So Hillary's dastardly plan to rig the primary by specifically suppressing Bernie supporters began four years ago?
The complaint is not that Hillary herself is rigging the systems. It is that the system has already been rigged towards establishment candidates. This is not Hillary's fault, but that is not the point. Saying it is not Hillary's fault is just a strawman argument.
The problem is not that *this* election is heavily rigged. It is that *all* elections are heavily rigged. The very fact people like Sanders and Trump are forced to obtain the backing of a major party to have a chance in the election is the biggest part of the problem. Our plurality voting system essentially guarantees a two party system at this scale.
I overall agree with the idea political parties should have rules which help them elect people who agree with their core values. But as long as we have a plurality voting system we have no choice but to make our two political parties more inclusive and less rigged towards establishment candidates. Without fixing these rules we will continue to have a very rigged system where the voice of the people is suppressed.
True, and I believe I saw some external video cards recently being made. But in terms of performance, I don't think having an external video card receiving data via USB-C or the likes will ever match or exceed one directly plugged in to a motherboard. But who knows.
I would have agreed with that, but after looking up the throughput of PCIe 3.0 and USB-C, it looks like they have very similar speeds. USB-C provides 1.25 GB/s while PCIe 3.0 is about 1 GB/s. There is the distance factor but it appears the speeds could be similar.
This truly sounds like a good opportunity for AMD to take some market share from Intel. If Intel ends the research and development by massive layoffs, spends billions on buying crappy companies (McAfee, Altera, etc..) and focuses just on trendy fads (cloud, experience, and IoT), they are doomed. The current Intel CEO seems to be following Microsoft's footprints from market dominance to quick destruction.
Yeah, and companies that focused on fads such as personal computers in the early 80's were doomed as well. We have a lot to learn from visionaries like IBM's John Akers who dismissed PC's as a fad best handled by companies with no vision, like Microsoft and Intel.
That's the thing. For casual use maybe your fone will be the "next computer" but as long as there's a PC gaming industry, they will keep pushing PC performance boundries.
No reason video acceleration needs to be done in the cell phone. That could happen in some module connected to the monitor / tv. This could easily be the duty of the next generation of consoles, with them simply being external GPUs which give your mobile devices better gaming experiences.
Not to mention that the wealth of a nation lies in the general public.
It does not. Half the world' wealth is held by the top 1% of individuals
While your statistics may hold true for financial wealth that is easily measured on a balance sheet, it is not the entirety of a country's wealth. A human being with zero net worth still has value. For instance I am 35 years old with an over $200k household income, but my net worth is quite low. About $100k in my house and $100k in retirement savings, but $110k in combined education loans. After factoring in all incidentals I probably have a net worth of between $150k-$200k, but that certainly does not encapsulate my value.
If I were to sell even 10% of my income for the rest of my life, I could probably get $300k for it (if such an investment vehicle even existed). Or to look at it another way, I have about $700k worth of life insurance as my wife and I feel that is the amount necessary for my children's lives to not be financially impacted by my death (although my wife's retirement would still be impacted if she never remarries).
Overall I think it is safe to say my wealth, including human capital, is well over $1 million dollars. But at most my net worth would show up at $200k in the statistics you show above. There are also plenty of working class families with a negative net worth whose human capital would put their net worth into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
400 Americans have more wealth than half of all other Americans
The top 400 Americans have about $1.4 trillion in net worth according to your link. Lets say their human capital was a skill to extract a 2.5% higher ROI than a standard mutual fund (about 7.5% in real dollars opposed to 5%) and that they on average have 20 years left in their careers. That would add an extra trillion dollars onto their net worth plus human capital, bringing it to $2.4 trillion.
Half of US households is about 67 million households, with an average size of 2.6. Lets use a conservative 1.25 workers per household, and a very low $100k in human capital per working American. That is an extra $8 trillion in net worth. Using a figure of $200k for human capital, or someone who can provide about $10k per year for their family above what they consume themselves, that becomes $16 trillion.
Whatever the figure it, the bottom 50% likely have at least 5x the true net worth of the top 400 families.
Not to mention that the wealth of a nation lies in the general public.
So this quote did end up being true. If you define the general public as everyone outside of those 400 wealthiest US families, they have over 95% of the financial value of the US. If you add human capital, the general public has over 99% of the wealth. You would have to define the general public as a very small subset of the country for this not to be true.
What you are describing is the working class. The middle class consists of people who own their own businesses and professionals, doctors, lawyers and amazingly teachers.
These definitions of working class and middle class may be the picture most people have in their mind, but I assure you they are not the definitions economists, journalists, or policy makers use. By your definitions the middle class is actually on the rise in the US, with the working class shrinking (and becoming poor). But the reality is an increasing upper middle class and increasing working class, with a shrinking middle class in the middle. The good news is the upper middle class is growing quicker than the working class, so at least more people leaving the middle class are going up than down.
To reach a family income of even $90,000 you are already entering the top 20% of households. That is the very top of what any economist would consider middle class. Combined household incomes reaching six figures are the upper middle class, who live very different lives than the middle class. Most families with at least one earner in one of the professions you listed would be considered upper middle class.
Most people have a very warped view of what the middle class is today. There is still some romantic notion of a single earner family with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. The reality is a middle class with a median household income of about $70k, with a majority of these families requiring dual earners to reach this income level. This amount of income does not give the middle class life most people would expect, including a stable income, adequate retirement savings, ability to pay most of their children's college costs, ability to go on one nice vacation per year, etc.
The upper middle class is growing rapidly even as the middle class is shrinking, but the ruse is the upper middle class is more similar to what people imagine when they think middle class.
I make slightly over $50,000 per year in Silicon Valley. If I wasn't working in government IT, I could make about 40% in pay but without the job security of a multi-year, fully funded contract.
I understand that job security is worth something, but certainly not working for 30% less than you could in the open market. If you could make $5833 per month but are willing to live on $4167 per month, you would still be breaking even if you could only find work for 8.5 months per year being paid your true value.
Most people put far too much value on a stable job, and this is one prime example.
Contracting sucks, but it's all I've been able to get. And before you say, "improve your skills," I am doing that, but having no degree compounds the problem!
This is why I get upset any time some startup founder says the best thing he ever did was drop out of college (or that he regrets finishing college). For the vast majority of people no amount of hard work will make up for not having a college degree. Even in the mostly meritocratic IT industry.
I certainly understand why you struggle to make less than $60k per year without a degree to show potential employers. I was stuck with about $40k per year until the last recession forced me to get a worthless UoP degree to find new employment. Now I make four times what I made ten years ago. No one cares about my degree now, but there were 1-2 crucial career building jobs over the past decade I would have never gotten without it.
... were they really beautiful people or is this just another dating site that engages in false advertising?
In this case a leak of the images and of the votes each person gave on potential new users would be far more interesting than just a users table dump. It could make for an interesting computer vision project identifying attractiveness. Or a project showing how a user's ethnicity affects his/her rating of people of different ethnicities. Plenty of non-PC research topics to go around.
Why isn't there condemnation on Slashdot for the hackers doing this?
As of the time you posted your comment (15 minutes after the story went live), there was no one on Slashdot saying the victims deserved to be punished. There was one post asking how they determined if someone was attractive enough, which is just an inquiry not a condemnation. Did you post this just assuming there would be a lot of victim shaming in the next few hours?
I for one agree there is nothing wrong with this site. I doubt I would make the cut, but what's wrong with that? When I was on Match.com (where I met my wife) I passed over many people I was not attracted to and I assume many women did the same to me. Sites that cater to a certain group, whether it be religious affinity, wealth, attractiveness, etc. don't strike me as more demeaning than the standard rituals of dating already are. They just make it more efficient.
Of course having more data to run statistical models against gives more confidence.
Not necessarily. Data sets of a few thousand records are generally sufficient for decent p values unless you're looking for effects that are so small that they're of limited commercial value..
I agree with this and the rest of your points. Confidence is an overloaded term in this context. I meant more data obviously increases human confidence, not necessarily that it should increase that confidence. More data is by itself better than less data. But just like any positive attribute, having too much of it makes people blind to aspects that aren't as positive.
This is true of just about any positive positive attribute, whether it is your workers' intelligence, a potential suitor's financial status, or a car's acceleration. All are considered a positive thing by most people, but all have diminishing returns. Just like getting more data.
And as far as strategy is concerned, do you really think Starcraft strategy is much more advanced than Go strategy? Personally I doubt it
I would agree Go strategy is more advanced, I also believe the tactical maneuvers in Starcraft require far more general intelligence than the strategy of either game. Deciding where to put a stone in Go requires far more strategic thinking than where/when to attack or what build order to use, but the process of acting on those strategic decisions is far different. Exactly how to attack, what units to target, when to evade units, how to evade units, what formation to use, etc. places far more decision making complexity on a game of Starcraft. And this is all done in real time while your opponent is switching tactical approaches every few seconds to beat you.
It is kind of semantics deciding what decisions are strategic and which are tactical, but overall there are far more "game states" in a game of Starcraft than a game of Go. Perhaps many order of magnitude more. Even once you remove variations of game state which don't impact the match result, I would bet Starcraft has a few order of magnitude more possible game states than Go.
I agree this article has no significant substance. Of course having more data to run statistical models against gives more confidence. So does hiring more Ivy League grads to work as your analysts or paying pricey firms like McKinsey to help make strategic decisions.
Everything that can help boost confidence has the potential to boost it too far. And everything that will help you make better decisions is confidence boosting. So unless you intentionally want to limit your ability to make intelligent decisions, you will have to carefully monitor whether you have too much confidence.
What exactly does his mean? I don't know anything about the amish, but I'd doubt many went hungry or without shelter. I live in one of the poorest areas of the US and I don't see many people truly lacking anything. Sure everybody drives a beater 1978 truck and lives in a dumpy house, but no one is hungry and everyone has a house and a car.
It means their unemployment levels were much higher than the rest of the US. Almost no one was going hungry in the latest recession, with food prices so low that is unlikely to happen even in a repeat of the great depression.
The coming changes brought on by automation are at least theorized to be drastically worst than anything seen in the great depression. People talk about greater than 50% unemployment. The article in question postulated a world with 90% unemployment. My original point was simply that in such a world, the Amish would fare at least as bad if not a little worst than the rest of the world. They would have all the job loss but very few if not none of the gains from this increased automation. They may finally have to accept significant government assistance.
But who is going to decide that instead of sitting home and watching TV, they're going to wait tables, or flip burgers, or enforce laws, or collect trash, or be a retail cashier?
One of the primary reasons a basic income may be necessary in the near future is we will have machines to flip burgers, AIs to drive garbage trucks, and kiosks along with RFID chips to replace cashiers. While not guaranteed, there is a real possibility that the vast majority of jobs could become obsolete.
As for jobs that likely won't be automated, like police officers, the pay will simply match what is necessary to motivate people to work. Just like today.
I wouldn't think so. There are still a lot of people that prefer hand-crafted stuff just because a real person made it, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Most people (under a certain age at least) don't buy hand made just because a real person made it. They do it because of a perception the quality is higher. Today that is usually a correct assumption, but in a few decades it likely won't hold true any more. At that point I think being hand-made won't be much of a selling point; especially for Centennials and future generations.
There will always be some people, myself included, who are willing to pay for genuine hand-crafted goods. If there's enough spare money around for people to buy unique luxury goods, the Amish will prosper.
But we are talking about a hypothetical world where robotics are fully capable of building highly unique luxury goods. Currently Amish furniture is considered a high quality product compared to what you might find at an Ikea. Today's consumer is still conditioned to think hand-made means quality. That is unlikely to be the case 50 years from now (perhaps even 20).
If the world becomes so impoverished that everybody struggles to survive, the Amish are already well-prepared for that situation.
That isn't true. The last recession has shown the Amish were hit much harder than most Americans. Their reliance on their own labor instead of producing things at scale makes them particularly at risk in a world where automation can create high quality goods (not just cheap crap).
Apply the Amish test. How well do yo think the Amish will be doing when the robots take over all work?
Almost as poorly as any other demographic that depends on farming and the trades. I say almost as poorly because Amish have a very strong savings mentality so they will fare better than the average American tradesman. Only 10% of the Amish still depend on farming for income, primarily because new land has become so expensive. So they have moved towards furniture, construction, and crafts. There were many Amish communities with about 20% unemployment levels during the last recession because of the downturn, so they are certainly not separate from the concerns of the US economy.
Once robots can produce furniture and crafts as well as hand crafted Amish versions, the Amish way of life may not survive. Or at least they will have to start using birth control to reduce their population ten fold.
No it isn't a "matter of time". People think that computers are going to get more and more powerful. They won't.
It doesn't matter if the current computer architectures don't get much more powerful. We already have an example of a biological machine running on 20 watts that has accomplished general intelligence.
Perhaps the first artificially intelligent being will be grown in a lab out of carbon neurons, instead of built out of silicon integrated circuits. But it will still happen. Like I said, it is only a matter of time.
I hate to break it to you: but what you are saying is gibberish. There likely will never be AI. Definitely not with digital computers. We cannot achieve the processing rates required.
You throw around terms like "definitely" far too lightly. The only thing we know for an absolute fact is that general intelligence is possible, since it exists already. The only question is how easy it is to replicate from scratch, and what hardware is necessary. Claiming it cannot be done with digital computers is as silly as saying no mechanical system could ever fly. You may be correct, but you have far too much certainty.
With almost 100% certainty humans will build our own custom general intelligent beings at some point. Likely the only thing that could prevent this is our extinction in the near future. This may include building a brain in a digital or quantum computer, or it may include growing it biologically one synapse at a time. But since we already know creating one is possible, it is only a matter of time.
I find it personally hard to believe it won't happen in the next 100 years, but quite possibly not in my lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
So Hillary's dastardly plan to rig the primary by specifically suppressing Bernie supporters began four years ago?
The complaint is not that Hillary herself is rigging the systems. It is that the system has already been rigged towards establishment candidates. This is not Hillary's fault, but that is not the point. Saying it is not Hillary's fault is just a strawman argument.
The problem is not that *this* election is heavily rigged. It is that *all* elections are heavily rigged. The very fact people like Sanders and Trump are forced to obtain the backing of a major party to have a chance in the election is the biggest part of the problem. Our plurality voting system essentially guarantees a two party system at this scale.
I overall agree with the idea political parties should have rules which help them elect people who agree with their core values. But as long as we have a plurality voting system we have no choice but to make our two political parties more inclusive and less rigged towards establishment candidates. Without fixing these rules we will continue to have a very rigged system where the voice of the people is suppressed.
True, and I believe I saw some external video cards recently being made. But in terms of performance, I don't think having an external video card receiving data via USB-C or the likes will ever match or exceed one directly plugged in to a motherboard. But who knows.
I would have agreed with that, but after looking up the throughput of PCIe 3.0 and USB-C, it looks like they have very similar speeds. USB-C provides 1.25 GB/s while PCIe 3.0 is about 1 GB/s. There is the distance factor but it appears the speeds could be similar.
This truly sounds like a good opportunity for AMD to take some market share from Intel. If Intel ends the research and development by massive layoffs, spends billions on buying crappy companies (McAfee, Altera, etc..) and focuses just on trendy fads (cloud, experience, and IoT), they are doomed. The current Intel CEO seems to be following Microsoft's footprints from market dominance to quick destruction.
Yeah, and companies that focused on fads such as personal computers in the early 80's were doomed as well. We have a lot to learn from visionaries like IBM's John Akers who dismissed PC's as a fad best handled by companies with no vision, like Microsoft and Intel.
That's the thing. For casual use maybe your fone will be the "next computer" but as long as there's a PC gaming industry, they will keep pushing PC performance boundries.
No reason video acceleration needs to be done in the cell phone. That could happen in some module connected to the monitor / tv. This could easily be the duty of the next generation of consoles, with them simply being external GPUs which give your mobile devices better gaming experiences.
Not to mention that the wealth of a nation lies in the general public.
It does not. Half the world' wealth is held by the top 1% of individuals
While your statistics may hold true for financial wealth that is easily measured on a balance sheet, it is not the entirety of a country's wealth. A human being with zero net worth still has value. For instance I am 35 years old with an over $200k household income, but my net worth is quite low. About $100k in my house and $100k in retirement savings, but $110k in combined education loans. After factoring in all incidentals I probably have a net worth of between $150k-$200k, but that certainly does not encapsulate my value.
If I were to sell even 10% of my income for the rest of my life, I could probably get $300k for it (if such an investment vehicle even existed). Or to look at it another way, I have about $700k worth of life insurance as my wife and I feel that is the amount necessary for my children's lives to not be financially impacted by my death (although my wife's retirement would still be impacted if she never remarries).
Overall I think it is safe to say my wealth, including human capital, is well over $1 million dollars. But at most my net worth would show up at $200k in the statistics you show above. There are also plenty of working class families with a negative net worth whose human capital would put their net worth into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
400 Americans have more wealth than half of all other Americans
The top 400 Americans have about $1.4 trillion in net worth according to your link. Lets say their human capital was a skill to extract a 2.5% higher ROI than a standard mutual fund (about 7.5% in real dollars opposed to 5%) and that they on average have 20 years left in their careers. That would add an extra trillion dollars onto their net worth plus human capital, bringing it to $2.4 trillion.
Half of US households is about 67 million households, with an average size of 2.6. Lets use a conservative 1.25 workers per household, and a very low $100k in human capital per working American. That is an extra $8 trillion in net worth. Using a figure of $200k for human capital, or someone who can provide about $10k per year for their family above what they consume themselves, that becomes $16 trillion.
Whatever the figure it, the bottom 50% likely have at least 5x the true net worth of the top 400 families.
Not to mention that the wealth of a nation lies in the general public.
So this quote did end up being true. If you define the general public as everyone outside of those 400 wealthiest US families, they have over 95% of the financial value of the US. If you add human capital, the general public has over 99% of the wealth. You would have to define the general public as a very small subset of the country for this not to be true.
If you've got a great business idea, your success with it probably doesn't depend much on whether you have a degree or not!
Yes, but unless you are one of the 1 in 10 who succeed in starting their own business, the degree will almost certainly still come in handy.
What you are describing is the working class. The middle class consists of people who own their own businesses and professionals, doctors, lawyers and amazingly teachers.
These definitions of working class and middle class may be the picture most people have in their mind, but I assure you they are not the definitions economists, journalists, or policy makers use. By your definitions the middle class is actually on the rise in the US, with the working class shrinking (and becoming poor). But the reality is an increasing upper middle class and increasing working class, with a shrinking middle class in the middle. The good news is the upper middle class is growing quicker than the working class, so at least more people leaving the middle class are going up than down.
To reach a family income of even $90,000 you are already entering the top 20% of households. That is the very top of what any economist would consider middle class. Combined household incomes reaching six figures are the upper middle class, who live very different lives than the middle class. Most families with at least one earner in one of the professions you listed would be considered upper middle class.
You expect us to read the fucking article? Am I on Slashdot or what?
Touche, you win this round.
Most people have a very warped view of what the middle class is today. There is still some romantic notion of a single earner family with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. The reality is a middle class with a median household income of about $70k, with a majority of these families requiring dual earners to reach this income level. This amount of income does not give the middle class life most people would expect, including a stable income, adequate retirement savings, ability to pay most of their children's college costs, ability to go on one nice vacation per year, etc.
The upper middle class is growing rapidly even as the middle class is shrinking, but the ruse is the upper middle class is more similar to what people imagine when they think middle class.
There is nothing in this story that says it's about the US.
Other than the link to the United States Department of Labor website?
I make slightly over $50,000 per year in Silicon Valley. If I wasn't working in government IT, I could make about 40% in pay but without the job security of a multi-year, fully funded contract.
I understand that job security is worth something, but certainly not working for 30% less than you could in the open market. If you could make $5833 per month but are willing to live on $4167 per month, you would still be breaking even if you could only find work for 8.5 months per year being paid your true value.
Most people put far too much value on a stable job, and this is one prime example.
Contracting sucks, but it's all I've been able to get. And before you say, "improve your skills," I am doing that, but having no degree compounds the problem!
This is why I get upset any time some startup founder says the best thing he ever did was drop out of college (or that he regrets finishing college). For the vast majority of people no amount of hard work will make up for not having a college degree. Even in the mostly meritocratic IT industry.
I certainly understand why you struggle to make less than $60k per year without a degree to show potential employers. I was stuck with about $40k per year until the last recession forced me to get a worthless UoP degree to find new employment. Now I make four times what I made ten years ago. No one cares about my degree now, but there were 1-2 crucial career building jobs over the past decade I would have never gotten without it.
The least they could do is send out a list of all companies who paid extortion fees so people could identify inept management who should be replaced.
... were they really beautiful people or is this just another dating site that engages in false advertising?
In this case a leak of the images and of the votes each person gave on potential new users would be far more interesting than just a users table dump. It could make for an interesting computer vision project identifying attractiveness. Or a project showing how a user's ethnicity affects his/her rating of people of different ethnicities. Plenty of non-PC research topics to go around.
Why isn't there condemnation on Slashdot for the hackers doing this?
As of the time you posted your comment (15 minutes after the story went live), there was no one on Slashdot saying the victims deserved to be punished. There was one post asking how they determined if someone was attractive enough, which is just an inquiry not a condemnation. Did you post this just assuming there would be a lot of victim shaming in the next few hours?
I for one agree there is nothing wrong with this site. I doubt I would make the cut, but what's wrong with that? When I was on Match.com (where I met my wife) I passed over many people I was not attracted to and I assume many women did the same to me. Sites that cater to a certain group, whether it be religious affinity, wealth, attractiveness, etc. don't strike me as more demeaning than the standard rituals of dating already are. They just make it more efficient.
Of course having more data to run statistical models against gives more confidence.
Not necessarily. Data sets of a few thousand records are generally sufficient for decent p values unless you're looking for effects that are so small that they're of limited commercial value. .
I agree with this and the rest of your points. Confidence is an overloaded term in this context. I meant more data obviously increases human confidence, not necessarily that it should increase that confidence. More data is by itself better than less data. But just like any positive attribute, having too much of it makes people blind to aspects that aren't as positive.
This is true of just about any positive positive attribute, whether it is your workers' intelligence, a potential suitor's financial status, or a car's acceleration. All are considered a positive thing by most people, but all have diminishing returns. Just like getting more data.
And as far as strategy is concerned, do you really think Starcraft strategy is much more advanced than Go strategy? Personally I doubt it
I would agree Go strategy is more advanced, I also believe the tactical maneuvers in Starcraft require far more general intelligence than the strategy of either game. Deciding where to put a stone in Go requires far more strategic thinking than where/when to attack or what build order to use, but the process of acting on those strategic decisions is far different. Exactly how to attack, what units to target, when to evade units, how to evade units, what formation to use, etc. places far more decision making complexity on a game of Starcraft. And this is all done in real time while your opponent is switching tactical approaches every few seconds to beat you.
It is kind of semantics deciding what decisions are strategic and which are tactical, but overall there are far more "game states" in a game of Starcraft than a game of Go. Perhaps many order of magnitude more. Even once you remove variations of game state which don't impact the match result, I would bet Starcraft has a few order of magnitude more possible game states than Go.
I agree this article has no significant substance. Of course having more data to run statistical models against gives more confidence. So does hiring more Ivy League grads to work as your analysts or paying pricey firms like McKinsey to help make strategic decisions.
Everything that can help boost confidence has the potential to boost it too far. And everything that will help you make better decisions is confidence boosting. So unless you intentionally want to limit your ability to make intelligent decisions, you will have to carefully monitor whether you have too much confidence.
hit much harder than most Americans.
What exactly does his mean? I don't know anything about the amish, but I'd doubt many went hungry or without shelter. I live in one of the poorest areas of the US and I don't see many people truly lacking anything. Sure everybody drives a beater 1978 truck and lives in a dumpy house, but no one is hungry and everyone has a house and a car.
It means their unemployment levels were much higher than the rest of the US. Almost no one was going hungry in the latest recession, with food prices so low that is unlikely to happen even in a repeat of the great depression.
The coming changes brought on by automation are at least theorized to be drastically worst than anything seen in the great depression. People talk about greater than 50% unemployment. The article in question postulated a world with 90% unemployment. My original point was simply that in such a world, the Amish would fare at least as bad if not a little worst than the rest of the world. They would have all the job loss but very few if not none of the gains from this increased automation. They may finally have to accept significant government assistance.
But who is going to decide that instead of sitting home and watching TV, they're going to wait tables, or flip burgers, or enforce laws, or collect trash, or be a retail cashier?
One of the primary reasons a basic income may be necessary in the near future is we will have machines to flip burgers, AIs to drive garbage trucks, and kiosks along with RFID chips to replace cashiers. While not guaranteed, there is a real possibility that the vast majority of jobs could become obsolete.
As for jobs that likely won't be automated, like police officers, the pay will simply match what is necessary to motivate people to work. Just like today.
I wouldn't think so. There are still a lot of people that prefer hand-crafted stuff just because a real person made it, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Most people (under a certain age at least) don't buy hand made just because a real person made it. They do it because of a perception the quality is higher. Today that is usually a correct assumption, but in a few decades it likely won't hold true any more. At that point I think being hand-made won't be much of a selling point; especially for Centennials and future generations.
There will always be some people, myself included, who are willing to pay for genuine hand-crafted goods. If there's enough spare money around for people to buy unique luxury goods, the Amish will prosper.
But we are talking about a hypothetical world where robotics are fully capable of building highly unique luxury goods. Currently Amish furniture is considered a high quality product compared to what you might find at an Ikea. Today's consumer is still conditioned to think hand-made means quality. That is unlikely to be the case 50 years from now (perhaps even 20).
If the world becomes so impoverished that everybody struggles to survive, the Amish are already well-prepared for that situation.
That isn't true. The last recession has shown the Amish were hit much harder than most Americans. Their reliance on their own labor instead of producing things at scale makes them particularly at risk in a world where automation can create high quality goods (not just cheap crap).
Apply the Amish test. How well do yo think the Amish will be doing when the robots take over all work?
Almost as poorly as any other demographic that depends on farming and the trades. I say almost as poorly because Amish have a very strong savings mentality so they will fare better than the average American tradesman. Only 10% of the Amish still depend on farming for income, primarily because new land has become so expensive. So they have moved towards furniture, construction, and crafts. There were many Amish communities with about 20% unemployment levels during the last recession because of the downturn, so they are certainly not separate from the concerns of the US economy.
Once robots can produce furniture and crafts as well as hand crafted Amish versions, the Amish way of life may not survive. Or at least they will have to start using birth control to reduce their population ten fold.
No it isn't a "matter of time". People think that computers are going to get more and more powerful. They won't.
It doesn't matter if the current computer architectures don't get much more powerful. We already have an example of a biological machine running on 20 watts that has accomplished general intelligence.
Perhaps the first artificially intelligent being will be grown in a lab out of carbon neurons, instead of built out of silicon integrated circuits. But it will still happen. Like I said, it is only a matter of time.
I hate to break it to you: but what you are saying is gibberish. There likely will never be AI. Definitely not with digital computers. We cannot achieve the processing rates required.
You throw around terms like "definitely" far too lightly. The only thing we know for an absolute fact is that general intelligence is possible, since it exists already. The only question is how easy it is to replicate from scratch, and what hardware is necessary. Claiming it cannot be done with digital computers is as silly as saying no mechanical system could ever fly. You may be correct, but you have far too much certainty.
With almost 100% certainty humans will build our own custom general intelligent beings at some point. Likely the only thing that could prevent this is our extinction in the near future. This may include building a brain in a digital or quantum computer, or it may include growing it biologically one synapse at a time. But since we already know creating one is possible, it is only a matter of time.
I find it personally hard to believe it won't happen in the next 100 years, but quite possibly not in my lifetime.