Your Choice #1 should not be 'losing your nation's right of self determination', at least not here in the U.S., theoretically at least, because we elected them and they are, ostensibly, supposed to be listening to us and implementing our collective will. #2 should, again ostensibly, be reined in by our elected officials and the civil and criminal justice system. #3 should be a reflection of the officials we chose to elect. #4 is pure fantasy of course and I, of course, was being sarcastic, and more than a little sardonic in referencing it in that context, if you didn't notice.
Colossus/Guardian is an order of magnitude better than the so-called 'AIs' that will be controlled by corporations and governments to spy on and profile citizens and, I'm sure, controlled by organized crime cabals and the 'new world order' type organizations.
Are you a politician? Because you sound like you have no idea how technology works at all. None of those ideas will work, especially the next-to-last: If you have no way to manually control your robot soldier, then you're asking for it to kill you.
We can't manage to secure our digital devices against hacking, how much more motivated do you think they're going to get to succeed at it if what's at stake is the annexation of U.S. owned robotic warriors? You won't need a campaign of propaganda and persuasion to flip soldiers into being traitors to their country, all you'll need is a pimply-faced computer nerd with the requisite skill-set and access to the right equipment, and voila, your mechanized soldiers are pwned.
All TV should be pay TV, and you just rent the programs you want to watch when you want to watch them! Come on, doesn't that make more sense?
Yeah, no thanks. I don't know about the rest of you, but my version of 'cutting the cord' involved installing an antenna on the roof and not paying anything for TV ever again. I'd rather not watch anything at all than ever have to pay for TV shows. I also mercilessly scoff and mock the whole idea that using a TV and a program guide of any kind is 'too difficult' and that it needs to be simplified; are we really becoming so dumb and slow that we can't even figure out how the TV works? I know I have no problems with it, what about you?
Well, to be fair, for most people those things are uninstallable or can't be disabled. I don't have and sure as hell don't want Windows 10 or any more Microsoft products, after the way I see them treat everyone, but I used to have an MCSE, and have been hacking on Windows since v3.1. There's some rather arcane and esoteric ways to stop Windows from doing things you don't want it doing, if you're willing to hack the Registry, and willing to play around with security settings on various key files. Can't say for sure if those tactics would work or not in Win10, they may have too thoroughly integrated objectionable things into critical parts of the system, but it's theoretically possible. Not that I'm advocating anyone put up with Windows 10. At this point I'd rather see everyone who can do so, bail on it and find some flavor of Linux they like, because the only way to win this game against Microsoft is to not play at all.
Let me add to your list of 'challenges': Hydrocephaly (water on the brain) is a very rare, very devastating disorder that can be fatal. Survivors of it can have 90% or more of their brain matter utterly destroyed by it. You'd think these rare survivors would be drooling idiots, barely alive, let alone capable of living anything like normal lives. But I've heard that at least some of them go on to not only have normal lives, but brilliant lives. With only 10% or less of a normal, functioning brain.
You're on the right track in what you're thinking.
People should be allowed to choose to try, not be excluded from trying at all because someone says "This test shows you shouldn't be allowed to do this". To quote another movie with Keanu Reeves in it, it's all about choice, and we shouldn't allow our own DNA to become "Just another system of control". If businesses are allowed to DNA test applicants, and based on an arbitrary criteria exclude applicants, then it's also not a great leap for schools to do the same. How would you like it if your kid decides he's really interested in engineering, and shows some aptitude for it, but universities won't accept him into their engineering program because the DNA test comes back as 'insufficient aptitude'? How would you feel if it was you?
I can be quoted as saying that the vast majority of people don't have any idea what their 'purpose' in life is, and very often are ill-equipped to find their 'purpose' themselves -- but that doesn't mean they should have their ability to choose their purpose taken away from them, either.
In my theoretical future scenario, how much farther would you have to go before we're living in a full-blown GATTACA world, where you can't even go out on a date with someone unless your DNA is 'compatible'? Can you imagine how bad that would be in the long run for the genetic diversity of the human race as a whole?
On the subject of 'cautionary tales', I suggest everyone re-watch that movie, because it's 100% relevant. This sort of nonsense should remain outlawed. Genetic predisposition is not the be-all-end-all of human potential; we learn. Education, skills, and experience should be determining factors.
..okay, how come you're not factoring in the energy that those technologies produce that doesn't have to be produced by burning fossil fuels? I'm not convinced that solar and wind are ever going to be 100% of the solution (I'd rather have nuclear power in one form or another) but those are not completely dead-end technologies either.
Well, that's why I ask questions like this one.;-) It's all well and good to get excited over something like this, but if it's going to do more harm than good then what's the point? For all we know it may take so much electricity to make this practical that trying to supply it all with so-called 'renewable' sources just isn't practical in itself.
Oh and by the way, is solar, wind, and what-not actually carbon-negative, once you figure in everything that has to be done to produce and implement solar panels, wind turbine generators, and so on? Never seem to hear anyone talking about that, either.;-)
Oh, yeah, and we need to pry the wealth from the 1% to.0001% who truly contribute nothing concrete.
Uh huh. And guess what? If this was, say, even as late as a few hundred years ago, in most parts of the world, having the wrong people hearing you say things like the above, would get you disappeared without a trace, or at the very least, your life ruined, for being 'uppity' and 'not knowing your place' and 'not properly respecting your betters'. Even these days in some parts of the world it's still like that. In some ways, even here in the U.S.. In any case, 'prying the wealth from the 1%' is more-or-less a non-starter -- unless you want Civil War 2. Even then, they'll have much of their wealth in off-shore holdings, and will just flee the country. You want a post-scarcity world? I think that you have to make the entire concept of 'wealth' obsolete. Remember, in the Star Trek Universe, Earth wasn't capitalistic anymore; that was one of the key features that made their society work the way it did, along with cheap plentiful resources. In our, real world, the 'have nots' taking the wealth from the 'haves' just shifts the roles around. Before you know it you have an entirely new crop of aristocracy, and we're back to the same problem you were trying to solve in the first place: an entitled 1% controlling 99% of the wealth and power, and doing anything they can to protect that and their position in society. You want to win the game? Don't play in the first place, and furthermore ban the game and make it obsolete.
LOL no, with the possible exception that if Microsoft managed somehow to destroy Apples' OS and became the only commercial desktop OS, everyone would suffer. I do not have and do not want any Apple products either, but there has to be some sort of competition or it's a bad thing for everyone. Personally I'd prefer a free and open-source OS like linux.
$10,000 per year is less than my rent, I couldn't live on that. I'm bringing home a little over $36,000 after taxes and just getting by paycheck to paycheck. It just won't work.
Friend, the first time this subject came up, I did the same math you just did, and posted it here, just like you did, and people's eyes glazed over, just like they did in this discussion, and two seconds later they just went right back to extolling the many virtues of UBI, and how it's going to create a Utopia for everyone. They don't want logic or reason, they don't want to think about the consequences, they just want to live in a fantasy world where they don't have to get up and go to work anymore. Of course they're just dreaming, it's not going to happen.
In the Star Trek Universe, they have incredibly cheap fusion and antimatter reactors for power, matter replicators to feed, clothe, and otherwise provide basic necessities for everyone, essentially free instantaneous transportation to anywhere on the planet (or orbit), and all of this costs more or less nothing. We might have fusion power at some point, assuming the environmentalist types and the NIMBYs don't prevent it, but direct energy-to-matter conversion to create goods and consumables will probably never happen. They also had faster-than-light starships, enabling them to have off-world colonies on earthlike planets, and became part of an interstellar extraterrestrial civilization of diverse species. Most of these things are highly unlikely to ever happen; we may be stuck on this one planet until we go extinct, and at this point you can't predict a 'post scarcity' era of any kind. Would I *like* it? Sure. But short of a Ring of Wishes it's not likely.
The first thing that happens is that you have children growing up in an environment where there is no history of earning and no expectation of it. That leads to the question: why bother with an education? Once you start questioning that and consider the costs - books, all the stuff the "other kids" have, trips, the cost of transporting your offspring to school - it all adds up. And to what end? You don't have a job, the next generation is even less likely to have one - why expend energy and time learning stuff that will be no use.
You and I are on the same page. I'm seeing a trend towards more and more technological conveniences making people physically and mentally more lazy and unmotivated; smartphones everywhere, and in the middle-future, so-called 'self-driving cars', and other things that give people no reason to learn to do things for themselves; why should they when there's some machine that does it all for them, and they don't have to know how it works? There is already a problem with people whose families have been on 100% Welfare for at least two generations; the kids/grandkids don't have any examples of their own family members working, so the concept is foreign to them. I'd suspect, as you say, they don't have much motivation to get an education, because what use do they have for it? There's free government money, and machines to do things for you. You have to ask yourself: Are they using the tools, or are the tools using them? So-called 'Universal Basic Income' will make this phenomenon more widespread, as you say: you'll have entire generations that don't understand 'work' or the people who do it, and won't have any real motivation to learn anything that could make them useful productive adults, because their basic needs are provided for and there's automatics to do everything else for them. I have to wonder to myself: At that point, what's the difference between humans and animals in a zoo? You're not living, you're just existing.
Of course I think we're getting worked up over nothing, anyone who looks at the math sees that this 'UBI' concept just doesn't scale up, it would bankrupt the country in short order, so it just won't happen.
This sounds about like some authoritarian dictator, after staging a successful military coup and executing everyone in the previous government, claiming what a 'benevolent ruler' he is, that 'his administration will be open and transparent', and 'any citizen may contact me directly at any time with any concerns they may have'. In other words: Unbelievable bullshit. You literally FORCE your spyware-laden 'operating system' on people who were perfectly happy with what they already had, hide spyware in updates to previous versions of your software, use trickery to get Windows 10 onto people's computers, then make wildly inaccurate claims about the 'adoption rate' of your crappy malware/spyware 'operating system' and your 'installed user base'. Then you proceed to systematically annex the Linux world or lock them out of platforms completely, and likely have some sort of plans to destroy Apple, which will be the only other commercial OS available to anyone. Microsoft can go to hell. I'd rather not own a computer anymore than put up with bullshit of this magnitude.
You just encapsulated in a single sentence the reason why I'd never, ever use Uber, Lyft, or any other conveyance service like it, and would rather just get myself from point to point instead in my own vehicle -- one that I operate myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Your Choice #1 should not be 'losing your nation's right of self determination', at least not here in the U.S., theoretically at least, because we elected them and they are, ostensibly, supposed to be listening to us and implementing our collective will. #2 should, again ostensibly, be reined in by our elected officials and the civil and criminal justice system. #3 should be a reflection of the officials we chose to elect. #4 is pure fantasy of course and I, of course, was being sarcastic, and more than a little sardonic in referencing it in that context, if you didn't notice.
Colossus/Guardian is an order of magnitude better than the so-called 'AIs' that will be controlled by corporations and governments to spy on and profile citizens and, I'm sure, controlled by organized crime cabals and the 'new world order' type organizations.
Are you a politician? Because you sound like you have no idea how technology works at all. None of those ideas will work, especially the next-to-last: If you have no way to manually control your robot soldier, then you're asking for it to kill you.
We can't manage to secure our digital devices against hacking, how much more motivated do you think they're going to get to succeed at it if what's at stake is the annexation of U.S. owned robotic warriors? You won't need a campaign of propaganda and persuasion to flip soldiers into being traitors to their country, all you'll need is a pimply-faced computer nerd with the requisite skill-set and access to the right equipment, and voila, your mechanized soldiers are pwned.
All TV should be pay TV, and you just rent the programs you want to watch when you want to watch them! Come on, doesn't that make more sense?
Yeah, no thanks. I don't know about the rest of you, but my version of 'cutting the cord' involved installing an antenna on the roof and not paying anything for TV ever again. I'd rather not watch anything at all than ever have to pay for TV shows. I also mercilessly scoff and mock the whole idea that using a TV and a program guide of any kind is 'too difficult' and that it needs to be simplified; are we really becoming so dumb and slow that we can't even figure out how the TV works? I know I have no problems with it, what about you?
Well, to be fair, for most people those things are uninstallable or can't be disabled. I don't have and sure as hell don't want Windows 10 or any more Microsoft products, after the way I see them treat everyone, but I used to have an MCSE, and have been hacking on Windows since v3.1. There's some rather arcane and esoteric ways to stop Windows from doing things you don't want it doing, if you're willing to hack the Registry, and willing to play around with security settings on various key files. Can't say for sure if those tactics would work or not in Win10, they may have too thoroughly integrated objectionable things into critical parts of the system, but it's theoretically possible. Not that I'm advocating anyone put up with Windows 10. At this point I'd rather see everyone who can do so, bail on it and find some flavor of Linux they like, because the only way to win this game against Microsoft is to not play at all.
But it's not virus or malware free. And has bugs that go years without being fixed.
That's worse than Windows, how, exactly?
It's not Windows.
It's not spyware.
It's not Microsoft.
It respects you.
It's your computer!
Try it today!
Let me add to your list of 'challenges': Hydrocephaly (water on the brain) is a very rare, very devastating disorder that can be fatal. Survivors of it can have 90% or more of their brain matter utterly destroyed by it. You'd think these rare survivors would be drooling idiots, barely alive, let alone capable of living anything like normal lives. But I've heard that at least some of them go on to not only have normal lives, but brilliant lives. With only 10% or less of a normal, functioning brain.
You're on the right track in what you're thinking.
Maybe someone forgot to use an English measurement and put in Metric instead.
People should be allowed to choose to try, not be excluded from trying at all because someone says "This test shows you shouldn't be allowed to do this". To quote another movie with Keanu Reeves in it, it's all about choice, and we shouldn't allow our own DNA to become "Just another system of control". If businesses are allowed to DNA test applicants, and based on an arbitrary criteria exclude applicants, then it's also not a great leap for schools to do the same. How would you like it if your kid decides he's really interested in engineering, and shows some aptitude for it, but universities won't accept him into their engineering program because the DNA test comes back as 'insufficient aptitude'? How would you feel if it was you?
I can be quoted as saying that the vast majority of people don't have any idea what their 'purpose' in life is, and very often are ill-equipped to find their 'purpose' themselves -- but that doesn't mean they should have their ability to choose their purpose taken away from them, either.
In my theoretical future scenario, how much farther would you have to go before we're living in a full-blown GATTACA world, where you can't even go out on a date with someone unless your DNA is 'compatible'? Can you imagine how bad that would be in the long run for the genetic diversity of the human race as a whole?
Dangerous waters. Slippery slopes.
On the subject of 'cautionary tales', I suggest everyone re-watch that movie, because it's 100% relevant.
This sort of nonsense should remain outlawed. Genetic predisposition is not the be-all-end-all of human potential; we learn. Education, skills, and experience should be determining factors.
grandparent
You've got a three-digit UID here and you're calling me a 'grandparent'? Screw you!
..okay, how come you're not factoring in the energy that those technologies produce that doesn't have to be produced by burning fossil fuels? I'm not convinced that solar and wind are ever going to be 100% of the solution (I'd rather have nuclear power in one form or another) but those are not completely dead-end technologies either.
Well, that's why I ask questions like this one. ;-)
;-)
It's all well and good to get excited over something like this, but if it's going to do more harm than good then what's the point? For all we know it may take so much electricity to make this practical that trying to supply it all with so-called 'renewable' sources just isn't practical in itself.
Oh and by the way, is solar, wind, and what-not actually carbon-negative, once you figure in everything that has to be done to produce and implement solar panels, wind turbine generators, and so on? Never seem to hear anyone talking about that, either.
Yes, but: is the entire process carbon-neutral, or preferably, carbon negative? If it's carbon-positive then it's a worthless science trick.
Oh, yeah, and we need to pry the wealth from the 1% to .0001% who truly contribute nothing concrete.
Uh huh. And guess what? If this was, say, even as late as a few hundred years ago, in most parts of the world, having the wrong people hearing you say things like the above, would get you disappeared without a trace, or at the very least, your life ruined, for being 'uppity' and 'not knowing your place' and 'not properly respecting your betters'. Even these days in some parts of the world it's still like that. In some ways, even here in the U.S.. In any case, 'prying the wealth from the 1%' is more-or-less a non-starter -- unless you want Civil War 2. Even then, they'll have much of their wealth in off-shore holdings, and will just flee the country. You want a post-scarcity world? I think that you have to make the entire concept of 'wealth' obsolete. Remember, in the Star Trek Universe, Earth wasn't capitalistic anymore; that was one of the key features that made their society work the way it did, along with cheap plentiful resources. In our, real world, the 'have nots' taking the wealth from the 'haves' just shifts the roles around. Before you know it you have an entirely new crop of aristocracy, and we're back to the same problem you were trying to solve in the first place: an entitled 1% controlling 99% of the wealth and power, and doing anything they can to protect that and their position in society. You want to win the game? Don't play in the first place, and furthermore ban the game and make it obsolete.
LOL no, with the possible exception that if Microsoft managed somehow to destroy Apples' OS and became the only commercial desktop OS, everyone would suffer. I do not have and do not want any Apple products either, but there has to be some sort of competition or it's a bad thing for everyone. Personally I'd prefer a free and open-source OS like linux.
$10,000 per year is less than my rent, I couldn't live on that. I'm bringing home a little over $36,000 after taxes and just getting by paycheck to paycheck. It just won't work.
Friend, the first time this subject came up, I did the same math you just did, and posted it here, just like you did, and people's eyes glazed over, just like they did in this discussion, and two seconds later they just went right back to extolling the many virtues of UBI, and how it's going to create a Utopia for everyone. They don't want logic or reason, they don't want to think about the consequences, they just want to live in a fantasy world where they don't have to get up and go to work anymore. Of course they're just dreaming, it's not going to happen.
In the Star Trek Universe, they have incredibly cheap fusion and antimatter reactors for power, matter replicators to feed, clothe, and otherwise provide basic necessities for everyone, essentially free instantaneous transportation to anywhere on the planet (or orbit), and all of this costs more or less nothing. We might have fusion power at some point, assuming the environmentalist types and the NIMBYs don't prevent it, but direct energy-to-matter conversion to create goods and consumables will probably never happen. They also had faster-than-light starships, enabling them to have off-world colonies on earthlike planets, and became part of an interstellar extraterrestrial civilization of diverse species. Most of these things are highly unlikely to ever happen; we may be stuck on this one planet until we go extinct, and at this point you can't predict a 'post scarcity' era of any kind. Would I *like* it? Sure. But short of a Ring of Wishes it's not likely.
The first thing that happens is that you have children growing up in an environment where there is no history of earning and no expectation of it. That leads to the question: why bother with an education? Once you start questioning that and consider the costs - books, all the stuff the "other kids" have, trips, the cost of transporting your offspring to school - it all adds up. And to what end? You don't have a job, the next generation is even less likely to have one - why expend energy and time learning stuff that will be no use.
You and I are on the same page. I'm seeing a trend towards more and more technological conveniences making people physically and mentally more lazy and unmotivated; smartphones everywhere, and in the middle-future, so-called 'self-driving cars', and other things that give people no reason to learn to do things for themselves; why should they when there's some machine that does it all for them, and they don't have to know how it works? There is already a problem with people whose families have been on 100% Welfare for at least two generations; the kids/grandkids don't have any examples of their own family members working, so the concept is foreign to them. I'd suspect, as you say, they don't have much motivation to get an education, because what use do they have for it? There's free government money, and machines to do things for you. You have to ask yourself: Are they using the tools, or are the tools using them? So-called 'Universal Basic Income' will make this phenomenon more widespread, as you say: you'll have entire generations that don't understand 'work' or the people who do it, and won't have any real motivation to learn anything that could make them useful productive adults, because their basic needs are provided for and there's automatics to do everything else for them. I have to wonder to myself: At that point, what's the difference between humans and animals in a zoo? You're not living, you're just existing.
Of course I think we're getting worked up over nothing, anyone who looks at the math sees that this 'UBI' concept just doesn't scale up, it would bankrupt the country in short order, so it just won't happen.
This sounds about like some authoritarian dictator, after staging a successful military coup and executing everyone in the previous government, claiming what a 'benevolent ruler' he is, that 'his administration will be open and transparent', and 'any citizen may contact me directly at any time with any concerns they may have'. In other words: Unbelievable bullshit. You literally FORCE your spyware-laden 'operating system' on people who were perfectly happy with what they already had, hide spyware in updates to previous versions of your software, use trickery to get Windows 10 onto people's computers, then make wildly inaccurate claims about the 'adoption rate' of your crappy malware/spyware 'operating system' and your 'installed user base'. Then you proceed to systematically annex the Linux world or lock them out of platforms completely, and likely have some sort of plans to destroy Apple, which will be the only other commercial OS available to anyone. Microsoft can go to hell. I'd rather not own a computer anymore than put up with bullshit of this magnitude.
My personal choice if I was travelling (which I almost never do anyway) would be to rent a car anyway.
You just encapsulated in a single sentence the reason why I'd never, ever use Uber, Lyft, or any other conveyance service like it, and would rather just get myself from point to point instead in my own vehicle -- one that I operate myself.