I hate this negative attitude that pervades the world these days. It discourages invention and ingenuity by telling people only the ignorant and crazy would even try. Everything we accomplish in the next 50-100 years will be something that reality gets in the way of just now. Most things which are genuinely revolutionary are actually fairly simple twists on existing things.
There are functional wave powered ocean vessels.
There is no such thing as 'free energy' in the sense of something from nothing, it has to come from somewhere. But energy isn't exactly in short supply. It's literally everywhere. Everything is made of energy after all and that IS reality.
This is definitely not the time to make assumptions about what will happen and what will come. There are so many new toys that completely redefine what is possible at play right now and new discoveries happening so fast and yet being made by such a small group of people that there are millions of potential revolutionary applications. There is a massive well of untapped potential that hasn't been explored because the people who know it's there are a small group and because the industries that make advanced technology are economically entrenched in current manufacturing methods.
One small example was that not too far back an independent inventor finally developed the first real hover board. That wasn't even actually using NEW theory, he cracked out an old understanding of physics and a the flux of a magnetic field repelling a conductor. Looking into this I was able to find lots of people had played with the effect in labs to demonstrate the physics. He didn't disclose what he did but with nothing but a reading of the relevant Wikipedia page and looking at the experimental setups I could find, where 80-90% of the energy consumed was lost to heat. There were definitely some immediate adjustments I could see that could be made to improve that efficiency dramatically. The patent office didn't believe him and he had to travel to Washington D.C. and demonstrate the board in person.
The patent office was skeptical and expended minimal resources on the claim, making him come to them to prove it. That increases the barrier but at least they gave him a chance to prove he'd successfully invented a science fiction device.
All the papers are out there, detailing DNA assembly of nanotech devices. That is something you can do in an improvised home lab. You can build metallic nano-structures using relatively inexpensive techniques that can be replicated in a home lab. Lithographic techniques could be utilized with some improvisation and basic electronics know how can be used to build structures out of cheap materials. Relatively simple but completely novel things are being discovered constantly here. You have some disadvantages but also advantages. The techniques you develop will be relatively inexpensive so your work might be inexpensive to replicate and spread commercially if you choose and if you do develop something novel there will likely be a great deal of potential to improve on it. There is a huge amount of potential in optical computing and holography as well. There is a great deal of advanced biology that can be done by an amateur in a home lab. Chemistry and electronics of course are always there as a tool. If you throw the game changer that is quantum physics into the mix who knows what someone using these tools could produce. You wouldn't have to be an expert in all these areas, someone who just picked up enough to be dangerous in several of these areas could accomplish something amazing.
"Actually, the definition of civilian [wikipedia.org] is well-defined in the Laws of War, commonly codified today in international laws by Protocol I [wikipedia.org] of the Geneva Conventions."
Really? Do you define your moral compass to directly align with the law? Let's look at what you said.
"So, actually the criteria are much more specific than you describe. "Civilians" can fight in wars, in which case they become "combatants," but they do not cease to be "civilians," as the term is commonly understood in contrast to organized military personnel.
As for the farmer in GGP's example, he's clearly a civilian unless he's a member of a military force. If he carries a gun but only for his own protection and does not engage in direct action against an enemy, he is probably assumed to be a "non-combatant" as well, under international legal definitions."
Define organized. Define military, Define what constitutes an insignia. Your definition of privileged combatant excludes every combatant relevant to a modern war (at least for the US which is where the automated death machines are coming into play). Terrorists groups aren't in organized military structure, they don't wear insignias, and they don't follow the laws and customs of warfare. So by your definition of civilian, they are all civilians and in some cases both civilians and combatants.
"As for the farmer in GGP's example, he's clearly a civilian unless he's a member of a military force. If he carries a gun but only for his own protection and does not engage in direct action against an enemy, he is probably assumed to be a "non-combatant" as well, under international legal definitions."
Probably assumed to be a non-combatant? Define direct action. Define "actively used in support." He is using his gun for protection to supply the combatants. Supplying the combatants is obviously supporting them. Arguably, carrying a gun for protection while transporting their goods IS actively using it to support them.
How is a drone or even a soldier supposed to know the difference between the men carrying the guns? If he is standing with the other men when the soldier fires on them and he fires on the soldier is he a combatant and okay to kill then, even though he is a civilian acting in self-defense? What if the soldier is replaced with a machine? Now it's a human being defending his life and not putting another at risk.
Companies have an advantage in that H1-B's can't switch jobs and stay in the states.
But while the family back home costing 1/10th the amount is an advantage for H1-B's I fail to see how it benefits the United States to allow that advantage. Just like we charge import/export taxes we should be charging taxes on imported labor to offset those differences for the good of our economy. There is no real advantage to the United States to use imported tech workers when there is a plentiful supply at home.
"By the same logic, computers should not be allowed in any life-critical situation."
That isn't true. Some of those situations have clearly defined parameters. For instance air traffic control is collision avoidance. You can build a truth table and mathematically prove every possible outcome within certain bounds. We can do and do do this for many critical programs.
"Civilian" and "Combatant", "Us" and "Them" these are fuzzy classifications at best. Human's fed all the data could not consistently classify people into one category or another, in fact, they can only achieve a better consensus with data limited by a perspective. If humans can't come up with a consistent definition how can they assess whether or not a machine is more or less accurately adhering to it?
The fact that we can all conceive of the vague notion of a "bad guy." Doesn't mean such a thing exists. The fact that no individual can come up with a set of discrete and measurable criteria that will successfully classify "bad guy" in a logically consistent way even for themselves, let alone get a consensus among others, says that being able to agree on a vague notion of a thing doesn't mean that vague notion actually exists. There is no such thing as a "bad guy." No matter how much we can all agree we should stop the bad guys.
Both are pretty likely. Let's start by defining civilian. Is the farmer who supports the militants cause and brings them goat cheese and steel a civilian? What about the farmer who is afraid of them and does the exact same thing? What if the farmer knows the danger level and carries a gun for personal defense?
You can't compute us and them in an analogue world where the real value is never actually 0 or 1 but always a shifting value in between and usually multiple shifting values in between. YOU can't, and neither can your robot.
It provides access to what is effectively the largest library of information in the world for starters. Also, computer based learning provides the opportunity for open source collaborative educating auto-pilots that can be incrementally improved. Rather than a teacher expending efforts to help a single student, they can expend efforts improving the adaptive learning system in a way that will help that student and everyone like that student from then on.
Of course, if the teacher just continues to do the same old "cover a section and assign the questions at the end" in a standardized text book or the same thing with a test of their own making testing that same material as their teaching style, it does no good at all. We can make anyone fashion a bucket to put the water in and we can't make the teachers lead their horses to the water, but without access and computers there is no water they COULD lead them to.
I do. For starters this kind of thing increases access to resources like Khan academy, wikipedia, open text books, and the internet as a whole which provides an information resource that makes a typical school library look like a giant waste of space.
The old guard following along with standardized texts and curriculum needs to be tossed out. Our schools are woefully inadequate. Our teachers are spread too thin. The internet allows for building interactive learning labs that adapt to individual students and their strengths and weaknesses in the kind of ways a good teacher would if they had the time to dedicate one on one with each student.
Our teachers instead of being babysitters each trying to re-invent the wheel should be doing three things, counting attendance and collaborating and contributing to open and free resources of this type, and last but not least they should be spending their efforts with students teaching things computers can't do like physical and spatial learning and tasks.
Why would we want to waste all the education that is required of our teachers on tutoring a student effectively or ineffectually tutoring 30 when that teacher can instead focus on an adaptive tutoring auto-pilot? As teachers recognize a failing (in the form of having to expend personal efforts) they collaborate, build an improvement for the auto-pilot, and the auto-pilot carries that ability to adapt to every single student thereafter. Eventually it becomes in effect a teacher with hundreds of years of collective experience providing one-on-one tutoring of our children. It slows down or speeds up as appropriate for the student in question so "no child is left behind" but also "no child is kept behind."
In general our students should be programming and studying physics and sciences in grade school. We should be moving on to more abstract maths as soon as possible because the younger we are the BETTER we are at understanding fluid and creative abstract concepts like these. And STEM is the key to the future success of our society.
All funds from government and for government should go through the standard tax system, nothing should bypass in the form of fees.
The problem with bypassing in the form of fees is that a certain portion of every dollar you make is related to government supported infrastructure (including education). It takes a lot more public infrastructure to enable the generation of million dollars worth of wealth than it does to generate $30,000. Thus a person making $30,000 has a much smaller debt to society to pay back. Anytime a fee like this is introduced that person with the smaller debt is subsidizing and paying debt owed by the person with the larger income.
The use tax is a sales tax on interstate commerce which is completely unconstitutional, if I'm accused of tax evasion courts ignore all my paper structures and convict if the bottom line is I got money and didn't pay the tax. Why should it be any different if the state is simply calling the exact same tax by a different name?
No the constitution prohibits imposing a tax on stuff imported from another state, period. Saying "oh and also marbles are bad" alongside said tax does not allow the state to do so. If any provision of any bill has the RESULT of taxing commerce across state lines it is unconstitutional.
How about we go the other direction and get rid of federal level income taxation. Let states charge income tax, potentially actually make living in one state notably different than living in another, you know, so you can choose. Let the feds ask the states for funds instead of the other way around.
The current system of "use taxes" is not fair because it's unconstitutional. The answer isn't to allow the unconstitutional tax, the answer is to not allow the "use" tax.
Yup, can you imagine the sort of lifeform that could exist as a conciousness with erosion as it's neural process? To it we MIGHT amount a short lived bacterial infection.
"That's not the only way to store electricity, it's just the least leak prone method we currently have."
Right, which makes it the way the we have to do it.;)
"It's interesting that your lightweight optical battery description happens to be for a house (immobile) and ignores the conversion between electricity, treating that as a separate piece of hardware"
It's interesting that you assume a conversion between electricity when I clearly outlined a scenario in which none is required. What are you going to do convert light gathered from the massive fusion reactors that fill our sky into electricity and feed it into a light bulb to turn it back into light? Of course not, you are just going to route it with fiber optic cabling and shine it through a diffuser directly down into your living room. The same with heat, you capture IR and shine that into your home. No electricity needed.
"It's interesting that your lightweight optical battery description happens to be for a house (immobile) and ignores the conversion between electricity, treating that as a separate piece of hardware. Completely useless for a mobile device, which is where you actually care about the mass of the battery."
The scenario was of the most useful application not depending on advances in optical computing. A battery that doesn't break down with recharge/discharge cycles and can have an incredible capacity without extreme mass is important in a home setting where you'd want to store the 3000w per square meter the sun is shining down on your roof. Also potentially in a vehicle. With existing electronics the lightweight battery would need to be converted to electricity and that would add an extra component that might not make it the answer in all cases. Of course it would still be carbon neutral and require very small pieces of our most efficient solar conversion panels, made more efficient by the fact we could pick the exact spectrum of light we will use, tune the panels to that spectrum, and we can make nearly perfect mirrors when turning for a specific frequency of light and release into a chamber lined with that.
With advances in optical computing your mobile device doesn't use electricity, it runs on light, recharges anywhere it is light out, and/or from an optic cable coming out of the wall and no conversion is required. Of course, NONE of that works, house, car, mobile devices, without an optic battery. Many of those applications work just fine without optical computing or memory.
Someone else mentioned timescales. It seems to me that it depends on how we define "life." Would you consider self-awareness to be life?
Self awareness basically emerges from any self scoring logical multi-dimensional memory system that can emerge patterns. Our brains use neural nets for this but the basic concept behind a neural net is so simple it could exist in logical patterns in ocean currents, rock formations, and or weather patterns on timescales of picoseconds or millions of years.
And then there is scoring, we control this with artificial neural nets because we want them to exhibit a behavior WE are defining and measuring. If you let go of that and just simplify it to a system that tries to assess what exists or doesn't exist with pre-defining what is "correct" for it. You just tie that neural net to a scoring system constantly going through a cycle of 1 (positive score, remember those connections), (neutral score, no change), 0 (negative score). At a glance this seems to have the result of canceling everything out, but that isn't true connections used during both of the first two cycles leave an imprint that will slowly fade unless repeated, higher order patterns will emerge with patterns of complexity limited only by the multi-dimensional memory system.
Are the patterns real or imaginary? They are reflections of what the system has actually been able to observe, measure, or experience which is all we ourselves can say about our thoughts and even our own existence. A system like this views new things through the lens of previous impressions and experiences. It learns. It can identify any pattern it can sense. Science says everything real has a pattern of observable behavior and properties. What about feelings? Feelings are probably a mix of biochemical reactions and perceptions. The result of an intelligence like us but without the biochemical reactions is probably closer to a sociopath, able to perceive, understand and even relate to the negative patterns that trigger the biochemical reactions but not actually having the emotional wash. Unlike a sociopath it wouldn't be human, so it might not relate very at all. One very cool automatic property of a system like this? That scoring loop means it spends 1/3 of it's existence doing what could be argued is the logical equivalent of sleeping.
If you are using the output to light your home, transmit data, or heat up some stew you don't need the solar cells. Toss light based computing in and you don't even need electronics anymore. I should be possible to create a reasonably efficient light motor as well, light can give up it's momentum and it has lots of it. If we can create a solar sail based on this we can create a motor. Light will bend in a magnetic field, that suggests and interaction that transfers energy, it would seem like it should be possible to build that interaction into a motor if you had enough light energy.
Not necessarily as I understand it. Electrical energy currently has to be stored as a potential within a chemical element. They aren't heavy because of the electrons they are heavy because a higher capacity battery literally means a bigger battery filled with a larger quantity of heavy chemicals.
This is more like a capacitor, actually trapping photons without a chemical storage and then releasing all of them in a burst. But unlike a capacitor the potential isn't between differently charged photons fighting each other. The "potential" is in the momentum of the photon which is retained and not in the force used to store it. The photon is being held in a balanced stasis, retaining it's momentum, and not being resisted by an insulator that will ultimately fail. Even better, they can selectively trap different frequencies of light.
That is super nice in terms of potential. Imagine your home in a world where these are built with large capacity. Your solar panel is no longer an inefficient convertor of light energy into electrical potential. It is now a light collector, it carries the light via an optical cable to a large capacity light battery that selectively traps visible and infrared light and lets excess pass out of your home. You don't block UV, you just let it pass away, so you aren't constantly eroding a blocking solution. The IR light is trapped as well but because it is held in stasis it's energy is retained and the battery holding it isn't hot and doesn't need insulated. This is used to heat your water and home. If your collector was on the roof the collecting of this IR light also goes a very long way toward keeping your home cool. The light in your home is the full visible spectrum of the sun (or any blend of any part of it you like) and even at night is actually sunlight. Not converted to electricity at 40% efficiency and back to light at 95% efficiency. The high capacity light batteries might need to be built in banks with smaller capacity, allowing you to release the amount of light you need in to the fine units of X, you can release 1X/s for 50s or you can release 50X/s for 1s.
None of that even requires optical computing. But with fully optical computing your gadgets will eventually all run directly on light. So again, no need for systems that convert other forms of energy to electricity with maybe 40% efficiency. You still have losses of course, imperfection in your optical fiber for instance. But the biggest loses come from that conversion and you've just taken our biggest forms of consumption (light/heat) and eliminated the need for conversion. The next biggest is mechanical energy. That does require conversion, but light is actually an excellent candidate for highly efficient conversion to mechanical energy, there is an awful lot of momentum there.
It's also CO2 and heat neutral, actually there should be a net reduction in global warming because some amount of energy from the sun that would have been released as heat will always be contained in the cumulative balance of these storage systems that never existed before.
Are we seeing the forerunner to light based batteries? You wouldn't actually need to trap light for memory in an optical system, you only need to have light leave at least a temporary imprint that will impact light bounced against it later.
Intelligence is already reasonably well explained, we use our understanding of intelligence to build our own intelligent systems. Just the other day I watched a human built intelligence given a virtual joystick and fed images of the screen and given no concept of a game (beyond using the score as a simple feedback mechanism) figure out how to play most Atari games better than humans can.
These kind of systems aren't even really that complex, they are just hard for us to follow because they work like ant hills, with lots of very simple pieces doing very simple things and the intelligence is a complex result that emerges when you add it all up. Even if you understand them they are difficult to really own. A good mechanic knows the machine inside and out and can model it's behavior in his head. That is much harder with intelligence because you can't break down it's stages into the behavior of the 2-6 elements our conscious mind is capable of considering at once.
Consciousness, is simply an emergence phenomenon of a sufficiently intelligent system.
"Second: on the bright side, unlike a certain other religion popular the world around, you can say something against the pope and not get assassinated by religious leaders for doing so."
At least not anymore. But you can get ex-communicated which a catholic believes is a one way ticket to an eternity of torture and suffering after an eyeblink short stay on Earth.
"Pedagogy is not a simple subject, and just because you know the material does not, in any way, mean that you can be an effective teacher"
The vast majority of teachers do nothing more than follow along with a textbook. Some paraphrase the material, some simply assign it as reading. Then they'll assign the questions at the end of the chapter as homework. Perhaps they'll have some handout assignments from the teacher version of the text. ANYONE can do that provided they themselves understand the material.
"To be a really good teacher you need to have mastery of the entire discipline so that you understand where every class fits into the overall tableau."
Who said anything about good teachers? But understanding where each class fits in is simply a matter of having worked through the material a few times. Teach the same text book two or three times and you'll have it all memorized and know where every class fits in. You might change it up a bit, skip things, alter things. At that point you are an expert. None of that has anything to do with advanced degrees. The fact that you are "qualified" to teach literally any course with any masters degree regardless of the relevance of your major is proof of that.
"Also, if you think passing the course, or even excelling at the course, gives you the necessary content knowledge to effectively teach it, you are terribly mistaken."
Who said anything about teaching effectively? That has little to do with most of the schools in the US. It means you had the ability to read and comprehend the material. Which means you could do so again and regurgitate that material for students.
"Not to mention the simple case of a student asking you a question that's not in the textbook (which is most of them)."
Read above where I indicated understanding the material, which an A student has done.
"If the highly paid programmers are skewed towards certain high cost of living markets, then it's fairer to compare salaries against other professions in those same markets, and not nationwide averages."
This is what everybody repeated when I lived in a more rural and lower paying market. It's not really as true as I was led to believe. It's even less true as time goes on. Things cost about the same in Home Depot, Walmart, and when buying from Amazon. Cars cost about the same, gas costs about the same, education costs the same, most everything costs about the same with the exception of housing and that isn't nearly so big a hit if you work in the city then live in suburbs like most people.
In rural Illinois you'd pay $500/month mortgage on a reasonable 3 bedroom home in a safe middle class neighborhood, in Dallas you'd pay maybe $700, in Albuquerque you'd pay $800, in Miami you'd pay $1200. So, the biggest gap there is $700/mo. That's $8,400 a year. You might pay up to $200/mo more on utilities (and that would be a massive and unlikely swing) so that is another $2400. $10,800 difference. If you are getting paid $50,000 a year in Omaha for a job I get $100,000 a year for in Dallas you most definitely are NOT making equivalent money after factoring cost of living. Not even close. You will have dramatically less disposable income.
On the flip side, you don't have to be nearly as good at what you do to stay employed in Omaha. There isn't nearly as much skilled competition.
"I didn't say that were that important, just that being a teacher requires an advanced degree and they are paid a lot less than programmers."
The type of degree required for the job really isn't relevant. It's true, IT generally doesn't actually require a degree. But there are plenty of people working in IT with degrees, bachelors and masters degrees abound. The people who have them aren't generally any better at the job. If anything they generally have however much time they wasted on slow university learning subtracted from their years of experience. Things that universities dedicate entire courses to are material IT professionals are expected to pick up during the process of using that material to single handedly deploy a project due in 4-6 weeks. Or even figure out on the fly to resolve a problem with a 30 minute SLA. Rinse, repeat, over and over again.
The amount of money you wasted to be taught largely irrelevant material really really slowly and usually in such a manner that you are unable to actually apply it in unique ways to solve real problems shouldn't be a factor in what you make. IT is the oil that keeps a profit making machine running, so they get a piece of the profit left after the leeches (aka sales, senior management, stockholders, etc) take off their chunk.
Teachers generate zero profits. Everything they make is a charitable donation except at for profit institutions. Below university level they serve two functions, one is to be a babysitter, the other is to teach more or less the exact same material from a textbook over and over again, year after year. In a grade school or high school those might be the same textbooks for 10 years. Yes what they do is important but to be a highschool teacher you need to be able to read and comprehend the material in one subject at the grade level of the class being taught. There is no reason they SHOULD need an advanced degree. Anyone who got an A in the course in question is qualified to teach it.
Even some university courses aren't much different. Learn the latest textbook, comprehend it, regurgitate. The books just tend to cycle out more often but they only have to learn the differences.
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I hate this negative attitude that pervades the world these days. It discourages invention and ingenuity by telling people only the ignorant and crazy would even try. Everything we accomplish in the next 50-100 years will be something that reality gets in the way of just now. Most things which are genuinely revolutionary are actually fairly simple twists on existing things.
There are functional wave powered ocean vessels.
There is no such thing as 'free energy' in the sense of something from nothing, it has to come from somewhere. But energy isn't exactly in short supply. It's literally everywhere. Everything is made of energy after all and that IS reality.
This is definitely not the time to make assumptions about what will happen and what will come. There are so many new toys that completely redefine what is possible at play right now and new discoveries happening so fast and yet being made by such a small group of people that there are millions of potential revolutionary applications. There is a massive well of untapped potential that hasn't been explored because the people who know it's there are a small group and because the industries that make advanced technology are economically entrenched in current manufacturing methods.
One small example was that not too far back an independent inventor finally developed the first real hover board. That wasn't even actually using NEW theory, he cracked out an old understanding of physics and a the flux of a magnetic field repelling a conductor. Looking into this I was able to find lots of people had played with the effect in labs to demonstrate the physics. He didn't disclose what he did but with nothing but a reading of the relevant Wikipedia page and looking at the experimental setups I could find, where 80-90% of the energy consumed was lost to heat. There were definitely some immediate adjustments I could see that could be made to improve that efficiency dramatically. The patent office didn't believe him and he had to travel to Washington D.C. and demonstrate the board in person.
The patent office was skeptical and expended minimal resources on the claim, making him come to them to prove it. That increases the barrier but at least they gave him a chance to prove he'd successfully invented a science fiction device.
All the papers are out there, detailing DNA assembly of nanotech devices. That is something you can do in an improvised home lab. You can build metallic nano-structures using relatively inexpensive techniques that can be replicated in a home lab. Lithographic techniques could be utilized with some improvisation and basic electronics know how can be used to build structures out of cheap materials. Relatively simple but completely novel things are being discovered constantly here. You have some disadvantages but also advantages. The techniques you develop will be relatively inexpensive so your work might be inexpensive to replicate and spread commercially if you choose and if you do develop something novel there will likely be a great deal of potential to improve on it. There is a huge amount of potential in optical computing and holography as well. There is a great deal of advanced biology that can be done by an amateur in a home lab. Chemistry and electronics of course are always there as a tool. If you throw the game changer that is quantum physics into the mix who knows what someone using these tools could produce. You wouldn't have to be an expert in all these areas, someone who just picked up enough to be dangerous in several of these areas could accomplish something amazing.
"Actually, the definition of civilian [wikipedia.org] is well-defined in the Laws of War, commonly codified today in international laws by Protocol I [wikipedia.org] of the Geneva Conventions."
Really? Do you define your moral compass to directly align with the law? Let's look at what you said.
"So, actually the criteria are much more specific than you describe. "Civilians" can fight in wars, in which case they become "combatants," but they do not cease to be "civilians," as the term is commonly understood in contrast to organized military personnel.
As for the farmer in GGP's example, he's clearly a civilian unless he's a member of a military force. If he carries a gun but only for his own protection and does not engage in direct action against an enemy, he is probably assumed to be a "non-combatant" as well, under international legal definitions."
Define organized. Define military, Define what constitutes an insignia. Your definition of privileged combatant excludes every combatant relevant to a modern war (at least for the US which is where the automated death machines are coming into play). Terrorists groups aren't in organized military structure, they don't wear insignias, and they don't follow the laws and customs of warfare. So by your definition of civilian, they are all civilians and in some cases both civilians and combatants.
"As for the farmer in GGP's example, he's clearly a civilian unless he's a member of a military force. If he carries a gun but only for his own protection and does not engage in direct action against an enemy, he is probably assumed to be a "non-combatant" as well, under international legal definitions."
Probably assumed to be a non-combatant? Define direct action. Define "actively used in support." He is using his gun for protection to supply the combatants. Supplying the combatants is obviously supporting them. Arguably, carrying a gun for protection while transporting their goods IS actively using it to support them.
How is a drone or even a soldier supposed to know the difference between the men carrying the guns? If he is standing with the other men when the soldier fires on them and he fires on the soldier is he a combatant and okay to kill then, even though he is a civilian acting in self-defense? What if the soldier is replaced with a machine? Now it's a human being defending his life and not putting another at risk.
Companies have an advantage in that H1-B's can't switch jobs and stay in the states.
But while the family back home costing 1/10th the amount is an advantage for H1-B's I fail to see how it benefits the United States to allow that advantage. Just like we charge import/export taxes we should be charging taxes on imported labor to offset those differences for the good of our economy. There is no real advantage to the United States to use imported tech workers when there is a plentiful supply at home.
"By the same logic, computers should not be allowed in any life-critical situation."
That isn't true. Some of those situations have clearly defined parameters. For instance air traffic control is collision avoidance. You can build a truth table and mathematically prove every possible outcome within certain bounds. We can do and do do this for many critical programs.
"Civilian" and "Combatant", "Us" and "Them" these are fuzzy classifications at best. Human's fed all the data could not consistently classify people into one category or another, in fact, they can only achieve a better consensus with data limited by a perspective. If humans can't come up with a consistent definition how can they assess whether or not a machine is more or less accurately adhering to it?
The fact that we can all conceive of the vague notion of a "bad guy." Doesn't mean such a thing exists. The fact that no individual can come up with a set of discrete and measurable criteria that will successfully classify "bad guy" in a logically consistent way even for themselves, let alone get a consensus among others, says that being able to agree on a vague notion of a thing doesn't mean that vague notion actually exists. There is no such thing as a "bad guy." No matter how much we can all agree we should stop the bad guys.
Both are pretty likely. Let's start by defining civilian. Is the farmer who supports the militants cause and brings them goat cheese and steel a civilian? What about the farmer who is afraid of them and does the exact same thing? What if the farmer knows the danger level and carries a gun for personal defense?
You can't compute us and them in an analogue world where the real value is never actually 0 or 1 but always a shifting value in between and usually multiple shifting values in between. YOU can't, and neither can your robot.
Excellent, sending a drone for you now.
It provides access to what is effectively the largest library of information in the world for starters. Also, computer based learning provides the opportunity for open source collaborative educating auto-pilots that can be incrementally improved. Rather than a teacher expending efforts to help a single student, they can expend efforts improving the adaptive learning system in a way that will help that student and everyone like that student from then on.
Of course, if the teacher just continues to do the same old "cover a section and assign the questions at the end" in a standardized text book or the same thing with a test of their own making testing that same material as their teaching style, it does no good at all. We can make anyone fashion a bucket to put the water in and we can't make the teachers lead their horses to the water, but without access and computers there is no water they COULD lead them to.
I do. For starters this kind of thing increases access to resources like Khan academy, wikipedia, open text books, and the internet as a whole which provides an information resource that makes a typical school library look like a giant waste of space.
The old guard following along with standardized texts and curriculum needs to be tossed out. Our schools are woefully inadequate. Our teachers are spread too thin. The internet allows for building interactive learning labs that adapt to individual students and their strengths and weaknesses in the kind of ways a good teacher would if they had the time to dedicate one on one with each student.
Our teachers instead of being babysitters each trying to re-invent the wheel should be doing three things, counting attendance and collaborating and contributing to open and free resources of this type, and last but not least they should be spending their efforts with students teaching things computers can't do like physical and spatial learning and tasks.
Why would we want to waste all the education that is required of our teachers on tutoring a student effectively or ineffectually tutoring 30 when that teacher can instead focus on an adaptive tutoring auto-pilot? As teachers recognize a failing (in the form of having to expend personal efforts) they collaborate, build an improvement for the auto-pilot, and the auto-pilot carries that ability to adapt to every single student thereafter. Eventually it becomes in effect a teacher with hundreds of years of collective experience providing one-on-one tutoring of our children. It slows down or speeds up as appropriate for the student in question so "no child is left behind" but also "no child is kept behind."
In general our students should be programming and studying physics and sciences in grade school. We should be moving on to more abstract maths as soon as possible because the younger we are the BETTER we are at understanding fluid and creative abstract concepts like these. And STEM is the key to the future success of our society.
All funds from government and for government should go through the standard tax system, nothing should bypass in the form of fees.
The problem with bypassing in the form of fees is that a certain portion of every dollar you make is related to government supported infrastructure (including education). It takes a lot more public infrastructure to enable the generation of million dollars worth of wealth than it does to generate $30,000. Thus a person making $30,000 has a much smaller debt to society to pay back. Anytime a fee like this is introduced that person with the smaller debt is subsidizing and paying debt owed by the person with the larger income.
Which doesn't change the fact that the state laws indicating you have to voluntarily pay them what amounts to sales tax on interstate purchases now.
The use tax is a sales tax on interstate commerce which is completely unconstitutional, if I'm accused of tax evasion courts ignore all my paper structures and convict if the bottom line is I got money and didn't pay the tax. Why should it be any different if the state is simply calling the exact same tax by a different name?
No the constitution prohibits imposing a tax on stuff imported from another state, period. Saying "oh and also marbles are bad" alongside said tax does not allow the state to do so. If any provision of any bill has the RESULT of taxing commerce across state lines it is unconstitutional.
How about we go the other direction and get rid of federal level income taxation. Let states charge income tax, potentially actually make living in one state notably different than living in another, you know, so you can choose. Let the feds ask the states for funds instead of the other way around.
The current system of "use taxes" is not fair because it's unconstitutional. The answer isn't to allow the unconstitutional tax, the answer is to not allow the "use" tax.
Yup, can you imagine the sort of lifeform that could exist as a conciousness with erosion as it's neural process? To it we MIGHT amount a short lived bacterial infection.
"That's not the only way to store electricity, it's just the least leak prone method we currently have."
;)
Right, which makes it the way the we have to do it.
"It's interesting that your lightweight optical battery description happens to be for a house (immobile) and ignores the conversion between electricity, treating that as a separate piece of hardware"
It's interesting that you assume a conversion between electricity when I clearly outlined a scenario in which none is required. What are you going to do convert light gathered from the massive fusion reactors that fill our sky into electricity and feed it into a light bulb to turn it back into light? Of course not, you are just going to route it with fiber optic cabling and shine it through a diffuser directly down into your living room. The same with heat, you capture IR and shine that into your home. No electricity needed.
"It's interesting that your lightweight optical battery description happens to be for a house (immobile) and ignores the conversion between electricity, treating that as a separate piece of hardware. Completely useless for a mobile device, which is where you actually care about the mass of the battery."
The scenario was of the most useful application not depending on advances in optical computing. A battery that doesn't break down with recharge/discharge cycles and can have an incredible capacity without extreme mass is important in a home setting where you'd want to store the 3000w per square meter the sun is shining down on your roof. Also potentially in a vehicle. With existing electronics the lightweight battery would need to be converted to electricity and that would add an extra component that might not make it the answer in all cases. Of course it would still be carbon neutral and require very small pieces of our most efficient solar conversion panels, made more efficient by the fact we could pick the exact spectrum of light we will use, tune the panels to that spectrum, and we can make nearly perfect mirrors when turning for a specific frequency of light and release into a chamber lined with that.
With advances in optical computing your mobile device doesn't use electricity, it runs on light, recharges anywhere it is light out, and/or from an optic cable coming out of the wall and no conversion is required. Of course, NONE of that works, house, car, mobile devices, without an optic battery. Many of those applications work just fine without optical computing or memory.
Someone else mentioned timescales. It seems to me that it depends on how we define "life." Would you consider self-awareness to be life?
Self awareness basically emerges from any self scoring logical multi-dimensional memory system that can emerge patterns. Our brains use neural nets for this but the basic concept behind a neural net is so simple it could exist in logical patterns in ocean currents, rock formations, and or weather patterns on timescales of picoseconds or millions of years.
And then there is scoring, we control this with artificial neural nets because we want them to exhibit a behavior WE are defining and measuring. If you let go of that and just simplify it to a system that tries to assess what exists or doesn't exist with pre-defining what is "correct" for it. You just tie that neural net to a scoring system constantly going through a cycle of 1 (positive score, remember those connections), (neutral score, no change), 0 (negative score). At a glance this seems to have the result of canceling everything out, but that isn't true connections used during both of the first two cycles leave an imprint that will slowly fade unless repeated, higher order patterns will emerge with patterns of complexity limited only by the multi-dimensional memory system.
Are the patterns real or imaginary? They are reflections of what the system has actually been able to observe, measure, or experience which is all we ourselves can say about our thoughts and even our own existence. A system like this views new things through the lens of previous impressions and experiences. It learns. It can identify any pattern it can sense. Science says everything real has a pattern of observable behavior and properties. What about feelings? Feelings are probably a mix of biochemical reactions and perceptions. The result of an intelligence like us but without the biochemical reactions is probably closer to a sociopath, able to perceive, understand and even relate to the negative patterns that trigger the biochemical reactions but not actually having the emotional wash. Unlike a sociopath it wouldn't be human, so it might not relate very at all. One very cool automatic property of a system like this? That scoring loop means it spends 1/3 of it's existence doing what could be argued is the logical equivalent of sleeping.
If you are using the output to light your home, transmit data, or heat up some stew you don't need the solar cells. Toss light based computing in and you don't even need electronics anymore. I should be possible to create a reasonably efficient light motor as well, light can give up it's momentum and it has lots of it. If we can create a solar sail based on this we can create a motor. Light will bend in a magnetic field, that suggests and interaction that transfers energy, it would seem like it should be possible to build that interaction into a motor if you had enough light energy.
Not necessarily as I understand it. Electrical energy currently has to be stored as a potential within a chemical element. They aren't heavy because of the electrons they are heavy because a higher capacity battery literally means a bigger battery filled with a larger quantity of heavy chemicals.
This is more like a capacitor, actually trapping photons without a chemical storage and then releasing all of them in a burst. But unlike a capacitor the potential isn't between differently charged photons fighting each other. The "potential" is in the momentum of the photon which is retained and not in the force used to store it. The photon is being held in a balanced stasis, retaining it's momentum, and not being resisted by an insulator that will ultimately fail. Even better, they can selectively trap different frequencies of light.
That is super nice in terms of potential. Imagine your home in a world where these are built with large capacity. Your solar panel is no longer an inefficient convertor of light energy into electrical potential. It is now a light collector, it carries the light via an optical cable to a large capacity light battery that selectively traps visible and infrared light and lets excess pass out of your home. You don't block UV, you just let it pass away, so you aren't constantly eroding a blocking solution. The IR light is trapped as well but because it is held in stasis it's energy is retained and the battery holding it isn't hot and doesn't need insulated. This is used to heat your water and home. If your collector was on the roof the collecting of this IR light also goes a very long way toward keeping your home cool. The light in your home is the full visible spectrum of the sun (or any blend of any part of it you like) and even at night is actually sunlight. Not converted to electricity at 40% efficiency and back to light at 95% efficiency. The high capacity light batteries might need to be built in banks with smaller capacity, allowing you to release the amount of light you need in to the fine units of X, you can release 1X/s for 50s or you can release 50X/s for 1s.
None of that even requires optical computing. But with fully optical computing your gadgets will eventually all run directly on light. So again, no need for systems that convert other forms of energy to electricity with maybe 40% efficiency. You still have losses of course, imperfection in your optical fiber for instance. But the biggest loses come from that conversion and you've just taken our biggest forms of consumption (light/heat) and eliminated the need for conversion. The next biggest is mechanical energy. That does require conversion, but light is actually an excellent candidate for highly efficient conversion to mechanical energy, there is an awful lot of momentum there.
It's also CO2 and heat neutral, actually there should be a net reduction in global warming because some amount of energy from the sun that would have been released as heat will always be contained in the cumulative balance of these storage systems that never existed before.
A step further? A light based battery is a step enough for me. Light has no mass.
Are we seeing the forerunner to light based batteries? You wouldn't actually need to trap light for memory in an optical system, you only need to have light leave at least a temporary imprint that will impact light bounced against it later.
Intelligence is already reasonably well explained, we use our understanding of intelligence to build our own intelligent systems. Just the other day I watched a human built intelligence given a virtual joystick and fed images of the screen and given no concept of a game (beyond using the score as a simple feedback mechanism) figure out how to play most Atari games better than humans can.
These kind of systems aren't even really that complex, they are just hard for us to follow because they work like ant hills, with lots of very simple pieces doing very simple things and the intelligence is a complex result that emerges when you add it all up. Even if you understand them they are difficult to really own. A good mechanic knows the machine inside and out and can model it's behavior in his head. That is much harder with intelligence because you can't break down it's stages into the behavior of the 2-6 elements our conscious mind is capable of considering at once.
Consciousness, is simply an emergence phenomenon of a sufficiently intelligent system.
"Second: on the bright side, unlike a certain other religion popular the world around, you can say something against the pope and not get assassinated by religious leaders for doing so."
At least not anymore. But you can get ex-communicated which a catholic believes is a one way ticket to an eternity of torture and suffering after an eyeblink short stay on Earth.
"Pedagogy is not a simple subject, and just because you know the material does not, in any way, mean that you can be an effective teacher"
The vast majority of teachers do nothing more than follow along with a textbook. Some paraphrase the material, some simply assign it as reading. Then they'll assign the questions at the end of the chapter as homework. Perhaps they'll have some handout assignments from the teacher version of the text. ANYONE can do that provided they themselves understand the material.
"To be a really good teacher you need to have mastery of the entire discipline so that you understand where every class fits into the overall tableau."
Who said anything about good teachers? But understanding where each class fits in is simply a matter of having worked through the material a few times. Teach the same text book two or three times and you'll have it all memorized and know where every class fits in. You might change it up a bit, skip things, alter things. At that point you are an expert. None of that has anything to do with advanced degrees. The fact that you are "qualified" to teach literally any course with any masters degree regardless of the relevance of your major is proof of that.
"Also, if you think passing the course, or even excelling at the course, gives you the necessary content knowledge to effectively teach it, you are terribly mistaken."
Who said anything about teaching effectively? That has little to do with most of the schools in the US. It means you had the ability to read and comprehend the material. Which means you could do so again and regurgitate that material for students.
"Not to mention the simple case of a student asking you a question that's not in the textbook (which is most of them)."
Read above where I indicated understanding the material, which an A student has done.
"If the highly paid programmers are skewed towards certain high cost of living markets, then it's fairer to compare salaries against other professions in those same markets, and not nationwide averages."
This is what everybody repeated when I lived in a more rural and lower paying market. It's not really as true as I was led to believe. It's even less true as time goes on. Things cost about the same in Home Depot, Walmart, and when buying from Amazon. Cars cost about the same, gas costs about the same, education costs the same, most everything costs about the same with the exception of housing and that isn't nearly so big a hit if you work in the city then live in suburbs like most people.
In rural Illinois you'd pay $500/month mortgage on a reasonable 3 bedroom home in a safe middle class neighborhood, in Dallas you'd pay maybe $700, in Albuquerque you'd pay $800, in Miami you'd pay $1200. So, the biggest gap there is $700/mo. That's $8,400 a year. You might pay up to $200/mo more on utilities (and that would be a massive and unlikely swing) so that is another $2400. $10,800 difference. If you are getting paid $50,000 a year in Omaha for a job I get $100,000 a year for in Dallas you most definitely are NOT making equivalent money after factoring cost of living. Not even close. You will have dramatically less disposable income.
On the flip side, you don't have to be nearly as good at what you do to stay employed in Omaha. There isn't nearly as much skilled competition.
"I didn't say that were that important, just that being a teacher requires an advanced degree and they are paid a lot less than programmers."
The type of degree required for the job really isn't relevant. It's true, IT generally doesn't actually require a degree. But there are plenty of people working in IT with degrees, bachelors and masters degrees abound. The people who have them aren't generally any better at the job. If anything they generally have however much time they wasted on slow university learning subtracted from their years of experience. Things that universities dedicate entire courses to are material IT professionals are expected to pick up during the process of using that material to single handedly deploy a project due in 4-6 weeks. Or even figure out on the fly to resolve a problem with a 30 minute SLA. Rinse, repeat, over and over again.
The amount of money you wasted to be taught largely irrelevant material really really slowly and usually in such a manner that you are unable to actually apply it in unique ways to solve real problems shouldn't be a factor in what you make. IT is the oil that keeps a profit making machine running, so they get a piece of the profit left after the leeches (aka sales, senior management, stockholders, etc) take off their chunk.
Teachers generate zero profits. Everything they make is a charitable donation except at for profit institutions. Below university level they serve two functions, one is to be a babysitter, the other is to teach more or less the exact same material from a textbook over and over again, year after year. In a grade school or high school those might be the same textbooks for 10 years. Yes what they do is important but to be a highschool teacher you need to be able to read and comprehend the material in one subject at the grade level of the class being taught. There is no reason they SHOULD need an advanced degree. Anyone who got an A in the course in question is qualified to teach it.
Even some university courses aren't much different. Learn the latest textbook, comprehend it, regurgitate. The books just tend to cycle out more often but they only have to learn the differences.