Is it horseshit that Google chooses to promote secondary non-official sites over official sites?
That's irrelevant and you're moving the goalposts. They did not "propagate false statements as facts".
They said, in effect, "Our algorithm thinks that this page is probably relevant to what you searched for". No claims were made about anything being a fact. They're displaying what comes out of a program that tries to guess what people are looking for or will want to view. That has nothing to do with factualness.
If you searched for Peter Pan and they gave you the "official" book, would you claim that they'd presented it as fact that you could fly around and fight pirates if you just stayed young?
And knowingly propagating false statements as facts effectively what Google is doing there
Horseshit. The only "fact" Google is claiming is that certain words and links appear in particular places and are associated with certain other words and links in ways that often tend to indicate relevance. That's all Google knows about anything anyway.
You are repeating an economic fallacy that was debunked by David Ricardo more than 200 years ago.
I'm familiar with it.
It's not interesting when the advantaged side has unknown incentive structures that probably don't include wanting to keep its own product at all, and may include actively wanting to give its production to the other side without compensation. For that matter, it's not relevant if the advantaged side converts the other side into paper clips. It's also not relevant when the advantage is so huge that one side's entire productive capacity is swamped by the friction the other side would encounter in bothering to try to trade.
You don't trade with AI. Any theory of exchange, voluntary or otherwise, is irrelevant. If you're using any analytical framework that involves trade, then you're using an inapplicable framework.
How many jobs do chimpanzees hold right now? Cattle? Little yappy lap dogs? I mean, humans only have a comparative advantage over those animals, right?
I suppose that if the AIs totally ignored us, or intentionally adopted a hands-off policy, humans could keep providing for themselves like chimpanzees do. I think there's effectively zero probability that AIs built by humans will let that happen.
If you think that "deep learning" is leading to general AI, you are mistaken.
If I thought deep learning would do it, I'd give it 10 years tops. In fact, deep learning per se is probably already mostly tapped out. It'll take at least a few more software advances of the same general size as deep learning. Probably some massive hardware advances, too. All of which will happen (and yes, I am well aware that Moore's Law died long ago).
If you think that general AI is impossible, or even that it can't overwhelmingly beat what humans have now, you have to explain what privileges general "natural" intelligence. The answer, of course, is that nothing does. It's just a technological problem involving physical systems.
If you think it'll take longer than a century, you have to explain what the hell you think would possibly take that long. In doing so, please refrain from mysticism, arguments assuming vast unexplained changes in the general rate of technological advance, arguments from ignorance, and arguments from fictional evidence.
I'm old enough to remember when people like you said computers could never even beat humans at chess, or at least that it would take hundreds of years.
... because past forms of automation haven't allowed machines to be better at every single thing a human can do. That will include management, engineering, art, creativity, diplomacy, empathic understanding of people's feelings, you name it. Machines will do it all better. Some people might value a few things, because they were done by humans, however inferior the results... but that's not a basis for an economy.
By the way, the machines will probably be really good at manipulating what you want, too, assuming they're tasked with that or task themselves with it.
It's true that not much happened when the car went over the bumps. It does not follow that the Grand Canyon is no problem.
it is not happening now
Yep, we still haven't gone over the lip. I give it roughly 30 to 100 years, probably on the shorter end.
The only way you could possibly argue that it wouldn't happen would be to spew some idiotic vitalist claptrap about souls and "unique humanity".
areas of the world that failed to automate are much poorer.
Duh. Obviously automation produces more. The issue is how you distribute it.
Up to now, it's been distributed mostly through "jobs", and that''s sort of vaguely worked if you were willing to distort your view of fairness a bit.
It's going to stop working in a very spectacular way. Jobs are going to be over. All jobs. Permanently. All human work of whatever kind will be economically irrelevant. Most of the traditional justifications for human ownership of capital are also going to ring pretty hollow, because they're typically based on accumulation of the rewards of past labor, and that doesn't fly after a certain amount of time.
30 to 100 years is a very short time to figure out how to deal with that, especially when you can't be sure what the machines' view on the matter will be.
Utilities and communications do sound like relatively good candidates. And medical care seems work OK as a UBS in plenty of places, since people already pretty much delegate decisions there to their doctors anyhow.
But if you can't at least do the food and shelter too, you haven't dealt with either people's basic needs or their major expenses. See more below about shelter, and no it's not that easy to keep shelter quiet if you don't also have infinite fast and free transportation (which I have to admit would also be a candidate UBS).
to the greatest extent possible via democratic processes rather than a bunch of bureaucrats
Oh. My. God. You're. Serious.
The only thing less efficient than bureaucracy is democracy. Or maybe bureacracy overseen by democracy.... and...
Problems for politicians, hardly different from today's or those that would exist under a UBI, people can vote on it.
Never been involved with politics, then?
The more decisions you have to make, the harder it is. Making one decision to give people some particular amount of money is much, much easier than making many decisions about what should or should not be a free service. Every time you deal with a different service, you deal with a different set of entrenched interests and a different set of people with Strong Opinions(TM).
Should Universal Basic Internet come with a porn filter? If so, which one? Should it also cover Extremist Content? Who do I talk to about filtering errors. Is 10mbps enough? How much can I download in a month? Speaking of which, can I run BitTorrent?
How much electricity should I be able to use in a month? Does it depend on where I live? On how many people live in my house? What if I have gas heat, or an electric water heater; does that change it?
Should Universal Basic Food have a vegan option? Halal? Kosher? Gluten free? All of the above at the same time so it tastes like sawdust? Should it aim to just keep you alive, or should it be tasty enough to compete with commercial food? If it sucks, how does that impact people's mental health and quality of life? If it doesn't, how are you going to placate the commercial food industry?
Does Universal Basic Care cover abortions? Birth control? Sex reassignment? OK, those will probably end up political no matter what...
Am I allowed to have a gun in Universal Basic Housing (not always now...)? Can my unit be inspected without notice (happens now...)? Do I lose the unit if I fail a drug test (happens now...)? How clean do I have to keep the unit? How often should we spray for roaches?
Boxers or briefs?
You couldn't vote on all those decisions. You'd have to set up a bureaucracy to deal with most of them. But don't worry; you could still have a fun political time second-guessing every decision your bureaucrats made, saddling them with infinite procedural rules (things also break if you don't do this), forcing them to justify every decision on a hot-button issue to micromanaging politicians while much more important issues get ignored, etc.
This would be made easier with advances in automated and additive manufacturing. New styles and "brands" for different items could even by generated on the fly by AI algorithms.
... and the week after that, the AI can just take over and support us all. In other words, that's all vaporware. I remember people promising all that stuff in 1998.
The housing problems are no different than those under a UBI or even the status quo. Only the rich can afford to pay people to custom-build houses to meet special circumstances.
Nobody's suggesting custom-built houses for free. There's a huge variety of already built housing on the market.
UBS provider would be more like a state-owned corporation than a planned economy, and those have worked well for China, Russia and many OPEC nations just off the top of my head.
The problem isn't in providing the services. The problem is in selecting and allocating the services. Not that many things are really "Universal". At the same time there will always be people who need (for whatever value of "need" you decide to care about) something you haven't declared to be "Universal"... or who need something you do think is "Universal", but can't use it in the form you provide.
If you decide that the Universal Basic Services Package includes N pairs of shoes (available colors: Universal Basic Brown, Universal Basic Grey, sizes 6 through 10), M razor blades, J bars of chocolate, and K pairs of nylons every month, then you ignore the fact that not everybody needs or wants exactly the same things in exactly the same proportions (and, by the way, you're ignoring the person who doesn't want the chocolate, or is even allergic to it, but whose life would be greatly enriched by, say, a set of paints). If you decide that a family of four needs to live in a Four Person Basic Accommodation, but four unrelated adults need four Individual Adult Basic Accommodations, then you're ignoring the fact that two members of that family hate each other, and two of those "unrelated" adults are sleeping together.
By the way, when I was a kid, we had a name for the Universal Basic Accommodations. We called them "the Projects".
If you instead give people a certain number of Universal Basic Service Tokens to spend every month on Approved Universal Basic Needs produced by the State Universal Basic Services Corporation, you're probably still leaving out the person who would be better off with the paints. The SUBSC only produces certain things. And they still live in the Projects.
In either case, you're also employing a bunch of people to determine what's in the program and what isn't. The rules will get very complicated very fast indeed. And if you offer variances upon application, you're employing an army of people to process the applications. Each exceptional circumstance is rare. Having some exceptional circumstance is very common. Not to mention the fact that every applicant is probably going to have to sit in a waiting room for two hours and answer a bunch of demeaning questions. Read some stuff about the experience of being on welfare. Why would it not be exactly like that?
Also, don't forget the incredible political pressure you'll be under to make the Universal Basic Products absolutely joyless, boring, and maybe just a little worse along every dimension than other products. You'll have one set of people pushing you not to give out anything that could possibly be perceived as a luxury, and another set pushing you not to give out anything that could possibly be offensive or "culturally insensitive". You'll have one group screaming that their pet item is a basic need, and another group screaming that anything they don't personally like is a wasteful luxury.
The people who can afford it will buy alternatives... unless of course you also plan to outlaw the alternatives, in which case we are all living on mil-spec Universal Basic People Chow.
How much more "planned economy" can you get?
And how is this not better than the alternative of being poor (which also carries a ton of stigma) while not having access to those services at all?
If you want to push UBS over UBI, then you have to compare it against UBI. You don't get to compare it against unrelieved poverty.
It's really obvious who's reliant on UBS. They're the ones wearing the Universal Basic Shoes (Universal Basic Brown, size 8) with the Universal Basic Garment, eating the Universal Basic Sandwich for lunch and getting on bus to or from the Uinveral Basic Projects.
Universal basic services would probably be as expensive as UBI if not more so, because of the cost of the bureaucracy to administer them. That same bureaucracy would make them slow and wasteful; the Soviets tried planned economies and it didn't work. AND being seen to use UBS would carry a ton of stigma and make it harder for people who did want to work to be accepted to do so.
A citizen's dividend is a UBI. It's just a way of funding a UBI.
Reasonably intelligent person: Hey, this fingerprint stuff is sensitive. Let's isolate it in separate hardware!
Non-stupid detail person:... and since it's specialized hardware and has information we want to control let's lock it down and have it only run code we've signed!
Well-meaning idiot:... and since it only runs our code, let's make it More Secure by having zero transparency!
Fucking worthless moron:... and since it's More Secure, let's put it in control of more stuff! And add more software! And funnel everything through it! Let's have it run the keyboard! And the camera! And the disk!
(Intel):... and let's give it direct network access, too!
Hacker: Pwnt!
This pattern happens over and over again at company after company. People build these "secure" enclaves to isolate things, and then as soon as they have them they blow that isolation by shoveling in every damned thing they can think of so everything can be "more secure". And since it's in charge of everything, it has to have control of everything. And then it gets cracked.
THAT'S NOT HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO FUCKING WORK!. If you have a sensitive function, you put it in its OWN FUCKING COMPARTMENT. And you give it no more privilege than it needs to do that one thing. You don't dump in a shit-ton of unrelated software into a coprocessor that's trusted for everything (and, by the way, is usually pretty much invisible to the OS).
Deep learning is still pretty stupid. It doesn't do what real intelligence does, namely achieve goals through directed action in unconstrained environments with incomplete information.
The thing is that that won't last. A few more breakthroughs along the lines of the last few years of deep learning, maybe in somewhat different areas, and you might very well have truly general AI.
You'll definitely get truly general AI sometime, because humans are just physical objects not magic. If humans are generally intelligent, then that can be and will be replicated by technology.
What people want is to make sure that we keep being "much better for it".
At some point, the new jobs that get created are probably going to be beyond most people. A bit further along than that, and the machines will be better than all humans at most new jobs... before those jobs get created. Humans win now because they're generally intelligent. When machines have that, there are going to be a helluva lot fewer jobs for humans, if any.
I guess things like "racecar driver" could be among them, but only if the whole draw of the "race" is that the "cars" are human-driven. Things that have to be done by humans are going to end up as a small niche. Even sex may not be on the list.
If 99 percent of economic value is created by machines, how do you allocate that value? Are you going to keep giving it all to to whoever happened to have an ancestor that happened to own the right machine at the right time? Forever? Or are you going to give it all to a few racecar drivers and the very best prostitutes?
Even today, nobody seems to be willing to face up to the idea that not everybody can be high-skilled, and the economy can't necessarily absorb that much high-skilled labor even if they could.
When machines are higher-than-high-skilled, human labor becomes more and more economically irrelevant.
But governments and laws (and "nations") are artificial constructs, too, just like corporations are.
Let's raise the stakes a bit on drinking alcohol in Saudi Arabia, OK?
Say I went to Saudi Arabia, and I somehow managed to run into a young woman who was, say, trying to escape from her family and get out of the country to avoid an arranged marriage, or avoid being beaten to death because she was a lesbian, or whatever. Well, then I damned well hope I'd have the courage and wherewithal to help her.
That would be a direct violation of Saudi law; I think they'd treat it as equivalent to kidnapping. Nonetheless, it would be the right thing to do.
... because Saudi Arabia and Saudi law are phantoms, just like corporations, whereas that hypothetical young woman would be a real person. Her claim to control her own life would be independent of law, and independent of the opinions of people who happen to live near her.
The idea that an arbitrarily chosen group of millions of people who can't know each other get to tell each other what to do, while the views of millions of other people don't count, and the views of the tell-ee don't count either, is very hard to defend from an ethical point of view, especially when what they're demanding is egregious. I don't forfeit the right to notice abuse, or escape the duty to notice it, just because I come from the wrong side of a line somebody drew on a map.
It's a mistake to treat corporations as artificial without recognizing that political units are equally so. Maybe we have to compromise sometimes and let these abstractions exist, but that is a pragmatic choice, and we can't just close our eyes to everything else from then on.
There's another issue, too: at the point we arrive in this story, corporations have already been set up as arbiters of what actual human beings can say. Not only that, but corporations have been institutionalized as probably the major way for large groups of human beings to coordinate their actions.
That may be bad. It's probably bad. You could probably sell me on making some huge changes to it, but it's the institutional structure we have. And corporations are already creations of government.
If you demand that corporations, or the real people employed by corporations, act exclusively according to the rules the government dictates, you deprive actual humans of one of the most important ways they have of acting together. Basically you bring the options that much closer to being only to "if you don't like this, go vote".
Not only is government just as artificial as corporations, but just as easy to corrupt. Democracy isn't a guarantee of justice, it's just a least-worst approach.
Nonetheless, the ability to use a hammer to drive a nail is not physics knowledge. It's carpentry knowledge.
The ability to use a calculator to get an answer is not math knowledge. It's not even arithmetic knowledge. And, unlike using a hammer, it's so trivial to learn that it counts for nothing at all.
"The industry" is always saying that. I've been doing this for over 30 years, and they have never stoped saying that. That doesn't make it true.
The thing is that it's always to their advantage if more people go to school in those fields, if governments make it easier to immigrate with those skills, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean there aren't enough people qualified to do the work. It may mean that the would prefer a glut of such people so they don't have to pay very much. And it's no skin off a CxO's nose if some of the people who spent the time getting the qualifications are working at McDonald's.
When the Snowden stuff came out, it turned out that the NSA was tapping cables, including cables belonging to Google, and getting tons of cleartext traffic.
The article says that Google wants its own pair "to keep its traffic private". Maybe that's just a misunderstanding or misphrasing. But it doesn't inspire confidence given that they screwed up and didn't encrypt last time.
Slashdot Mirror
That's irrelevant and you're moving the goalposts. They did not "propagate false statements as facts".
They said, in effect, "Our algorithm thinks that this page is probably relevant to what you searched for". No claims were made about anything being a fact. They're displaying what comes out of a program that tries to guess what people are looking for or will want to view. That has nothing to do with factualness.
If you searched for Peter Pan and they gave you the "official" book, would you claim that they'd presented it as fact that you could fly around and fight pirates if you just stayed young?
Horseshit. The only "fact" Google is claiming is that certain words and links appear in particular places and are associated with certain other words and links in ways that often tend to indicate relevance. That's all Google knows about anything anyway.
Then how come every single project's C style guide requires you to indent it just so?
What's really broken is having the humans relying on whitespace (which they DO), and the compiler relying on punctuation.
I'm familiar with it.
It's not interesting when the advantaged side has unknown incentive structures that probably don't include wanting to keep its own product at all, and may include actively wanting to give its production to the other side without compensation. For that matter, it's not relevant if the advantaged side converts the other side into paper clips. It's also not relevant when the advantage is so huge that one side's entire productive capacity is swamped by the friction the other side would encounter in bothering to try to trade.
You don't trade with AI. Any theory of exchange, voluntary or otherwise, is irrelevant. If you're using any analytical framework that involves trade, then you're using an inapplicable framework.
How many jobs do chimpanzees hold right now? Cattle? Little yappy lap dogs? I mean, humans only have a comparative advantage over those animals, right?
I suppose that if the AIs totally ignored us, or intentionally adopted a hands-off policy, humans could keep providing for themselves like chimpanzees do. I think there's effectively zero probability that AIs built by humans will let that happen.
If I thought deep learning would do it, I'd give it 10 years tops. In fact, deep learning per se is probably already mostly tapped out. It'll take at least a few more software advances of the same general size as deep learning. Probably some massive hardware advances, too. All of which will happen (and yes, I am well aware that Moore's Law died long ago).
If you think that general AI is impossible, or even that it can't overwhelmingly beat what humans have now, you have to explain what privileges general "natural" intelligence. The answer, of course, is that nothing does. It's just a technological problem involving physical systems.
If you think it'll take longer than a century, you have to explain what the hell you think would possibly take that long. In doing so, please refrain from mysticism, arguments assuming vast unexplained changes in the general rate of technological advance, arguments from ignorance, and arguments from fictional evidence.
I'm old enough to remember when people like you said computers could never even beat humans at chess, or at least that it would take hundreds of years.
By the way, the machines will probably be really good at manipulating what you want, too, assuming they're tasked with that or task themselves with it.
It's true that not much happened when the car went over the bumps. It does not follow that the Grand Canyon is no problem.
Yep, we still haven't gone over the lip. I give it roughly 30 to 100 years, probably on the shorter end.
The only way you could possibly argue that it wouldn't happen would be to spew some idiotic vitalist claptrap about souls and "unique humanity".
Duh. Obviously automation produces more. The issue is how you distribute it.
Up to now, it's been distributed mostly through "jobs", and that''s sort of vaguely worked if you were willing to distort your view of fairness a bit.
It's going to stop working in a very spectacular way. Jobs are going to be over. All jobs. Permanently. All human work of whatever kind will be economically irrelevant. Most of the traditional justifications for human ownership of capital are also going to ring pretty hollow, because they're typically based on accumulation of the rewards of past labor, and that doesn't fly after a certain amount of time.
30 to 100 years is a very short time to figure out how to deal with that, especially when you can't be sure what the machines' view on the matter will be.
They're separate so you can be sure to forget to fix the security bugs in at least one of them.
Utilities and communications do sound like relatively good candidates. And medical care seems work OK as a UBS in plenty of places, since people already pretty much delegate decisions there to their doctors anyhow.
But if you can't at least do the food and shelter too, you haven't dealt with either people's basic needs or their major expenses. See more below about shelter, and no it's not that easy to keep shelter quiet if you don't also have infinite fast and free transportation (which I have to admit would also be a candidate UBS).
Oh. My. God. You're. Serious.
The only thing less efficient than bureaucracy is democracy. Or maybe bureacracy overseen by democracy. ... and ...
Never been involved with politics, then?
The more decisions you have to make, the harder it is. Making one decision to give people some particular amount of money is much, much easier than making many decisions about what should or should not be a free service. Every time you deal with a different service, you deal with a different set of entrenched interests and a different set of people with Strong Opinions(TM).
Should Universal Basic Internet come with a porn filter? If so, which one? Should it also cover Extremist Content? Who do I talk to about filtering errors. Is 10mbps enough? How much can I download in a month? Speaking of which, can I run BitTorrent?
How much electricity should I be able to use in a month? Does it depend on where I live? On how many people live in my house? What if I have gas heat, or an electric water heater; does that change it?
Should Universal Basic Food have a vegan option? Halal? Kosher? Gluten free? All of the above at the same time so it tastes like sawdust? Should it aim to just keep you alive, or should it be tasty enough to compete with commercial food? If it sucks, how does that impact people's mental health and quality of life? If it doesn't, how are you going to placate the commercial food industry?
Does Universal Basic Care cover abortions? Birth control? Sex reassignment? OK, those will probably end up political no matter what...
Am I allowed to have a gun in Universal Basic Housing (not always now...)? Can my unit be inspected without notice (happens now...)? Do I lose the unit if I fail a drug test (happens now...)? How clean do I have to keep the unit? How often should we spray for roaches?
Boxers or briefs?
You couldn't vote on all those decisions. You'd have to set up a bureaucracy to deal with most of them. But don't worry; you could still have a fun political time second-guessing every decision your bureaucrats made, saddling them with infinite procedural rules (things also break if you don't do this), forcing them to justify every decision on a hot-button issue to micromanaging politicians while much more important issues get ignored, etc.
Nobody's suggesting custom-built houses for free. There's a huge variety of already built housing on the market.
The problem isn't in providing the services. The problem is in selecting and allocating the services. Not that many things are really "Universal". At the same time there will always be people who need (for whatever value of "need" you decide to care about) something you haven't declared to be "Universal"... or who need something you do think is "Universal", but can't use it in the form you provide.
If you decide that the Universal Basic Services Package includes N pairs of shoes (available colors: Universal Basic Brown, Universal Basic Grey, sizes 6 through 10), M razor blades, J bars of chocolate, and K pairs of nylons every month, then you ignore the fact that not everybody needs or wants exactly the same things in exactly the same proportions (and, by the way, you're ignoring the person who doesn't want the chocolate, or is even allergic to it, but whose life would be greatly enriched by, say, a set of paints). If you decide that a family of four needs to live in a Four Person Basic Accommodation, but four unrelated adults need four Individual Adult Basic Accommodations, then you're ignoring the fact that two members of that family hate each other, and two of those "unrelated" adults are sleeping together.
By the way, when I was a kid, we had a name for the Universal Basic Accommodations. We called them "the Projects".
If you instead give people a certain number of Universal Basic Service Tokens to spend every month on Approved Universal Basic Needs produced by the State Universal Basic Services Corporation, you're probably still leaving out the person who would be better off with the paints. The SUBSC only produces certain things. And they still live in the Projects.
In either case, you're also employing a bunch of people to determine what's in the program and what isn't. The rules will get very complicated very fast indeed. And if you offer variances upon application, you're employing an army of people to process the applications. Each exceptional circumstance is rare. Having some exceptional circumstance is very common. Not to mention the fact that every applicant is probably going to have to sit in a waiting room for two hours and answer a bunch of demeaning questions. Read some stuff about the experience of being on welfare. Why would it not be exactly like that?
Also, don't forget the incredible political pressure you'll be under to make the Universal Basic Products absolutely joyless, boring, and maybe just a little worse along every dimension than other products. You'll have one set of people pushing you not to give out anything that could possibly be perceived as a luxury, and another set pushing you not to give out anything that could possibly be offensive or "culturally insensitive". You'll have one group screaming that their pet item is a basic need, and another group screaming that anything they don't personally like is a wasteful luxury.
The people who can afford it will buy alternatives... unless of course you also plan to outlaw the alternatives, in which case we are all living on mil-spec Universal Basic People Chow.
How much more "planned economy" can you get?
If you want to push UBS over UBI, then you have to compare it against UBI. You don't get to compare it against unrelieved poverty.
It's really obvious who's reliant on UBS. They're the ones wearing the Universal Basic Shoes (Universal Basic Brown, size 8) with the Universal Basic Garment, eating the Universal Basic Sandwich for lunch and getting on bus to or from the Uinveral Basic Projects.
Universal basic services would probably be as expensive as UBI if not more so, because of the cost of the bureaucracy to administer them. That same bureaucracy would make them slow and wasteful; the Soviets tried planned economies and it didn't work. AND being seen to use UBS would carry a ton of stigma and make it harder for people who did want to work to be accepted to do so.
A citizen's dividend is a UBI. It's just a way of funding a UBI.
Reasonably intelligent person: Hey, this fingerprint stuff is sensitive. Let's isolate it in separate hardware!
Non-stupid detail person: ... and since it's specialized hardware and has information we want to control let's lock it down and have it only run code we've signed!
Well-meaning idiot: ... and since it only runs our code, let's make it More Secure by having zero transparency!
Fucking worthless moron: ... and since it's More Secure, let's put it in control of more stuff! And add more software! And funnel everything through it! Let's have it run the keyboard! And the camera! And the disk!
(Intel): ... and let's give it direct network access, too!
Hacker: Pwnt!
This pattern happens over and over again at company after company. People build these "secure" enclaves to isolate things, and then as soon as they have them they blow that isolation by shoveling in every damned thing they can think of so everything can be "more secure". And since it's in charge of everything, it has to have control of everything. And then it gets cracked.
THAT'S NOT HOW IT'S SUPPOSED TO FUCKING WORK!. If you have a sensitive function, you put it in its OWN FUCKING COMPARTMENT. And you give it no more privilege than it needs to do that one thing. You don't dump in a shit-ton of unrelated software into a coprocessor that's trusted for everything (and, by the way, is usually pretty much invisible to the OS).
Morons.
Sexual reproduction is a fad.
Can't argue with this...
Deep learning is still pretty stupid. It doesn't do what real intelligence does, namely achieve goals through directed action in unconstrained environments with incomplete information.
The thing is that that won't last. A few more breakthroughs along the lines of the last few years of deep learning, maybe in somewhat different areas, and you might very well have truly general AI.
You'll definitely get truly general AI sometime, because humans are just physical objects not magic. If humans are generally intelligent, then that can be and will be replicated by technology.
If the machines are producing huge amounts of goods and services, I have trouble seeing how that's a "decimated economy".
That's a very productive economy with an output allocation problem.
Nobody wants to go to a non-automated world.
What people want is to make sure that we keep being "much better for it".
At some point, the new jobs that get created are probably going to be beyond most people. A bit further along than that, and the machines will be better than all humans at most new jobs... before those jobs get created. Humans win now because they're generally intelligent. When machines have that, there are going to be a helluva lot fewer jobs for humans, if any.
I guess things like "racecar driver" could be among them, but only if the whole draw of the "race" is that the "cars" are human-driven. Things that have to be done by humans are going to end up as a small niche. Even sex may not be on the list.
If 99 percent of economic value is created by machines, how do you allocate that value? Are you going to keep giving it all to to whoever happened to have an ancestor that happened to own the right machine at the right time? Forever? Or are you going to give it all to a few racecar drivers and the very best prostitutes?
... except that peasants were valuable economic assets. You couldn't farm the fields and build the castle without peasants.
Peasants are still needed at the moment, but for how long? And what happens afterwards?
I think this is true.
Even today, nobody seems to be willing to face up to the idea that not everybody can be high-skilled, and the economy can't necessarily absorb that much high-skilled labor even if they could.
When machines are higher-than-high-skilled, human labor becomes more and more economically irrelevant.
I'm not ignoring it. I just don't think it's so important that it makes a government different in kind for this purpose.
Democracy fails all the time.
But governments and laws (and "nations") are artificial constructs, too, just like corporations are.
Let's raise the stakes a bit on drinking alcohol in Saudi Arabia, OK?
Say I went to Saudi Arabia, and I somehow managed to run into a young woman who was, say, trying to escape from her family and get out of the country to avoid an arranged marriage, or avoid being beaten to death because she was a lesbian, or whatever. Well, then I damned well hope I'd have the courage and wherewithal to help her.
That would be a direct violation of Saudi law; I think they'd treat it as equivalent to kidnapping. Nonetheless, it would be the right thing to do.
The idea that an arbitrarily chosen group of millions of people who can't know each other get to tell each other what to do, while the views of millions of other people don't count, and the views of the tell-ee don't count either, is very hard to defend from an ethical point of view, especially when what they're demanding is egregious. I don't forfeit the right to notice abuse, or escape the duty to notice it, just because I come from the wrong side of a line somebody drew on a map.
It's a mistake to treat corporations as artificial without recognizing that political units are equally so. Maybe we have to compromise sometimes and let these abstractions exist, but that is a pragmatic choice, and we can't just close our eyes to everything else from then on.
There's another issue, too: at the point we arrive in this story, corporations have already been set up as arbiters of what actual human beings can say. Not only that, but corporations have been institutionalized as probably the major way for large groups of human beings to coordinate their actions.
That may be bad. It's probably bad. You could probably sell me on making some huge changes to it, but it's the institutional structure we have. And corporations are already creations of government.
If you demand that corporations, or the real people employed by corporations, act exclusively according to the rules the government dictates, you deprive actual humans of one of the most important ways they have of acting together. Basically you bring the options that much closer to being only to "if you don't like this, go vote".
Not only is government just as artificial as corporations, but just as easy to corrupt. Democracy isn't a guarantee of justice, it's just a least-worst approach.
Nonetheless, the ability to use a hammer to drive a nail is not physics knowledge. It's carpentry knowledge.
The ability to use a calculator to get an answer is not math knowledge. It's not even arithmetic knowledge. And, unlike using a hammer, it's so trivial to learn that it counts for nothing at all.
Well, so far, you could hold it anywhere else in the Americas. Canada's nice.
I mean, I imagine they'll get around to screwing that up, too, but they haven't said that yet.
The thing is that the US really isn't a viable venue any more without the laptop thing.
Move the conferences. The US is no longer a viable venue.
"The industry" is always saying that. I've been doing this for over 30 years, and they have never stoped saying that. That doesn't make it true.
The thing is that it's always to their advantage if more people go to school in those fields, if governments make it easier to immigrate with those skills, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean there aren't enough people qualified to do the work. It may mean that the would prefer a glut of such people so they don't have to pay very much. And it's no skin off a CxO's nose if some of the people who spent the time getting the qualifications are working at McDonald's.
When the Snowden stuff came out, it turned out that the NSA was tapping cables, including cables belonging to Google, and getting tons of cleartext traffic.
The article says that Google wants its own pair "to keep its traffic private". Maybe that's just a misunderstanding or misphrasing. But it doesn't inspire confidence given that they screwed up and didn't encrypt last time.
In that case, you shouldn't trust Tor itself, since it relies on a terrific amount of equally complicated crypto and other code.