasingly technical, doesn't behoove me to post articles more to my liking. And, if by democracy you mean a right to free speech, then I have just as much right to complain about what I read.
I think he meant Democracy as in each citizen has a duty in participating and maintaining the democratic institution. So if you don't like the quality of the discussion, participate. If you don't like the quality of the article submissions, participate. You certainly have the right to complain even if you aren't taking on any personal responsibility to do anything about it, but people will be less likely to care about your ranting.
You pointed out a good reason to leave equipment, but the original post said anyone buying equipment is "doing it wrong". This is simply false. If anything the companies who cannot afford computers up front are doing something wrong.
If you leave anything, you are giving additional profit to a financing company. Maybe the opportunity costs are high enough to lease the equipment, sometimes they aren't. Either way no one can make a blanket statement that it is always better to either lease or buy equipment.
The benefits of keeping jobs in our own country fall disproportionately on our working class. Screw efficiency, we're talking about people's lives here.
It won't be the working class who benefits from most of the manufacturing jobs which are reshored back to the USA. It will be the robotics engineers, marketing staff, and sales departments. This is the biggest problem in this debate, IMHO - we don't even know what we are debating about. Increasing manufacturing in the USA is no longer about bringing back $60k/yr jobs with pensions for people with no college degrees.
Jobs for the working class are now in sectors like customer service and retail. Since these do not pay nearly as much, we need to find ways to help them live a good life regardless of their economic value to society. I personally am a proponent of a universal basic income, but there are plenty of options. They all likely require increased progressive taxation, however, and the very politicians claiming to focus on the working class are the ones fighting against the programs which would actually help them.
Yeah, I should have just passed by your original troll comment without giving it a second thought. Nothing valuable will come from further discussion with a person like you. My bad.
You're ignorant comments at the end hid an insightful post in the beginning.
For decades our economy (and environment) benefited from moving entire sectors of the manufacturing industry overseas. The USA has remained a manufacturing giant overall (in 2005 China was 20% of global manufacturing while USA was 18%) but this article illustrates the USA lost key capabilities in many sectors of manufacturing. This is not necessarily a bad thing since we gain significantly from our partnership with developing countries, but it is certainly a concern we should address.
About 10 years ago, as the economy was recovering from the financial crisis, manufacturing jobs starting "reshoring" back to the US. We went from 11.4 million manufacturing jobs in 2010 to 12.4 million jobs in 2016, and is now at about 12.8 million. The trend line for the past 8 years is pretty constant except for a bad year in 2016.
Unfortunately now we have a President who cares more about his talking points than actual progress. Creating artificial reasons to reshore manufacturing (like the trade war) instead of real market-based reasons only damages our economy overall while other developed economies take advantage of our foolishness. Being economically inefficient on purpose is not a great strategy.
Slashdot, where obvious truths are modded down and the poster flamed by a bunch of panty-waste, communist trash. I see it was your turn to get this maltreatment.
Everything he said up until the "fixing all of the destruction Bush and Obama inflicted on America" part was insightful, but then it took a turn for the worst. The post is correctly labeled as a Troll.
My laptop is a Lenovo running Windows, and it is over $2k. Macbooks are pretty expensive, but they also use top quality parts throughout. The same goes for other flagship machines such as Surface Pro/Book laptops and the Thinkpad P52 (what I have). I am having trouble finding configurations for a 17" 4k Dell with H series processors and all the other bells and whistles, but I bet it would be over $2k as well.
The Mac tax on laptops is not that high. Comparable Windows laptops are almost as much, as long as you are really looking at comparable machines. I still built my own desktop though since you can easily save $1-2k on a top of the line build. I can't build my own laptop though.
While a half dozen people have already pointed out the Mac Pro is not a laptop, no one mentioned there are still reasons to buy a $3k laptop. Laptops which act more like mobile workstations than a laptop often have very powerful processors, large high resolution screens, lots of RAM, large SSD hard drives, powerful video cards, and large batteries. I use a similar machine at work (closer to $2k because I don't need a good video card), and while my company could save $500 or more by getting me a desktop having a mobile work computer provides a lot of freedom. I can bring my computer to meetings, work from home (compliance requires I use a work machine at home), and work while on work trips.
When you have employees costing the company $100k-$200k per year, a 1% productivity enhancement from a better machine can pay for a $1k more expensive laptop in under a year.
Just because most people can do their jobs on 13" ultra slim laptops, doesn't mean everyone can.
Not even close to the same thing. I work at a small under 1000 employee financial institution, and we perform multiple audits per year on our vendors and have dozens of audits performed on us each year. No breach of our clients' data would ever just be our vendor's fault. We could certainly share blame, and sue our vendor for damages, but the lose of trust from our clients would be by far the worst outcome.
If the point is to show that the AI is better at making strategic decisions, then yes, you must limit it so that it works under the same constraints as a human.
Not necessarily. Even two humans generally approach strategic decisions in different ways. Some may focus on high level concepts while others focus on certain details and work their way up. Showing that an AI can make strategic decisions is far more important than the AI making those decisions in the same way a human would. The decisions being made are what is important.
Anyone bringing up general AI in these discussions just likes hearing themselves talk (or type in this case). It is a meaningless argumentative discussion. I doubt anyone working on Alphastar would say their goal is to get closer to general AI. Their goal is more likely to push the boundaries of what decisions we can start to offload to AI, and are using games to do it.
Mostly this just illustrates the shifting definition of being a millionaire. The still most common definition is someone with a million dollars in assets, but as you have pointed out that is no longer a significant amount of money. It represents about $30-40k per year in retirement income (increasing with inflation). But the term is more frequently being used to describe someone who consistently makes $1 million per year in income. This requires either a very high paying job or over $25 million in assets. It probably won't be long until the latter definition is more common, because it more accurately reflects what people have in mind when using the term millionaire.
In 2007, the crash was the result of repackaged bad mortgage debt traded like it was good debt.
There are many more scenarios than just a debt crisis which could cause our next recession. Inflation hasn't been a problem even with significant stimulus, but the causes of inflation tend to lag and can be hard to fight so runaway inflation is still a legitimate concern. Corporate debt is over 50% higher as a percentage of GDP today than it was in 2007, caused by incredibly cheap interest rates, which can certainly cause small dips in the economy to have much larger ripple effects. Higher inflation which is generally combated with higher interest rates would exacerbate this problem. And then there are always trade wars, which we are already seeing on a very small scale without many responsible parties in power to combat if it gets out of control.
I'm not saying I think another great recession is likely, but there are certainly many potential causes of one on the horizon.
These tech companies are starting to feel significant push back from consumers on data privacy issues, but they risk losing competitive advantage if they are the first to budge. The data is just to valuable. The government setting up laws which help protect privacy while creating a competitive environment where everyone is following the same rules is perhaps the only good option. They certainly aren't capable of governing themselves in a way which protects consumers (not that any other industry has ever been able to do that without government intervention).