Exactly. It's something that works at the level of a human subconscious: the leftover bits of evolved junk in our minds from before we developed sentience. The sorts of things that let us shout at the sky before a thunderstorm and then assume that we've made Thor angry, not the sorts of things that allow us to build a modern technical society.
The Butlerian Jihad in the original Dune books was a reaction to the majority of humans delegating most of their thinking to machines, which allowed the humans that controlled the machines to control them. Every year, this seems more prophetic.
Except that the claims of strong AI 'real soon now' have been coming since the '60s. Current AI research is producing things that are good at the sorts of things that an animal's autonomic system does. AI research 40 years ago was doing the same thing, only (much) slower. The difference between that and a sentient system is a qualitative difference, whereas the improvements that you list are all quantitative.
Neural networks are good at generating correlations, but that's about all that they're good for. A large part of learning to think as a human child is learning to emulate a model of computation that's better suited to sentient awareness on a complex neural network. Most animals have neural networks in their heads that are far more complex than anything that we can build now, yet I'm not seeing mice replacing humans in most jobs.
If you don't care about performance parity with anything modern, Hercules emulates a number of the older IBM mainframes a lot faster than they ever ran.
You might like to pay attention when the muck spreaders are out - the stuff that they're coating the fields in is not plain old organic dirt (or even soil, which is an incredibly complex substance in its own right). It's not even shit anymore, it's a complex growing medium that's covered by numerous patents.
Given that most of this code was originally targeting systems from the 1960's and 70's, I can't imagine there being an insurmountable number of lines of code
According to Wikipedia, Gartner estimated about 200 billion lines of COBOL code in 1997. To put that in perspective, that's more than the total amount of open source C code tracked by OpenHub.net. Can you imagine persuading someone to rewrite all of that C code in a newer language?
That's the second post I've seen saying that COBOL has no unicode support, yet COBOL 2002 added unicode support and is widely supported (COBOL 2014, less so). If you're running on an IBM system, a bunch of the COBOL unicode operations are accelerated in hardware.
So you'd rather play a game that you know is rigged against you than try to change the rules, while simultaneously complaining that people who want to change the rules are self destructive? No wonder we elect the leaders we do...
And that's exactly the attitude that leads to this situation: the belief among a large subset of the population that they will eventually get rich and benefit from all of the loopholes that aid the rich. The overwhelming majority of the richest people in the world were born rich. They didn't come from being lower middle class and work hard to earn their money.
IBM used to have a bunch of aptitude tests for entry-level technical jobs. I was recently speaking to a retired alumna at my college who applied to their admin track and after doing the tests for that was asked if she'd be willing to try the technical track tests. She did well in those and stayed with the company for 10 years, helping to design System/360 and 370. She was particularly smug about the fact that her boyfriend at the time had failed the same aptitude tests.
And yet it works in exactly the way Libertarians are telling us things will work: companies put an agreed-on label on their products, they have an incentive to check unreasonable-sounding claims from their competitors as do consumer groups, and there is redress through the courts (and bad publicity) if anyone is caught cheating. For once, it's a free market solution that is working with a minimal amount of government intervention.
This isn't the reason the cloud makes a terrible backup. The thing that you want to avoid with a backup is correlated failures: things that cause a failure of your primary store should be different from things that cause a failure of your backup. Your house burning down or thieves coming and stealing your computers will cause failures of both your original and on-site backups. It's a lot less likely that the founder of your cloud provider will be arrested for the same reason that you lose your laptop.
Remember: it only matters if your backup storage fails at the same time as your on-line storage.
No, he's right. To afford a standard of living comparable to what the same engineer would be able to afford elsewhere, he needs to make $500K/year. That's obviously not sustainable for his employer, which means that the rational thing to do is start moving jobs out of the bay area (which some companies have already started - Microsoft closed the bay area Microsoft Research site a year or two back, for example).
You can address that by having a progressive tax. In the UK, there are tax-free savings accounts that have a limited pay-in amount per year[1], income on which is exempt from income tax. You could do the same thing with a wealth tax: anything in a tax-free savings account doesn't count. You could perhaps also add an exemption for money in your primary residence, up to the median house price in your region. Beyond that, add a tax-free allowance of something like $50K and most people will pay nothing.
The real problem with such a scheme is that it's open to tax avoidance. It's fine for poor people, whose wealth is typically in cash form and so easily valued, but what about wealth held in private stocks in off-shore corporations? Those currently don't even need to be disclosed, and if they are then it's often very difficult to determine the value of the company (especially if it's a shell company that owns other shell companies that own real assets, with arbitrary levels of indirection in the middle). To make it work, you need complete financial transparency on all private companies.
[1] When they were introduced, this was about £3K, which was pretty reasonable. If you're earning 50% more than minimum wage in most of the country, you can get close to this. Now it's over £10K, which effectively makes it a tax break for the rich. Unfortunately, it doesn't roll over either, so if you have irregular income then you couldn't put in nothing one year and then £6K the next.
Gold leaf can be made one atom thick and gold electroplating can do the same. The total volume of gold required to cover something tap sized at a thickness of one atom is pretty small.
"Fly over country" is poor because being in the middle of nowhere leads to less economic activity
This is definitely true for physical goods that have high transportation costs. It's less true for virtual goods, such as most of the California exports.
Add to that, claiming unemployment benefits after moving also typically takes a while to set up, so you need to have enough capital to cover your cost of living for a few months if you move somewhere to look for work, rather than moving somewhere because you have a job offer. And you're not going to get a job offer before you move unless you go and visit a place to interview first, which costs in hotel bills and transport unless your prospective employer covers interview costs (which only happens for relatively high-skill jobs).
There are a few things wrong with your analysis. The first is that disk writes tend to be bursty for desktop users. You write a few hundred MBs (or a few GBs) and then drop down to an average of a few tens or hundreds of KBs per second. Spinning rust can easily keep up with the average write throughput of a typical user, it's the bursts that it has problems with. If you can buffer a few hundred MBs of writes, reorder them to reduce head movement, and then write them out behind the user, then you'll get much better performance. Obviously, this won't help for server workloads where you're I/O limited all of the time, but it will help a lot with desktop / laptop use.
The second is that one of the big bottlenecks for modern filesystems is the wait until data is safely in persistent storage. System RAM doesn't help here, because it goes away with power failure. To ensure consistency, you have to pause writing parts of an update until you've received confirmation that the previous part is written. In a conventional journaled FS, for example, you don't start writing the updates until you've confirmed that the journal has been committed to disk. With NV cache, you can get this confirmation practically instantly. If there's a power failure, then the drive just has to replay the transactions from NVRAM.
I thought Waitrose delivered everywhere where they had a large store. Don't they deliver in your area?
For what it's worth, I've had under a dozen substitutions in five years of using Ocado (fewer than I got in any six month period with Tesco before that) and things always come with long shelf lives. They also have excellent customer support and will quickly fix anything that they get wrong.
Unfortunately groceries kind of suck online in the UK.
Seriously? Between the major supermarket chains and Ocado all providing online order / home delivery, none of them works for you? I'll admit, I gave up on Tesco repeatedly sending me things that were one day away from their use-by date, but there's a reasonable amount of competition.
You actually see this on Amazon, where a number of third-party sellers automatically set their prices by querying the Amazon price or the cheapest third-party price and undercutting it slightly. This sometimes leads to amusing effects where two third-party sellers are offering something for 10% less than the cheapest other seller and forget to set a minimum price.
I seem to recall a study a few years back that showed that most highly paid CEOs' decisions were not better than random and, in a number of cases, were significantly worse. They shouldn't be worried that they can be replaced by AI, they should be worried that they can be replaced by a magic 8 ball.
The problem isn't robots taking all our jobs, it's robots taking half of our jobs. How do you manage a society in which 50% of the working-age population are contributing essential work for the functioning of civilisation and the other 50% are not able to do anything that a machine can't do better? Unemployment rates of 10-20% are currently seriously problematic for western societies and cause huge economic problems. For some jobs, you can solve it by dividing the work among more people, so you have four people working a 10 hour week instead of one working a 40 hour week, but that doesn't help you to deal with the people who aren't able to do any available jobs.
Add to that, the defining feature of a functional language is the set of things that it disallows, not the set of things that it permits. A multi-paradigm language, by definition, has to permit anything that the various paradigms permit and so doesn't gain the benefits that you get from being able to reason about your code in a language that doesn't permit unconstrained mutability or side effects.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure it has adds. And multiplies, and divides, and function calls, and object construction. Unless you use NoScript, of course.
Exactly. It's something that works at the level of a human subconscious: the leftover bits of evolved junk in our minds from before we developed sentience. The sorts of things that let us shout at the sky before a thunderstorm and then assume that we've made Thor angry, not the sorts of things that allow us to build a modern technical society.
The Butlerian Jihad in the original Dune books was a reaction to the majority of humans delegating most of their thinking to machines, which allowed the humans that controlled the machines to control them. Every year, this seems more prophetic.
Except that the claims of strong AI 'real soon now' have been coming since the '60s. Current AI research is producing things that are good at the sorts of things that an animal's autonomic system does. AI research 40 years ago was doing the same thing, only (much) slower. The difference between that and a sentient system is a qualitative difference, whereas the improvements that you list are all quantitative.
Neural networks are good at generating correlations, but that's about all that they're good for. A large part of learning to think as a human child is learning to emulate a model of computation that's better suited to sentient awareness on a complex neural network. Most animals have neural networks in their heads that are far more complex than anything that we can build now, yet I'm not seeing mice replacing humans in most jobs.
If you don't care about performance parity with anything modern, Hercules emulates a number of the older IBM mainframes a lot faster than they ever ran.
You might like to pay attention when the muck spreaders are out - the stuff that they're coating the fields in is not plain old organic dirt (or even soil, which is an incredibly complex substance in its own right). It's not even shit anymore, it's a complex growing medium that's covered by numerous patents.
Given that most of this code was originally targeting systems from the 1960's and 70's, I can't imagine there being an insurmountable number of lines of code
According to Wikipedia, Gartner estimated about 200 billion lines of COBOL code in 1997. To put that in perspective, that's more than the total amount of open source C code tracked by OpenHub.net. Can you imagine persuading someone to rewrite all of that C code in a newer language?
That's the second post I've seen saying that COBOL has no unicode support, yet COBOL 2002 added unicode support and is widely supported (COBOL 2014, less so). If you're running on an IBM system, a bunch of the COBOL unicode operations are accelerated in hardware.
So you'd rather play a game that you know is rigged against you than try to change the rules, while simultaneously complaining that people who want to change the rules are self destructive? No wonder we elect the leaders we do...
And that's exactly the attitude that leads to this situation: the belief among a large subset of the population that they will eventually get rich and benefit from all of the loopholes that aid the rich. The overwhelming majority of the richest people in the world were born rich. They didn't come from being lower middle class and work hard to earn their money.
IBM used to have a bunch of aptitude tests for entry-level technical jobs. I was recently speaking to a retired alumna at my college who applied to their admin track and after doing the tests for that was asked if she'd be willing to try the technical track tests. She did well in those and stayed with the company for 10 years, helping to design System/360 and 370. She was particularly smug about the fact that her boyfriend at the time had failed the same aptitude tests.
Then, almost by definition, it is worthless
And yet it works in exactly the way Libertarians are telling us things will work: companies put an agreed-on label on their products, they have an incentive to check unreasonable-sounding claims from their competitors as do consumer groups, and there is redress through the courts (and bad publicity) if anyone is caught cheating. For once, it's a free market solution that is working with a minimal amount of government intervention.
This isn't the reason the cloud makes a terrible backup. The thing that you want to avoid with a backup is correlated failures: things that cause a failure of your primary store should be different from things that cause a failure of your backup. Your house burning down or thieves coming and stealing your computers will cause failures of both your original and on-site backups. It's a lot less likely that the founder of your cloud provider will be arrested for the same reason that you lose your laptop.
Remember: it only matters if your backup storage fails at the same time as your on-line storage.
No, he's right. To afford a standard of living comparable to what the same engineer would be able to afford elsewhere, he needs to make $500K/year. That's obviously not sustainable for his employer, which means that the rational thing to do is start moving jobs out of the bay area (which some companies have already started - Microsoft closed the bay area Microsoft Research site a year or two back, for example).
You can address that by having a progressive tax. In the UK, there are tax-free savings accounts that have a limited pay-in amount per year[1], income on which is exempt from income tax. You could do the same thing with a wealth tax: anything in a tax-free savings account doesn't count. You could perhaps also add an exemption for money in your primary residence, up to the median house price in your region. Beyond that, add a tax-free allowance of something like $50K and most people will pay nothing.
The real problem with such a scheme is that it's open to tax avoidance. It's fine for poor people, whose wealth is typically in cash form and so easily valued, but what about wealth held in private stocks in off-shore corporations? Those currently don't even need to be disclosed, and if they are then it's often very difficult to determine the value of the company (especially if it's a shell company that owns other shell companies that own real assets, with arbitrary levels of indirection in the middle). To make it work, you need complete financial transparency on all private companies.
[1] When they were introduced, this was about £3K, which was pretty reasonable. If you're earning 50% more than minimum wage in most of the country, you can get close to this. Now it's over £10K, which effectively makes it a tax break for the rich. Unfortunately, it doesn't roll over either, so if you have irregular income then you couldn't put in nothing one year and then £6K the next.
Gold leaf can be made one atom thick and gold electroplating can do the same. The total volume of gold required to cover something tap sized at a thickness of one atom is pretty small.
"Fly over country" is poor because being in the middle of nowhere leads to less economic activity
This is definitely true for physical goods that have high transportation costs. It's less true for virtual goods, such as most of the California exports.
Add to that, claiming unemployment benefits after moving also typically takes a while to set up, so you need to have enough capital to cover your cost of living for a few months if you move somewhere to look for work, rather than moving somewhere because you have a job offer. And you're not going to get a job offer before you move unless you go and visit a place to interview first, which costs in hotel bills and transport unless your prospective employer covers interview costs (which only happens for relatively high-skill jobs).
The second is that one of the big bottlenecks for modern filesystems is the wait until data is safely in persistent storage. System RAM doesn't help here, because it goes away with power failure. To ensure consistency, you have to pause writing parts of an update until you've received confirmation that the previous part is written. In a conventional journaled FS, for example, you don't start writing the updates until you've confirmed that the journal has been committed to disk. With NV cache, you can get this confirmation practically instantly. If there's a power failure, then the drive just has to replay the transactions from NVRAM.
For what it's worth, I've had under a dozen substitutions in five years of using Ocado (fewer than I got in any six month period with Tesco before that) and things always come with long shelf lives. They also have excellent customer support and will quickly fix anything that they get wrong.
Unfortunately groceries kind of suck online in the UK.
Seriously? Between the major supermarket chains and Ocado all providing online order / home delivery, none of them works for you? I'll admit, I gave up on Tesco repeatedly sending me things that were one day away from their use-by date, but there's a reasonable amount of competition.
You actually see this on Amazon, where a number of third-party sellers automatically set their prices by querying the Amazon price or the cheapest third-party price and undercutting it slightly. This sometimes leads to amusing effects where two third-party sellers are offering something for 10% less than the cheapest other seller and forget to set a minimum price.
I seem to recall a study a few years back that showed that most highly paid CEOs' decisions were not better than random and, in a number of cases, were significantly worse. They shouldn't be worried that they can be replaced by AI, they should be worried that they can be replaced by a magic 8 ball.
The problem isn't robots taking all our jobs, it's robots taking half of our jobs. How do you manage a society in which 50% of the working-age population are contributing essential work for the functioning of civilisation and the other 50% are not able to do anything that a machine can't do better? Unemployment rates of 10-20% are currently seriously problematic for western societies and cause huge economic problems. For some jobs, you can solve it by dividing the work among more people, so you have four people working a 10 hour week instead of one working a 40 hour week, but that doesn't help you to deal with the people who aren't able to do any available jobs.
Add to that, the defining feature of a functional language is the set of things that it disallows, not the set of things that it permits. A multi-paradigm language, by definition, has to permit anything that the various paradigms permit and so doesn't gain the benefits that you get from being able to reason about your code in a language that doesn't permit unconstrained mutability or side effects.