I think they should rename any such legislation the "right to tamper", thus ensuring that government agencies and industrial espionage operators and private detectives won't get in trouble for "repairing" your device.
Nice try but China is developing AI that translates COBOL to rust, while stealing one US penny per transaction and locking the penny away on a blockchain implemented on a distributed network of Huawei smartphones. Don't cha know.
But "seriously", if you can code up a new altcoin in COBOL, I will be seriously impressed and not bored, admiring the sheer surrealist abstract impressionist audacity of it.
Your description would seem to favour the totally observer-subjective viewpoint. As the information converges (that is, more and more entangled things are measured together), there is a more and more constrained and complicated wavefunction, with many very particular peaks and valleys, and very rapidly less remaining uncertainty in state description.
But still, could there be two inconsistent versions of all that, held by so-far-not-entangled observers? When those observers finally compare notes, by convolving their models of what's out there together (becoming entngled), it's interesting that that comes out to a single consistent classical state estimation.
Or maybe it isn't interesting. Maybe it's just the way that math (convolution of wavefunctions) has to work, and whatever that says, that's what you get, and somehow "of course" that's a consistent description of classical reality.
But seriously, as I understand "observation" in the measurement and quantum-mechanics sense, something doesn't have to be conscious, or even complex, to be an observer. Anything which can received and encode information through transfer of energy, that is, anything that can be entangled, can be an observer.
Many things/points/particles/locations/events in the universe observe/measure/are entangled with many other things. And conversely there are many boundaries across which the things on either side of the boundary are not yet entangled, not observing each other.
That's how I understand the distinction between when/where classical physics theory works and when quantum theory works.
Luckily the 8 year old kid successfully uses that thought experiment to correctly conclude that God is just an imaginary concept, and a self-inconsistent one at that.
I think they're trying to talk about boundaries across which things have NOT been interacting (in a quantum-state destructive way) yet. No matter how complex the thing inside a boundary is, you could in principle (t least in a thought experiment) have the whole thing not entangled in any way with the observer and their entangled environment. So can that complex but isolated thing be in a quantum state/superposition, FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of the outside observer? I suspect that was the idea of the box concept.
I think one question about whether the wavefunction has collapsed/decohered or not is whether the answer to that is subjective or objective (Does the answer depend on who's/what's observing and what their state of information/entanglement with various things is?)
Without being able to crack the math and physics of the new thought experiment (I'm not at that level), I feel that the new paper is poking around that question.
How does it come to be (or why does it have to be, or DOES it have to be) that when quantum systems get measured and collapsed, by various "independent" observers, that the result is a single consistent complex classical state. How does that happen? Does it always happen?
What percentage of all the able adults in your neighborhood, or your city, would be capable of doing those jobs, in your estimation? What percentage of them will be needed, to work on those new jobs you're thinking of?
Technology creates jobs, until the technology starts becoming more capable by itself, in more and more areas, than people, then technology creates more jobs for other technology, not for people. That's what people can't seem to get into their obtuse skulls.
There seems to be one of those "denial" psychological problems going on. It's too terrible to contemplate, therefore we'll deny it. Global warming due to human GHG emissions. DENIED. Check. Job reduction trend due to better-than-human automation. DENIED. Check.
Imagine an almost horizontal line, being the average perceptual and intellectual capacity of a person, or if you like, the average intelligence-guided physical action capacity of a person. A complex mishmash of capability that is a little hard to quantify, admittedly, but that's why I said "imagine". It's a thought experiment, with some simplifications. The line is almost horizontal because human innate capability improves noticeably on evolutionary timescales (100,000s to millions of years). Now this human capability line actually starts to curve upward a bit, as human cultural memes develop, like education, external information storage, reliably complex communication between people and generations. So human capability, in recent centuries trained by better-informed minds, starts increasing faster than body evolution and brain evolution would seem to support without all the extra information system evolution.
Now imagine a horizontal line that starts well below the human line. This is the "independent-of-human-wielders" capability of artificial tools and machines invented by humans. That line stays really low for a long time, because all such tools/machines needed total human guidance to do their thing, for centuries. Then with the industrial revolution, increasingly automated machines did a lot with less human supervision but still needed a lot of repair, care, and tending by humans. And other humans were needed to manage and calculate about the economic processes supported by those partly automated machines. So jobs were created as jobs were destroyed, and productivity per person improved. The line of machine capability curved upward a little bit, with the industrial automation.
But now imagine rapidly advancing computer-algorithm-guided machinery, including calculating and modelling machinery, and physical-process machinery. And imagine that the algorithms are increasingly crafted to train themselves and learn and model their environment themselves (still a way to go, but that's clearly the direction and rapid progress is being made.) Imagine that computer perception and cognition, initially in limited-scope areas, but generalizing rapidly with new AI inventions, becomes comparable to human cognition, or in some areas, exceeds it. And imagine that computer cognition guiding increasingly flexible physical-process systems (robotics, automated assembly lines, automated transportation, 3D printers, robot building-assembly systems, etc. There is still a need for human engineering to improve these systems, and manage their orchestration at the top level, and there is still a need for a few repair people for tasks still too variable for the AI and robots to handle, but in general, this whole thing can run by itself and produce stuff and move stuff and people. So what we see is the line of general capability (intellectual and physical) of the AI and automated systems/processes starts to curve up rapidly, at the speed of the collective human scientific and engineering advances that invent this technology.
At some point, the machine line crosses above the human line, at which point the average job is more cost-effectively, and often just more effectively, done by the AI and automated system.
So no, more interesting careers will not come along with this, except for the odd uber-genius who can keep up. The automated (economic) system (as a whole) will just start to run itself with less and less human intervention.
The lines cross, and then everything is different. This doesn't happen suddenly, but blurred over a 50ish or whatever year period, but we are now well into that period. Our thinking, and economic modelling, about all of this will have to change profoundly. Anywhere your micro-economic or macro-economic model talks about an effect on human labour or income or spending power, cross that out and insert "machine" instead.
Yeah but here's the thing. The tech is getting better and better, some would say exponentially, but we can just say, real fast, on a year by year basis.
People are getting better too, but on a 100,000 year by 100,000 year evolutionary basis.
So when you get automated out of a job (hypothetical but will be real for say 50% of non-lazy, average competent people soon), would you want your employer who automated your work, and still makes profits, to pay a tax on profit that gives you a bit of universal basic income? Or not?
Didn't try that because pretty sure my slashdot post settings are set to the "plain-text" format option, as opposed to some kind of html format option. I guess they meant plain-text without less-than characters.
Ok, there's a stupid bug in slashdot apparently, not including my less-than sign. There. One bug. What's up with that. Let me try again. Hmm. There was a less-than in there just to the left of this sentence. That's lame on slashdot software's part. So you proved that ALL programs have bugs? Didn't think so.
Blanket arguments against computer algorithms for secure voting (or secure anything) are illogical, emotional, and flawed.
People argue to the effect: Because many programs have been found to have a security flaw in either A) the algorithm mathematics and logical assumptions, or in B) the implementation, therefore ALL programs must have some flaw in A) or B) therefore there is no such thing is a secure computer program. That is just bullshit. It's incorrect, unsupported generalization from specific examples.
Just because it is a wise precautionary stance to be extremely skeptical of computer algorithmic voting security (or application security in general), and just because it is wise to demand transparency of the system so that it can be continually reviewed and critiqued (by both the competent and the incompetent), DOES NOT mean that no secure voting system (or application of whatever kind that should be secure, like banking) is possible.
The reasoning that all computerized voting is flawed is the same is the following reasoning: Many software programs have bugs (either in design or implementation), Therefore all software programs have bugs. And that is just layman-level, lazy-thinking, paranoid, non-technical bullshit. There are, obviously, many algorithms and implementations that do not have bugs.
Here's one, in pseudocode, to output the number 10: n = 0 while n 10:
n = n + 1 print(n)
Ok, it's simple, but there are by simple extension many more complex programs that also have no bugs and do some defined calculation or data processing as designed, correctly implementing an unflawed mathematical and logical computable operation. And you can say, oh, but the language layer or vm layer or OS layer or whatever, below, has bugs, and I will say, many of them do, but it is not a necessary condition. So stop saying that adequate computer security is impossible. It's not. It's just very very very hard.
But whatever it is, it should be easy compared to the ease of carting stations' worth of paper ballotboxes off to a bonfire in military trucks, or simply threatening with submachineguns or machetes anyone that dares venture near a polling station. The bar we're competing with is NOT VERY HIGH.
Seriously, there are zero-knowledge proofs, mixes, all kinds of true anonymization techniques. There ARE currently unbroken strong encryption methods. And a voter authentication process that uses computers (bottom-up trust and reputation networks on a blockchain) AND people to build up assurance in the identity is not necessarily less trustworthy than a human and easily-forged paper document/ identity card authentication system.
Let's get serious and seriously technical here, and stop with the fearmongering bullshit. Are all zero-knowledge proof and input mixing algorithms inherently flawed, for example? Can you prove that? Is all strong encryption, including new research-stage quantum-resistant algorithms, definitely breakable within the forseeable future? That's not the assumption that we're building the entire rest of the application ecosystem on computerized networks on.
More realistically, there is an arms race between encryption and anonymization algorithm design and implementation, and attacks on them. But that ongoing battle DOES NOT LOGICALLY MEAN that in well-defined areas, we can't be assured it is correct and secure. 1 + 1 == 2 ALL THE TIME (in decimal and a few other bases anyway).
Slashdot Mirror
I think they should rename any such legislation the "right to tamper", thus ensuring that government agencies and industrial espionage operators and private detectives won't get in trouble for "repairing" your device.
"And Facebook is truly the only company that's singularly about people."
suggested branding:
Facebook - The People Company
- "We know your people"
- "We like, know people"
Nice try but China is developing AI that translates COBOL to rust, while stealing one US penny per transaction and locking the penny away on a blockchain implemented on a distributed network of Huawei smartphones. Don't cha know.
not the other way round. Never forget that.
But "seriously", if you can code up a new altcoin in COBOL, I will be seriously impressed and not bored, admiring the sheer surrealist abstract impressionist audacity of it.
So as to never be roped into a job like that.
In my defense, back then, COBOL did not even have an ELSE statement.
It was just pretty dumb.
And all the stuff written in it was stultifyingly boring.
That was the best 1% mark I ever sacrificed.
should be throttled.
For blatant Orwellian abuse of the language, if for nothing else.
Your description would seem to favour the totally observer-subjective viewpoint. As the information converges (that is, more and more entangled things are measured together), there is a more and more constrained and complicated wavefunction, with many very particular peaks and valleys, and very rapidly less remaining uncertainty in state description.
But still, could there be two inconsistent versions of all that, held by so-far-not-entangled observers? When those observers finally compare notes, by convolving their models of what's out there together (becoming entngled), it's interesting that that comes out to a single consistent classical state estimation.
Or maybe it isn't interesting. Maybe it's just the way that math (convolution of wavefunctions) has to work, and whatever that says, that's what you get, and somehow "of course" that's a consistent description of classical reality.
Cats are independent creatures.
But seriously, as I understand "observation" in the measurement and quantum-mechanics sense, something doesn't have to be conscious, or even complex, to be an observer.
Anything which can received and encode information through transfer of energy, that is, anything that can be entangled, can be an observer.
Many things/points/particles/locations/events in the universe observe/measure/are entangled with many other things.
And conversely there are many boundaries across which the things on either side of the boundary are not yet entangled, not observing each other.
That's how I understand the distinction between when/where classical physics theory works and when quantum theory works.
Luckily the 8 year old kid successfully uses that thought experiment to correctly conclude that God is just an imaginary concept, and a self-inconsistent one at that.
And if a tree falls on that mime box, will there be a silent scream that nobody hears?
Please stop with the mime memes.
I think they're trying to talk about boundaries across which things have NOT been interacting (in a quantum-state destructive way) yet.
No matter how complex the thing inside a boundary is, you could in principle (t least in a thought experiment) have the whole thing not entangled in any way with the observer and their entangled environment. So can that complex but isolated thing be in a quantum state/superposition, FROM THE PERSPECTIVE of the outside observer?
I suspect that was the idea of the box concept.
I think one question about whether the wavefunction has collapsed/decohered or not is whether the answer to that is subjective or objective (Does the answer depend on who's/what's observing and what their state of information/entanglement with various things is?)
Without being able to crack the math and physics of the new thought experiment (I'm not at that level), I feel that the new paper is poking around that question.
How does it come to be (or why does it have to be, or DOES it have to be) that when quantum systems get measured and collapsed, by various "independent" observers, that the result is a single consistent complex classical state.
How does that happen? Does it always happen?
Because he could be spinning in his grave in either direction. (sorry).
What percentage of all the able adults in your neighborhood, or your city, would be capable of doing those jobs, in your estimation? What percentage of them will be needed, to work on those new jobs you're thinking of?
Technology creates jobs, until the technology starts becoming more capable by itself, in more and more areas, than people, then technology creates more jobs for other technology, not for people. That's what people can't seem to get into their obtuse skulls.
There seems to be one of those "denial" psychological problems going on. It's too terrible to contemplate, therefore we'll deny it.
Global warming due to human GHG emissions. DENIED. Check.
Job reduction trend due to better-than-human automation. DENIED. Check.
Imagine an almost horizontal line, being the average perceptual and intellectual capacity of a person, or if you like, the average intelligence-guided physical action capacity of a person. A complex mishmash of capability that is a little hard to quantify, admittedly, but that's why I said "imagine". It's a thought experiment, with some simplifications.
The line is almost horizontal because human innate capability improves noticeably on evolutionary timescales (100,000s to millions of years).
Now this human capability line actually starts to curve upward a bit, as human cultural memes develop, like education, external information storage, reliably complex communication between people and generations. So human capability, in recent centuries trained by better-informed minds, starts increasing faster than body evolution and brain evolution would seem to support without all the extra information system evolution.
Now imagine a horizontal line that starts well below the human line. This is the "independent-of-human-wielders" capability of artificial tools and machines invented by humans. That line stays really low for a long time, because all such tools/machines needed total human guidance to do their thing, for centuries. Then with the industrial revolution, increasingly automated machines did a lot with less human supervision but still needed a lot of repair, care, and tending by humans. And other humans were needed to manage and calculate about the economic processes supported by those partly automated machines.
So jobs were created as jobs were destroyed, and productivity per person improved. The line of machine capability curved upward a little bit, with the industrial automation.
But now imagine rapidly advancing computer-algorithm-guided machinery, including calculating and modelling machinery, and physical-process machinery. And imagine that the algorithms are increasingly crafted to train themselves and learn and model their environment themselves (still a way to go, but that's clearly the direction and rapid progress is being made.) Imagine that computer perception and cognition, initially in limited-scope areas, but generalizing rapidly with new AI inventions, becomes comparable to human cognition, or in some areas, exceeds it. And imagine that computer cognition guiding increasingly flexible physical-process systems (robotics, automated assembly lines, automated transportation, 3D printers, robot building-assembly systems, etc. There is still a need for human engineering to improve these systems, and manage their orchestration at the top level, and there is still a need for a few repair people for tasks still too variable for the AI and robots to handle, but in general, this whole thing can run by itself and produce stuff and move stuff and people.
So what we see is the line of general capability (intellectual and physical) of the AI and automated systems/processes starts to curve up rapidly, at the speed of the collective human scientific and engineering advances that invent this technology.
At some point, the machine line crosses above the human line, at which point the average job is more cost-effectively, and often just more effectively, done by the AI and automated system.
So no, more interesting careers will not come along with this, except for the odd uber-genius who can keep up. The automated (economic) system (as a whole) will just start to run itself with less and less human intervention.
The lines cross, and then everything is different. This doesn't happen suddenly, but blurred over a 50ish or whatever year period, but we are now well into that period. Our thinking, and economic modelling, about all of this will have to change profoundly. Anywhere your micro-economic or macro-economic model talks about an effect on human labour or income or spending power, cross that out and insert "machine" instead.
You're right. Any common idiot does "know" that.
Give them trackable stablecoins.
Recipient must click to agree to tracking of those funds through the economy.
(See corruption in action, or not as the case may be)
Learn.
Optimize.
Repeat.
Profit?
Yeah but here's the thing.
The tech is getting better and better, some would say exponentially, but we can just say, real fast, on a year by year basis.
People are getting better too, but on a 100,000 year by 100,000 year evolutionary basis.
You do the math.
So when you get automated out of a job (hypothetical but will be real for say 50% of non-lazy, average competent people soon), would you want your employer who automated your work, and still makes profits, to pay a tax on profit that gives you a bit of universal basic income? Or not?
Oh, ok, they changed all my post settings on me in some new version of slashdot. Oh well.
Didn't try that because pretty sure my slashdot post settings are set to the "plain-text" format option, as opposed to some kind of html format option. I guess they meant plain-text without less-than characters.
That only works in a scenario in which unemployment is temporary. That's not going to be the case going forward, due to automation.
Ok, there's a stupid bug in slashdot apparently, not including my less-than sign.
There. One bug.
What's up with that. Let me try again. Hmm. There was a less-than in there just to the left of this sentence. That's lame on slashdot software's part.
So you proved that ALL programs have bugs?
Didn't think so.
Blanket arguments against computer algorithms for secure voting (or secure anything) are illogical, emotional, and flawed.
People argue to the effect: Because many programs have been found to have a security flaw in either A) the algorithm mathematics and logical assumptions, or in B) the implementation, therefore ALL programs must have some flaw in A) or B) therefore there is no such thing is a secure computer program. That is just bullshit. It's incorrect, unsupported generalization from specific examples.
Just because it is a wise precautionary stance to be extremely skeptical of computer algorithmic voting security (or application security in general), and just because it is wise to demand transparency of the system so that it can be continually reviewed and critiqued (by both the competent and the incompetent),
DOES NOT mean that no secure voting system (or application of whatever kind that should be secure, like banking) is possible.
The reasoning that all computerized voting is flawed is the same is the following reasoning:
Many software programs have bugs (either in design or implementation),
Therefore all software programs have bugs.
And that is just layman-level, lazy-thinking, paranoid, non-technical bullshit.
There are, obviously, many algorithms and implementations that do not have bugs.
Here's one, in pseudocode, to output the number 10:
n = 0
while n 10:
n = n + 1
print(n)
Ok, it's simple, but there are by simple extension many more complex programs that also have no bugs and do some defined calculation or data processing as designed, correctly implementing an unflawed mathematical and logical computable operation.
And you can say, oh, but the language layer or vm layer or OS layer or whatever, below, has bugs, and I will say, many of them do, but it is not a necessary condition.
So stop saying that adequate computer security is impossible. It's not. It's just very very very hard.
But whatever it is, it should be easy compared to the ease of carting stations' worth of paper ballotboxes off to a bonfire in military trucks, or simply threatening with submachineguns or machetes anyone that dares venture near a polling station. The bar we're competing with is NOT VERY HIGH.
Seriously, there are zero-knowledge proofs, mixes, all kinds of true anonymization techniques. There ARE currently unbroken strong encryption methods. And a voter authentication process that uses computers (bottom-up trust and reputation networks on a blockchain) AND people to build up assurance in the identity is not necessarily less trustworthy than a human and easily-forged paper document/ identity card authentication system.
Let's get serious and seriously technical here, and stop with the fearmongering bullshit.
Are all zero-knowledge proof and input mixing algorithms inherently flawed, for example? Can you prove that?
Is all strong encryption, including new research-stage quantum-resistant algorithms, definitely breakable within the forseeable future?
That's not the assumption that we're building the entire rest of the application ecosystem on computerized networks on.
More realistically, there is an arms race between encryption and anonymization algorithm design and implementation, and attacks on them. But that ongoing battle DOES NOT LOGICALLY MEAN that in well-defined areas, we can't be assured it is correct and secure.
1 + 1 == 2 ALL THE TIME (in decimal and a few other bases anyway).