Our computers fuck up all the time because of bad sofrware. So do your phones. So will so-called 'autonomous cars', and the more complex the software, the harder it is to find the bugs in it, and in this case the bugs WILL GET PEOPLE KILLED
Bugs in the human brain killed 38,300 people in 2015 and injured another 4.4 million. And these bugs are far harder to find and fix than autonomous driving cars would be. Yes, it's very likely each year self-driving cars will kill thousands of people and injure hundreds of thousands more. But even if this is true they would still be an order of magnitude safer than human drivers.
I'm not saying it is an absolute that self-driving cars will be safer than humans in the next 10 years, but it is certainly not nonsense.
It looks like a better headline to this story could have been "How can we get techies to spend more time improving the world?" It doesn't appear you are unaware why they aren't doing it now so this may have geared the answers closer to what you were looking for.
In an attempt to answer your intended question:
1) One way for techies to improve the world is simply to create tools used by others who are improving the world. Better business intelligence tools can and are used by charities to identify and target those they help, not just by for profit corporations. Improved social media apps were arguably instrumental in the Arab Spring, and will likely continue to assist in other efforts to improve the world. It's easy to dismiss "meaningless apps" but they are created because they solve a problem for someone, so to their customers these apps are improving the world.
2) Increasing funding to charities and to for profit companies with a focus on social good will cause more techies to work on these projects. This funding would almost certainly need to come from governmental organizations as they have the easiest method of collecting revenue for projects with little to no ROI (mandatory taxes).
So if you really see this as a problem to improve, choose the most liberal political party in your country (which has a chance of winning elections) and work to help them get into (or stay in) power. That is most likely the best path to improving this problem.
Technology and especially information technology is the focus on human power right now, and that power can be applied to better goals [...]
Technology is not the focus of human power right now, financial capital is. This is unlikely to ever change. Technology is simply a tool used by those with power (regardless of how much power they have) to achieve their goals. The percentage of technological advancement geared towards social good is directly proportional to the desire to enact social good by those who have financial capital.
When those with financial capital are more interested in solving the world's most important problems than they are in gaining more capital, technology will quite naturally shift its focus towards those new goals.
Isn't Venture Capital throwing money at a problem with the hope of solving it and making money? Why is throwing money at BeerMe, DriveMe, FeedMe, etc., a reasonable idea but throwing money at a more important problem not acceptable or likely to work?
Solving a problem does not inherently make you money. Creating a solution customers are willing and able to spend money on will make you money. By giving $10 to a starving poor person I could solve that hunger (at least temporarily), but I am unlikely to see a return on that "investment". Finding a way to make a better tasting ketchup, on the other hand, could make a lot of money, regardless of whether tastier ketchup is a more important than feeding starving people.
Venture capital is not charity. Wealthy people can certainly choose to start a foundation (like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) instead of investing in a VC firm if solving "important" problems is their goal. If they choose investing, however, return on investment is likely the goal.
There are a lot of VC funded companies solving very important problems, but the reason they were funded almost certainly was because they could show a potential return on investment. Social good could have been a factor, but very few companies (or possibly no companies) are funded by VC's as a charity case.
In those societies, if you wanted to share a secret with a select few, you may do that. They may talk about it with others, but there is no method of instantaneous mass distribution.
You can still do this today, just don't talk about it digitally. 100 years ago if you sent a letter to a friend it also had the chance of being stolen. Your friends still had the ability to tell others and start gossip.
but we can condemn that person behind an assumed anonymity, so that we suffer no consequences for the things we say or do
This is certainly a slight difference from the past, but once a mob starts attacking someone, individuals in that mob rarely face consequences for their actions. Not many members of lynching mobs, or people pelting others with mud or excrement in a pillory, ever faced consequences for their actions.
And no, people do not consider the consequences of sharing electronic information. We see that time, and time, and time again.
No argument here, although a few more decades of ruined lives has a good chance of changing this perception.
And what of the consequences? Are they just? Should we give up the ability to share any personal information in this age without expecting it to be condemned and mocked worldwide by anonymous fools?
Until our society grows to the point where we realize everyone has aspects of their life which could invite juvenile ridicule, it is absolutely the correct decision to never share personal information digitally which we wouldn't broadcast to the world. Never bitch about work or a friend over text, never email / text / snapchat nude photos, etc. This is basic stuff which unfortunately a vast majority of people don't realize is important. Hopefully enough of these stories changes that naive ignorance in the general public.
to not admit that instantaneous electronic dissemination of information by anonymous individuals -- who face no consequences for their actions -- is radically different than what any society has ever dealt with before would be absurd.
It has always existed; it's called gossip. Tracking the source of gossip is a little easier than authorities tracking the source of anonymous online leaks, but not that much easier. The only difference is concrete proof can be provided now, which in most cases is a good thing because gossip with a complete lack of proof is not taken as seriously.
Because really, it's not her fault: it's a new situation created by technology that humans weren't equipped to deal with.
The new situation is people who think there are no consequences for their actions. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, and I'm guessing it wasn't a revelation even then that public knowledge of questionable sexual behavior could have severe consequences for the rest of your life (or even result in death quite quickly).
We need to realize as a society that privacy and anonymity were the aberrations in human history.
We're seeing a new phenomenon relative to the entirely of human existence -- it's not natural for people to adjust to.
What are you talking about? For how much of human history do you think it was easy for average people to leave their society and start a new life? For how much of human history do you think average people had a large enough community to enjoy actual anonymity at any point in their life?
For most of human history you had small villages with a few hundred people, so anything you did followed you for life. I'm probably even being generous with that "few hundred" figure. Even in large cities people were segregated into smaller communities. What do you think would have happened to a woman who had sex in public for their ex-boyfriend and a few other people to watch in 1200 AD? It probably wouldn't have a happy ending for the woman.
Our society (especially in the US) has enjoyed perhaps a couple hundred years providing an unusual level of anonymity and chance for a new start in life. The final result of the information age will almost certainly put that to an end. Our societies need to spend more time dealing with the consequences of a lack of privacy and the permanency of information instead of kicking that can down the road with stupid laws and an idealistic view of human history.
Having sympathy for the woman and having outrage that these kind of stupid decisions end up creating even more stupid laws are not mutually exclusive. Having more outrage about laws that affect billions of people (even if only slightly) than sympathy for a single human life is also quite natural, consider 150,000 people die each day.
If there was no such thing as Right to be Forgotten laws, there would be nothing but sympathy for this woman. But considering the political climate it is reasonable most of us are upset at the people peeing in the pool everyone else has to swim in.
Those were all technologies that were in some way vastly superseded in quality or functionality.
The standard audio jack is currently extremely high quality (yay push-pull transistors) and universally standard and will remain so, outside of the apple-verse, for decades to come.
History never repeats itself, but it often rhymes. I certainly agree this situation is unique in its own way, just like most of the changes I mentioned. But the one constant will be Apple users who gave up their desire to choose for themselves a long time ago. In the Windows / Android world progress can be just as messy, but you have plenty of other options if you don't like what Dell / Lenovo / Samsung are doing.
Anyone who stayed with Apple after the lightning connector change will stay with Apple after this, save a very small (and vocal) minority.
The only thing false about the comparison is this time they have upped the ante a little. I would have said the same when they made most peripherals obsolete by introducing the lightning connector. I see no reason why Apple users who put up with all of the changes I mentioned will suddenly jump ship now. They may lose a few audiophiles, but not many.
I dislike Apple primarily because there aren't enough options when they decide to get rid of something I like. In the Windows world similar changes often happen, but I have the option of going with a different manufacturer if I'm not ready for the change yet. You give up that control in the Apple ecosystem.
Getting rid of the headphone jack on all Apple's products will be suicide for them.
Yes, just like when Apple removed the serial port, parallel port, 5.25" floppy drive, 3.5" floppy drive, VGA port, Ethernet port, and when they introduced the lightning connector. After all of that, I'm sure getting rid of the headphone jack will be the straw that broke the camel's back.
Samsung should have quit with the NOTE 4 they really haven't improved that much since it's release. Now mine is paid off also.
They are going to have a hard time getting me to upgrade my Note 4. It may be the first phone I keep for four years. Unless someone gives me a 6"+ flagship phone and/or stop going thinner and give us a 6000+ mAh battery, I'll have this Note 4 until they no longer offer a replacement plan for the next time I break it.
If you're a factory owner, for instance, and you're cranking out product to sell to people who get the money for free, how long until you decide to stop essentially giving away your products and retool the factory to produce only for yourself?
If your factory only produces things for yourself, what do you sell to give yourself more income than someone who just lives on basic income?
I'm not sure you get how basic income would work. You could have people making $40k doing nothing of significant economic value, people making $60k by supplementing their income with some part time service work, and people making $200k per year doing high value work. (all figures made up just to provide scale) You still have economic incentive to do work, but never the threat of a miserable life if you choose not to work. I know if my parents gave me a $40k per year annuity for life, I would still choose to work, so it isn't like giving people subsistence level money for nothing will destroy the will to work for high value workers.
I've been hearing that since the 1970's. Like the Great Earthquake that supposed to send California into the ocean, I've been waiting for that one too.
They have been working on speech recognition since the 1950's, and only in the past couple years have these system reached human level accuracy. Neural networks were created in the 40's, were thought to be on the brink of usefulness in the 90's, but only in the past five years has deep learning really made neural networks useful for many real world problems.
The nature of exponential growth, which we have seen in both computer hardware and algorithm design for over half a century, is it will seem like no progress has been made until mere moments before past predictions become a reality. Put another way, if you started filling up Lake Michigan with one fluid ounce of water in 1940 and doubled that every 18 months, in 70 years you would only have a few inches of depth. But wait another decade and it's 40 feet deep, and five years later it is filled (max depth: 922 feet).
There is plenty of room for debate on this topic, but complaining about a lack of tangible progress over the past 50 years is not a relevant topic.
Has any technology ever had any long term unemployment increasing effect throughout human history?
Yes, just not with humans yet. Horses as a species had weathered many technological advances without losing value in the economy. But past history was irrelevant once technology finally reached the point where horses were mostly not needed. It took 35 years for their population to drop from about 21.5 million to 6 million in the US.
The situation of horses in the early 1900's and humans today is not a perfect comparison, but then again comparing future human employment amidst technological change with past history is not a perfect comparison either. History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.
The only things we know for sure are we have seen members of our workforce lose their jobs and not have them replaced, even when jobs have been replaced it has taken over a generation at times in the past (many Luddites died in poverty after their jobs were lost), and past history is often not a good predictor of future events. I'm not sure if any of these facts make me feel confident our economy will always find jobs for displaced workers.
I think "income" distribution is very hard problem if by that you mean "money" distribution.
I did say wealth distribution on purpose because income distribution doesn't really cover the whole problem. It also avoids thinking of the problem in terms of just "money" but instead of thinking about all assets and income in general.
There is no guarantee that the available pool of money taken from the people who make it is sufficient to cover the people who don't.
Even today, without the massive productivity improvements improved AI will bring, the US has about $85 trillion in net worth and has a total yearly personal income of about $16 trillion. This would provide $680k in assets and $128k in income to every two adult household in the US if distributed completely evenly. I am certainly not advocating such an extreme level of redistribution, I am just pointing out we have more than enough wealth in this country to take care of everyone whose job is displaced by technology.
Even if there is no net gain in national wealth every time a robot / algorithm takes away someone's job without the economy replacing it, we still have enough money to support them with a middle class lifestyle while unemployed. After you factor in the increase in wealth these AI agents will bring to our economy, we will be even better able to support the massively unemployed.
Put another way, the total economy can shrink even as the top 1% make out like bandits. Taking all their loot won't cover the other 99%.
While this is probably correct, the top 20%-50% will have enough loot to cover the rest of society. And they will be forced to, unless they want another French Revolution (or want to slaughter tens of millions of dissidents).
Basic income combined with employment insurance based on recent levels of industry disruption.
The answers to this problem aren't very complicated. The political processes involved in enacting the solutions are a different story. They require a significant amount of wealth redistribution which is not popular right now for a large percentage of voters. My guess it will become more popular once even U3 unemployment creeps over 30%.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor.
That has been true for "dumb robots", but as AI progresses even highly skilled jobs can feel the pinch. There are many highly paid professions which require a great deal of knowledge but not much creativity. Many jobs in the law and medical professions come to mind. Software has already disrupted the pipeline between recent law graduates and experienced lawyers making life very hard on new lawyers. Over the next twenty years it will become more common for people who have spent 8+ years of college to join a workforce which no longer needs their profession, even though the job prospects looked great when they started school.
Most skilled work will see more demand because of improved AI (until general AI that is), but very few supposedly skilled jobs will be "safe".
We'll all look like the lazy fucks stuck on the spaceship in WALL-E.
Considering 80% of jobs are either sedentary or require light activity, it's at least likely that people would get in better shape on average if everyone becomes unemployed. I was in great shape when I had the time to spend 15-20 hours per week working out or playing sports, but now that I have a job with real responsibilities I've gained a lot of weight. I was unemployed for about six months during the last recession and I lost 40 pounds. It only took a couple years of working to put it back on.
It sadly doesn't matter how great the platform itself is if there are so few apps, and those that there are are terrible.
Until Microsoft makes their mobile OS capable of running Android apps, their phones will never take off. The Lumia 950 XL is certainly in the same league as the Note 5 so if their interface really was better I would certainly consider a windows phone upgrade to my Note 4 if it can run any Android app along with Windows ones.
But Windows will never make up the gap in mobile apps for iOS and Android, so taking advantage of one of these being open source is the only option I see.
Anyone Remember CompuAdd?? or Gateway??, not many do, but after being giants in computer sales on line they opened retail stores and it crippled them and cost them going out of business. Amazon needs to be extremely careful, what is that quote, "those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it".
This has nothing to do with making money selling Amazon devices. They likely lose some money on each device even before paying for a storefront. This is about selling devices which make it more likely those customers buy more products on Amazon. It is a completely different business model than Gateway stores, or even Apple / Microsoft stores.
I would suggest killing it first, because it's going to get pissed after the first bite. Your analogy works pretty well actually, since the last time a new party won the White House (Republicans) it required the implosion of one of the two major parties about 8 years prior. I agree it is possible for a current third party to win the White House, but by the time it happens it must become one of the two major parties before the Presidential elections begin. Just getting 13% of the vote instead of 2% won't do anything, just like taking the first bite of a living elephant won't be too successful.
Sorry pal, but now you're moving the goalpost. You declared that capitalism is selling at the highest cost the market will bear.
No, Kabukiwookie said that. Rockoon, the man you are replying to, said nothing of the sort. Rockoon pointed out not all market economies (where supply/demand helps set pricing) are capitalistic in nature. Governments can be involved in a market economy without their economy being primarily controlled by private ownership of property and the means of production (capitalism). China is a prime example of communism which relies heavily on manipulating market forces through state run corporations. On a global scale it behaves very similarly to capitalism, but the lack of private ownership of the economy precludes it from being considered capitalism.
the thing is - this is not supposed to be a capitalist institution. A public university is part of the civil service.
Every institution within a market economy, whether the economy is capitalism or communism, will be affected by market forces. Every institution without exception. Unless the government can both control the institution and force people to work there for a rate determined by the government, market forces will affect even non-profit institutions.
Making money, training people for a job, or increasing demand for IT professionals in the local economy are nowhere on the list of things a university is supposed to do.
There I fixed that for you to make it more relevant to the topic at hand. Like you implied above, the university should stick to its public charter and not take on so many tangential roles. Public universities were not created to increase the number of IT jobs by employing them in the university. If lowering the costs of operations helps them provide a better learning experience for a more affordable cost to society, they are doing their job. The choice to outsource IT operations may still be a bad one, but it doesn't conflict with the role of public universities in our society.
Slashdot Mirror
Our computers fuck up all the time because of bad sofrware. So do your phones. So will so-called 'autonomous cars', and the more complex the software, the harder it is to find the bugs in it, and in this case the bugs WILL GET PEOPLE KILLED
Bugs in the human brain killed 38,300 people in 2015 and injured another 4.4 million. And these bugs are far harder to find and fix than autonomous driving cars would be. Yes, it's very likely each year self-driving cars will kill thousands of people and injure hundreds of thousands more. But even if this is true they would still be an order of magnitude safer than human drivers.
I'm not saying it is an absolute that self-driving cars will be safer than humans in the next 10 years, but it is certainly not nonsense.
It looks like a better headline to this story could have been "How can we get techies to spend more time improving the world?" It doesn't appear you are unaware why they aren't doing it now so this may have geared the answers closer to what you were looking for.
In an attempt to answer your intended question:
1) One way for techies to improve the world is simply to create tools used by others who are improving the world. Better business intelligence tools can and are used by charities to identify and target those they help, not just by for profit corporations. Improved social media apps were arguably instrumental in the Arab Spring, and will likely continue to assist in other efforts to improve the world. It's easy to dismiss "meaningless apps" but they are created because they solve a problem for someone, so to their customers these apps are improving the world.
2) Increasing funding to charities and to for profit companies with a focus on social good will cause more techies to work on these projects. This funding would almost certainly need to come from governmental organizations as they have the easiest method of collecting revenue for projects with little to no ROI (mandatory taxes).
So if you really see this as a problem to improve, choose the most liberal political party in your country (which has a chance of winning elections) and work to help them get into (or stay in) power. That is most likely the best path to improving this problem.
Technology and especially information technology is the focus on human power right now, and that power can be applied to better goals [...]
Technology is not the focus of human power right now, financial capital is. This is unlikely to ever change. Technology is simply a tool used by those with power (regardless of how much power they have) to achieve their goals. The percentage of technological advancement geared towards social good is directly proportional to the desire to enact social good by those who have financial capital.
When those with financial capital are more interested in solving the world's most important problems than they are in gaining more capital, technology will quite naturally shift its focus towards those new goals.
Isn't Venture Capital throwing money at a problem with the hope of solving it and making money? Why is throwing money at BeerMe, DriveMe, FeedMe, etc., a reasonable idea but throwing money at a more important problem not acceptable or likely to work?
Solving a problem does not inherently make you money. Creating a solution customers are willing and able to spend money on will make you money. By giving $10 to a starving poor person I could solve that hunger (at least temporarily), but I am unlikely to see a return on that "investment". Finding a way to make a better tasting ketchup, on the other hand, could make a lot of money, regardless of whether tastier ketchup is a more important than feeding starving people.
Venture capital is not charity. Wealthy people can certainly choose to start a foundation (like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) instead of investing in a VC firm if solving "important" problems is their goal. If they choose investing, however, return on investment is likely the goal.
There are a lot of VC funded companies solving very important problems, but the reason they were funded almost certainly was because they could show a potential return on investment. Social good could have been a factor, but very few companies (or possibly no companies) are funded by VC's as a charity case.
In those societies, if you wanted to share a secret with a select few, you may do that. They may talk about it with others, but there is no method of instantaneous mass distribution.
You can still do this today, just don't talk about it digitally. 100 years ago if you sent a letter to a friend it also had the chance of being stolen. Your friends still had the ability to tell others and start gossip.
but we can condemn that person behind an assumed anonymity, so that we suffer no consequences for the things we say or do
This is certainly a slight difference from the past, but once a mob starts attacking someone, individuals in that mob rarely face consequences for their actions. Not many members of lynching mobs, or people pelting others with mud or excrement in a pillory, ever faced consequences for their actions.
This is just the modern version of a pillory.
And no, people do not consider the consequences of sharing electronic information. We see that time, and time, and time again.
No argument here, although a few more decades of ruined lives has a good chance of changing this perception.
And what of the consequences? Are they just? Should we give up the ability to share any personal information in this age without expecting it to be condemned and mocked worldwide by anonymous fools?
Until our society grows to the point where we realize everyone has aspects of their life which could invite juvenile ridicule, it is absolutely the correct decision to never share personal information digitally which we wouldn't broadcast to the world. Never bitch about work or a friend over text, never email / text / snapchat nude photos, etc. This is basic stuff which unfortunately a vast majority of people don't realize is important. Hopefully enough of these stories changes that naive ignorance in the general public.
to not admit that instantaneous electronic dissemination of information by anonymous individuals -- who face no consequences for their actions -- is radically different than what any society has ever dealt with before would be absurd.
It has always existed; it's called gossip. Tracking the source of gossip is a little easier than authorities tracking the source of anonymous online leaks, but not that much easier. The only difference is concrete proof can be provided now, which in most cases is a good thing because gossip with a complete lack of proof is not taken as seriously.
Because really, it's not her fault: it's a new situation created by technology that humans weren't equipped to deal with.
The new situation is people who think there are no consequences for their actions. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, and I'm guessing it wasn't a revelation even then that public knowledge of questionable sexual behavior could have severe consequences for the rest of your life (or even result in death quite quickly).
We need to realize as a society that privacy and anonymity were the aberrations in human history.
We're seeing a new phenomenon relative to the entirely of human existence -- it's not natural for people to adjust to.
What are you talking about? For how much of human history do you think it was easy for average people to leave their society and start a new life? For how much of human history do you think average people had a large enough community to enjoy actual anonymity at any point in their life?
For most of human history you had small villages with a few hundred people, so anything you did followed you for life. I'm probably even being generous with that "few hundred" figure. Even in large cities people were segregated into smaller communities. What do you think would have happened to a woman who had sex in public for their ex-boyfriend and a few other people to watch in 1200 AD? It probably wouldn't have a happy ending for the woman.
Our society (especially in the US) has enjoyed perhaps a couple hundred years providing an unusual level of anonymity and chance for a new start in life. The final result of the information age will almost certainly put that to an end. Our societies need to spend more time dealing with the consequences of a lack of privacy and the permanency of information instead of kicking that can down the road with stupid laws and an idealistic view of human history.
Having sympathy for the woman and having outrage that these kind of stupid decisions end up creating even more stupid laws are not mutually exclusive. Having more outrage about laws that affect billions of people (even if only slightly) than sympathy for a single human life is also quite natural, consider 150,000 people die each day.
If there was no such thing as Right to be Forgotten laws, there would be nothing but sympathy for this woman. But considering the political climate it is reasonable most of us are upset at the people peeing in the pool everyone else has to swim in.
Those were all technologies that were in some way vastly superseded in quality or functionality.
The standard audio jack is currently extremely high quality (yay push-pull transistors) and universally standard and will remain so, outside of the apple-verse, for decades to come.
History never repeats itself, but it often rhymes. I certainly agree this situation is unique in its own way, just like most of the changes I mentioned. But the one constant will be Apple users who gave up their desire to choose for themselves a long time ago. In the Windows / Android world progress can be just as messy, but you have plenty of other options if you don't like what Dell / Lenovo / Samsung are doing.
Anyone who stayed with Apple after the lightning connector change will stay with Apple after this, save a very small (and vocal) minority.
False comparison. Keep at it ass-hole.
The only thing false about the comparison is this time they have upped the ante a little. I would have said the same when they made most peripherals obsolete by introducing the lightning connector. I see no reason why Apple users who put up with all of the changes I mentioned will suddenly jump ship now. They may lose a few audiophiles, but not many.
I dislike Apple primarily because there aren't enough options when they decide to get rid of something I like. In the Windows world similar changes often happen, but I have the option of going with a different manufacturer if I'm not ready for the change yet. You give up that control in the Apple ecosystem.
Getting rid of the headphone jack on all Apple's products will be suicide for them.
Yes, just like when Apple removed the serial port, parallel port, 5.25" floppy drive, 3.5" floppy drive, VGA port, Ethernet port, and when they introduced the lightning connector. After all of that, I'm sure getting rid of the headphone jack will be the straw that broke the camel's back.
Samsung should have quit with the NOTE 4 they really haven't improved that much since it's release. Now mine is paid off also.
They are going to have a hard time getting me to upgrade my Note 4. It may be the first phone I keep for four years. Unless someone gives me a 6"+ flagship phone and/or stop going thinner and give us a 6000+ mAh battery, I'll have this Note 4 until they no longer offer a replacement plan for the next time I break it.
If you're a factory owner, for instance, and you're cranking out product to sell to people who get the money for free, how long until you decide to stop essentially giving away your products and retool the factory to produce only for yourself?
If your factory only produces things for yourself, what do you sell to give yourself more income than someone who just lives on basic income?
I'm not sure you get how basic income would work. You could have people making $40k doing nothing of significant economic value, people making $60k by supplementing their income with some part time service work, and people making $200k per year doing high value work. (all figures made up just to provide scale) You still have economic incentive to do work, but never the threat of a miserable life if you choose not to work. I know if my parents gave me a $40k per year annuity for life, I would still choose to work, so it isn't like giving people subsistence level money for nothing will destroy the will to work for high value workers.
I've been hearing that since the 1970's. Like the Great Earthquake that supposed to send California into the ocean, I've been waiting for that one too.
They have been working on speech recognition since the 1950's, and only in the past couple years have these system reached human level accuracy. Neural networks were created in the 40's, were thought to be on the brink of usefulness in the 90's, but only in the past five years has deep learning really made neural networks useful for many real world problems.
The nature of exponential growth, which we have seen in both computer hardware and algorithm design for over half a century, is it will seem like no progress has been made until mere moments before past predictions become a reality. Put another way, if you started filling up Lake Michigan with one fluid ounce of water in 1940 and doubled that every 18 months, in 70 years you would only have a few inches of depth. But wait another decade and it's 40 feet deep, and five years later it is filled (max depth: 922 feet).
There is plenty of room for debate on this topic, but complaining about a lack of tangible progress over the past 50 years is not a relevant topic.
Has any technology ever had any long term unemployment increasing effect throughout human history?
Yes, just not with humans yet. Horses as a species had weathered many technological advances without losing value in the economy. But past history was irrelevant once technology finally reached the point where horses were mostly not needed. It took 35 years for their population to drop from about 21.5 million to 6 million in the US.
The situation of horses in the early 1900's and humans today is not a perfect comparison, but then again comparing future human employment amidst technological change with past history is not a perfect comparison either. History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes.
The only things we know for sure are we have seen members of our workforce lose their jobs and not have them replaced, even when jobs have been replaced it has taken over a generation at times in the past (many Luddites died in poverty after their jobs were lost), and past history is often not a good predictor of future events. I'm not sure if any of these facts make me feel confident our economy will always find jobs for displaced workers.
I think "income" distribution is very hard problem if by that you mean "money" distribution.
I did say wealth distribution on purpose because income distribution doesn't really cover the whole problem. It also avoids thinking of the problem in terms of just "money" but instead of thinking about all assets and income in general.
There is no guarantee that the available pool of money taken from the people who make it is sufficient to cover the people who don't.
Even today, without the massive productivity improvements improved AI will bring, the US has about $85 trillion in net worth and has a total yearly personal income of about $16 trillion. This would provide $680k in assets and $128k in income to every two adult household in the US if distributed completely evenly. I am certainly not advocating such an extreme level of redistribution, I am just pointing out we have more than enough wealth in this country to take care of everyone whose job is displaced by technology.
Even if there is no net gain in national wealth every time a robot / algorithm takes away someone's job without the economy replacing it, we still have enough money to support them with a middle class lifestyle while unemployed. After you factor in the increase in wealth these AI agents will bring to our economy, we will be even better able to support the massively unemployed.
Put another way, the total economy can shrink even as the top 1% make out like bandits. Taking all their loot won't cover the other 99%.
While this is probably correct, the top 20%-50% will have enough loot to cover the rest of society. And they will be forced to, unless they want another French Revolution (or want to slaughter tens of millions of dissidents).
Ideas?
Basic income combined with employment insurance based on recent levels of industry disruption.
The answers to this problem aren't very complicated. The political processes involved in enacting the solutions are a different story. They require a significant amount of wealth redistribution which is not popular right now for a large percentage of voters. My guess it will become more popular once even U3 unemployment creeps over 30%.
I think robots replace jobs for less skilled labor.
That has been true for "dumb robots", but as AI progresses even highly skilled jobs can feel the pinch. There are many highly paid professions which require a great deal of knowledge but not much creativity. Many jobs in the law and medical professions come to mind. Software has already disrupted the pipeline between recent law graduates and experienced lawyers making life very hard on new lawyers. Over the next twenty years it will become more common for people who have spent 8+ years of college to join a workforce which no longer needs their profession, even though the job prospects looked great when they started school.
Most skilled work will see more demand because of improved AI (until general AI that is), but very few supposedly skilled jobs will be "safe".
We'll all look like the lazy fucks stuck on the spaceship in WALL-E.
Considering 80% of jobs are either sedentary or require light activity, it's at least likely that people would get in better shape on average if everyone becomes unemployed. I was in great shape when I had the time to spend 15-20 hours per week working out or playing sports, but now that I have a job with real responsibilities I've gained a lot of weight. I was unemployed for about six months during the last recession and I lost 40 pounds. It only took a couple years of working to put it back on.
It sadly doesn't matter how great the platform itself is if there are so few apps, and those that there are are terrible.
Until Microsoft makes their mobile OS capable of running Android apps, their phones will never take off. The Lumia 950 XL is certainly in the same league as the Note 5 so if their interface really was better I would certainly consider a windows phone upgrade to my Note 4 if it can run any Android app along with Windows ones.
But Windows will never make up the gap in mobile apps for iOS and Android, so taking advantage of one of these being open source is the only option I see.
Anyone Remember CompuAdd?? or Gateway??, not many do, but after being giants in computer sales on line they opened retail stores and it crippled them and cost them going out of business. Amazon needs to be extremely careful, what is that quote, "those who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it".
This has nothing to do with making money selling Amazon devices. They likely lose some money on each device even before paying for a storefront. This is about selling devices which make it more likely those customers buy more products on Amazon. It is a completely different business model than Gateway stores, or even Apple / Microsoft stores.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
I would suggest killing it first, because it's going to get pissed after the first bite. Your analogy works pretty well actually, since the last time a new party won the White House (Republicans) it required the implosion of one of the two major parties about 8 years prior. I agree it is possible for a current third party to win the White House, but by the time it happens it must become one of the two major parties before the Presidential elections begin. Just getting 13% of the vote instead of 2% won't do anything, just like taking the first bite of a living elephant won't be too successful.
Sorry pal, but now you're moving the goalpost. You declared that capitalism is selling at the highest cost the market will bear.
No, Kabukiwookie said that. Rockoon, the man you are replying to, said nothing of the sort. Rockoon pointed out not all market economies (where supply/demand helps set pricing) are capitalistic in nature. Governments can be involved in a market economy without their economy being primarily controlled by private ownership of property and the means of production (capitalism). China is a prime example of communism which relies heavily on manipulating market forces through state run corporations. On a global scale it behaves very similarly to capitalism, but the lack of private ownership of the economy precludes it from being considered capitalism.
the thing is - this is not supposed to be a capitalist institution. A public university is part of the civil service.
Every institution within a market economy, whether the economy is capitalism or communism, will be affected by market forces. Every institution without exception. Unless the government can both control the institution and force people to work there for a rate determined by the government, market forces will affect even non-profit institutions.
Making money, training people for a job, or increasing demand for IT professionals in the local economy are nowhere on the list of things a university is supposed to do.
There I fixed that for you to make it more relevant to the topic at hand. Like you implied above, the university should stick to its public charter and not take on so many tangential roles. Public universities were not created to increase the number of IT jobs by employing them in the university. If lowering the costs of operations helps them provide a better learning experience for a more affordable cost to society, they are doing their job. The choice to outsource IT operations may still be a bad one, but it doesn't conflict with the role of public universities in our society.