Yes - this first-person stuff is just really annoying. "My science team..." urgh. The probe doesn't "own" those people - it's the other way around. "I'm working a menial job to provide low level data for a team of brilliant research scientists" would be better. But really? No. Let's no anthropomorphize this stuff - it's beyond annoying. If/when we get true AI, then the computer can speak in the first person...otherwise...hell no.
In most cases, it's not the appearance of someone that makes them a great actor - it's the way they convey emotion - how they deliver the lines - comedic timing...all of that kind of stuff.
Preserving the APPEARANCE of a great actor won't help them to actually ACT after their death.
Doubtless we can teach AI's to do that too - but merely capturing the appearance isn't what's required here.
After all - consider all of the cartoon/3D-animation movies where they hire actual good actors to play the roles.
When Robin Williams played the Genie in Aladdin - did we care that the genie didn't look like him? NO! It was his manic comedy style that sold the performance.
"up to 80+ hours"...what does that even mean? "Up to" (meaning less-than-or-equal-to) "80" (a conveniently rounded number) "plus" (presumably meaning greater than or equal to) hours. So basically, anywhere between 0 and infinity hours? Or maybe 80 hours PRECISELY?
People who write this stuff really need to stop covering their asses because what they say has ZERO meaning. All I get out of this is "It has a battery that runs it for some completely unknown amount of time".
Almost all efforts through history to force (or even merely encourage) people to use one word or phrase instead of another have been failures. Language is a fluid thing and its written on-the-fly by the people who speak it.
People say "Linux" because it's easier than "GNU/Linux" and it really doesn't matter a damn whether you think the latter is right or wrong. You stand about as much chance of changing it than getting people to stop boldly splitting infinitives, to prevent them from saying "ATM Machine" or to understand that "Gay" also means "Happy". We say "Megabyte" when it should be "Mebibyte" - and "Disk Space" when we mean "Unused bytes within a box full of flash chips".
Language does what it pleases...it's virtually impossible to control.
So, it's "Linux" - and yes, we know that the GNU folks made a gigantic contribution - without which "Linux" would simply not exist...and we regret that language is not doing what they might ideally wish it to do.
"Nobody who is anti-ad goes with proprietary streaming"
This is patent nonsense. I am anti-ad - and I subscribe to four different streaming services (including NetFlix and Amazon) precisely because they don't have adverts. If they ever DO start using adverts - then I'll unsubscribe and lose nothing.
So right there, there is an "existence proof" that you're wrong.
I stream because (having "cut the cord") I still want to watch some TV now and again. I don't especially care whether I stream or download because I'm not really into watching the same show/movie more than once. I don't want to "own" the content for future use. Streaming is marginally more convenient than downloading because it starts playing within seconds of choosing to watch something rather than having to download the entire thing first...but honestly, I don't give a damn which it is.
I use a Roku for streaming - and the fact that every streaming service has it's own software is no more than a very minor annoyance.
If it was some kind of material where I wanted to watch it more than once - maybe I'd be concerned enough to want to download it...but that's not the case here.
Music would be a different matter. I VERY commonly listen to the same music many, many times - and for that, I need to own my own copy and (preferably) have it stored on my own hard drive.
Seems to me that the reason to want to move from conventional TV to streaming are precisely BECAUSE there are no adverts. It's not just the annoyance of watching the adverts themselves - it's more subtle than that:
* With advertising, you can't be allowed to fast-forward at will because you'll be able to skip the adverts. * With advertising, the advertisers are the arbiters of whether a show is successful, not the audience. * With advertising, "binge watching" produces bad results for the advertisers because all of their ads get shown in a shorter period of elapsed time - they want the long term exposure that comes with a reproducible audience over a period of months to years. * With advertising, each episode of a show has to incorporate the same amount of advertising to pay for itself. This forces production into a mode where every show is the exact same length - rather than ending where a natural break in the story happens. This results in scripts either being trimmed or padded in ways that are not ideal. A similar effect happens where an advert break is needed in the middle of a piece of drama or a key conversation.
Those things produce worse content than with freely streamed video.
These subtle effects are extremely noticeable when you watch a show that was DESIGNED for adverts versus one that was made for streaming.
Advertising seems like it's free - but you're actually paying for it by wasting your life in 4 minute chunks. Worse still, if they advertise something you actually want to buy - the cost of the advert gets added into your product. Thousands of dollars of the price of a car are the cost of advertising it to you. Cut out adverts - and we all save money...which we can use to pay higher streaming fees.
In the end, the ONLY people who lose out are the ad agencies and production companies...and that's fine by me.
Yep - I agree. Intelligence appears to be an emergent property of complexity...so at some point we hit that level of complexity and voila "I think therefore I am" and so forth.
I really think those details can be worked out. The companies know this is happening - they know they have a few years to work it out - and the incentive is there for sure.
It's going to be hard to steal a self-driving truck - it's just going to drive wherever it's been told to drive to when it was loaded - it's not like it has any controls for the thief to access - the cab may not even exist. No seats, no windows, nothing - just a motor a gas tanks and a big computer with a bunch of sensors. And if it doesn't stop between loading and unloading - when are thieves going to be able to get near it? The truck will know if it's doors are being opened at the wrong location, set off sirens and call 911.
Refuelling is an interesting issue - but it can be like the "good old days" when a guy came out of the gas station to refuel your car for you.
Very true - but the point of the OP was about jobs.
It doesn't take a general AI to take jobs. A self-driving truck (which isn't really "AI" at all) can quite easily take 2 million US jobs away within about 5 years from it's introduction. Repeat for fast-food cooks, taxi drivers, tax preparers, medical coders...you name it.
A General AI - a true intelligence - may just decide that it's bored with driving trucks or playing Go and just decide to spend the next million years meditating on the properties of the number '42'. Since we'd have zero understanding of how it works (nobody really understands the weighting numbers that are the "program" in a neural network) - there would likely be no way to fix it.
So between the risk that a general AI might end our civilisation within a matter of days - and the risk that we'd spend a fortune developing one only to discover that it has ADHD or is obsessed in ridiculous and self-defeating ways...I'm not sure what to think about that possibility.
Only to say that we're not one tiny step closer to having a general AI than we were 40 years ago.
The point about AlphaGo isn't that it plays amazing Go.
The point is that it learned to play from being fed images of the board. It taught itself the rules and how to play to win - and it even got better by playing itself when it ran out of human-played games to look at....AND THEN it beat the best human player by an unprecedented margin.
That's a BIG step up from (for example) Deep Blue's coup in chess.
The OP is crazy. Let's look at some hard realities: There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA...maybe half of those are long-distance. We already have cars that can auto-drive on the freeway adequately. How long will it be between the day the first viable self-driving truck arrives on the scene until about 1.75 million people wind up being unemployed?
With AI trucks being able to drive 24/7 without having to take mandatory breaks - goods will get where they're going about twice as fast...that's a HUGE win. You'll only need half the number of trucks to get the same amount of goods transported because half of them are not sitting idle in truck-stops like they are now. Without driver salaries (health care coverage, taxes, management) - and probably with lower insurance premiums - and likely with lower fuel bills (I'm betting the AI drives at the perfect speed/gear for the conditions 100% of the time)...road transport will probably be HALF the cost without human drivers.
About 10% of those truckers are self-employed - so they'll be in work until they can't work cheaply enough to beat the AI's - but the big fleets will be anxious to switch over as fast as they can. An average 18 wheeler truck is scrapped after 5 to 6 years in service. And that's probably the maximum amount of time it'll be until the last long distant truck driver is unemployed.
If existing truck vendors provide add-on kits for current generation trucks, the adoption rate could be much faster. If Elon Musk's upcoming all-electric truck works out as claimed - then with states like California having aggressive "zero emissions" policies - it could happen much faster even than that.
If only half the number of trucks are needed - then the truck manufacturers will have to down-size too. When you cut out the ancillary jobs such as fast-food cooks and truck-stop owners - you could easily be looking at 2 million job losses.
Sure, there will be gains in electronics to manufacture these AI units - but I think a lot of that stuff will go to China...only the R&D will stay in the USA.
Even if AI trucks are only smart enough to reliably do freeway driving - there would STILL be massive incentives to putting a human driver at the offramp to drive the truck from freeway to destination then drop it back onto the on-ramp for it's next trip. All he needs is a motorbike to get him on to the next freeway exit/entrance after each truck is on it's way. One human driver could handle a dozen trucks quite easily.
We have perfect data on what 1g does to a person. Following extended ISS and MIR missions, we have pretty decent data on 0g - and the answer is that it slowly kills us. But we have literally no data WHATEVER on what 0.17g (moon) or 0.38g (mars) does to us.
Is that enough gravity to avoid 100% of the problems in 0g? Does it actually have ALL of the problems of 0g?
We really have no clue.
Given the nature of orbits and getting to Mars and back, you either have to stay for no longer than 2 weeks - or you have to stay for an entire year. If we send people to Mars for 2 weeks - after 6 months in zero-g flight - and with another 6 months of zero-g to get home again - the effect on the crew will be within the range of adverse conditions that we've seen for 12 months in zero-g (VERY BAD!), regardless of what 2 weeks at Mars gravity does to them. But if we send them for an entire year - then they could easily be anywhere between dead and fully healthy when they head home.
The 2 week mission provides us with no information whatever. The second approach is REALLY dangerous. If Mars gravity is no better than zero-g then the astronauts will have had 2 years of inadequate gravity...and they may well end up dead. We have NO CLUE what 2 years of inadequate-gravity does to people.
So what we NEED to be doing - as a matter of urgency - is sending a spinning 1/3rd g artificial gravity environment into orbit and sticking some astronauts inside it for months at a time. All we need is a reasonable sized crew compartment (Hi Bigelow guys! This is your thing!) and a decent counter-weight with a strong cable between them. All the crew have to do is live there and exercise daily. Heck, I bet we could find people who'd pay millions to do it.
This is actually a MUCH more important thing to know than what we'll gain by sending people to Mars. It determines whether mankind has any kind of future at all in space or whether it's robots all the way.
None of the efforts to get people to Mars appear to have that anywhere in their mission plans...which is crazy!
The computational complexity is undeniably vast - but it's not infinite.
If the simulation hypothesis is true then we know NOTHING WHATEVER about the nature of the "real" universe - only that of our own. We're probably OK with assuming that our mathematics are applicable - but we can determine nothing about the physics of this place.
So, for example, in the real universe, the speed of light might be infinite.
This would allow computers to perform calculations infinitely quickly - and to access memory storage that's as large as a galaxy without any lag. It's also possible that things like atoms are a LOT smaller in the real universe - and that would allow the pan-galactic hyper-beings to have much MUCH denser circuitry.
Sure, we don't know for sure that this is possible in the "real" universe - but there is no conceivable way to prove that it's not possible.
The simulation hypothesis (like the existence of God) is an "unfalsifiable hypothesis" - we can't EVER prove that something is impossible without knowing the laws of physics upon which it depends.
Generally, we tend to ignore falsifiable hypotheses - but that doesn't make them false.
So this research - while undoubtedly fascinating and clever - proves nothing of the sort.
1) I put up a website for my small business. 2) Without net neutrality - I'll probably have to pay some contribution for the bandwidth YOU consume when you visit it or I'm in the S-L-O-W lane. 3) There are a bazillion ISP's - they demand money from me - how does that even work? I have to write 1000 checks every month? How do I track which ISP the end-user used to pull down my data to verify what I owe them? 4) Because I have no way to know whether my website might "go viral" - I have no easy way to cap the fees I might wind up having to pay!
End result is that I can't risk having my own website.
5) Hence, the only way to do business is to sign up with Amazon/Facebook/Apple-store/etc middle-men. They have the clout to haggle good prices from the ISP's because nobody wants to be the ISP that doesn't let you to connect to Amazon/Facebook/Apple/etc at reasonable speeds. 6) Hence, I have to pay a chunk of my profits over to an organization who did NOTHING to earn that money. 7) Hence big businesses get bigger, small businesses find it even harder to survive than they do now. 8) Worse still - if I do something that the ISP's and/or the middle-men don't like (maybe I try to compete with them) - then they kick me off the service.
If the ISP's truly need to make more money - they need to charge the end user for the bandwidth they use, not the information provider.
Since SOMEONE pays - no matter what - the end user either pays for the bandwidth they use - or pays for higher priced goods and services that indirectly cover the cost of the bandwidth they used. So for end-users. it's a zero-sum game...UNLESS we're all forced to pay tolls to Amazon/Facebook/Apple-store/etc for doing something that really didn't need to be done. Adding an extra (pointless) layer is expensive. The expression "highway robbery" is literally what can happen.
Incidentally, the same problem happens with healthcare. Come what may, healthcare charges must be paid for by someone. But adding an HMO between patient and doctor/hospital adds an extra pointless layer that adds cost and delivers nothing of value.
Self driving cars will undoubtedly have many problems - that's not the question. The question is: Will they have more problems than humans? If you deface a sign enough - then a human can't recognize it either. The car, however, can be equipped with a database of where the signs are - it can compare the picture it sees with the database and with the pictures other cars have seen at that same location.
A car has MUCH more information than a person.
I would also bet that it could use the fact that signs are retro-reflective and return more energy from LIDAR than a sticker or spray paint can.
There are MANY ways to make this tiny problem "go away" for cars - but none to make it "go away" for humans.
I had two of them (both "model 2") with floating point BASIC and more memory. I did the popular "lowercase conversion" to both of them - the standard model ONLY HAD UPPERCASE. Amazingly, all you needed to do was add an addtional RAM chip to store the extra bit in the frame buffer and everything else "just worked"! The OS and the character generator ROM were all compatible with that! This strongly suggests that Tandy had originally intended it to have lowercase support - but decided to "cheap out" and save the cost of that extra RAM chip.
I built a wire-wrapped floppy disk controller (5" drive) and adding an external ROM with code to read and write files from disk.
I desperately wanted to port CP/M on to the TRS-80 but the way the boot ROM was placed in the address space made that impossible.
I wrote a couple of machine-code games for it - and sold maybe 100 copies of one of them (a side-scrolling space shooter)...which seemed like a lot at the time! Sadly, mass-producing tapes using a standard audio tape drive was kinda flaky and I ended up sending out replacement tapes to a lot of customers which meant I didn't make as much profit as I hoped.
It wasn't a *great* machine. The Apple ][ was better - but it was what I had, and I loved it.
Clearly they are writing for an audience that doesn't understand any of the issue behind Net Neutrality - and they are throwing anything at the problem that might sound like a "job killer" that might 'stick'.
If they say that autonomous cars need a non-neutral net - then that will be believed by the lawmakers - who are told continually about the US lead in this technology and how it's very popular with the general public...and lawmakers up and down the country are rushing out laws to allow them to be driven in various states. They wouldn't want to throw a valuable/popular idea like that out the window because of Net Neutrality - so this makes a great throw-away line for Comcast - even though it's a blatant falsehood. That falsehood will never become obvious to lawmakers until it's far too late.
Comcast are now "officially evil" - but since I think they were already on my "officially evil" list, I guess not much changed.
My wife and I run a small business (we sell a modest number of laser-cut models online). The cost of shipping our product is about 30% of our sales price - so we must work hard to minimise postage charges. USPS is vastly cheaper than UPS/FedEx/etc...and we avoid USPS "Flat Rate Shipping" because it's three times the price of doing it the traditional way. We always tell the post office desk staff "Ship the cheapest way possible" (no tracking, no insurance, no nothing) because the number of "shipping failures" is negligible and paying for these items isn't cost-effective.
But some of the ways USPS operates are ludicrous. We COULD do all of our shipping work online and just drop the packages off at the post office - but they charge MORE for doing that than handing a pile of ~100 packages to the desk clerk and waiting for them to painstakingly enter the Zip code for each one - then stick THREE labels onto each envelope and finally, use a little rubber stamp to mark them "First Class". I try to go to the post office when there isn't a long line ahead of me - but you can be 100% sure that when I'm done, a long line has built up behind me. I'd be in and out in under a minute if they didn't charge me so much for doing the work for them! But spending 40 minutes watching the desk while they do all of this is very cost-effective for me.
This is doubly stupid because our $100 label printing machine automatically looks up the Zip code we get from our customers and converts that into a kind of bar code that it prints at the bottom of every label...so a simple hand-scanner would reduce the time it takes them to enter the data considerably...and having their label printing contraption put ALL of the data onto one sticker rather than three (plus a rubber stamp) would also streamline the process immensely.
Amazon has clearly negotiated a way around these crazy rules - but small businesses can't do that. I'm quite sure that much of the $1.46 that Amazon is costing us could be eliminated by simply giving all small businesses the ability to pay online WITHOUT the huge up-charge.
WITH NetNeutrality - every end user who connects to the internet pays the same amount to their ISP, regardless of what content they transfer. They might pay more if they use more bandwidth - that's not covered by Net Neutrality.
WITHOUT NetNeutrality - the ISP can charge you more for visiting some web sites than others - they can effectively shut out websites who compete with them (imagine what Cable companies who are also ISP's might do to YouTube and NetFlix) - AND they can charge website owners for transferring data from their websites to the end users.
What you wrote in your post is nothing to do with the issue at hand here.
Think of this as if it were "Phone company neutrality" instead. We currently have "Phone Neutrality" - the charges for phone calls depends on distance - but nothing else. If we abolished "Phone Neutrality" then the phone company could notice that you call your Mom a lot - and that these are longer than average calls. They could legally charge you extra for calling your Mom than for equally long calls to (say) your best friend.
We have "Phone Neutrality" because the phone company is regulated as a "Common Carrier" - which means that they are paid to transfer data and that's all. They aren't allowed to filter content or mess with quality.
Just in case you don't think they would if they could - it was common practice before the common carrier rules for phone companies to deliberate reduce the quality of signals coming from phones operated by their rivals. Don't think your ISP wouldn't stoop to the same tactics...."Oh no...is your NetFlix stream dropping out AGAIN! Oh what a shame! Maybe you should just give us another $120 a month to give you cable TV...and then you'll be able to enjoy all of our lovely adverts too!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes - this first-person stuff is just really annoying. "My science team..." urgh. The probe doesn't "own" those people - it's the other way around. "I'm working a menial job to provide low level data for a team of brilliant research scientists" would be better. But really? No. Let's no anthropomorphize this stuff - it's beyond annoying. If/when we get true AI, then the computer can speak in the first person...otherwise...hell no.
In most cases, it's not the appearance of someone that makes them a great actor - it's the way they convey emotion - how they deliver the lines - comedic timing...all of that kind of stuff.
Preserving the APPEARANCE of a great actor won't help them to actually ACT after their death.
Doubtless we can teach AI's to do that too - but merely capturing the appearance isn't what's required here.
After all - consider all of the cartoon/3D-animation movies where they hire actual good actors to play the roles.
When Robin Williams played the Genie in Aladdin - did we care that the genie didn't look like him? NO! It was his manic comedy style that sold the performance.
The thing is - some games are GPU-bound and others are CPU-bound.
If it's the former - then you can replace your CPU with DeepThought, Holly or HAL and your frame rate won't move an inch.
So whether this contraption does you any good depends sensitively on the games you play and the performance of your GPU.
Even the performance of your GPU will depend on your screen resolution.
The ONLY reliable benchmark is the actual application you're running on the actual Before and After hardware setups.
So left-handers and tab-users are still fair game for abuse?
(There's a reason the TAB key is on the left of the keyboard...those bastards!)
Did Moore's law just end? Intel said they thought it had...maybe this is confirmation.
"up to 80+ hours"...what does that even mean? "Up to" (meaning less-than-or-equal-to) "80" (a conveniently rounded number) "plus" (presumably meaning greater than or equal to) hours. So basically, anywhere between 0 and infinity hours? Or maybe 80 hours PRECISELY?
People who write this stuff really need to stop covering their asses because what they say has ZERO meaning. All I get out of this is "It has a battery that runs it for some completely unknown amount of time".
Almost all efforts through history to force (or even merely encourage) people to use one word or phrase instead of another have been failures.
Language is a fluid thing and its written on-the-fly by the people who speak it.
People say "Linux" because it's easier than "GNU/Linux" and it really doesn't matter a damn whether you think the latter is right or wrong. You stand about as much chance of changing it than getting people to stop boldly splitting infinitives, to prevent them from saying "ATM Machine" or to understand that "Gay" also means "Happy". We say "Megabyte" when it should be "Mebibyte" - and "Disk Space" when we mean "Unused bytes within a box full of flash chips".
Language does what it pleases...it's virtually impossible to control.
So, it's "Linux" - and yes, we know that the GNU folks made a gigantic contribution - without which "Linux" would simply not exist...and we regret that language is not doing what they might ideally wish it to do.
"Nobody who is anti-ad goes with proprietary streaming"
This is patent nonsense. I am anti-ad - and I subscribe to four different streaming services (including NetFlix and Amazon) precisely because they don't have adverts. If they ever DO start using adverts - then I'll unsubscribe and lose nothing.
So right there, there is an "existence proof" that you're wrong.
I stream because (having "cut the cord") I still want to watch some TV now and again. I don't especially care whether I stream or download because I'm not really into watching the same show/movie more than once. I don't want to "own" the content for future use. Streaming is marginally more convenient than downloading because it starts playing within seconds of choosing to watch something rather than having to download the entire thing first...but honestly, I don't give a damn which it is.
I use a Roku for streaming - and the fact that every streaming service has it's own software is no more than a very minor annoyance.
If it was some kind of material where I wanted to watch it more than once - maybe I'd be concerned enough to want to download it...but that's not the case here.
Music would be a different matter. I VERY commonly listen to the same music many, many times - and for that, I need to own my own copy and (preferably) have it stored on my own hard drive.
Seems to me that the reason to want to move from conventional TV to streaming are precisely BECAUSE there are no adverts. It's not just the annoyance of watching the adverts themselves - it's more subtle than that:
* With advertising, you can't be allowed to fast-forward at will because you'll be able to skip the adverts.
* With advertising, the advertisers are the arbiters of whether a show is successful, not the audience.
* With advertising, "binge watching" produces bad results for the advertisers because all of their ads get shown in a shorter period of elapsed time - they want the long term exposure that comes with a reproducible audience over a period of months to years.
* With advertising, each episode of a show has to incorporate the same amount of advertising to pay for itself. This forces production into a mode where every show is the exact same length - rather than ending where a natural break in the story happens. This results in scripts either being trimmed or padded in ways that are not ideal. A similar effect happens where an advert break is needed in the middle of a piece of drama or a key conversation.
Those things produce worse content than with freely streamed video.
These subtle effects are extremely noticeable when you watch a show that was DESIGNED for adverts versus one that was made for streaming.
Advertising seems like it's free - but you're actually paying for it by wasting your life in 4 minute chunks. Worse still, if they advertise something you actually want to buy - the cost of the advert gets added into your product. Thousands of dollars of the price of a car are the cost of advertising it to you. Cut out adverts - and we all save money...which we can use to pay higher streaming fees.
In the end, the ONLY people who lose out are the ad agencies and production companies...and that's fine by me.
I'm pretty sure Turing is dead.
Yep - I agree. Intelligence appears to be an emergent property of complexity...so at some point we hit that level of complexity and voila "I think therefore I am" and so forth.
I really think those details can be worked out. The companies know this is happening - they know they have a few years to work it out - and the incentive is there for sure.
It's going to be hard to steal a self-driving truck - it's just going to drive wherever it's been told to drive to when it was loaded - it's not like it has any controls for the thief to access - the cab may not even exist. No seats, no windows, nothing - just a motor a gas tanks and a big computer with a bunch of sensors. And if it doesn't stop between loading and unloading - when are thieves going to be able to get near it? The truck will know if it's doors are being opened at the wrong location, set off sirens and call 911.
Refuelling is an interesting issue - but it can be like the "good old days" when a guy came out of the gas station to refuel your car for you.
I don't see any serious obstacles.
Very true - but the point of the OP was about jobs.
It doesn't take a general AI to take jobs. A self-driving truck (which isn't really "AI" at all) can quite easily take 2 million US jobs away within about 5 years from it's introduction. Repeat for fast-food cooks, taxi drivers, tax preparers, medical coders...you name it.
A General AI - a true intelligence - may just decide that it's bored with driving trucks or playing Go and just decide to spend the next million years meditating on the properties of the number '42'. Since we'd have zero understanding of how it works (nobody really understands the weighting numbers that are the "program" in a neural network) - there would likely be no way to fix it.
So between the risk that a general AI might end our civilisation within a matter of days - and the risk that we'd spend a fortune developing one only to discover that it has ADHD or is obsessed in ridiculous and self-defeating ways...I'm not sure what to think about that possibility.
Only to say that we're not one tiny step closer to having a general AI than we were 40 years ago.
The point about AlphaGo isn't that it plays amazing Go.
The point is that it learned to play from being fed images of the board. It taught itself the rules and how to play to win - and it even got better by playing itself when it ran out of human-played games to look at....AND THEN it beat the best human player by an unprecedented margin.
That's a BIG step up from (for example) Deep Blue's coup in chess.
The OP is crazy. Let's look at some hard realities: There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the USA...maybe half of those are long-distance. We already have cars that can auto-drive on the freeway adequately. How long will it be between the day the first viable self-driving truck arrives on the scene until about 1.75 million people wind up being unemployed?
With AI trucks being able to drive 24/7 without having to take mandatory breaks - goods will get where they're going about twice as fast...that's a HUGE win. You'll only need half the number of trucks to get the same amount of goods transported because half of them are not sitting idle in truck-stops like they are now. Without driver salaries (health care coverage, taxes, management) - and probably with lower insurance premiums - and likely with lower fuel bills (I'm betting the AI drives at the perfect speed/gear for the conditions 100% of the time)...road transport will probably be HALF the cost without human drivers.
About 10% of those truckers are self-employed - so they'll be in work until they can't work cheaply enough to beat the AI's - but the big fleets will be anxious to switch over as fast as they can. An average 18 wheeler truck is scrapped after 5 to 6 years in service. And that's probably the maximum amount of time it'll be until the last long distant truck driver is unemployed.
If existing truck vendors provide add-on kits for current generation trucks, the adoption rate could be much faster. If Elon Musk's upcoming all-electric truck works out as claimed - then with states like California having aggressive "zero emissions" policies - it could happen much faster even than that.
If only half the number of trucks are needed - then the truck manufacturers will have to down-size too. When you cut out the ancillary jobs such as fast-food cooks and truck-stop owners - you could easily be looking at 2 million job losses.
Sure, there will be gains in electronics to manufacture these AI units - but I think a lot of that stuff will go to China...only the R&D will stay in the USA.
Even if AI trucks are only smart enough to reliably do freeway driving - there would STILL be massive incentives to putting a human driver at the offramp to drive the truck from freeway to destination then drop it back onto the on-ramp for it's next trip. All he needs is a motorbike to get him on to the next freeway exit/entrance after each truck is on it's way. One human driver could handle a dozen trucks quite easily.
We have perfect data on what 1g does to a person. Following extended ISS and MIR missions, we have pretty decent data on 0g - and the answer is that it slowly kills us. But we have literally no data WHATEVER on what 0.17g (moon) or 0.38g (mars) does to us.
Is that enough gravity to avoid 100% of the problems in 0g? Does it actually have ALL of the problems of 0g?
We really have no clue.
Given the nature of orbits and getting to Mars and back, you either have to stay for no longer than 2 weeks - or you have to stay for an entire year. If we send people to Mars for 2 weeks - after 6 months in zero-g flight - and with another 6 months of zero-g to get home again - the effect on the crew will be within the range of adverse conditions that we've seen for 12 months in zero-g (VERY BAD!), regardless of what 2 weeks at Mars gravity does to them. But if we send them for an entire year - then they could easily be anywhere between dead and fully healthy when they head home.
The 2 week mission provides us with no information whatever. The second approach is REALLY dangerous. If Mars gravity is no better than zero-g then the astronauts will have had 2 years of inadequate gravity...and they may well end up dead. We have NO CLUE what 2 years of inadequate-gravity does to people.
So what we NEED to be doing - as a matter of urgency - is sending a spinning 1/3rd g artificial gravity environment into orbit and sticking some astronauts inside it for months at a time. All we need is a reasonable sized crew compartment (Hi Bigelow guys! This is your thing!) and a decent counter-weight with a strong cable between them. All the crew have to do is live there and exercise daily. Heck, I bet we could find people who'd pay millions to do it.
This is actually a MUCH more important thing to know than what we'll gain by sending people to Mars. It determines whether mankind has any kind of future at all in space or whether it's robots all the way.
None of the efforts to get people to Mars appear to have that anywhere in their mission plans...which is crazy!
The computational complexity is undeniably vast - but it's not infinite.
If the simulation hypothesis is true then we know NOTHING WHATEVER about the nature of the "real" universe - only that of our own. We're probably OK with assuming that our mathematics are applicable - but we can determine nothing about the physics of this place.
So, for example, in the real universe, the speed of light might be infinite.
This would allow computers to perform calculations infinitely quickly - and to access memory storage that's as large as a galaxy without any lag. It's also possible that things like atoms are a LOT smaller in the real universe - and that would allow the pan-galactic hyper-beings to have much MUCH denser circuitry.
Sure, we don't know for sure that this is possible in the "real" universe - but there is no conceivable way to prove that it's not possible.
The simulation hypothesis (like the existence of God) is an "unfalsifiable hypothesis" - we can't EVER prove that something is impossible without knowing the laws of physics upon which it depends.
Generally, we tend to ignore falsifiable hypotheses - but that doesn't make them false.
So this research - while undoubtedly fascinating and clever - proves nothing of the sort.
1) I put up a website for my small business.
2) Without net neutrality - I'll probably have to pay some contribution for the bandwidth YOU consume when you visit it or I'm in the S-L-O-W lane.
3) There are a bazillion ISP's - they demand money from me - how does that even work? I have to write 1000 checks every month? How do I track which ISP the end-user used to pull down my data to verify what I owe them?
4) Because I have no way to know whether my website might "go viral" - I have no easy way to cap the fees I might wind up having to pay!
End result is that I can't risk having my own website.
5) Hence, the only way to do business is to sign up with Amazon/Facebook/Apple-store/etc middle-men. They have the clout to haggle good prices from the ISP's because nobody wants to be the ISP that doesn't let you to connect to Amazon/Facebook/Apple/etc at reasonable speeds.
6) Hence, I have to pay a chunk of my profits over to an organization who did NOTHING to earn that money.
7) Hence big businesses get bigger, small businesses find it even harder to survive than they do now.
8) Worse still - if I do something that the ISP's and/or the middle-men don't like (maybe I try to compete with them) - then they kick me off the service.
If the ISP's truly need to make more money - they need to charge the end user for the bandwidth they use, not the information provider.
Since SOMEONE pays - no matter what - the end user either pays for the bandwidth they use - or pays for higher priced goods and services that indirectly cover the cost of the bandwidth they used. So for end-users. it's a zero-sum game...UNLESS we're all forced to pay tolls to Amazon/Facebook/Apple-store/etc for doing something that really didn't need to be done. Adding an extra (pointless) layer is expensive. The expression "highway robbery" is literally what can happen.
Incidentally, the same problem happens with healthcare. Come what may, healthcare charges must be paid for by someone. But adding an HMO between patient and doctor/hospital adds an extra pointless layer that adds cost and delivers nothing of value.
Hence net-neutrality.
Did he actually stipulate that nobody could copy anything off of the hard drive BEFORE it would be crushed by a steam roller?
Self driving cars will undoubtedly have many problems - that's not the question. The question is: Will they have more problems than humans? If you deface a sign enough - then a human can't recognize it either. The car, however, can be equipped with a database of where the signs are - it can compare the picture it sees with the database and with the pictures other cars have seen at that same location.
A car has MUCH more information than a person.
I would also bet that it could use the fact that signs are retro-reflective and return more energy from LIDAR than a sticker or spray paint can.
There are MANY ways to make this tiny problem "go away" for cars - but none to make it "go away" for humans.
Yes - you're right! My bad.
40 years is a long time for the small cluster of brain cells who's only purpose in life was to remember that fact ! :-)
I had two of them (both "model 2") with floating point BASIC and more memory. I did the popular "lowercase conversion" to both of them - the standard model ONLY HAD UPPERCASE. Amazingly, all you needed to do was add an addtional RAM chip to store the extra bit in the frame buffer and everything else "just worked"! The OS and the character generator ROM were all compatible with that! This strongly suggests that Tandy had originally intended it to have lowercase support - but decided to "cheap out" and save the cost of that extra RAM chip.
I built a wire-wrapped floppy disk controller (5" drive) and adding an external ROM with code to read and write files from disk.
I desperately wanted to port CP/M on to the TRS-80 but the way the boot ROM was placed in the address space made that impossible.
I wrote a couple of machine-code games for it - and sold maybe 100 copies of one of them (a side-scrolling space shooter)...which seemed like a lot at the time! Sadly, mass-producing tapes using a standard audio tape drive was kinda flaky and I ended up sending out replacement tapes to a lot of customers which meant I didn't make as much profit as I hoped.
It wasn't a *great* machine. The Apple ][ was better - but it was what I had, and I loved it.
Clearly they are writing for an audience that doesn't understand any of the issue behind Net Neutrality - and they are throwing anything at the problem that might sound like a "job killer" that might 'stick'.
If they say that autonomous cars need a non-neutral net - then that will be believed by the lawmakers - who are told continually about the US lead in this technology and how it's very popular with the general public...and lawmakers up and down the country are rushing out laws to allow them to be driven in various states. They wouldn't want to throw a valuable/popular idea like that out the window because of Net Neutrality - so this makes a great throw-away line for Comcast - even though it's a blatant falsehood. That falsehood will never become obvious to lawmakers until it's far too late.
Comcast are now "officially evil" - but since I think they were already on my "officially evil" list, I guess not much changed.
My wife and I run a small business (we sell a modest number of laser-cut models online). The cost of shipping our product is about 30% of our sales price - so we must work hard to minimise postage charges. USPS is vastly cheaper than UPS/FedEx/etc...and we avoid USPS "Flat Rate Shipping" because it's three times the price of doing it the traditional way. We always tell the post office desk staff "Ship the cheapest way possible" (no tracking, no insurance, no nothing) because the number of "shipping failures" is negligible and paying for these items isn't cost-effective.
But some of the ways USPS operates are ludicrous. We COULD do all of our shipping work online and just drop the packages off at the post office - but they charge MORE for doing that than handing a pile of ~100 packages to the desk clerk and waiting for them to painstakingly enter the Zip code for each one - then stick THREE labels onto each envelope and finally, use a little rubber stamp to mark them "First Class". I try to go to the post office when there isn't a long line ahead of me - but you can be 100% sure that when I'm done, a long line has built up behind me. I'd be in and out in under a minute if they didn't charge me so much for doing the work for them! But spending 40 minutes watching the desk while they do all of this is very cost-effective for me.
This is doubly stupid because our $100 label printing machine automatically looks up the Zip code we get from our customers and converts that into a kind of bar code that it prints at the bottom of every label...so a simple hand-scanner would reduce the time it takes them to enter the data considerably...and having their label printing contraption put ALL of the data onto one sticker rather than three (plus a rubber stamp) would also streamline the process immensely.
Amazon has clearly negotiated a way around these crazy rules - but small businesses can't do that. I'm quite sure that much of the $1.46 that Amazon is costing us could be eliminated by simply giving all small businesses the ability to pay online WITHOUT the huge up-charge.
I think you may be a bit confused about this.
WITH NetNeutrality - every end user who connects to the internet pays the same amount to their ISP, regardless of what content they transfer. They might pay more if they use more bandwidth - that's not covered by Net Neutrality.
WITHOUT NetNeutrality - the ISP can charge you more for visiting some web sites than others - they can effectively shut out websites who compete with them (imagine what Cable companies who are also ISP's might do to YouTube and NetFlix) - AND they can charge website owners for transferring data from their websites to the end users.
What you wrote in your post is nothing to do with the issue at hand here.
Think of this as if it were "Phone company neutrality" instead. We currently have "Phone Neutrality" - the charges for phone calls depends on distance - but nothing else. If we abolished "Phone Neutrality" then the phone company could notice that you call your Mom a lot - and that these are longer than average calls. They could legally charge you extra for calling your Mom than for equally long calls to (say) your best friend.
We have "Phone Neutrality" because the phone company is regulated as a "Common Carrier" - which means that they are paid to transfer data and that's all. They aren't allowed to filter content or mess with quality.
Just in case you don't think they would if they could - it was common practice before the common carrier rules for phone companies to deliberate reduce the quality of signals coming from phones operated by their rivals. Don't think your ISP wouldn't stoop to the same tactics...."Oh no...is your NetFlix stream dropping out AGAIN! Oh what a shame! Maybe you should just give us another $120 a month to give you cable TV...and then you'll be able to enjoy all of our lovely adverts too!