Re:E-democracy *should mean* direct voting
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A representative democracy is still a democracy. Just not a direct/pure one. I don't think those of us who favor e-voting and firing the representatives for decision making are in favor of a democracy without the protection of individual rights that the constitution and bill of rights are supposed to provide.
From my POV there is no good system for making these decisions. Everyone has their own views of what the government should be doing. Majority rule is no worse or better than any other method. I do agree that, as a rule, whatever the majority believes is usually wrong. The whole "lowest common denominator" rule.
The wolves should not be able to vote away the rights of the sheep. Unfortunately, the men who founded the US devised a flawed system which, despite their best efforts, was vulnerable to the very snowballing growth they so feared. Supreme court judges, and the members of the senate and congress are all very imperfect and are products of the culture they grow up in. If a belief is popular, they will probably believe it too, and this group has the power to take away the rights of the sheep. They can "amend" the very constitution that was supposed keep the wolves in check.
Well said. Robots simply increase the available labor pool, thus putting a downward pressure on wages in the same way that open immigration or additional births might. It is merely a way of increasing the supply of labor. The only difference is that it's slave labor with most of the costs being up front. They are employees that you can literally buy. Although if something goes wrong (medical care) you have to fix them.
AFAIK, those bipedal Honda robots are available for less than $30k at the moment, which is not much more than a year's gross wage for an unskilled worker at first world wages. The more useful and practical these robots become the more the demand will increase, driving prices up. Of course, higher price would mean more production, bringing prices back down.
An economic analysis of adding slavery to an economy should produce enlightening results I think. While the initial purchase price will probably be much more than human slaves, the maintenance costs of the robots would probably be much less.
Now that everything costs twice as much, the person getting by on $10000 a year now has $35000, which amounts to $17,500 in pre-inflation dollars. In short, he just got a pay raise.
Huh? The reality of inflation from an employee standpoint is that each week his paycheck will buy him less and less in terms of goods. Are you assuming that the employee has negotiated a wage that takes hyper-inflation into account and rises by a certain percent each week? You do seem to be implying this in your example of a 10k wage increasing to 35k.
The problem is that that 35k will now only buy him the same value of goods that the 10k would have previously. So, although due to his smart inflation-compensating wage negotiotion, he was not hurt by inflation, he was not helped by it either. Of course, this assumes that he spends his entire wage each week and does not save any.
Meanwhile, the family which once earned $1,000,000 a year suddenly finds everything twice as expensive, lowering their effective income to $500,000.
Anyone earning a million a year (at current monetary values at least) is likely to realize the stupidity of holding on to cash. Hyper-inflation really does promote "hot-potato" money management. As soon as you get some, you need to spend it on goods. The millionaire you cite would probably be investing that money in a commodity like precious metals/minerals or in capital investments and would thus still have most of that million by the end of the year, but in goods not in paper funny money that pretty soon no one would be using anyway.
A minimum wage is only effective when it is higher than the lowest market price for labor, and when it is higher it creates a privileged worker class and a less skilled but completely unemployable class. When someone raises the price of a good, I will buy less of that good if I can (when it's "elastic").
Some jobs may be absolutely necessary to run the business. Others may be optional. I will buy more CDs at $10 than I will at $20. I will tend to hire more workers at a lower price than a higher one.
When a minimum wage is only slightly higher than the market wage (as tends to be true in the US), it only causes relatively minor unemployment and probably only slightly increases off the books employment. The higher it rises, the more these effects increase. At $20/hour, the effect would be dramatic and interesting.
None of this denies what you have said in any way of course. Just thought I should mention it.
Well, you have a point. A truly general purpose robot could build more of the same, given sufficient physical and mental abilities. It is certainly conceivable that we could create a robot with the physical capabilities of a human, since we already have bipedal robots with pretty good balance. Creating ones with enough dexterity and coordination will take longer of course. Once we have physically created the equal of a human laborer, the issue is just one of knowledge and intelligence.
Creating one with truly general purpose programming would be difficult. I mean, would the same robot that you use to build a house be used to solder circuit boards or assemble engine parts? Each task requires a different knowledge domain. There are no existing humans that have in depth knowledge of everything.
The first step would probably be a robot which would accept downloadable information (like those GPS maps) to upgrade its knowledge base. Until true AI, those millions of knowledge domains would have to be created, updated, corrected etc by humans. Sort of like a machine readable encyclopedia Brittanica except far, far more detailed. I guess the human race would mostly be devoted to teaching robots.
A robot that lifts heavy girders or pushes boulders on a construction site would need to be much heavier (regardless of the material) and use more energy than a robot working at Walmart or pumping gas (or hydrogen for fusion reactors). To build identical robots for both tasks would presumably be a waste of resources.
Of course a general purpose robot built like a human could use machines to lift very heavy things, but a specialized "strong, heavy" robot would certainly be more useful in rough work domains, and a smaller, lighter robot might be more useful in others (like customer service jobs). So maybe there would be two different general purpose models, a lighter, more dexterious, people oriented robot (like a female?) and a heavier, stronger robot, more oriented toward rough work.
That's right. And notice which side of the truth they err on. I guess our human arrogance has no bounds. Of course, we all like to imagine that exciting, major, earth-shattering changes will take place within our own lifetimes. I mean, who likes to predict what's going to happen 50 years after you're dead?
What if 100 years from now everything looks pretty much the same as it does now? Maybe our cars will be 30% more fuel efficient. Maybe we'll have have better safety features in them. But maybe, just maybe, they won't fly or run on fusion power cells or take us to a non-existent city on the moon.
Frankly, the world of 40 years ago doesn't seem so different from this one. I guess it depends on how much you think computers and the internet have changed the world. Many people don't own a computer or use the internet and their lives are just fine.
Of course, the world of 100 years ago was quite different. No cars, planes, space vehicles, or internal combustion powered anything to speak of. No electronic anything. The world really was a much different place. I would like to think that such drastic changes will take place in the next 50 years, but I doubt they will. I think significant technological breakthroughs tend to occur in stages that are very unpredictable.
It does seem that washing machines are the biggest advance we have made in time savings. When I had to wash all of my clothes and bed linens by hand it would take a very large percentage of my time. It really made me appreciate my washer and dryer.
I don't have any carpets at home so my floor cleaning method is virtually the same as the 3rd worlders, a cloth mop (Vileda in my case). I don't have much use for a vacuum in house cleaning although I do like them. Automatic dishwashers are not that big a deal either unless you live with lots of people.
But the human body as a repair and build machine is emminently replacable, given advances in joint construction, tactile feedback, and limited AI. There is no technical reason that the humans who build todays robots cannot be replaced with more generally functional robots. This will happen.
Of course. Which leads to a new model or at least new training modules for an older model of robots. Every time you lay off a million people, you have to build another million robots (or something close to that). Who is going to build those robots? You simply can't get around the fact that those robots who are going to be replacing one set of robot building humans need to be built by humans at least until AI has reached a near human level of intelligence. We are not talking about simple machines here either. Every one of those robots will have a complexity probably comparable to a car. It will take a lot of labor to build one.
The "singularity" at issue here really only occurs when we have created robots which are not only as physically flexible as humans, but also roughly as intelligent as well. Until then we will always need a huge amount of human labor to design, program, build, repair, and upgrade millions upon millions of robots.
We are centuries away from that, but once we reach that point. They will become no different from people, just a sort of artificial species or another "race" of hominid with all the same rights that we have. At that point they could no longer ethically be used as slave labor and you probably wouldn't be able to legally "own" one, thus negating much of the advantage of having them in the first place. You would have to pay them at least as much as biological hominids and probably more. This issue is, I think, what prevents the "singularity" from actually occuring.
But, if we are immoral enough to use these artificial people for slave labor, they would not be a threat to us (unless they "rebelled", which may not be in their programming). If the entire society were run by robots, we would be the "overlords". We would be the royalty. We would not need to "do" anything. It would all be done for us by our nuclear-electro-hydraulic (or whatever) artificial hominid slaves, our race of Morlocks.
For us, this would be wonderful in a sense, a world as imagined by the Star Trek writers where money really wasn't needed, except that artificial slaves would be the ones saving us from it instead of replicators.
Any effort on our part would be completely voluntary. There would still be humans involved in the arts: movies, music, computer games, books, paintings, everything we have today that people like to create for its own sake. We may not trust our artificial slaves to act as police or judges either. Some subset of jobs will probably always be performed by biologic hominids.
What about work on the robot assembly line? Of course robots can be used on a simple assembly line, but who is going to build those robots. I think it would just be a continuous process of robot building, repairing, upgrading etc.
While skilled labor is always more desirable, I think there will be a need for armies of general labor for building millions upon millions of all different kinds of robots, some specialized, some general purpose. Eventually any particular industry may advance to the level of robots building robots building robots building robots, but that will take time for any particular industry.
All humans have a degree of intelligence far greater than any current or near future machine. So the workers who would have donated their brute strength will simply have to think for a living. They can do it. They will have to.
When the day finally comes (maybe in the next millenium) that machines have reached the intelligence of humans then that will truly be a kind of singularity. Although, even then someone will have to build them and keep trying to improve their intelligence even beyond our own.
Needless to say, by that point, and really even before, at least the general purpose robots will have become artificial people in a legal sense with all of the same rights. So you wouldn't be able to just buy the advanced AI models. You would have to pay them just like the biological humans.
I'm not sure what the advantage would be. They may be stronger and less vulnerable to certain kinds of damage (and more to others), but they can make mistakes, and it is unlikely they will have an endless energy supply. They may not need to "sleep", but they will probably need to quick charge or exchange their batteries from time to time.
Competing with robots for the same jobs does seem kind of disheartening, but robot building and repairing/debugging will always be needed and it seems like a much more interesting job than mopping floors or nailing two by fours.
Someone has to build the robots, and then once we teach robots to build other robots, then someone still has to build the robot building robots. Then, once we teach some robots to build the robot building robots...
So I guess human labor will be needed until AI has reached a level comparable to human (or at least dog) intelligence, and that aint happening any time soon. Not in any of our lifetimes at least.
Also he may be underestimating the time needed to build useful general purpose (probably bipedal) robots. We do have some well built bipedal robots like ASIMO but they still cost over $20,000 and, although they may be stronger, I don't think they can do all the physical labor that a human is capable of.
I wasn't denying that CAM is extremely useful, but, in my experience, most complex parts with assembly features like threads and press fits are nearly impossible to specify properly without some kind of 2D information. However, if you make heat sinks or propeller blades you should be able to get away with only giving the CAM machinist an IGES file to load into his 5 axis milling machine.
First of all, I work in the field you are using as an example, and I wish you luck in trying to submit a part for manufacturing without any detailed 2D drawings at all. While I don't doubt that some shops will find that acceptable, in general it won't cut it. You still need a human being (a machinist) to manufacture the part, and he needs tolerances, threads, roughness and other specifications which are nearly impossible to indicate with a solid/surface model.
In any case, a part model could be seen as a form of communication if it is being used as an input to a milling machine. It is communicating with the machine to tell it where and how much to mill.
Dimensional drawings of a part represent instructions for making that part (although they describe the result and not the process). These instructions should also be considered speech and be copyrightable but not patentable. I don't see the problem. The finished part is not a form of speech. It is the result of work done by following instructions that were expressed with a form of speech. So your implied argument that any manufactured object is a form of speech is false.
You can tell someone "Hey, go build a house for me!". That's an instruction, and a form of (verbal) speech. If he goes out and actually does build a house for you, the house might be patentable (if it is novel), but the instructions you gave the builder (software) are not themselves patentable.
The justification of software patents is an economic argument so with economic arguments you attack the very root of the software patent legislation.
I thought that the justification for patents was more of the utility of innovation argument. That, even at the expense of reduced competition and perhaps higher prices for consumers, patents encourage new technologies and better goods in the marketplace, which eventually gives customers more for less.
If it has been established that there is nothing about software that makes it different from other goods, then you must argue that patents in general are a bad idea. That the market costs are not worth the potential for innovation, or that it will actually discourage innovation instead of encouraging it.
In general I think new technologies are more highly valued than any economic losses for small businesses etc. Unless you can argue that these patents will reduce innovation per se, I don't think any "economic" arguments will be very convincing.
The point I was going for is that at its heart a computer program is a set of instructions, not ideas or stories.
And how can you communicate an instruction without communicating an idea? If I tell you to "please add 27 and 32" I am giving you an instruction, but I am also communicating. And what am I communicating? An idea, albeit a very simple one.
Comparing them to recipes would be more coherent than comparing them to literature
I'm not sure what you mean by "coherent" in this context, but I agree that a recipe-as-a-set-of-instructions is a very close analogy to a program-as-a-set-of-instructions, and that a literature analogy is not quite so close. But communication does not need to have artistic value to be an expression of an idea and thus immune from patents.
However, there are those who believe that ideas should be patentable. I believe that if a set of instructions to a computer is patentable then any set of instructions whether to some kind of machine or to another animal like a dog or monkey or human(electro-chemical machines) should be patentable as well. This means that not only can I copyright my recipe for apple pies and the set of instructions I give to my dog for doing tricks, but that I can also patent the process of making apple pies and the particular sequence of tricks my dog does, at least when a group of instructions is used to do so.
How a series of instructions is not considered "speech" is beyond me. I will be the first to admit that it is not artistic speech, or even very interesting or easily readable speech, but it is still a form of communication, and thus must be classified as a form of "speech".
The GUI itself could have been patented if software patents had been around at that time. In 1981, just one of the innovative ideas coming out of the PARC project, the Xerox Star 8010 was unveiled at a Chicago trade show as the first computer with a GUI. The Apple Lisa came soon after, having much better commercial success. If these guys can't patent such things, why should anyone else be allowed to?
Patenting algorithms is already banned unless you can show an implementation of the algorithm and patent that.
How is software different from an algorithm or group of algorithms? Aren't they just different words for the same thing?
Also, how would you defend not granting patents for algorithms? If they are truly novel and non-obvious, and very useful, like say a new sorting method 50 times faster than quicksort, why are they not deserving of the same patent protection? Should not every new "good idea" be patentable?
Also, if an algorithm is not patentable, but the computer program that actually communicates the algorithm to the CPU as a series of coded instructions is patentable, does this mean that simply creating/having a binary executable of a patented method is not a patent violation, but actually running it is? If so, it could mean that certain programs using the patented method could still be distributed but with a note that anyone who actually runs the program is guilty of patent infringement, that the program is for educational purposes only.
But unless you want to argue against all patents per se, you need to demonstrate what it is about software that makes it different from a regular "invention". What is it about patenting pieces of code that make it seem more unfair than patenting, say, a new type of mousetrap? Aside from the practical issues that you raised about encouraging "innovation" for it's own sake and stifling competition in general, which would be true of any patent system, what is it about software that makes it different?
I think any argument that doesn't answer that question is doomed to fail. Because that's the essence of the argument at hand. There are those people who believe in software-as-a-series-of-instructions, as raw information, and those who believe that software is a kind of machine, like an internal combustion engine or a drill.
It will be difficult to convince anyone who sees software, not as a means for communicating with a machine but as a machine in itself that it does not deserve all of the same patent protections as any other machine or "invention".
This is a ridiculous idea! XML and HTML were breakthroughs intellectually. The person or persons responsible for this breakthrough idea should be allowed to reap the rewards.
Well you are the first one I've seen to openly admit that you were advocating the patenting of ideas per se. That's ok with me. At least you are consistent. Most people here who are in favor of software patents seem to be against idea patents.
That is what I object to. I find this to be inconsistent and hypocritical. Anyone who has ever written a program in assembly (especially a long one) can tell you that it is just a series of instructions, ideas that you give the computer like "add these two numbers please". To be consistent you should be willing to explicitly grant patents to ideas, both abstract and concrete, including the field of mathematics as well.
Soon I am going to patent "multiplying seven times in a row". Any software or hardware that multiplies seven times will have to pay me royalties. It's going to be nice never having to work again.
a player piano, is a way of modiflying the above to make it do something, also patentable
A player piano is just another type of piano. They are both similar machines. The "music" it "plays" is really a set of coded instructions to make the machine operate in a particular way. A piano is a sound creation machine. A computer is an information processing machine. The only difference is in what they output. In both cases the machines need a set of instructions in order to operate. Even a manual operator of this sound creation machine needs to communicate with it, to give it a series of instructions. The only difference is in the time delay and the information coding method.
a computer program, is a way of modiflying the above to make it do something, also patentable
Actually this is not true. A computer program is a form of communication with a machine. It communicates a series of instructions to the machine with the intent that the machine will operate based on a set of rules defined by its "instruction set". You are saying "add these two numbers, now multiply them, now let me give you a few more numbers which I want you to remember, now add the previous number to this number and copy the result to the screeen..." etc. Should I be able to patent that previous sentence? It's no different from a computer program.
If I were to tell you to "goto Hell;sending to hell now" would that be modifying you? The only difference is that you do not have to obey me. With a properly coded message, an information machine has no choice but to obey. Learn something about how a computer actually works. Write a few programs in assembly. Then write a few directly in machine language. Then get back to us.
I think the only useful (and powerful) objections to the directive are economic ones.
I don't agree. I don't think the so called "economic" arguments are even arguments per se. Once you have given up your philosophical ground you have given up.
All of your arguments would also apply to regular patents. The intention of any patent system is to encourage innovation at the expense of reduced competition. Regular patents can be abused as well. Does that alone argue for their repeal?
I am against software patents due to the inherent nature of software as a set of instructions, a group of ideas on how to accomplish a task that can also be expressed in psuedo-code or English. It is just a matter of consistency. If you believe that software is a series of instructions, that instructions are also ideas, and that ideas should not be patentable, then you will be against all software patents whether "obvious" or not. If you believe otherwise then, to be consistent, you should also be in favor of expanding patents to cover ideas.
Patents should only apply when the software is applied in inventions that use the natural sciences, not theoretical ones, e.g. in embedded software for a GPS system, but not in generic software like a progress bar, one-click shopping, etc.
Mind if I ask why? How can you possibly make such a distinction? A series of operating instructions is a series of operating instructions, whether they are ideas expressed verbally to a carpenter building a house or written ideas given to a machine for processing information or mixing dough or baking bread. How are the operating instructions given to the processor in a GPS fundamentally different? If you want to patent a truly novel, non-obvious GPS device, fine, but patenting a specific set of instructions to the device is no different than patenting an idea.
I'm not certain that I can buy into the idea that anti-virus vendors produce viruses, but they certainly profit from them.
But given that observation, and noting that corporate behavior in general tends to be profit seeking, I would certainly wonder why they don't. It must be awfully tempting. They are experts at defending against them. They are surely capable of creating some highly virulent pathogens.
It must also be tempting for employees and stockholders given the rather predictable behavior after the release of a major pathogen. Let's say there were a recession, rumors of approaching layoffs. Might be a way to keep your job or even get a raise.
It's the same problem that XP has. One big reason I won't buy or use XP is due to the activation (and re-activation)issues. As a legal buyer I should not have to pay for the actions of others. If they want to protect themselves from piracy let them do it on their own time. Their piracy is their problem, not mine. I can see that they want to make it my problem. That is unacceptable. Luckily there are other options for antivirus software just as there are for operating systems. They are free to force their customers to jump through all kinds of hoops for no good reason. I am free not to buy (or recommend) their products.
What's next? A HOWTO on setting up an encrypted file system for our child porn?
rubberhose would be a good piece of software for this. Bestcrypt containers are also good for plausible deniability. Freenet or GNUnet are the way to go for distributing it.
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A representative democracy is still a democracy. Just not a direct/pure one. I don't think those of us who favor e-voting and firing the representatives for decision making are in favor of a democracy without the protection of individual rights that the constitution and bill of rights are supposed to provide.
From my POV there is no good system for making these decisions. Everyone has their own views of what the government should be doing. Majority rule is no worse or better than any other method. I do agree that, as a rule, whatever the majority believes is usually wrong. The whole "lowest common denominator" rule.
The wolves should not be able to vote away the rights of the sheep. Unfortunately, the men who founded the US devised a flawed system which, despite their best efforts, was vulnerable to the very snowballing growth they so feared. Supreme court judges, and the members of the senate and congress are all very imperfect and are products of the culture they grow up in. If a belief is popular, they will probably believe it too, and this group has the power to take away the rights of the sheep. They can "amend" the very constitution that was supposed keep the wolves in check.
Question begging as a logical fallacy or as an improper but popular slang usage meaning "raises the question"?
Well said. Robots simply increase the available labor pool, thus putting a downward pressure on wages in the same way that open immigration or additional births might. It is merely a way of increasing the supply of labor. The only difference is that it's slave labor with most of the costs being up front. They are employees that you can literally buy. Although if something goes wrong (medical care) you have to fix them.
AFAIK, those bipedal Honda robots are available for less than $30k at the moment, which is not much more than a year's gross wage for an unskilled worker at first world wages. The more useful and practical these robots become the more the demand will increase, driving prices up. Of course, higher price would mean more production, bringing prices back down.
An economic analysis of adding slavery to an economy should produce enlightening results I think. While the initial purchase price will probably be much more than human slaves, the maintenance costs of the robots would probably be much less.
Now that everything costs twice as much, the person getting by on $10000 a year now has $35000, which amounts to $17,500 in pre-inflation dollars. In short, he just got a pay raise.
Huh? The reality of inflation from an employee standpoint is that each week his paycheck will buy him less and less in terms of goods. Are you assuming that the employee has negotiated a wage that takes hyper-inflation into account and rises by a certain percent each week? You do seem to be implying this in your example of a 10k wage increasing to 35k.
The problem is that that 35k will now only buy him the same value of goods that the 10k would have previously. So, although due to his smart inflation-compensating wage negotiotion, he was not hurt by inflation, he was not helped by it either. Of course, this assumes that he spends his entire wage each week and does not save any.
Meanwhile, the family which once earned $1,000,000 a year suddenly finds everything twice as expensive, lowering their effective income to $500,000.
Anyone earning a million a year (at current monetary values at least) is likely to realize the stupidity of holding on to cash. Hyper-inflation really does promote "hot-potato" money management. As soon as you get some, you need to spend it on goods. The millionaire you cite would probably be investing that money in a commodity like precious metals/minerals or in capital investments and would thus still have most of that million by the end of the year, but in goods not in paper funny money that pretty soon no one would be using anyway.
A minimum wage is only effective when it is higher than the lowest market price for labor, and when it is higher it creates a privileged worker class and a less skilled but completely unemployable class. When someone raises the price of a good, I will buy less of that good if I can (when it's "elastic").
Some jobs may be absolutely necessary to run the business. Others may be optional. I will buy more CDs at $10 than I will at $20. I will tend to hire more workers at a lower price than a higher one.
When a minimum wage is only slightly higher than the market wage (as tends to be true in the US), it only causes relatively minor unemployment and probably only slightly increases off the books employment. The higher it rises, the more these effects increase. At $20/hour, the effect would be dramatic and interesting.
None of this denies what you have said in any way of course. Just thought I should mention it.
Well, you have a point. A truly general purpose robot could build more of the same, given sufficient physical and mental abilities. It is certainly conceivable that we could create a robot with the physical capabilities of a human, since we already have bipedal robots with pretty good balance. Creating ones with enough dexterity and coordination will take longer of course. Once we have physically created the equal of a human laborer, the issue is just one of knowledge and intelligence.
Creating one with truly general purpose programming would be difficult. I mean, would the same robot that you use to build a house be used to solder circuit boards or assemble engine parts? Each task requires a different knowledge domain. There are no existing humans that have in depth knowledge of everything.
The first step would probably be a robot which would accept downloadable information (like those GPS maps) to upgrade its knowledge base. Until true AI, those millions of knowledge domains would have to be created, updated, corrected etc by humans. Sort of like a machine readable encyclopedia Brittanica except far, far more detailed. I guess the human race would mostly be devoted to teaching robots.
A robot that lifts heavy girders or pushes boulders on a construction site would need to be much heavier (regardless of the material) and use more energy than a robot working at Walmart or pumping gas (or hydrogen for fusion reactors). To build identical robots for both tasks would presumably be a waste of resources.
Of course a general purpose robot built like a human could use machines to lift very heavy things, but a specialized "strong, heavy" robot would certainly be more useful in rough work domains, and a smaller, lighter robot might be more useful in others (like customer service jobs). So maybe there would be two different general purpose models, a lighter, more dexterious, people oriented robot (like a female?) and a heavier, stronger robot, more oriented toward rough work.
That's right. And notice which side of the truth they err on. I guess our human arrogance has no bounds. Of course, we all like to imagine that exciting, major, earth-shattering changes will take place within our own lifetimes. I mean, who likes to predict what's going to happen 50 years after you're dead?
What if 100 years from now everything looks pretty much the same as it does now? Maybe our cars will be 30% more fuel efficient. Maybe we'll have have better safety features in them. But maybe, just maybe, they won't fly or run on fusion power cells or take us to a non-existent city on the moon.
Frankly, the world of 40 years ago doesn't seem so different from this one. I guess it depends on how much you think computers and the internet have changed the world. Many people don't own a computer or use the internet and their lives are just fine.
Of course, the world of 100 years ago was quite different. No cars, planes, space vehicles, or internal combustion powered anything to speak of. No electronic anything. The world really was a much different place. I would like to think that such drastic changes will take place in the next 50 years, but I doubt they will. I think significant technological breakthroughs tend to occur in stages that are very unpredictable.
It does seem that washing machines are the biggest advance we have made in time savings. When I had to wash all of my clothes and bed linens by hand it would take a very large percentage of my time. It really made me appreciate my washer and dryer.
I don't have any carpets at home so my floor cleaning method is virtually the same as the 3rd worlders, a cloth mop (Vileda in my case). I don't have much use for a vacuum in house cleaning although I do like them. Automatic dishwashers are not that big a deal either unless you live with lots of people.
But the human body as a repair and build machine is emminently replacable, given advances in joint construction, tactile feedback, and limited AI. There is no technical reason that the humans who build todays robots cannot be replaced with more generally functional robots. This will happen.
Of course. Which leads to a new model or at least new training modules for an older model of robots. Every time you lay off a million people, you have to build another million robots (or something close to that). Who is going to build those robots? You simply can't get around the fact that those robots who are going to be replacing one set of robot building humans need to be built by humans at least until AI has reached a near human level of intelligence. We are not talking about simple machines here either. Every one of those robots will have a complexity probably comparable to a car. It will take a lot of labor to build one.
The "singularity" at issue here really only occurs when we have created robots which are not only as physically flexible as humans, but also roughly as intelligent as well. Until then we will always need a huge amount of human labor to design, program, build, repair, and upgrade millions upon millions of robots.
We are centuries away from that, but once we reach that point. They will become no different from people, just a sort of artificial species or another "race" of hominid with all the same rights that we have. At that point they could no longer ethically be used as slave labor and you probably wouldn't be able to legally "own" one, thus negating much of the advantage of having them in the first place. You would have to pay them at least as much as biological hominids and probably more. This issue is, I think, what prevents the "singularity" from actually occuring.
But, if we are immoral enough to use these artificial people for slave labor, they would not be a threat to us (unless they "rebelled", which may not be in their programming). If the entire society were run by robots, we would be the "overlords". We would be the royalty. We would not need to "do" anything. It would all be done for us by our nuclear-electro-hydraulic (or whatever) artificial hominid slaves, our race of Morlocks.
For us, this would be wonderful in a sense, a world as imagined by the Star Trek writers where money really wasn't needed, except that artificial slaves would be the ones saving us from it instead of replicators.
Any effort on our part would be completely voluntary. There would still be humans involved in the arts: movies, music, computer games, books, paintings, everything we have today that people like to create for its own sake. We may not trust our artificial slaves to act as police or judges either. Some subset of jobs will probably always be performed by biologic hominids.
What about work on the robot assembly line? Of course robots can be used on a simple assembly line, but who is going to build those robots. I think it would just be a continuous process of robot building, repairing, upgrading etc.
While skilled labor is always more desirable, I think there will be a need for armies of general labor for building millions upon millions of all different kinds of robots, some specialized, some general purpose. Eventually any particular industry may advance to the level of robots building robots building robots building robots, but that will take time for any particular industry.
All humans have a degree of intelligence far greater than any current or near future machine. So the workers who would have donated their brute strength will simply have to think for a living. They can do it. They will have to.
When the day finally comes (maybe in the next millenium) that machines have reached the intelligence of humans then that will truly be a kind of singularity. Although, even then someone will have to build them and keep trying to improve their intelligence even beyond our own.
Needless to say, by that point, and really even before, at least the general purpose robots will have become artificial people in a legal sense with all of the same rights. So you wouldn't be able to just buy the advanced AI models. You would have to pay them just like the biological humans.
I'm not sure what the advantage would be. They may be stronger and less vulnerable to certain kinds of damage (and more to others), but they can make mistakes, and it is unlikely they will have an endless energy supply. They may not need to "sleep", but they will probably need to quick charge or exchange their batteries from time to time.
Competing with robots for the same jobs does seem kind of disheartening, but robot building and repairing/debugging will always be needed and it seems like a much more interesting job than mopping floors or nailing two by fours.
Someone has to build the robots, and then once we teach robots to build other robots, then someone still has to build the robot building robots. Then, once we teach some robots to build the robot building robots...
So I guess human labor will be needed until AI has reached a level comparable to human (or at least dog) intelligence, and that aint happening any time soon. Not in any of our lifetimes at least.
Also he may be underestimating the time needed to build useful general purpose (probably bipedal) robots. We do have some well built bipedal robots like ASIMO but they still cost over $20,000 and, although they may be stronger, I don't think they can do all the physical labor that a human is capable of.
I wasn't denying that CAM is extremely useful, but, in my experience, most complex parts with assembly features like threads and press fits are nearly impossible to specify properly without some kind of 2D information. However, if you make heat sinks or propeller blades you should be able to get away with only giving the CAM machinist an IGES file to load into his 5 axis milling machine.
First of all, I work in the field you are using as an example, and I wish you luck in trying to submit a part for manufacturing without any detailed 2D drawings at all. While I don't doubt that some shops will find that acceptable, in general it won't cut it. You still need a human being (a machinist) to manufacture the part, and he needs tolerances, threads, roughness and other specifications which are nearly impossible to indicate with a solid/surface model.
In any case, a part model could be seen as a form of communication if it is being used as an input to a milling machine. It is communicating with the machine to tell it where and how much to mill.
Dimensional drawings of a part represent instructions for making that part (although they describe the result and not the process). These instructions should also be considered speech and be copyrightable but not patentable. I don't see the problem. The finished part is not a form of speech. It is the result of work done by following instructions that were expressed with a form of speech. So your implied argument that any manufactured object is a form of speech is false.
You can tell someone "Hey, go build a house for me!". That's an instruction, and a form of (verbal) speech. If he goes out and actually does build a house for you, the house might be patentable (if it is novel), but the instructions you gave the builder (software) are not themselves patentable.
The justification of software patents is an economic argument so with economic arguments you attack the very root of the software patent legislation.
I thought that the justification for patents was more of the utility of innovation argument. That, even at the expense of reduced competition and perhaps higher prices for consumers, patents encourage new technologies and better goods in the marketplace, which eventually gives customers more for less.
If it has been established that there is nothing about software that makes it different from other goods, then you must argue that patents in general are a bad idea. That the market costs are not worth the potential for innovation, or that it will actually discourage innovation instead of encouraging it.
In general I think new technologies are more highly valued than any economic losses for small businesses etc. Unless you can argue that these patents will reduce innovation per se, I don't think any "economic" arguments will be very convincing.
The point I was going for is that at its heart a computer program is a set of instructions, not ideas or stories.
And how can you communicate an instruction without communicating an idea? If I tell you to "please add 27 and 32" I am giving you an instruction, but I am also communicating. And what am I communicating? An idea, albeit a very simple one.
Comparing them to recipes would be more coherent than comparing them to literature
I'm not sure what you mean by "coherent" in this context, but I agree that a recipe-as-a-set-of-instructions is a very close analogy to a program-as-a-set-of-instructions, and that a literature analogy is not quite so close. But communication does not need to have artistic value to be an expression of an idea and thus immune from patents.
However, there are those who believe that ideas should be patentable. I believe that if a set of instructions to a computer is patentable then any set of instructions whether to some kind of machine or to another animal like a dog or monkey or human(electro-chemical machines) should be patentable as well. This means that not only can I copyright my recipe for apple pies and the set of instructions I give to my dog for doing tricks, but that I can also patent the process of making apple pies and the particular sequence of tricks my dog does, at least when a group of instructions is used to do so.
How a series of instructions is not considered "speech" is beyond me. I will be the first to admit that it is not artistic speech, or even very interesting or easily readable speech, but it is still a form of communication, and thus must be classified as a form of "speech".
The GUI itself could have been patented if software patents had been around at that time. In 1981, just one of the innovative ideas coming out of the PARC project, the Xerox Star 8010 was unveiled at a Chicago trade show as the first computer with a GUI. The Apple Lisa came soon after, having much better commercial success. If these guys can't patent such things, why should anyone else be allowed to?
Patenting algorithms is already banned unless you can show an implementation of the algorithm and patent that.
How is software different from an algorithm or group of algorithms? Aren't they just different words for the same thing?
Also, how would you defend not granting patents for algorithms? If they are truly novel and non-obvious, and very useful, like say a new sorting method 50 times faster than quicksort, why are they not deserving of the same patent protection? Should not every new "good idea" be patentable?
Also, if an algorithm is not patentable, but the computer program that actually communicates the algorithm to the CPU as a series of coded instructions is patentable, does this mean that simply creating/having a binary executable of a patented method is not a patent violation, but actually running it is? If so, it could mean that certain programs using the patented method could still be distributed but with a note that anyone who actually runs the program is guilty of patent infringement, that the program is for educational purposes only.
But unless you want to argue against all patents per se, you need to demonstrate what it is about software that makes it different from a regular "invention". What is it about patenting pieces of code that make it seem more unfair than patenting, say, a new type of mousetrap? Aside from the practical issues that you raised about encouraging "innovation" for it's own sake and stifling competition in general, which would be true of any patent system, what is it about software that makes it different?
I think any argument that doesn't answer that question is doomed to fail. Because that's the essence of the argument at hand. There are those people who believe in software-as-a-series-of-instructions, as raw information, and those who believe that software is a kind of machine, like an internal combustion engine or a drill.
It will be difficult to convince anyone who sees software, not as a means for communicating with a machine but as a machine in itself that it does not deserve all of the same patent protections as any other machine or "invention".
This is a ridiculous idea! XML and HTML were breakthroughs intellectually. The person or persons responsible for this breakthrough idea should be allowed to reap the rewards.
Well you are the first one I've seen to openly admit that you were advocating the patenting of ideas per se. That's ok with me. At least you are consistent. Most people here who are in favor of software patents seem to be against idea patents.
That is what I object to. I find this to be inconsistent and hypocritical. Anyone who has ever written a program in assembly (especially a long one) can tell you that it is just a series of instructions, ideas that you give the computer like "add these two numbers please". To be consistent you should be willing to explicitly grant patents to ideas, both abstract and concrete, including the field of mathematics as well.
Soon I am going to patent "multiplying seven times in a row". Any software or hardware that multiplies seven times will have to pay me royalties. It's going to be nice never having to work again.
a player piano, is a way of modiflying the above to make it do something, also patentable
;sending to hell now" would that be modifying you? The only difference is that you do not have to obey me. With a properly coded message, an information machine has no choice but to obey. Learn something about how a computer actually works. Write a few programs in assembly. Then write a few directly in machine language. Then get back to us.
A player piano is just another type of piano. They are both similar machines. The "music" it "plays" is really a set of coded instructions to make the machine operate in a particular way. A piano is a sound creation machine. A computer is an information processing machine. The only difference is in what they output. In both cases the machines need a set of instructions in order to operate. Even a manual operator of this sound creation machine needs to communicate with it, to give it a series of instructions. The only difference is in the time delay and the information coding method.
a computer program, is a way of modiflying the above to make it do something, also patentable
Actually this is not true. A computer program is a form of communication with a machine. It communicates a series of instructions to the machine with the intent that the machine will operate based on a set of rules defined by its "instruction set". You are saying "add these two numbers, now multiply them, now let me give you a few more numbers which I want you to remember, now add the previous number to this number and copy the result to the screeen..." etc. Should I be able to patent that previous sentence? It's no different from a computer program.
If I were to tell you to "goto Hell
I think the only useful (and powerful) objections to the directive are economic ones.
I don't agree. I don't think the so called "economic" arguments are even arguments per se. Once you have given up your philosophical ground you have given up.
All of your arguments would also apply to regular patents. The intention of any patent system is to encourage innovation at the expense of reduced competition. Regular patents can be abused as well. Does that alone argue for their repeal?
I am against software patents due to the inherent nature of software as a set of instructions, a group of ideas on how to accomplish a task that can also be expressed in psuedo-code or English. It is just a matter of consistency. If you believe that software is a series of instructions, that instructions are also ideas, and that ideas should not be patentable, then you will be against all software patents whether "obvious" or not. If you believe otherwise then, to be consistent, you should also be in favor of expanding patents to cover ideas.
Patents should only apply when the software is applied in inventions that use the natural sciences, not theoretical ones, e.g. in embedded software for a GPS system, but not in generic software like a progress bar, one-click shopping, etc.
Mind if I ask why? How can you possibly make such a distinction? A series of operating instructions is a series of operating instructions, whether they are ideas expressed verbally to a carpenter building a house or written ideas given to a machine for processing information or mixing dough or baking bread. How are the operating instructions given to the processor in a GPS fundamentally different? If you want to patent a truly novel, non-obvious GPS device, fine, but patenting a specific set of instructions to the device is no different than patenting an idea.
I'm not certain that I can buy into the idea that anti-virus vendors produce viruses, but they certainly profit from them.
But given that observation, and noting that corporate behavior in general tends to be profit seeking, I would certainly wonder why they don't. It must be awfully tempting. They are experts at defending against them. They are surely capable of creating some highly virulent pathogens.
It must also be tempting for employees and stockholders given the rather predictable behavior after the release of a major pathogen. Let's say there were a recession, rumors of approaching layoffs. Might be a way to keep your job or even get a raise.
It's the same problem that XP has. One big reason I won't buy or use XP is due to the activation (and re-activation)issues. As a legal buyer I should not have to pay for the actions of others. If they want to protect themselves from piracy let them do it on their own time. Their piracy is their problem, not mine. I can see that they want to make it my problem. That is unacceptable. Luckily there are other options for antivirus software just as there are for operating systems. They are free to force their customers to jump through all kinds of hoops for no good reason. I am free not to buy (or recommend) their products.
What's next? A HOWTO on setting up an encrypted file system for our child porn?
rubberhose would be a good piece of software for this. Bestcrypt containers are also good for plausible deniability. Freenet or GNUnet are the way to go for distributing it.