We need about a 100 billion (thats billion with a B) times more advanced AI than what we have today
This is almost certainly not true. The human brain has 100 trillion connections. Some artificial neural nets (ANNs) have over a million. So the brain has 100 million (with an M, not billion with a B) fewer. But the synapses in the brain fire 100 times per second, while ANNs can clock a million times faster. So now we are within a factor of 100... but that is not all. As far as we know, a brain stores ALL information in synapses. So you are using synapses to remember what your third grade teacher looked like, your mother's voice, and what freshly baked cookies smell like. None of that is useful when you are, say, trying to ride a bicycle, and none of those other synapses are being used. But a computer only needs to load the synaptic data needed for a particular task, and leave the rest on a HDD. An array of HDDs can store petabytes of synaptic data (far more than a brain), and swap them in and out as needed. Furthermore, much knowledge can be stored in tabular or text rather than synapses, and use associative lookup that is way faster and less error prone than a NN. A human brain has to use NNs for everything, because that is all it has got, but a computer can only use it where appropriate, and use simpler algorithms when possible. There is little reason to believe that hardware capability is the limiting factor in AI. Of course faster hardware will help, but we mostly need better algorithms and more data.
You know, the self-aware kind, not the "neural network of densely interconnected weighted pathways."
We have at least seven billion instances of self-aware intelligences, and and every single one of them is based on a neural network of densely interconnected weighted pathways.
i think the people, for the most part, would rather think for themselves
I think not. Most tasks currently done by AI are mind numbing repetitive tasks, like categorizing images, face recognition, processing handwritten checks, transcribing voice and video, monitoring security cameras, etc. These are not things that people want to do, or should be doing.
the solutions to all the *real* issues will not be liked by their rich friends.
Rich people invest in transformative tech innovation. Poor people don't. They spend their money on food, rent, etc. By saying the law should be more progressive and less favorable to the rich, you are engaging in petty politics and impeding transformative technology. Petty concerns like jobs, livable wages, and clean drinking water are exactly what Eric Schmidt (personal net worth: $9B) is complaining about.
Or they could realize that tech improves in both capability and cost effectiveness, and drone tech in particular has been improving rapidly. So it is likely a good time to revisit the idea.
I own a quadcopter drone. I am also an embedded system programmer. I used to work in a warehouse, drove a forklift, and participated in many inventory audits. Maybe I am missing something, but I just don't see any roadblocks to making it work. The biggest obstacle would be the lack of GPS inside the warehouse, but an obvious solution would be to put waypoint barcodes on the racks, the ceiling, and/or the floor. That is already the way that many wheeled robots navigate, so many warehouses already have these waypoint markers.
Dying on Mars is definitely possible with current technology
It is possible, but not affordable. Elon's total net worth is ~$12B. That is nowhere near enough to get a live person to Mars so he can die there. The tech has to improve so the cost can come down. The cost bottleneck is getting from the earth's surface to LEO. So that is what he is working on.
getting caught up in political garbage rather than focusing on the collective ascension of the species
The problem with "getting rid of petty politics" is that the only way to get rid of it is to impose one viewpoint. So how do we fix the transgender toilet issue? Do we tell the TG people to just shut up and use the toilet matching their birth gender? Or do we override the democratic rights of the people of North Carolina? To most people, one or the other of those is "obviously" the right solution, but we don't agree on which one. So who gets to decide? And how do we force the "losers" to accept the decision (especially if they turn out to be the majority)?
People don't even agree that "transformative technology" is a good thing. There is strong opposition to GMO. Many people fear AI. Workers don't like robots "stealing" their jobs.
Anyway, I don't really see "petty politics" as impeding tech. If anything, it is the other way around. If the politicians are busy arguing about toilets, they have less time to interfere with the economy, regulate innovators, and "pick winners". The last time the economy was truly "booming" was when the politicians were focused on Bill Clinton's blowjobs.
Isn't the entire purpose of SpaceX to get to Mars? The rocket launch business is just to fund things and develop the technology.
Indeed. Elon has said that his goal is to die on Mars. SpaceX is just a means to that end. He talks about Mars because that is the ultimate purpose of it all.
Lead pipes were banned in 1961. Lead solder use in plumbing was banned in 1987.
So if your house was built after 1961, it is unlikely that you have much lead in your water, and if it was built after 1987, it is unlikely you have more than a trace. Most lead in drinking water comes from household plumbing, not from the water supply or distribution pipes.
If you live in an older house, and have kids, or especially if you are planning to have kids, you should have your water tested. Lead is very damaging to developing fetal nervous systems.
Is it reasonable to extrapolate the effects of radiation exposure?
Radiation effects are probably sub-linear, but since low dose data is sparse, linear extrapolation is generally used just to be on the safe side. There is some evidence that low levels of radiation may actually be good for you.
Most radiation in drinking water is from iodine, potassium, and cesium. The iodine is not much of a problem if you use iodized salt or get enough iodine in your diet. The cesium and potassium do not bio-accumulate. You pee them out.
Lead is a much bigger problem. Lead poisoning has caused trillions of dollars of damage to our economy, mostly from lowered IQ, crime, prison building, etc. That has gone way down since leaded gasoline was banned, but even today black children average about twice the blood lead levels as white children. We have a ways to go, and the people responsible for this latest disclosure need to be held accountable. We should be proactively checking water supplies, and directly measuring the blood lead levels of kids in high risk areas. That would be way cheaper than operating more prisons.
Because you would need a lot of them. Maybe one for every pallet rack. A Walmart distribution center contains thousands of racks.
Or even cameras that travel along ceiling rails and can zoom in to the specific product location.
You would need rails for every aisle, and very high res cameras to see pallet barcodes from a 48 ft ceiling at a high angle. They would be way out of range of any passive RFID pallet tags.
Those sound cheaper than custom-designed drones.
The drones are mostly off-the-shelf. Only a few components are customized. You would only need two or three drones per warehouse (one working, and one or two backups). That would be way cheaper than a big installation of fixed or rail cameras.
Get families off of welfare and stop taxpayers from subsidizing Walmart's profits.
By providing these people with jobs, Walmart is reducing the amount of welfare they would otherwise receive. If you demand that every employee receive a "living wage" that can support a family, then Walmart is going to replace many of those employees with drones/self-checkout/stocking-robots/etc. and the welfare bill will go up, not down.
If you go into a Walmart, you will see some employees in wheelchairs, some have Downs Syndrome. Many of these people would be otherwise unemployable. They are at the bottom of the economic ladder, and you want to kick away the lowest rung.
If you have acres and acres of panels, that will be a lot of expensive labor, and it is unlikely that any workers would be available on standby in the middle of the Atacama desert. It is easier and cheaper to just give it away.
I don't know about the effect you talk, but I wonder if shorting the panels improves lifetime.
Running the power through a (very big (in physical size, not ohms)) resistor would help, but a full short would not reduce the heat. This is just basic conservation of energy: If you aren't taking energy out of the panels as electrical power, then that energy will remain in the panels as heat.
But until the mid-1980s you didn't have to start looking for your next employer the minute you settled into your new job.
This is false nostalgia, and is not supported by evidence. Average job tenure in the mid 1980s was about the same as it is today, and there is no data that shows either employer or employee loyalty was any better than it is today. As each generation reaches geezerhood, they come to believe that things were better when they were young, and the world is going to hell because of those dang kids today who are all lazy/stupid/selfish/etc.
The solar panels don't break if you don't consume the electricity.
Not immediately. But if you shutdown the inverters, the voltage builds up in the cells until the backflow of electrons cancels out the solar induced flux, generating heat. Hotter cells have a shorter lifetime.
With free power I could possibly generate a profit mining bitcoin!
Bitcoin mining requires a high capital investment in equipment that needs to be run 24/7 to return a profit. Occasional free electricity isn't as important as the average cost of power over longer periods. The best locations for bitcoin mining are where cheap and reliable hydropower is available, such as Iceland and Washington State.
Yes, but that was back when most people stayed with one employer for life
Actually, "lifetime employment" is a myth that mostly never happened. Average job tenure is higher today than it has been in thirty years, and is about the same as it was in the 1960s. Sure, some people spent their entire career at one company (as some people still do today), but many more (especially women and minorities) did not have stable employment.
As opposed to the black or hispanic working class men, who are doing wonderful, right?
Yes, that is right. Blacks and Hispanic men are doing relatively better. They still aren't doing as well as whites, but their economic conditions have been improving, while working class white men have been stagnating. This explains why blacks and Hispanics are more likely to support Hillary Clinton, the "status quo" candidate. The status quo is actually working pretty well for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Self-awareness has not only never been demonstrated in a model form of neural network
Current artificial neural networks have about as many neurons as the brain of a cockroach, so no one expects them to be "self-aware".
it likely may never be demonstrable in such a context.
Why? Because life is based on magic?
We need about a 100 billion (thats billion with a B) times more advanced AI than what we have today
This is almost certainly not true. The human brain has 100 trillion connections. Some artificial neural nets (ANNs) have over a million. So the brain has 100 million (with an M, not billion with a B) fewer. But the synapses in the brain fire 100 times per second, while ANNs can clock a million times faster. So now we are within a factor of 100 ... but that is not all. As far as we know, a brain stores ALL information in synapses. So you are using synapses to remember what your third grade teacher looked like, your mother's voice, and what freshly baked cookies smell like. None of that is useful when you are, say, trying to ride a bicycle, and none of those other synapses are being used. But a computer only needs to load the synaptic data needed for a particular task, and leave the rest on a HDD. An array of HDDs can store petabytes of synaptic data (far more than a brain), and swap them in and out as needed. Furthermore, much knowledge can be stored in tabular or text rather than synapses, and use associative lookup that is way faster and less error prone than a NN. A human brain has to use NNs for everything, because that is all it has got, but a computer can only use it where appropriate, and use simpler algorithms when possible. There is little reason to believe that hardware capability is the limiting factor in AI. Of course faster hardware will help, but we mostly need better algorithms and more data.
You know, the self-aware kind, not the "neural network of densely interconnected weighted pathways."
We have at least seven billion instances of self-aware intelligences, and and every single one of them is based on a neural network of densely interconnected weighted pathways.
i think the people, for the most part, would rather think for themselves
I think not. Most tasks currently done by AI are mind numbing repetitive tasks, like categorizing images, face recognition, processing handwritten checks, transcribing voice and video, monitoring security cameras, etc. These are not things that people want to do, or should be doing.
the solutions to all the *real* issues will not be liked by their rich friends.
Rich people invest in transformative tech innovation. Poor people don't. They spend their money on food, rent, etc. By saying the law should be more progressive and less favorable to the rich, you are engaging in petty politics and impeding transformative technology. Petty concerns like jobs, livable wages, and clean drinking water are exactly what Eric Schmidt (personal net worth: $9B) is complaining about.
Or they could realize that tech improves in both capability and cost effectiveness, and drone tech in particular has been improving rapidly. So it is likely a good time to revisit the idea.
I own a quadcopter drone. I am also an embedded system programmer. I used to work in a warehouse, drove a forklift, and participated in many inventory audits. Maybe I am missing something, but I just don't see any roadblocks to making it work. The biggest obstacle would be the lack of GPS inside the warehouse, but an obvious solution would be to put waypoint barcodes on the racks, the ceiling, and/or the floor. That is already the way that many wheeled robots navigate, so many warehouses already have these waypoint markers.
Dying on Mars is definitely possible with current technology
It is possible, but not affordable. Elon's total net worth is ~$12B. That is nowhere near enough to get a live person to Mars so he can die there. The tech has to improve so the cost can come down. The cost bottleneck is getting from the earth's surface to LEO. So that is what he is working on.
getting caught up in political garbage rather than focusing on the collective ascension of the species
The problem with "getting rid of petty politics" is that the only way to get rid of it is to impose one viewpoint. So how do we fix the transgender toilet issue? Do we tell the TG people to just shut up and use the toilet matching their birth gender? Or do we override the democratic rights of the people of North Carolina? To most people, one or the other of those is "obviously" the right solution, but we don't agree on which one. So who gets to decide? And how do we force the "losers" to accept the decision (especially if they turn out to be the majority)?
People don't even agree that "transformative technology" is a good thing. There is strong opposition to GMO. Many people fear AI. Workers don't like robots "stealing" their jobs.
Anyway, I don't really see "petty politics" as impeding tech. If anything, it is the other way around. If the politicians are busy arguing about toilets, they have less time to interfere with the economy, regulate innovators, and "pick winners". The last time the economy was truly "booming" was when the politicians were focused on Bill Clinton's blowjobs.
Isn't the entire purpose of SpaceX to get to Mars? The rocket launch business is just to fund things and develop the technology.
Indeed. Elon has said that his goal is to die on Mars. SpaceX is just a means to that end. He talks about Mars because that is the ultimate purpose of it all.
Lead pipes were banned in 1961.
Lead solder use in plumbing was banned in 1987.
So if your house was built after 1961, it is unlikely that you have much lead in your water, and if it was built after 1987, it is unlikely you have more than a trace. Most lead in drinking water comes from household plumbing, not from the water supply or distribution pipes.
If you live in an older house, and have kids, or especially if you are planning to have kids, you should have your water tested. Lead is very damaging to developing fetal nervous systems.
the nasty sludge that my tap water leaves behind after distillation is more than enough justification as it is.
If you analyse that "sludge" you will likely find that it is 99% calcium carbonate ... which is good for you.
Is it reasonable to extrapolate the effects of radiation exposure?
Radiation effects are probably sub-linear, but since low dose data is sparse, linear extrapolation is generally used just to be on the safe side. There is some evidence that low levels of radiation may actually be good for you.
Most radiation in drinking water is from iodine, potassium, and cesium. The iodine is not much of a problem if you use iodized salt or get enough iodine in your diet. The cesium and potassium do not bio-accumulate. You pee them out.
Lead is a much bigger problem. Lead poisoning has caused trillions of dollars of damage to our economy, mostly from lowered IQ, crime, prison building, etc. That has gone way down since leaded gasoline was banned, but even today black children average about twice the blood lead levels as white children. We have a ways to go, and the people responsible for this latest disclosure need to be held accountable. We should be proactively checking water supplies, and directly measuring the blood lead levels of kids in high risk areas. That would be way cheaper than operating more prisons.
Why wouldn't static cameras work better?
Because you would need a lot of them. Maybe one for every pallet rack. A Walmart distribution center contains thousands of racks.
Or even cameras that travel along ceiling rails and can zoom in to the specific product location.
You would need rails for every aisle, and very high res cameras to see pallet barcodes from a 48 ft ceiling at a high angle. They would be way out of range of any passive RFID pallet tags.
Those sound cheaper than custom-designed drones.
The drones are mostly off-the-shelf. Only a few components are customized. You would only need two or three drones per warehouse (one working, and one or two backups). That would be way cheaper than a big installation of fixed or rail cameras.
Get families off of welfare and stop taxpayers from subsidizing Walmart's profits.
By providing these people with jobs, Walmart is reducing the amount of welfare they would otherwise receive. If you demand that every employee receive a "living wage" that can support a family, then Walmart is going to replace many of those employees with drones/self-checkout/stocking-robots/etc. and the welfare bill will go up, not down.
If you go into a Walmart, you will see some employees in wheelchairs, some have Downs Syndrome. Many of these people would be otherwise unemployable. They are at the bottom of the economic ladder, and you want to kick away the lowest rung.
This means "maintain high margins by laying people off"
My hypocrisy detector is beeping. How many unnecessary people do you employ?
Plastic tarps over the panels?
If you have acres and acres of panels, that will be a lot of expensive labor, and it is unlikely that any workers would be available on standby in the middle of the Atacama desert. It is easier and cheaper to just give it away.
I don't know about the effect you talk, but I wonder if shorting the panels improves lifetime.
Running the power through a (very big (in physical size, not ohms)) resistor would help, but a full short would not reduce the heat. This is just basic conservation of energy: If you aren't taking energy out of the panels as electrical power, then that energy will remain in the panels as heat.
Why not just call it what it is? Thumbnails.
Because then they wouldn't get funded.
But until the mid-1980s you didn't have to start looking for your next employer the minute you settled into your new job.
This is false nostalgia, and is not supported by evidence. Average job tenure in the mid 1980s was about the same as it is today, and there is no data that shows either employer or employee loyalty was any better than it is today. As each generation reaches geezerhood, they come to believe that things were better when they were young, and the world is going to hell because of those dang kids today who are all lazy/stupid/selfish/etc.
It isn't the type of thing you stop dating someone for though.
Just ask her to bring her laptop to your first date, and then check her ~/.indent.pro before the relationship gets serious.
The solar panels don't break if you don't consume the electricity.
Not immediately. But if you shutdown the inverters, the voltage builds up in the cells until the backflow of electrons cancels out the solar induced flux, generating heat. Hotter cells have a shorter lifetime.
With free power I could possibly generate a profit mining bitcoin!
Bitcoin mining requires a high capital investment in equipment that needs to be run 24/7 to return a profit. Occasional free electricity isn't as important as the average cost of power over longer periods. The best locations for bitcoin mining are where cheap and reliable hydropower is available, such as Iceland and Washington State.
Yes, but that was back when most people stayed with one employer for life
Actually, "lifetime employment" is a myth that mostly never happened. Average job tenure is higher today than it has been in thirty years, and is about the same as it was in the 1960s. Sure, some people spent their entire career at one company (as some people still do today), but many more (especially women and minorities) did not have stable employment.
As opposed to the black or hispanic working class men, who are doing wonderful, right?
Yes, that is right. Blacks and Hispanic men are doing relatively better. They still aren't doing as well as whites, but their economic conditions have been improving, while working class white men have been stagnating. This explains why blacks and Hispanics are more likely to support Hillary Clinton, the "status quo" candidate. The status quo is actually working pretty well for them.
I don't think that's it at all. Two very close relatives of mine had decent paying jobs when they committed suicide
Maybe they killed themselves because they were sick of listening to you extrapolating personal anecdotes to explain national phenomena.