Anyways, the only viable option I personally know about is regulation similar to a utility. This is both bad and good. There's a cost to the regulations - the government has to be paid and when it has to manage something, it tends to charge a lot in taxes and fees and unnecessary rules and regulations.
But on the other side of the coin, these overage fees wouldn't fly. The utility would have to document their actual cost and at the prices these fees are at, they'd be shot down. They also wouldn't be allowed to give away certain services for free, unless those services were considered a public service.
At this point, the internet is an essential service, as essential as telephone service used to be. Only slightly less important than power/water/sewage/trash pickup. All 4 of which are natural monopolies as well...
Is internet service not effectively also a natural monopoly?
In most areas there are at most 2 sets of wires, and it costs money to maintain both.
There is very little economic reason for a competitor to arise, because the existing monopolies can squeeze out any competitor trying to move in easily using well known tactics. The only reason there are 2 sets of wires is that originally, the cable TV wire could not be used to replace analog phones until technology developed in the 1990s.
A certain amount of money is needed. Outright fraud causes even the most libertarian and laissez faire government to fail. So you think anyone that thinks everyone should have to pay the taxes they owe - so taxes don't have to be raised on everyone, which just hits the people actually paying taxes instead of evading them harder - makes one a communist. I see why slashdot is dying.
Even libertarians recognize you can't have outright fraud between parties or the whole system breaks down. This includes between property owners and the government.
Trump is indirectly stealing from everyone else, because if he pays less taxes, other people have to pay more.
The problem is the companies are fraudulently claiming they can't find enough workers (for low salaries that are not really keeping up with inflation for that kind of work) and manipulating the government to raise the H1B cap. Or, they are supposed to show they tried to find American workers first, and they fraudulently list misleading employment ads, fraudulently claim they are offering more money to the H1B than they pay, and so on. It's a scam.
You like tax and bank fraud? That's what it is. Understating the value of a property like that, you're committing either tax fraud or investment fraud.
Now, of course Trump will never face charges himself, at least not criminal ones, since he can agree to pay a large "fine" instead, but that's a separate issue...
20% efficient commercial panels are readily available and only a little bit more expensive. So maybe 10.5 miles per day if it's an "average" day. Though you better not have too much shading from the house the car is parked next to, or fences, or high rise buildings, etc.
I personally think this is a good idea simply because it can at a minimum negate losses from leaving it parked and let you run the climate control if you're sitting in it. Though yeah they can't encrust the card, you'd have to embed them into the hood and roof and trunk. Maybe just a panel embedded in the roof so you can run the A/C and charge your laptop if you are stuck somewhere waiting in your car for someone.
This is a problem. I think making humans perform jobs that software or robots CAN do at all is both evil and immoral.
The reason is you're impeding progress. By impeding progress, you're costing the lives of billions of people. See, while you or I may not be fortunate enough to live long enough, at some future data, progress will reach the point that de facto immortality is possible. No longer will the people of this error live a brief life then experience eternal oblivion - their consciousness can be stored or even run distributed over a network of computers (or hardware emulators that mirror biological brain tissue precisely) and they will continue to enjoy life until they are murdered in a civilization ending war or the heat death.
We need robots to free up every job possible. We need megacities made to concentrate our best and brightest for the maximum productivity. We need less environmental laws, not more - we can bring back all the extinct species after we gain molecular control of matter and have the ability to do so easily.
It is a problem that some humans probably will get left out, but artificial restrictions on robots is not the solution. Welfare doesn't have to impede someone's self esteem.
Pick up litter? - Maybe you don't need a super-intelligence, but a robot that picks up litter doesn't mind doing it, and a bigger supervisor AI that maintains the robots also doesn't mind cleaning the bits of litter off, having no sense of smell or disgust or boredom, all of which are evolved hardcoded things in humans that make sense in the context of ourselves but are not needed for this.
Ditto everything you mentioned except teaching children. The reason why the teaching is an exception is because it requires interpreting human emotion. Since humans themselves are imprecise on what emotions they are feeling, it takes a very very complex system to make an AI that can do all this.
In any case, you're utterly, fatally wrong. Think a little bigger. In the actual universe we're in, super-intelligence creates a rat race of possibly perpetual warfare for resources as machine civilizations fight it out. Superintelligence means you can turn the rocks of a solar system into more machinery faster than your competitor, and your equipment will exploit physics to an ever more refined degree.
Well, first of all, from a practical sense, if you have a way to train a deep learning computer system to do any specific task, even if the machine doesn't have a will of it's own or the ability to learn arbitrary tasks automatically, you actually HAVE made immense progress.
Right now that training is expensive, but there's a plan to reduce that. Google has packed up their software into easy to use APIs so anyone can start on training a network to do something, and given out free courses on Udacity. Presumably, there will be more advanced versions of this soon. The fundamental computer chips are getting cheaper - Nvidia has made a big release of more powerful chips, Google has a custom ASIC for the job, etc.
So even if you can't just plug in HAL 9000 and have it do anything and everything, if you can create..."subminds" or "VIs" or something that can do thousands and thousands of SPECIFIC tasks better than humans - tasks that are well defined, and have very specific data on success and failure - you can automate millions of jobs across thousands of separate tasks.
How do you use this to get to AI? Bootstrapping. Automate the tasks of assembly of machinery in factories and of mining and resource extraction. Use the now far cheaper computers and robot hardware to build far vaster systems.
IDEALLY, you'd have all the people who were displaced become AI developers. I'm aware this is a pipe dream for several reasons but that's the ideal solution. Eventually you might have collections of neural network "solutions", where each one can do a separate task. You now train up a network to PICK a specific solution dependent on the task at hand. So now an AI connected to a robot will solve a crossword puzzle by writing if you put it in front of them, sort your fridge if you put it in front on that, etc. Machine still doesn't have goals, but presumably we could do that next.
It might be sooner than you think. It's all about the economics - as this process picks up steam and makes money, it will go vastly faster. In the past, AI was just a drain on the economy - just university researchers poking around with tiny systems that had no practical use.
It was just for BASIC? Because that quote makes a ton more sense, even at the time he allegedly made it, computers with more memory existed in use. But you have to really work at it to eat more than 640k using interpreted basic - you of course can use more, but if your program is that big it shouldn't be written in basic...
Don't forget, reasonable frame latencies. I've been wanting to get a 55" 4k to use as a computer monitor for a while now. The prices have come down to about $1800 on sale, but the current models have embarrassingly bad 50 ms+ latencies.
The reason this is embarrassing is that the physical panel changes image in under 1 millisecond. The slow latencies are because the manufacturers are skimping on the chips used to drive them (or maybe the electronics for OLED don't have fast refresh chips available yet. I don't know for sure, the VR headset teardowns show custom FPGAs in them. )
And yeah, burn in is another problem. I may have to "limp along" on a mere 4k LCD monitor for a while still. (since no burn in, and available displays have faster refresh rates than OLED TVs)
Yeah, about that. Compiling is obviously a process with tremendous interconnected dependencies. While there are multi-core compilers, one would expect mediocre scaling, especially above the "normal" 4 CPUs.
One possibility is that "deca" is the slang for "Deca Durabolin". This anabolic steroid is infamous for causing loss of sexual function as a side effect - which is in a way quite ironically amusing, as one would imagine that most steroid users are trying to make their bodies more attractive for mates of whichever gender they prefer.
The loss of sexual function is called "deca dick".
Still, one would imagine that having your monstrously powerful new CPU named after a steroid isn't the worst thing. This chip certainly is "juiced up", it's the most powerful CPU Intel has ever released.
In before the racist comments about how Chinese people, having a high population in proportion to their available territory and resources, deserve to be crammed like sardines into this thing.
Yeah. You know, most of the problems I heard of with Unions had to do with deferred benefits. If the Unions had focused their negotiations on "cash on the table" deals (or perhaps the laws had been written to discourage business deals where one party or both can easily renege on past commitments) things would have been ok. Some idiot thought it was a better idea to secure a "pension" requiring future payments (and therefore massive profits) from GM rather than a slightly bigger paycheck immediately and a good 401k matching deal.
Near as I can tell, the minimum wage is something akin to the Federal government acting like a Union on behalf of it's citizens. A mediocre union, although if you think about it there are a lot of similarities. A pension plan, the government sometimes stepping in when the employer fires you for protected class violations, etc.
A union is a way to counteract employer's immense bargaining power ("take this job at this low pay or starve") with collective bargaining "if you don't pay us more you can't have ANY employees".
I know what you're thinking - if the market were labor were completely free, where employers bid up the price they offer until they are offering just a little bit less than employer's true value to a firm - a minimum wage would create a shortage. (since employers cannot offer jobs to those who don't add more value than the wage is)
NASA is talking about (and might eventually maybe do) a mission where they go grab ONE asteroid and bring it back. Once they find a few candidates, they will obviously have to send robot probes to the candidates for a close examination. No way to do it by telescope, before you ever try to move an asteroid you need to see it at extremely close range to see it's true composition, look for cracks, etc.
Then they have some plan to send a robot spacecraft with a shit-ton of dV to bring it back. (and so they need an engine with fairly high ISP and fairly high thrust so the burns can be finished in a reasonable time period. Unfortunately the only way to get that even on paper is nuclear and they probably don't want to develop one)
And put the asteroid in an accessible place so it can be rendezvoused with and looked at in person by a chosen few astronaut geologists.
I also think Libertarians are idiots. However, in this SPECIFIC CASE they aren't totally wrong. It wouldn't ever come to the "last barrel" of oil because oil/fossil fuels happens to be distributed in increasingly hard to access deposits. So, smoothly over time, the price to recover them would go up and up and up. This creates an incentive for alternatives - and there are alternatives in this case, namely solar and nuclear, etc - to receive investment money and to compete in the energy market.
The problem is that there's basically no incentive in a totally free market world NOT to burn the oil. With no government, and since it's a tragedy of the commons thing (if I decide to waste a bunch of fuel, the negative effect on me from the tiny amount of CO2 I add is negligible whether I do it or not, even if I am suffering from the effects of global warming), the ultimate result is that we all end up overheating in a planet overburned with CO2.
Don't forget the real problem. To put the atmosphere back like it was by packing all the carbon back into a stable form, we'd need to generate as much energy to run our equipment as every last joule gained from burning fossil fuels over centuries at a minimum. More realistically we'd need something like twice that or more.
It's not impossible. In fact, IF we do develop the tech needed, in a way all this fossil fuel burning can be thought of as a "loan" to help human civilization really get industry going.
The method needed is essentially nanotechnology or more accurately "atomically precise manufacturing". In theory, some day (hopefully sooner, before we all burn up) we'll have machines made of nanorobotic subunits that are produced on production machinery that is composed of nanorobotic subunits. Hence, the machines would be able to self replicate and also make a wide variety of products.
In this case, the product you'd want would be a very thin and efficient solar panel and gas sieves that accept CO2. The machines would sieve in atmospheric CO2, convert it back to hydrocarbon or some kind of stable dry powder (maybe diamond dust?), using the energy from the sun to run the machinery. We'd have to cover the entire Sahara Desert and probably other large deserts to get this project done in a reasonable time. More robots would collect the resulting powder and we'd glue it together and dump it in the ocean to sink to the bottom or something.
All the math, theory, and rough practical design checks out for this kind of tech. Might still take a century or longer to develop, however.
You're paying massively inflated prices for panels then. It is only possible explanation. Again, go to sunelec.com. Or Ebay USA. Or Wholesalesolar. Or 50 other sites. And look for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
You just gave a textbook definition of a natural monopoly.
Anyways, the only viable option I personally know about is regulation similar to a utility. This is both bad and good. There's a cost to the regulations - the government has to be paid and when it has to manage something, it tends to charge a lot in taxes and fees and unnecessary rules and regulations.
But on the other side of the coin, these overage fees wouldn't fly. The utility would have to document their actual cost and at the prices these fees are at, they'd be shot down. They also wouldn't be allowed to give away certain services for free, unless those services were considered a public service.
At this point, the internet is an essential service, as essential as telephone service used to be. Only slightly less important than power/water/sewage/trash pickup. All 4 of which are natural monopolies as well...
Is internet service not effectively also a natural monopoly?
In most areas there are at most 2 sets of wires, and it costs money to maintain both.
There is very little economic reason for a competitor to arise, because the existing monopolies can squeeze out any competitor trying to move in easily using well known tactics. The only reason there are 2 sets of wires is that originally, the cable TV wire could not be used to replace analog phones until technology developed in the 1990s.
A certain amount of money is needed. Outright fraud causes even the most libertarian and laissez faire government to fail. So you think anyone that thinks everyone should have to pay the taxes they owe - so taxes don't have to be raised on everyone, which just hits the people actually paying taxes instead of evading them harder - makes one a communist. I see why slashdot is dying.
Even libertarians recognize you can't have outright fraud between parties or the whole system breaks down. This includes between property owners and the government.
Trump is indirectly stealing from everyone else, because if he pays less taxes, other people have to pay more.
The problem is the companies are fraudulently claiming they can't find enough workers (for low salaries that are not really keeping up with inflation for that kind of work) and manipulating the government to raise the H1B cap. Or, they are supposed to show they tried to find American workers first, and they fraudulently list misleading employment ads, fraudulently claim they are offering more money to the H1B than they pay, and so on. It's a scam.
You like tax and bank fraud? That's what it is. Understating the value of a property like that, you're committing either tax fraud or investment fraud.
Now, of course Trump will never face charges himself, at least not criminal ones, since he can agree to pay a large "fine" instead, but that's a separate issue...
20% efficient commercial panels are readily available and only a little bit more expensive. So maybe 10.5 miles per day if it's an "average" day. Though you better not have too much shading from the house the car is parked next to, or fences, or high rise buildings, etc.
I personally think this is a good idea simply because it can at a minimum negate losses from leaving it parked and let you run the climate control if you're sitting in it. Though yeah they can't encrust the card, you'd have to embed them into the hood and roof and trunk. Maybe just a panel embedded in the roof so you can run the A/C and charge your laptop if you are stuck somewhere waiting in your car for someone.
data -> date, error-era.
This is a problem. I think making humans perform jobs that software or robots CAN do at all is both evil and immoral.
The reason is you're impeding progress. By impeding progress, you're costing the lives of billions of people. See, while you or I may not be fortunate enough to live long enough, at some future data, progress will reach the point that de facto immortality is possible. No longer will the people of this error live a brief life then experience eternal oblivion - their consciousness can be stored or even run distributed over a network of computers (or hardware emulators that mirror biological brain tissue precisely) and they will continue to enjoy life until they are murdered in a civilization ending war or the heat death.
We need robots to free up every job possible. We need megacities made to concentrate our best and brightest for the maximum productivity. We need less environmental laws, not more - we can bring back all the extinct species after we gain molecular control of matter and have the ability to do so easily.
It is a problem that some humans probably will get left out, but artificial restrictions on robots is not the solution. Welfare doesn't have to impede someone's self esteem.
Pick up litter? - Maybe you don't need a super-intelligence, but a robot that picks up litter doesn't mind doing it, and a bigger supervisor AI that maintains the robots also doesn't mind cleaning the bits of litter off, having no sense of smell or disgust or boredom, all of which are evolved hardcoded things in humans that make sense in the context of ourselves but are not needed for this.
Ditto everything you mentioned except teaching children. The reason why the teaching is an exception is because it requires interpreting human emotion. Since humans themselves are imprecise on what emotions they are feeling, it takes a very very complex system to make an AI that can do all this.
In any case, you're utterly, fatally wrong. Think a little bigger. In the actual universe we're in, super-intelligence creates a rat race of possibly perpetual warfare for resources as machine civilizations fight it out. Superintelligence means you can turn the rocks of a solar system into more machinery faster than your competitor, and your equipment will exploit physics to an ever more refined degree.
Well, first of all, from a practical sense, if you have a way to train a deep learning computer system to do any specific task, even if the machine doesn't have a will of it's own or the ability to learn arbitrary tasks automatically, you actually HAVE made immense progress.
Right now that training is expensive, but there's a plan to reduce that. Google has packed up their software into easy to use APIs so anyone can start on training a network to do something, and given out free courses on Udacity. Presumably, there will be more advanced versions of this soon. The fundamental computer chips are getting cheaper - Nvidia has made a big release of more powerful chips, Google has a custom ASIC for the job, etc.
So even if you can't just plug in HAL 9000 and have it do anything and everything, if you can create..."subminds" or "VIs" or something that can do thousands and thousands of SPECIFIC tasks better than humans - tasks that are well defined, and have very specific data on success and failure - you can automate millions of jobs across thousands of separate tasks.
How do you use this to get to AI? Bootstrapping. Automate the tasks of assembly of machinery in factories and of mining and resource extraction. Use the now far cheaper computers and robot hardware to build far vaster systems.
IDEALLY, you'd have all the people who were displaced become AI developers. I'm aware this is a pipe dream for several reasons but that's the ideal solution. Eventually you might have collections of neural network "solutions", where each one can do a separate task. You now train up a network to PICK a specific solution dependent on the task at hand. So now an AI connected to a robot will solve a crossword puzzle by writing if you put it in front of them, sort your fridge if you put it in front on that, etc. Machine still doesn't have goals, but presumably we could do that next.
It might be sooner than you think. It's all about the economics - as this process picks up steam and makes money, it will go vastly faster. In the past, AI was just a drain on the economy - just university researchers poking around with tiny systems that had no practical use.
It was just for BASIC? Because that quote makes a ton more sense, even at the time he allegedly made it, computers with more memory existed in use. But you have to really work at it to eat more than 640k using interpreted basic - you of course can use more, but if your program is that big it shouldn't be written in basic...
Ironically, oppressing civil unrest creates tons of jobs for police and jailers and so forth.
Jobs that are as easy to automate as the average job is...
Don't forget, reasonable frame latencies. I've been wanting to get a 55" 4k to use as a computer monitor for a while now. The prices have come down to about $1800 on sale, but the current models have embarrassingly bad 50 ms+ latencies.
The reason this is embarrassing is that the physical panel changes image in under 1 millisecond. The slow latencies are because the manufacturers are skimping on the chips used to drive them (or maybe the electronics for OLED don't have fast refresh chips available yet. I don't know for sure, the VR headset teardowns show custom FPGAs in them. )
And yeah, burn in is another problem. I may have to "limp along" on a mere 4k LCD monitor for a while still. (since no burn in, and available displays have faster refresh rates than OLED TVs)
No shit you can use 10 cores, but how much faster is 10 than 5? Note the word "scaling"?
Yeah, about that. Compiling is obviously a process with tremendous interconnected dependencies. While there are multi-core compilers, one would expect mediocre scaling, especially above the "normal" 4 CPUs.
One possibility is that "deca" is the slang for "Deca Durabolin". This anabolic steroid is infamous for causing loss of sexual function as a side effect - which is in a way quite ironically amusing, as one would imagine that most steroid users are trying to make their bodies more attractive for mates of whichever gender they prefer.
The loss of sexual function is called "deca dick".
Still, one would imagine that having your monstrously powerful new CPU named after a steroid isn't the worst thing. This chip certainly is "juiced up", it's the most powerful CPU Intel has ever released.
In before the racist comments about how Chinese people, having a high population in proportion to their available territory and resources, deserve to be crammed like sardines into this thing.
Yeah. You know, most of the problems I heard of with Unions had to do with deferred benefits. If the Unions had focused their negotiations on "cash on the table" deals (or perhaps the laws had been written to discourage business deals where one party or both can easily renege on past commitments) things would have been ok. Some idiot thought it was a better idea to secure a "pension" requiring future payments (and therefore massive profits) from GM rather than a slightly bigger paycheck immediately and a good 401k matching deal.
Near as I can tell, the minimum wage is something akin to the Federal government acting like a Union on behalf of it's citizens. A mediocre union, although if you think about it there are a lot of similarities. A pension plan, the government sometimes stepping in when the employer fires you for protected class violations, etc.
A union is a way to counteract employer's immense bargaining power ("take this job at this low pay or starve") with collective bargaining "if you don't pay us more you can't have ANY employees".
I know what you're thinking - if the market were labor were completely free, where employers bid up the price they offer until they are offering just a little bit less than employer's true value to a firm - a minimum wage would create a shortage. (since employers cannot offer jobs to those who don't add more value than the wage is)
But it's not a free market.
NASA is talking about (and might eventually maybe do) a mission where they go grab ONE asteroid and bring it back. Once they find a few candidates, they will obviously have to send robot probes to the candidates for a close examination. No way to do it by telescope, before you ever try to move an asteroid you need to see it at extremely close range to see it's true composition, look for cracks, etc.
Then they have some plan to send a robot spacecraft with a shit-ton of dV to bring it back. (and so they need an engine with fairly high ISP and fairly high thrust so the burns can be finished in a reasonable time period. Unfortunately the only way to get that even on paper is nuclear and they probably don't want to develop one)
And put the asteroid in an accessible place so it can be rendezvoused with and looked at in person by a chosen few astronaut geologists.
I also think Libertarians are idiots. However, in this SPECIFIC CASE they aren't totally wrong. It wouldn't ever come to the "last barrel" of oil because oil/fossil fuels happens to be distributed in increasingly hard to access deposits. So, smoothly over time, the price to recover them would go up and up and up. This creates an incentive for alternatives - and there are alternatives in this case, namely solar and nuclear, etc - to receive investment money and to compete in the energy market.
The problem is that there's basically no incentive in a totally free market world NOT to burn the oil. With no government, and since it's a tragedy of the commons thing (if I decide to waste a bunch of fuel, the negative effect on me from the tiny amount of CO2 I add is negligible whether I do it or not, even if I am suffering from the effects of global warming), the ultimate result is that we all end up overheating in a planet overburned with CO2.
Don't forget the real problem. To put the atmosphere back like it was by packing all the carbon back into a stable form, we'd need to generate as much energy to run our equipment as every last joule gained from burning fossil fuels over centuries at a minimum. More realistically we'd need something like twice that or more.
It's not impossible. In fact, IF we do develop the tech needed, in a way all this fossil fuel burning can be thought of as a "loan" to help human civilization really get industry going.
The method needed is essentially nanotechnology or more accurately "atomically precise manufacturing". In theory, some day (hopefully sooner, before we all burn up) we'll have machines made of nanorobotic subunits that are produced on production machinery that is composed of nanorobotic subunits. Hence, the machines would be able to self replicate and also make a wide variety of products.
In this case, the product you'd want would be a very thin and efficient solar panel and gas sieves that accept CO2. The machines would sieve in atmospheric CO2, convert it back to hydrocarbon or some kind of stable dry powder (maybe diamond dust?), using the energy from the sun to run the machinery. We'd have to cover the entire Sahara Desert and probably other large deserts to get this project done in a reasonable time. More robots would collect the resulting powder and we'd glue it together and dump it in the ocean to sink to the bottom or something.
All the math, theory, and rough practical design checks out for this kind of tech. Might still take a century or longer to develop, however.
You're paying massively inflated prices for panels then. It is only possible explanation. Again, go to sunelec.com. Or Ebay USA. Or Wholesalesolar. Or 50 other sites. And look for yourself.