Re: "modern industrial civilization STILL runs primarily on Fossil Fuels."
which by your "logic" means that can't change, right? And certainly means it can't change fast enough to meaningfully impact the global warming hole we've dug for ourselves, right?
See that's where you're wrong. We CAN change, using the same smarts (both political and technological) that got us all the fossil-fuel based tech and economy, and not only that, we would be fncking stupid not to organize to change as fast as possible, knowing what we know about the problem now.
Believing only in the status quo fundamentally means lacking both motivation and imagination. Don't be one of those slackers.
Would you say the same (don't sacrifice freedom to get the rapid change) if the expedient change needed was sending an expensive rocket to shift to safety a giant, life killing asteroid that was predicted, with 97% certainty, to be going to impact Earth in 9 years?
So the freedom loss, say, was a proposed extra 5% income tax to be paid by every worker for 3 years, needed to pay for the super-accelerated "Manhattan project" to design, build, launch the system to prevent the asteroid impact.
but only because they filled a need or provided value of a certain new kind to people first and best.
You are free to get together with a few fellow schemers and invent, implement and test, and promote, an alternative to each of the big players' info-products, and give yours the added feature of decentralization and no central ownership of or access to the collective-and-personal information-value.
You will probably have to charge people a nominal fee to use it, to cover your hosting fees and lunch money.
But no one is going to stop you from doing this. Only your own lack of ability and stick-toitiveness would stop you.
Remember, in these parts, complaining is equivalent to volunteering.
that cause a single winner in each info-technology niche.
It's that one company executes better, and then the network effect kicks in, as that company collects more customers (who prefer it) and then gets the value of the collective interactions of and data from all those customers.
For consumers, often it's the case that having the search knowledge or the social network spread among different providers / applications just makes like more complicated for them, and reduces the simplicity and value proposition somewhat.
So is "free and fair" competition allowed to produce a clear winner, which people then definitely prefer, or is it not? What are the benefits and pitfalls of breaking up such a natural monopoly?
The sheer force of sucking vacuosity is threatening to disrupt the space time continuum.
The waves of lies after lies are beating down the defenses of the still sane.
He's steering his nuclear-armed bumper car into every obstacle at full throttle, while he races down the track backwards against the traffic.
My slashdot username is truly relevant again. I coined it in the lead-up to the J.W. Bush "weapons of mass delusion" Gulf War. I could never have imagined a more dumb-ass president than JW. Boy was I wrong.
Uber software processed some pixel data and erroneously concluded that there was no significant solid object right in front of the car. Simple as that.
To imply that the the software "saw" a person there but ignored the person is pejorative, sensationalist language, designed to troll.
By the way this was a false negative (detection), not false positive.
A false negative means it decided there was nothing there i.e. that the data did not indicate an object. But that was false.
A false positive would mean the system decided something was in front of the car, when there wasn't anything or anything significant anyway.
The problem is when you set the parameters to lower the rate of false negatives (A good thing if you are considering being a pedestrian), then the rate of false positives goes up. Which would mean a car that slams its brakes on with no good reason too often. And that can cause accidents too, because following drivers are often tailgating or not paying attention.
The only way out of this dilemma is better sensors, and more sensors, preferably sensitive to different physical symptoms of object presence, and/or better use by the algorithms of multiple independent types of features from the images. That should reduce both the false positive and false negative object detection rate.
This change will not necessarily be linear. There are a lot of variables involved. e.g. - declining costs and increasing pervasiveness of computing power + memory + info storage + networking - Nonlinear "punctuated equilibrium" pattern of AI and robotics-control technology innovation and improvement. - AI / robotics capabilities creeping up the normal distribution bell curve(s) of various human capabilities. At some point, the machine capabilities are greater than the mean human capability level in a given area, meaning eventually that most people are outcompeted by automation in that area of cognition or endeavour.
It could be more of a tipping-point phenomenon. There's a case of a river in the Yukon. At a certain point, after thousands of years flowing down one valley heading North, the glacier that forced that river down that valley melted, and the river valley and lake it feeds dried up, and the river flows down a different valley to the South. Path of least resistance. Sudden, discontinuous change.
Good point about it being technically inefficient for government to direct specific revenues to specific services.
But that being said, UBI is a good idea and carbon taxes are a good idea, and we have neither, so perhaps tying them together (their amounts) is politically smart in the short run to get acceptance of them.
Most people don't know how the systems that support them (and that they support through taxation or paying for stuff) actually work or are structured, nor do they know the constraints on those systems; the limits where if the systems are pushed/distorted too much one way they will collapse.
Therefore most people don't know what they SHOULD want, in terms of policy or outcomes. Most people don't know what effective, beneficial changes to feasible systems would look like.
Most people just can't figure out what's really going on, what's really wrong with it, or how it could be improved without breaking everything.
Most people are therefore highly susceptible to simplistic populist messages which are utter nonsense, but put the most manipulative charismatic blowhard in power where they can rage around like a bullshitting bull in a chinashop.
We need an emphasis in education on both critical thinking and systems thinking.
Then, democracy might actually work. Right now, it's a f**king disaster. A pet monkey spinning a bottle would make better policy decisions.
But you're not understanding something fundamental. The link between people working and amount of production is going away due to smart automation. The engineered automation is getting significantly smarter and more physically flexible and capable every decade. While people's mental/physical capacity is relatively limited, at least in terms of population averages. At a certain point, which has already come for some percentage of the population, more education and training won't help you compete with a computerized or robotic way of doing what you do. That intersection and reversal of superiority on capability trend-curves is inevitable now. Therefore production can increase while jobs decrease. Even jobs that remain, like say, medical doctor, will be such that the human is doing at most half of the heavy thinking. Super-smart AIs, with instant access to globally combined best-practices knowledge, will do the other half, so the inherent value of the human's contribution to that work will be, say, half of what it is now. All human work will be eliminated or devalued, with very few exceptions in the realm of interpersonal work.
You are right that labor-based socialism has no solution to this.
But scarcity of stuff will be less of a problem, as automation turns the world into a automatically human-serving smart world. Stuff suitable for humans will then metaphorically fall from trees, with a few human supervisors guiding the system, and a few more entrepreneurial types determining the system's evolution.
This is the emerging context in which UBI makes great sense.
At some point down this road, we have to ask, what exactly is the purpose of an individual human's life (since it is clearly no longer to help make widgets or grow wheat). But that's beyond my pay grade.
and mock your paranoid concept of a new world order.
Isn't that just code for some ethnocultural group that you particularly despise?
Get a grip and worry about your own shit. You just wish that whatever you're doing was important enough that some mysterious figment of your fevered brain cabal would actually care to include a moment's thought about you in their grand plan. Get a feckin' grip.
A dumb pipe should be a dumb pipe. It should be an insulated pipe (i.e. end-to-end encrypted).
Do Microsoft and whoever really want to be considered responsible for everyone's sh*t-stained content out there? Really? They should be doing everything in their power to not be technically able to know what's flowing.
If you don't agree with spending the tax on R&D into new energy economy technologies, then you can just lower income taxes by the amount of revenue taken in by the carbon tax, or use it to start funding the universal basic income we're going to need soon because of automation and AI.
There are other ways we can harness solar energy, and geothermal energy. Our addiction to the drug of cheap fossil fuels is preventing us from getting to those other ways fast enough.
A massive carbon tax would do a much more effective job at accelerating our transition off fossil fuels and slowing global warming.
A massive carbon tax so that, to start with, Americans pay the same for gas as Europeans, who do just fine with that, and then keep increasing it.
That's the best thing that would work, because except for tilting the playing field the way we have to move, it lets the free market take care of how to achieve the change.
But unfortunately, an effectively large carbon tax would take politicians with brains, a conscience, and guts. So I'm not that optimistic given the garbage we currently have.
An "antibiotic" is "a medicine that inhibits the growth of or destroys microorganisms".
So if it inhibits or destroys bacteria, it's an antibiotic, whether you traditionally think of it as one or not.
A better article title would have been something like: "Some existing medicines used for other conditions are found to act as antibiotics". Boring but less misleading.
Slashdot Mirror
Re: "modern industrial civilization STILL runs primarily on Fossil Fuels."
which by your "logic" means that can't change, right?
And certainly means it can't change fast enough to meaningfully impact the global warming hole we've dug for ourselves, right?
See that's where you're wrong. We CAN change, using the same smarts (both political and technological) that got us all the fossil-fuel based tech and economy, and not only that, we would be fncking stupid not to organize to change as fast as possible, knowing what we know about the problem now.
Believing only in the status quo fundamentally means lacking both motivation and imagination. Don't be one of those slackers.
Re: Not sacrificing freedom for expedient change.
Would you say the same (don't sacrifice freedom to get the rapid change) if the expedient change needed was sending an expensive rocket to shift to safety a giant, life killing asteroid that was predicted, with 97% certainty, to be going to impact Earth in 9 years?
So the freedom loss, say, was a proposed extra 5% income tax to be paid by every worker for 3 years, needed to pay for the super-accelerated "Manhattan project" to design, build, launch the system to prevent the asteroid impact.
Just curious what your opinion on that would be.
but only because they filled a need or provided value of a certain new kind to people first and best.
You are free to get together with a few fellow schemers and invent, implement and test, and promote, an alternative to each of the big players' info-products, and give yours the added feature of decentralization and no central ownership of or access to the collective-and-personal information-value.
You will probably have to charge people a nominal fee to use it, to cover your hosting fees and lunch money.
But no one is going to stop you from doing this. Only your own lack of ability and stick-toitiveness would stop you.
Remember, in these parts, complaining is equivalent to volunteering.
that cause a single winner in each info-technology niche.
It's that one company executes better, and then the network effect kicks in, as that company collects more customers (who prefer it) and then gets the value of the collective interactions of and data from all those customers.
For consumers, often it's the case that having the search knowledge or the social network spread among different providers / applications just makes like more complicated for them, and reduces the simplicity and value proposition somewhat.
So is "free and fair" competition allowed to produce a clear winner, which people then definitely prefer, or is it not? What are the benefits and pitfalls of breaking up such a natural monopoly?
skew things closer to reality, using "big data" and objective machine-learning algorithms.
This is NOT news.
Wake me up when he does something not boneheaded.
The sheer force of sucking vacuosity is threatening to disrupt the space time continuum.
The waves of lies after lies are beating down the defenses of the still sane.
He's steering his nuclear-armed bumper car into every obstacle at full throttle, while he races down the track backwards against the traffic.
My slashdot username is truly relevant again. I coined it in the lead-up to the J.W. Bush "weapons of mass delusion" Gulf War.
I could never have imagined a more dumb-ass president than JW. Boy was I wrong.
Mr. Benjamin Notayahoo? "I'm not a yahoo!" "Seriously, how could you think I'm a yahoo? It's right there in my name."
It's a trap!
Uber software did not "see but ignore woman".
Uber software processed some pixel data and erroneously concluded that there was no significant solid object right in front of the car.
Simple as that.
To imply that the the software "saw" a person there but ignored the person is pejorative, sensationalist language, designed to troll.
By the way this was a false negative (detection), not false positive.
A false negative means it decided there was nothing there i.e. that the data did not indicate an object. But that was false.
A false positive would mean the system decided something was in front of the car, when there wasn't anything or anything significant anyway.
The problem is when you set the parameters to lower the rate of false negatives (A good thing if you are considering being a pedestrian), then the rate of false positives goes up. Which would mean a car that slams its brakes on with no good reason too often. And that can cause accidents too, because following drivers are often tailgating or not paying attention.
The only way out of this dilemma is better sensors, and more sensors, preferably sensitive to different physical symptoms of object presence, and/or better use by the algorithms of multiple independent types of features from the images. That should reduce both the false positive and false negative object detection rate.
This change will not necessarily be linear. There are a lot of variables involved.
e.g.
- declining costs and increasing pervasiveness of computing power + memory + info storage + networking
- Nonlinear "punctuated equilibrium" pattern of AI and robotics-control technology innovation and improvement.
- AI / robotics capabilities creeping up the normal distribution bell curve(s) of various human capabilities. At some point, the machine capabilities are greater than the mean human capability level in a given area, meaning eventually that most people are outcompeted by automation in that area of cognition or endeavour.
It could be more of a tipping-point phenomenon. There's a case of a river in the Yukon. At a certain point, after thousands of years flowing down one valley heading North, the glacier that forced that river down that valley melted, and the river valley and lake it feeds dried up, and the river flows down a different valley to the South. Path of least resistance. Sudden, discontinuous change.
An AI (free / open source of course.)
Good point about it being technically inefficient for government to direct specific revenues to specific services.
But that being said, UBI is a good idea and carbon taxes are a good idea, and we have neither, so perhaps tying them together (their amounts) is politically smart in the short run to get acceptance of them.
Most people don't know how the systems that support them (and that they support through taxation or paying for stuff) actually work or are structured, nor do they know the constraints on those systems; the limits where if the systems are pushed/distorted too much one way they will collapse.
Therefore most people don't know what they SHOULD want, in terms of policy or outcomes. Most people don't know what effective, beneficial changes to feasible systems would look like.
Most people just can't figure out what's really going on, what's really wrong with it, or how it could be improved without breaking everything.
Most people are therefore highly susceptible to simplistic populist messages which are utter nonsense, but put the most manipulative charismatic blowhard in power where they can rage around like a bullshitting bull in a chinashop.
We need an emphasis in education on both critical thinking and systems thinking.
Then, democracy might actually work. Right now, it's a f**king disaster. A pet monkey spinning a bottle would make better policy decisions.
But you're not understanding something fundamental. The link between people working and amount of production is going away due to smart automation. The engineered automation is getting significantly smarter and more physically flexible and capable every decade. While people's mental/physical capacity is relatively limited, at least in terms of population averages. At a certain point, which has already come for some percentage of the population, more education and training won't help you compete with a computerized or robotic way of doing what you do. That intersection and reversal of superiority on capability trend-curves is inevitable now. Therefore production can increase while jobs decrease. Even jobs that remain, like say, medical doctor, will be such that the human is doing at most half of the heavy thinking. Super-smart AIs, with instant access to globally combined best-practices knowledge, will do the other half, so the inherent value of the human's contribution to that work will be, say, half of what it is now. All human work will be eliminated or devalued, with very few exceptions in the realm of interpersonal work.
You are right that labor-based socialism has no solution to this.
But scarcity of stuff will be less of a problem, as automation turns the world into a automatically human-serving smart world. Stuff suitable for humans will then metaphorically fall from trees, with a few human supervisors guiding the system, and a few more entrepreneurial types determining the system's evolution.
This is the emerging context in which UBI makes great sense.
At some point down this road, we have to ask, what exactly is the purpose of an individual human's life (since it is clearly no longer to help make widgets or grow wheat). But that's beyond my pay grade.
It's too bad Australia seems to be run by fossils these days though, so that won't happen.
and mock your paranoid concept of a new world order.
Isn't that just code for some ethnocultural group that you particularly despise?
Get a grip and worry about your own shit. You just wish that whatever you're doing was important enough that some mysterious figment of your fevered brain cabal would actually care to include a moment's thought about you in their grand plan. Get a feckin' grip.
A dumb pipe should be a dumb pipe.
It should be an insulated pipe (i.e. end-to-end encrypted).
Do Microsoft and whoever really want to be considered responsible for everyone's sh*t-stained content out there? Really?
They should be doing everything in their power to not be technically able to know what's flowing.
If you don't agree with spending the tax on R&D into new energy economy technologies, then you can just lower income taxes by the amount of revenue taken in by the carbon tax, or use it to start funding the universal basic income we're going to need soon because of automation and AI.
Read up on this:
From a US court case where some big oil companies are being sued.
Keep reading/scrolling down this til you come to the numbered questions and answers.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/se...
https://nikolamotor.com/one
https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/mo...
https://www.arcimoto.com/vehic...
http://www.zeromotorcycles.com...
The whole point of a carbon tax is:
Energy != Fossil Fuels
There are other ways we can harness solar energy, and geothermal energy. Our addiction to the drug of cheap fossil fuels is preventing us from getting to those other ways fast enough.
A massive carbon tax would do a much more effective job at accelerating our transition off fossil fuels and slowing global warming.
A massive carbon tax so that, to start with, Americans pay the same for gas as Europeans, who do just fine with that, and then keep increasing it.
That's the best thing that would work, because except for tilting the playing field the way we have to move, it lets the free market take care of how to achieve the change.
But unfortunately, an effectively large carbon tax would take politicians with brains, a conscience, and guts. So I'm not that optimistic given the garbage we currently have.
An "antibiotic" is "a medicine that inhibits the growth of or destroys microorganisms".
So if it inhibits or destroys bacteria, it's an antibiotic, whether you traditionally think of it as one or not.
A better article title would have been something like: "Some existing medicines used for other conditions are found to act as antibiotics". Boring but less misleading.