While "autopilot" is engaged, you do have visibility to "what the car sees" on the screen. That tells you what obstacles it sees as well as where it thinks the vehicle lanes are. If they don't seem to make sense to what you see, then it's time to take over.
Like the "autopilot" in planes, when the cruise control take over, it reduces cognitive load because the driver doesn't need to pay attention to as many things. That translates into less stress and the ability to pay attention for longer.
If the driver does other things instead, that's really the driver's fault. Though Tesla's marketing isn't really helping on that front, either.
Bumping this up for visibility, because the AC is spot on.
Everything I've heard from Tesla owners driving moderate to long distances is that it's far less stressful with autopilot. Much less mental fatigue, because there's a lot less you need to do. It's not nothing, but when your car largely stays in its lane, slows for traffic ahead of you, auto-brakes if there's an obstruction, monitors your blind spots, turns on the wipers when it rains, and figures out how far you can go before recharging and suggests convenient charge stations and guides you to them, there's a ton less you need to be thinking about. Watch the road, make sure it's seeing what you're seeing, and it will get you where you want to go.
So because technology fails one time we should give up on it?
Both your example and the one in the article have been addressed at this point. And due to only one or two issues, the technology has been fixed on every model of that vehicle.
That's the nice thing about technology.
The second, significant failure in your reasoning is not considering the lives saved with the technology working correctly. While it's not an easy calculation, ignoring the benefit and focusing on the harm can easily lead you to cause more damage if you decide to forego the technology.
Last, "If the person hadn't decided to drive drunk, they likely wouldn't have caused a crash that killed someone."
We haven't been able to patch that yet. We have patched the Boeing 737 Max 8 problem along with the Tesla lane-following problem. I would argue that the things we can fix that kill people are far less dangerous than the things we can't (or won't) fix that kill far more people.
There are plenty of examples of people very dutifully following the instructions from their GPS into trouble despite it being painfully obvious that the GPS instructions were faulty in some way.
But seriously, I completely agree. It takes very little to confuse, fool, or distract a human. There is nothing surprising about being able to do that, nor should there be something surprising about being able to do the same to a machine with sensory input. The difference is that you can reprogram the machine to not do that next time. Humans are surprisingly resistant to learning not to do dumb shit, and all it takes is a night with no sleep or a bit of trauma in their lives, and humans tend to become a mess at doing lots of things they formerly did well.
And it doesn't even require that! Humans have brain malfunctions all the time. We are amazingly bad at driving. I continue to be amazed at how people can get into accidents at stop lights in broad daylight. For another great example, (and some laughs) go find some pictures on the internet of people driving vehicles too tall under things which are too short. Dumptrucks with the beds raised. Excavators with the arms up being pulled on a trailer. Tractor trailers driven under very clearly marked low bridges getting their tops ripped off. Rental trucks stuck in drive-thrus.
Your average human almost certainly is a better driver than the current state of the art machine but some machines have already surpassed some humans and they are getting better all the time while human drivers aren't.
Human drivers also have a bell-curve in terms of ability with age. And 10 years from now a 16 year old driver is going to be just as bad as a 16 year old driver now. Self-driving software will have decades or centuries of additional experience at that point, and possibly more. One thing that's important to recognize is that humans learn in series, while software can learn in massive parallel. And when a human dies, we're not yet able to copy the learning in their brain into the brain of a fresh human to pick up where we left off.
Aaah, yes, how could I forget that step? I was just automatically ordering a Venti when I could have just ordered a Short!
Tell me, when was the last time you went into a restaurant and ordered a small burger, and they accommodated you? Is that common where you live? Because it's not common anywhere I've lived.
Most places do not offer burgers of different sizes. I've been to a few places where you could order x number of patties stacked on the burger, but that's about it. In any non-fast-food restaurant, even that's not common. And who wants a bunch of thin, dry, overcooked patties anyway? A big, thick, juicy patty pink in the middle is where it's at.
Thanks for the info! I'm guessing I've had the new recipe, since I had one last week. It's clear that I've only seen the old nutrition information, and I didn't realize that they changed recipes.
The one I had last week was plenty burger enough for me to ask the waitress to make sure I got the right thing. If that was the one with 50 less calories, a bit less saturated fat, less sodium, and some fiber, sign me up. That was a decent burger.
Check the replies in this thread. A bunch of us have had the Impossible burger, and it's no joke. It's as good as any fast food burger. No, it's not going to beat a farm-to-table black angus burger stuffed with mushrooms and blue cheese, but it's more than passable for a fast food burger.
Sometimes I want a burger. Specifically, I want the taste of a burger, but I don't always feel like dropping a greasy hunk of burger into my stomach.
Previously, my go-to was a spicy black bean patty with bacon on it. Bun, spicy beans, lettuce, pico, bacon. Not quite a hamburger, but damn tasty. Fits the bill decently when I don't want something so heavy.
Now I've got a new option. I can get a patty that's like 100 calories less than a typical burger, but which looks and tastes like a burger, and fills that "I want a burger but not a food coma" hole. I got one last week, and it was pretty much identical to a normal burger. However, 5 hrs later I was hungry again, and I never got that greasy full feeling you can get when you pound too much ground beef.
If you're an environmentalist, you know livestock are bad for the planet. If you can't give up your burger, now you've got an option to choose a more friendly one.
Again in my opinion, the impossible burger tries too hard to be meat, and has an artificial "grilled" taste that lingers in the mouth like old grease.
I didn't find it artificial tasting. It does indeed try very hard to be meat, however, and largely succeeds at that. This isn't a burger for vegans, it's a burger for meat eaters.
If you don't like or normally don't eat meat, you won't like the Impossible burger.
The first time I had it, it came with vegan cheese which really ruined the burger.
The second time I had it I put cheddar and bacon on it. Better than most fast food burgers I've had by quite a bit. I checked to make sure that it was indeed the right patty, and the waitress laughed and said I was the second person who needed confirmation in as many minutes.
What's a little stupid about it is that it's about as unhealthy as a regular burger. I was expecting it to be healthier, maybe have some fiber and less fat, but it's just slightly fewer calories and just as fatty. Better for the earth, but not all that much better for consumer. But I guess that's why it can masquerade as a burger so well.
I tried smart compose for all of one email, and every single suggestion it had was laughably off. I gave it 3 paragraphs to be useful, and it's clear that it's nowhere near useful. And it's not like I was typing something complicated - I was discussing trip logistics with a family member. There was not a single suggestion that I would have remotely considered selecting. It was baffling.
I'm unclear who wants this sort of "help". It's so half-baked and shitty that I can't help but think that it's just more data collection that they hope will be useful in the future. It is 100% not ready for prime-time, unless you're writing at a 3rd grade level or below. And even then, I kind-of doubt it.
Michelin star chefs need Michelin star ingredients, and those come from all corners of the world, the rarer the better. It's not really feasible to have an army of millions of specialized robots geographically disbursed tending to the thousands of niche crops needed to provide gourmet food. Terrior is a problem we've not really solved fully yet, and we're not that close to being able to create growing conditions locally for anywhere near the number of animals and plants that would be needed. Pink peppercorns, Chardonnay grapes, kelp, sturgeon, truffles, tuna, bananas, civet coffee, vanilla beans, wild blueberries, moose, crayfish, agave.....the list goes on and on.
The only practical way to have the best of these things available for the elite is if they are cultivated and distributed widely by everyone else. Someone needs to sort through thousands of every one of these things to pick out the best, and something needs to be done with the rest of them. Nobody grows one grape vine and makes one bottle of wine out of it each year because it's the best of the best. The best grapes from an entire vineyard are selected each year, and then the best barrels of the resulting wine are selected, then the best blends of the best barrels is what makes it to the top.
While theoretically robots could do all of it some day, we're far from robots being able to do any appreciable amount of it now. And that's just for food. Add in all the rest of the stuff and the infrastructure needed for that stuff, and we're a long, long way from the elite being self-sufficient.
It's one thing to lay out soft skills that a lot of people don't have and say that's where jobs lie in the future. It's a whole different ballgame to ignore the fact that computers are already making inroads there, and already are better than some percent of the population at those things. Unless the authors are expecting technology to suddenly go in reverse, they're packing bags for a ship that's already sailed.
Nice summary. I concur on all parts, but would add the following about "sustainer".
This is an immediate, long term cost sink, like IT always is. So if it makes more jobs than the AI replaces then AI isn't cost effective/competitive.
I agree on the second part, but not entirely on the first part.
As we've seen a million times over, a lot of companies will buy technology and then just use it until it's well past end-of-life, with no plans to update or recover from failure.
Think of all the factories running equipment on Windows 95 boxes still. All the companies still running XP because they built an in-house app that only works in Internet Explorer. All the places where people's sole job is to transfer data between unconnected systems.
AI is going to be handled just like this in a lot of places. The AI sorting for the factory is going to work good enough, so it's just going to sit there and do it's job until the computer it's on dies or the line is decommissioned. The telephone tree AI is going to mostly work, and Brenda will recognize that all the calls on Product X need to get forwarded to James because the AI doesn't get it right. And that will go on for years.
And a major selling point of AI is that it self-corrects. It's not like machine learning where if it's consistently wrong you wipe it and provide a better training set. Theoretically, you deploy AI and it figures shit out for itself. That should definitely reduce the amount of labor required.
I don't disagree on our issues with wealth inequality, but I think you're being a little short-sighted.
Because the King didn't need the Serfs to buy their products. The King doesn't need us.
The king might think that, but he's dead wrong.
If the king wants to watch movies or TV, he needs us to subsidize them. If the king wants to drive on a road, he needs us to subsidize them. If the king wants to eat food, either he's growing it all himself on his estate, or he needs us to plant, pick, process, and transport that food. If the king wants to go on the internet, he needs us to be creating things to do there, or it will be empty. If the king wants to listen to music, he either has to hire thousands of his own musicians, or he needs us to subsidize the vast variety of music in the world. If the king wants a car, plane, or boat, he's going to have to pay for all of the raw materials, all of the processing, all of the engineering, all of construction, all of the spare parts, all of the training, all the infrastructure for all that, or he needs us to be doing all of that already so he can just select he best of that for himself.
The elite can't have the lifestyle they currently have without all of us doing the shit we're doing for ourselves already. They are definitely able to select the best of the best, but that doesn't exist at all without the rest of us making it for ourselves to begin with.
I suspect that the old practice of wealthy families employing full-time household servants will make a significant comeback over the next couple of decades, when legions of low-skill but able-bodied people find themselves irresistibly replaced by software and robotics.
I thought this as well at one point, but then I realized that robotics are going to fill this niche. Sure, some people will want a human touch, but a lot will just want the Roomba 2035 to do it's job without judging as they sit around playing with their junk.
While we don't have an automated laundry and dryer system yet, once that's done we'll have automated a lot of the household chores. Automated lawn mowers are becoming more viable, automated floor sweepers have been around for a decade now, dishwashers and microwaves for 30+ years, Nest and the like mean you don't even pay attention to your thermostat anymore, etc., etc. A friend has a Shiatsu massage chair. Probably not as good as a real Shiatsu massage, but available with the flip of a switch 24 hrs a day.
Unskilled labor is barely viable with our current technology. I don't see it becoming more viable as time goes on, only less. Sure, some may want to pay for humans to do a job worse for more money for some sort of status or ego boost, but I don't foresee enough people wanting to to offset all the jobs lost.
Sure. But this isn't moral value. It's economic value. And increasingly, a lot of people aren't economically valuable enough that they can keep themselves housed, fed, healthy, and happy.
The big question is what do we do for these people? The article suggests that if we just give them access to the internet they can educate themselves into an economically valuable worker, and all our problems will be solved. But it ignores that a) not everyone is capable of educating themselves to the level necessary, and b) even a moderate level of education may not be sufficient in the future to compete with robots, automation, and AI/machine learning.
I agree that everyone has value. The question is how we ensure their health and happiness if it's not economically viable to have them working to support themselves.
We are walking up the ladder of job complexity due to technology, leaving behind more and more people incapable of educating themselves up for the jobs of the future. There will indeed be a massive and growing class of the unemployed and the unemployable as programmed machines take over the lower level jobs, many of which are the entry level jobs that start one off in work life......A huge percentage of the human population is only suited to lower level manual labor.
Indeed.
Every time an article like this comes up, a bunch of people show up and say, "There will be jobs we haven't even thought of yet, and those people can be retrained to do them." While I'm a pretty creative person, I struggle to come up with a future unskilled job that won't be done by robots and machine learning better and faster than it could be done by humans. Nobody is going to come up with a new job and not throw AI and robotics at it first. Humans won't even be considered for it, and the tasks won't be designed to be done by a human anyway. All the VC money being thrown out right now is going to startups which promise a revolution doing exactly this.
The first hologram world guides aren't going to be humans. It's going to be, "Hey Alexa, where's the strip club?" You're not going to give a valet the keys to your flying car. Dive bars and chain restaurants are going to profit immensely from automated service. Sit down, have your eye scanned, and your preferred meal and beverage are delivered to you and billed to you. All while checking out super realistic titties at the hologram world strip club beamed into your eye.
We are seriously nearing a time where a lot of the stripping, table waiting, cooking, and bartending jobs may be in serious peril. Combine that with what Boston Dynamics is doing, and we've got a lot of people to find jobs for in the near future that don't have the capacity to build skills that can't be replicated by technology.
I think the gig economy is the canary in the coal mine. We're already seeing a lot of people doing a bunch of random part-time jobs because they can't find reliable full-time jobs. At the moment, it's still cheaper to hire them (and not provide benefits, and thus force society to subsidize them) than it is to invest in automation. This won't be true of any new businesses, however. And it's not necessarily going to remain true, especially if we decide that businesses can't pay their employees so little that they need social welfare services to survive.
Implementing the vacations/more sick days/ etc would negatively affect stock values for shareholders.
Citation very much needed. Because most of the existing research shows that reducing employee work hours doesn't impact productivity. Employees do something like 30 hrs of real work every week, if that. Making them happier and less stressed ups productivity rather than reducing it.
And if you really think that it's illegal to do something like this, then put your money where your mouth is and buy some stock. Pull out the research that more hours doesn't mean more productivity, and costs the company more in salaries and business expenses, and sue them.
At this very moment the flip side of the coin is happening, and if it's actually something you could punish a company for doing, you could do so.
I think you have a lot of very, very insightful points, but you've missed a few things, and I don't really agree with your initial premise.
The market approach can fail in the case of monopolies and certain niche cases summed up by the tragedy of the commons (pollution is the most common example) and the prisoner's dilemma.
There are a few other ways it can fail.
The average person is not very good at estimating the TCO of any product. In addition, they're not good at weighing cost vs features. Advertising, especially misleading advertising, can very effectively convince people to not follow market forces, and to not buy the more cost-effective product. This is not uncommon, and it's a major driver of legislation.
In an ideal world, advertising wouldn't do more than educate. Unfortunately, we've gotten really, really good at it, and we can get people to do all sorts of self-defeating shit with advertising. Due to this, we can't just rely on market forces to shake out the way we'd hope. A lack of enforcement for truth-in-advertising compounds this.
A second way market forces can fall is when corporations exert undue influence on government. While monopolies do this well, even without a monopoly a block of companies can really push a legislative agenda to benefit them, at the expense of the general population. With the travesty which was Citizens United, it's now easier than ever for a couple of companies to throw a lot of money into a PAC and influence government.
If we could separate government from corporate influence, it would be a different story. At that point, theoretically companies would have to compete on the merits of their products, and governments would be the will and voice of their people. Neither is happening at the moment, and that's a problem.
That's what makes the U.S. approach to government so effective. Tens of thousands of local governments get to try both the regulatory and free market approach.
But this is where the neocon platform shifts from "The red states don't oppose things the left favors per se. They typically favor a market-centric approach." to straight up hypocrisy. As the summary noted,
Meanwhile, Tennessee's state House and Senate have passed a different kind of bill -- one that bans local Tennessee governments from regulating plastic bags,
That (and similar bills) has happened in a number of other states, often very red states.
You say,
That's a common misconception by the left - that the red states oppose anything the left favors out of spite or ignorance.
But then we see shit like this, where the "small government, free market" republicans are willing to pass legislation that curtails local control, and enforces a market position which may not be the most cost effective one, all factors considered. (And that includes pollution, environmental damage, and climate change.) When a solid percent of republicans are climate change deniers, cynical hypocritical legislation like this can only seem to be done out of spite.
How else do you explain banning local governments from passing regulations to protect the environment, or even talking about climate change?
If it was the more big-government-friendly democrats doing this, and it was for social works, it's what we'd be expecting. When republicans are not allowing local governments to govern, and their legislation is focused on what are generally considered liberal issues, enacted by liberal pockets in their state, I don't see how you argue that it's not pure spite.
Wow. You either didn't read or didn't understand my post. Since this seems to be hard for you, I'll try again:
Maybe you assume everything is recorded all the time, but most people don't.
My expectations are that most/. readers are not "most people", and thus Buzzfeed clickbait headlines designed for "most people" are inappropriate for this audience.
An article and/or headline making a statement regarding what I think is a lazy and condescending way to write. There is no reason to do it, and no value in communicating like that.
I expect journalists to be able to write better than that.
If journalists can't, I expect/. submitters to do better.
If/. submitters can't, I expect/. editors to.
And if/. editors can't, I expect/. posters to point out this long chain of failing. If we don't demand at least some minimal standards, we might as well just go to reddit.
Yep. Mix of not having access to the vehicle, and possibly the vehicle not being functional enough to do this without specialized know-how.
Also, right after you're in an accident you're probably not in "delete my browser history" mode. More than likely, top priorities are a) Am I and my passengers ok? b) Are the other people/things involved ok? c) Is my car totaled? Do I need to find a repair place or just buy a new one? d) Holy crap, I need to get home, I need a new car to drive now!....h)Wait....did I leave any personal stuff in my car?....y) Wait....did I leave any personal information in my car that someone could potentially access if they hooked up a computer to it in the junkyard?
Right? Fuck the editors who write these headlines, fuck their supervisors who don't fire them, fuck the submitter for including them, and fuck the/. editors for just rubber stamping shit like this.
No, they don't keep more data than I think. Honestly, I bet they keep less. I expect them to keep everything. Seat position. Temperature profile. Mirror positions. Then between the seat and mirrors they calculate my body size and keep that. And cross-reference the in-car camera that they take pictures of me with, and the seat firmness to gauge my weight. They've got my age and hearing nailed down, since they can cross-reference volume with the rest of my physical stats and get my BMI.
Eye-gaze tracking plus exterior cameras means they watch what I look at. Know my sexual orientation, what animals I like, and whether or not my eyesight is good enough to read signs. And what stores I visit.
Seriously, fuck these headlines. No. They don't keep more detail than I think. I'm a paranoid fuck who understands full well how much they have access to and what they could do with it. And they surprisingly seem to keep less and do less. I've spent like 2 decades hoping that/. could get a headline worthy of the audience, but I'm always disappointed.
"Dumbasses don't factory reset their Teslas, and leave a lot of personal info in them."
Slashdot Mirror
While "autopilot" is engaged, you do have visibility to "what the car sees" on the screen. That tells you what obstacles it sees as well as where it thinks the vehicle lanes are. If they don't seem to make sense to what you see, then it's time to take over.
Like the "autopilot" in planes, when the cruise control take over, it reduces cognitive load because the driver doesn't need to pay attention to as many things. That translates into less stress and the ability to pay attention for longer.
If the driver does other things instead, that's really the driver's fault. Though Tesla's marketing isn't really helping on that front, either.
Bumping this up for visibility, because the AC is spot on.
Everything I've heard from Tesla owners driving moderate to long distances is that it's far less stressful with autopilot. Much less mental fatigue, because there's a lot less you need to do. It's not nothing, but when your car largely stays in its lane, slows for traffic ahead of you, auto-brakes if there's an obstruction, monitors your blind spots, turns on the wipers when it rains, and figures out how far you can go before recharging and suggests convenient charge stations and guides you to them, there's a ton less you need to be thinking about. Watch the road, make sure it's seeing what you're seeing, and it will get you where you want to go.
So because technology fails one time we should give up on it?
Both your example and the one in the article have been addressed at this point. And due to only one or two issues, the technology has been fixed on every model of that vehicle.
That's the nice thing about technology.
The second, significant failure in your reasoning is not considering the lives saved with the technology working correctly. While it's not an easy calculation, ignoring the benefit and focusing on the harm can easily lead you to cause more damage if you decide to forego the technology.
Last, "If the person hadn't decided to drive drunk, they likely wouldn't have caused a crash that killed someone."
We haven't been able to patch that yet. We have patched the Boeing 737 Max 8 problem along with the Tesla lane-following problem. I would argue that the things we can fix that kill people are far less dangerous than the things we can't (or won't) fix that kill far more people.
There are plenty of examples of people very dutifully following the instructions from their GPS into trouble despite it being painfully obvious that the GPS instructions were faulty in some way.
Really? That could never happen!
But seriously, I completely agree. It takes very little to confuse, fool, or distract a human. There is nothing surprising about being able to do that, nor should there be something surprising about being able to do the same to a machine with sensory input. The difference is that you can reprogram the machine to not do that next time. Humans are surprisingly resistant to learning not to do dumb shit, and all it takes is a night with no sleep or a bit of trauma in their lives, and humans tend to become a mess at doing lots of things they formerly did well.
And it doesn't even require that! Humans have brain malfunctions all the time. We are amazingly bad at driving. I continue to be amazed at how people can get into accidents at stop lights in broad daylight. For another great example, (and some laughs) go find some pictures on the internet of people driving vehicles too tall under things which are too short. Dumptrucks with the beds raised. Excavators with the arms up being pulled on a trailer. Tractor trailers driven under very clearly marked low bridges getting their tops ripped off. Rental trucks stuck in drive-thrus.
Your average human almost certainly is a better driver than the current state of the art machine but some machines have already surpassed some humans and they are getting better all the time while human drivers aren't.
Human drivers also have a bell-curve in terms of ability with age. And 10 years from now a 16 year old driver is going to be just as bad as a 16 year old driver now. Self-driving software will have decades or centuries of additional experience at that point, and possibly more. One thing that's important to recognize is that humans learn in series, while software can learn in massive parallel. And when a human dies, we're not yet able to copy the learning in their brain into the brain of a fresh human to pick up where we left off.
Nope. Been going on for a few days now.
Aaah, yes, how could I forget that step? I was just automatically ordering a Venti when I could have just ordered a Short!
Tell me, when was the last time you went into a restaurant and ordered a small burger, and they accommodated you? Is that common where you live? Because it's not common anywhere I've lived.
Most places do not offer burgers of different sizes. I've been to a few places where you could order x number of patties stacked on the burger, but that's about it. In any non-fast-food restaurant, even that's not common. And who wants a bunch of thin, dry, overcooked patties anyway? A big, thick, juicy patty pink in the middle is where it's at.
I'm a little curious - what are your go-tos for those sorts of foods? It's obviously not most tofu available in grocery stores.
Thanks for the info! I'm guessing I've had the new recipe, since I had one last week. It's clear that I've only seen the old nutrition information, and I didn't realize that they changed recipes.
The one I had last week was plenty burger enough for me to ask the waitress to make sure I got the right thing. If that was the one with 50 less calories, a bit less saturated fat, less sodium, and some fiber, sign me up. That was a decent burger.
Check the replies in this thread. A bunch of us have had the Impossible burger, and it's no joke. It's as good as any fast food burger. No, it's not going to beat a farm-to-table black angus burger stuffed with mushrooms and blue cheese, but it's more than passable for a fast food burger.
Sometimes I want a burger. Specifically, I want the taste of a burger, but I don't always feel like dropping a greasy hunk of burger into my stomach.
Previously, my go-to was a spicy black bean patty with bacon on it. Bun, spicy beans, lettuce, pico, bacon. Not quite a hamburger, but damn tasty. Fits the bill decently when I don't want something so heavy.
Now I've got a new option. I can get a patty that's like 100 calories less than a typical burger, but which looks and tastes like a burger, and fills that "I want a burger but not a food coma" hole. I got one last week, and it was pretty much identical to a normal burger. However, 5 hrs later I was hungry again, and I never got that greasy full feeling you can get when you pound too much ground beef.
If you're an environmentalist, you know livestock are bad for the planet. If you can't give up your burger, now you've got an option to choose a more friendly one.
Again in my opinion, the impossible burger tries too hard to be meat, and has an artificial "grilled" taste that lingers in the mouth like old grease.
I didn't find it artificial tasting. It does indeed try very hard to be meat, however, and largely succeeds at that. This isn't a burger for vegans, it's a burger for meat eaters.
If you don't like or normally don't eat meat, you won't like the Impossible burger.
The first time I had it, it came with vegan cheese which really ruined the burger.
The second time I had it I put cheddar and bacon on it. Better than most fast food burgers I've had by quite a bit. I checked to make sure that it was indeed the right patty, and the waitress laughed and said I was the second person who needed confirmation in as many minutes.
What's a little stupid about it is that it's about as unhealthy as a regular burger. I was expecting it to be healthier, maybe have some fiber and less fat, but it's just slightly fewer calories and just as fatty. Better for the earth, but not all that much better for consumer. But I guess that's why it can masquerade as a burger so well.
I tried smart compose for all of one email, and every single suggestion it had was laughably off. I gave it 3 paragraphs to be useful, and it's clear that it's nowhere near useful. And it's not like I was typing something complicated - I was discussing trip logistics with a family member. There was not a single suggestion that I would have remotely considered selecting. It was baffling.
I'm unclear who wants this sort of "help". It's so half-baked and shitty that I can't help but think that it's just more data collection that they hope will be useful in the future. It is 100% not ready for prime-time, unless you're writing at a 3rd grade level or below. And even then, I kind-of doubt it.
I think that's a long way off.
Michelin star chefs need Michelin star ingredients, and those come from all corners of the world, the rarer the better. It's not really feasible to have an army of millions of specialized robots geographically disbursed tending to the thousands of niche crops needed to provide gourmet food. Terrior is a problem we've not really solved fully yet, and we're not that close to being able to create growing conditions locally for anywhere near the number of animals and plants that would be needed. Pink peppercorns, Chardonnay grapes, kelp, sturgeon, truffles, tuna, bananas, civet coffee, vanilla beans, wild blueberries, moose, crayfish, agave.....the list goes on and on.
The only practical way to have the best of these things available for the elite is if they are cultivated and distributed widely by everyone else. Someone needs to sort through thousands of every one of these things to pick out the best, and something needs to be done with the rest of them. Nobody grows one grape vine and makes one bottle of wine out of it each year because it's the best of the best. The best grapes from an entire vineyard are selected each year, and then the best barrels of the resulting wine are selected, then the best blends of the best barrels is what makes it to the top.
While theoretically robots could do all of it some day, we're far from robots being able to do any appreciable amount of it now. And that's just for food. Add in all the rest of the stuff and the infrastructure needed for that stuff, and we're a long, long way from the elite being self-sufficient.
Supply chains are necessary, even for a king.
It's pretty impossible that complex reasoning, creativity, social and emotional intelligence, and sensory perception will ever be done by a machine.
I mean, all that machines can do for creativity now is create art in multiple styles including abstract weirdness like Dali, create photorealistic art based on crude drawings supplied as source material, write shitty stories, and create pop songs. There's no way that they will ever do more than that in the future, right?
I'm sure that they will never be able to sense emotions in people, nor will they replace a therapist. We certainly won't try to get AI to determine if people are likely to be criminals or re-offend if they have been convicted before.
Computers definitely will never be able to see and sort things, smell, recognize songs, or have a sense of touch or feel pain.
It's one thing to lay out soft skills that a lot of people don't have and say that's where jobs lie in the future. It's a whole different ballgame to ignore the fact that computers are already making inroads there, and already are better than some percent of the population at those things. Unless the authors are expecting technology to suddenly go in reverse, they're packing bags for a ship that's already sailed.
Nice summary. I concur on all parts, but would add the following about "sustainer".
This is an immediate, long term cost sink, like IT always is. So if it makes more jobs than the AI replaces then AI isn't cost effective/competitive.
I agree on the second part, but not entirely on the first part.
As we've seen a million times over, a lot of companies will buy technology and then just use it until it's well past end-of-life, with no plans to update or recover from failure.
Think of all the factories running equipment on Windows 95 boxes still. All the companies still running XP because they built an in-house app that only works in Internet Explorer. All the places where people's sole job is to transfer data between unconnected systems.
AI is going to be handled just like this in a lot of places. The AI sorting for the factory is going to work good enough, so it's just going to sit there and do it's job until the computer it's on dies or the line is decommissioned. The telephone tree AI is going to mostly work, and Brenda will recognize that all the calls on Product X need to get forwarded to James because the AI doesn't get it right. And that will go on for years.
And a major selling point of AI is that it self-corrects. It's not like machine learning where if it's consistently wrong you wipe it and provide a better training set. Theoretically, you deploy AI and it figures shit out for itself. That should definitely reduce the amount of labor required.
I don't disagree on our issues with wealth inequality, but I think you're being a little short-sighted.
Because the King didn't need the Serfs to buy their products. The King doesn't need us.
The king might think that, but he's dead wrong.
If the king wants to watch movies or TV, he needs us to subsidize them. If the king wants to drive on a road, he needs us to subsidize them. If the king wants to eat food, either he's growing it all himself on his estate, or he needs us to plant, pick, process, and transport that food. If the king wants to go on the internet, he needs us to be creating things to do there, or it will be empty. If the king wants to listen to music, he either has to hire thousands of his own musicians, or he needs us to subsidize the vast variety of music in the world. If the king wants a car, plane, or boat, he's going to have to pay for all of the raw materials, all of the processing, all of the engineering, all of construction, all of the spare parts, all of the training, all the infrastructure for all that, or he needs us to be doing all of that already so he can just select he best of that for himself.
The elite can't have the lifestyle they currently have without all of us doing the shit we're doing for ourselves already. They are definitely able to select the best of the best, but that doesn't exist at all without the rest of us making it for ourselves to begin with.
I suspect that the old practice of wealthy families employing full-time household servants will make a significant comeback over the next couple of decades, when legions of low-skill but able-bodied people find themselves irresistibly replaced by software and robotics.
I thought this as well at one point, but then I realized that robotics are going to fill this niche. Sure, some people will want a human touch, but a lot will just want the Roomba 2035 to do it's job without judging as they sit around playing with their junk.
While we don't have an automated laundry and dryer system yet, once that's done we'll have automated a lot of the household chores. Automated lawn mowers are becoming more viable, automated floor sweepers have been around for a decade now, dishwashers and microwaves for 30+ years, Nest and the like mean you don't even pay attention to your thermostat anymore, etc., etc. A friend has a Shiatsu massage chair. Probably not as good as a real Shiatsu massage, but available with the flip of a switch 24 hrs a day.
Unskilled labor is barely viable with our current technology. I don't see it becoming more viable as time goes on, only less. Sure, some may want to pay for humans to do a job worse for more money for some sort of status or ego boost, but I don't foresee enough people wanting to to offset all the jobs lost.
Sure. But this isn't moral value. It's economic value. And increasingly, a lot of people aren't economically valuable enough that they can keep themselves housed, fed, healthy, and happy.
The big question is what do we do for these people? The article suggests that if we just give them access to the internet they can educate themselves into an economically valuable worker, and all our problems will be solved. But it ignores that a) not everyone is capable of educating themselves to the level necessary, and b) even a moderate level of education may not be sufficient in the future to compete with robots, automation, and AI/machine learning.
I agree that everyone has value. The question is how we ensure their health and happiness if it's not economically viable to have them working to support themselves.
We are walking up the ladder of job complexity due to technology, leaving behind more and more people incapable of educating themselves up for the jobs of the future. There will indeed be a massive and growing class of the unemployed and the unemployable as programmed machines take over the lower level jobs, many of which are the entry level jobs that start one off in work life......A huge percentage of the human population is only suited to lower level manual labor.
Indeed.
Every time an article like this comes up, a bunch of people show up and say, "There will be jobs we haven't even thought of yet, and those people can be retrained to do them." While I'm a pretty creative person, I struggle to come up with a future unskilled job that won't be done by robots and machine learning better and faster than it could be done by humans. Nobody is going to come up with a new job and not throw AI and robotics at it first. Humans won't even be considered for it, and the tasks won't be designed to be done by a human anyway. All the VC money being thrown out right now is going to startups which promise a revolution doing exactly this.
The first hologram world guides aren't going to be humans. It's going to be, "Hey Alexa, where's the strip club?" You're not going to give a valet the keys to your flying car. Dive bars and chain restaurants are going to profit immensely from automated service. Sit down, have your eye scanned, and your preferred meal and beverage are delivered to you and billed to you. All while checking out super realistic titties at the hologram world strip club beamed into your eye.
We are seriously nearing a time where a lot of the stripping, table waiting, cooking, and bartending jobs may be in serious peril. Combine that with what Boston Dynamics is doing, and we've got a lot of people to find jobs for in the near future that don't have the capacity to build skills that can't be replicated by technology.
I think the gig economy is the canary in the coal mine. We're already seeing a lot of people doing a bunch of random part-time jobs because they can't find reliable full-time jobs. At the moment, it's still cheaper to hire them (and not provide benefits, and thus force society to subsidize them) than it is to invest in automation. This won't be true of any new businesses, however. And it's not necessarily going to remain true, especially if we decide that businesses can't pay their employees so little that they need social welfare services to survive.
Implementing the vacations/more sick days/ etc would negatively affect stock values for shareholders.
Citation very much needed. Because most of the existing research shows that reducing employee work hours doesn't impact productivity. Employees do something like 30 hrs of real work every week, if that. Making them happier and less stressed ups productivity rather than reducing it.
And if you really think that it's illegal to do something like this, then put your money where your mouth is and buy some stock. Pull out the research that more hours doesn't mean more productivity, and costs the company more in salaries and business expenses, and sue them.
At this very moment the flip side of the coin is happening, and if it's actually something you could punish a company for doing, you could do so.
No. That's not what I'm saying. Try reading it again.
I think you have a lot of very, very insightful points, but you've missed a few things, and I don't really agree with your initial premise.
The market approach can fail in the case of monopolies and certain niche cases summed up by the tragedy of the commons (pollution is the most common example) and the prisoner's dilemma.
There are a few other ways it can fail.
The average person is not very good at estimating the TCO of any product. In addition, they're not good at weighing cost vs features. Advertising, especially misleading advertising, can very effectively convince people to not follow market forces, and to not buy the more cost-effective product. This is not uncommon, and it's a major driver of legislation.
In an ideal world, advertising wouldn't do more than educate. Unfortunately, we've gotten really, really good at it, and we can get people to do all sorts of self-defeating shit with advertising. Due to this, we can't just rely on market forces to shake out the way we'd hope. A lack of enforcement for truth-in-advertising compounds this.
A second way market forces can fall is when corporations exert undue influence on government. While monopolies do this well, even without a monopoly a block of companies can really push a legislative agenda to benefit them, at the expense of the general population. With the travesty which was Citizens United, it's now easier than ever for a couple of companies to throw a lot of money into a PAC and influence government.
If we could separate government from corporate influence, it would be a different story. At that point, theoretically companies would have to compete on the merits of their products, and governments would be the will and voice of their people. Neither is happening at the moment, and that's a problem.
That's what makes the U.S. approach to government so effective. Tens of thousands of local governments get to try both the regulatory and free market approach.
But this is where the neocon platform shifts from "The red states don't oppose things the left favors per se. They typically favor a market-centric approach." to straight up hypocrisy. As the summary noted,
Meanwhile, Tennessee's state House and Senate have passed a different kind of bill -- one that bans local Tennessee governments from regulating plastic bags,
That (and similar bills) has happened in a number of other states, often very red states.
You say,
That's a common misconception by the left - that the red states oppose anything the left favors out of spite or ignorance.
But then we see shit like this, where the "small government, free market" republicans are willing to pass legislation that curtails local control, and enforces a market position which may not be the most cost effective one, all factors considered. (And that includes pollution, environmental damage, and climate change.) When a solid percent of republicans are climate change deniers, cynical hypocritical legislation like this can only seem to be done out of spite.
How else do you explain banning local governments from passing regulations to protect the environment, or even talking about climate change?
If it was the more big-government-friendly democrats doing this, and it was for social works, it's what we'd be expecting. When republicans are not allowing local governments to govern, and their legislation is focused on what are generally considered liberal issues, enacted by liberal pockets in their state, I don't see how you argue that it's not pure spite.
Wow. You either didn't read or didn't understand my post. Since this seems to be hard for you, I'll try again:
Maybe you assume everything is recorded all the time, but most people don't.
My expectations are that most /. readers are not "most people", and thus Buzzfeed clickbait headlines designed for "most people" are inappropriate for this audience.
An article and/or headline making a statement regarding what I think is a lazy and condescending way to write. There is no reason to do it, and no value in communicating like that.
I expect journalists to be able to write better than that.
If journalists can't, I expect /. submitters to do better.
If /. submitters can't, I expect /. editors to.
And if /. editors can't, I expect /. posters to point out this long chain of failing. If we don't demand at least some minimal standards, we might as well just go to reddit.
Yep. Mix of not having access to the vehicle, and possibly the vehicle not being functional enough to do this without specialized know-how.
Also, right after you're in an accident you're probably not in "delete my browser history" mode. More than likely, top priorities are a) Am I and my passengers ok? b) Are the other people/things involved ok? c) Is my car totaled? Do I need to find a repair place or just buy a new one? d) Holy crap, I need to get home, I need a new car to drive now! ....h)Wait....did I leave any personal stuff in my car? ....y) Wait....did I leave any personal information in my car that someone could potentially access if they hooked up a computer to it in the junkyard?
Your nerd card is now revoked.
Right? Fuck the editors who write these headlines, fuck their supervisors who don't fire them, fuck the submitter for including them, and fuck the /. editors for just rubber stamping shit like this.
No, they don't keep more data than I think. Honestly, I bet they keep less. I expect them to keep everything. Seat position. Temperature profile. Mirror positions. Then between the seat and mirrors they calculate my body size and keep that. And cross-reference the in-car camera that they take pictures of me with, and the seat firmness to gauge my weight. They've got my age and hearing nailed down, since they can cross-reference volume with the rest of my physical stats and get my BMI.
Eye-gaze tracking plus exterior cameras means they watch what I look at. Know my sexual orientation, what animals I like, and whether or not my eyesight is good enough to read signs. And what stores I visit.
Seriously, fuck these headlines. No. They don't keep more detail than I think. I'm a paranoid fuck who understands full well how much they have access to and what they could do with it. And they surprisingly seem to keep less and do less. I've spent like 2 decades hoping that /. could get a headline worthy of the audience, but I'm always disappointed.
"Dumbasses don't factory reset their Teslas, and leave a lot of personal info in them."
How hard was that?