>This is precisely the reason why I quit Facebook permanently.
Vanity pages, competing to have the most friends, and giving all your personal information to a giant corporate database. I'm not that vain, I prefer real friends over someone who agrees to be linked on my vanity page, and I don't care to give away information that will be used against me (even if the anticipated use is only targeted advertising).
Still, I joined in the early days (under a pseudonym) because Classmates was pay-for-access and it was coming up to that point in my life where a school reunion was likely. THEN I got out.
I got out long enough ago that I doubt Facebook kept anything on me, but given how good they are at building shadow profiles from 3rd party information they probably know far more about me than I'd be comfortable with.
I prefer the Russian method of having extremely sexy women sleep with men and then waiting for them to say something stupid to impress the women.
I mean, what, the Chinese are going to give me a job offer via LinkedIn, but the Russians send a hot woman to my bed? I know which agency I'm going to turn for.
(Sadly, Putin's never targeted me in a Russian honeypot operation... or my wife has a really solid cover and has stuck around despite me never giving her anything useful.)
It all seems like such a waste of effort, much like having a standing army - it's a game you only play because everyone else is playing it, and it's only risk-free to stop if everyone stops (which you can't confirm without playing).
It's a game of control that mainly benefits the ruling classes - without it there'd be more economic productivity to put towards making all us peasants that much more content, but less ability to control concentration of wealth.
Next tell me water is wet, I'm waiting on that breaking news with great anticipation!
Intelligence services do intelligence and counter-intelligence work on behalf of domestic political and corporate interests. Specific instances of this are made public when convenient for propaganda purposes.
Unless you really think none of the EU nations is spying on the Chinese...
>Response courtesy of iPhone next word prediction.
Ugh. I have enough trouble with my iPhone autocorrecting what I've already typed without dealing with it telling me what it thinks I'm going to type next.
Apparently this is something that is (thankfully) off by default, because I have never experienced it.
>If it's programmed intelligently there's no reason it couldn't be equivalent to (or better than) a human therapist.
Even though humans are doing the same thing - receive stimulus/apply rule/respond - there's no program out there yet that is anywhere near complex enough to do what we do.
So far as I am aware, the Turing test has only been 'passed' by severely constraining the breadth of conversation.
>People pray and gain emotional benefit from that.
I don't trust people who pray, either... but as a general rule religious people seem to manage to compartmentalize their irrational thinking.
>A chatbot at least answers.
A person who prays provides their own answer even if they're not realizing that is the case, so unlike a chat bot there's actually some intelligence there.
I generally put people into two categories with regards to their ideas of friendship:
1) Anyone they know and don't hate is a 'friend'. Their relationships are shallow and unreliable, and contact may be infrequent.
2) Friends are rare people they know, like, and have enough of a social bond to depend on them without question in an emergency.
If you, like me, are in the second group... you should be aware it is quite possible you might never find that kind of relationship (I exclude my wife from the count, since that bond is something I rate even higher than friendship). Consider yourself lucky if you find one, never mind more than one.
This is quite independent of the greater social structure, since there's enough of us around these days that any group you classify yourself in is bound to have enough people you can find several you can get along with.
> I think there's a lot more to crossing the galaxy in 5M years than velocity alone.
Agreed. But humans have gone from banging rocks together to the space and information age in 200,000 years. That's basically 'from scratch'. Now imagine you've arrived at a new planetary system having foreknowledge of the available resources, and brought all your tech know-how and a 'starter kit' with you.
I think you'd have to agree that the amount of time required to jump off to the next candidate planetary system would be insignificant compared to the travel time, especially towards the end of the process of spreading out as there are fewer and fewer unexploited systems to head to and more and more groups looking for them.
I mean, you're perhaps talking an average of thousands of years of travel between destinations... I think a couple of hundred to get established and send someone off on the next hop isn't much to worry about.
5.5 million years, then? IF it is at all practical given the difficulty and required investment.
>This is based on the assumption that galactic colonization is a) desirable
Staying in one place gets you extinction, guaranteed. (Of course, on a long enough timescale, so does any other conceivable action) Still, given the tech to do it, people explore. If we didn't we'd have died out millions of years ago as dull little primates that didn't feel like leaving their little patch of savannah. Similar truth should apply to any other intelligent life out there.
>and b) happens in a von Neumann probe sort of way, which would be a different matter altogether.
If the first group wants to spread out, there's not much reason to suspect their descendants wouldn't be the same way. Humans in colony ships or self-replicating probes... it's a minor difference in schedule. Either way, technology spreads like an infection across the galaxy (which is meant to describe the spread, and not communicate any positive or negative associations).
The early chat bots - and I mean EARLY, as in 'about as likely to pass a Turing test as a passage from your preferred dictionary' - had people seeking therapy from them.
>the 41-year-old father of two school-age children, who says his conversations with the bot flowed naturally. "I felt heard and understood."
No way would I hire someone who feels 'heard and understood' after an exchange with a chat bot. This is somebody without the social skills to have anyone in their life to talk to, and will spill to a dumb text parser. How can you have the intellectual capacity to understand what a chat bot is and still gain any emotional benefit from interacting with one?
Root causes, buddy, root causes. Figure out why you don't have an actual intelligent human in your life to discuss this stuff with, maybe work on that. Because humans are social primates, and if you're not taking care of your social needs, everything else will eventually crumble anyway.
I've posted this idea before, this was an overly simplified version.
You'd likely end up with a fair amount of lawyer-ese to cover such situations, as well as problems like new products or businesses that are (naturally) a monopoly for a period of time.
Eugenics gets a bad name from the early 20th century when nobody had any decent idea about how heredity worked. With a basic concept of 'I have power in this society, therefore I and my children are superior, let us proceed to sterilize people I do not like', it was bound to go south quickly. Then comes Hitler.
You might think trying to kill all the Jews in German-controlled areas was bad (and you'd be right, obviously), but that wasn't eugenics. It was scapegoating and taking political advantage of racism. In terms of eugenics, it was the Nazi attempt to kill off homosexuals, the retarded, and the deformed that was particularly horrible and exposed a complete lack of understanding of the difference between genetics, disease, and environmental influences.
The general concept of eugenics itself isn't to kill off people you don't like - the general concept is that you can breed for traits in humans just like any other animal. And that's 100% correct.
We're getting to the point now where germ line genetic engineering will become a thing. Eugenics relies on understanding what is heritable and how it is passed on, and then getting people to agree to have children with specific other people or refrain from having children at all. Genetic engineering, on the other hand, can be a case of 'here, take this pill and you will be healthier'. And ANYONE can take the pill in question.
I think genetic engineering will remove the question of eugenics from the table long before we get over our distrust of it due to past ignorant abuse in the name of the concept.
>I am at this age. There are skills in demand which I've not invested time and training in, and which it would take me years to become comfortable enough to contribute in any notable way.
I've become an expert twice now and then had to retrain. I'm only now getting back to 'pretty damn competent' in my third specialization, and it looks like I'm going to get re-categorized again.
A lot of people in management simply have no idea that jobs in IT aren't generic. You're a 'computer tech' and thus anything from plugging in a computer to the wall outlet to coding a human-level AI is all the same thing to them. But hey, every time they set me on a new course, at least it's five years fresher... otherwise I'd be in some small cubicle somewhere maintaining the last legacy Novell server and waiting to get laid off.
(On a related note... I just googled Novell and apparently it's still alive and kicking. I haven't seen or heard of an operational Novell server since 1999)
If all they can do is install Windows, drivers, and join a domain... they're the IT equivalent of a standard screwdriver and could have been replaced by any non-stupid high school grad looking to land their first IT job. Even by accident they should have picked up some specialized knowledge beyond that after an average of 30 years employment each.
Speaking of that experience... 30 years? While Windows 3.11 for Workgroups came out in 1992... it seems unlikely you could start there and have no skills today, since it's a LOT easier now. If you could get a network up with Microsoft products then, unless you're brain dead you should be a lot more than front line desktop support by now.
And that's before I ask what these two guys were doing for the 5 years before Windows networking was even a thing. I'd be really interested in meeting someone who managed to start with Windows 2.0 and still can't handle more than an OS install 30 years later. Not 'good' impressed, but impressed.
It depends on the economy. If things are great (from a wider perspective than that of just the 1%), nobody would take these jobs and conditions would improve (or the problem would be avoided).
If you have a large enough bunch of people desperate for money, though, suddenly they don't really have much choice but to be exploited.
We have laws about such things because history shows us enough rich people are OK with defacto slavery that if you let them, they'll enslave everyone they can.
Older workers are generally more familiar with their rights and more willing to stand up for them. Of course, we should be condemning management for taking advantage of the naÃve youth, but instead we blame the old people for wanting their half of the contract honored.
Younger workers are generally more likely to miss Fridays and Mondays due to 'illness' - either skipping out to start the weekend early or coming back late because they're hung over. And in fact younger workers are more likely to come in hung over on Thursdays, too.
Older workers are less likely to be enthusiastic about new tasks, because in addition to just generally not wanting to put in extra effort on something they may not like, they also have spent a lot of time getting good at what they already know.
Younger workers are often more willing to throw their own time into a project they are enthusiastic about. This is because they haven't discovered life balance yet, and because they have fewer responsibilities (or haven't learned to respect what responsibilities they have). Again, this is a case where we should condemn management for taking advantage of the youth, not condemn older workers for not wanting to be taken advantage of.
The mistake they made was not putting in an interface at each table, thus eliminating the milling mob in front of the pickup counter.
Imagine if you walked into McDs, sat down and ordered, and then a staffer brought the completed tray to you when the order was filled.
You could have the computer tracking how long people sit before ordering, how long they take to eat, and how long it takes staff to confirm the table is cleaned after they go. (I'd give employees cards to scan at the terminal to confirm they checked).
If you really wanted to get fancy at some future date, there's no reason those trays couldn't be delivered by robot.
1) The company has to admit (some) responsibility for allowing this to happen. Why were these people not given training long ago when things started to shift? If they refused, why weren't they dealt with appropriately? Management done screwed up.
2) Get approval to terminate their employment if necessary. Otherwise, you may was well put a few reclining chairs in the lounge and ask them to nap through their shifts until retirement.
3) Give them a computer that meets the new standard, and give them standard tasks that the organization generally performs on that platform. Let them keep their old computer so they can google for help.
4) Give them a generous schedule to get the standard tasks completed. I'd start with "Spend a week on the new computer to familiarize yourself with the interface. Type up a report, fill out a spreadsheet, produce a presentation, browse the Internet, save your work on our cloud storage." Simplified versions of whatever the average user does, excluding any extremely specialized applications.
5) Give them standard IT tasks that you need performed on that platform. I'd give them a box and say, "Get this on the network". If they already know how to join something to a Windows domain, they already know a lot more than your summary suggests... or they're untrainable.
6) Give them a generous schedule to get the standard IT tasks completed. Don't hesitate to allow them to be mentored by whoever is doing this kind of work right now.
7) The tough bit - fire anyone who doesn't put in a decent effort.
Honestly, Mac and Linux aren't impossibly difficult to handle, but it is imposing when you have all sorts of MS-based assumptions about how things work and suddenly none of those assumptions apply. 'Cloud' is just a buzzword that for most purposes simply means you don't have physical control of the servers.
This is more about familiarization than training from scratch.
>The paper is basically an argument against Aubrey de Grey, who claims that in the near future, we will figure out specific technologies (and de Grey lists them) that will allow us to live 200 or even 500 years
Look, I think de Grey's a bit of a whack job, but his fundamental vision of the human body as a complicated device where we can figure out how to repair age-related failures seems pretty logical to me.
I think he oversimplifies the task, but human bodies aren't magical constructs. At the very least, we should be able to have the immune system of a naked mole rat and the lifespan of a giant tortoise. Nature's already done those things, they're absolutely possible. Then you add human minds to the investigation, and there's the possibility to exceed what random mutation and natural selection have achieved.
Slashdot Mirror
>This is precisely the reason why I quit Facebook permanently.
Vanity pages, competing to have the most friends, and giving all your personal information to a giant corporate database. I'm not that vain, I prefer real friends over someone who agrees to be linked on my vanity page, and I don't care to give away information that will be used against me (even if the anticipated use is only targeted advertising).
Still, I joined in the early days (under a pseudonym) because Classmates was pay-for-access and it was coming up to that point in my life where a school reunion was likely. THEN I got out.
I got out long enough ago that I doubt Facebook kept anything on me, but given how good they are at building shadow profiles from 3rd party information they probably know far more about me than I'd be comfortable with.
>They are just taking a different tack.
I prefer the Russian method of having extremely sexy women sleep with men and then waiting for them to say something stupid to impress the women.
I mean, what, the Chinese are going to give me a job offer via LinkedIn, but the Russians send a hot woman to my bed? I know which agency I'm going to turn for.
(Sadly, Putin's never targeted me in a Russian honeypot operation... or my wife has a really solid cover and has stuck around despite me never giving her anything useful.)
It all seems like such a waste of effort, much like having a standing army - it's a game you only play because everyone else is playing it, and it's only risk-free to stop if everyone stops (which you can't confirm without playing).
It's a game of control that mainly benefits the ruling classes - without it there'd be more economic productivity to put towards making all us peasants that much more content, but less ability to control concentration of wealth.
Next tell me water is wet, I'm waiting on that breaking news with great anticipation!
Intelligence services do intelligence and counter-intelligence work on behalf of domestic political and corporate interests. Specific instances of this are made public when convenient for propaganda purposes.
Unless you really think none of the EU nations is spying on the Chinese...
You appear to be deliberately misunderstanding me just to be contrary. That's not very productive.
>Response courtesy of iPhone next word prediction.
Ugh. I have enough trouble with my iPhone autocorrecting what I've already typed without dealing with it telling me what it thinks I'm going to type next.
Apparently this is something that is (thankfully) off by default, because I have never experienced it.
>If it's programmed intelligently there's no reason it couldn't be equivalent to (or better than) a human therapist.
Even though humans are doing the same thing - receive stimulus/apply rule/respond - there's no program out there yet that is anywhere near complex enough to do what we do.
So far as I am aware, the Turing test has only been 'passed' by severely constraining the breadth of conversation.
>People pray and gain emotional benefit from that.
I don't trust people who pray, either... but as a general rule religious people seem to manage to compartmentalize their irrational thinking.
>A chatbot at least answers.
A person who prays provides their own answer even if they're not realizing that is the case, so unlike a chat bot there's actually some intelligence there.
I generally put people into two categories with regards to their ideas of friendship:
1) Anyone they know and don't hate is a 'friend'. Their relationships are shallow and unreliable, and contact may be infrequent.
2) Friends are rare people they know, like, and have enough of a social bond to depend on them without question in an emergency.
If you, like me, are in the second group... you should be aware it is quite possible you might never find that kind of relationship (I exclude my wife from the count, since that bond is something I rate even higher than friendship). Consider yourself lucky if you find one, never mind more than one.
This is quite independent of the greater social structure, since there's enough of us around these days that any group you classify yourself in is bound to have enough people you can find several you can get along with.
Both can be true, you know. Stories can be hyped for financial gain AND be true.
I suggest you read about Eliza, a much more primitive bot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> I think there's a lot more to crossing the galaxy in 5M years than velocity alone.
Agreed. But humans have gone from banging rocks together to the space and information age in 200,000 years. That's basically 'from scratch'. Now imagine you've arrived at a new planetary system having foreknowledge of the available resources, and brought all your tech know-how and a 'starter kit' with you.
I think you'd have to agree that the amount of time required to jump off to the next candidate planetary system would be insignificant compared to the travel time, especially towards the end of the process of spreading out as there are fewer and fewer unexploited systems to head to and more and more groups looking for them.
I mean, you're perhaps talking an average of thousands of years of travel between destinations... I think a couple of hundred to get established and send someone off on the next hop isn't much to worry about.
5.5 million years, then? IF it is at all practical given the difficulty and required investment.
>This is based on the assumption that galactic colonization is a) desirable
Staying in one place gets you extinction, guaranteed. (Of course, on a long enough timescale, so does any other conceivable action) Still, given the tech to do it, people explore. If we didn't we'd have died out millions of years ago as dull little primates that didn't feel like leaving their little patch of savannah. Similar truth should apply to any other intelligent life out there.
>and b) happens in a von Neumann probe sort of way, which would be a different matter altogether.
If the first group wants to spread out, there's not much reason to suspect their descendants wouldn't be the same way. Humans in colony ships or self-replicating probes... it's a minor difference in schedule. Either way, technology spreads like an infection across the galaxy (which is meant to describe the spread, and not communicate any positive or negative associations).
That is interesting. Please go on.
Response courtesy of Eliza: https://www.eclecticenergies.c...
> No one is doing that
Oh yes they are; some people are really strange.
The early chat bots - and I mean EARLY, as in 'about as likely to pass a Turing test as a passage from your preferred dictionary' - had people seeking therapy from them.
>the 41-year-old father of two school-age children, who says his conversations with the bot flowed naturally. "I felt heard and understood."
No way would I hire someone who feels 'heard and understood' after an exchange with a chat bot. This is somebody without the social skills to have anyone in their life to talk to, and will spill to a dumb text parser. How can you have the intellectual capacity to understand what a chat bot is and still gain any emotional benefit from interacting with one?
Root causes, buddy, root causes. Figure out why you don't have an actual intelligent human in your life to discuss this stuff with, maybe work on that. Because humans are social primates, and if you're not taking care of your social needs, everything else will eventually crumble anyway.
I've posted this idea before, this was an overly simplified version.
You'd likely end up with a fair amount of lawyer-ese to cover such situations, as well as problems like new products or businesses that are (naturally) a monopoly for a period of time.
Eugenics gets a bad name from the early 20th century when nobody had any decent idea about how heredity worked. With a basic concept of 'I have power in this society, therefore I and my children are superior, let us proceed to sterilize people I do not like', it was bound to go south quickly. Then comes Hitler.
You might think trying to kill all the Jews in German-controlled areas was bad (and you'd be right, obviously), but that wasn't eugenics. It was scapegoating and taking political advantage of racism. In terms of eugenics, it was the Nazi attempt to kill off homosexuals, the retarded, and the deformed that was particularly horrible and exposed a complete lack of understanding of the difference between genetics, disease, and environmental influences.
The general concept of eugenics itself isn't to kill off people you don't like - the general concept is that you can breed for traits in humans just like any other animal. And that's 100% correct.
We're getting to the point now where germ line genetic engineering will become a thing. Eugenics relies on understanding what is heritable and how it is passed on, and then getting people to agree to have children with specific other people or refrain from having children at all. Genetic engineering, on the other hand, can be a case of 'here, take this pill and you will be healthier'. And ANYONE can take the pill in question.
I think genetic engineering will remove the question of eugenics from the table long before we get over our distrust of it due to past ignorant abuse in the name of the concept.
>I am at this age. There are skills in demand which I've not invested time and training in, and which it would take me years to become comfortable enough to contribute in any notable way.
I've become an expert twice now and then had to retrain. I'm only now getting back to 'pretty damn competent' in my third specialization, and it looks like I'm going to get re-categorized again.
A lot of people in management simply have no idea that jobs in IT aren't generic. You're a 'computer tech' and thus anything from plugging in a computer to the wall outlet to coding a human-level AI is all the same thing to them. But hey, every time they set me on a new course, at least it's five years fresher... otherwise I'd be in some small cubicle somewhere maintaining the last legacy Novell server and waiting to get laid off.
(On a related note... I just googled Novell and apparently it's still alive and kicking. I haven't seen or heard of an operational Novell server since 1999)
If all they can do is install Windows, drivers, and join a domain... they're the IT equivalent of a standard screwdriver and could have been replaced by any non-stupid high school grad looking to land their first IT job. Even by accident they should have picked up some specialized knowledge beyond that after an average of 30 years employment each.
Speaking of that experience... 30 years? While Windows 3.11 for Workgroups came out in 1992... it seems unlikely you could start there and have no skills today, since it's a LOT easier now. If you could get a network up with Microsoft products then, unless you're brain dead you should be a lot more than front line desktop support by now.
And that's before I ask what these two guys were doing for the 5 years before Windows networking was even a thing. I'd be really interested in meeting someone who managed to start with Windows 2.0 and still can't handle more than an OS install 30 years later. Not 'good' impressed, but impressed.
It depends on the economy. If things are great (from a wider perspective than that of just the 1%), nobody would take these jobs and conditions would improve (or the problem would be avoided).
If you have a large enough bunch of people desperate for money, though, suddenly they don't really have much choice but to be exploited.
We have laws about such things because history shows us enough rich people are OK with defacto slavery that if you let them, they'll enslave everyone they can.
Older workers are generally more familiar with their rights and more willing to stand up for them. Of course, we should be condemning management for taking advantage of the naÃve youth, but instead we blame the old people for wanting their half of the contract honored.
Younger workers are generally more likely to miss Fridays and Mondays due to 'illness' - either skipping out to start the weekend early or coming back late because they're hung over. And in fact younger workers are more likely to come in hung over on Thursdays, too.
Older workers are less likely to be enthusiastic about new tasks, because in addition to just generally not wanting to put in extra effort on something they may not like, they also have spent a lot of time getting good at what they already know.
Younger workers are often more willing to throw their own time into a project they are enthusiastic about. This is because they haven't discovered life balance yet, and because they have fewer responsibilities (or haven't learned to respect what responsibilities they have). Again, this is a case where we should condemn management for taking advantage of the youth, not condemn older workers for not wanting to be taken advantage of.
The mistake they made was not putting in an interface at each table, thus eliminating the milling mob in front of the pickup counter.
Imagine if you walked into McDs, sat down and ordered, and then a staffer brought the completed tray to you when the order was filled.
You could have the computer tracking how long people sit before ordering, how long they take to eat, and how long it takes staff to confirm the table is cleaned after they go. (I'd give employees cards to scan at the terminal to confirm they checked).
If you really wanted to get fancy at some future date, there's no reason those trays couldn't be delivered by robot.
1) The company has to admit (some) responsibility for allowing this to happen. Why were these people not given training long ago when things started to shift? If they refused, why weren't they dealt with appropriately? Management done screwed up.
2) Get approval to terminate their employment if necessary. Otherwise, you may was well put a few reclining chairs in the lounge and ask them to nap through their shifts until retirement.
3) Give them a computer that meets the new standard, and give them standard tasks that the organization generally performs on that platform. Let them keep their old computer so they can google for help.
4) Give them a generous schedule to get the standard tasks completed. I'd start with "Spend a week on the new computer to familiarize yourself with the interface. Type up a report, fill out a spreadsheet, produce a presentation, browse the Internet, save your work on our cloud storage." Simplified versions of whatever the average user does, excluding any extremely specialized applications.
5) Give them standard IT tasks that you need performed on that platform. I'd give them a box and say, "Get this on the network". If they already know how to join something to a Windows domain, they already know a lot more than your summary suggests... or they're untrainable.
6) Give them a generous schedule to get the standard IT tasks completed. Don't hesitate to allow them to be mentored by whoever is doing this kind of work right now.
7) The tough bit - fire anyone who doesn't put in a decent effort.
Honestly, Mac and Linux aren't impossibly difficult to handle, but it is imposing when you have all sorts of MS-based assumptions about how things work and suddenly none of those assumptions apply. 'Cloud' is just a buzzword that for most purposes simply means you don't have physical control of the servers.
This is more about familiarization than training from scratch.
In terms of employed humans, you also have to include statistics for coffee shops that shut down when a Starbucks popped up.
Just because Starbucks is employing more people doesn't mean the industry as a whole is doing so.
>The paper is basically an argument against Aubrey de Grey, who claims that in the near future, we will figure out specific technologies (and de Grey lists them) that will allow us to live 200 or even 500 years
Look, I think de Grey's a bit of a whack job, but his fundamental vision of the human body as a complicated device where we can figure out how to repair age-related failures seems pretty logical to me.
I think he oversimplifies the task, but human bodies aren't magical constructs. At the very least, we should be able to have the immune system of a naked mole rat and the lifespan of a giant tortoise. Nature's already done those things, they're absolutely possible. Then you add human minds to the investigation, and there's the possibility to exceed what random mutation and natural selection have achieved.
Nothing about Trump is made OK by anything about Clinton.
Attempt to distract from the Orange Buffon: failed.
But you'll try again and again, right?