Actually, David Graeber has conceded this very point in his original piece on the topic:
Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: ‘who are you to say what jobs are really “necessary”? What's necessary anyway? You're an anthropology professor, what's the “need” for that?’ (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?
However, on the flip-side, they will all consistently fail in the same way if they have the same bug
You say this like it's a bad thing.
Of course it could be a very bad thing. Assume it's a fatal flaw - you could have a lot of people dying or getting injured in a very short period of time (the time between the bug manifesting itself and being fixed). If the bugs were more random (like a human driver's errors), the bug would only affect a person or two.
The only difference is that the self-driving vehicle can avoid taking the chance by turning it over to me to take the chance. I honestly don't know if it would be better if it kept control and tried it than handing control to me. But, the buck is passed.
Herein lies another important problem which is seldom discussed. "Disengagement" only works as an effective safety backstop if you have an experienced driver at the wheel..
In other words, it only makes sense for the first massively deployed generation of autonomous vehicles, where you can be sure that almost everyone behind the wheel has already spent years driving on their own. However, once you have a generation of people growing up used to being driven around rather than driving, and being driven by the autonomous cars 95% of the time, they will all be bad, inexperienced drivers...and forcing them to take control in situations where a computer doesn't know what to do will probably make things worse. So, beyond the first wave of massively deployed self-driving cars, the car has to be able to handle 100% of the situations or it ain't good for nothing at all. That's why I like the designs without a steering wheel: you either make it all work without a driver in all situations or you don't make it work at all.
I don't think self-driving cars will be perfect, but I think they'll be a lot more consistent and always keep reasonable safety margins.
Probably. However, on the flip-side, they will all consistently fail in the same way if they have the same bug (and bug-free software is impossible), unlike humans, whose errors are a lot more randomized. Sure, not all cars will run the same software, but the market in any given country is bound to be dominated by a single-digit number of manufacturers, compared to millions of human drivers (or a lot more). From a systemic perspective, human variation and imperfection is not a bug, it's a feature.
The other problem here is that with the in-vogue neural network based AI, finding flaws and bugs is even more difficult...since it is very difficult to understand why a complex neural network has "decided" to do something. With standard, "non-AI" software code, you can always follow the logic of the programmer (even if it takes a long while to figure it out).
Seldom (if ever) is there the rather obvious suggestion to limit autonomous vehicles to simple point to point 'highway' trips; but that's exactly where and how it should be done for the foreseeable future, if it happens at all. That is, the (literally) lethal mistake is to introduce autonomous vehicles into the complex and chaotic world of city driving.
Absolutely, self-driving cars should at first be limited only to freeways...not only for the very important reasons you mention, but also because freeways open up an easy (and relatively low-cost) avenue for installing autonomous-vehicle-specific infrastructure along them, which would make them much safer.
However, the companies most pushing autonomous vehicle development don't want to do that, and it's clear why. Use on freeways only would just effectively make autonomous driving a fancier version of cruise control. Sure, some people would pay for it, especially those that take long intercity trips; but it wouldn't be a killer application that would make everyone want to go out and a buy a new car. A car that drives you around everywhere by itself and is basically a personal taxi service (you don't have to worry where it's parked, etc.) might be such a killer app.
Furthermore, autonomous cars that don't drive in the cities are not going to help Uber and Lyft eliminate their human drivers, delivery companies and the like eliminate their human drivers, allow Waymo to launch a driverless taxi service, and allow the car companies to keeping making a steady stream of revenue in a world where car ownership and usage rates may steeply decline due to various factors.
Add a failing test, add code to fix failing test, deploy to all vehicles - fixed. Humans rearly learn in that fashion.
Indeed, humans rarely learn in that fashion...and that's you know, an advantage. Humans operate in a highly non-linear and unpredictable environment, and they developed, after millions of years of evolution, ways to deal with that. One way is a large variety among humans, so that they do not all have the same flaw (nor the same "fix"). It's really hubris to think that software, with its 60 or so years of development, could more robustly handle the world than humans, in situations that humans have evolved for (while humans have not been driving for millions of years, driving is very similar to age-old human activities, like, you know, just running and wandering about).
Looking at road death statistics would seem to suggest that German drivers are a lot better than American drivers, while for instance Russian drivers are a lot worse. Now it's not all due to quality of driving (but also quality of roads, law enforcement, car safety standards, etc.) and the quality of driving itself is impacted by many factors, but we can safely say for instance that drunk driving is a huge problem in Russia that contributes a lot to their death rate being higher than America's, while the far more stringent process of driver training and driver certification in Germany contributes a lot to their death rate being lower.
The companies developing self-driving cars, being either American or doing most of their testing in America, seem to take American drivers as the baseline. However, looking around the world one can conclude that American drivers could indeed improve quite a bit. Not to mention that historically, drivers have improved...most places in North America, any moron can easily get a driver's license. Even that's an improvement based on the situation several decades ago, surely it can be improved still.
You are one of those people that sets a zero point for history arbitrarily and then references everything to that as if nothing before that ever happened.
And you're one of those people in the hand-waving school of history: things just happen, you know, wars and stuff, always has been the case. Well, yes, wars have always happened, but each war has a very definitive set of causes. Sometimes they are many, sometimes they are complex and difficult to identify, but they are there. Germany is the main culprit for World War I, that is a simple undeniable historical fact.
These same documents of course also show that during this time the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, etc. were all pacifist nations. Clearly, only German leaders looked favorably on conquest as a means to an end. No one had ever heard the word "Empire" until the Germans came up with it. Expanding your power and territory through military conquest? The British and French would never do such a thing! It's inconceivable!
Please. Germany was following the example set by every European power since... well, since there were European powers.
No one ever said the others were pacifists. Likewise, what Germany did - instigating a continental war it, in the final few weeks before it pulled the trigger and decided to go all in, knew it would be catastrophic, is a relatively rare occurrance. European powers went to war all the time, but very rarely to all-out catastrophic continental wars where almost everyone fought everyone. That has happened about 4 times in European history, and twice it was Germany's fault. Not a stellar record.
The Germans were paranoid of France and Russia. They wanted to defeat them while they still felt they could. Furthermore, the German generals were paranoid about their own populace - with increasing liberalization of German society, they feared that at some point a government of social democrats and liberals would not be willing to fight their imperial wars. So they pushed and pushed and pushed for war - until they finally got what they wanted in 1914.
If the Germans would not so belligerent, would some kind of WW1 have happened anyway, at some other point? Maybe - who knows. Perhaps Russia and France would have become paranoid and attacked Germany. Then however, we would be talking about how it was their fault, and not Germany's. Or maybe, Germany would have continued to rise economically, and accordingly, politically, and would have peacefully become the most powerful and dominant European country and a maybe at some point, even world power. Think of China today - rising extremely in wealth and importance, but without fighting huge regional or world wars.
What was different about WWI was the technology and the alliances that brought so many nations into the conflict at once. If not for those 2 factors it would not have been the "Great War", but rather just "another war" in a very long (and incomplete) list of wars between European nations.
I'm sorry, but no. It was catastrophic because everyone fought everyone, not because of the technology. Of course, the technology helped a kill a lot of people, and more efficiently than ever before. However, the fact that a lot of people died also had to do with the fact that there was a lot of people - the population of Europe, and the world, had never been larger in history. Europe had experienced catastrophic wars in which everyone fought everyone twice before - the Napoleonic wars, and the Thirty Years' War. They had less casualties in terms of absolute numbers, but in a relative sense, they were just as catastrophic as WW1. So it was not just "another war", it is comparable only to those two in previous European history.
WW2 is a direct result of the outcome of WW1 and how it was handled. Do you really think a WW2 would have happened without Versailles and what it meant for Germany?
You have to be careful with the qualification "direct result". In a way, yes, it was a direct result. Does that mean WW2 was inevitable just because WW1 happened the way it did? Of course not.
I can just as easily argue that had the Entente allies been harsher on Germany in 1918, had they occuppied it and then rebuilt Germany's political system while purging the political elite of militarists and nationalists (the way they ended up doing in 1945), WW2 would've never happened. Of course, you can also argue it would not have happened if they had been kinder on Germany. Many different paths and outcomes were possible. Nothing was set in stone by Versailles. It's just like WW1 - the Germans wanted war on numerous ocassions since the 1890s, and pulled back each time - until they decided not to in 1914. They could have pulled back then for some reason or another, and then decided to pull the trigger in say, 1916, or 1920...or whatever.
Personally, I think that in 1918, some things should've been harsher on Germany, some kinder. For example, less stringent reparations, and no ban on unification with Austria (given a democratically expressed mandate for unification in both of those German states - to satisfy popular German nationalistic tendencies). On the other hand, the Allies should have insisted on a complete purge of the Prussian military elite - the people who were most responsible for pushing Europe into war (it wasn't the German Socialdemocrats who were the problem...).
In the 1920s and 1930s, there were numerous opportunities to stop Hitler's rise, Germany's rearmament, and prevent WW2 (or, at least, make history turn out differently than it did). There is nothing which makes Versailles = Nazis in power some sort of intractable mathematical identity.
Look, for example, at Italy: it was on the winning side in WW1, yet still the Fascists came to power there, very shortly after the war. Fascism (of which Nazism was a particular strand) was a reaction to the problems of modernity and industrialisation (as was Communism), and many countries without the same history as Germany acquired Fascist/quasi-fascist/right-wing dictatorships without being humiliated at Versailles.
Says who? The victors write the history books. The Germans were only the main culprits because they lost.
Says the overwhelming historical consensus. So say all the historical documents, where you have German generals, politicians, and the Emperor repeteadly pushing for war in the 1890s and 1900s. WWI is essentially a result of German paranoia. They worried that Russia and France would attack them on two fronts, and they wanted to pre-empt that.
I suggest a book by a German historian, Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War, the most authoratative and definitive publication on the topic. Germany, most definitely, is the country most to blame for the outbreak of World War I. Of that, there can be no doubt. The historical record practically speaks for itself.
What Germany did in WWI did not warrant the Treaty of Versailles. What Germany did in WWII did warrant what happened afterwards.
The first sentence is a matter for discussion. Certainly, the Treaty of Versailles appopriately apportioned the blame, whether the punishment was over the top is another question. The second sentence is a classic approach used by revisionists and apologists of Imperial Germany - hide behind acknowledging the horrors of WW2 unconditionally to relativize those of WW1. No, World War I was not some senseless conflict the power "sleepwalked" into. Germany was clearly the bad guy in WW1, as it was in WW2. The fact that they were a lot worse in WW2 doesn't change the fact they were bad in WW1.
Lots of doctors will be replaced. We have a health care professional shortage due to the influence of the AMA. They're responsible for the nature of health education, which is designed to keep the supply of health professionals low in order to keep prices high. However, that only means there's more motivation to come up with automated health systems, so AMA member doctors (under 40% of doctors, mind you) are shooting themselves in the foot hardcore here. The doctor shortage will be solved primarily by arming nurses with expert systems.
First, you're assuming the AMA (and whatever other organizations exist in other countries) will not change their behaviour. They might as well be blackmailed by politicians eager to solve the shortage by importing doctors from abroad to loosen up their rules under the threat of being automated out of their jobs (even if the threat is not necessarily credible).
Second, you're assuming that people will accept being treated by nurses with computers instead of people with "M.D." next to their names...not to mention the question of liability for malpractice. That opens a few more cans of worms.
Third, you are generalizing the situation in one country to the world - while other countries have their AMA equivalents (notably Canada), many European countries do not have such a convoluted system designed for reducing the number of physicians available (accordingly, physicians in those countries don't make millions of dollars per year, on average).
Fourth, you are forgetting the role of regulators such as the FDA...hospitals, even if they wanted to, cannot just rollout AI to treat patients. It will be baby steps, with each baby step being stringently controlled. This will give lots of time to doctors to adapt to working with the machines, rather than being replaced by them.
Both you and the grandparent are making the same mistake: conflating education and intelligence. Most people are sufficiently intelligent to run a small self-sufficient farm. That's pretty much what 95% of the population was doing a few hundred years ago. The difference is that, back then, they were taught the basics of farming from when they were old enough to walk. Now they are taught to read and write instead. Most of those peasant farmers would have been able to do simple office jobs with the same training.
The real problem is the amount of time that the training takes. If you need skills that take 10 years to acquire to move to a new job, then that's not a good short-term solution for you. And it's also not a good long-term solution if that job isn't going to be around in 10 years and you don't know what skills will be required for the ones that will be.
I'm not conflating anything. I'm just saying farming takes a lot of skill, which the average office worker doesn't have - not because of lack of intelligence, but lack of training and experience. So, I agree with you on that count. I was just pointing out that farming is not a low-brainpower activity just because it uses a different skill set from being a middle manager in an office, or something like that. I also wanted to point out that it was easier, in the 20th century, for a former farmer to become a factory worker, than vice-versa. It takes less training to become a factory worker.
As for the other stuff - you are absolutely correct. If you keep having to "reinvent yourself" every 10 years, that is very stressful. Certainly isn't a long-term solution. The thing is, our industrial civilization had, in the 20th century, essentially made low-skilled but high-paying jobs plentiful. One could finish high school (or in some countries, just elementary school), and become a member of the "working middle class" with just an extra year or two of practical education or on-the-job training. People grew to think of this as "normal", when in fact, for most of civilized history, this was not normal at all. Compare that to tradespeople or professionals, who invest a lot of time into education and training, and for the most part then remain in that profession for their entire working life.
It's interesting how, of all the leaders of the world, the French leaders are great at assembling a German Reich and making it their enemy. Napoleon III enabled the Second Reich 1870 by declaring a ridiculous war on Prussia, Clemenceau with his attempt to annihilate German with insane demands after WW1 gave Hitler the ammunition to become Chancellor and create the Third Reich...
France, please stop doing that, ok?
France was reacting out of fear in 1870 trying to prevent German reunification, which Prussia wanted to achieve anyway. Remember, the Austro-Prussian war was four years before that (1866). Bismarck actively sought war with France after that in order to galvanize the southern Germany states (minus Austria) into joining in a union with Prussia. You can say Napoleon III was stupid to fall for it, but let's not paint France as the problem when Prussia was the problem. Prussia was the problem in the start of WW1 as well, since German unification as it happened allowed Prussian militarism to infect all of Germany. It's no wonder that in 1945, the Allies disbanded the state of Prussia. Good riddance. Now I'm no fan of the Hapsburgs, in fact I intensely dislike the f*ckers, but I do think a unified Germany ruled from Vienna would have been vastly preferrable to one ruled from Berlin.
As for the Treaty of Versailles - yes, it was highly punishing, perhaps over the top. However Germany *was* the main culprit in WW1, the main reason for the most destructive war in human history up to that time. So being pissed off at Germany, that was kind of understandable. Actually, by the 1930s, most of the reparations were restructured as to no longer burden the German economy. France, Britain, America et al. had realized they had been too harsh and changed the terms of the peace. Arguably, the problem was being too soft on Germany that is, Hitler, in the mid 1930s. The pendulum swung the other way, and Germany was left alone until it started attacking other countries. France and Britain followed a policy of appeasement instead of striking early, while Hitler was weak, to topple him - for example, when he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, a clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Finally, one can argue that WW2 demonstrates that being even harsher on Germany than after WW1 was actually the way to go. After WW1, Germany lost a bit of territory, had a bunch of limitations and reparations imposed on it, but was then left alone. In WW2, the Allies first intentionally levelled Germany to the ground (did not happen in WW1), then occupied it completely, disbanding all local government above municipality level (again, didn't happen in WW1), pillaged a great deal of what remained of its resources (again, didn't happen after WW1), put its entire political elite on trial and in jail (minus the ones they hanged - didn't happen after WW1), enforced on Germany their own political and historical narrative of the war pervasively (so you didn't get all the bitter revisionism as after WW1), and then rebuilt Germany in their own image from the ground up, making it an occuppied non-sovereign country for 45 years (occupation ended in 1990). Oh, but they didn't charge reparations. Right...
Today we have different jobs but on average they require a bit more brainpower than plowing a field did...
Right. I'd challenge any average office worker of today to go run a farm...not to make money, just to feed themselves. I'd wager they'd starve in a year.
Stop underestimating farming. Running your own farm required more brainpower than working on a factory assembly line. There are many studies which have shown that industrial work actually makes people dull, zombified, and stupid.
In the past, when we've automated low skill jobs, we've pushed people into higher skill jobs in the process. Farmers ended up working in factories. Factory workers ended up working in offices.
You're making a rather false assumption here, thinking that factory jobs are necessarily "higher skill" than farming. No. Especially in the early 20th century, working in a factory was a lower skilled job than farming. That's why any Joe could go to a city and find a job in a factory - they all used cheap unskilled labour en masse. In fact, the assembly line was invented for the exact purpose of using unskilled and low-skilled labour - divide the manufacturing process into a series of relatively simple repetitive tasks, and any idiot could learn to do them very quickly. That was the whole point. Industrialization allowed the use of unskilled or low-skilled workers to produce, en masse, cheaply, things that previously required highly-skilled workers that took years to train and made each product by hand from start to finish in a rather long process (in a word, artisans).
But right now, we're automating the higher skill jobs. And there is a very distinct limit to how highly skilled a large percentage of the workforce can become. We're on the cusp of automating away what a large percentage of office workers do every day. What are they going to do instead? Train to be doctors? Oh, wait, we're throwing machine learning and automation at medicine too, and that's showing a lot of promise.
The reason that so many jobs can be automated (and have been automated) is exactly because we turned them into a series of well-defined repetitive tasks...that's easy for any human to learn, but is also easy to design a machine for. It's therefore no wonder the first place industrial robots took off was the factory assembly line. Many office workers just shuffle paper (or computer files), so they are also automatable. In fact, we already had one huge wave of office worker replacement by machines a few decades ago - when computers became widespread. What one accountant can do today on a computer used to require a full room of people on abacuses and typewriters.
This stuff about AI and ML "showing promise" in medicine - is just you taking it too far. AI/ML will certainly be another diagnostic tool which will help doctors make decisions, but they will not replace them, just like MRI scanners have not replaced them. We just don't know enough about how the human body works to fully automate medicine, and that's not going to change in the near future.
We are fast approaching the time when we're going to be making robots and machine learning ("AI") that do almost anything better than the average human could do it. What do the average humans do then?
This is pure conjecture without any actual evidence to back it up.
When we put all of the agricultural laborers out of a job, what are they going to do instead? What else are you going to train a migrant produce picker to do that can't also be done by a robot?
When we put several million truck, taxi, and bus drivers out of jobs, what are we going to train them to do? Stock shelves in the store? Cut hair? Make coffee?
When most of the accounting jobs go away, what do they do?
We've got no shortage of things for people to do. The problem is that inevitably, robots and machine learning are going to be able to do most of those things better and cheaper.
You are showing a distinct lack of imagination (as are most people). Go back to 1750, and tell people how many millions will be employed in 250 years directly and indirectly, by the various entertainment industries (professional sports, TV, film, etc. etc.) - they would probably laugh at you, and if they manage to take you seriously, would probably say what a hedonistic and amoral society that must be. Yet here we are...doing much better than the folks in 1750, thank you. In 50 t
During this shift away from agricultural labor after World War I, who funded mass retraining of the workforce? That might help us figure out who will retrain the current workforce for the age of automation.
You didn't need a lot of retraining to work on a factory assembly line in the 1920s.
Without Musk, Tesla would not exist. At the beginning, Musk was more hands-off at Tesla - he was running SpaceX, and Tesla was a sort of side investment. That did not really turn out well for Tesla. Then Musk kind of strongarmed himself into being the CEO, and took things over directly. Tesla has done a lot better since. Under previous management, Tesla was struggling to build the Roadster. Now it builds three models, in much greater numbers.
Yeah, Elon Musk is a sociopath. Probably, partially, a psychopath, too. However you sort of have to be to achieve all the things he has done. He has pushed his companies - SpaceX and Tesla - to do things most people generally considered to be impossible. Might they still fail at the end? Sure. Would handing them over to someone else make them wonderfully profitable? I seriously doubt it.
but here's the real issue, do the vast majority of people even want this problem fixed? I do not think they really care.
It's not that people do not care - they do not understand. Ask people a straightforward privacy question, like for example, "would you want a 24 hr live video stream of your bedroom broadcast onto to the internet for everyone to see?" - and most people would recoil at the thought and give you a resounding "Hell no!" as an answer. That's because that's a simple scenario to imagine, and people get it and understand the repercussions instantly.
The type of data gathering Facebook, Google, et al. do and the type of things they do with that data is way too abstract and complicated for people to grasp instantly. It's difficult to understand the possible (and existing) repercussions. In some ways, it is all (still) too subtle - until there is some major scandal (bigger than this political campaign stuff - something like phones snapping randomly pictures of people while on the toiler and posting them to all social networks, I mean, something that shocking and obvious and deeply embarassing to almost everyone), this will remain so.
People understand the way other people affect their privacy - that is why they freak out if they think their phone is listening in on to their conversations, or secretly taking pictures or videos. That's like other people peeping on them, and it also feels like the device is gathering information they didn't allow it to gather. On the other hand, the way computer algorithms affect their privacy, that's too complex and abstract. It's hard to instantly get the consequences of an algorithm mining your photos, mining your social media posts, and crossreferencing that with your movement (since it's tracking your location) to infer information about you - information that you probably did not want to share. People usually think - well, I posted all those pictures on facebook, so who cares if other people see them? I posted some stuff on Twitter, it was meant for other people to see, so what? They don't generally get meta-data, cross-referencing, and inference...because for humans to do that, you need to be a private eye and devote your entire day to making the connections, it's hard work - just to figure out that for one person. To do it human-style, Facebook would need as many employees as it has users (almost). Computers analyze the data much more quickly. People are generally not aware of that.
I totally agree. This is exactly where you see in which situations computers are superior to humans (e.g. achieving a reliable, consistent 90 second headway between fully loaded subway trains at rush hour) and what you need to achieve that (it's not just stuff in the train, but also on the rails, signals, in the stations). The electric train is a solved problem, but a battery-powered one could be useful on less frequently used rail lines where it doesn't make sense to electrify (and here it would displace diesel trains). With self-driving trains (even say, self-driving wagons that could detach and join up with others), it would probably make sense to expand rail for freight...freight is a lot more schedulable and predictable than passenger car traffic, so it would lend itself more easily to automation.
The people who think it takes hard AI to achieve full autonomy in a self driving car vastly overestimate the cognitive abilities of human drivers. The computer does not need a complete and entirely correct model of the environment to be a better driver than a person. People are very easily overwhelmed by complex traffic situations and make tons of mistakes. Roads are designed to enable safe traffic regardless of these cognitive deficiencies. Computers can take advantage of that too.
And people who make claims such as yours tend to forget that roads were designed for humans, not computers, and that some things that humans do very easily are very difficult for computers to do (and of course, vice-versa).
If we had roads which were designed for computers, I am sure computers would very quickly outperform human drivers. The problem is - we don't.
I believe that self-driving efforts are focused on the wrong thing: trying to reproduce a human driver, and claiming it's better if it, on average, messes up less than a human. Instead, it should be focused on trying to create an infrastructure that supports self-driving vehicles. Does that mean they will be able to drive on every imaginable road? Probably not...but likely on 95% of roads (such e.g. all roads and streets in cities), once the roll-out is complete. In this case, it probably will be safer...but if it satisfies a bunch of conditions first.
The other problem that people who claim "humans are not that smart, computers are better than them on average" miss is the variability among humans. No human driver is identical; almost all make mistakes, but the types of mistakes that are made (and the situations which they are made in) can differ widely. However, software flaws are replicated identically across many units...potentially millions of them. Joe in Chicago being a bad driver does not affect Bob in Cleveland. An undetected bug in Tesla's Autopilot will affect all Tesla owners in the world potentially, and probably under the same (or very similar) conditions. You might be in a situation where you have a 100% probability of a screw-up under certain conditions. That is simply not the case with any human driver. Now imagine if say, 20% of the cars on the road are self-driving...what you are potentially setting things up for is a black swan type of event: software-driven cars may be much safer 99% of the time, but could be prone to major screw-ups 1% of the time that will dwarf the combined effects of bad human driving.
Variability among human drivers also allows for evolutionary selection: reckless drivers will typically die, or have their licenses taken away from them. This does not remove all of the bad drivers - but does remove a great deal of them over the long run. How do we do that with self-driving cars? A destruction of one self-driving car with a flaw will not end it, because then likely all other cars of the same model and series have the same flaw. Removing just that particular car won't do it, you'd have to do a recall...now recalls can already get quite bad, imagine all of the recalls we're gonna have with self-driving vehicles (where the authorities are bound to more paranoid)...and it won't all be software problems you can patch, there will be hardware problems too.
I'm not saying these are all insurmountable problems. They can be addressed. I'm just saying there's a lot more to autonomous vehicles than the techno-optimistic "self-driving cars just need to cause less accidents on average than humans" stance. A lot more. It cannot be reduced just to a single metric. Or just a bunch of numeric metrics.
We are a republic. We are not a democracy. Democracies are stupid.
It's kind of the same something, unless you are very restrictive in your definition of "democracy" and/or "republic".
Case in point: official name of Greece in Greek: Elliniki Dimokratia. Offical English translation: Hellenic Republic.
Mind you, none of this "we are a republic not a democracy" nonsense has anything to do with why California and South Dakota have the same number of senators. That's because the US is a federation (more precisely: a federal republic, but there are federations which are not republics, like say, Canada or Australia, where similar principles apply - so it's a feature of federations, not a feature of republics. France is also a republic, but not a federal one). In a federation, the federal units/subjects (states in the US case) typically equal representation in some chamber of the legislature.
What is worse, somewhat more inefficient, or not working at all?
What happens as soon as a bit of road debris is left to accumulate in the tracks, which causes the vehicle contact to become damaged and disfunctional? At least a large inductive coil buried under asphalt would be protected and not require moving parts.
Well, this is a test track, so we will see how it works. Personally, I'm skeptical. That doesn't mean that wireless charging is the answer, though.
Despite all of the brou-ha-ha and countless research into wireless charging, most things that charge (and especially moving things like streetcars, trains, and trolleybuses) do so via physical contact. There are reasons why this is so.
Schools are very safe. A child in America is far more likely to be shot at home. If you have been led to believe otherwise, you should reexamine your news sources.
This is one of those "more people die from slipping in bathtubs than in terrorist attacks" type of arguments.
Mass shooters are not going to go to people's homes, because they want to kill a lot of people at once. Go into a home, maybe you can kill five people at once if they all happen to be there. Hence they target places with lots of people - like schools.
People's homes also generally much less frequented places. The number of people that go in and out daily are usually in the single digits. Meanwhile, a school is a public place with hundreds or thousands of people coming in and out and moving about daily. Much easier for a shooter to slip in there and cause havoc.
Finally, parents have total control over whether their children will be accidentally shot at home. Remove all guns from the home (or have none in the first place), and the probability of the child getting accidentally shot at home by a parent's gun decreases to exactly 0%. Parents have much less control over whether their children will be shot in a public place, like a school.
Schools in America are definitely NOT "very safe". If there is a school shooting like every other week, they are not safe. Period. Sure, some schools, somewhere, can be said to be. However this cannot be generalized to "schools" in general. Similarly. "but it's only 0,01% of schools that have seen shootings" is not an argument. There are comparable countries where the rate is much much lower, or zero. America has a problem with maniacs that shoot up schools. That's a fact. Why, how, I don't know. What's the solution? I don't know. However, it's a problem. A big one. It cannot be waved away by simple and misleading statistics.
If you want to ensure that gig economy workers have the best wages and conditions, make sure that there are a large number of gig economy service providers competing with each other.
I dont think you get how this "gig economy" is meant to work.
The workers... erm... Contractors aren't meant to get the best wages and/or conditions. The system is designed to transfer costs from the employer to the employee... erm... contractor whilst paying them a less than liveable wage in order to ensure the company can make as much money as possible (which also isn't happening).
Exactly.
Historically, post-WWII, in the West, "gig jobs" mostly fell into two broad categories:
1) High-skilled, well-paying jobs for which there was comparatively a lot of work and a limited supply of skilled labour. This includes both plumbers and freelance programmers. People would go the contractor or "gig" route because they could make more money than working as an employee for someone else in the same field of work. Here, the line between "gig" and "small business" (where does one end, and the other begin?) is often blurred.
2) High-skilled (well, not necessarily, or without necessarily an objective measure of what "skill" is) occupations where overall (sometimes pent-up) demand might be high, but where the payoffs are highly asymmetric and distributed. This includes people like musicians, writers, artists, etc. At the same time, the supply of labour is potentially quite large, but the distribution of skill (or "skill") within that labour supply is highly concentrated in a few individuals which are difficult to identify, all mixed in with a large dose of randomness. So things don't lend themselves to a neat employer-employee relationship (at least not for the vast majority of job-seekers in these fields).
What we have now with Uber and the like fits into neither of those two categories. We have, essentially, old-fashioned low-skilled "piece work". It's no different than low-skilled physical workers idling around in city squares in the late 19th century waiting for someone to pick them for a day's (or a few days' if they were lucky) work, to go dig ditches, clean up trash, carry heavy loads, or whatever - then be paid for that day's work at the end, only to find themselves idling in the square again tomorrow. Perhaps for days, or weeks. While this was great for employers of low-skilled labourers, it was crap for the labourers themselves. No wonder unions and all of that came out of that, along with a whole bunch of leftist political ideology.
I'm trying to understand your thought process, because to me they're obviously contractors and I don't understand the counterargument. You're saying that since they can't set their own prices, they're employees? But if they could set their own prices, they would be contractors? Does that mean you think that any employer that lets you negotiate your salary, and pays different employees different amounts, is actually not an employer? I'm not being snarky, I really don't get the opposing view.
I think the parent post you've replied to is confused between Uber's drivers being contractors of the riders vs. being contractors of Uber.
People who rent out their places via AirBnB choose the price. AirBnB takes a cut. Clearly, AirBnB landlords are completely independent in terms of pricing (and a bunch of other terms on how their property is used), and AirBnB is just providing them a service. Now, Uber claimed to be doing the same thing for (essentially) taxi drivers. However, since Uber drivers do not all advertise a price that they choose, and then a rider picks one, but rather, the rider is a customer of Uber, and Uber sets the prices (and often pays drivers more than what the rider has paid Uber in order to build market share), from the riders' perspective, an Uber driver is certainly not a contractor of them. The riders are, legally speaking, Uber's customers, not the drivers' customers. Just like at Wal-Mart, you are Wal-Mart's customer, not cash lady Joanna's customer.
However, that has nothing to do with whether the drivers are contractors or employees of Uber. The line between contractor and employee can be murky, and really depends on the definiton of those terms within a given legal jurisdiction.
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Actually, David Graeber has conceded this very point in his original piece on the topic:
Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: ‘who are you to say what jobs are really “necessary”? What's necessary anyway? You're an anthropology professor, what's the “need” for that?’ (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?
However, on the flip-side, they will all consistently fail in the same way if they have the same bug
You say this like it's a bad thing.
Of course it could be a very bad thing. Assume it's a fatal flaw - you could have a lot of people dying or getting injured in a very short period of time (the time between the bug manifesting itself and being fixed). If the bugs were more random (like a human driver's errors), the bug would only affect a person or two.
The only difference is that the self-driving vehicle can avoid taking the chance by turning it over to me to take the chance. I honestly don't know if it would be better if it kept control and tried it than handing control to me. But, the buck is passed.
Herein lies another important problem which is seldom discussed. "Disengagement" only works as an effective safety backstop if you have an experienced driver at the wheel..
In other words, it only makes sense for the first massively deployed generation of autonomous vehicles, where you can be sure that almost everyone behind the wheel has already spent years driving on their own. However, once you have a generation of people growing up used to being driven around rather than driving, and being driven by the autonomous cars 95% of the time, they will all be bad, inexperienced drivers...and forcing them to take control in situations where a computer doesn't know what to do will probably make things worse. So, beyond the first wave of massively deployed self-driving cars, the car has to be able to handle 100% of the situations or it ain't good for nothing at all. That's why I like the designs without a steering wheel: you either make it all work without a driver in all situations or you don't make it work at all.
I don't think self-driving cars will be perfect, but I think they'll be a lot more consistent and always keep reasonable safety margins.
Probably. However, on the flip-side, they will all consistently fail in the same way if they have the same bug (and bug-free software is impossible), unlike humans, whose errors are a lot more randomized. Sure, not all cars will run the same software, but the market in any given country is bound to be dominated by a single-digit number of manufacturers, compared to millions of human drivers (or a lot more). From a systemic perspective, human variation and imperfection is not a bug, it's a feature.
The other problem here is that with the in-vogue neural network based AI, finding flaws and bugs is even more difficult...since it is very difficult to understand why a complex neural network has "decided" to do something. With standard, "non-AI" software code, you can always follow the logic of the programmer (even if it takes a long while to figure it out).
Seldom (if ever) is there the rather obvious suggestion to limit autonomous vehicles to simple point to point 'highway' trips; but that's exactly where and how it should be done for the foreseeable future, if it happens at all. That is, the (literally) lethal mistake is to introduce autonomous vehicles into the complex and chaotic world of city driving.
Absolutely, self-driving cars should at first be limited only to freeways...not only for the very important reasons you mention, but also because freeways open up an easy (and relatively low-cost) avenue for installing autonomous-vehicle-specific infrastructure along them, which would make them much safer.
However, the companies most pushing autonomous vehicle development don't want to do that, and it's clear why. Use on freeways only would just effectively make autonomous driving a fancier version of cruise control. Sure, some people would pay for it, especially those that take long intercity trips; but it wouldn't be a killer application that would make everyone want to go out and a buy a new car. A car that drives you around everywhere by itself and is basically a personal taxi service (you don't have to worry where it's parked, etc.) might be such a killer app.
Furthermore, autonomous cars that don't drive in the cities are not going to help Uber and Lyft eliminate their human drivers, delivery companies and the like eliminate their human drivers, allow Waymo to launch a driverless taxi service, and allow the car companies to keeping making a steady stream of revenue in a world where car ownership and usage rates may steeply decline due to various factors.
Add a failing test, add code to fix failing test, deploy to all vehicles - fixed. Humans rearly learn in that fashion.
Indeed, humans rarely learn in that fashion...and that's you know, an advantage. Humans operate in a highly non-linear and unpredictable environment, and they developed, after millions of years of evolution, ways to deal with that. One way is a large variety among humans, so that they do not all have the same flaw (nor the same "fix"). It's really hubris to think that software, with its 60 or so years of development, could more robustly handle the world than humans, in situations that humans have evolved for (while humans have not been driving for millions of years, driving is very similar to age-old human activities, like, you know, just running and wandering about).
Humans are unlikely to improve at driving.
Which human drivers, though?
Looking at road death statistics would seem to suggest that German drivers are a lot better than American drivers, while for instance Russian drivers are a lot worse. Now it's not all due to quality of driving (but also quality of roads, law enforcement, car safety standards, etc.) and the quality of driving itself is impacted by many factors, but we can safely say for instance that drunk driving is a huge problem in Russia that contributes a lot to their death rate being higher than America's, while the far more stringent process of driver training and driver certification in Germany contributes a lot to their death rate being lower.
The companies developing self-driving cars, being either American or doing most of their testing in America, seem to take American drivers as the baseline. However, looking around the world one can conclude that American drivers could indeed improve quite a bit. Not to mention that historically, drivers have improved...most places in North America, any moron can easily get a driver's license. Even that's an improvement based on the situation several decades ago, surely it can be improved still.
You are one of those people that sets a zero point for history arbitrarily and then references everything to that as if nothing before that ever happened.
And you're one of those people in the hand-waving school of history: things just happen, you know, wars and stuff, always has been the case. Well, yes, wars have always happened, but each war has a very definitive set of causes. Sometimes they are many, sometimes they are complex and difficult to identify, but they are there. Germany is the main culprit for World War I, that is a simple undeniable historical fact.
These same documents of course also show that during this time the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, etc. were all pacifist nations. Clearly, only German leaders looked favorably on conquest as a means to an end. No one had ever heard the word "Empire" until the Germans came up with it. Expanding your power and territory through military conquest? The British and French would never do such a thing! It's inconceivable!
Please. Germany was following the example set by every European power since... well, since there were European powers.
No one ever said the others were pacifists. Likewise, what Germany did - instigating a continental war it, in the final few weeks before it pulled the trigger and decided to go all in, knew it would be catastrophic, is a relatively rare occurrance. European powers went to war all the time, but very rarely to all-out catastrophic continental wars where almost everyone fought everyone. That has happened about 4 times in European history, and twice it was Germany's fault. Not a stellar record.
The Germans were paranoid of France and Russia. They wanted to defeat them while they still felt they could. Furthermore, the German generals were paranoid about their own populace - with increasing liberalization of German society, they feared that at some point a government of social democrats and liberals would not be willing to fight their imperial wars. So they pushed and pushed and pushed for war - until they finally got what they wanted in 1914.
If the Germans would not so belligerent, would some kind of WW1 have happened anyway, at some other point? Maybe - who knows. Perhaps Russia and France would have become paranoid and attacked Germany. Then however, we would be talking about how it was their fault, and not Germany's. Or maybe, Germany would have continued to rise economically, and accordingly, politically, and would have peacefully become the most powerful and dominant European country and a maybe at some point, even world power. Think of China today - rising extremely in wealth and importance, but without fighting huge regional or world wars.
What was different about WWI was the technology and the alliances that brought so many nations into the conflict at once. If not for those 2 factors it would not have been the "Great War", but rather just "another war" in a very long (and incomplete) list of wars between European nations.
I'm sorry, but no. It was catastrophic because everyone fought everyone, not because of the technology. Of course, the technology helped a kill a lot of people, and more efficiently than ever before. However, the fact that a lot of people died also had to do with the fact that there was a lot of people - the population of Europe, and the world, had never been larger in history. Europe had experienced catastrophic wars in which everyone fought everyone twice before - the Napoleonic wars, and the Thirty Years' War. They had less casualties in terms of absolute numbers, but in a relative sense, they were just as catastrophic as WW1. So it was not just "another war", it is comparable only to those two in previous European history.
WW2 is a direct result of the outcome of WW1 and how it was handled. Do you really think a WW2 would have happened without Versailles and what it meant for Germany?
You have to be careful with the qualification "direct result". In a way, yes, it was a direct result. Does that mean WW2 was inevitable just because WW1 happened the way it did? Of course not.
I can just as easily argue that had the Entente allies been harsher on Germany in 1918, had they occuppied it and then rebuilt Germany's political system while purging the political elite of militarists and nationalists (the way they ended up doing in 1945), WW2 would've never happened. Of course, you can also argue it would not have happened if they had been kinder on Germany. Many different paths and outcomes were possible. Nothing was set in stone by Versailles. It's just like WW1 - the Germans wanted war on numerous ocassions since the 1890s, and pulled back each time - until they decided not to in 1914. They could have pulled back then for some reason or another, and then decided to pull the trigger in say, 1916, or 1920...or whatever.
Personally, I think that in 1918, some things should've been harsher on Germany, some kinder. For example, less stringent reparations, and no ban on unification with Austria (given a democratically expressed mandate for unification in both of those German states - to satisfy popular German nationalistic tendencies). On the other hand, the Allies should have insisted on a complete purge of the Prussian military elite - the people who were most responsible for pushing Europe into war (it wasn't the German Socialdemocrats who were the problem...).
In the 1920s and 1930s, there were numerous opportunities to stop Hitler's rise, Germany's rearmament, and prevent WW2 (or, at least, make history turn out differently than it did). There is nothing which makes Versailles = Nazis in power some sort of intractable mathematical identity.
Look, for example, at Italy: it was on the winning side in WW1, yet still the Fascists came to power there, very shortly after the war. Fascism (of which Nazism was a particular strand) was a reaction to the problems of modernity and industrialisation (as was Communism), and many countries without the same history as Germany acquired Fascist/quasi-fascist/right-wing dictatorships without being humiliated at Versailles.
Says who? The victors write the history books. The Germans were only the main culprits because they lost.
Says the overwhelming historical consensus. So say all the historical documents, where you have German generals, politicians, and the Emperor repeteadly pushing for war in the 1890s and 1900s. WWI is essentially a result of German paranoia. They worried that Russia and France would attack them on two fronts, and they wanted to pre-empt that.
I suggest a book by a German historian, Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War, the most authoratative and definitive publication on the topic. Germany, most definitely, is the country most to blame for the outbreak of World War I. Of that, there can be no doubt. The historical record practically speaks for itself.
What Germany did in WWI did not warrant the Treaty of Versailles. What Germany did in WWII did warrant what happened afterwards.
The first sentence is a matter for discussion. Certainly, the Treaty of Versailles appopriately apportioned the blame, whether the punishment was over the top is another question. The second sentence is a classic approach used by revisionists and apologists of Imperial Germany - hide behind acknowledging the horrors of WW2 unconditionally to relativize those of WW1. No, World War I was not some senseless conflict the power "sleepwalked" into. Germany was clearly the bad guy in WW1, as it was in WW2. The fact that they were a lot worse in WW2 doesn't change the fact they were bad in WW1.
Lots of doctors will be replaced. We have a health care professional shortage due to the influence of the AMA. They're responsible for the nature of health education, which is designed to keep the supply of health professionals low in order to keep prices high. However, that only means there's more motivation to come up with automated health systems, so AMA member doctors (under 40% of doctors, mind you) are shooting themselves in the foot hardcore here. The doctor shortage will be solved primarily by arming nurses with expert systems.
First, you're assuming the AMA (and whatever other organizations exist in other countries) will not change their behaviour. They might as well be blackmailed by politicians eager to solve the shortage by importing doctors from abroad to loosen up their rules under the threat of being automated out of their jobs (even if the threat is not necessarily credible).
Second, you're assuming that people will accept being treated by nurses with computers instead of people with "M.D." next to their names...not to mention the question of liability for malpractice. That opens a few more cans of worms.
Third, you are generalizing the situation in one country to the world - while other countries have their AMA equivalents (notably Canada), many European countries do not have such a convoluted system designed for reducing the number of physicians available (accordingly, physicians in those countries don't make millions of dollars per year, on average).
Fourth, you are forgetting the role of regulators such as the FDA...hospitals, even if they wanted to, cannot just rollout AI to treat patients. It will be baby steps, with each baby step being stringently controlled. This will give lots of time to doctors to adapt to working with the machines, rather than being replaced by them.
Both you and the grandparent are making the same mistake: conflating education and intelligence. Most people are sufficiently intelligent to run a small self-sufficient farm. That's pretty much what 95% of the population was doing a few hundred years ago. The difference is that, back then, they were taught the basics of farming from when they were old enough to walk. Now they are taught to read and write instead. Most of those peasant farmers would have been able to do simple office jobs with the same training.
The real problem is the amount of time that the training takes. If you need skills that take 10 years to acquire to move to a new job, then that's not a good short-term solution for you. And it's also not a good long-term solution if that job isn't going to be around in 10 years and you don't know what skills will be required for the ones that will be.
I'm not conflating anything. I'm just saying farming takes a lot of skill, which the average office worker doesn't have - not because of lack of intelligence, but lack of training and experience. So, I agree with you on that count. I was just pointing out that farming is not a low-brainpower activity just because it uses a different skill set from being a middle manager in an office, or something like that. I also wanted to point out that it was easier, in the 20th century, for a former farmer to become a factory worker, than vice-versa. It takes less training to become a factory worker.
As for the other stuff - you are absolutely correct. If you keep having to "reinvent yourself" every 10 years, that is very stressful. Certainly isn't a long-term solution. The thing is, our industrial civilization had, in the 20th century, essentially made low-skilled but high-paying jobs plentiful. One could finish high school (or in some countries, just elementary school), and become a member of the "working middle class" with just an extra year or two of practical education or on-the-job training. People grew to think of this as "normal", when in fact, for most of civilized history, this was not normal at all. Compare that to tradespeople or professionals, who invest a lot of time into education and training, and for the most part then remain in that profession for their entire working life.
It's interesting how, of all the leaders of the world, the French leaders are great at assembling a German Reich and making it their enemy. Napoleon III enabled the Second Reich 1870 by declaring a ridiculous war on Prussia, Clemenceau with his attempt to annihilate German with insane demands after WW1 gave Hitler the ammunition to become Chancellor and create the Third Reich...
France, please stop doing that, ok?
France was reacting out of fear in 1870 trying to prevent German reunification, which Prussia wanted to achieve anyway. Remember, the Austro-Prussian war was four years before that (1866). Bismarck actively sought war with France after that in order to galvanize the southern Germany states (minus Austria) into joining in a union with Prussia. You can say Napoleon III was stupid to fall for it, but let's not paint France as the problem when Prussia was the problem. Prussia was the problem in the start of WW1 as well, since German unification as it happened allowed Prussian militarism to infect all of Germany. It's no wonder that in 1945, the Allies disbanded the state of Prussia. Good riddance. Now I'm no fan of the Hapsburgs, in fact I intensely dislike the f*ckers, but I do think a unified Germany ruled from Vienna would have been vastly preferrable to one ruled from Berlin.
As for the Treaty of Versailles - yes, it was highly punishing, perhaps over the top. However Germany *was* the main culprit in WW1, the main reason for the most destructive war in human history up to that time. So being pissed off at Germany, that was kind of understandable. Actually, by the 1930s, most of the reparations were restructured as to no longer burden the German economy. France, Britain, America et al. had realized they had been too harsh and changed the terms of the peace. Arguably, the problem was being too soft on Germany that is, Hitler, in the mid 1930s. The pendulum swung the other way, and Germany was left alone until it started attacking other countries. France and Britain followed a policy of appeasement instead of striking early, while Hitler was weak, to topple him - for example, when he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, a clear violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Finally, one can argue that WW2 demonstrates that being even harsher on Germany than after WW1 was actually the way to go. After WW1, Germany lost a bit of territory, had a bunch of limitations and reparations imposed on it, but was then left alone. In WW2, the Allies first intentionally levelled Germany to the ground (did not happen in WW1), then occupied it completely, disbanding all local government above municipality level (again, didn't happen in WW1), pillaged a great deal of what remained of its resources (again, didn't happen after WW1), put its entire political elite on trial and in jail (minus the ones they hanged - didn't happen after WW1), enforced on Germany their own political and historical narrative of the war pervasively (so you didn't get all the bitter revisionism as after WW1), and then rebuilt Germany in their own image from the ground up, making it an occuppied non-sovereign country for 45 years (occupation ended in 1990). Oh, but they didn't charge reparations. Right...
Today we have different jobs but on average they require a bit more brainpower than plowing a field did...
Right. I'd challenge any average office worker of today to go run a farm...not to make money, just to feed themselves. I'd wager they'd starve in a year.
Stop underestimating farming. Running your own farm required more brainpower than working on a factory assembly line. There are many studies which have shown that industrial work actually makes people dull, zombified, and stupid.
In the past, when we've automated low skill jobs, we've pushed people into higher skill jobs in the process. Farmers ended up working in factories. Factory workers ended up working in offices.
You're making a rather false assumption here, thinking that factory jobs are necessarily "higher skill" than farming. No. Especially in the early 20th century, working in a factory was a lower skilled job than farming. That's why any Joe could go to a city and find a job in a factory - they all used cheap unskilled labour en masse. In fact, the assembly line was invented for the exact purpose of using unskilled and low-skilled labour - divide the manufacturing process into a series of relatively simple repetitive tasks, and any idiot could learn to do them very quickly. That was the whole point. Industrialization allowed the use of unskilled or low-skilled workers to produce, en masse, cheaply, things that previously required highly-skilled workers that took years to train and made each product by hand from start to finish in a rather long process (in a word, artisans).
But right now, we're automating the higher skill jobs. And there is a very distinct limit to how highly skilled a large percentage of the workforce can become. We're on the cusp of automating away what a large percentage of office workers do every day. What are they going to do instead? Train to be doctors? Oh, wait, we're throwing machine learning and automation at medicine too, and that's showing a lot of promise.
The reason that so many jobs can be automated (and have been automated) is exactly because we turned them into a series of well-defined repetitive tasks...that's easy for any human to learn, but is also easy to design a machine for. It's therefore no wonder the first place industrial robots took off was the factory assembly line. Many office workers just shuffle paper (or computer files), so they are also automatable. In fact, we already had one huge wave of office worker replacement by machines a few decades ago - when computers became widespread. What one accountant can do today on a computer used to require a full room of people on abacuses and typewriters.
This stuff about AI and ML "showing promise" in medicine - is just you taking it too far. AI/ML will certainly be another diagnostic tool which will help doctors make decisions, but they will not replace them, just like MRI scanners have not replaced them. We just don't know enough about how the human body works to fully automate medicine, and that's not going to change in the near future.
We are fast approaching the time when we're going to be making robots and machine learning ("AI") that do almost anything better than the average human could do it. What do the average humans do then?
This is pure conjecture without any actual evidence to back it up.
When we put all of the agricultural laborers out of a job, what are they going to do instead? What else are you going to train a migrant produce picker to do that can't also be done by a robot?
When we put several million truck, taxi, and bus drivers out of jobs, what are we going to train them to do? Stock shelves in the store? Cut hair? Make coffee?
When most of the accounting jobs go away, what do they do?
We've got no shortage of things for people to do. The problem is that inevitably, robots and machine learning are going to be able to do most of those things better and cheaper.
You are showing a distinct lack of imagination (as are most people). Go back to 1750, and tell people how many millions will be employed in 250 years directly and indirectly, by the various entertainment industries (professional sports, TV, film, etc. etc.) - they would probably laugh at you, and if they manage to take you seriously, would probably say what a hedonistic and amoral society that must be. Yet here we are...doing much better than the folks in 1750, thank you. In 50 t
During this shift away from agricultural labor after World War I, who funded mass retraining of the workforce? That might help us figure out who will retrain the current workforce for the age of automation.
You didn't need a lot of retraining to work on a factory assembly line in the 1920s.
The problem with Tesla is Elon Musk.
That's a rather silly statement.
Without Musk, Tesla would not exist. At the beginning, Musk was more hands-off at Tesla - he was running SpaceX, and Tesla was a sort of side investment. That did not really turn out well for Tesla. Then Musk kind of strongarmed himself into being the CEO, and took things over directly. Tesla has done a lot better since. Under previous management, Tesla was struggling to build the Roadster. Now it builds three models, in much greater numbers.
Yeah, Elon Musk is a sociopath. Probably, partially, a psychopath, too. However you sort of have to be to achieve all the things he has done. He has pushed his companies - SpaceX and Tesla - to do things most people generally considered to be impossible. Might they still fail at the end? Sure. Would handing them over to someone else make them wonderfully profitable? I seriously doubt it.
but here's the real issue, do the vast majority of people even want this problem fixed? I do not think they really care.
It's not that people do not care - they do not understand. Ask people a straightforward privacy question, like for example, "would you want a 24 hr live video stream of your bedroom broadcast onto to the internet for everyone to see?" - and most people would recoil at the thought and give you a resounding "Hell no!" as an answer. That's because that's a simple scenario to imagine, and people get it and understand the repercussions instantly.
The type of data gathering Facebook, Google, et al. do and the type of things they do with that data is way too abstract and complicated for people to grasp instantly. It's difficult to understand the possible (and existing) repercussions. In some ways, it is all (still) too subtle - until there is some major scandal (bigger than this political campaign stuff - something like phones snapping randomly pictures of people while on the toiler and posting them to all social networks, I mean, something that shocking and obvious and deeply embarassing to almost everyone), this will remain so.
People understand the way other people affect their privacy - that is why they freak out if they think their phone is listening in on to their conversations, or secretly taking pictures or videos. That's like other people peeping on them, and it also feels like the device is gathering information they didn't allow it to gather. On the other hand, the way computer algorithms affect their privacy, that's too complex and abstract. It's hard to instantly get the consequences of an algorithm mining your photos, mining your social media posts, and crossreferencing that with your movement (since it's tracking your location) to infer information about you - information that you probably did not want to share. People usually think - well, I posted all those pictures on facebook, so who cares if other people see them? I posted some stuff on Twitter, it was meant for other people to see, so what? They don't generally get meta-data, cross-referencing, and inference...because for humans to do that, you need to be a private eye and devote your entire day to making the connections, it's hard work - just to figure out that for one person. To do it human-style, Facebook would need as many employees as it has users (almost). Computers analyze the data much more quickly. People are generally not aware of that.
I totally agree. This is exactly where you see in which situations computers are superior to humans (e.g. achieving a reliable, consistent 90 second headway between fully loaded subway trains at rush hour) and what you need to achieve that (it's not just stuff in the train, but also on the rails, signals, in the stations). The electric train is a solved problem, but a battery-powered one could be useful on less frequently used rail lines where it doesn't make sense to electrify (and here it would displace diesel trains). With self-driving trains (even say, self-driving wagons that could detach and join up with others), it would probably make sense to expand rail for freight...freight is a lot more schedulable and predictable than passenger car traffic, so it would lend itself more easily to automation.
The people who think it takes hard AI to achieve full autonomy in a self driving car vastly overestimate the cognitive abilities of human drivers. The computer does not need a complete and entirely correct model of the environment to be a better driver than a person. People are very easily overwhelmed by complex traffic situations and make tons of mistakes. Roads are designed to enable safe traffic regardless of these cognitive deficiencies. Computers can take advantage of that too.
And people who make claims such as yours tend to forget that roads were designed for humans, not computers, and that some things that humans do very easily are very difficult for computers to do (and of course, vice-versa).
If we had roads which were designed for computers, I am sure computers would very quickly outperform human drivers. The problem is - we don't.
I believe that self-driving efforts are focused on the wrong thing: trying to reproduce a human driver, and claiming it's better if it, on average, messes up less than a human. Instead, it should be focused on trying to create an infrastructure that supports self-driving vehicles. Does that mean they will be able to drive on every imaginable road? Probably not...but likely on 95% of roads (such e.g. all roads and streets in cities), once the roll-out is complete. In this case, it probably will be safer...but if it satisfies a bunch of conditions first.
The other problem that people who claim "humans are not that smart, computers are better than them on average" miss is the variability among humans. No human driver is identical; almost all make mistakes, but the types of mistakes that are made (and the situations which they are made in) can differ widely. However, software flaws are replicated identically across many units...potentially millions of them. Joe in Chicago being a bad driver does not affect Bob in Cleveland. An undetected bug in Tesla's Autopilot will affect all Tesla owners in the world potentially, and probably under the same (or very similar) conditions. You might be in a situation where you have a 100% probability of a screw-up under certain conditions. That is simply not the case with any human driver. Now imagine if say, 20% of the cars on the road are self-driving...what you are potentially setting things up for is a black swan type of event: software-driven cars may be much safer 99% of the time, but could be prone to major screw-ups 1% of the time that will dwarf the combined effects of bad human driving.
Variability among human drivers also allows for evolutionary selection: reckless drivers will typically die, or have their licenses taken away from them. This does not remove all of the bad drivers - but does remove a great deal of them over the long run. How do we do that with self-driving cars? A destruction of one self-driving car with a flaw will not end it, because then likely all other cars of the same model and series have the same flaw. Removing just that particular car won't do it, you'd have to do a recall...now recalls can already get quite bad, imagine all of the recalls we're gonna have with self-driving vehicles (where the authorities are bound to more paranoid)...and it won't all be software problems you can patch, there will be hardware problems too.
I'm not saying these are all insurmountable problems. They can be addressed. I'm just saying there's a lot more to autonomous vehicles than the techno-optimistic "self-driving cars just need to cause less accidents on average than humans" stance. A lot more. It cannot be reduced just to a single metric. Or just a bunch of numeric metrics.
We are a republic. We are not a democracy. Democracies are stupid.
It's kind of the same something, unless you are very restrictive in your definition of "democracy" and/or "republic".
Case in point: official name of Greece in Greek: Elliniki Dimokratia. Offical English translation: Hellenic Republic.
Mind you, none of this "we are a republic not a democracy" nonsense has anything to do with why California and South Dakota have the same number of senators. That's because the US is a federation (more precisely: a federal republic, but there are federations which are not republics, like say, Canada or Australia, where similar principles apply - so it's a feature of federations, not a feature of republics. France is also a republic, but not a federal one). In a federation, the federal units/subjects (states in the US case) typically equal representation in some chamber of the legislature.
What is worse, somewhat more inefficient, or not working at all?
What happens as soon as a bit of road debris is left to accumulate in the tracks, which causes the vehicle contact to become damaged and disfunctional? At least a large inductive coil buried under asphalt would be protected and not require moving parts.
Well, this is a test track, so we will see how it works. Personally, I'm skeptical. That doesn't mean that wireless charging is the answer, though.
Despite all of the brou-ha-ha and countless research into wireless charging, most things that charge (and especially moving things like streetcars, trains, and trolleybuses) do so via physical contact. There are reasons why this is so.
a high chance of being shot to death?
Schools are very safe. A child in America is far more likely to be shot at home. If you have been led to believe otherwise, you should reexamine your news sources.
This is one of those "more people die from slipping in bathtubs than in terrorist attacks" type of arguments.
Mass shooters are not going to go to people's homes, because they want to kill a lot of people at once. Go into a home, maybe you can kill five people at once if they all happen to be there. Hence they target places with lots of people - like schools.
People's homes also generally much less frequented places. The number of people that go in and out daily are usually in the single digits. Meanwhile, a school is a public place with hundreds or thousands of people coming in and out and moving about daily. Much easier for a shooter to slip in there and cause havoc.
Finally, parents have total control over whether their children will be accidentally shot at home. Remove all guns from the home (or have none in the first place), and the probability of the child getting accidentally shot at home by a parent's gun decreases to exactly 0%. Parents have much less control over whether their children will be shot in a public place, like a school.
Schools in America are definitely NOT "very safe". If there is a school shooting like every other week, they are not safe. Period. Sure, some schools, somewhere, can be said to be. However this cannot be generalized to "schools" in general. Similarly. "but it's only 0,01% of schools that have seen shootings" is not an argument. There are comparable countries where the rate is much much lower, or zero. America has a problem with maniacs that shoot up schools. That's a fact. Why, how, I don't know. What's the solution? I don't know. However, it's a problem. A big one. It cannot be waved away by simple and misleading statistics.
If you want to ensure that gig economy workers have the best wages and conditions, make sure that there are a large number of gig economy service providers competing with each other.
I dont think you get how this "gig economy" is meant to work. The workers... erm... Contractors aren't meant to get the best wages and/or conditions. The system is designed to transfer costs from the employer to the employee... erm... contractor whilst paying them a less than liveable wage in order to ensure the company can make as much money as possible (which also isn't happening).
Exactly.
Historically, post-WWII, in the West, "gig jobs" mostly fell into two broad categories:
1) High-skilled, well-paying jobs for which there was comparatively a lot of work and a limited supply of skilled labour. This includes both plumbers and freelance programmers. People would go the contractor or "gig" route because they could make more money than working as an employee for someone else in the same field of work. Here, the line between "gig" and "small business" (where does one end, and the other begin?) is often blurred.
2) High-skilled (well, not necessarily, or without necessarily an objective measure of what "skill" is) occupations where overall (sometimes pent-up) demand might be high, but where the payoffs are highly asymmetric and distributed. This includes people like musicians, writers, artists, etc. At the same time, the supply of labour is potentially quite large, but the distribution of skill (or "skill") within that labour supply is highly concentrated in a few individuals which are difficult to identify, all mixed in with a large dose of randomness. So things don't lend themselves to a neat employer-employee relationship (at least not for the vast majority of job-seekers in these fields).
What we have now with Uber and the like fits into neither of those two categories. We have, essentially, old-fashioned low-skilled "piece work". It's no different than low-skilled physical workers idling around in city squares in the late 19th century waiting for someone to pick them for a day's (or a few days' if they were lucky) work, to go dig ditches, clean up trash, carry heavy loads, or whatever - then be paid for that day's work at the end, only to find themselves idling in the square again tomorrow. Perhaps for days, or weeks. While this was great for employers of low-skilled labourers, it was crap for the labourers themselves. No wonder unions and all of that came out of that, along with a whole bunch of leftist political ideology.
I'm trying to understand your thought process, because to me they're obviously contractors and I don't understand the counterargument. You're saying that since they can't set their own prices, they're employees? But if they could set their own prices, they would be contractors? Does that mean you think that any employer that lets you negotiate your salary, and pays different employees different amounts, is actually not an employer? I'm not being snarky, I really don't get the opposing view.
I think the parent post you've replied to is confused between Uber's drivers being contractors of the riders vs. being contractors of Uber.
People who rent out their places via AirBnB choose the price. AirBnB takes a cut. Clearly, AirBnB landlords are completely independent in terms of pricing (and a bunch of other terms on how their property is used), and AirBnB is just providing them a service. Now, Uber claimed to be doing the same thing for (essentially) taxi drivers. However, since Uber drivers do not all advertise a price that they choose, and then a rider picks one, but rather, the rider is a customer of Uber, and Uber sets the prices (and often pays drivers more than what the rider has paid Uber in order to build market share), from the riders' perspective, an Uber driver is certainly not a contractor of them. The riders are, legally speaking, Uber's customers, not the drivers' customers. Just like at Wal-Mart, you are Wal-Mart's customer, not cash lady Joanna's customer.
However, that has nothing to do with whether the drivers are contractors or employees of Uber. The line between contractor and employee can be murky, and really depends on the definiton of those terms within a given legal jurisdiction.