Not to pick nits, but offloading functions to a computer does nothing to boost brain power. Brain power remains constant in this scenario. However, the productivity and ability of the individual is enhanced, but technology has always done that.
Or one could feed and educate the poor. Just a thought.
We've tried that. It never seems to work. You get them fed, and damned if they don't just turn around and start shooting at each other.:-P
Actually we have yet to try it in the last 100 years, with the exception of the Peace Corps which small and some religious groups, also small. What we have done is given all the aid to corrupt regimes who use it to keep in power and then they start shooting at each other.
One only has to look back at history to see who it was who funded and trained Bin Laden.
Some communities. How about the entire state of Tennessee which recently passed laws allowing creationism equal time in all science curriculum's and made it possible to fire teachers if they even mention "gateway sexual activities" in any area. What this country needs is a national curriculum which would apply to every state, city and town whether that town was in California or Tennessee. It also needs national textbooks with the subjects overseen by professionals in the field instead of local school boards deciding that "little Johnny Reb" needs to be told that America is a God Based nation like they did in Texas. The fact that most schools have become nothing more than sports star mills might have something to do with the state of education, too.
And let the free market happen. If people don't like it, then they will move away as will the businesses. We've had national curriculums in one form or another for decades. They don't work. Ultimately, the people in the community should be responsible for what happens in their community, not some politician thousands of miles away.
You act as if ONLY space exploration can lead to these things (and actually most of they came from military spending, not space, but space has more than it's fare share to its credit).
Do you think that it is space exploration itself that leads to these great technologies or that the brightest minds are corralled and focused on a specific problem? If the former, then how did we ever get to the point of even having space exploration? If the later, then wouldn't a national effort to focus the minds of the scientific community on a different endeavor also reap similar benefits?
What about building habitats in the ocean? Could solve world hunger, find new medicines and over population. What about sustainable energy sources other than petrol based? What about turning desserts into cropland? All of these things, of course, are going on now, but not with the push of "In 10 years we will put a man on the moon..." and then marshaling the resources to do so.
It is not space exploration, in and of itself, that causes the benefits you mention. It is the collective effort of thousands of our best scientist working towards the same goal. That goal can be any number of things.
"What reason is there not to have actual people living in it?"
Duh, so they can nuke it in case of a robot uprising.
Or more likely so nobody is around to see what they are really doing there. They've built cities in the past for secret research. The Manhattan Project comes to mind.
Or since the government already owns Times Beach and a bunch of other sites purchased with the super fund, why not use one of them, or even an abandoned/closed military base.
The point of all of this is to test all of these things on existing infrastructure. But, if you have to go out and build the infrastructure, then it really isn't existing infrastructure is it?
Icons are just symbols. They don't have to actually look like what they represent, particularly when it is an action. What about those red octagons or yellow triangles at intersections. They don't look like anything they represent and yet they work quite well.
Exactly how is facebook cutting traffic for the carriers? If I send a text message via FB versus the sms application in my phone, are not the same amount of bytes being transferred? Actually, the FB transfer probably uses more traffic.
What is true, though, is that SMS is a private service that the carriers gouge the public on in pricing and they haven't found a way to exploit the user who uses FB for their texting. At least not yet.
Or one could feed and educate the poor. Just a thought.
We already do that. We could do a lot better at it if we weren't being attacked by the people who don't want us to. The folks who want, for example, to educate the poor in Afghanistan need military protection to avoid having their throats cut. The folks who want to deliver food to starving people in Somalia need military escorts to avoid having the food stolen by the Islamists that use those resources to power militias that are busy slaughtering and starving the people we're trying to help. Get the picture? Without military spending, we wouldn't have had massive aid immediately available overseas when Indonesia got pasted by an enormous tsunami in 2009, and couldn't have secured the aid provided.
As for educating the poor here in the US... what do you recomment? More money, it sounds like? Let's start with DC, shall we? Over $10,000 per year per student, huge numbers of which continue to leave school functionally illiterate, unemployable, and destined to live off the nanny state. Money isn't the problem, culture is the problem. Got any suggestions? Be careful, people who make constructive suggestion in situations like that end up being called racists, not problem solvers.
I do not disagree with you that in poor countries, people in power do not want the poor educated, because they may/will lose control. I'd even venture to say the same thing in the US. As for educating the poor in the US, I don't think it would require any more money than we spend now. It would require less government interference and could be accomplished by turning control back over to local school boards and communities.
Does that mean everybody will get the same educational opportunities, no, probably not. But the government educational equalization programs have proven to be innefective where poor schools did not improve and good schools declined. With local school board control, there is also the risk that in some communities, creationism and the like will be taught. That's a risk I'm willing to take as the vast majority of them would not do that
In those communities that value education, education will be a priority and those communities will grow. Look at most college towns. Businesses like to locate there, they have good standards of living, they have good community life. All of this is not because their is a university or college there, but because the community itself supports education (granted a university or college attracts those who value education).
It just seems odd that a 17 yr old in college doesn't need the government to determine his curriculum but a 17 yr old in high school does. Likewise, somebody can home school their children in most states, without the government getting totally involved (not that I am a big proponent of that) and these home schooled students seem to do quite well academically when they move beyound homeschooling. Maybe education wouldn't cost so much without all of the buracracy that has been added over the last 40 years or so.
Oddly enough, helping more people survive tends to lower population growth.
That is what all the research shows, whether on animals or humans. The higher the survial rate, or attainment of adulthood (not just sexual maturity), the lower the birthrate becomes.. Nature figured this all out long before man picked up the first stone tool.
Huh, you mean the Africans chose to have their (largely democratic) governments overthrown and replaced with British pillaging engines? Then when the British were finally kicked out the governments weren't actually replaced, only the people at the helm. Actually changing government at an institutional level is not an easy thing, especially when the vast bulk of the populace lacks the education to understand how (method, if not magnitude) they're being exploited.
But I'll agree, feeding people doesn't seem to help outside of short-term crises, in fact it can makes things worse by destroying local food markets and driving farmers out of business (potentially turning a short term crisis into an ongoing problem). Fair Trade exports have a related effect, why would a farmer grow food for the local market when he can grow much more profitable goods for the export market?
Education on the other hand does seem to help, as does free access to birth control and family planning education. It's not that hard for someone living on the knife edge of poverty to understand that they can give a couple kids a much better life than you can a handful, but abstinence is a tough pill to swallow. Of course education especially has it's detractors - every tin-hat dictator and religious power monger realizes their power depends on keeping the populace ignorant and downtrodden, and many won't hesitate to stoop to violent rhetoric to incite the populace against their would-be liberators. Still, there's plenty of places where that's not the case, and as we do what we can there word tends to spread. You can only keep people under your thumb so long before they start noticing that their neighbors who did listen to those vile, evil, disease-spreading infidels are actually looking a lot healthier and happier than they used to.
Not that I am promoting abstinance in any way, but I do want to point out that prior to the 1960s, it was the only way available and it seemed to work pretty well over all. With only abstinance, birthrates in countries that worked on reducing poverty and increasing education still fell. Today's modern methods may be much more effective than absitnance, but my point is that even abstinance is the only option it doesn't negate the effects of poverty reduction and education.
History has shown that as populations become more educated and better nourished that birthrates actually decline. It seems that poverty promotes high birth rates. Maybe it has something to do with there being slim odds to pass ones genes on to the future generations, the more one procreates, the better the chances of that occuring.
How one eliviates poverty and educates the poor is another issue. It has already been shown that drop shipping food doesn't work except in times of extreme famine. It has also been shown that giving financial aid to corrupt governments does not work either. But then again, neither does propping up corrupt regimes corporate and political reasons.
You're assuming it can only accelerate for a short period. A proper drive system will have acceleration over much longer distances allowing it to reach a significantly higher velocity. The moon is on our doorstep, Mars quite a bit further. It also has to slow down at the other end, mind you!
Space is a lot like ice. Acceleration isn't the big problem. Deceleration is.
Right, the people responsible for programming it could never possibly imagine a car being a danger to anyone not in the vehicle. That's just a totally absurd design requirement.
It's not that at all. It is about choices. Should the programming while driving 60 mph a) hit the moose and have it enter the passenger compartement and kill the front seek occupants, b) drive off the road, off the embankment and enter a state where it is no longer in control and probably kill or seriously injur the occupants or c) swerve to the left avoiding the moose, protecting the occupants but wiping out the motorcycle?
This is no different than those exercises in grade school where the life boat only holds so many people and there are one too many so you have to decide who doesn't get to get in the life boat. The difference is here, some programmer programmed a computer to make the decision for you instead of you making it yourself.
While a motorcyclist may be safer if all the cars were driverless does not mean that a motocyclist will be safe. That is, unless, motorcyclists become driverless, too, at which point, why have a motorcycle?
They won't suddenly accelerate or change lanes for no reason at all, or pass me in my own lane.
Unless the AI in the car determines it is better to change lanes and hit you than the moose that is entering it's lane. The AI is going to protect its passengers, first, so whatever is going to cause the least damage to them is the course of action it will take -- even if that means bouncing you off the highway.
'If you truly trust the intelligence of the vehicle, then you get in the vehicle and you do our work while you're traveling
And if I don't trust the intelligence of the vehicle? Then what? I'm a programmer and as a result of that, I have an inherent distrust of computers, especially if it's autonomously hurtling me around at 70 mph.
And second, I don't want to "do my work" while I'm in the car. I don't understand this interest in always having to be doing something productive. Today was a nice day, so I drove into work with the top down, enjoying the weather, and listening to the radio, and I don't feel that time was wasted at all.
I agree with this. People won't be doing work in these cars anymore than they do on the bus or train. It's a false selling point.
Wasn't there just a story on slashdot regarding positive bias? This article smacks of it!
Before there could be any statistical reduction in accidents, traffic jams, improved commute times, etc. Enough drivers have to switch over to automated cars to make a difference. For instance, these cars have been tested in California for quite some time, and yet there has been no impact on the overall accident rate or traffic conditions. Why not? Because there aren't enough of them to make a difference, yet.
Driver errors are only one problem. What about natural occurrences? When driving along ocean highway and the rocks give way in front of you ("Beware of falling rocks"), how will such a vehicle be able to sense that the rocks are about to fall? I have no problem that it can sense that they did fall and avoid them in the road, but if they are in the process of falling, what then? Likewise, with animals and tree limbs, etc.
We can't even predict, with 100% accuracy, where a thunderstorm is going to go. How do we think a car will be able to take in all of the data analyze it and figure out what to do?
NOTE: I am not claiming that the thing won't be safer than people driving cars. I am only questioning the hype and hyperbole surrounding what is being said by supposed experts as to what will happen. To claim one of these cars will end all of our problems is ludicrous. The last time such a claim was made was just over 100 years ago with a ship named Titanic.
I use a form of it when I use a time tracker at work (personal choice, not company mandated). My tracker has a prominent bar chart with my percentage of productive time vs the average of everyone else using the tool. I make a game out of it and try to keep my bar higher than the average. Personally, I am not motivated at all by the more public forms of gamification; I could care less about a gold star. I feel like if it is used as an actual performance metric that the PHBs can get their greasy hands all over, it breaks down. After all, games are meant to be gamed. People have been trying to come up with even a few quantifiable metrics to evaluate software engineers for years, and every one of them can be gamed. Lines of code: a recipe for copy/paste olympics. Fewest bugs: projects get delayed as the balance between speed and quality get out of whack, or the smartest coders use their weight to get the easiest projects. Most features: 80% of the bug reports are unwanted features, not actual "glitches". For lines of code specifically, Bill Gates once said that "measuring software by lines of code is like measuring airplanes by weight". I tend to think that for most metrics used in this way (even outside programming), they misdirect workers from using common sense and reduce overall quality.
But you are doing this for you. What if your employer were doing it and posting it for all to see?
Gamification, or what we used to call extrinsic rewards, will probably continue to grow until the first major lawsuit over how it is being used to discriminate or violate privacy. If gamification is used as part of performance reviews and employee performance reviews are confidential, then does it violate privacy? If it can be shown that the best rewards go to the men or whites or pick your category, even if it is non-monetary, is it a form of workplace hostility.
My suggestion would be to leave gaming rewards to gamers and businesses to focus on more traditional forms of recognition.
Slashdot Mirror
The phrase "the productivity and ability of the individual is enhanced, but technology has always done that." applies to a lot more than computers.
Which means that businesses will use this to find out how often their employees aren't engaged in their jobs and terminate the slackers.
Not to pick nits, but offloading functions to a computer does nothing to boost brain power. Brain power remains constant in this scenario. However, the productivity and ability of the individual is enhanced, but technology has always done that.
Or one could feed and educate the poor. Just a thought.
We've tried that. It never seems to work. You get them fed, and damned if they don't just turn around and start shooting at each other. :-P
Actually we have yet to try it in the last 100 years, with the exception of the Peace Corps which small and some religious groups, also small. What we have done is given all the aid to corrupt regimes who use it to keep in power and then they start shooting at each other.
One only has to look back at history to see who it was who funded and trained Bin Laden.
Some communities. How about the entire state of Tennessee which recently passed laws allowing creationism equal time in all science curriculum's and made it possible to fire teachers if they even mention "gateway sexual activities" in any area.
What this country needs is a national curriculum which would apply to every state, city and town whether that town was in California or Tennessee. It also needs national textbooks with the subjects overseen by professionals in the field instead of local school boards deciding that "little Johnny Reb" needs to be told that America is a God Based nation like they did in Texas.
The fact that most schools have become nothing more than sports star mills might have something to do with the state of education, too.
And let the free market happen. If people don't like it, then they will move away as will the businesses. We've had national curriculums in one form or another for decades. They don't work. Ultimately, the people in the community should be responsible for what happens in their community, not some politician thousands of miles away.
You act as if ONLY space exploration can lead to these things (and actually most of they came from military spending, not space, but space has more than it's fare share to its credit).
Do you think that it is space exploration itself that leads to these great technologies or that the brightest minds are corralled and focused on a specific problem? If the former, then how did we ever get to the point of even having space exploration? If the later, then wouldn't a national effort to focus the minds of the scientific community on a different endeavor also reap similar benefits?
What about building habitats in the ocean? Could solve world hunger, find new medicines and over population. What about sustainable energy sources other than petrol based? What about turning desserts into cropland? All of these things, of course, are going on now, but not with the push of "In 10 years we will put a man on the moon..." and then marshaling the resources to do so.
It is not space exploration, in and of itself, that causes the benefits you mention. It is the collective effort of thousands of our best scientist working towards the same goal. That goal can be any number of things.
Correlation and causation are not the same thing.
"What reason is there not to have actual people living in it?"
Duh, so they can nuke it in case of a robot uprising.
Or more likely so nobody is around to see what they are really doing there. They've built cities in the past for secret research. The Manhattan Project comes to mind.
Or since the government already owns Times Beach and a bunch of other sites purchased with the super fund, why not use one of them, or even an abandoned/closed military base.
The point of all of this is to test all of these things on existing infrastructure. But, if you have to go out and build the infrastructure, then it really isn't existing infrastructure is it?
Icons are just symbols. They don't have to actually look like what they represent, particularly when it is an action. What about those red octagons or yellow triangles at intersections. They don't look like anything they represent and yet they work quite well.
Exactly how is facebook cutting traffic for the carriers? If I send a text message via FB versus the sms application in my phone, are not the same amount of bytes being transferred? Actually, the FB transfer probably uses more traffic.
What is true, though, is that SMS is a private service that the carriers gouge the public on in pricing and they haven't found a way to exploit the user who uses FB for their texting. At least not yet.
Or one could feed and educate the poor. Just a thought.
We already do that. We could do a lot better at it if we weren't being attacked by the people who don't want us to. The folks who want, for example, to educate the poor in Afghanistan need military protection to avoid having their throats cut. The folks who want to deliver food to starving people in Somalia need military escorts to avoid having the food stolen by the Islamists that use those resources to power militias that are busy slaughtering and starving the people we're trying to help. Get the picture? Without military spending, we wouldn't have had massive aid immediately available overseas when Indonesia got pasted by an enormous tsunami in 2009, and couldn't have secured the aid provided.
As for educating the poor here in the US... what do you recomment? More money, it sounds like? Let's start with DC, shall we? Over $10,000 per year per student, huge numbers of which continue to leave school functionally illiterate, unemployable, and destined to live off the nanny state. Money isn't the problem, culture is the problem. Got any suggestions? Be careful, people who make constructive suggestion in situations like that end up being called racists, not problem solvers.
I do not disagree with you that in poor countries, people in power do not want the poor educated, because they may/will lose control. I'd even venture to say the same thing in the US. As for educating the poor in the US, I don't think it would require any more money than we spend now. It would require less government interference and could be accomplished by turning control back over to local school boards and communities.
Does that mean everybody will get the same educational opportunities, no, probably not. But the government educational equalization programs have proven to be innefective where poor schools did not improve and good schools declined. With local school board control, there is also the risk that in some communities, creationism and the like will be taught. That's a risk I'm willing to take as the vast majority of them would not do that
In those communities that value education, education will be a priority and those communities will grow. Look at most college towns. Businesses like to locate there, they have good standards of living, they have good community life. All of this is not because their is a university or college there, but because the community itself supports education (granted a university or college attracts those who value education).
It just seems odd that a 17 yr old in college doesn't need the government to determine his curriculum but a 17 yr old in high school does. Likewise, somebody can home school their children in most states, without the government getting totally involved (not that I am a big proponent of that) and these home schooled students seem to do quite well academically when they move beyound homeschooling. Maybe education wouldn't cost so much without all of the buracracy that has been added over the last 40 years or so.
Just a thought.
Oddly enough, helping more people survive tends to lower population growth.
That is what all the research shows, whether on animals or humans. The higher the survial rate, or attainment of adulthood (not just sexual maturity), the lower the birthrate becomes.. Nature figured this all out long before man picked up the first stone tool.
Huh, you mean the Africans chose to have their (largely democratic) governments overthrown and replaced with British pillaging engines? Then when the British were finally kicked out the governments weren't actually replaced, only the people at the helm. Actually changing government at an institutional level is not an easy thing, especially when the vast bulk of the populace lacks the education to understand how (method, if not magnitude) they're being exploited.
But I'll agree, feeding people doesn't seem to help outside of short-term crises, in fact it can makes things worse by destroying local food markets and driving farmers out of business (potentially turning a short term crisis into an ongoing problem). Fair Trade exports have a related effect, why would a farmer grow food for the local market when he can grow much more profitable goods for the export market?
Education on the other hand does seem to help, as does free access to birth control and family planning education. It's not that hard for someone living on the knife edge of poverty to understand that they can give a couple kids a much better life than you can a handful, but abstinence is a tough pill to swallow. Of course education especially has it's detractors - every tin-hat dictator and religious power monger realizes their power depends on keeping the populace ignorant and downtrodden, and many won't hesitate to stoop to violent rhetoric to incite the populace against their would-be liberators. Still, there's plenty of places where that's not the case, and as we do what we can there word tends to spread. You can only keep people under your thumb so long before they start noticing that their neighbors who did listen to those vile, evil, disease-spreading infidels are actually looking a lot healthier and happier than they used to.
Not that I am promoting abstinance in any way, but I do want to point out that prior to the 1960s, it was the only way available and it seemed to work pretty well over all. With only abstinance, birthrates in countries that worked on reducing poverty and increasing education still fell. Today's modern methods may be much more effective than absitnance, but my point is that even abstinance is the only option it doesn't negate the effects of poverty reduction and education.
History has shown that as populations become more educated and better nourished that birthrates actually decline. It seems that poverty promotes high birth rates. Maybe it has something to do with there being slim odds to pass ones genes on to the future generations, the more one procreates, the better the chances of that occuring.
How one eliviates poverty and educates the poor is another issue. It has already been shown that drop shipping food doesn't work except in times of extreme famine. It has also been shown that giving financial aid to corrupt governments does not work either. But then again, neither does propping up corrupt regimes corporate and political reasons.
You're assuming it can only accelerate for a short period. A proper drive system will have acceleration over much longer distances allowing it to reach a significantly higher velocity. The moon is on our doorstep, Mars quite a bit further. It also has to slow down at the other end, mind you!
Space is a lot like ice. Acceleration isn't the big problem. Deceleration is.
Hence the statement there is no STARship with just an ion drive. Starships travel between the stars.
But the Ionship Enterprise just doesn't have the right sound to it.
at a cost of roughly $1 trillion
So a fraction of what we spend on the military finding new ways to blow things up or on wall street bailing out incompetent bankers, then?
Given the choice of blowing it on a Bernie Madoff or Goldman Sachs/Lehman Bros., I vote we build a starship. I'll clean the Jeffries Tubes.
To !@#$ with Earth!
Or one could feed and educate the poor. Just a thought.
Right, the people responsible for programming it could never possibly imagine a car being a danger to anyone not in the vehicle. That's just a totally absurd design requirement.
It's not that at all. It is about choices. Should the programming while driving 60 mph a) hit the moose and have it enter the passenger compartement and kill the front seek occupants, b) drive off the road, off the embankment and enter a state where it is no longer in control and probably kill or seriously injur the occupants or c) swerve to the left avoiding the moose, protecting the occupants but wiping out the motorcycle?
This is no different than those exercises in grade school where the life boat only holds so many people and there are one too many so you have to decide who doesn't get to get in the life boat. The difference is here, some programmer programmed a computer to make the decision for you instead of you making it yourself.
While a motorcyclist may be safer if all the cars were driverless does not mean that a motocyclist will be safe. That is, unless, motorcyclists become driverless, too, at which point, why have a motorcycle?
They won't suddenly accelerate or change lanes for no reason at all, or pass me in my own lane.
Unless the AI in the car determines it is better to change lanes and hit you than the moose that is entering it's lane. The AI is going to protect its passengers, first, so whatever is going to cause the least damage to them is the course of action it will take -- even if that means bouncing you off the highway.
'If you truly trust the intelligence of the vehicle, then you get in the vehicle and you do our work while you're traveling
And if I don't trust the intelligence of the vehicle? Then what? I'm a programmer and as a result of that, I have an inherent distrust of computers, especially if it's autonomously hurtling me around at 70 mph.
And second, I don't want to "do my work" while I'm in the car. I don't understand this interest in always having to be doing something productive. Today was a nice day, so I drove into work with the top down, enjoying the weather, and listening to the radio, and I don't feel that time was wasted at all.
I agree with this. People won't be doing work in these cars anymore than they do on the bus or train. It's a false selling point.
I would like to go to a bar with friends without one of them suffering the fate of the designated driver.
On the other hand, if you have a problem with drunk dialing, imagine if you had a car that could drive you to your ex's house with a voice command...
They already have a type of driverless car for that (at least from you and your friend's perspective). It's called a taxi.
Wasn't there just a story on slashdot regarding positive bias? This article smacks of it!
Before there could be any statistical reduction in accidents, traffic jams, improved commute times, etc. Enough drivers have to switch over to automated cars to make a difference. For instance, these cars have been tested in California for quite some time, and yet there has been no impact on the overall accident rate or traffic conditions. Why not? Because there aren't enough of them to make a difference, yet.
Driver errors are only one problem. What about natural occurrences? When driving along ocean highway and the rocks give way in front of you ("Beware of falling rocks"), how will such a vehicle be able to sense that the rocks are about to fall? I have no problem that it can sense that they did fall and avoid them in the road, but if they are in the process of falling, what then? Likewise, with animals and tree limbs, etc.
We can't even predict, with 100% accuracy, where a thunderstorm is going to go. How do we think a car will be able to take in all of the data analyze it and figure out what to do?
NOTE: I am not claiming that the thing won't be safer than people driving cars. I am only questioning the hype and hyperbole surrounding what is being said by supposed experts as to what will happen. To claim one of these cars will end all of our problems is ludicrous. The last time such a claim was made was just over 100 years ago with a ship named Titanic.
I use a form of it when I use a time tracker at work (personal choice, not company mandated). My tracker has a prominent bar chart with my percentage of productive time vs the average of everyone else using the tool. I make a game out of it and try to keep my bar higher than the average. Personally, I am not motivated at all by the more public forms of gamification; I could care less about a gold star. I feel like if it is used as an actual performance metric that the PHBs can get their greasy hands all over, it breaks down. After all, games are meant to be gamed. People have been trying to come up with even a few quantifiable metrics to evaluate software engineers for years, and every one of them can be gamed. Lines of code: a recipe for copy/paste olympics. Fewest bugs: projects get delayed as the balance between speed and quality get out of whack, or the smartest coders use their weight to get the easiest projects. Most features: 80% of the bug reports are unwanted features, not actual "glitches". For lines of code specifically, Bill Gates once said that "measuring software by lines of code is like measuring airplanes by weight". I tend to think that for most metrics used in this way (even outside programming), they misdirect workers from using common sense and reduce overall quality.
But you are doing this for you. What if your employer were doing it and posting it for all to see?
Gamification, or what we used to call extrinsic rewards, will probably continue to grow until the first major lawsuit over how it is being used to discriminate or violate privacy. If gamification is used as part of performance reviews and employee performance reviews are confidential, then does it violate privacy? If it can be shown that the best rewards go to the men or whites or pick your category, even if it is non-monetary, is it a form of workplace hostility.
My suggestion would be to leave gaming rewards to gamers and businesses to focus on more traditional forms of recognition.