You are looking at a potential future automatic driving cars, not the reality we have.
Sure, but that is what we're talking about. No automated car on the road today could safely transport a kid somewhere. They're not designed for that, and nobody claims it can be done today.
What the study is comparing is overall scientific literacy as a product of the comprehension of a single scientific concept.
The study had nothing to do with measuring comprehensive of the theory of evolution. It measured whether the participant agreed that humans developed from earlier species of animals. That really is a measurement of belief, not comprehension.
Suppose I ask you, "According to Lamark's theory, within a pair of identical twin bears a twin that runs frequently is not more likely to have progeny that are able to run faster than a twin that remains idle. (True/False/I-Don't-Know)" If you are scientifically literate, you should know the answer to that question is False, even though you understand that this is not an accepted scientific theory. Now, if you dropped the first 4 words in the question then you would be measuring whether you agree with Lamark's theory or not. If you prepended the question with "A majority of scientists believe that..." instead then that might be a measure of your estimation of scientific consensus.
those who willfully choose to disregard the science will, of course, be marred with an incredible blind spot in their science comprehension. inferential logic would suggest that, yes, their scientific comprehension of everything from mutagenic bacteria to human reproduction will be degraded
But that was exactly what the study tested, and they found that a response to the evolution question had no correlation with the accuracy of responses on other questions. So, science actually suggests that your hypothesis is not in fact correct, no matter how much sense it might make.
Lets say you see an accident happen and pull over to assist, you are trained in CPR or in the medical field. You reacted to data the car does not know.
Keep in mind that with automated vehicles the moment that person called for help an ambulance would be dispatched and would travel 90mph slowing down only for turns directly to the location, without a single other vehicle coming anywhere close to it. Sure, maybe a few cases will come up where help might have arrived faster without the automation, but for every one of those there will be hundreds of cases where help arrived MUCH faster than it would in today's world.
Oh, and if you have a heart attack driving and hit the help button, then your car becomes the ambulance taking you at 90mph to the nearest ER without a single other car getting in the way.
But it sure measures the amount of faith people want to put into "a wizard did it" as a valid explanation of something.
Sure, but you can still get into "cargo cult science" if you're not careful.
The goal isn't to get people to chant "evolution," "AGW," or whatever else the latest hot-button mantra is. The goal is to actually get an informed population to be able to critically and skeptically evaluate any proposal they are given. Otherwise they're going to be perpetually stuck in the mindset of whatever was popular back when they were kids (which is why they're not on-board with AGW today, and in 20 years adults will be preaching today's approach to AGW when something better is being argued by all the scientists of the day).
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
Well, if you ask "did humans evolve from other primates?" or something similar, it is belief that you're in fact measuring. People can answer yes/no to that without any understanding of evolution, and depending on how exactly you ask it even many people who believe evolution is responsible for the diversity of life on earth might still disagree.
If you ask "describe the essential mechanisms that must be present for evolution to occur" then you're measuring scientific literacy.
Part of the whole purpose of Bitcoin was that it was designed to not need exchanges. The exchanges capitalized on the ignorance of people who were used to using exchanges and thinking in those terms, and didn't realize that they were paying money for something they could have gotten for "free".
Bitcoin doesn't require banks for storage, but it certainly needs exchanges. What is your alternative if you have $100 in USD that you want to convert into Bitcoin? You could look on some random forum and mail a check to some random individual and hope they deposit the bitcoin in your wallet. Exchanges exist for the same reason that escrow services do - they're points of convenience and trust.
Yup - the whole distinction is mostly historical in practice. Bottom line is that DO/MD are really the only options if you want to practice medicine in the US, and colleges generally issue one or the other. Doctors attend whatever college they can get into - they're not going to toss half their options. Every DO I've seen practices exactly the same as every MD I've seen.
No argument there. I know from driver's ed that when I'm driving I should be constantly thinking about what I would do if the car in front of me came to a sudden halt, etc. The reality is that when I'm driving down the road I'm probably only giving the car 20% of my brainpower. The other 80% is spent on daydreaming, conversation, or dozing off. I doubt that I'm unique in this regard.
An automated vehicle could be continuously monitoring everything it sees, considering all kinds of scenarios for what could go wrong, and not only deciding what it should do if something went wrong, but proactively positioning itself so that in such a situation it would have as many good options as possible.
Pilots are supposed to do this sort of thing, and to some degree they do it on airliners. The pilots of a twin-engine jet operating far from an airport (such as over the ocean) will mark on their route where the point is that the closest airport changes, so that at any time they know what direction to start heading in if something goes wrong. They are checking fuel remaining against forecast to spot discrepancies (could be a problem or not). They rotate between starter units on each startup to detect possible issues, and of course they do a full walk-around even in a downpour so that if a truck clipped a protruding part of the plane they know about it. If people operated cars in the same manner we'd be a lot safer driving. With automation, this could be what driving looks like in the future, but with a computer doing all the work.
For the forseeable future however, most adults can drive a car if they needed to take over, Which brings us back to the question of whether that ability should be a requirement.
It depends on your definition of "ability to drive." Today an adult can drive a car with a 1E-8 risk of killing somebody for each mile they drive. While most seem to think that this means that people can drive cars, I'd say that it means that people can't drive cars already. It is all a matter of risk tolerance.
If I say "Head for the Dog and Duck", will it stop me in the middle of the road outside, or take me round the back into the car park?
Why would an establishment have a car park in a world full of autonomous vehicles? That seems like an incredible waste of high-value real estate. You'll just get out of your car and the car will go figure out what to do with itself, probably parking in some big cheap garage on the outskirts of town.
We're talking about a future when automated vehicles are established - not some Google prototype car that nobody would think about putting their kid in.
I don't think you understood what GP was saying. He just wanted to make sure that he wouldn't be held liable under any circumstances if A) he was not controlling the vehicle and B) he had all the required maintenance performed on the vehicle.
Presumably the car wouldn't have any means of manual control inside - certainly I wouldn't want to put a kid in a car if they could grab the wheel and do something stupid.
I can see his point. I wouldn't want to be sued for a "computer glitch" that may end up killing someone. I'm not even sure I want that on my conscience.
Oh, I fully buy into the fact that liability laws would need to be passed to handle autonomous vehicles. People who operate certified vehicles shouldn't be liable for their failures. Manufacturers who follow the law in certifying their vehicles probably shouldn't be liable for their errors either. The certification process should prevent an unacceptable fatality rate (keep in mind that today we "accept" 40k people dying in cars every year).
I own an AED and the the think does routine self-checks to ensure that in the event that it is needed it will work. There is no reason that a car couldn't do the same - with all critical components being self-tested, and with the rest covered by a periodic maintenance requirement (which the car enforces).
No, but I would require that airliners have a qualified pilot on board in case the autopilot makes a mistake.
You might want to look up the stats. Quite a few crashes are caused by the pilots on-board ignoring errors and overriding the autopilot in situations where the autopilot would have done just fine on its own.
Passenger planes are not designed today to fly autonomously, but they're not too far away from it and there are a lot of experts in aviation who wonder if the humans don't cause more problems than they solve today.
since atomicthumbs is talking about passengers in the car that would know how to drive in the event that the AI made a mistake
In real life such passengers do not exist. People are not capable of driving cars without a substantial risk of killing themselves, their passengers, and those around them. This is why they do it 40k times per year today in the US alone.
Sure, the average car passenger does it better than the average plane passenger, but nobody is going to propose sending a child off in a car driven by an AI until AIs drive a lot better than humans do today (which isn't a terribly hard hurdle to jump).
if the accident was due to malfunctioning equipment it would either be a "No fault" or treated the same as a recall or it was due to improper upkeep which would be negligence of the owner.
I'd think that improper maintenance would be a thing of the past with autonomous vehicles. The car would simply refuse to operate if it was overdue for maintenance, and it could go drive itself for repairs while you aren't using it.
Sure, in the beginning things would work as they do today, but when the auto fatality rate drops from 40k/yr to 100/yr and 99/100 of those are attributable to poor maintenance, we'll suddenly see pressure to fix that problem.
What you should be asking is would you be willing to fly in an airplane without a flight crew? While today's modern planes have fantastic autopilots that can even take off and land the plane; and while the hazards encountered while flying are very well known, the systems are not 100% full proof and do fail.
If the airplane were tested and had a demonstrated performance superior to a manned crew, then I'd be a fool to get in an airplane that had a crew onboard. Human pilots can indeed solve problems today that an autopilot cannot, but they also create problems that an autopilot would never have gotten into in the first place.
Autonomous cars may be safer than regular cars, but to assume that they won't fail is wishful thinking and dangerous.
They don't have to be infallible. They only need to be less fallible than a human driver. Humans manage to kill something like 40k people per year in the US alone. If the computer does better than that, then your odds are better off if the car doesn't have a driving wheel at all.
Again, I'm not saying the technology is there today - only that when that day comes we should embrace it. I suspect the day will come sooner for aircraft - they're not designed to be completely autonomous today, but they're already fairly close.
It would be interesting to learn how does this neural networks interact. Is it a single neural network, are several independent neural networks, that have points where they interact. Or are they interdependent neural networks, where some parts are fully independent, and other, where they mix with others ?
The more I read it is one big mess. There are areas with functional optimization which is why a stroke in a certain part of the brain tends to impact most people in the same way. However, lots of operations that we might think of as simple involve many different parts of the brain working together.
My sense is that the brain is a collection of many interconnected sub-networks. Each sub-network forms certain patterns during development, with major interconnections forming during development. The structure of neurons in the cerebellum looks completely different from what you'd find in the frontal lobe. I suspect that if you looked closely enough within the brain you'd find similar differences between the various regions of the brain.
It isn't unlike a CPU. You have circuits for storage, addition, logic, and so on, and then they're wired together in coordination. You can tweak the design of the cache without impacting the design of the ALU much. The various regions of the brain can therefore evolve a bit independently, but since any region probably is involved in many higher-level functions many changes have both advantages and disadvantages.
So, just so I am clear... When the autonomous vehicle runs someone over because it failed to "see" the person, the CEO of the company making the vehicle as well as the developers go to jail for manslaughter, right? Then I'm fine with it.
Sure, as long as when a human runs somebody over we send their parent and every driving instructor they ever had to jail for manslaughter as well.
A CEO who comes up with a car that saves the lives of the 40k people who die every year in the US from car accidents and then fails to save the life of a few odd people is a hero in my book.
Granting sufficient contextual awareness to free roaming vehicles is too intractable.
That's a pretty bold statement. Human brains can do it, and they're made out of matter. Why wouldn't a computer that is also made out of matter not be able to do the same thing?
I didn't say that it would happen tomorrow. However, at some point computers will surpass humans in driving skill - it seems inevitable to me. It is just a matter of when.
How can money held in trust for somebody else be lost other than by mismanagement? Every bank in the world holds money in trust for others and most of them manage to do it without losing track of it (and frankly they should be better-regulated than they are as it is). You just need to hold money for as little time as necessary and avoid treating the money you're holding onto like it is your personal investment account.
An exchange doesn't need to hold money. If they ran a bank and an exchange then those operations should have been isolated.
An exchange had little reason to exist at all, except to milk stupid investors. Dealing in Bitcoin did not require exchanges. AND they added exchange fees that were totally unnecessary, and which was actually a form of double-dipping.
Banks are repositories for MONEY. Bitcoin does not need repositories. There is a very huge damned difference.
All currencies are traded on exchanges today - they're a convenience. Sure, if I have a pocket full of yen there is no reason that I shouldn't be able to work out a deal with a store owner to buy some milk in the US with it. However, in practice this is fairly painful for all involved, so instead everybody just goes to an exchange where they charge totally unnecessary fees so that we can have the convenience of working in a single currency.
There will always be a need for exchanges. They act as market makers and also can function as a trusted intermediary for financial systems that do not guarantee atomic transactions (which is pretty-much all of them, especially if you want to go between two different systems).
no. the idea of an autonomous vehicle with no possible driver to override it is just plain stupid.
The idea of a manually-operated vehicle with no possibility of a more accurate automated system overriding it is just plain stupid.
It all comes down to risk. Obviously today autonomous vehicles aren't ready to take over completely. However, they will steadily improve, and it seems unlikely that human drivers will improve at all. At some point the risk of a computer causing an accident will drop below the risk of a person causing one, and at that point it becomes safer to just not let people interfere with the operation of the vehicle.
Would you consider it wise to give passengers in an airliner the ability to take over in case the pilot makes a mistake? Such a feature is far more likely to cause a disaster than avert one. Once cars get to the point where they can be operated more safely than aircraft (which are already safer than cars are today) then taking control of a car in a crisis will just be getting in the way of the proven driver: the machine.
This is where separation of concerns comes in. They're not just running an exchange in the case you describe - they're holding onto money.
Fine, they run a bank/brokerage, and an exchange. These should be separate concerns, with the exchange never holding money at all, and the bank being run like a bank.
Hence my point about the "momentary trading volume." Mt. Gox was holding far more bitcoin (or purporting to, at least) than necessary to fill trades.
I don't have a problem with them taking money and holding it for a few hours until they match everybody up at a reasonable price. If there were some kind of problem, there shouldn't have been a loss of more than a few hours of trading volume.
It had to be gross mismanagement at best. An exchange doesn't need to hold money. If they ran a bank and an exchange then those operations should have been isolated.
This is really just a bank failure by another name. Banks love to take risks with other people's money, which is why they tend to fail all the time when left to their own devices, which is why nobody leaves them to their own devices.
Those who lost money from Mt. Gox were treating it as a bank, not as an exchange. It is a lot easier to mess up the operation of a bank, or to be burned by a bank failure. That is why the FDIC was created in the US, and I imagine that most countries have similar sorts of arrangements. If somebody was storing any significant amount of money at Mt. Gox then perhaps they've learned something.
Storing your bitcoins in an unregulated bitcoin-based bank is no different than storing your US dollars in an unregulated dollar-based bank.
I agree with everything you said though - exchanges shouldn't have money at risk at all if operated properly, concerns should be separated, and even if something was messed up the exchange concern should never have more money on-hand than the momentary trading volume.
For example, a smartphone combination patent would claim: touchscreen only UI + rectangular case + fast CPU + lots of RAM + phone functionality. The period of protection would only be 5 to 7 years since it's not as innovative as a utility patent.
The iPhone was hardly the first phone that had this combination of features.
Also, the iPhone was leading in market share for quite a while after Android came along, and is still the most profitable phone on the US market, despite the fact that Apple's patents have basically done little to deter others from developing features.
A 7 year patent would mean that we'd be seeing our first android phones in a month. Apple sells something like 30-40M phones per quarter, making quite a bit of profit on each.
Also, competition from Android also has forced Apple to try to innovate. Can you imagine what the carrier deals would be like if they were the only smartphone in town? How about the terms for app publishers - Apple already controls the market with an iron hand on their platform, so you can imagine what it would be like if there were no competition.
I think patents only make sense in cases where there wouldn't be adequate advancement without them. Consumer gadgets seem to be a world where they aren't necessary. Even in realms where they're probably necessary like pharmaceuticals they could stand quite a bit of reform (switch to more of a bounty system, or allow them only until $n in profits are accrued, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
If anything could motivate me to meta-mod, this will... :)
You are looking at a potential future automatic driving cars, not the reality we have.
Sure, but that is what we're talking about. No automated car on the road today could safely transport a kid somewhere. They're not designed for that, and nobody claims it can be done today.
What the study is comparing is overall scientific literacy as a product of the comprehension of a single scientific concept.
The study had nothing to do with measuring comprehensive of the theory of evolution. It measured whether the participant agreed that humans developed from earlier species of animals. That really is a measurement of belief, not comprehension.
Suppose I ask you, "According to Lamark's theory, within a pair of identical twin bears a twin that runs frequently is not more likely to have progeny that are able to run faster than a twin that remains idle. (True/False/I-Don't-Know)" If you are scientifically literate, you should know the answer to that question is False, even though you understand that this is not an accepted scientific theory. Now, if you dropped the first 4 words in the question then you would be measuring whether you agree with Lamark's theory or not. If you prepended the question with "A majority of scientists believe that..." instead then that might be a measure of your estimation of scientific consensus.
those who willfully choose to disregard the science will, of course, be marred with an incredible blind spot in their science comprehension. inferential logic would suggest that, yes, their scientific comprehension of everything from mutagenic bacteria to human reproduction will be degraded
But that was exactly what the study tested, and they found that a response to the evolution question had no correlation with the accuracy of responses on other questions. So, science actually suggests that your hypothesis is not in fact correct, no matter how much sense it might make.
Lets say you see an accident happen and pull over to assist, you are trained in CPR or in the medical field. You reacted to data the car does not know.
Keep in mind that with automated vehicles the moment that person called for help an ambulance would be dispatched and would travel 90mph slowing down only for turns directly to the location, without a single other vehicle coming anywhere close to it. Sure, maybe a few cases will come up where help might have arrived faster without the automation, but for every one of those there will be hundreds of cases where help arrived MUCH faster than it would in today's world.
Oh, and if you have a heart attack driving and hit the help button, then your car becomes the ambulance taking you at 90mph to the nearest ER without a single other car getting in the way.
But it sure measures the amount of faith people want to put into "a wizard did it" as a valid explanation of something.
Sure, but you can still get into "cargo cult science" if you're not careful.
The goal isn't to get people to chant "evolution," "AGW," or whatever else the latest hot-button mantra is. The goal is to actually get an informed population to be able to critically and skeptically evaluate any proposal they are given. Otherwise they're going to be perpetually stuck in the mindset of whatever was popular back when they were kids (which is why they're not on-board with AGW today, and in 20 years adults will be preaching today's approach to AGW when something better is being argued by all the scientists of the day).
There is no "belief" for evolutionary principles. It is not a system of religious thought.
Well, if you ask "did humans evolve from other primates?" or something similar, it is belief that you're in fact measuring. People can answer yes/no to that without any understanding of evolution, and depending on how exactly you ask it even many people who believe evolution is responsible for the diversity of life on earth might still disagree.
If you ask "describe the essential mechanisms that must be present for evolution to occur" then you're measuring scientific literacy.
Part of the whole purpose of Bitcoin was that it was designed to not need exchanges. The exchanges capitalized on the ignorance of people who were used to using exchanges and thinking in those terms, and didn't realize that they were paying money for something they could have gotten for "free".
Bitcoin doesn't require banks for storage, but it certainly needs exchanges. What is your alternative if you have $100 in USD that you want to convert into Bitcoin? You could look on some random forum and mail a check to some random individual and hope they deposit the bitcoin in your wallet. Exchanges exist for the same reason that escrow services do - they're points of convenience and trust.
Yup - the whole distinction is mostly historical in practice. Bottom line is that DO/MD are really the only options if you want to practice medicine in the US, and colleges generally issue one or the other. Doctors attend whatever college they can get into - they're not going to toss half their options. Every DO I've seen practices exactly the same as every MD I've seen.
No argument there. I know from driver's ed that when I'm driving I should be constantly thinking about what I would do if the car in front of me came to a sudden halt, etc. The reality is that when I'm driving down the road I'm probably only giving the car 20% of my brainpower. The other 80% is spent on daydreaming, conversation, or dozing off. I doubt that I'm unique in this regard.
An automated vehicle could be continuously monitoring everything it sees, considering all kinds of scenarios for what could go wrong, and not only deciding what it should do if something went wrong, but proactively positioning itself so that in such a situation it would have as many good options as possible.
Pilots are supposed to do this sort of thing, and to some degree they do it on airliners. The pilots of a twin-engine jet operating far from an airport (such as over the ocean) will mark on their route where the point is that the closest airport changes, so that at any time they know what direction to start heading in if something goes wrong. They are checking fuel remaining against forecast to spot discrepancies (could be a problem or not). They rotate between starter units on each startup to detect possible issues, and of course they do a full walk-around even in a downpour so that if a truck clipped a protruding part of the plane they know about it. If people operated cars in the same manner we'd be a lot safer driving. With automation, this could be what driving looks like in the future, but with a computer doing all the work.
For the forseeable future however, most adults can drive a car if they needed to take over, Which brings us back to the question of whether that ability should be a requirement.
It depends on your definition of "ability to drive." Today an adult can drive a car with a 1E-8 risk of killing somebody for each mile they drive. While most seem to think that this means that people can drive cars, I'd say that it means that people can't drive cars already. It is all a matter of risk tolerance.
If I say "Head for the Dog and Duck", will it stop me in the middle of the road outside, or take me round the back into the car park?
Why would an establishment have a car park in a world full of autonomous vehicles? That seems like an incredible waste of high-value real estate. You'll just get out of your car and the car will go figure out what to do with itself, probably parking in some big cheap garage on the outskirts of town.
We're talking about a future when automated vehicles are established - not some Google prototype car that nobody would think about putting their kid in.
I don't think you understood what GP was saying. He just wanted to make sure that he wouldn't be held liable under any circumstances if A) he was not controlling the vehicle and B) he had all the required maintenance performed on the vehicle.
Presumably the car wouldn't have any means of manual control inside - certainly I wouldn't want to put a kid in a car if they could grab the wheel and do something stupid.
I can see his point. I wouldn't want to be sued for a "computer glitch" that may end up killing someone. I'm not even sure I want that on my conscience.
Oh, I fully buy into the fact that liability laws would need to be passed to handle autonomous vehicles. People who operate certified vehicles shouldn't be liable for their failures. Manufacturers who follow the law in certifying their vehicles probably shouldn't be liable for their errors either. The certification process should prevent an unacceptable fatality rate (keep in mind that today we "accept" 40k people dying in cars every year).
I own an AED and the the think does routine self-checks to ensure that in the event that it is needed it will work. There is no reason that a car couldn't do the same - with all critical components being self-tested, and with the rest covered by a periodic maintenance requirement (which the car enforces).
No, but I would require that airliners have a qualified pilot on board in case the autopilot makes a mistake.
You might want to look up the stats. Quite a few crashes are caused by the pilots on-board ignoring errors and overriding the autopilot in situations where the autopilot would have done just fine on its own.
Passenger planes are not designed today to fly autonomously, but they're not too far away from it and there are a lot of experts in aviation who wonder if the humans don't cause more problems than they solve today.
since atomicthumbs is talking about passengers in the car that would know how to drive in the event that the AI made a mistake
In real life such passengers do not exist. People are not capable of driving cars without a substantial risk of killing themselves, their passengers, and those around them. This is why they do it 40k times per year today in the US alone.
Sure, the average car passenger does it better than the average plane passenger, but nobody is going to propose sending a child off in a car driven by an AI until AIs drive a lot better than humans do today (which isn't a terribly hard hurdle to jump).
if the accident was due to malfunctioning equipment it would either be a "No fault" or treated the same as a recall or it was due to improper upkeep which would be negligence of the owner.
I'd think that improper maintenance would be a thing of the past with autonomous vehicles. The car would simply refuse to operate if it was overdue for maintenance, and it could go drive itself for repairs while you aren't using it.
Sure, in the beginning things would work as they do today, but when the auto fatality rate drops from 40k/yr to 100/yr and 99/100 of those are attributable to poor maintenance, we'll suddenly see pressure to fix that problem.
What you should be asking is would you be willing to fly in an airplane without a flight crew? While today's modern planes have fantastic autopilots that can even take off and land the plane; and while the hazards encountered while flying are very well known, the systems are not 100% full proof and do fail.
If the airplane were tested and had a demonstrated performance superior to a manned crew, then I'd be a fool to get in an airplane that had a crew onboard. Human pilots can indeed solve problems today that an autopilot cannot, but they also create problems that an autopilot would never have gotten into in the first place.
Autonomous cars may be safer than regular cars, but to assume that they won't fail is wishful thinking and dangerous.
They don't have to be infallible. They only need to be less fallible than a human driver. Humans manage to kill something like 40k people per year in the US alone. If the computer does better than that, then your odds are better off if the car doesn't have a driving wheel at all.
Again, I'm not saying the technology is there today - only that when that day comes we should embrace it. I suspect the day will come sooner for aircraft - they're not designed to be completely autonomous today, but they're already fairly close.
It would be interesting to learn how does this neural networks interact. Is it a single neural network, are several independent neural networks, that have points where they interact. Or are they interdependent neural networks, where some parts are fully independent, and other, where they mix with others ?
The more I read it is one big mess. There are areas with functional optimization which is why a stroke in a certain part of the brain tends to impact most people in the same way. However, lots of operations that we might think of as simple involve many different parts of the brain working together.
My sense is that the brain is a collection of many interconnected sub-networks. Each sub-network forms certain patterns during development, with major interconnections forming during development. The structure of neurons in the cerebellum looks completely different from what you'd find in the frontal lobe. I suspect that if you looked closely enough within the brain you'd find similar differences between the various regions of the brain.
It isn't unlike a CPU. You have circuits for storage, addition, logic, and so on, and then they're wired together in coordination. You can tweak the design of the cache without impacting the design of the ALU much. The various regions of the brain can therefore evolve a bit independently, but since any region probably is involved in many higher-level functions many changes have both advantages and disadvantages.
So, just so I am clear... When the autonomous vehicle runs someone over because it failed to "see" the person, the CEO of the company making the vehicle as well as the developers go to jail for manslaughter, right? Then I'm fine with it.
Sure, as long as when a human runs somebody over we send their parent and every driving instructor they ever had to jail for manslaughter as well.
A CEO who comes up with a car that saves the lives of the 40k people who die every year in the US from car accidents and then fails to save the life of a few odd people is a hero in my book.
Granting sufficient contextual awareness to free roaming vehicles is too intractable.
That's a pretty bold statement. Human brains can do it, and they're made out of matter. Why wouldn't a computer that is also made out of matter not be able to do the same thing?
I didn't say that it would happen tomorrow. However, at some point computers will surpass humans in driving skill - it seems inevitable to me. It is just a matter of when.
It had to be gross mismanagement at best.
No, it didn't.
How can money held in trust for somebody else be lost other than by mismanagement? Every bank in the world holds money in trust for others and most of them manage to do it without losing track of it (and frankly they should be better-regulated than they are as it is). You just need to hold money for as little time as necessary and avoid treating the money you're holding onto like it is your personal investment account.
An exchange doesn't need to hold money. If they ran a bank and an exchange then those operations should have been isolated.
An exchange had little reason to exist at all, except to milk stupid investors. Dealing in Bitcoin did not require exchanges. AND they added exchange fees that were totally unnecessary, and which was actually a form of double-dipping.
Banks are repositories for MONEY. Bitcoin does not need repositories. There is a very huge damned difference.
All currencies are traded on exchanges today - they're a convenience. Sure, if I have a pocket full of yen there is no reason that I shouldn't be able to work out a deal with a store owner to buy some milk in the US with it. However, in practice this is fairly painful for all involved, so instead everybody just goes to an exchange where they charge totally unnecessary fees so that we can have the convenience of working in a single currency.
There will always be a need for exchanges. They act as market makers and also can function as a trusted intermediary for financial systems that do not guarantee atomic transactions (which is pretty-much all of them, especially if you want to go between two different systems).
no. the idea of an autonomous vehicle with no possible driver to override it is just plain stupid.
The idea of a manually-operated vehicle with no possibility of a more accurate automated system overriding it is just plain stupid.
It all comes down to risk. Obviously today autonomous vehicles aren't ready to take over completely. However, they will steadily improve, and it seems unlikely that human drivers will improve at all. At some point the risk of a computer causing an accident will drop below the risk of a person causing one, and at that point it becomes safer to just not let people interfere with the operation of the vehicle.
Would you consider it wise to give passengers in an airliner the ability to take over in case the pilot makes a mistake? Such a feature is far more likely to cause a disaster than avert one. Once cars get to the point where they can be operated more safely than aircraft (which are already safer than cars are today) then taking control of a car in a crisis will just be getting in the way of the proven driver: the machine.
This is where separation of concerns comes in. They're not just running an exchange in the case you describe - they're holding onto money.
Fine, they run a bank/brokerage, and an exchange. These should be separate concerns, with the exchange never holding money at all, and the bank being run like a bank.
Hence my point about the "momentary trading volume." Mt. Gox was holding far more bitcoin (or purporting to, at least) than necessary to fill trades.
I don't have a problem with them taking money and holding it for a few hours until they match everybody up at a reasonable price. If there were some kind of problem, there shouldn't have been a loss of more than a few hours of trading volume.
It had to be gross mismanagement at best. An exchange doesn't need to hold money. If they ran a bank and an exchange then those operations should have been isolated.
This is really just a bank failure by another name. Banks love to take risks with other people's money, which is why they tend to fail all the time when left to their own devices, which is why nobody leaves them to their own devices.
Exchanges should not lose inventory!
Exchanges should not have inventory to lose!
Those who lost money from Mt. Gox were treating it as a bank, not as an exchange. It is a lot easier to mess up the operation of a bank, or to be burned by a bank failure. That is why the FDIC was created in the US, and I imagine that most countries have similar sorts of arrangements. If somebody was storing any significant amount of money at Mt. Gox then perhaps they've learned something.
Storing your bitcoins in an unregulated bitcoin-based bank is no different than storing your US dollars in an unregulated dollar-based bank.
I agree with everything you said though - exchanges shouldn't have money at risk at all if operated properly, concerns should be separated, and even if something was messed up the exchange concern should never have more money on-hand than the momentary trading volume.
For example, a smartphone combination patent would claim: touchscreen only UI + rectangular case + fast CPU + lots of RAM + phone functionality. The period of protection would only be 5 to 7 years since it's not as innovative as a utility patent.
The iPhone was hardly the first phone that had this combination of features.
Also, the iPhone was leading in market share for quite a while after Android came along, and is still the most profitable phone on the US market, despite the fact that Apple's patents have basically done little to deter others from developing features.
A 7 year patent would mean that we'd be seeing our first android phones in a month. Apple sells something like 30-40M phones per quarter, making quite a bit of profit on each.
Also, competition from Android also has forced Apple to try to innovate. Can you imagine what the carrier deals would be like if they were the only smartphone in town? How about the terms for app publishers - Apple already controls the market with an iron hand on their platform, so you can imagine what it would be like if there were no competition.
I think patents only make sense in cases where there wouldn't be adequate advancement without them. Consumer gadgets seem to be a world where they aren't necessary. Even in realms where they're probably necessary like pharmaceuticals they could stand quite a bit of reform (switch to more of a bounty system, or allow them only until $n in profits are accrued, etc).