There are plenty of jobs. But the jobs on offer all have at least one of the following problems: 1. They pay you what you are worth, rather than what you think you are worth. 2. They don't let you follow your dreams of self-actualization. 3. The require you to have actual skills. 4. You have to move.
the productivity gains of the last 100 or perhaps even 50 years has outstripped everything in human history combined.
Not true. The invention of agriculture, the forging or iron, the invention of the steel mouldboard, and the electrification of the early 20th century all affected a far greater proportion of the population.
Geometric progressions like this...
Productivity is not increasing geometrically. In fact, the rate of productivity growth is falling since most manufacturing jobs are already gone, and service jobs are proving much harder to automate. That may change in the future, but today job losses to tech are declining.
How many humans have lost their jobs to "deep learning"? Approximately zero.
We are all grateful to be heirs of the industrial revolution, but it was pure hell for those living through it.
Nope. Most of the factory workers saw their situation as a big improvement over the alternative of grinding rural poverty back on the farm. Same with Chinese factory workers today. Anyone who thinks working on an assembly line is "pure hell" has never spent a 16 hour day in a mosquito infested rice paddy.
3rd-graders in your neck of the woods must be significantly brighter than most if you can hand them the equation above and ask them to "solve for X."
Except the use of "X" is entirely superfluous. There is no reason whatsoever to write such a simple calculation as an algebraic equation.
If you want to add 2+2, you can write X+X=Y, and solve for Y when the domain is fixed at 2. How many 3rd graders can solve that equation? Not many, but that that doesn't mean they don't know 2+2=4.
A pretty basic tenet of any religion (or at least the ones that have become dominant today) is that THIS religion is the ONLY ONE TRUE religion, all else being heresy
Most religions make no such claim. The vast majority of religions are "tribal" and make no effort to proselytize to outsiders. Go to your local synagogue and tell the rabbi that you want to convert to Judaism. Most likely he will try to talk you out of it. If you go to a Hindu temple, you will likely encounter similar rejection. Buddhists will be more welcoming, but they make no claim to be the "ONE TRUE" religion, and many don't even consider Buddhism to be a religion. More of a philosophy.
In fact if A and B were in a religious war...
There is no such thing as a "religious war". Wars are fought for power and resources. Religion is just a justification, and as a way to motivate poor fools to die for the benefit of rich leaders. The Thirty Years War was by far the worst "religious war" in Europe, yet both Catholic France and Muslim Turkey fought on the "protestant" side.
Apple in particular has a record for not spending much on lobbying
Microsoft also donated very little prior to 1998, when the feds initiated an anti-trust lawsuit that could have broken up the company and destroyed their monopoly pricing power. Since then, Microsoft has donated 10s of millions, and has had few legal problems despite very few behavioral changes.
It is silly to blame corps for donating when our political system provides so much value to big donors.
... and going up against the combined anti-net-neutrality speech of Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Verizon, etc. weighting in at 572 million.
Indeed. It is interesting that the donations of these four tech companies was emphasized, while the donations of a hundred times as much by their adversaries was not even mentioned.
Well of course if you limit yourself to only "improvements" then by definition they all lead to improvement in the standard of living.
Bullcrap. An "improvement in technology" is not DEFINED as an "improvement in living standards". They are two different things. The first generally leads to the 2nd, but that is not by "definition". The claim of the techno-pessimists is the opposite: That improving tech will lead to lower living standards for many people.
Here's an invention that did not lead to improvement in standards of living: religion.
Religion brought order and structure to tribal societies. Tribes with religion out-competed and out-survived tribes without religion.
Right. Because this proved true in the last 150 years of 10,000 years of human history it can never prove false.
Productivity improvements have been occurring for a lot longer than 150 years. Agriculture has been around for 10,000 years. Writing, paper, concrete, and steel are all technologies invented more than a thousand years ago.
Can you name any productivity improvement, ever, that did not lead to higher living standards?
Most AI-chicken-littles predicate their doom-and-gloom on the assumption that only "the rich" will have access to new technology. The same predictions were made about cars, personal computers, and even washing machines. Yet today, car ownership is widespread, and billions of people have a computer in their pocket. There is no reason to believe the future will be different. It is not just "the rich" that have Siri on their cellphones. Household robots will almost certainly be designed for the mass market, not the 1%.
Can you name any productivity enhancing technology, ever, that has been used solely by "the rich"?
What happened to the US having antitrust legislation?
Have you been following the election returns for the last few decades? Do you know which party controls the presidency, the supreme court, the senate, the house, 2/3rds of the governorships, and most of the state legislatures?
Either you have to keep the people happy with handouts or you need to get rid of the people...
Or maybe, just maybe, it will be exactly like what has happened with every other historical advance in productivity: the economy will expand, new jobs will be created, and living standards will improve.
China is building Skynet. America is building the F-35.
And where was the hardware designed and the software written?
Irrelevant, since according to the law, that makes no difference whatsoever. Companies do not pay less income tax if they have fewer, or even no employees in America.
Even if they hadn't, whatever they'd been coding in would be obsolete.
I went to college 35 years ago, and learned C, along with data structures, algorithms, and TCP/IP networking. Amount of what I learned that is now obsolete: 0%.
I suspect it's most useful for people who are already able to program but who want a crash course in web development.
If you already know coding, you can learn webdev in a few days from free on-line tutorials or maybe a $20 book from Amazon.
everyone from kindergarteners to grandmas should be learning to "code"
Nearly everyone can benefit from coding. I have written many Google Sheets triggers, plugins for Quickbooks, etc. for friends and relatives. These are usually a dozen or so lines of Javascript, and maybe a few regexes. If you can code, this is trivial, but if you can't then you are stuck.
All of these people took algebra in high school. None of them have used algebra, even once, since HS. So it is silly that our schools teach algebra and not coding... and please don't say "You need algebra to understand coding" because that is patently false. I have taught 4th graders to code, and they certainly haven't learned algebra.
Wealth is absolutely a fixed size pie. Scarcity of resources is the fundamental problem that economics tries to solve.
You are applying 19th century economics to the 21st century. Five of the biggest corporations in America are Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. None of them rely on coal or iron ore. They rely on human ingenuity and intellectual property, neither of which is inherently limited.
1. Legal expenses, which are a one time cost
I incorporated on-line for $200. I spent $0 on legal fees.
2. Double taxation, which my plan would eliminate
Most corps in America are S-Corps, which are not subject to double taxation.
That only keeps the peace for the people back home... in the land of the dominant enforcer. Everyone else has to deal with war on their doorstep.
It keeps the peace for everyone who accepts the current world order. Today, that is most of the world, which is more peaceful than ever before in history. Even most muslim countries accept American hegemony. The only real challenges to the Pax Americana are in a few Shiite countries (Iran, Syria) and a few non-state entities (ISIS, Hezbollah, the Houthi tribe in Yemen). China may challenge America in the future, but their current activities in the SCS don't amount to much, and are not a direct threat to American interests.
I kept seeing places where the lip/mouth movements did not jibe with what was being said.
If you can see the difference, a GAN can also see it... and correct it. This is the first demo. The tech to will improve rapidly, especially since the demand for fake news is high.
Is all crypto currency over-valued when it is so frequently anonymously stolen?
It was not "stolen". Crypto-currencies are based on the implementing code, and the only "rules" are in the code. So if the code allowed someone to transfer ownership, then that transfer followed the "rules" and is just as legitimate as any other transfer. Just because some people misunderstood the rules, that doesn't make it "wrong" for someone else to follow them to their own advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
There aren't any jobs left now.
There are plenty of jobs. But the jobs on offer all have at least one of the following problems:
1. They pay you what you are worth, rather than what you think you are worth.
2. They don't let you follow your dreams of self-actualization.
3. The require you to have actual skills.
4. You have to move.
the productivity gains of the last 100 or perhaps even 50 years has outstripped everything in human history combined.
Not true. The invention of agriculture, the forging or iron, the invention of the steel mouldboard, and the electrification of the early 20th century all affected a far greater proportion of the population.
Geometric progressions like this ...
Productivity is not increasing geometrically. In fact, the rate of productivity growth is falling since most manufacturing jobs are already gone, and service jobs are proving much harder to automate. That may change in the future, but today job losses to tech are declining.
How many humans have lost their jobs to "deep learning"? Approximately zero.
The standard of living and productivity was about flat from 400 AD to 1600 AD.
Only in Europe. China and the Islamic caliphate prospered during that time, and that is where the innovations were happening.
We are all grateful to be heirs of the industrial revolution, but it was pure hell for those living through it.
Nope. Most of the factory workers saw their situation as a big improvement over the alternative of grinding rural poverty back on the farm. Same with Chinese factory workers today. Anyone who thinks working on an assembly line is "pure hell" has never spent a 16 hour day in a mosquito infested rice paddy.
3rd-graders in your neck of the woods must be significantly brighter than most if you can hand them the equation above and ask them to "solve for X."
Except the use of "X" is entirely superfluous. There is no reason whatsoever to write such a simple calculation as an algebraic equation.
If you want to add 2+2, you can write X+X=Y, and solve for Y when the domain is fixed at 2. How many 3rd graders can solve that equation? Not many, but that that doesn't mean they don't know 2+2=4.
A pretty basic tenet of any religion (or at least the ones that have become dominant today) is that THIS religion is the ONLY ONE TRUE religion, all else being heresy
Most religions make no such claim. The vast majority of religions are "tribal" and make no effort to proselytize to outsiders. Go to your local synagogue and tell the rabbi that you want to convert to Judaism. Most likely he will try to talk you out of it. If you go to a Hindu temple, you will likely encounter similar rejection. Buddhists will be more welcoming, but they make no claim to be the "ONE TRUE" religion, and many don't even consider Buddhism to be a religion. More of a philosophy.
In fact if A and B were in a religious war ...
There is no such thing as a "religious war". Wars are fought for power and resources. Religion is just a justification, and as a way to motivate poor fools to die for the benefit of rich leaders. The Thirty Years War was by far the worst "religious war" in Europe, yet both Catholic France and Muslim Turkey fought on the "protestant" side.
Apple in particular has a record for not spending much on lobbying
Microsoft also donated very little prior to 1998, when the feds initiated an anti-trust lawsuit that could have broken up the company and destroyed their monopoly pricing power. Since then, Microsoft has donated 10s of millions, and has had few legal problems despite very few behavioral changes.
It is silly to blame corps for donating when our political system provides so much value to big donors.
... and going up against the combined anti-net-neutrality speech of Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Verizon, etc. weighting in at 572 million.
Indeed. It is interesting that the donations of these four tech companies was emphasized, while the donations of a hundred times as much by their adversaries was not even mentioned.
That's algebra. X - .2X = NewPrice
No it isn't. That is just 3rd grade arithmetic.
Well of course if you limit yourself to only "improvements" then by definition they all lead to improvement in the standard of living.
Bullcrap. An "improvement in technology" is not DEFINED as an "improvement in living standards". They are two different things. The first generally leads to the 2nd, but that is not by "definition". The claim of the techno-pessimists is the opposite: That improving tech will lead to lower living standards for many people.
Here's an invention that did not lead to improvement in standards of living: religion.
Religion brought order and structure to tribal societies. Tribes with religion out-competed and out-survived tribes without religion.
Right. Because this proved true in the last 150 years of 10,000 years of human history it can never prove false.
Productivity improvements have been occurring for a lot longer than 150 years. Agriculture has been around for 10,000 years. Writing, paper, concrete, and steel are all technologies invented more than a thousand years ago.
Can you name any productivity improvement, ever, that did not lead to higher living standards?
Most AI-chicken-littles predicate their doom-and-gloom on the assumption that only "the rich" will have access to new technology. The same predictions were made about cars, personal computers, and even washing machines. Yet today, car ownership is widespread, and billions of people have a computer in their pocket. There is no reason to believe the future will be different. It is not just "the rich" that have Siri on their cellphones. Household robots will almost certainly be designed for the mass market, not the 1%.
Can you name any productivity enhancing technology, ever, that has been used solely by "the rich"?
What happened to the US having antitrust legislation?
Have you been following the election returns for the last few decades? Do you know which party controls the presidency, the supreme court, the senate, the house, 2/3rds of the governorships, and most of the state legislatures?
Hint: It isn't the antitrust party.
Either you have to keep the people happy with handouts or you need to get rid of the people...
Or maybe, just maybe, it will be exactly like what has happened with every other historical advance in productivity: the economy will expand, new jobs will be created, and living standards will improve.
China is building Skynet. America is building the F-35.
You get a bucket full of them (say, 10 trillion), weigh it on the bathroom scale ...
10 trillion protons would weigh a few picograms. You will need about 10 quadrillion picograms to fill a bucket.
Even then, the protons would be contaminated with electrons, gluons, neutrons, etc. It will be much harder to fill a bucket with pure protons.
You need geometry to do UI design.
What is taught in a geometry class that is relevant to laying out a webpage? Do you use Euclid's axioms to properly pad a text field?
algebra helps you figure out how many dollars you're making for every page you wrote and how to invest your profits wisely.
No it doesn't. That is just arithmetic.
And where was the hardware designed and the software written?
Irrelevant, since according to the law, that makes no difference whatsoever. Companies do not pay less income tax if they have fewer, or even no employees in America.
Even if they hadn't, whatever they'd been coding in would be obsolete.
I went to college 35 years ago, and learned C, along with data structures, algorithms, and TCP/IP networking.
Amount of what I learned that is now obsolete: 0%.
I suspect it's most useful for people who are already able to program but who want a crash course in web development.
If you already know coding, you can learn webdev in a few days from free on-line tutorials or maybe a $20 book from Amazon.
everyone from kindergarteners to grandmas should be learning to "code"
Nearly everyone can benefit from coding. I have written many Google Sheets triggers, plugins for Quickbooks, etc. for friends and relatives. These are usually a dozen or so lines of Javascript, and maybe a few regexes. If you can code, this is trivial, but if you can't then you are stuck.
All of these people took algebra in high school. None of them have used algebra, even once, since HS. So it is silly that our schools teach algebra and not coding ... and please don't say "You need algebra to understand coding" because that is patently false. I have taught 4th graders to code, and they certainly haven't learned algebra.
Nothing to do with the iPhone.
Indeed. I have a Samsung Galaxy V, and it sucks power when the GPS is on. I only turn on GPS with I am actively using the map app.
They want the benefits of being in this country without having to support it.
When a iPhone made in China is sold in Germany, which of them should pay the taxes for the benefits of being in America?
Wealth is absolutely a fixed size pie. Scarcity of resources is the fundamental problem that economics tries to solve.
You are applying 19th century economics to the 21st century. Five of the biggest corporations in America are Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. None of them rely on coal or iron ore. They rely on human ingenuity and intellectual property, neither of which is inherently limited.
1. Legal expenses, which are a one time cost
I incorporated on-line for $200. I spent $0 on legal fees.
2. Double taxation, which my plan would eliminate
Most corps in America are S-Corps, which are not subject to double taxation.
That only keeps the peace for the people back home... in the land of the dominant enforcer. Everyone else has to deal with war on their doorstep.
It keeps the peace for everyone who accepts the current world order. Today, that is most of the world, which is more peaceful than ever before in history. Even most muslim countries accept American hegemony. The only real challenges to the Pax Americana are in a few Shiite countries (Iran, Syria) and a few non-state entities (ISIS, Hezbollah, the Houthi tribe in Yemen). China may challenge America in the future, but their current activities in the SCS don't amount to much, and are not a direct threat to American interests.
I kept seeing places where the lip/mouth movements did not jibe with what was being said.
If you can see the difference, a GAN can also see it ... and correct it. This is the first demo. The tech to will improve rapidly, especially since the demand for fake news is high.
taking without the owners' consent.
The owner is whoever the code says the owner is. Just because you thought you owned it, doesn't mean you do.
Is all crypto currency over-valued when it is so frequently anonymously stolen?
It was not "stolen". Crypto-currencies are based on the implementing code, and the only "rules" are in the code. So if the code allowed someone to transfer ownership, then that transfer followed the "rules" and is just as legitimate as any other transfer. Just because some people misunderstood the rules, that doesn't make it "wrong" for someone else to follow them to their own advantage.