I can't agree. Our overseas bases were useless in avoiding the 9/11 attacks. When was the last time they were useful in stopping an attack against our nation or defeating the attackers? You are unable to see that we are being scammed, my fellow Citizen. Bear in mind as you answer the question that 1) Al Qaeda has not yet been "defeated" in any credible or durable sense, and 2) their main financiers, the people and governments of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, are our allies in the "War on Terror." Also, Iraq was never a threat nor did it ever attack us. North Korea either, BTW. They are all bluster and no bite. Iran is not an enemy, it is a straw man to distract us from the Arab side of the Persian Gulf.
Ha ha! I agree with you, but the point is to transfer wealth from the many to the few, not to do useful and efficient things for the many. We are in Afghanistan and Iraq because some very influential stakeholders in the US and international plutocracy are making money hand over fist. Are you going to politely ask them to stop? Good luck, Citizen.
By now it should be obvious to all that Obama is as faithful a servant to them as Dubya ever was.
Your claims about lower cost are pure speculation. The amortized cost will be unaffordably huge, the train route will be skewed by dozens of cities well away from the optimum route between major cities, truckers will not smile and bend over so that their livelihoods can be vaporized, passengers and shippers will not pay more just to use the choo-choo train when driving existing vehicles is still much cheaper, state governments cannot possibly shoulder the new debt that would be required, etc. etc.
It will not benefit west coast corridors. Air travel will still be competitive, and in California simply driving along I5 will remain the cheapest means of moving up and down the San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco corridor, and you'll save yourself the car rental when you get there. This is a huge scam foisted on voters with "Lookit the pritty choo-choo train!" propaganda to 1) sell more bonds to the states (who will end up paying double the nominal value of the bonds), and 2) shower well-connected contractors with meaty projects few people will ever use.
There is no significant, durable difference relevant to the average citizen between GW Bush and BH Obama, or between the Democrat and Republican parties. They are merely different flavors of the same profoundly corrupt corporatist plutocracy. The difference between vanilla and chocolate supermarket ice creams is a little bit of dye and a slightly different artificial flavor.
No way would I spend my own hard-earned nickels and dimes on it. If my employer were to provide one on the other hand, I'd be happy to have it. I'm only now starting to understand what the damn thing is good for (aside from video watching, social networking, and other such frivolity).
Why hasn't it occurred? Because powerful computing hardware has never been so cheap and abundant. That is the new, disruptive change. It still growing by leaps and bounds. You can already buy cards with 64 cores running linux and put them in your PC or robot. Mobile devices are already going multicore. Distributed machine learning is already a reality. Those things did not exist before. and that is why there hasn't been 50% unemployment due directly to automation. Forget Asimov and Bradbury, they did not foresee it. Try Marshall Brain instead.
You have in effect answered your own question with an attempt to qualify your claims:
If, and this is a huge if, almost all tasks that required human intervention for 'menial' tasks was taken over instantly by robots, then yes we would have a problem. A huge percentage of our workforce would suddenly not have a job, we'd have social unrest, etc. But the way that it's been happening for the past couple hundred years is that the automation has been creeping, slowly replacing tasks. Yes, people who used to work looms are no longer needed with modern cloth manufacturing, but people shift and move and retrain. There is not an additional 1% permanent underclass of loom workers out there.
The unemployment problem facing the US today is structural, due partly to automation and outsourcing, as well as to the integration of international trade and concomitantly of international labor costs. Large scale automation can only devalue labor further in an already unfavorable environment, at least for US workers. There is at least a "1% permanent underclass" not of loom workers but of people being displaced by these dynamics. Automation is only a part of it to be sure, but it will experience rapid growth over the next few decades. In my personal opinion, it will be the dominant factor within ten years or so. Lucky for you, this post will probably still be easily available online at that time. I personally challenge you to throw it in my face on Feb 9, 2020 and legitimately claim that I was wrong.
You are so off the mark it is almost cute. First and foremost, the trend towards replacing human labor with robots is occurring under a corporatist plutocratic regime, not some ill-defined "socialist system." The fruits of the robotic labor serve the plutocracy, who own the means of production. This will not change in the foreseeable future.
This is because you can only conceive of a capitalist system where you are defined by a combination of the money you have and the "productive work" you do.
Now that's just ridiculous 1990s flame-war claptrap. The notion that avoidance of all "productive work" is a worthy goal for humanity is simple-minded and childish. Nobody is claiming that in the current system you are "defined by" your job. You are raising shallow, pointless issues. This has nothing to do with "the protestant work ethic." The vast majority of the human population is not protestant, and most of them work, often starting as children. If you believe that work is "unavoidable drain on their time an energies, which could be better used elsewhere," then you really have no imagination and lack basic insight into human society and history, not to mention the very nature of "work" itself.
You have put forth no compelling arguments in favor of the elimination of human labor by machines without providing any alternatives for those displaced by them.
You're simply repeating the standard naive argument from 60 or more years ago. Eliminating "menial" labor, more commonly called "blue collar jobs," is neither scalable nor survivable. Those people will not become engineers, scientists, professionals, or "white collar" employees as your model will effectively require. While many products and services may diminish in price, a great many people will become under- or unemployed. The poverty line will go up, not down. Beware of simply accepting pop-culture notions of capitalism, they are wrong. Many counter-intuitive results will come from making machines do all the work. Those who don't own robots will be increasingly unable to participate in the economy.
However, saying that there's nothing else for you to do is false, and probably defeatist or possibly lazy
This is a gratuitous conjecture. If you are shifting all unskilled work to machines then there will in fact be nothing else for unskilled workers to do, by definition. They are not lazy, they are displaced. Eliminating all possible forms of human labor that can be more cheaply performed by machines, and doing so as quickly as possible is beyond foolhardy. It invites cataclysm.
Sure, if a machine takes your job, then it sucks for you
This would be funny if it weren't so preposterous and sociopathic. Don't worry, your turn will come.
If you can get a computer to do [those tasks] then that's a phenomenal saving, and it frees up the human to do something more interesting.
Right. That's what's been happening. Humans have been freed up to do more interesting things, and for more pay, too. Uh huh.
So, the more we make machines do more of the work people do, the more interesting work there is for the rest of us? Those of us who don't own the machines? Those of us who need to make a decent living? Does this guy live on planet earth? Can it be that in 2011 there are still people in decision-making positions who still believe that?
Yeah! Goddamn fuckin' whippersnapper little peckers.
I actually remember those days as well. More to the point, I had forgotten them long ago. Last time I got an HP box I uninstalled just about everything that wasn't absolutely positively necessary for the damn thing to work.
vendors should take seriously is the initial impression a bloated system has on their reputation
OK, upwards of 30 years past the beginning of the "microcomputer revolution," vendors are supposed to become aware of "the initial impression a bloated system has on their reputation?" What for? Who cares? What consumer gives a crap? Most consumers may even be pleased they're getting something for nothing, or the appearance of it anyway. Not being able to deal with bloatware is grounds for exclusion even from slashdot. Dude, if you can't even deal with that, how did you end up on this forum?
Sorry to be harsh, and I gather the above doesn't really apply to you in particular, but the question/complaint in TFA is utterly and completely ridiculous. It is sappy whining about a standard part of computer system commerce.
The question was ridiculous. How did such shallow crybabying get to a slashdot feature? Hasn't that poor schmuck ever heard of DIY computers and GNU/Linux? Most likely (like a lot of us), there's some have-to-have Windows software he needs, so he's screwed and has to get a cheap commercial Windows box. Bummer, man. That's the way it is.
But don't you get it? Private industry will run them! They know how to run things on time, on budget, and with a fantastic safety record! Not like that mean old incompetent government. What have those socialist assholes ever done?
Ah yes, the "private enterprise does things better than the government" meme. It is unfounded, of course, but sounds really good. This time, it's being applied to 30 year old space vehicles built for the government then operated and maintained by them (two of which suffered catastrophic failure, BTW). By some magical force (the Invisible Hand, perhaps), private enterprise will not only make them work better than ever before with a truly spartan budget, but with wealthy civilian passengers onboard!
1) Propose some bullshit idea to privatize a government function
2) Shut eyes really tight and repeat some capitalistic mumbo jumbo (any one will do)
3) ???
4) Profit!
Slashdot Mirror
My sentiments exactly. Use whatever distro you want. Use a Mac. Use Windows for all I care. Just quit whining, FFS (excellent acronym, BTW).
They log into a computer to go to a virtual kiosk? Is it a metakiosk?
I can't agree. Our overseas bases were useless in avoiding the 9/11 attacks. When was the last time they were useful in stopping an attack against our nation or defeating the attackers? You are unable to see that we are being scammed, my fellow Citizen. Bear in mind as you answer the question that 1) Al Qaeda has not yet been "defeated" in any credible or durable sense, and 2) their main financiers, the people and governments of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, are our allies in the "War on Terror." Also, Iraq was never a threat nor did it ever attack us. North Korea either, BTW. They are all bluster and no bite. Iran is not an enemy, it is a straw man to distract us from the Arab side of the Persian Gulf.
Ha ha! I agree with you, but the point is to transfer wealth from the many to the few, not to do useful and efficient things for the many. We are in Afghanistan and Iraq because some very influential stakeholders in the US and international plutocracy are making money hand over fist. Are you going to politely ask them to stop? Good luck, Citizen.
By now it should be obvious to all that Obama is as faithful a servant to them as Dubya ever was.
Your claims about lower cost are pure speculation. The amortized cost will be unaffordably huge, the train route will be skewed by dozens of cities well away from the optimum route between major cities, truckers will not smile and bend over so that their livelihoods can be vaporized, passengers and shippers will not pay more just to use the choo-choo train when driving existing vehicles is still much cheaper, state governments cannot possibly shoulder the new debt that would be required, etc. etc.
It will not benefit west coast corridors. Air travel will still be competitive, and in California simply driving along I5 will remain the cheapest means of moving up and down the San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco corridor, and you'll save yourself the car rental when you get there. This is a huge scam foisted on voters with "Lookit the pritty choo-choo train!" propaganda to 1) sell more bonds to the states (who will end up paying double the nominal value of the bonds), and 2) shower well-connected contractors with meaty projects few people will ever use.
There is no significant, durable difference relevant to the average citizen between GW Bush and BH Obama, or between the Democrat and Republican parties. They are merely different flavors of the same profoundly corrupt corporatist plutocracy. The difference between vanilla and chocolate supermarket ice creams is a little bit of dye and a slightly different artificial flavor.
10" is not enough for you?
No way would I spend my own hard-earned nickels and dimes on it. If my employer were to provide one on the other hand, I'd be happy to have it. I'm only now starting to understand what the damn thing is good for (aside from video watching, social networking, and other such frivolity).
Why hasn't it occurred? Because powerful computing hardware has never been so cheap and abundant. That is the new, disruptive change. It still growing by leaps and bounds. You can already buy cards with 64 cores running linux and put them in your PC or robot. Mobile devices are already going multicore. Distributed machine learning is already a reality. Those things did not exist before. and that is why there hasn't been 50% unemployment due directly to automation. Forget Asimov and Bradbury, they did not foresee it. Try Marshall Brain instead.
You have in effect answered your own question with an attempt to qualify your claims:
If, and this is a huge if, almost all tasks that required human intervention for 'menial' tasks was taken over instantly by robots, then yes we would have a problem. A huge percentage of our workforce would suddenly not have a job, we'd have social unrest, etc. But the way that it's been happening for the past couple hundred years is that the automation has been creeping, slowly replacing tasks. Yes, people who used to work looms are no longer needed with modern cloth manufacturing, but people shift and move and retrain. There is not an additional 1% permanent underclass of loom workers out there.
The unemployment problem facing the US today is structural, due partly to automation and outsourcing, as well as to the integration of international trade and concomitantly of international labor costs. Large scale automation can only devalue labor further in an already unfavorable environment, at least for US workers. There is at least a "1% permanent underclass" not of loom workers but of people being displaced by these dynamics. Automation is only a part of it to be sure, but it will experience rapid growth over the next few decades. In my personal opinion, it will be the dominant factor within ten years or so. Lucky for you, this post will probably still be easily available online at that time. I personally challenge you to throw it in my face on Feb 9, 2020 and legitimately claim that I was wrong.
You are so off the mark it is almost cute. First and foremost, the trend towards replacing human labor with robots is occurring under a corporatist plutocratic regime, not some ill-defined "socialist system." The fruits of the robotic labor serve the plutocracy, who own the means of production. This will not change in the foreseeable future.
This is because you can only conceive of a capitalist system where you are defined by a combination of the money you have and the "productive work" you do.
Now that's just ridiculous 1990s flame-war claptrap. The notion that avoidance of all "productive work" is a worthy goal for humanity is simple-minded and childish. Nobody is claiming that in the current system you are "defined by" your job. You are raising shallow, pointless issues. This has nothing to do with "the protestant work ethic." The vast majority of the human population is not protestant, and most of them work, often starting as children. If you believe that work is "unavoidable drain on their time an energies, which could be better used elsewhere," then you really have no imagination and lack basic insight into human society and history, not to mention the very nature of "work" itself.
You have put forth no compelling arguments in favor of the elimination of human labor by machines without providing any alternatives for those displaced by them.
The AC you are responding to is one of the many, many people who won't get it until it is far too late.
You're simply repeating the standard naive argument from 60 or more years ago. Eliminating "menial" labor, more commonly called "blue collar jobs," is neither scalable nor survivable. Those people will not become engineers, scientists, professionals, or "white collar" employees as your model will effectively require. While many products and services may diminish in price, a great many people will become under- or unemployed. The poverty line will go up, not down. Beware of simply accepting pop-culture notions of capitalism, they are wrong. Many counter-intuitive results will come from making machines do all the work. Those who don't own robots will be increasingly unable to participate in the economy.
However, saying that there's nothing else for you to do is false, and probably defeatist or possibly lazy
This is a gratuitous conjecture. If you are shifting all unskilled work to machines then there will in fact be nothing else for unskilled workers to do, by definition. They are not lazy, they are displaced. Eliminating all possible forms of human labor that can be more cheaply performed by machines, and doing so as quickly as possible is beyond foolhardy. It invites cataclysm.
Sure, if a machine takes your job, then it sucks for you
This would be funny if it weren't so preposterous and sociopathic. Don't worry, your turn will come.
I'm glad you don't do QA where I work.
Are you equating the elimination of human labor with progress?
The ones with the most heavily funded lobbyists will win. Innovation and efficiency always take a back seat, if they're in the car at all.
If you can get a computer to do [those tasks] then that's a phenomenal saving, and it frees up the human to do something more interesting.
Right. That's what's been happening. Humans have been freed up to do more interesting things, and for more pay, too. Uh huh.
So, the more we make machines do more of the work people do, the more interesting work there is for the rest of us? Those of us who don't own the machines? Those of us who need to make a decent living? Does this guy live on planet earth? Can it be that in 2011 there are still people in decision-making positions who still believe that?
Tech company CEO decides to put engineers in positions of responsibility.
Brilliant, Holmes, brilliant! Why didn't we think of this before!
In Soviet Russia the space mission aborts you!
Yeah! Goddamn fuckin' whippersnapper little peckers.
I actually remember those days as well. More to the point, I had forgotten them long ago. Last time I got an HP box I uninstalled just about everything that wasn't absolutely positively necessary for the damn thing to work.
vendors should take seriously is the initial impression a bloated system has on their reputation
OK, upwards of 30 years past the beginning of the "microcomputer revolution," vendors are supposed to become aware of "the initial impression a bloated system has on their reputation?" What for? Who cares? What consumer gives a crap? Most consumers may even be pleased they're getting something for nothing, or the appearance of it anyway. Not being able to deal with bloatware is grounds for exclusion even from slashdot. Dude, if you can't even deal with that, how did you end up on this forum?
Sorry to be harsh, and I gather the above doesn't really apply to you in particular, but the question/complaint in TFA is utterly and completely ridiculous. It is sappy whining about a standard part of computer system commerce.
What are you, 60 years old?
The question was ridiculous. How did such shallow crybabying get to a slashdot feature? Hasn't that poor schmuck ever heard of DIY computers and GNU/Linux? Most likely (like a lot of us), there's some have-to-have Windows software he needs, so he's screwed and has to get a cheap commercial Windows box. Bummer, man. That's the way it is.
But don't you get it? Private industry will run them! They know how to run things on time, on budget, and with a fantastic safety record! Not like that mean old incompetent government. What have those socialist assholes ever done?
Ah yes, the "private enterprise does things better than the government" meme. It is unfounded, of course, but sounds really good. This time, it's being applied to 30 year old space vehicles built for the government then operated and maintained by them (two of which suffered catastrophic failure, BTW). By some magical force (the Invisible Hand, perhaps), private enterprise will not only make them work better than ever before with a truly spartan budget, but with wealthy civilian passengers onboard!
1) Propose some bullshit idea to privatize a government function
2) Shut eyes really tight and repeat some capitalistic mumbo jumbo (any one will do)
3) ???
4) Profit!