You say that like it's no big deal, but it's a really, really big deal. It doesn't call in sick. It doesn't have car trouble and miss a shift. It doesn't come in late. It doesn't come in hungover. It doesn't cause drama with the other employees. It doesn't spit in the food. It doesn't require training every 3-4 months because the previous robot doing that job quit, and it's a new hire. And when new ones are deployed, they don't need training. They can just have the brains of the current one copied over.
All of this represents huge savings for a company. It's not just the cost of the robot that has to be considered. It's part of a much bigger structure, and I'd bet that it immediately cuts down on some externalized costs.
And yes, all this does is flip a burger. But how much longer before another "all it does" is cut potatoes and fry them? And how much longer before another "all it does" is season and form patties? (Actually, for most big chains that's happened already.)
But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do....
Like flip burgers?
I'm really not sure how you come to the conclusion that the concern of automating jobs away is hyperbole. Lets take all these hypothetical 18 year old HS dropouts who used to make $7/hr flipping burgers. Kids who can't really do math, struggle with basic literacy, and in short don't have really useful life skills. What other jobs are increasing in number that would fit those (lack of) skill-sets, in order to offset the ones lost to automation?
We're automating janitorial work, kitchen work, automotive work, factory work, etc. Almost every possible job that someone with minimal skills could do is getting squeezed, and there just aren't new ones being created. What new jobs are being created are high-skill jobs, and that doesn't offset the loss of low-skill jobs.
Can you point to an industry with an increasing need for low-skill workers? If so, please share. Because I can't find anywhere near enough to dent the number of people that are and will be put out of work due to automation.
Wow, you have a really dystopian world-view. So because bad things could theoretically happen in the future, you're against....everything? All technological progress?
Because all of these things are equally applicable to the stock market, banking system, online commerce, IOT, cell network, etc.
While I don't disagree about the problems that could happen, I fail to see a situation where "Hackers murdering 20,000 people per year in the future" is a real possibility. That's not how any company stays in business.
Clearly if it is the case that the accident wouldn't have happened were the human driving in the first place, then humans are fools for trusting self driving.
That's a rather obvious failure in logic, and I'm surprised you didn't notice it before hitting submit.
Single accidents aren't things you can base policy decisions on. If they were, we'd have no large ocean liners (Titanic), no planes, and obviously no cars.
What you can sensibly base policy and decisions on are the aggregate rates of accidents. If autonomous driving cars cause more accidents on the whole than self driving, I agree, it's somewhat foolish to trust self-driving cars. But if they do not, then it is equally foolish to trust humans to drive. Making decisions based on single events is generally a pretty stupid thing to do.
So, maybe automated cars aren't going to work for BLM dirt roads or blizzards. It doesn't mean they don't have a place, and can't replace a lot of the cars on the road.
We really are new at the self-driving thing at this point. And it's already better than a lot of drivers in a lot of situations. I think we're on the exponential upswing in self-driving tech, and not at any sort of plateau. The amount of money and engineering that's being poured into it now is already rapidly producing results, and will continue to produce results in the future.
I don't expect that this will be solved in one day, but I also expect that we're going to see some radical shifts in our commuting. Maybe an automated commute around Billings won't be in the cards in the next five years, but I'd be surprised if a commute around Houston or LA wasn't. I'm in the upper midwest, and the commutes for my wife and I would be largely doable at this point, except for a week or two every year when the road conditions would likely be too bad for the current tech to handle. But then again, those two weeks are bad enough that the current humans can't really do it either, drifting around because they can't see the lines, sliding off the road, sliding through stops, etc.
I do agree with your skepticism, but only in part. Most of those issues are issues today, and there aren't large-scale issues with them. Yes, OnStar can be hacked, and does get hacked once in awhile. Keyless entry gets hacked. Humans are shitheads. None of that changes with autonomous cars. The same laws still apply. If you're dangerously interfering with a driverless car, you're going to get arrested same as if you were doing that with a regular car.
Not only has the price come down, but there are so many options now that you can pretty much find whatever you need for any purpose. I've found some sweet candelabra ones, I got some quirky fake-incandescent ones for the entry light fixture, nice flat-white globes for the bathroom, appliance bulbs, etc.
The most expensive ones were all of about $5 each, have about a 10 year lifespan, and if run 24 hrs per day, would cost me about 2 cents. That's half to a third of the energy draw of CFLs, which themselves were half to a third of incandescent lights.
What amazes me is how many lights are still incandescent, halogen, etc. Entire cities full of street lights and stoplights, millions of businesses, tons of appliances.... I agree that it's going to trend downward, at least until electric cars start to really take off. Then it will bounce back up, but that's no longer a fair comparison unless you also consider the lack of gas consumption.
Agreed, and even their premise that nuclear is carbon free is flawed. Nuclear plants take a ridiculous amount of concrete to make, and concrete production is one of our most CO2 intensive activities. Uranium mining, refining, and transport is also very carbon heavy. Net energy production compared to fossil fuel use? Definitely much less carbon intensive, but it's not zero by a long shot.
That's a nice emotional outburst you have there, but it doesn't match the facts. Facts are that there is no "human safety net behind the wheel" most of the time.
If you look at fatalities per mile driven, automatic cars are safer.
If you look at the occurance of accidents due to distracted driving, they are going up rather than down.
As much as it makes you uncomfortable and unhappy, this is not a net negative in terms of safety.
"Should the person who boards an automated shuttle at the airport have an engineer's certification?"
If you're not in charge of driving a vehicle, not expected to jump in in case of emergency, and don't need to interact with it other than pushing a couple of buttons to tell it where to go/stop, why would you need some certification that shows you're qualified to drive it?
For this reason, I'm not really that upset to see CA get rid of the driver requirement. Humans suck at driving. Humans suck even worse at needing to remain alert for hours, and react in an instant to something. IMO Google has it right. Just design the human out of the system. Sure, it means that your automated car can't go everywhere, but even if it can go around 50% of a city, it would massively change transportation.
And if your driverless car isn't ready for prime-time, we've got insurance and lawsuits which should mitigate the damage. It's not like companies have a goal of wanton destruction, and driverless cars are already sketchy to a large percentage of the population. Honestly, I'm thinking that Uber has paved the way for driverless cars. A lot of people don't want to interact with their driver. They want a car to show up after they've put their destination into their phone, and they want to dick around on their phone until the car stops and they get out where they want to be. No reason for that person to be a licensed driver, IMO.
Recent research into cashless societies find this to be the case. We expect that cashless societies would be barter economies, but when people really looked into them, they found that they were mostly IOU economies. Small enough communities that everyone remembers the debts owed by others, and hold those others accountable to paying them.
Shifting to money just removes the mental burden of keeping track of the many IOUs, and is a necessity to create larger communities.
While I'm a big fan and super interested in the solar roof, I'm still waiting to see 4-5 years of data for a better cost/benefit analysis. On the face of it, the numbers do add up, but it's a brand new product, and I do expect that there will be some bugs to be shaken out.
Given the weather and climate diversity in this country, I want to see how the roofs perform across a wide geographic area for a couple of years. How do they handle extreme events? What does maintenance really look like?
I tend to distrust companies selling me a free lunch, and while I have some real faith that Musk can make it work, I'm not willing to totally buy into the numbers just yet.
I've said it for a while, autonomous cars look good because they've only ever been tested in sunny California... they need to be able to work on the back roads of Cornwall and suburban streets of London....
I think you're closer, but still not there yet. Cornwall is ok, but how about somewhere like Cornwall with hills or mountains? Steep curves and varying road-widths? Sure London is a challenge, but how about Chicago or Boston in the winter, with banks of snow, obscured lines, and narrower streets than normal?
As you note, there are a lot of people who live in not-so-perfect driving conditions. A lot of people where I live struggle to drive when 1/4" of snow obscures the lines on the road, and that's a relatively common occurrence. I don't know how well automated driving will do in that situation, but until it's at least as good as the bottom 30% of drivers, it's not going to be ready for prime-time. Once it's that good, it at least won't be worst than a lot of drivers on the road, and that's a step forward.
I think what we're missing is differentiating between "not so good at driving" and "potentially disastrous". As you note, AEB triggering because of a leaf falls into the "potentially disastrous" category. Until we're pretty convinced that automated driving isn't going to potentially cause a disaster, people are not going to be willing to rely on it too much. Once we're pretty sure that it won't, even if it's not so good at driving, it's closer to "let your teenager drive because you're feeling lazy", and that's something that's pretty common.
And that's a) counter to the established facts, and b) now discredited based on the contents of this new memo.
Having read both, it's pretty impressive how terribly written and sloppy Nunes' was, and how decently well written and comprehensive this one is. Given the lack of detail in Nunes', it seems pretty clear that his was the more creatively cherry-picked of the two.
I'm honestly a little confused why Nunes would produce such obvious garbage. Didn't think the other side would get a rebuttal, or figured it wouldn't matter, since the right is immune to facts that go against their scary fantasy world?
There's nothing fundamentally flawed or bad about the underlying technologies of both. They are well understood, practical solutions that can solve really important problems. CRISPR more than blockchains, but still.
The issue is the snake-oil sellers, confidence men, and their ilk. We call them startups now, but the same applies.
Anyone can take a product or process that isn't well understood and sucker rubes with it. It doesn't make that product or process illegitimate.
One big problem with AI is that it does not realize when it has done something incorrect so it can correct for it.
So, just like the people that it's replacing?
Because seriously, if you haven't worked with people who do this exact thing, I'd be surprised. As the GP noted, even 10% unemployment is going to be pretty disruptive socially. And AI doesn't have to be perfect to do that. It doesn't even have to be better than the 10% of the people it's replacing, provided that it's cheaper than the mistakes it makes.
I don't disagree that 28 years is too much. But If there is a minimum, that's it, unless "We the people" can pile up enough money to make 60% of our "representatives" to fix that.
And the problem is far more complex than overt racism like simply refusing to hire non-white people.
Dunning-Kruger in action here. "I know nothing about this, but I'm plenty smart enough to tell you that it's stupid and here's why..."
I wish everyone who gets their panties all in a twist about fostering diversity in organizations could be forced to at least learn some very basic facts about it. It's hard to have a rational discussion with people foaming at the mouth over their ignorant perception of something. Although that does speak volumes about who they are as individuals.
Why in the world should have to do all of those things to ensure continuous access to something I legally purchased? If I need more than a license key, there is something majorly wrong with that product.
Yep. While doing research I found that the articles relating to my work were a couple of decades out of date, poorly written, and potentially wrong even when they were written. I took my time, wrote a much better one, included citations to more recent published research, posted it, and had a bot instantly revert it. Talked to the self-imposed "owner" of the page and bot, and got nowhere. After two weeks of fighting with the dumbass, I just gave up.
In hindsight, I should have posted it under a slightly different title, and then have gone and redirected all the links to the original page to the new one. Let the guy lord over an orphaned page, so nobody bothered him again.
If the media industry had behaved civilly, I'd agree with you. But they didn't. So fuck them.
From wikipedia: The goal of copyright law, as set forth in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution, is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This includes incentivizing the creation of art, literature, architecture, music, and other works of authorship.
Infinite copyright, as now purchased by Disney the the like, does not do this. The original term for a copyright was 14 years, with an additional extension of 14 years if the author was still alive. If we return to this, I'll play the game and respect copyright. It will mean that everything made before 1990 is free to use, and I think that will kickstart some amazing works of art and creativity, as people modify and expand on the things that shaped their childhood.
Limiting my right to play a game I paid money for doesn't do "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" either. I have a couple of games that I paid for, and for which the publisher has removed my ability to play the game. One is a DRM scheme that relies on a server that does not exist any more, and another requires an official company server, which no longer exists. Neither company has released a patch or fix, or has otherwise assisted in fixing the issue that they caused.
Sorry, folks, but we live in a capitalist society. You aren't entitled to anything just by right of being able to copy, take, or otherwise acquire it.
Likewise, we live in a capitalist society. Companies aren't entitled to take something away from me that I legally purchased from them, or otherwise deny me the ability to use what they sold at an arbitrary later date.
When this no longer happens, I'll happily respect copyright. But at the moment, it's accelerating rather than diminishing. Within the UWP DRM are five separate subsystems, each of which must work for you to play the game you bought. As soon as one doesn't, you are denied what you paid for.
While the initial goal of this group was not an exactly ethical one, I have a hard time being too mad, knowing that what they did will probably allow someone to play the game they legally purchased in the future, when MS takes that ability away from them.
When corporations stop screwing us with copyright bullshit like this, I'll be on your side. Until then, fuck those guys, and good on anyone undermining their evil schemes.
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I know, right? There's no tomato picking machines, apple picking machines, blueberry picking machines, or raspberry picking machines, AND THERE NEVER WILL BE!!!
Well, except that all it does is flip the burger
You say that like it's no big deal, but it's a really, really big deal. It doesn't call in sick. It doesn't have car trouble and miss a shift. It doesn't come in late. It doesn't come in hungover. It doesn't cause drama with the other employees. It doesn't spit in the food. It doesn't require training every 3-4 months because the previous robot doing that job quit, and it's a new hire. And when new ones are deployed, they don't need training. They can just have the brains of the current one copied over.
All of this represents huge savings for a company. It's not just the cost of the robot that has to be considered. It's part of a much bigger structure, and I'd bet that it immediately cuts down on some externalized costs.
And yes, all this does is flip a burger. But how much longer before another "all it does" is cut potatoes and fry them? And how much longer before another "all it does" is season and form patties? (Actually, for most big chains that's happened already.)
But when you see how much they struggle to automate the jobs even high school drop-outs do....
Like flip burgers?
I'm really not sure how you come to the conclusion that the concern of automating jobs away is hyperbole. Lets take all these hypothetical 18 year old HS dropouts who used to make $7/hr flipping burgers. Kids who can't really do math, struggle with basic literacy, and in short don't have really useful life skills. What other jobs are increasing in number that would fit those (lack of) skill-sets, in order to offset the ones lost to automation?
We're automating janitorial work, kitchen work, automotive work, factory work, etc. Almost every possible job that someone with minimal skills could do is getting squeezed, and there just aren't new ones being created. What new jobs are being created are high-skill jobs, and that doesn't offset the loss of low-skill jobs.
Can you point to an industry with an increasing need for low-skill workers? If so, please share. Because I can't find anywhere near enough to dent the number of people that are and will be put out of work due to automation.
Wife and I ended up with a habit of taking a picture of the dry erase board on the fridge before going to run errands.
Or asking the person at home to text a picture of it.
It's a mix of old and new school. Not great, not even good, but it mostly works.
Well, the timeouts and failure to load parts of the page haven't been helping, but I do agree with your point...
Wow, you have a really dystopian world-view. So because bad things could theoretically happen in the future, you're against....everything? All technological progress?
Because all of these things are equally applicable to the stock market, banking system, online commerce, IOT, cell network, etc.
While I don't disagree about the problems that could happen, I fail to see a situation where "Hackers murdering 20,000 people per year in the future" is a real possibility. That's not how any company stays in business.
Clearly if it is the case that the accident wouldn't have happened were the human driving in the first place, then humans are fools for trusting self driving.
That's a rather obvious failure in logic, and I'm surprised you didn't notice it before hitting submit.
Single accidents aren't things you can base policy decisions on. If they were, we'd have no large ocean liners (Titanic), no planes, and obviously no cars.
What you can sensibly base policy and decisions on are the aggregate rates of accidents. If autonomous driving cars cause more accidents on the whole than self driving, I agree, it's somewhat foolish to trust self-driving cars. But if they do not, then it is equally foolish to trust humans to drive. Making decisions based on single events is generally a pretty stupid thing to do.
So, maybe automated cars aren't going to work for BLM dirt roads or blizzards. It doesn't mean they don't have a place, and can't replace a lot of the cars on the road.
We really are new at the self-driving thing at this point. And it's already better than a lot of drivers in a lot of situations. I think we're on the exponential upswing in self-driving tech, and not at any sort of plateau. The amount of money and engineering that's being poured into it now is already rapidly producing results, and will continue to produce results in the future.
I don't expect that this will be solved in one day, but I also expect that we're going to see some radical shifts in our commuting. Maybe an automated commute around Billings won't be in the cards in the next five years, but I'd be surprised if a commute around Houston or LA wasn't. I'm in the upper midwest, and the commutes for my wife and I would be largely doable at this point, except for a week or two every year when the road conditions would likely be too bad for the current tech to handle. But then again, those two weeks are bad enough that the current humans can't really do it either, drifting around because they can't see the lines, sliding off the road, sliding through stops, etc.
I do agree with your skepticism, but only in part. Most of those issues are issues today, and there aren't large-scale issues with them. Yes, OnStar can be hacked, and does get hacked once in awhile. Keyless entry gets hacked. Humans are shitheads. None of that changes with autonomous cars. The same laws still apply. If you're dangerously interfering with a driverless car, you're going to get arrested same as if you were doing that with a regular car.
Not only has the price come down, but there are so many options now that you can pretty much find whatever you need for any purpose. I've found some sweet candelabra ones, I got some quirky fake-incandescent ones for the entry light fixture, nice flat-white globes for the bathroom, appliance bulbs, etc.
The most expensive ones were all of about $5 each, have about a 10 year lifespan, and if run 24 hrs per day, would cost me about 2 cents. That's half to a third of the energy draw of CFLs, which themselves were half to a third of incandescent lights.
What amazes me is how many lights are still incandescent, halogen, etc. Entire cities full of street lights and stoplights, millions of businesses, tons of appliances.... I agree that it's going to trend downward, at least until electric cars start to really take off. Then it will bounce back up, but that's no longer a fair comparison unless you also consider the lack of gas consumption.
Agreed, and even their premise that nuclear is carbon free is flawed. Nuclear plants take a ridiculous amount of concrete to make, and concrete production is one of our most CO2 intensive activities. Uranium mining, refining, and transport is also very carbon heavy. Net energy production compared to fossil fuel use? Definitely much less carbon intensive, but it's not zero by a long shot.
Exactly how frequently do you think that humans stop automated cars in order to prevent a fatal accident?
I'm aware of exactly 0 times that this has happened.
I'm also aware of several occurrences where human drivers failed to stop automated cars from getting into fatal accidents.
So what's the point of a driver? Especially given that automated cars are safer than human drivers?
That's a nice emotional outburst you have there, but it doesn't match the facts. Facts are that there is no "human safety net behind the wheel" most of the time.
If you look at fatalities per mile driven, automatic cars are safer.
If you look at the occurance of accidents due to distracted driving, they are going up rather than down.
As much as it makes you uncomfortable and unhappy, this is not a net negative in terms of safety.
I'm in a 'no' for that category.
"Should the person who boards an automated shuttle at the airport have an engineer's certification?"
If you're not in charge of driving a vehicle, not expected to jump in in case of emergency, and don't need to interact with it other than pushing a couple of buttons to tell it where to go/stop, why would you need some certification that shows you're qualified to drive it?
For this reason, I'm not really that upset to see CA get rid of the driver requirement. Humans suck at driving. Humans suck even worse at needing to remain alert for hours, and react in an instant to something. IMO Google has it right. Just design the human out of the system. Sure, it means that your automated car can't go everywhere, but even if it can go around 50% of a city, it would massively change transportation.
And if your driverless car isn't ready for prime-time, we've got insurance and lawsuits which should mitigate the damage. It's not like companies have a goal of wanton destruction, and driverless cars are already sketchy to a large percentage of the population. Honestly, I'm thinking that Uber has paved the way for driverless cars. A lot of people don't want to interact with their driver. They want a car to show up after they've put their destination into their phone, and they want to dick around on their phone until the car stops and they get out where they want to be. No reason for that person to be a licensed driver, IMO.
But it goes VROOOOMMMMM very loudly!
And sadly, that alone counts for far too much for far too large of a section of society.
Money is (mostly) IOUs
Recent research into cashless societies find this to be the case. We expect that cashless societies would be barter economies, but when people really looked into them, they found that they were mostly IOU economies. Small enough communities that everyone remembers the debts owed by others, and hold those others accountable to paying them.
Shifting to money just removes the mental burden of keeping track of the many IOUs, and is a necessity to create larger communities.
While I'm a big fan and super interested in the solar roof, I'm still waiting to see 4-5 years of data for a better cost/benefit analysis. On the face of it, the numbers do add up, but it's a brand new product, and I do expect that there will be some bugs to be shaken out.
Given the weather and climate diversity in this country, I want to see how the roofs perform across a wide geographic area for a couple of years. How do they handle extreme events? What does maintenance really look like?
I tend to distrust companies selling me a free lunch, and while I have some real faith that Musk can make it work, I'm not willing to totally buy into the numbers just yet.
I've said it for a while, autonomous cars look good because they've only ever been tested in sunny California... they need to be able to work on the back roads of Cornwall and suburban streets of London....
I think you're closer, but still not there yet. Cornwall is ok, but how about somewhere like Cornwall with hills or mountains? Steep curves and varying road-widths? Sure London is a challenge, but how about Chicago or Boston in the winter, with banks of snow, obscured lines, and narrower streets than normal?
As you note, there are a lot of people who live in not-so-perfect driving conditions. A lot of people where I live struggle to drive when 1/4" of snow obscures the lines on the road, and that's a relatively common occurrence. I don't know how well automated driving will do in that situation, but until it's at least as good as the bottom 30% of drivers, it's not going to be ready for prime-time. Once it's that good, it at least won't be worst than a lot of drivers on the road, and that's a step forward.
I think what we're missing is differentiating between "not so good at driving" and "potentially disastrous". As you note, AEB triggering because of a leaf falls into the "potentially disastrous" category. Until we're pretty convinced that automated driving isn't going to potentially cause a disaster, people are not going to be willing to rely on it too much. Once we're pretty sure that it won't, even if it's not so good at driving, it's closer to "let your teenager drive because you're feeling lazy", and that's something that's pretty common.
And that's a) counter to the established facts, and b) now discredited based on the contents of this new memo.
Having read both, it's pretty impressive how terribly written and sloppy Nunes' was, and how decently well written and comprehensive this one is. Given the lack of detail in Nunes', it seems pretty clear that his was the more creatively cherry-picked of the two.
I'm honestly a little confused why Nunes would produce such obvious garbage. Didn't think the other side would get a rebuttal, or figured it wouldn't matter, since the right is immune to facts that go against their scary fantasy world?
I will make a pedantic comment in response:
There's nothing fundamentally flawed or bad about the underlying technologies of both. They are well understood, practical solutions that can solve really important problems. CRISPR more than blockchains, but still.
The issue is the snake-oil sellers, confidence men, and their ilk. We call them startups now, but the same applies.
Anyone can take a product or process that isn't well understood and sucker rubes with it. It doesn't make that product or process illegitimate.
One big problem with AI is that it does not realize when it has done something incorrect so it can correct for it.
So, just like the people that it's replacing?
Because seriously, if you haven't worked with people who do this exact thing, I'd be surprised. As the GP noted, even 10% unemployment is going to be pretty disruptive socially. And AI doesn't have to be perfect to do that. It doesn't even have to be better than the 10% of the people it's replacing, provided that it's cheaper than the mistakes it makes.
I don't think that's a very high bar to cross.
I don't disagree that 28 years is too much. But If there is a minimum, that's it, unless "We the people" can pile up enough money to make 60% of our "representatives" to fix that.
And that's never going to happen.
Posted from firefox on a ubuntu 16.04 install...
And the problem is far more complex than overt racism like simply refusing to hire non-white people.
Dunning-Kruger in action here. "I know nothing about this, but I'm plenty smart enough to tell you that it's stupid and here's why..."
I wish everyone who gets their panties all in a twist about fostering diversity in organizations could be forced to at least learn some very basic facts about it. It's hard to have a rational discussion with people foaming at the mouth over their ignorant perception of something. Although that does speak volumes about who they are as individuals.
Why in the world should have to do all of those things to ensure continuous access to something I legally purchased? If I need more than a license key, there is something majorly wrong with that product.
Yep. While doing research I found that the articles relating to my work were a couple of decades out of date, poorly written, and potentially wrong even when they were written. I took my time, wrote a much better one, included citations to more recent published research, posted it, and had a bot instantly revert it. Talked to the self-imposed "owner" of the page and bot, and got nowhere. After two weeks of fighting with the dumbass, I just gave up.
In hindsight, I should have posted it under a slightly different title, and then have gone and redirected all the links to the original page to the new one. Let the guy lord over an orphaned page, so nobody bothered him again.
If the media industry had behaved civilly, I'd agree with you. But they didn't. So fuck them.
From wikipedia: The goal of copyright law, as set forth in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution, is "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This includes incentivizing the creation of art, literature, architecture, music, and other works of authorship.
Infinite copyright, as now purchased by Disney the the like, does not do this. The original term for a copyright was 14 years, with an additional extension of 14 years if the author was still alive. If we return to this, I'll play the game and respect copyright. It will mean that everything made before 1990 is free to use, and I think that will kickstart some amazing works of art and creativity, as people modify and expand on the things that shaped their childhood.
Limiting my right to play a game I paid money for doesn't do "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" either. I have a couple of games that I paid for, and for which the publisher has removed my ability to play the game. One is a DRM scheme that relies on a server that does not exist any more, and another requires an official company server, which no longer exists. Neither company has released a patch or fix, or has otherwise assisted in fixing the issue that they caused.
Sorry, folks, but we live in a capitalist society. You aren't entitled to anything just by right of being able to copy, take, or otherwise acquire it.
Likewise, we live in a capitalist society. Companies aren't entitled to take something away from me that I legally purchased from them, or otherwise deny me the ability to use what they sold at an arbitrary later date.
When this no longer happens, I'll happily respect copyright. But at the moment, it's accelerating rather than diminishing. Within the UWP DRM are five separate subsystems, each of which must work for you to play the game you bought. As soon as one doesn't, you are denied what you paid for.
While the initial goal of this group was not an exactly ethical one, I have a hard time being too mad, knowing that what they did will probably allow someone to play the game they legally purchased in the future, when MS takes that ability away from them.
When corporations stop screwing us with copyright bullshit like this, I'll be on your side. Until then, fuck those guys, and good on anyone undermining their evil schemes.