Agreed. My point was that people generally do not want to be exposed to new stuff but need it.
My general observation is that ample, easy choice results in polarization of the population around fewer more radically defined interest areas. Fewer people venture outside of their comfort zone and discover wider horizons, not more as people with the adventurer mindset would hope.
This is because the choice not to change has always been more attractive to most and is now more available.
Yes, adventurers are better served now, but they are the few (and decreasing), not the many.
Now, even some of the adventurers are being led into a false type of adventure - extremacy over breadth. Extremacy feels like adventure but is actually the opposite. It's like diving into a straitjacket.
Interestingly, the generational change seems to be increasing, possibly in reaction to the greater stagnation of adult change.
There are of course exceptions, but it is not general human nature to widen horizons when given choice.
I can remember many times in the distant past listening to stations I didn't really like because they were all I could pick up. In doing so, my tastes sometimes changed to include something truly new. My tastes now include rock, classical, blues, jazz and country amongst others.
Now, one can easily "discover" thousands of rehashes of the same old stuff that they "like". This is not discovery. It is stagnation.
It's been just less than 100 years since the very first commercial broadcast radio station was licensed - and that one was for news.
There are people alive today who didn't experience broadcast radio in the early years of their lives. It was initially only for those with money.
How can anything that didn't even exist in the early lives of some alive today be even close to being "traditional"? Virtually nothing in the realm of tech is "traditional" yet. It will all change and most of it will change within the lives of even middle-aged folks alive today. The tech revolution, especially electronics tech, is still in its childhood if not infancy. It is growing and changing like a preteen in puberty and is just as unpredictable.
I'd actually guess you're right. It appears that virtually all Rust usage is in some unknown "evolving" country.
I tried to dig into it a bit in the 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survey results and see that though it is the "most loved" language, it does not appear on the "most wanted" list nor is it in the top 25 "most used" languages.
Worldwide, it has the second highest salary, but it does not even have an entry on the languages by salary lists for the US, UK, Germany, France or India.
The average experience level of people using it is also on the low side.
I can only conclude that it must be very popular amongst new programmers in some country that is at the bleeding edge of evolving and unknown.
This isn't an argument that can have a single truth that covers everyone. There are some people who are experiencing the difficulties described and many who aren't. People are different with different levels of capability and tolerance. If there is no way that you will give up live access to CNN, you can't cut your cable. I cut my cable more than a decade ago and still miss certain aspects.
In my case, I will not pay more than about $20 per month for the family beyond my internet costs for all media purchases combined. I'd likely maintain that limit even if I had limitless income because it serves the purpose of limiting my viewing time too.
That generally means I'll pay for two services and no more. Right now, I'm just paying for Netflix and a music service. There is no chance that Disney or any other service will ever get my business unless they can fully supplant Netflix for the same price. If the price point is significantly compromised, I'll go back to watching only what is free.
It would be nice if an extension could be created to work on eliminating them to provide protection from the subconscious impact. But, they are very thoroughly embedded - especially all of the little star ratings scattered about.
This is sort of what I'm thinking about but falls short in a critical fashion. "Noise" isn't good enough because someone will figure out how to filter it. There is already technology that can put go through a user's searches and pull out those that are part of a "session", i.e. they are a group of searches exploring a path through a topic area of some sort.
I think the system needs to fake one or more plausible users with interests and timing consistent with the fact they are a person, their location, and culture. Otherwise, filters could be developed to separate out the plausible from the random. I'm most concerned with stopping the personality and interest profiling, not the identification of illegal activities. The majority of folks with privacy concerns aren't committing illegal activities that they need to hide.
It is one of the mechanisms created in the last couple of decades to magnify the appearance that there is a lack of people qualified for the work. Just come up with a new certification, claim that there is a shortage of people who have it (there is because why would someone with decades of experience get it), and beg the government to let in more cheap workers.
There are many more qualified programmers sitting on the sideline than they need. The problem is not that it is difficult to find workers. It is that it is difficult to find workers who will work for the low wages that they want to pay, especially if it requires moving to some of the ridiculously expensive locations they insist on placing their operations in.
They know this and often advertise jobs that they have no intent to pay to fill to create the illusion that there is a shortage. This helps in their case to bring in more offshore talent that will undercut wages.
They have the money as shown by their profits and the outrageous wages paid to those higher up the chain.
Somehow, the normal capitalist formula that says wages should rise to balance the supply has been broken. I believe it is largely due to them having enough success to not care and a reduction in the consumer's pickiness on product quality and features. I'm sure there are other factors.
Perhaps you visited your ancestry DNA match list and even clicked on the person's name while a tracker was active from some other site and the data was either gathered directly by or sold to Facebook. I think the trackers are responsible for a lot of this.
Or, there is always the other person. You don't know what they have done. They may have actually searched for you directly on Facebook.
I think this latter path explains most of the harder mysteries. We rarely consider what the other person has revealed. I know that many of the people I see suggested to me on LinkedIn have either been searching for me, have me in their address book, or have in some fashion mentioned me somewhere. The leak didn't come from my data or habits, it came from theirs.
I've often thought about this type of app - but without the sensitive topic thought.
There are many things that the search engines and sites using trackers find out about us that are just annoying violations of privacy - like who we are related to or know. Other examples are products that we are interested in, shows that we like, churches and other organizations we attend, what times we are usually awake and surfing the web, where we've traveled to, etc.
It would be interesting to explore whether an app or extension could be created that enhances privacy by obfuscating all of that information - employing a smart bot to use both the web and apps in semi-random fashion.
I say "semi-random" because I think it would be more difficult to discern truth if the things it was looking up, places it was pretending to go, etc. were reasonable for someone living in my area and fitting into society in at least a similar fashion. It would also need to do these things in a fashion that looks like a human. i.e. people don't visit a hundred sites at once, they read along the way. The timing needs to be right at the least.
If you could get a large takeup on an app like this, it could destroy the tracking / targeted advertising industry. Of course, that means there would be a kick back. This is an industry with a total valuation in the trillions.
My thought isn't that there should be more suits for not developing tech, but that there should be more suits for not deploying tech that was already reasonably available. Every stage / step toward autonomous driving will save lives and some are already reasonably available.
In a broader fashion though, often, a tech isn't deployed because someone has a patent and is unreasonably charging for its use or even keeping it for their own use at all costs due to a product advantage it gives. I think that could be attacked as having caused an unreasonable death.
A possibly appropriate example recently mentioned in the media is the circular saw safety feature that detects when a blade has contacted skin and instantly stops it. It has been around for more than a decade and would pay for its costs many times over in the cost of the injuries it will stop. However, tools are usually manufactured at a very low-profit ratio - often less than 10%. The owner of the patent has always wanted 8% or more of the gross, not of the profit. Even 8% of the profit is too much to ask for a commodity low margin product.
I think it possible that a lawsuit for an injury that has occurred with a product not using that patented technology could succeed if brought equally against the manufacturer and against the owner of the patent whose unreasonable price (as shown by nobody paying it) has cost the limbs and sometimes lives of hundreds if not thousands of people.
Having the license in this country is often career-ending, much like having a PhD. It can make it very difficult to get a job. I've been in corporations that had thousands of engineers and never met anyone I knew to have it. I think they tend to be in certain structural and mechanical, and most civil and architectural engineering areas. The electrical, aeronautical, and computer engineering professions have much less of this.
Regardless, there is no such thing as a vehicle on the road today that does not make some safety compromise. Not one single vehicle uses the best-known safety mechanism for every single aspect of the car. No one could buy it if they did, and it wouldn't meet other necessary criteria if every compromise was made in the safety direction. Our government often has to force the matter by making regulations like the ones coming down the pipe soon to require all vehicles to have automatic braking technology. This is tech that has been available for a while, but many engineers must be signing off on vehicles that are killing people, otherwise, the government wouldn't have to be stepping in.
Everything engineered makes these compromises. For example, every building might be designed to handle a 500-year quake, but what happens if a 5,000-year quake comes along?
Airbags are an interesting example. Even the best airbag systems kill some people who would not have died without airbags. But they save many more that would have. So, you accept the compromise. Many years ago, seatbelts did the same and still do. Yet, we have them, and are even required by law in most places to wear them.
With the autonomous vehicle question, it is ready to deploy when it will save more people than it will kill when measured versus human drivers (all of them, not just the competent ones). To wait any longer would be killing those people that it might have saved. Of course, determining when that point is is a near impossibility. The hard call will either be made or the vehicles will never be made because the engineers will never be able to say with any product that it is not flawed in some situation - often in which it is being misused by the consumer.
Realistically, we do wait longer than the point of net balance because the public does not understand statistically-based decisions very well. When it is your family member that died because the tech failed you want to blame the tech without looking at the whole picture. We often don't even know when our family member died because the tech that could have saved them was held back because it was being over-engineered.
Often, these hard decisions are the reason for regulation - not to protect the public but to allow the companies protection in deploying something that a big picture organization like the government has determined will be a net benefit to the public while being a detriment to some individuals. The engineers then have the excuse of having met the regulation. It seems to work better with our minds.
Absent specific regulations and tests to target (which is the ideal situation in a free society), the business leaders are usually the ones who make the tough calls.
I've been in engineering organizations releasing new products that had life saving or threatening potential. It is always an agonizing, scary hard call as to when you've passed the threshold of risk.
There is a bell curve with a peak. You rarely hit the peak. If you make the call too late, you cost the lives of those you might have saved - too soon, you cost lives of those who might have saved themselves.
Even if you hit the peak perfectly, you'll always be able to truthfully argue that some people are being saved who would have died and some are dying who would have lived. The peak is a point of balance between the two - not a perfect elimination.
I can remember many times hating my bosses when they released a product that I didn't feel was ready. As an engineer, I have to be over-focused on the problems and stand no chance of seeing when I am perfectly perched on that probability peak. They had to pry the projects from my hands to get them out the door. I actually begged in tears once. But, in retrospect, I can't think of any case where my bosses weren't right in releasing the product that I was concerned about releasing.
What we need to force progress is for attorneys to get smart and start figuring out how to file more effective suits for lack of progress toward autonomy. How many are dying today because we don't have it? We need to focus hard on that.
Self-driving brings with it many, many forms of disruption that will add up to one thing, year-over-year-over-year reductions in the cost of daily transportation. Everyone not participating will see nothing but increases as their support structure gradually collapses.
The switch to fleets owned by the manufacturers has many potential benefits centered around a reversal in historic incentives to create planned obsolescence and the usage efficiencies that can be gained via fleet operations planning:
drivetrains will be designed for a million miles or more of operation with few repairs
interiors will be designed for easy recycling so that they can be kept new and easily upgraded
most common repairs will be designed to be done in a plug and play fashion
brakes will just last
When you only have one car, it needs to be able to handle your worst case usage. With a fleet, the few long trips will be handed to the vehicles with the newest or biggest batteries while the 95% of the trips that are short can be handled by short range vehicles or those with older batteries.
batteries will last longer and even then be cycled to charge station usage where they can be useful for a magnitude more cycles than in the vehicles instead of being recycled
fleets will back their own insurance and have both built-in incentives for safety and the complete data necessary to determine where their efforts are best spent because of it
charge time becomes a fleet efficiency concern, not a personal time concern. You'd never wait for a charge. A new car will be waiting for you at the time and place that you need it.
When going on a trip, you'll have door-to-door service with a price dependent on what you can afford and your tolerance. The cheapest means would have a fleet car take you to a fleet bus or train after which a fleet car will take you to your destination. The more expensive routes might use a less efficient car or plane in the middle leg. Luggage will likely travel in standardized modules without your needing to manage it at any point.
In fact, with self-driving vehicles becoming the norm, I expect many services to blossom that might just eliminate the need for luggage altogether. For example, I could subscribe to a system that simply always has clothes that fit me perfectly and are appropriate to my day available when I need them wherever I am at instead of having my own and taking them with me.
Homes will no longer have any need for garages. This is under-roof space that is pretty expensive to have.
Storage in homes can be reduced as it becomes easier to simply warehouse items without ever having to visit the warehouse yourself or even to just rent items that you don't need very often.
Most of the vehicles on the road (which may even increase) will not need to be built to carry people at all as the economic system changes to one that brings things to people instead of one where people have to go get things. People will only go places when they have a desire or need to be there, not as a chore.
This tech is so disruptive that there is no reason why this list can't go to thousands of bullet points. And there is a whole other layer beyond this because developing a tech like this usually advances the science. Then areas that have no relationship will see benefits that are likely to surpass the direct ones.
And, btw, I've heard this same discussion with many other techs. In the end, it will become dominant and people will either adjust and learn to make the best of the new ways or become old, sourpuss grouches sitting around bemoaning how stupid the younger generations are, glorifying the days gone by, and crying for a regression to the way things used to be as the world marches on as it always has.
I think Mr. Herbert had it right. We should start the engineering at the animal level and shoot for a creating a mindless animal that grows continuously without movement. Just shovel garbage in one end and slice meat off the other.
I started out as a Computer Engineer in avionics and evolved to System Engineering and Architecting. At that level, I had to be able to pick up virtually any engineering trade to a fairly high degree of competency. I also had to master things like human factors design and project planning, project management, etc. I would say that I absolutely had to be a "polymath" and that it is essential to have such people in the higher level positions of R&D efforts.
I consistently see that "leaps" in technology tend to be made by polymaths whose thoughts benefited from unexpected cross-fertilization between fields. In fact, it seems to me that the way to break loose virtually any field that has stagnated is to bring in people from other fields to try to break the tunnel vision effect that the narrowly focused seem to suffer from.
But, moreover, other aspects of life benefit as well. I can perform most of my own car repairs with a high degree of competency. I have earned my Journeyman Electrician's license. I installed my own instant water heater a couple of months ago. I rebuilt a floor and wall shortly before that. I've completely replumbed the hot and cold water in more than one home. I have bought homes, stripped them to the frame, and rebuilt every aspect but that frame without hiring a single contractor. I am a very competent cook and cook all of my family's meals. I've rebuilt wells that supply my drinking water. I've written short stories. I can have a conversation with my doctor about my health without him dumbing down any language and can easily understand most medical research papers. I am a competent accountant and have successfully kept books for businesses. And on and on and on.
Once you reach a certain level of competency, you get to where you just know the way something has to work because everything follows the same rules of math, physics, biology, etc.
In short, being a polymath has enriched my life so much, I wouldn't want to give it up for any amount of pay. I'd much rather have the pleasure of doing things myself than be rich and pay others to do things for me.
In imagining the future computing world, I've always imagined it would include personal AI assistants. I never imagined that they wouldn't be running directly on my home computer and accessing the net as my proxy.
I believe the most critical open source need today is a strong AI assistant. Missing it is like missing the addition of Linux to open source.
It is going to be interesting to see how flexible the gigafactory is. Battery tech is evolving fast and I wonder what portion of the investment will be lost in retooling lines to majorly different new chemistries. Tesla could be in danger from too much early lock-in - depends on to what degree they've planned for it.
It is interesting to see people shocked by this. The sunshine laws in Florida are so strong that all of this is openly sold. Check out this site that puts it all online by zip - http://flvoters.com/by_zip.htm...
Professionals in any field are immersed in the problems they face now. System engineers look across fields and see leaps the professionals never imagined. We will eventually see a leap in AI and it is unlikely to come from a professional in the field. I imagine it will come from someone in an imaging field who figures out how to quickly map a brain or a mathematical field who figures out how to fill in the blanks of a map with an equivalent of the net that "must" be there or some other direction we haven't thought of.
Once the technology is there to build a device with the computational capacity and complexity of a late fetal brain, someone will figure out how to move a human fetal equivalent into it and start raising it. Period.
The first generation (and likely last created by "us") of true AI we create will be a copy of ourselves.
Because our brain works best in a physical body with eating, sleeping, and other needs and we won't understand enough to unravel all of the dependencies, the first one that actually works will be "raised" in a virtual body that goes through all of the normal life stages in a virtual world that recreates everything that contributes to the normal development of a human mind.
The only way we become extinct is if we don't equip it to succeed. Assuming it can reproduce itself, maintain and expand its environment, use our technologies to send itself off planet, etc. we will go on because it is us. It is a stage of evolution, not extinction.
Perhaps our ability to modify ourselves is going to outpace our ability to get enough people off of the planet to keep our population in check (maybe 100 million per year or so?).
This will drive us to start modifying ourselves and our way of living to require less resources. Ultimately, that should end as a people with no physical bodies living in a virtual world far more fantastic than the real galaxy due to not having to follow laws of physics in its models. Nobody would care to go exploring reality. Too boring.
The ultimate limit of population growth would be determined by how much of the planet on which we exist can be turned into a computer and the length of our existence would be determined by the energy available within our solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. My point was that people generally do not want to be exposed to new stuff but need it.
My general observation is that ample, easy choice results in polarization of the population around fewer more radically defined interest areas. Fewer people venture outside of their comfort zone and discover wider horizons, not more as people with the adventurer mindset would hope.
This is because the choice not to change has always been more attractive to most and is now more available.
Yes, adventurers are better served now, but they are the few (and decreasing), not the many.
Now, even some of the adventurers are being led into a false type of adventure - extremacy over breadth. Extremacy feels like adventure but is actually the opposite. It's like diving into a straitjacket.
Interestingly, the generational change seems to be increasing, possibly in reaction to the greater stagnation of adult change.
I'm not so sure about that.
There are of course exceptions, but it is not general human nature to widen horizons when given choice.
I can remember many times in the distant past listening to stations I didn't really like because they were all I could pick up. In doing so, my tastes sometimes changed to include something truly new. My tastes now include rock, classical, blues, jazz and country amongst others.
Now, one can easily "discover" thousands of rehashes of the same old stuff that they "like". This is not discovery. It is stagnation.
It's been just less than 100 years since the very first commercial broadcast radio station was licensed - and that one was for news.
There are people alive today who didn't experience broadcast radio in the early years of their lives. It was initially only for those with money.
How can anything that didn't even exist in the early lives of some alive today be even close to being "traditional"? Virtually nothing in the realm of tech is "traditional" yet. It will all change and most of it will change within the lives of even middle-aged folks alive today. The tech revolution, especially electronics tech, is still in its childhood if not infancy. It is growing and changing like a preteen in puberty and is just as unpredictable.
If consumers have devolved enough to pay for something like this, could I get rich by charging people a daily fee to spam their inbox?
I'd actually guess you're right. It appears that virtually all Rust usage is in some unknown "evolving" country.
I tried to dig into it a bit in the 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survey results and see that though it is the "most loved" language, it does not appear on the "most wanted" list nor is it in the top 25 "most used" languages.
Worldwide, it has the second highest salary, but it does not even have an entry on the languages by salary lists for the US, UK, Germany, France or India.
The average experience level of people using it is also on the low side.
I can only conclude that it must be very popular amongst new programmers in some country that is at the bleeding edge of evolving and unknown.
This isn't an argument that can have a single truth that covers everyone. There are some people who are experiencing the difficulties described and many who aren't. People are different with different levels of capability and tolerance. If there is no way that you will give up live access to CNN, you can't cut your cable. I cut my cable more than a decade ago and still miss certain aspects.
In my case, I will not pay more than about $20 per month for the family beyond my internet costs for all media purchases combined. I'd likely maintain that limit even if I had limitless income because it serves the purpose of limiting my viewing time too.
That generally means I'll pay for two services and no more. Right now, I'm just paying for Netflix and a music service. There is no chance that Disney or any other service will ever get my business unless they can fully supplant Netflix for the same price. If the price point is significantly compromised, I'll go back to watching only what is free.
It would be nice if an extension could be created to work on eliminating them to provide protection from the subconscious impact. But, they are very thoroughly embedded - especially all of the little star ratings scattered about.
This is sort of what I'm thinking about but falls short in a critical fashion. "Noise" isn't good enough because someone will figure out how to filter it. There is already technology that can put go through a user's searches and pull out those that are part of a "session", i.e. they are a group of searches exploring a path through a topic area of some sort.
I think the system needs to fake one or more plausible users with interests and timing consistent with the fact they are a person, their location, and culture. Otherwise, filters could be developed to separate out the plausible from the random. I'm most concerned with stopping the personality and interest profiling, not the identification of illegal activities. The majority of folks with privacy concerns aren't committing illegal activities that they need to hide.
It is one of the mechanisms created in the last couple of decades to magnify the appearance that there is a lack of people qualified for the work. Just come up with a new certification, claim that there is a shortage of people who have it (there is because why would someone with decades of experience get it), and beg the government to let in more cheap workers.
There are many more qualified programmers sitting on the sideline than they need. The problem is not that it is difficult to find workers. It is that it is difficult to find workers who will work for the low wages that they want to pay, especially if it requires moving to some of the ridiculously expensive locations they insist on placing their operations in.
They know this and often advertise jobs that they have no intent to pay to fill to create the illusion that there is a shortage. This helps in their case to bring in more offshore talent that will undercut wages.
They have the money as shown by their profits and the outrageous wages paid to those higher up the chain.
Somehow, the normal capitalist formula that says wages should rise to balance the supply has been broken. I believe it is largely due to them having enough success to not care and a reduction in the consumer's pickiness on product quality and features. I'm sure there are other factors.
Perhaps you visited your ancestry DNA match list and even clicked on the person's name while a tracker was active from some other site and the data was either gathered directly by or sold to Facebook. I think the trackers are responsible for a lot of this.
Or, there is always the other person. You don't know what they have done. They may have actually searched for you directly on Facebook.
I think this latter path explains most of the harder mysteries. We rarely consider what the other person has revealed. I know that many of the people I see suggested to me on LinkedIn have either been searching for me, have me in their address book, or have in some fashion mentioned me somewhere. The leak didn't come from my data or habits, it came from theirs.
I've often thought about this type of app - but without the sensitive topic thought.
There are many things that the search engines and sites using trackers find out about us that are just annoying violations of privacy - like who we are related to or know. Other examples are products that we are interested in, shows that we like, churches and other organizations we attend, what times we are usually awake and surfing the web, where we've traveled to, etc.
It would be interesting to explore whether an app or extension could be created that enhances privacy by obfuscating all of that information - employing a smart bot to use both the web and apps in semi-random fashion.
I say "semi-random" because I think it would be more difficult to discern truth if the things it was looking up, places it was pretending to go, etc. were reasonable for someone living in my area and fitting into society in at least a similar fashion. It would also need to do these things in a fashion that looks like a human. i.e. people don't visit a hundred sites at once, they read along the way. The timing needs to be right at the least.
If you could get a large takeup on an app like this, it could destroy the tracking / targeted advertising industry. Of course, that means there would be a kick back. This is an industry with a total valuation in the trillions.
My thought isn't that there should be more suits for not developing tech, but that there should be more suits for not deploying tech that was already reasonably available. Every stage / step toward autonomous driving will save lives and some are already reasonably available.
In a broader fashion though, often, a tech isn't deployed because someone has a patent and is unreasonably charging for its use or even keeping it for their own use at all costs due to a product advantage it gives. I think that could be attacked as having caused an unreasonable death.
A possibly appropriate example recently mentioned in the media is the circular saw safety feature that detects when a blade has contacted skin and instantly stops it. It has been around for more than a decade and would pay for its costs many times over in the cost of the injuries it will stop. However, tools are usually manufactured at a very low-profit ratio - often less than 10%. The owner of the patent has always wanted 8% or more of the gross, not of the profit. Even 8% of the profit is too much to ask for a commodity low margin product.
I think it possible that a lawsuit for an injury that has occurred with a product not using that patented technology could succeed if brought equally against the manufacturer and against the owner of the patent whose unreasonable price (as shown by nobody paying it) has cost the limbs and sometimes lives of hundreds if not thousands of people.
Having the license in this country is often career-ending, much like having a PhD. It can make it very difficult to get a job. I've been in corporations that had thousands of engineers and never met anyone I knew to have it. I think they tend to be in certain structural and mechanical, and most civil and architectural engineering areas. The electrical, aeronautical, and computer engineering professions have much less of this.
Regardless, there is no such thing as a vehicle on the road today that does not make some safety compromise. Not one single vehicle uses the best-known safety mechanism for every single aspect of the car. No one could buy it if they did, and it wouldn't meet other necessary criteria if every compromise was made in the safety direction. Our government often has to force the matter by making regulations like the ones coming down the pipe soon to require all vehicles to have automatic braking technology. This is tech that has been available for a while, but many engineers must be signing off on vehicles that are killing people, otherwise, the government wouldn't have to be stepping in.
Everything engineered makes these compromises. For example, every building might be designed to handle a 500-year quake, but what happens if a 5,000-year quake comes along?
Airbags are an interesting example. Even the best airbag systems kill some people who would not have died without airbags. But they save many more that would have. So, you accept the compromise. Many years ago, seatbelts did the same and still do. Yet, we have them, and are even required by law in most places to wear them.
With the autonomous vehicle question, it is ready to deploy when it will save more people than it will kill when measured versus human drivers (all of them, not just the competent ones). To wait any longer would be killing those people that it might have saved. Of course, determining when that point is is a near impossibility. The hard call will either be made or the vehicles will never be made because the engineers will never be able to say with any product that it is not flawed in some situation - often in which it is being misused by the consumer.
Realistically, we do wait longer than the point of net balance because the public does not understand statistically-based decisions very well. When it is your family member that died because the tech failed you want to blame the tech without looking at the whole picture. We often don't even know when our family member died because the tech that could have saved them was held back because it was being over-engineered.
Often, these hard decisions are the reason for regulation - not to protect the public but to allow the companies protection in deploying something that a big picture organization like the government has determined will be a net benefit to the public while being a detriment to some individuals. The engineers then have the excuse of having met the regulation. It seems to work better with our minds.
Absent specific regulations and tests to target (which is the ideal situation in a free society), the business leaders are usually the ones who make the tough calls.
I've been in engineering organizations releasing new products that had life saving or threatening potential. It is always an agonizing, scary hard call as to when you've passed the threshold of risk.
There is a bell curve with a peak. You rarely hit the peak. If you make the call too late, you cost the lives of those you might have saved - too soon, you cost lives of those who might have saved themselves.
Even if you hit the peak perfectly, you'll always be able to truthfully argue that some people are being saved who would have died and some are dying who would have lived. The peak is a point of balance between the two - not a perfect elimination.
I can remember many times hating my bosses when they released a product that I didn't feel was ready. As an engineer, I have to be over-focused on the problems and stand no chance of seeing when I am perfectly perched on that probability peak. They had to pry the projects from my hands to get them out the door. I actually begged in tears once. But, in retrospect, I can't think of any case where my bosses weren't right in releasing the product that I was concerned about releasing.
What we need to force progress is for attorneys to get smart and start figuring out how to file more effective suits for lack of progress toward autonomy. How many are dying today because we don't have it? We need to focus hard on that.
Hmmm. The preview for that put space between the bullets. That sucks.
Self-driving brings with it many, many forms of disruption that will add up to one thing, year-over-year-over-year reductions in the cost of daily transportation. Everyone not participating will see nothing but increases as their support structure gradually collapses.
The switch to fleets owned by the manufacturers has many potential benefits centered around a reversal in historic incentives to create planned obsolescence and the usage efficiencies that can be gained via fleet operations planning:
This tech is so disruptive that there is no reason why this list can't go to thousands of bullet points. And there is a whole other layer beyond this because developing a tech like this usually advances the science. Then areas that have no relationship will see benefits that are likely to surpass the direct ones.
And, btw, I've heard this same discussion with many other techs. In the end, it will become dominant and people will either adjust and learn to make the best of the new ways or become old, sourpuss grouches sitting around bemoaning how stupid the younger generations are, glorifying the days gone by, and crying for a regression to the way things used to be as the world marches on as it always has.
I think Mr. Herbert had it right. We should start the engineering at the animal level and shoot for a creating a mindless animal that grows continuously without movement. Just shovel garbage in one end and slice meat off the other.
The slig is an awesome idea!
I started out as a Computer Engineer in avionics and evolved to System Engineering and Architecting. At that level, I had to be able to pick up virtually any engineering trade to a fairly high degree of competency. I also had to master things like human factors design and project planning, project management, etc. I would say that I absolutely had to be a "polymath" and that it is essential to have such people in the higher level positions of R&D efforts.
I consistently see that "leaps" in technology tend to be made by polymaths whose thoughts benefited from unexpected cross-fertilization between fields. In fact, it seems to me that the way to break loose virtually any field that has stagnated is to bring in people from other fields to try to break the tunnel vision effect that the narrowly focused seem to suffer from.
But, moreover, other aspects of life benefit as well. I can perform most of my own car repairs with a high degree of competency. I have earned my Journeyman Electrician's license. I installed my own instant water heater a couple of months ago. I rebuilt a floor and wall shortly before that. I've completely replumbed the hot and cold water in more than one home. I have bought homes, stripped them to the frame, and rebuilt every aspect but that frame without hiring a single contractor. I am a very competent cook and cook all of my family's meals. I've rebuilt wells that supply my drinking water. I've written short stories. I can have a conversation with my doctor about my health without him dumbing down any language and can easily understand most medical research papers. I am a competent accountant and have successfully kept books for businesses. And on and on and on.
Once you reach a certain level of competency, you get to where you just know the way something has to work because everything follows the same rules of math, physics, biology, etc.
In short, being a polymath has enriched my life so much, I wouldn't want to give it up for any amount of pay. I'd much rather have the pleasure of doing things myself than be rich and pay others to do things for me.
In imagining the future computing world, I've always imagined it would include personal AI assistants. I never imagined that they wouldn't be running directly on my home computer and accessing the net as my proxy.
I believe the most critical open source need today is a strong AI assistant. Missing it is like missing the addition of Linux to open source.
It is going to be interesting to see how flexible the gigafactory is. Battery tech is evolving fast and I wonder what portion of the investment will be lost in retooling lines to majorly different new chemistries. Tesla could be in danger from too much early lock-in - depends on to what degree they've planned for it.
It is interesting to see people shocked by this. The sunshine laws in Florida are so strong that all of this is openly sold. Check out this site that puts it all online by zip - http://flvoters.com/by_zip.htm...
Professionals in any field are immersed in the problems they face now. System engineers look across fields and see leaps the professionals never imagined. We will eventually see a leap in AI and it is unlikely to come from a professional in the field. I imagine it will come from someone in an imaging field who figures out how to quickly map a brain or a mathematical field who figures out how to fill in the blanks of a map with an equivalent of the net that "must" be there or some other direction we haven't thought of.
Once the technology is there to build a device with the computational capacity and complexity of a late fetal brain, someone will figure out how to move a human fetal equivalent into it and start raising it. Period.
The first generation (and likely last created by "us") of true AI we create will be a copy of ourselves.
Because our brain works best in a physical body with eating, sleeping, and other needs and we won't understand enough to unravel all of the dependencies, the first one that actually works will be "raised" in a virtual body that goes through all of the normal life stages in a virtual world that recreates everything that contributes to the normal development of a human mind.
The only way we become extinct is if we don't equip it to succeed. Assuming it can reproduce itself, maintain and expand its environment, use our technologies to send itself off planet, etc. we will go on because it is us. It is a stage of evolution, not extinction.
I think we're suffering a failure of imagination.
Perhaps our ability to modify ourselves is going to outpace our ability to get enough people off of the planet to keep our population in check (maybe 100 million per year or so?).
This will drive us to start modifying ourselves and our way of living to require less resources. Ultimately, that should end as a people with no physical bodies living in a virtual world far more fantastic than the real galaxy due to not having to follow laws of physics in its models. Nobody would care to go exploring reality. Too boring.
The ultimate limit of population growth would be determined by how much of the planet on which we exist can be turned into a computer and the length of our existence would be determined by the energy available within our solar system.