In all honestly, it could just be your typical garden-variety internet troll, grasping at whatever low-hanging fruit they can. But in this day and age of the internet where astroturfing is such a Thing that we actually created a term for it, it's also not outside the realm of possibility that it's a propagandist.
Tell me, friend: How much does the Chinese government pay you to spread propaganda for them in U.S. media? Is it enough to live on? Or is this just your 'side hustle' for extra money? Are you even in the U.S.? Are you a U.S. or Chinese citizen, or maybe just here on a visa, or even here illegally, as an operative for the communist Chinese government? I wonder, do they pay well? Is it a monthly stipend, or is this piece-work, and you're paid per comment or article you post? Is it by the word, maybe?
Communist China Government shill, please leave. No one believes you. We wouldn't even believe you even if you were so brave (dumb?) as to post using your real name, or any name at all, for that matter.
..this isn't funny; in fact, I find it to be distinctly unfunny. Knowing China and it's human rights/civil rights record, sounds to me more like 'Human and Civil Rights Violator Robot' than anything regarding 'security', unless you want to look at in in the vein of 'security of the Chinese communist regime'. In my opinion, it's bad enough when you have humans oppressing humans, but it's an order of magnitude worse when you have a machine oppressing humans; naturally these 'bots could be ordered to do anything to anyone, up to and including killing them, and since they're not alive, have no conscience, have no emotions, they'll just do it. This is a dark day for Chinese citizens if you ask me.
People who promote abstinence fall into one or both of two categories: 1. Wanting to control people's lives through controlling sex 2. Being so uncomfortable with sexuality, even their own, that they'd rather it didn't even exist, or at least stayed hidden 99.99999..% of the time
Okay.. let's say that's plausible (because it is). No need to panic the cattle.. er, I mean, the general public, right? Are you also implying that every astonomer, astrophysicist, and any other scientist that might be working with radiotelescopes, is directly under the thumb of the government 24/7/365, and couldn't directly release information to the Internet without being intercepted? Seems a bit draconic even for the federal government, and seems like a lot of trouble to go to. They'd have to almost literally have federal agents assigned to them 24/7/365 to make sure they're not talking about something they might have discovered. Got any proof of any of this, or are you just the garden-variety Anonymous Cowardly conspiracy theorist?
Mining has always been one of the most dangerous jobs that humans have ever had, and traditionally one of the most disproportionately low-paying compared to how dangerous it is. Of all the applications for so-called 'AI' (still bugs me how that term is misused, by the way), so-called 'self-driving' technolgy, and automation technology that put human workers out of jobs, this is one that I definitely approve of, so that humans don't have to die horribly or be horribly injured in mining accidents. Of course it'll take putting a gun to some people's heads to make them be responsible for re-educating and re-training displaced mine workers for new, safer jobs (something I feel should be a requirement), but at least this is a step in the right direction.
Once. We did it once. Not a thousand times, not a hundred times, not ten times, not even twice, but once, and never again, and you don't see anyone suggesting that we do it again, either, or asking why we didn't do it again. In fact if I'm not mistaken it's even been suggested that once was a bad idea and that it should never be done again. So again I ask: Why would some other species do it at all? Perhaps we were dumb to do it, and Independence Day will end up having been a cautionary tale for us.
As much as I'd like it if we discovered incontrovertible evidence that there are other sentient beings in the Universe with their own civilizations and technology (I hold out the belief that it would help cure humankind of all our infighting), I have to ask myself, "Why would any civilization even want to do that in the first place?". The vast majority of humans on this planet are not looking outward with their thoughts, they're looking inward, concerned with their day-to-day survival, and will look at you funny if you start talking about other beings on other planets; why would an alien race have a different opinion? Our own government here in the U.S. has to more or less have a gun put to it's head to fund any space program, even. Also consider that another sentient race might consider the idea of drawing attention to themselves and their planet as insane, inviting disaster in the form of an invading force, and therefore would go out of their way to shield their electromagnetic emissions so that they don't draw any unwanted attention. And, of course, there's the rather cynical theory that technological species eventually extinguish themselves with their own weapons of mass destruction, or destroy their own ecosphere to the point where it won't sustain them anymore. Really, I'd be thrilled to hear we've discovered and decoded transmissions of an alien version of The Andy Griffith Show from millions of years ago, but it seems that for every reason we should be seeing such signals, there is at least one reason we wouldn't.
But I maintain that it's suicidal to get into a 'self driving car' that has no way for you to control it, and I know for a fact that I'm far, far from being alone in that. You won't be able to sell the public on a so-called 'self-driving car' that has no way for them to control it with their own two hands and own two feet, and they won't be satisfied with some sort of voice control, or even a big red 'Emergency Stop' button. It'll have to be a 'glorified driver safety system', then, and I think the vast majority of people will be perfectly fine with that. Besides which there will always be circumstances where an automated system just can't cope, and for those situations there has to be manual controls so a human being can maneuver the vehicle, and video game controls or some sort of keypad just isn't going to cut it, either. It needs to be the same traditional controls we've had all along. So it may as well be a sophisticated 'cruise control' feature that also happens to help keep you from getting in collisions or veering off the road. Also realize that where in 5 to 10 years you might be able to buy a vehicle with some system like this, it's only going to be on high-end luxury cars as an expensive option, not on your average everyday economy car that the vast majority of people can afford. There's no government mandate or law you can trot out, outlawing manually driven vehicles, that would ever make it into law; you're not going to tell 200,000,000 Americans that they have to throw their cars away and buy an expensive new one whether they like it or not. At best you're looking at 20 to 30 years before this makes it into the mainstream, and that's being very liberal in my estimate. In the meantime people will still drive their own cars. I'd recommend we institute reforms in driver education and training to improve driver competency in the meantime, things I've heard about how they train new drivers now makes me wonder what they're thinking.
My point is that if it's not going to be 100% reliable 100% of the time then you can't have a self-driving car that has no controls for a human driver. Knowing how systems are developed and the challenges in creating such a system I can't see such a vehicle ever being allowed for public use and would certainly never set foot inside one unless I was feeling suicidal. That handful of percentage points that it can't handle means you must still be competent to manually operate a vehicle and pay attention at all times, and the vehicle must have a full set of controls for a human operator that are availble and active at all times. Of course one of my fears about technology such as this is that while humans will still be required to be competent drivers, these systems will make them lazy and their driving skills will atrophy, and when the time comes that they are needed to control the vehicle, they won't be able to do it anymore.
Most people have no idea what "information" is required when approval is required for a life critical system involving software.
You are absolutely correct. Having worked for a diagnostic medical device manufacturer for some years, I am cognizant of what the dollar cost and time required is to perform FDA qualification testing for such devices before it may be certified for sale in the United States. It's extensive and comprehensive, and we weren't even building a machine that could potentially endanger someone's life if it was defective or failed in some way. A 'self-driving' vehicle, and especially a 'driverless' vehicle has the potential to cause massive loss of human life if it is defective or fails. It's fitness for use is totally binary; it either works perfectly, or it fails completely, nothing between the two is acceptable. Meanwhile all companies attempting to develop such systems are investing many many millions of dollars. I can just imagine how much pressure they're under from their boards of directors, stockholders, and investors, to bring these products to market and start generating profits from them. Unfortunately for all of them however profits cannot come before safety in this case. If your smartphone or computer crashes that's disappointing; if a dozen people die in an accident because a self-driving car system has a flaw or an unforseen failure, then that's completely unacceptable and someone should be going to jail over it and/or paying huge amounts in settlements.
It is true that 90% of the problem of autonomous driving is solved. It's also true that the remaining 10% are exponentially hard and won't be solved in the next 20 years.
Nice to see someone commenting on this subject that isn't so blindly enthusiastic about it that they adopt the potentially fatal 'what could possibly go wrong' attitude towards it.
Unlike so many technology products, self-driving cars have the potential to cause massive loss of human lives if they're defective or fail. Even 99% isn't close enough, it must be 100% perfect 100% of the time, or it's not safe enough.
Of course someone will now chime in with something along the lines of 'humans are not competent to drive and any machine would do a better job', but I disagree, if the human in question is one of the people whose life is at stake if the system fails, then that human being should have the right and the ability to be the final backup to the automated system. Since asking any machine to be 100% perfect 100% of the time is not attainable in the real world, then it must be made possible for a human driver to take over from the automated system at any time.
So-called 'self-driving vehicles' are a subject that must be approached with the utmost of caution considering that a defective system of this type could cause massive loss of human lives. Companies developing such systems must be required to at least as cautious, and preferably doubly so, than medical device or pharmaceutical manufacturers are in the testing of their products for safety.
It's actually very simple: They're getting paid in both cases you mention. The government is paying them to violate our rights and our privacy, and robocall companies are paying them to look the other way. AT&T is a bunch of assholes, and this surprises you why, exactly?
It was Budweiser, so it's grossly inaccurate to call it 'beer'. The closest description I'll accept for that swill is 'beer-like beverage', and then only if I'm in a really good mood. Really, there ought to be a law about what you can and can't call 'beer' in this country. The only thing worse than Budweiser, is PBR. Even Coors is better than either one of those. Hell, I'd rather get roaring drunk off oilcans of Fosters Lager than drink even one Budweiser.
Damnit. Now I want a Newcastle.
At any rate.. this is hardly a 'win' for self-driving vehicles and so-called 'AI' in general. You're literally leaving a bad taste in everyones' mouth, driving a truckload of Budweiser around. This would have been a good time for the thing to crash; it would have gone a long ways towards proving that 'AI' is capable of being sentient -- as well as showing it's capable of having Good Taste.
Well guess what, friend? It's not the 1950's anymore, and by the way the America you thought you grew up in? It never existed in the first place. The only difference today is that the too-nosy-for-their-own-good government types, and corporations, now have much better technology to help them stick their little brown noses into things that are none of their business, and most people are carrying it around with them 24/7/365. This is the world we live in now. There's still time to change it so we're not under a microscope every moment of every day, but that won't happen if everyone just sticks their heads in the sand and pretends it's not real.
I'm voting third-party across the board. I know none of them will win; I'm doing it to mock our broken, near-pointless electoral system. That, and I'm sick and tired of compromising my principles for the mere expedient of 'electing the least bad candidate'. I don't like or trust either one of them, and will not have my name associated with either one of them being elected -- even if she's the foregone conclusion at this point.
I wonder how much the development of room-temperature superconductors would improve battery technology (and supercapacitor technology, for that matter) and electric cars in general? Imagine if you could build electric motors with superconducting wire, for instance. How much more efficient would they be?
..or for dilithium power cells, or dark matter-based energy sources, or portable quantum singularity-based power sources. These 'chemical' batteries are so Last Thursday; totally uncool.
You know, if your smartphones had, I dunno, an OFF switch, so you could power them completely down when you're not using them, I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that the battery would last longer.;-) But, of course, then you wouldn't be able to be tracked and monitored 24/7/365, so of course the powers-that-be don't want to make them that way. A pity, that.
AIs are unbiased not clouded by greed and they don't need to have a short view, sure they can be made to work by one corporation or another but how long can you control something significantly more intelligent than you?
Oh here we go again.. *sigh*
Listen, bub.. the so-called 'AI' we have now is not 'intelligent' in any sense of the word that I am willing to acknowledge. They're clever little learning machines, and come up with some interesting output, but they are not self-aware and they are not conscious and I'd rather eat a bullet than have my life controlled by one. Please, though, do come back when you've got one I can meet with for an hour or so on a daily basis for random conversation; when you come up with one that is conscious, self-aware, thinks on a human-intelligence level, has a real and original sense of humor (and furthermore reacts properly to someone else's humor), and understands irony, then perhaps we'll be having a different conversation. Until then I remain utterly unimpressed by everyones' so-called 'artificial intelligence' machines and really have no use for them -- and I certainly do not want them in any position of authority.
Oh and by the way: You're confusing science-fiction 'AI' with the pathetic excuse for it we have right now. Please stop doing that, it's annoying.
Do you ever wonder what the world will look like when everyone has their own personal quantum computer?
At the rate and direction we're going, it'll be a dystopian future world where you can't even take a dump in the privacy of your own home bathroom without some government spook having a terabyte of data collected from the 'event'. Of course, that being said, it's just as possible that while we'll have record amounts of surveillance and spying on everyone all the time, everyone will have access to continually morphing high-end encryption driven by their own quantum computers, creating a 'balance of power' on both sides of the equation.
Or, just maybe, we, as a race, grow out of this anal-retentive, must-watch-everyone-all-the-time, anxiety-driven, infantile stage of our social development, into a New Age of 'Live and Let Live' on all sides of all equations. Yeah, yeah, I know. Let a guy dream, will you?
As so many others have already said, this can't be legal in pretty much any country that has a rule of law. At the very least, if you made something like this on your own as a one-off, anyone who fell victim to it would have more than adequate grounds to bring a civil suit against you for bodily injury and who knows what else, even if they in fact could be proven to have been trying to steal the bike in the first place. Then there's the issue of innocent bystanders being caught in the 'blast radius' of the device and being made so incredibly sick from it; they'd have grounds to take you to civil court for damages. Also, how can anyone guarantee that the chemical(s) used in this are 100% 'safe' for 100% of all people? People sometimes have the strangest very-specific allergic reactions to things that they never would have suspected; if someone, even the thief themself, had an allergic reaction to this and died, the end-user and the manufacturer would possibly be held criminally responsible for the death, and most certainly would be sued in civil court by the next-of-kin for wrongful death. Finally, you must ask yourself this question: Is it really worth going to all this risk just to protect a bicycle? I'm a cyclist myself, and even if it was a $15000 bike (yes, there are some bikes I've seen that cost that much!) how does that compare to a human life, even that of a skeezy bike thief? It's not a reasonable response to a potential threat.
I don't even own a bike lock. If I'm out on one of my bikes, it either never leaves my line-of-sight, or I leave it in the care of someone I know and trust, or I take it inside with me if I stop somewhere. If I have to drive somewhere I'm going to ride it's locked up inside the vehicle if I need to step away from it's line-of-sight. Furthermore I recommend that if you feel a need to ride your bike somewhere you're going to have to leave it, and it's a risky place to leave a bike, then perhaps you'd better re-think riding a bike there in the first place, or make other arrangements for the bike other than trusting any bike lock to protect it. Doesn't matter if it's a 'bike-shaped object' from Walmart that cost only a couple hundred bucks, or a top-of-the-line racing bike that's worth a fair fraction of your annual income, bike thieves will steal anything they can get their hands on.
'Not enough people care' because they've been indoctrinated and brainwashed by corporations and to a certain extent the government to believe that sharing your entire life with the world is normal and proper, and that not sharing every bloody thing with complete strangers is selfish and may be indicative of some sort of criminal activity or mental illness. Of course this is utter and complete bullshit, at around a certain age every child starts wanting privacy, and this is a perfectly natural and healthy part of their development. I hold out the hope that our natural, normal, healthy tendencies as a species will eventually win out against this unnatural, unhealthy programming that has been imposed upon some people. In the meantime we should continue to positivley reinforce that privacy is valuable and precious and needs to be protected and encouraged, and that the depredations of companies like Google and so many others, as well as our own government, needs to be discouraged and legislated against, and that not using your real name online, and not using 'services' (in quotes because I dispute, on philosophical grounds, how something can be a 'service' when it's really being such a disservice to you) that require your legal name, will provide some protection for your privacy.
Slashdot Mirror
In all honestly, it could just be your typical garden-variety internet troll, grasping at whatever low-hanging fruit they can. But in this day and age of the internet where astroturfing is such a Thing that we actually created a term for it, it's also not outside the realm of possibility that it's a propagandist.
Tell me, friend: How much does the Chinese government pay you to spread propaganda for them in U.S. media? Is it enough to live on? Or is this just your 'side hustle' for extra money?
Are you even in the U.S.? Are you a U.S. or Chinese citizen, or maybe just here on a visa, or even here illegally, as an operative for the communist Chinese government?
I wonder, do they pay well? Is it a monthly stipend, or is this piece-work, and you're paid per comment or article you post? Is it by the word, maybe?
Communist China Government shill, please leave. No one believes you. We wouldn't even believe you even if you were so brave (dumb?) as to post using your real name, or any name at all, for that matter.
..this isn't funny; in fact, I find it to be distinctly unfunny. Knowing China and it's human rights/civil rights record, sounds to me more like 'Human and Civil Rights Violator Robot' than anything regarding 'security', unless you want to look at in in the vein of 'security of the Chinese communist regime'. In my opinion, it's bad enough when you have humans oppressing humans, but it's an order of magnitude worse when you have a machine oppressing humans; naturally these 'bots could be ordered to do anything to anyone, up to and including killing them, and since they're not alive, have no conscience, have no emotions, they'll just do it. This is a dark day for Chinese citizens if you ask me.
I'd rather not have anyone screwing around with my endocrine system; thanks but no thanks. I'll find some other way.
People who promote abstinence fall into one or both of two categories:
1. Wanting to control people's lives through controlling sex
2. Being so uncomfortable with sexuality, even their own, that they'd rather it didn't even exist, or at least stayed hidden 99.99999..% of the time
Okay.. let's say that's plausible (because it is). No need to panic the cattle.. er, I mean, the general public, right? Are you also implying that every astonomer, astrophysicist, and any other scientist that might be working with radiotelescopes, is directly under the thumb of the government 24/7/365, and couldn't directly release information to the Internet without being intercepted? Seems a bit draconic even for the federal government, and seems like a lot of trouble to go to. They'd have to almost literally have federal agents assigned to them 24/7/365 to make sure they're not talking about something they might have discovered. Got any proof of any of this, or are you just the garden-variety Anonymous Cowardly conspiracy theorist?
Mining has always been one of the most dangerous jobs that humans have ever had, and traditionally one of the most disproportionately low-paying compared to how dangerous it is. Of all the applications for so-called 'AI' (still bugs me how that term is misused, by the way), so-called 'self-driving' technolgy, and automation technology that put human workers out of jobs, this is one that I definitely approve of, so that humans don't have to die horribly or be horribly injured in mining accidents. Of course it'll take putting a gun to some people's heads to make them be responsible for re-educating and re-training displaced mine workers for new, safer jobs (something I feel should be a requirement), but at least this is a step in the right direction.
Once. We did it once. Not a thousand times, not a hundred times, not ten times, not even twice, but once, and never again, and you don't see anyone suggesting that we do it again, either, or asking why we didn't do it again. In fact if I'm not mistaken it's even been suggested that once was a bad idea and that it should never be done again. So again I ask: Why would some other species do it at all? Perhaps we were dumb to do it, and Independence Day will end up having been a cautionary tale for us.
As much as I'd like it if we discovered incontrovertible evidence that there are other sentient beings in the Universe with their own civilizations and technology (I hold out the belief that it would help cure humankind of all our infighting), I have to ask myself, "Why would any civilization even want to do that in the first place?". The vast majority of humans on this planet are not looking outward with their thoughts, they're looking inward, concerned with their day-to-day survival, and will look at you funny if you start talking about other beings on other planets; why would an alien race have a different opinion? Our own government here in the U.S. has to more or less have a gun put to it's head to fund any space program, even. Also consider that another sentient race might consider the idea of drawing attention to themselves and their planet as insane, inviting disaster in the form of an invading force, and therefore would go out of their way to shield their electromagnetic emissions so that they don't draw any unwanted attention. And, of course, there's the rather cynical theory that technological species eventually extinguish themselves with their own weapons of mass destruction, or destroy their own ecosphere to the point where it won't sustain them anymore. Really, I'd be thrilled to hear we've discovered and decoded transmissions of an alien version of The Andy Griffith Show from millions of years ago, but it seems that for every reason we should be seeing such signals, there is at least one reason we wouldn't.
But I maintain that it's suicidal to get into a 'self driving car' that has no way for you to control it, and I know for a fact that I'm far, far from being alone in that. You won't be able to sell the public on a so-called 'self-driving car' that has no way for them to control it with their own two hands and own two feet, and they won't be satisfied with some sort of voice control, or even a big red 'Emergency Stop' button. It'll have to be a 'glorified driver safety system', then, and I think the vast majority of people will be perfectly fine with that. Besides which there will always be circumstances where an automated system just can't cope, and for those situations there has to be manual controls so a human being can maneuver the vehicle, and video game controls or some sort of keypad just isn't going to cut it, either. It needs to be the same traditional controls we've had all along. So it may as well be a sophisticated 'cruise control' feature that also happens to help keep you from getting in collisions or veering off the road. Also realize that where in 5 to 10 years you might be able to buy a vehicle with some system like this, it's only going to be on high-end luxury cars as an expensive option, not on your average everyday economy car that the vast majority of people can afford. There's no government mandate or law you can trot out, outlawing manually driven vehicles, that would ever make it into law; you're not going to tell 200,000,000 Americans that they have to throw their cars away and buy an expensive new one whether they like it or not. At best you're looking at 20 to 30 years before this makes it into the mainstream, and that's being very liberal in my estimate. In the meantime people will still drive their own cars. I'd recommend we institute reforms in driver education and training to improve driver competency in the meantime, things I've heard about how they train new drivers now makes me wonder what they're thinking.
My point is that if it's not going to be 100% reliable 100% of the time then you can't have a self-driving car that has no controls for a human driver. Knowing how systems are developed and the challenges in creating such a system I can't see such a vehicle ever being allowed for public use and would certainly never set foot inside one unless I was feeling suicidal. That handful of percentage points that it can't handle means you must still be competent to manually operate a vehicle and pay attention at all times, and the vehicle must have a full set of controls for a human operator that are availble and active at all times. Of course one of my fears about technology such as this is that while humans will still be required to be competent drivers, these systems will make them lazy and their driving skills will atrophy, and when the time comes that they are needed to control the vehicle, they won't be able to do it anymore.
Most people have no idea what "information" is required when approval is required for a life critical system involving software.
You are absolutely correct. Having worked for a diagnostic medical device manufacturer for some years, I am cognizant of what the dollar cost and time required is to perform FDA qualification testing for such devices before it may be certified for sale in the United States. It's extensive and comprehensive, and we weren't even building a machine that could potentially endanger someone's life if it was defective or failed in some way. A 'self-driving' vehicle, and especially a 'driverless' vehicle has the potential to cause massive loss of human life if it is defective or fails. It's fitness for use is totally binary; it either works perfectly, or it fails completely, nothing between the two is acceptable. Meanwhile all companies attempting to develop such systems are investing many many millions of dollars. I can just imagine how much pressure they're under from their boards of directors, stockholders, and investors, to bring these products to market and start generating profits from them. Unfortunately for all of them however profits cannot come before safety in this case. If your smartphone or computer crashes that's disappointing; if a dozen people die in an accident because a self-driving car system has a flaw or an unforseen failure, then that's completely unacceptable and someone should be going to jail over it and/or paying huge amounts in settlements.
It is true that 90% of the problem of autonomous driving is solved. It's also true that the remaining 10% are exponentially hard and won't be solved in the next 20 years.
Nice to see someone commenting on this subject that isn't so blindly enthusiastic about it that they adopt the potentially fatal 'what could possibly go wrong' attitude towards it.
Unlike so many technology products, self-driving cars have the potential to cause massive loss of human lives if they're defective or fail. Even 99% isn't close enough, it must be 100% perfect 100% of the time, or it's not safe enough.
Of course someone will now chime in with something along the lines of 'humans are not competent to drive and any machine would do a better job', but I disagree, if the human in question is one of the people whose life is at stake if the system fails, then that human being should have the right and the ability to be the final backup to the automated system. Since asking any machine to be 100% perfect 100% of the time is not attainable in the real world, then it must be made possible for a human driver to take over from the automated system at any time.
So-called 'self-driving vehicles' are a subject that must be approached with the utmost of caution considering that a defective system of this type could cause massive loss of human lives. Companies developing such systems must be required to at least as cautious, and preferably doubly so, than medical device or pharmaceutical manufacturers are in the testing of their products for safety.
Pay attention to meeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's what this sounds like. No basis in reality, just some outrageous, fantastic press release to get some free advertising for Uber. *Ignore*
It's actually very simple: They're getting paid in both cases you mention. The government is paying them to violate our rights and our privacy, and robocall companies are paying them to look the other way. AT&T is a bunch of assholes, and this surprises you why, exactly?
It was Budweiser, so it's grossly inaccurate to call it 'beer'. The closest description I'll accept for that swill is 'beer-like beverage', and then only if I'm in a really good mood. Really, there ought to be a law about what you can and can't call 'beer' in this country. The only thing worse than Budweiser, is PBR. Even Coors is better than either one of those. Hell, I'd rather get roaring drunk off oilcans of Fosters Lager than drink even one Budweiser.
Damnit. Now I want a Newcastle.
At any rate.. this is hardly a 'win' for self-driving vehicles and so-called 'AI' in general. You're literally leaving a bad taste in everyones' mouth, driving a truckload of Budweiser around. This would have been a good time for the thing to crash; it would have gone a long ways towards proving that 'AI' is capable of being sentient -- as well as showing it's capable of having Good Taste.
Well guess what, friend? It's not the 1950's anymore, and by the way the America you thought you grew up in? It never existed in the first place. The only difference today is that the too-nosy-for-their-own-good government types, and corporations, now have much better technology to help them stick their little brown noses into things that are none of their business, and most people are carrying it around with them 24/7/365. This is the world we live in now. There's still time to change it so we're not under a microscope every moment of every day, but that won't happen if everyone just sticks their heads in the sand and pretends it's not real.
Oh, I am, believe me.
I'm voting third-party across the board. I know none of them will win; I'm doing it to mock our broken, near-pointless electoral system. That, and I'm sick and tired of compromising my principles for the mere expedient of 'electing the least bad candidate'. I don't like or trust either one of them, and will not have my name associated with either one of them being elected -- even if she's the foregone conclusion at this point.
I wonder how much the development of room-temperature superconductors would improve battery technology (and supercapacitor technology, for that matter) and electric cars in general? Imagine if you could build electric motors with superconducting wire, for instance. How much more efficient would they be?
..or for dilithium power cells, or dark matter-based energy sources, or portable quantum singularity-based power sources. These 'chemical' batteries are so Last Thursday; totally uncool.
;-) But, of course, then you wouldn't be able to be tracked and monitored 24/7/365, so of course the powers-that-be don't want to make them that way. A pity, that.
You know, if your smartphones had, I dunno, an OFF switch, so you could power them completely down when you're not using them, I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that the battery would last longer.
AIs are unbiased not clouded by greed and they don't need to have a short view, sure they can be made to work by one corporation or another but how long can you control something significantly more intelligent than you?
Oh here we go again.. *sigh*
Listen, bub.. the so-called 'AI' we have now is not 'intelligent' in any sense of the word that I am willing to acknowledge. They're clever little learning machines, and come up with some interesting output, but they are not self-aware and they are not conscious and I'd rather eat a bullet than have my life controlled by one. Please, though, do come back when you've got one I can meet with for an hour or so on a daily basis for random conversation; when you come up with one that is conscious, self-aware, thinks on a human-intelligence level, has a real and original sense of humor (and furthermore reacts properly to someone else's humor), and understands irony, then perhaps we'll be having a different conversation. Until then I remain utterly unimpressed by everyones' so-called 'artificial intelligence' machines and really have no use for them -- and I certainly do not want them in any position of authority.
Oh and by the way: You're confusing science-fiction 'AI' with the pathetic excuse for it we have right now. Please stop doing that, it's annoying.
Do you ever wonder what the world will look like when everyone has their own personal quantum computer?
At the rate and direction we're going, it'll be a dystopian future world where you can't even take a dump in the privacy of your own home bathroom without some government spook having a terabyte of data collected from the 'event'. Of course, that being said, it's just as possible that while we'll have record amounts of surveillance and spying on everyone all the time, everyone will have access to continually morphing high-end encryption driven by their own quantum computers, creating a 'balance of power' on both sides of the equation.
Or, just maybe, we, as a race, grow out of this anal-retentive, must-watch-everyone-all-the-time, anxiety-driven, infantile stage of our social development, into a New Age of 'Live and Let Live' on all sides of all equations. Yeah, yeah, I know. Let a guy dream, will you?
As so many others have already said, this can't be legal in pretty much any country that has a rule of law. At the very least, if you made something like this on your own as a one-off, anyone who fell victim to it would have more than adequate grounds to bring a civil suit against you for bodily injury and who knows what else, even if they in fact could be proven to have been trying to steal the bike in the first place. Then there's the issue of innocent bystanders being caught in the 'blast radius' of the device and being made so incredibly sick from it; they'd have grounds to take you to civil court for damages. Also, how can anyone guarantee that the chemical(s) used in this are 100% 'safe' for 100% of all people? People sometimes have the strangest very-specific allergic reactions to things that they never would have suspected; if someone, even the thief themself, had an allergic reaction to this and died, the end-user and the manufacturer would possibly be held criminally responsible for the death, and most certainly would be sued in civil court by the next-of-kin for wrongful death. Finally, you must ask yourself this question: Is it really worth going to all this risk just to protect a bicycle? I'm a cyclist myself, and even if it was a $15000 bike (yes, there are some bikes I've seen that cost that much!) how does that compare to a human life, even that of a skeezy bike thief? It's not a reasonable response to a potential threat.
I don't even own a bike lock. If I'm out on one of my bikes, it either never leaves my line-of-sight, or I leave it in the care of someone I know and trust, or I take it inside with me if I stop somewhere. If I have to drive somewhere I'm going to ride it's locked up inside the vehicle if I need to step away from it's line-of-sight. Furthermore I recommend that if you feel a need to ride your bike somewhere you're going to have to leave it, and it's a risky place to leave a bike, then perhaps you'd better re-think riding a bike there in the first place, or make other arrangements for the bike other than trusting any bike lock to protect it. Doesn't matter if it's a 'bike-shaped object' from Walmart that cost only a couple hundred bucks, or a top-of-the-line racing bike that's worth a fair fraction of your annual income, bike thieves will steal anything they can get their hands on.
'Not enough people care' because they've been indoctrinated and brainwashed by corporations and to a certain extent the government to believe that sharing your entire life with the world is normal and proper, and that not sharing every bloody thing with complete strangers is selfish and may be indicative of some sort of criminal activity or mental illness. Of course this is utter and complete bullshit, at around a certain age every child starts wanting privacy, and this is a perfectly natural and healthy part of their development. I hold out the hope that our natural, normal, healthy tendencies as a species will eventually win out against this unnatural, unhealthy programming that has been imposed upon some people. In the meantime we should continue to positivley reinforce that privacy is valuable and precious and needs to be protected and encouraged, and that the depredations of companies like Google and so many others, as well as our own government, needs to be discouraged and legislated against, and that not using your real name online, and not using 'services' (in quotes because I dispute, on philosophical grounds, how something can be a 'service' when it's really being such a disservice to you) that require your legal name, will provide some protection for your privacy.