But the damn fool does not realize, his machines won't need food, would not buy entertainment, would not buy a home or pay for college. As more and more employers automate more and more functions and lay off more and more people, he will end up with lots of shiny new machines willing sell food at great profit.... if only there are people with money to buy them.
And this is the point at which he instead tasks his machines with making more and better machines (instead of now-worthless food).
And that's how the singularity happens.
A Japanese robot company called FANUC (Factory Automatic NUmerical Control) has been operating a "lights-out" automated factory employing robots that make other robots for years. They are said to run for 30 days unsupervised at a time, making 50 robots a day. And I'm getting this from articles from 6 years ago.
"I'm always amazed by the consumer who thinks that he can demand production and enjoy the benefits of other people's capital."
Given that as of now, and since quite long time, "capital" is nothing but a fiat convention, I'm always amazed by the capitalist who thinks he in fact owns anything unless a majority of people abides by it.
All capital represents someone's labor - but that doesn't mean the person using the capital performed the labor to create it. Like Obama said "you didn't build that".
And after the masses string up the producers for their wealth.
Nobody's talking about stringing up the producers for their wealth. They're talking about stringing up the parasites for their wealth. Let's face it, nobody is productive enough to become wealthy from their own productivity - even the best brain surgeons and rocket scientists are barely rich. Those that have become truly wealthy have done so through business - by exploiting the labor of others - or by exploiting markets - simply taking the wealth of others. These people don't make a net positive contribution to society, and yet they're the ones that amass all the wealth. It's the producers that are losing wealth, as the middle class is eroded, and wealth stratification continues to worsen.
If you disagree, can you explain to me how stringing up, say, the Walton family would meaningfully impact society? Would we be lost in a world incapable of conducting retail sales operations without the Waltons? Would the lack of their high-volume low-margin retail empire really result in a world where nobody produces anything, farmers stop farming, cats and dogs start living together? By what mechanism?
I feel like you're the one saying it would impact society. Once the people you hate are gone, what does change? The signs on the stores that now say "Wal-Mart" say something else? How does entering someone else's name in the global financial system somewhere as the owner of X million shares of stock meaningfully impact society?
Lawyer firms used to employ armies of articlers and clerks to do discovery and research on case law, and are already being replaced by automated systems that do the same work in less time.
Every heard of the buzzword "e-discovery"? A lot of people have been hired to develop, use, and maintain the software systems that are involved in legal cases in the 21st century.
The idea of a machine taking your job becomes meaningless when your job is defined as automating or doing manually what hasn't been automated yet. Obviously not everything has been automated at once, or ever will be finished. So there is always somewhere for new graduates to start.
Not true. Self-evidently not true. Not even true when occupancy* levels are low, and definitely not true where levels are high. London bus occupancy is above 20 -- clearly, this delivers much lower carbon per passenger mile than any petrol/diesel car could achieve (especially when you take account of the fact that many London buses are hybrids).
Occupancy = passenger miles divided by vehicle miles.
It takes some chutzpah to bring up occupancy levels and at the same time assume all cars only have one person in them. Bonus points for using the phrase "self-evident" without any arithmetic.
Say half the buses are hybrids, hybrids get 4 mpg, and non-hybrids get 2.8 mpg (American not Imperial) Average 3.4 mpg, multiplied by 20 is 68 mpg, which is higher than any car I know of (keep in mind I'm using American gallons here). But a car carrying 2 people only has to get 34 mpg to match the bus, 3 people - 23 mpg, 4 people - 17 mpg.
Also note that occupancy for the whole of Great Britain is more like 11. See https://www.gov.uk/government/... So carbon output of an average bus-person-mile is probably about the same overall as driving a car by yourself, and two people in a car are much more efficient than the average of the bus system.
No what is needed is having bus routes not suck. Wan to know why i drive instead of taking the bus? Because I dont have 1.5 hours for my commute to take the bus that goes from the stop near my home, to the mall, then to the other community and then finally downtown. Public transportation needs 2X the number of buses and 2X the number of routes.
Well, that sort of makes sense from a self-centered perspective, but more buses and routes means more empty seats. And that means that it's no longer good for the environment at some point. I tried to estimate how much fuel the city buses around where I live use per person-mile, and my back-of-the-envelope estimate was overall they burn as much as a person driving 25 mpg car alone. Not that great, simply because they do not and cannot run full all the time. Cutting their efficiency in half doesn't seem worth it, especially as it won't fix the fact that they're slow because they stop a lot.
I think the ramifications go beyond the ability. The precedence is more important. If they can order Apple to do this, they can order Apple to install eavesdropping software to another "THIS single phone" that happens to be owned by a Chinese government official. Unfortunately the FBI hasn't thought that China can do the same thing to a US official once precedence is set.
Let me turn that over and savor it a bit. The Chinese government can't make Apple do something unless it is definitely legal in the US? I have to say I agree with you, the FBI probably hasn't thought of that.
Well, it seems rather wasteful to use the Concorde, ever week, to have your hair styled. There's plenty of great stylists in London. You don't need to consume 350,000+ L of kerosene every week for a hair cut.
He didn't, that is a gross exaggeration, especially since he didn't fly all by himself. The Concorde got about 16 passenger-miles per gallon of jet fuel, so it wasn't that inefficient. Since it's 3460 miles from London to NY, that equates to about 1640 liters round trip.
If you make $100k but they're making $700k off of you (even after expenses), who is getting the bad deal?
Public companies disclose to the world when they are losing money, so you can't say your employer is making even a penny off you if you work for one of those.
Get ready for a shock: it already happened! In the 1950s they invented a form of AI called "a compiler" and it replaced all the software developers. Any that you may think you have met are therefore merely a figment of a diseased imagination.
What you really want is tariffs and protectionism, but after 50 years of the right wing (economically speaking) press vilifying them nobody can bring themselves to say it. You will note that China and India both rely heavily on tariffs. They've worked for hundreds of years at their intended purpose of purpose
India's GDP per capita is $1500. Saying we want economic policies more like theirs because their policies are obviously successful makes no sense. On top of that, haven't they been getting exponentially better off precisely as they have instituted free market reforms in recent years?
I used bitcoins to purchase a rifle, for example, and it was shipped to a FFL in my state, where I filled out the 4473 and waited for the NICS check. I wouldn't have done it that way if my interest had been either crime or paranoia.
It's easy to find a chart of the US dollar relative to an index of other major currencies, (https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DTWEXM) and it shows that in 40 years it's only ranged from 70% to 140% of what it was in 1975. That is somewhat volatile, but it's not nearly as volatile as bitcoin, and after 40 years, the dollar is pretty close to where it started, relative to the rest of the world. And oil isn't currency, or if you think it is, nobody questions that it's very problematic as one.
So your parallel doesn't really hold up. At the extreme, the dollar has moved half as much as bitcoin, in 10 times the amount of time.
What you're ignoring is that fuel is used both for acceleration and for overcoming friction and air resistance at constant speed. A heavier car is at a disadvantage in the first case, but may be at an advantage in the second.
A perfect example is the Prius C vs. the regular Prius. The Prius C is a lighter car, and gets 53/46 mpg (city/highway) and the regular Prius gets 51/48. A heaver car may be more aerodynamic, and benefits from having more inertia when cruising.
Cars like the Mazda2 or Honda Fit used to get slighly worse mileage than heavier cars like the Mazda3 and Civic (although they may have improved a bit).
Weight has an impact when you are talking about large differences, but you sound like you think a car that weighs 20% more is going use 20% more fuel, which is an error.
I've always said this as, turn off the server, put it in a safe, fill the safe with cement, and then drop the safe in the Marianas trench...
I am not responsible for any priapisms this post causes "secpro"s
The difference between n log n and n is not nearly as important as the difference between n log n and n^2. Think about scaling the problem size by a million. It's nice to have the skills to optimize code, but it's also nice to know better than to do it prematurely, or at the expense of other tradeoffs. I would rather work with someone who can instantly understand what's appropriate, rather than someone constantly looking for artificial ways to prove their superiority.
I wrote a program in Pascal in high school that allowed you to sort random numbers using almost any algorithm, as an animated bar graph. I'm sure many other people have done similar things, (I was inspired by a QuickBasic program with more limited choices) but I really was fascinated by the visual effects of different methods.
But ever since, I never have and probably never will have to write a sort professionally. The only information that I really retain is that every sort function should have n log n run time in the worst case, and be stable.
On the other hand, implementing a binary search is something I have found the need to do, repeatedly.
And most Computer Science 101 questions are, face it, age discrimination. After 20 years, nobody remembers the stuff they haven't used since graduation.
That's quite a difference to where I live (Scotland). Here, car dealerships often have no, or very few petrol (gas) engined versions of the new family sized cars for sale and pretty much all are diesel.
Price per litre of petrol (95RON) is within 3% of a gallon of diesel.
You might think that the difference between gas and diesel in the US is because the US taxes diesel more than gas. However, I just looked it up, and diesel is only taxed about 2% more than gas in my state. So that doesn't explain why diesel is expensive.
Haven't we been trying for decades to put restrictions on the execution of programs in order to stop computer viruses? What is impressive about removing the restrictions? You could take Linux, remove all the security features, and install every possible emulator set up to automatically be invoked, and say that's the future of computing...
Hmm.. No. There's 17% more energy in a gallon of diesel than a gallon of gasoline. My 2014 TDI achieves 56mpg while cruising at 80mph in 6th gear.
This is exactly why I haven't bought a diesel. Even though diesel is cheaper relative to gas than in a long time, it's still 13.7% more expensive where I live, which means assuming your number is right, I'd only save less than 3% on gas. Roughly $500 over 15 years. A Chevy Cruze diesel averages $5000 (!!) more expensive than a top of the line LTZ gasoline version of the same car. So there is just no payback at all.
They're going to actually be regulated for real for the first time in ages
You can't cheat, if there's no regulation. And if the regulation weren't pretty damn harsh, it wouldn't be worth their while to cheat. It's sad how often a slight change in regulation or the enforcement of regulation is heralded as the magical transition from no regulation to regulation. Needless to say, I take such exaggerated rhetoric as a sure sign that the writer is completely ignorant of the topic and has nothing worthwhile to say about it.
I don't think that it is reasonable to divorce your definition of regulation from enforcement. Zero enforcement can't be seen as other than zero regulation. Going from zero enforcement to some enforcement is exactly what "regulated for real" obviously means. It is entirely reasonable to see that as a transition from no regulation to regulation.
Slashdot Mirror
Got you beat. I saw "Gluten-free low-sodium table salt" at the store.
I believe silicon dioxide is used as an additive to salt - add enough and it would be "low sodium".
But the damn fool does not realize, his machines won't need food, would not buy entertainment, would not buy a home or pay for college. As more and more employers automate more and more functions and lay off more and more people, he will end up with lots of shiny new machines willing sell food at great profit.... if only there are people with money to buy them.
And this is the point at which he instead tasks his machines with making more and better machines (instead of now-worthless food).
And that's how the singularity happens.
A Japanese robot company called FANUC (Factory Automatic NUmerical Control) has been operating a "lights-out" automated factory employing robots that make other robots for years. They are said to run for 30 days unsupervised at a time, making 50 robots a day. And I'm getting this from articles from 6 years ago.
"I'm always amazed by the consumer who thinks that he can demand production and enjoy the benefits of other people's capital."
Given that as of now, and since quite long time, "capital" is nothing but a fiat convention, I'm always amazed by the capitalist who thinks he in fact owns anything unless a majority of people abides by it.
All capital represents someone's labor - but that doesn't mean the person using the capital performed the labor to create it. Like Obama said "you didn't build that".
And after the masses string up the producers for their wealth.
Nobody's talking about stringing up the producers for their wealth. They're talking about stringing up the parasites for their wealth. Let's face it, nobody is productive enough to become wealthy from their own productivity - even the best brain surgeons and rocket scientists are barely rich. Those that have become truly wealthy have done so through business - by exploiting the labor of others - or by exploiting markets - simply taking the wealth of others. These people don't make a net positive contribution to society, and yet they're the ones that amass all the wealth. It's the producers that are losing wealth, as the middle class is eroded, and wealth stratification continues to worsen.
If you disagree, can you explain to me how stringing up, say, the Walton family would meaningfully impact society? Would we be lost in a world incapable of conducting retail sales operations without the Waltons? Would the lack of their high-volume low-margin retail empire really result in a world where nobody produces anything, farmers stop farming, cats and dogs start living together? By what mechanism?
I feel like you're the one saying it would impact society. Once the people you hate are gone, what does change? The signs on the stores that now say "Wal-Mart" say something else? How does entering someone else's name in the global financial system somewhere as the owner of X million shares of stock meaningfully impact society?
Virtually nobody is choosing to put their savings (capital) into companies with high costs and low profits.
Have you looked at the stock market recently? Take Amazon for example - they're the poster child for success via low profits.
Lawyer firms used to employ armies of articlers and clerks to do discovery and research on case law, and are already being replaced by automated systems that do the same work in less time.
Every heard of the buzzword "e-discovery"? A lot of people have been hired to develop, use, and maintain the software systems that are involved in legal cases in the 21st century.
The idea of a machine taking your job becomes meaningless when your job is defined as automating or doing manually what hasn't been automated yet. Obviously not everything has been automated at once, or ever will be finished. So there is always somewhere for new graduates to start.
Not true. Self-evidently not true. Not even true when occupancy* levels are low, and definitely not true where levels are high. London bus occupancy is above 20 -- clearly, this delivers much lower carbon per passenger mile than any petrol/diesel car could achieve (especially when you take account of the fact that many London buses are hybrids).
Occupancy = passenger miles divided by vehicle miles.
It takes some chutzpah to bring up occupancy levels and at the same time assume all cars only have one person in them. Bonus points for using the phrase "self-evident" without any arithmetic.
Say half the buses are hybrids, hybrids get 4 mpg, and non-hybrids get 2.8 mpg (American not Imperial) Average 3.4 mpg, multiplied by 20 is 68 mpg, which is higher than any car I know of (keep in mind I'm using American gallons here). But a car carrying 2 people only has to get 34 mpg to match the bus, 3 people - 23 mpg, 4 people - 17 mpg.
Also note that occupancy for the whole of Great Britain is more like 11. See https://www.gov.uk/government/... So carbon output of an average bus-person-mile is probably about the same overall as driving a car by yourself, and two people in a car are much more efficient than the average of the bus system.
No what is needed is having bus routes not suck. Wan to know why i drive instead of taking the bus? Because I dont have 1.5 hours for my commute to take the bus that goes from the stop near my home, to the mall, then to the other community and then finally downtown. Public transportation needs 2X the number of buses and 2X the number of routes.
Well, that sort of makes sense from a self-centered perspective, but more buses and routes means more empty seats. And that means that it's no longer good for the environment at some point. I tried to estimate how much fuel the city buses around where I live use per person-mile, and my back-of-the-envelope estimate was overall they burn as much as a person driving 25 mpg car alone. Not that great, simply because they do not and cannot run full all the time. Cutting their efficiency in half doesn't seem worth it, especially as it won't fix the fact that they're slow because they stop a lot.
I think the ramifications go beyond the ability. The precedence is more important. If they can order Apple to do this, they can order Apple to install eavesdropping software to another "THIS single phone" that happens to be owned by a Chinese government official. Unfortunately the FBI hasn't thought that China can do the same thing to a US official once precedence is set.
Let me turn that over and savor it a bit. The Chinese government can't make Apple do something unless it is definitely legal in the US? I have to say I agree with you, the FBI probably hasn't thought of that.
Well, it seems rather wasteful to use the Concorde, ever week, to have your hair styled. There's plenty of great stylists in London. You don't need to consume 350,000+ L of kerosene every week for a hair cut.
He didn't, that is a gross exaggeration, especially since he didn't fly all by himself. The Concorde got about 16 passenger-miles per gallon of jet fuel, so it wasn't that inefficient. Since it's 3460 miles from London to NY, that equates to about 1640 liters round trip.
If you make $100k but they're making $700k off of you (even after expenses), who is getting the bad deal?
Public companies disclose to the world when they are losing money, so you can't say your employer is making even a penny off you if you work for one of those.
Get ready for a shock: it already happened! In the 1950s they invented a form of AI called "a compiler" and it replaced all the software developers. Any that you may think you have met are therefore merely a figment of a diseased imagination.
So, 1/1/0001 instead.
What you really want is tariffs and protectionism, but after 50 years of the right wing (economically speaking) press vilifying them nobody can bring themselves to say it. You will note that China and India both rely heavily on tariffs. They've worked for hundreds of years at their intended purpose of purpose
India's GDP per capita is $1500. Saying we want economic policies more like theirs because their policies are obviously successful makes no sense. On top of that, haven't they been getting exponentially better off precisely as they have instituted free market reforms in recent years?
I used bitcoins to purchase a rifle, for example, and it was shipped to a FFL in my state, where I filled out the 4473 and waited for the NICS check. I wouldn't have done it that way if my interest had been either crime or paranoia.
Did you pay sales tax?
It's easy to find a chart of the US dollar relative to an index of other major currencies, (https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DTWEXM) and it shows that in 40 years it's only ranged from 70% to 140% of what it was in 1975. That is somewhat volatile, but it's not nearly as volatile as bitcoin, and after 40 years, the dollar is pretty close to where it started, relative to the rest of the world. And oil isn't currency, or if you think it is, nobody questions that it's very problematic as one.
So your parallel doesn't really hold up. At the extreme, the dollar has moved half as much as bitcoin, in 10 times the amount of time.
https://tools.wmflabs.org/geoh...
Why are people saying things (not only on slashdot) like "nobody has ever deployed a probe to [the Moon's] far side" Is there a joke I'm not getting?
What you're ignoring is that fuel is used both for acceleration and for overcoming friction and air resistance at constant speed. A heavier car is at a disadvantage in the first case, but may be at an advantage in the second.
A perfect example is the Prius C vs. the regular Prius. The Prius C is a lighter car, and gets 53/46 mpg (city/highway) and the regular Prius gets 51/48. A heaver car may be more aerodynamic, and benefits from having more inertia when cruising.
Cars like the Mazda2 or Honda Fit used to get slighly worse mileage than heavier cars like the Mazda3 and Civic (although they may have improved a bit).
Weight has an impact when you are talking about large differences, but you sound like you think a car that weighs 20% more is going use 20% more fuel, which is an error.
I've always said this as, turn off the server, put it in a safe, fill the safe with cement, and then drop the safe in the Marianas trench...
I am not responsible for any priapisms this post causes "secpro"s
Ok, but it's still not secure from James Cameron.
The difference between n log n and n is not nearly as important as the difference between n log n and n^2. Think about scaling the problem size by a million. It's nice to have the skills to optimize code, but it's also nice to know better than to do it prematurely, or at the expense of other tradeoffs. I would rather work with someone who can instantly understand what's appropriate, rather than someone constantly looking for artificial ways to prove their superiority.
I wrote a program in Pascal in high school that allowed you to sort random numbers using almost any algorithm, as an animated bar graph. I'm sure many other people have done similar things, (I was inspired by a QuickBasic program with more limited choices) but I really was fascinated by the visual effects of different methods. But ever since, I never have and probably never will have to write a sort professionally. The only information that I really retain is that every sort function should have n log n run time in the worst case, and be stable. On the other hand, implementing a binary search is something I have found the need to do, repeatedly. And most Computer Science 101 questions are, face it, age discrimination. After 20 years, nobody remembers the stuff they haven't used since graduation.
That's quite a difference to where I live (Scotland). Here, car dealerships often have no, or very few petrol (gas) engined versions of the new family sized cars for sale and pretty much all are diesel.
Price per litre of petrol (95RON) is within 3% of a gallon of diesel.
You might think that the difference between gas and diesel in the US is because the US taxes diesel more than gas. However, I just looked it up, and diesel is only taxed about 2% more than gas in my state. So that doesn't explain why diesel is expensive.
Haven't we been trying for decades to put restrictions on the execution of programs in order to stop computer viruses? What is impressive about removing the restrictions? You could take Linux, remove all the security features, and install every possible emulator set up to automatically be invoked, and say that's the future of computing...
Hmm .. No. There's 17% more energy in a gallon of diesel than a gallon of gasoline. My 2014 TDI achieves 56mpg while cruising at 80mph in 6th gear.
This is exactly why I haven't bought a diesel. Even though diesel is cheaper relative to gas than in a long time, it's still 13.7% more expensive where I live, which means assuming your number is right, I'd only save less than 3% on gas. Roughly $500 over 15 years. A Chevy Cruze diesel averages $5000 (!!) more expensive than a top of the line LTZ gasoline version of the same car. So there is just no payback at all.
They're going to actually be regulated for real for the first time in ages
You can't cheat, if there's no regulation. And if the regulation weren't pretty damn harsh, it wouldn't be worth their while to cheat. It's sad how often a slight change in regulation or the enforcement of regulation is heralded as the magical transition from no regulation to regulation. Needless to say, I take such exaggerated rhetoric as a sure sign that the writer is completely ignorant of the topic and has nothing worthwhile to say about it.
I don't think that it is reasonable to divorce your definition of regulation from enforcement. Zero enforcement can't be seen as other than zero regulation. Going from zero enforcement to some enforcement is exactly what "regulated for real" obviously means. It is entirely reasonable to see that as a transition from no regulation to regulation.