Ride sharing is also having a substantial impact on the system, especially as the system enters the death spiral. In the past, people may have put up with poor service since there were no good alternatives, but now that ride sharing has significantly improved access to and reduced the price of hiring a private car, people are simply opting out. Unfortunately, this is just going to accelerate the spin downward.
The neighborhood that Amazon chose, Crystal City, has a very high rate of commercial vacancies. It used to host a large number of Federal employees and related Federal contractors, but between Federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) and dispersal of the Federal government post-9/11, a lot of office buildings have stood empty. Given that it's at a unique junction of multiple Metro stations and the VRE Heavy Rail, it should be able to absorb at least the initial waves without infrastructure upgrades. Long run however, they're going to have to make some additional upgrades to reach the full 25,000.
This is much more comprehensive though. No-fly lists are based on a narrow focus of national security. Social Credit Scores are much broader, with people losing access to air travel and other "luxuries" for overdue debts, playing too many video games, associating with other people who have low social credit scores, etc.
What I'm suggesting is that there is a formal organization that they can use to put pressure on Zuckerberg. I know that the Commonwealth nations are all independent state, but that's what this kind of multilateral organization is for, to use their collective weight for common interests. Talk about Her Majesty was merely for literary flourish.
Play the Commonwealth card! Her Majesty calls you to testify before the 2.4 billion citizens of her Commonwealth Realms and allied republics, many of whom are nations currently targeted by Facebook.
At least for Facebook, one approach suggested is to force Facebook to split off their subsidiaries to create rivals and reduce the broad range of data they can collect. So that would mean re-establishing Instagram, WhatsApp, and other large brands as separate entities. It's not perfect, but it would break up the sheer scale they've achieved through those acquisitions.
Google, Amazon and Twitter are harder since those businesses are built around a more centralized section. You could force Amazon for example to break away AWS from their e-Commerce and entertainment units. Google, maybe break off Gmail and the Android businesses from the core search machine. These ideas all require further study, but I think its a starting point to explore.
For those who raise privacy concerns around this, TSA already has all the data through the Global Entry / Precheck application process. When you use Global Entry / Precheck, they already get your photograph from your passport (which is linked to a wealth of other information including birthplace, social security number, international travel, etc.), your fingerprints and current address and contact information from when you applied, and all of your domestic flight information through the myriad of national airport security and customs databases. This is less about harvesting new data and more leveraging existing new data to streamline the process for everyone.
Now if they expand this to ALL domestic air travelers, it's probably breaking new ground, but even then, they still in theory have access to everyone's photos through the Read ID system.
Most of the responsibility of this falls on the Pentagon. The government insists on tightly controlling all the requirements, and so in an environment where cost is king, if the customer doesn't properly write in cyber as a requirement, there isn't any incentive by the contractors to go beyond what is written. That is what the GAO report is primarily criticizing: that the DoD did not take cyber seriously until recently and that they are still trying to figure out how to architect a secure environment and write requirements for it. So even if a contractor says, "Hey, government Contracting Officer, you should tighten security around this system," the government Contracting Officer, if they understand even what's going on, will probably say, "I dunno, does that change the requirements? We're not going to pay you for it."
Bah! The Korean War was conducted by 1.4M armed "volunteers" who were showing solidarity with a fellow socialist state. The invasion of India was a land grab... err... merely self defense of our borders. The invasion of Vietnam was a punitive self defense expedition to help prop up a regime so bloodthirsty that even other Communist nations wanted to dispose of... err... protect the innocent Khmer Rouge from bullying by pseudo-socialist Soviet imperialists and their Vietnamese puppet lackeys!:P/s
Just to point out that people are forgetting the broader context: not just Boeing but a lot of companies from startups to mature aerospace firms are all racing toward the unmanned flying car concept. Airbus, Bell, Uber, EHang, Zee.Aero (backed by Larry Page), just to name a few all have various VTOL unmanned passenger aircraft in the works.
In any case, the point I think the authors were making (the wrong article is linked so I can't easily verify it) is that AI will make it harder for developing nations to improve their economies, rather than making their current economies worse. So it's more a case of AI undermining evolutionary development than it being a revolution in itself.
Agreed. Even before the recent cache of AI, there was a lot of concern that increasing industrial productivity (what a lot of folks refer to as Industry 4.0) driven by automation, additive manufacturing, robotics, big data, and AI, is disrupting the export-oriented economic development model that a lot of nations used to grow in the 20th century. Think Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and most recently China. The idea was you leverage cheap labor to work your way up from cheap, commodity exports to designing and manufacturing high tech goods. However, increased automation is eroding the cost advantage that cheap labor once had. Some might argue that China is the last country to be able to use this model - they brought a tremendous amount of cheap labor to the market that drastically warped the global system (I would argue for example that it killed Mexico's chance to use the same development route), and through various fiscal tactics and sheer scale, China was able to keep that cost advantage for much longer than most nations. Thus, by the time China moves on, the advances in manufacturing have basically left other developing nations few options. China speaking of which is aggressively advancing automation as well to ensure that the manufacturing base they've built does not shift to other, cheaper nations.
We should just treat algorithms as what they are, a tool. So if an algorithm fails, then the liability / accountability should flow as it would any other tool. Did the developers build a flawed algorithm? Then they should be liable for the damage caused. Did the hospital, agency, etc. incorrectly deploy or use the tool? Then they hold responsibility. Does the developer not know why the tool failed? Well that's your problem, and you're still responsible for it.
This Wired article does a better job of explaining the specifics.
One ad seeking a roofer, from a company called Enhanced Roofing and Remodeling, was targeted to men 23 to 50 in Silver Spring, Maryland, according to information from Facebook accompanying the ad. Another, from JK Moving, seeking drivers, targeted men age 21 to 55 who live or were recently in Maryland.
In both cases, they very specifically targeted not just gender (men) but age (21-55, 23-50). Doesn't seem like much nuance around it.
If you put the more generic racist arguments aside of Chinese not being a people of "original thought", there is a question of whether the modern Communist Chinese system will be able to be creative and inventive at the same rate as the West. This was the big question for a lot of nations, China included, on whether you could replicate the rapid pace of Western technological innovation and thought without the "harmful" concepts of liberal society and free flow of information. This is doubly true as the current PRC government under President Xi undoes a lot of the liberalization that had been driven by Deng Xiaoping following the Cultural Revolution.
Blaming WhatsApp is like blaming the cellphone providers for this massacre: it was merely a communications tool used to coordinate and facilitate violence. Should the cellphone companies share responsibility for not shutting down communications? Or more troubling, should both WhatsApp and the cellphone companies be responsible for monitoring every communication and try to identify and censor any speech that could lead to violence? Even if you think that's a good idea, privacy be damned, how do you actually pull that off?
The article directly addresses the "great streetcar conspiracy" and notes that there were broader changes that doomed the streetcar. National City Lines may have been a part of it, but they got involved long after the trend was firmly established.
In the popular history of postwar urban development, blame for the decline of the streetcars and interurbans is often placed at the feet of National City Lines, the company owned by General Motors, Firestone, and others in the auto industry that bought out many local streetcar companies to convert their operations to rubber-tired, GM-made buses. But the main issue was not the technology change—it was the decline in transit service, which happened everywhere, whether or not NCL bought the local company.
This accusation [GM killed the streetcar], however, ignores fundamental problems that the streetcar system in Los Angeles had been facing for years. The dirty secret about the streetcar lines: they were wildly unprofitable and were quickly losing riders. In Transport of Delight, Jonathan Richmond points out that the Pacific Electric line managed to turn a profit in only two years between 1923 and the end of World War II. Meanwhile, between 1945 and 1951, the number of riders carried each year fell by nearly 80 million.
Cheaper to operate and requiring less maintenance, buses began phasing out the streetcars very early. In 1926, 15 percent of the total miles traveled by Pacific Electric riders was along bus routes; that number would more than double by 1939.
While I'm personally not a fan of Verizon and the whole practice of throttling on "unlimited plans", this really does feel more like the Fire Department bureaucracy trying to pass blame because their acquisitions office screwed up and bought the wrong product. I can easily imagine what happened now, some contracting officer thinking, "You know what, I don't need a government plan, I'll just get this consumer plan here that's a couple bucks cheaper a month. They're not going to need all that data; they'd probably just use it to stream Netflix at home or something."
To be fair, just for PR sakes, let alone public good, Verizon should have immediately lifted the cap versus trying to negotiate while the entire state was on fire. Though that we could also chalk up to Verizon's own bureaucracy...
I think a better comparison would be to an asset bubble similar to tulips, 1990s tech stocks, 2008 housing crisis, etc. There is some value in bitcoins, and perhaps more general cryptocurrencies, but the market has clearly not yet figured out how to effectively evaluate and price them yet.
“Cut off those necks of the sons of the dog and kick them into the water”... One Buddhist nationalist group set up a page called the “Kalar Beheading Gang.”
A third user shared a blog item that pictures a boatload of Rohingya refugees landing in Indonesia. “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster,” a commenter wrote.
One user posted a restaurant advertisement featuring Rohingya-style food. “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn kalars!” the person wrote, using a pejorative for the Rohingya.
Direct calls for beheading people, immolating refugees of a particular race, and genocide against a specific people group would be considered hate speech and incitement by most people. We're not simply talking about expelling them, people are calling for the outright deaths of an entire people group within their borders.
I come at this as an engineer with a designer in the family, but I don't think people are giving enough credit to the value of good design. Yes, theoretically, you can learn about art and design from self study, but that's the same attitude of those who say they can write software through self study: yes, you can, but unless you're a one-in-a-million genius, it probably won't be any good. A well trained designer is not that different from a well trained software engineer: four to eight years of theory and training reinforced by years of professional practice, continuous study of new and historical techniques, etc.
My general criticism of these kind of articles is that they tend to just blend all the humanities together as if they're all the same, much like how they just lump STEM together. Much like how you wouldn't ask a civil engineer to design a microprocessor, saying that an English major can design an interface just as well as an actual designer or asking a musician to organize large quantities of government data as effectively as a library archivist is just as silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Another potential issue is that China plays a lot faster and looser around ethics than most Western nations. Want to do human genetic experimentation with minimal oversight? How about accelerate your AI research with even looser data privacy and controls than the already weak protections by American tech companies?
Ride sharing is also having a substantial impact on the system, especially as the system enters the death spiral. In the past, people may have put up with poor service since there were no good alternatives, but now that ride sharing has significantly improved access to and reduced the price of hiring a private car, people are simply opting out. Unfortunately, this is just going to accelerate the spin downward.
The neighborhood that Amazon chose, Crystal City, has a very high rate of commercial vacancies. It used to host a large number of Federal employees and related Federal contractors, but between Federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) and dispersal of the Federal government post-9/11, a lot of office buildings have stood empty. Given that it's at a unique junction of multiple Metro stations and the VRE Heavy Rail, it should be able to absorb at least the initial waves without infrastructure upgrades. Long run however, they're going to have to make some additional upgrades to reach the full 25,000.
This is much more comprehensive though. No-fly lists are based on a narrow focus of national security. Social Credit Scores are much broader, with people losing access to air travel and other "luxuries" for overdue debts, playing too many video games, associating with other people who have low social credit scores, etc.
What I'm suggesting is that there is a formal organization that they can use to put pressure on Zuckerberg. I know that the Commonwealth nations are all independent state, but that's what this kind of multilateral organization is for, to use their collective weight for common interests. Talk about Her Majesty was merely for literary flourish.
Play the Commonwealth card! Her Majesty calls you to testify before the 2.4 billion citizens of her Commonwealth Realms and allied republics, many of whom are nations currently targeted by Facebook.
At least for Facebook, one approach suggested is to force Facebook to split off their subsidiaries to create rivals and reduce the broad range of data they can collect. So that would mean re-establishing Instagram, WhatsApp, and other large brands as separate entities. It's not perfect, but it would break up the sheer scale they've achieved through those acquisitions.
Google, Amazon and Twitter are harder since those businesses are built around a more centralized section. You could force Amazon for example to break away AWS from their e-Commerce and entertainment units. Google, maybe break off Gmail and the Android businesses from the core search machine. These ideas all require further study, but I think its a starting point to explore.
For those who raise privacy concerns around this, TSA already has all the data through the Global Entry / Precheck application process. When you use Global Entry / Precheck, they already get your photograph from your passport (which is linked to a wealth of other information including birthplace, social security number, international travel, etc.), your fingerprints and current address and contact information from when you applied, and all of your domestic flight information through the myriad of national airport security and customs databases. This is less about harvesting new data and more leveraging existing new data to streamline the process for everyone.
Now if they expand this to ALL domestic air travelers, it's probably breaking new ground, but even then, they still in theory have access to everyone's photos through the Read ID system.
Most of the responsibility of this falls on the Pentagon. The government insists on tightly controlling all the requirements, and so in an environment where cost is king, if the customer doesn't properly write in cyber as a requirement, there isn't any incentive by the contractors to go beyond what is written. That is what the GAO report is primarily criticizing: that the DoD did not take cyber seriously until recently and that they are still trying to figure out how to architect a secure environment and write requirements for it. So even if a contractor says, "Hey, government Contracting Officer, you should tighten security around this system," the government Contracting Officer, if they understand even what's going on, will probably say, "I dunno, does that change the requirements? We're not going to pay you for it."
Bah! The Korean War was conducted by 1.4M armed "volunteers" who were showing solidarity with a fellow socialist state. The invasion of India was a land grab... err... merely self defense of our borders. The invasion of Vietnam was a punitive self defense expedition to help prop up a regime so bloodthirsty that even other Communist nations wanted to dispose of... err... protect the innocent Khmer Rouge from bullying by pseudo-socialist Soviet imperialists and their Vietnamese puppet lackeys! :P /s
Just to point out that people are forgetting the broader context: not just Boeing but a lot of companies from startups to mature aerospace firms are all racing toward the unmanned flying car concept. Airbus, Bell, Uber, EHang, Zee.Aero (backed by Larry Page), just to name a few all have various VTOL unmanned passenger aircraft in the works.
Honestly, I'd rather buy an Amazon house brand versus some of the random crap coming from a questionable Shenzhen copycat shop.
I was going to joke about how Candy Crush is so 2012, and then I saw they're still pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars per year with around 300 million active users a month (at least at the end of 2017). So uh... I guess for a large part of the population, it's still a key application that should be standard...?
Fascinating.
In any case, the point I think the authors were making (the wrong article is linked so I can't easily verify it) is that AI will make it harder for developing nations to improve their economies, rather than making their current economies worse. So it's more a case of AI undermining evolutionary development than it being a revolution in itself.
Agreed. Even before the recent cache of AI, there was a lot of concern that increasing industrial productivity (what a lot of folks refer to as Industry 4.0) driven by automation, additive manufacturing, robotics, big data, and AI, is disrupting the export-oriented economic development model that a lot of nations used to grow in the 20th century. Think Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and most recently China. The idea was you leverage cheap labor to work your way up from cheap, commodity exports to designing and manufacturing high tech goods. However, increased automation is eroding the cost advantage that cheap labor once had. Some might argue that China is the last country to be able to use this model - they brought a tremendous amount of cheap labor to the market that drastically warped the global system (I would argue for example that it killed Mexico's chance to use the same development route), and through various fiscal tactics and sheer scale, China was able to keep that cost advantage for much longer than most nations. Thus, by the time China moves on, the advances in manufacturing have basically left other developing nations few options. China speaking of which is aggressively advancing automation as well to ensure that the manufacturing base they've built does not shift to other, cheaper nations.
We should just treat algorithms as what they are, a tool. So if an algorithm fails, then the liability / accountability should flow as it would any other tool. Did the developers build a flawed algorithm? Then they should be liable for the damage caused. Did the hospital, agency, etc. incorrectly deploy or use the tool? Then they hold responsibility. Does the developer not know why the tool failed? Well that's your problem, and you're still responsible for it.
One ad seeking a roofer, from a company called Enhanced Roofing and Remodeling, was targeted to men 23 to 50 in Silver Spring, Maryland, according to information from Facebook accompanying the ad. Another, from JK Moving, seeking drivers, targeted men age 21 to 55 who live or were recently in Maryland.
In both cases, they very specifically targeted not just gender (men) but age (21-55, 23-50). Doesn't seem like much nuance around it.
If you put the more generic racist arguments aside of Chinese not being a people of "original thought", there is a question of whether the modern Communist Chinese system will be able to be creative and inventive at the same rate as the West. This was the big question for a lot of nations, China included, on whether you could replicate the rapid pace of Western technological innovation and thought without the "harmful" concepts of liberal society and free flow of information. This is doubly true as the current PRC government under President Xi undoes a lot of the liberalization that had been driven by Deng Xiaoping following the Cultural Revolution.
Blaming WhatsApp is like blaming the cellphone providers for this massacre: it was merely a communications tool used to coordinate and facilitate violence. Should the cellphone companies share responsibility for not shutting down communications? Or more troubling, should both WhatsApp and the cellphone companies be responsible for monitoring every communication and try to identify and censor any speech that could lead to violence? Even if you think that's a good idea, privacy be damned, how do you actually pull that off?
In the popular history of postwar urban development, blame for the decline of the streetcars and interurbans is often placed at the feet of National City Lines, the company owned by General Motors, Firestone, and others in the auto industry that bought out many local streetcar companies to convert their operations to rubber-tired, GM-made buses. But the main issue was not the technology change—it was the decline in transit service, which happened everywhere, whether or not NCL bought the local company.
A few other good articles:
This accusation [GM killed the streetcar], however, ignores fundamental problems that the streetcar system in Los Angeles had been facing for years. The dirty secret about the streetcar lines: they were wildly unprofitable and were quickly losing riders. In Transport of Delight, Jonathan Richmond points out that the Pacific Electric line managed to turn a profit in only two years between 1923 and the end of World War II. Meanwhile, between 1945 and 1951, the number of riders carried each year fell by nearly 80 million.
Cheaper to operate and requiring less maintenance, buses began phasing out the streetcars very early. In 1926, 15 percent of the total miles traveled by Pacific Electric riders was along bus routes; that number would more than double by 1939.
By the time that National City Lines entered the picture, the dismantling of the streetcar system was well underway. As The Guardian puts it, "one can confidently accuse General Motors and their National City Lines of nothing worse than scheming to profit from a trend already in motion."
While I'm personally not a fan of Verizon and the whole practice of throttling on "unlimited plans", this really does feel more like the Fire Department bureaucracy trying to pass blame because their acquisitions office screwed up and bought the wrong product. I can easily imagine what happened now, some contracting officer thinking, "You know what, I don't need a government plan, I'll just get this consumer plan here that's a couple bucks cheaper a month. They're not going to need all that data; they'd probably just use it to stream Netflix at home or something."
To be fair, just for PR sakes, let alone public good, Verizon should have immediately lifted the cap versus trying to negotiate while the entire state was on fire. Though that we could also chalk up to Verizon's own bureaucracy...
I think a better comparison would be to an asset bubble similar to tulips, 1990s tech stocks, 2008 housing crisis, etc. There is some value in bitcoins, and perhaps more general cryptocurrencies, but the market has clearly not yet figured out how to effectively evaluate and price them yet.
Harry Harrison wrote a story about this...
“Cut off those necks of the sons of the dog and kick them into the water”... One Buddhist nationalist group set up a page called the “Kalar Beheading Gang.”
A third user shared a blog item that pictures a boatload of Rohingya refugees landing in Indonesia. “Pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster,” a commenter wrote.
One user posted a restaurant advertisement featuring Rohingya-style food. “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn kalars!” the person wrote, using a pejorative for the Rohingya.
Direct calls for beheading people, immolating refugees of a particular race, and genocide against a specific people group would be considered hate speech and incitement by most people. We're not simply talking about expelling them, people are calling for the outright deaths of an entire people group within their borders.
I come at this as an engineer with a designer in the family, but I don't think people are giving enough credit to the value of good design. Yes, theoretically, you can learn about art and design from self study, but that's the same attitude of those who say they can write software through self study: yes, you can, but unless you're a one-in-a-million genius, it probably won't be any good. A well trained designer is not that different from a well trained software engineer: four to eight years of theory and training reinforced by years of professional practice, continuous study of new and historical techniques, etc.
My general criticism of these kind of articles is that they tend to just blend all the humanities together as if they're all the same, much like how they just lump STEM together. Much like how you wouldn't ask a civil engineer to design a microprocessor, saying that an English major can design an interface just as well as an actual designer or asking a musician to organize large quantities of government data as effectively as a library archivist is just as silly.