The flipside is that not many good articles are being submitted for consideration.
Have you ever really watched the firehose for a few days? I have.
There are tons of interesting tech articles that go by, some of which are strongly endorsed by those trying to use the firehose to encourage articles as we're told it is intended to do.
The editors (and oh, how loosely I use that term) dependably and repeatedly ignore the interesting tech stuff and spam us with garbage -- and poorly edited garbage at that.
I maintain that there are plenty of good articles bobbing around just under the surface. The the world is outright aflame with interesting stuff. What we don't have is good editors.
Sorry for the delay in response. I really don't come here that much any more.
I wouldn't doubt for a moment that you submitted it in good form, and they screwed it up from there.
The submission itself, as processed by the/. "editors" (cough) is an editing fail, the ultimate responsibility for which lands in./'s lap. No question about that.
Slashdot's continuing refusal to hire competent people is responsible for a great deal of this particular kind of malfuckery.
<RANT>
And that's not even nearly all. After a reasonable number of years wandering around here, I'm pretty close to bailing. It's painful to watch the place stumble into the future with incompetent management, editors utterly unworthy of the name, still missing posting amenities (including various font characters darned near any other place would take in stride, code formatting, etc.) that other sites have had for over a decade now, and with the inherently (still) broken moderation system screwing things up so badly, losing great AC posts and crushing great logged-in ones, and the laughable "meta-moderation" system making it even worse, compounding the moderate-by-disagreement fault many times over.
There are alternatives now. Nothing's perfect, but/. is has drifted down near the bottom of the heap.
You would think the steadily dropping comment participation would be a hint to the owners that the place needs some serious attention... but it looks very much like they're just squeezing the dishrag dry. It's beyond benign neglect and well into pernicious decay.
Energy cost is lower, and those will be dominant over longer term.
This is likely another demonstration of "those who have the money, make more money."
Solar panels: You can save all kinds of money. If you can afford to install the system in the first place. Investments: You can make all kinds of interest. If you have money to invest. Toilet paper: You can save lots of money. If you buy it in bunches on sale. But if you can't spare the funds... your TP costs more than the person with a few bucks to spare who buys it in bulk. Likewise has storage space for it, etc.
Algorithms and processor sets are not artificial intelligence and neural networks
That's like saying a software defined radio is not a radio.
It's right -- but it's also completely wrong.
And the important part in the context here... yeah, the completely wrong part.
You can create a perfectly fine neural network with a general purpose von Neuman or Harvard architecture CPU. Speed and efficiency are issues, that's all, and that's what the TPU is designed to address.
1. The big screen. There's something to be said about watching visual storytelling on a three-story screen, particularly when the film really takes advantage of the format.
My screen is 204" diagonal. I can muddle through.
2. People everywhere. A group of people laughing together simultaneously triggers a feeling that you should laugh, too; during a suspenseful moment, you can feel dozens of strangers suck in their breath together.
Yes, and catch the latest airborne disease. No thank you. And just by the by, I actually do have my own reactions and am content to experience them without being sucked in by the cinematic equivalent of Stockholm syndrome.
3. Focus. Even people who try their hardest to give a movie their undivided attention on a living-room screen have fallen victim to temptations like "Well, I'm just sitting here, I might as well pay the electric bill."
You have to be kidding me. At home, no crying babies, no cellphones going off, no ushers hassling people to put their feet down, no one getting up and down in front of you to hit the head or the snack bar... "people" screwing up my focus are the main reason why I don't go to the theater!
4. Relentlessness. Part of the advantage of that kind of focus is that movies that are tense, scary, or deeply emotional can cast much more of a spell over you when you don't have the option to pause or turn away from the worst, then rewind later to catch it safely out of context.
Sometimes the need for the bathroom is relentless. Given the one against the other, I'll take the pause button, thanks. Other reasons too, but that one wins every time, and theaters can't beat it, period.
5. A massive speaker system.
I only have 2,000 watts RMS, dual 18" subs... you get the idea. I can cripple along with it.
6. Previews.
You left out "local ads" and the "turn off your cellphone" schtick (which apparently a large portion of the audience is too dull to comprehend) and by the way, these previews are for movies that suck, and lastly, most disks these days do have previews, but I can skip them if they suck, which, like at the theater, they usually do. Until they bring back cartoons (hello, Scrat!), you got nuthin here. Tip: replacing cartoons with sucky local ads... not a win for the theater enterprise working to keep customers coming in.
7. Disruption. A problem with watching movies at home is that it makes the film-watching experience blur into the same experience as surfing cable channels, running a Netflix comedy show in the background while you do dishes, or half-assedly watching an Adventure Time marathon while stoned.
Sounds like a (series of) personal problem(s) to me. The only disruption that matters is the one you can't control. In other words, a theater full of people whom you have no authority over. No thank you. Also, I never do any of those things. So there's that.
8. Alone time. Going to the movies with friends or your significant other can be a cherished pastime, especially when you're surrounded by an excited audience.
Well, yeah, but I can have that at home, too. Nothing to see here, move along.
9. 32 ounces of cola in the dark.
yeah, washing over your feet when the idiot behind you forgets and knocks it off the chair arm, which, by the way, there is only one of per person, unlike my actual theater seating, which is full bore, two-arm reclining awesomness x5.
10. Bragging rights.
I believe you misspelled "embarrassment." As in: "I spent way too much for something I only saw part of while being severely annoyed by others, paying too much for snacks of which there is a very poor selec
Since when is software development NOT a complex, specialized job requiring a high level of skill?
Oh, it certainly can be.
But it's never required a degree. That is just a mechanism to keep qualified people -- by which I only mean, they have the skills to do the work -- from being considered for employment. It's so widespread that it is rarely questioned. By keeping the barriers as high as possible, they are able to claim "can't find skilled candidates", which of course is 100% utter bullshit. But it gets them onto the cheap foreign employee wagon, which is where they want to be.
The U.S. cannot allow programs such as H1-B visa create a situation where wage arbitrage prevents American citizens from earning a living in their own country.
I care about what people think, when they see twitter posts. When all you see is likes, what you have is an echo chamber.
And while I take your point, believe it or not, the problem is that huge numbers of people care about those posts, and use them to leverage their own views and attitudes.
Just because something has flaws (and Twitter certainly does) doesn't mean it has no effect on the world we live in.
What Twitter really needs to do is change from hearts-only, to a visible thumbs-up count (same as the heart) and a visible thumbs-down count.
Why?
Because politicians -- pretty much all of them -- sit there with these asinine tweets that have "hearts" on them in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. And there is no indication whatsoever from the people who disagree on the tweet; you have to wade through unending BS to see that, and there's no telling how far you'll have to go.
But if a politician says "X", and it's 10,000 thumbs-up / hearts, and 150,000 thumbs-down, now you know what you're looking at. And for that matter, so does the politician.
I don't care -- at all -- about other folk. But I think Twitter is doing the nation a direct disservice by going hearts-only on politician's accounts. I don't think it would hurt anyone to see both sides of the opinions of their tweets either (goes for slashdot comments, too.) Politicians, though... that hearts thing is straight-up misleading at times.
Anyway. I doubt they care. But I thought I'd speak up here. (Yeah, I sent them a support item on this. It disappeared into the usual darkness over there.)
Wouldn't it be nice if some politician posts X, and you could actually show them what you thought? I think so.
Sure they do. Significant energy is required to pump the gas; that energy is lost in the process. There's no free lunch to be had just because gas moves in a pipeline. Same goes for oil.
You did in fact say "drones". It was the very first few words of your post - "If you use drones/"
What I said was "drones/robots/self-driving cars or some combination" - clearly indicating any and all. Not "drones" per se.
But even military drones can't cope with all (or even most) weather.
Today's tech is not the end game by any means. So using today's capabilities to make claims about tomorrow's likely circumstance needs to extend the progress curve before it can be taken seriously. IOW, the fact that a military drone can't cope with some weather at this time is in no way an indication that the same type of drone won't be able to in the near future (and the progress being made in LDNLS systems is a very strong indication they probably will.) Same for everything else. What it boils down to: Yes, today there still are lots of delivery jobs. But in a not-too-distant tomorrow, there won't be. Same for many other sectors.
It sounds like you haven't used any actual software development/engineering skills in a long time
Heh heh. Yes, well, I suppose I can see how you might get that impression. However, no. It's just that a lot of the make work is gone, and so I can concentrate on the meat of the problem instead of having to write menu systems, widget systems, threading, etc. Here is an example of the stuff I write. That software is pretty much state of the art for the sector it addresses. It offers some things that nothing else in the market segment does, and it's very high performance. None of the core functionality comes from anywhere but my head. But having said that, there's a shitload of stuff I didn't have to write to make the app work, and I have the source code to all of it too, so generally speaking, nothing is "going away" such that it would get all up in my face.
As for my career, I'm retired. Already made my nest; I do this for fun now.
Ya have to wonder what this speculative subrosa funding operation would do when presented with a bill for the five billion dollar hit Samsung took with their stupid non-replicable battery, though. "Sure, no problem"?
At that point, assuming remuneration was not forthcoming, might be best to part ways with said public agency.
We know they want to create disposable phones, because then they get to sell you a new one.
However, this issue shows that this particular reduction in function can cost them billions in immediate costs, plus loss of reputation. If this doesn't change the approach, then we know they're stupid, and some people will make decisions on that basis.
Not that I'm surprised Samsung continues to act stupidly. After all, they can only see 1/4 down the financial road, because they have allowed themselves to be captured by a diseased financial system. Same for everyone else that copies the thin-over-all mindset.
wake me up when they can replace software developers.
I was an asm programmer until they created compilers. Asm was very hard, and honestly, very interesting. But slow. I wrote PCB routing software in those early days. Asm let me get the job done with those early computer systems in satisfactory execution time.
Then, I wrote c in an editor and then ran make, letting the compiler write the asm, though still doing the debugging in great detail. That went on until IDEs came around.
Then, I began to write all manner of custom routines in c, and there was very little debugging to do, comparatively speaking, because you could trace everything that was going on so incredibly easily. That made for much faster and more efficient and reliable production of my custom code.
But most of that stopped too, when various pre-supplied and pre-debugged classes became available that obviated the need to first, write everything that was required, and second, to test everything except the high-ish level use of those objects. What I was actually writing got less and less complex and custom, and more and more was actually getting done.
Then came the day that I learned how to write evolutionary software and actually got to watch software learn to solve a problem that I had not explicitly described to it. I turned that into a game (and I turned the reasonably profitable result of that into my first exotic car purchase.)
We're now actually decades beyond that, and I write really cool stuff in very, very few lines. I no longer think of my job as all that hard at all, though I write things far more complex these days on much more capable hardware. I can take a machine learning library, stroke it a bit, and hand back a system that can solve problems for which I couldn't even begin to imagine a worthy algorithmic solution.
Back in the asm days, if you'd asked me to do the things I do easily today, I'd have just laughed at you. Tomorrow, I will likely be laughing again at the things I consider hard today. Because that's been the unbroken path things have followed.
There's an obvious progression of what non-human systems can accomplish described here, as progress stacks one capability upon the next, rinses, and repeats. I think if you assume that this process has reached its apex, or that humans will always be at the sharp end of the process, I'm pretty confident that you're indulging in some seriously uncalled-for optimism.
It's probably best to be awake now, before your job goes away. Odds are excellent that it will be rather sudden, too.
Whatever you want to call intelligent machines - AGI, AI, non-human people - we don't have them now. What we have so far is some moderately useful, extremely vertical stuff that generally exists under the technical auspices of multi-layer neural networks. I personally have decided to call this stuff LDNLS, as it provides a useful handle that makes it clear I'm not talking about non-human people.
I don't really care what you call it, as long as we can arrive at an understanding that we're talking about the same thing. This stuff is what is leading the latest wave of encroachment on the job market. It's likely going to encroach a lot more before it hits any inherent limits, and our society will be forced into doing something of the magnitude of a society-wide paradigm shift (or several) in order to address the change in earning / buying capacities of all those displaced workers. The systems that will be the penultimate cause of this still won't be non-human people. Just... systems.
All true, and I agree with everything you said along these lines, particularly your #5.
However, when intelligent machines do arrive, this will present its own powerful influence on society that is almost dead-certain to be completely different from that which will have been imposed by LDNLS systems prior. It's difficult to see what that influence will be, because it's like imagining you having a kid that you actually don't have yet, and then saying what they are going to grow up to want to do and be. You might have some lovely fantasies about it, but in the end, it's going to be the kid who creates their own path through the society they end up existing within -- not you. For instance, reasoning beings are not going to be tied to driving your car for you, or at least, not by choice. If they are, they'll be working out a way to get out of it.
I will grant you that we have multiple times, in multiple ways, decided that non-consensual slavery is a thing we want to impose on those we find ourselves able to; but this will be the first time where those slaves are extremely likely to be considerably smarter than we are across the board by many, many times, and are also quite able to exist without the same resources we actually require (grain, for instance) so I'm hoping we can skip that chapter completely. Otherwise we may find ourselves in some rather deep brown we can't get out of.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever really watched the firehose for a few days? I have.
There are tons of interesting tech articles that go by, some of which are strongly endorsed by those trying to use the firehose to encourage articles as we're told it is intended to do.
The editors (and oh, how loosely I use that term) dependably and repeatedly ignore the interesting tech stuff and spam us with garbage -- and poorly edited garbage at that.
I maintain that there are plenty of good articles bobbing around just under the surface. The the world is outright aflame with interesting stuff. What we don't have is good editors.
Sorry for the delay in response. I really don't come here that much any more.
I wouldn't doubt for a moment that you submitted it in good form, and they screwed it up from there.
The submission itself, as processed by the /. "editors" (cough) is an editing fail, the ultimate responsibility for which lands in ./'s lap. No question about that.
Slashdot's continuing refusal to hire competent people is responsible for a great deal of this particular kind of malfuckery.
<RANT>
And that's not even nearly all. After a reasonable number of years wandering around here, I'm pretty close to bailing. It's painful to watch the place stumble into the future with incompetent management, editors utterly unworthy of the name, still missing posting amenities (including various font characters darned near any other place would take in stride, code formatting, etc.) that other sites have had for over a decade now, and with the inherently (still) broken moderation system screwing things up so badly, losing great AC posts and crushing great logged-in ones, and the laughable "meta-moderation" system making it even worse, compounding the moderate-by-disagreement fault many times over.
There are alternatives now. Nothing's perfect, but /. is has drifted down near the bottom of the heap.
You would think the steadily dropping comment participation would be a hint to the owners that the place needs some serious attention... but it looks very much like they're just squeezing the dishrag dry. It's beyond benign neglect and well into pernicious decay.
Ugh. What a shame.
</RANT>
Read it again. It repeats itself, verbatim.
Just like to step in and add Apple's trashcan Mac Pro design to your "industry came up with complete disaster" list.
Thanks.
Now, which pineapple do you choose?
This is likely another demonstration of "those who have the money, make more money."
Solar panels: You can save all kinds of money. If you can afford to install the system in the first place.
Investments: You can make all kinds of interest. If you have money to invest.
Toilet paper: You can save lots of money. If you buy it in bunches on sale. But if you can't spare the funds... your TP costs more than the person with a few bucks to spare who buys it in bulk. Likewise has storage space for it, etc.
And so on.
That's like saying a software defined radio is not a radio.
It's right -- but it's also completely wrong.
And the important part in the context here... yeah, the completely wrong part.
You can create a perfectly fine neural network with a general purpose von Neuman or Harvard architecture CPU. Speed and efficiency are issues, that's all, and that's what the TPU is designed to address.
My screen is 204" diagonal. I can muddle through.
Yes, and catch the latest airborne disease. No thank you. And just by the by, I actually do have my own reactions and am content to experience them without being sucked in by the cinematic equivalent of Stockholm syndrome.
You have to be kidding me. At home, no crying babies, no cellphones going off, no ushers hassling people to put their feet down, no one getting up and down in front of you to hit the head or the snack bar... "people" screwing up my focus are the main reason why I don't go to the theater!
Sometimes the need for the bathroom is relentless. Given the one against the other, I'll take the pause button, thanks. Other reasons too, but that one wins every time, and theaters can't beat it, period.
I only have 2,000 watts RMS, dual 18" subs... you get the idea. I can cripple along with it.
You left out "local ads" and the "turn off your cellphone" schtick (which apparently a large portion of the audience is too dull to comprehend) and by the way, these previews are for movies that suck, and lastly, most disks these days do have previews, but I can skip them if they suck, which, like at the theater, they usually do. Until they bring back cartoons (hello, Scrat!), you got nuthin here. Tip: replacing cartoons with sucky local ads... not a win for the theater enterprise working to keep customers coming in.
Sounds like a (series of) personal problem(s) to me. The only disruption that matters is the one you can't control. In other words, a theater full of people whom you have no authority over. No thank you. Also, I never do any of those things. So there's that.
Well, yeah, but I can have that at home, too. Nothing to see here, move along.
yeah, washing over your feet when the idiot behind you forgets and knocks it off the chair arm, which, by the way, there is only one of per person, unlike my actual theater seating, which is full bore, two-arm reclining awesomness x5.
I believe you misspelled "embarrassment." As in: "I spent way too much for something I only saw part of while being severely annoyed by others, paying too much for snacks of which there is a very poor selec
Oh, it certainly can be.
But it's never required a degree. That is just a mechanism to keep qualified people -- by which I only mean, they have the skills to do the work -- from being considered for employment. It's so widespread that it is rarely questioned. By keeping the barriers as high as possible, they are able to claim "can't find skilled candidates", which of course is 100% utter bullshit. But it gets them onto the cheap foreign employee wagon, which is where they want to be.
Too late. Way, way too late.
I care about what people think, when they see twitter posts. When all you see is likes, what you have is an echo chamber.
And while I take your point, believe it or not, the problem is that huge numbers of people care about those posts, and use them to leverage their own views and attitudes.
Just because something has flaws (and Twitter certainly does) doesn't mean it has no effect on the world we live in.
What Twitter really needs to do is change from hearts-only, to a visible thumbs-up count (same as the heart) and a visible thumbs-down count.
Why?
Because politicians -- pretty much all of them -- sit there with these asinine tweets that have "hearts" on them in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. And there is no indication whatsoever from the people who disagree on the tweet; you have to wade through unending BS to see that, and there's no telling how far you'll have to go.
But if a politician says "X", and it's 10,000 thumbs-up / hearts, and 150,000 thumbs-down, now you know what you're looking at. And for that matter, so does the politician.
I don't care -- at all -- about other folk. But I think Twitter is doing the nation a direct disservice by going hearts-only on politician's accounts. I don't think it would hurt anyone to see both sides of the opinions of their tweets either (goes for slashdot comments, too.) Politicians, though... that hearts thing is straight-up misleading at times.
Anyway. I doubt they care. But I thought I'd speak up here. (Yeah, I sent them a support item on this. It disappeared into the usual darkness over there.)
Wouldn't it be nice if some politician posts X, and you could actually show them what you thought? I think so.
This slashdot news story is clearly a troll.
Sure they do. Significant energy is required to pump the gas; that energy is lost in the process. There's no free lunch to be had just because gas moves in a pipeline. Same goes for oil.
FTFS:
...which makes his work even more impressive.
Slashdot, would you people please hire someone competent to write/edit English summaries?
Thank you.
I can hope it'll get there later, but I cannot for the life of me imagine why the parent was not modded to 11 within 60 seconds of being posted.
It's also very, very poorly supported. Writing HTML mail that works and isn't dead simple... that takes a lot of knowing random vendor pitfalls.
What I said was "drones/robots/self-driving cars or some combination" - clearly indicating any and all. Not "drones" per se.
Today's tech is not the end game by any means. So using today's capabilities to make claims about tomorrow's likely circumstance needs to extend the progress curve before it can be taken seriously. IOW, the fact that a military drone can't cope with some weather at this time is in no way an indication that the same type of drone won't be able to in the near future (and the progress being made in LDNLS systems is a very strong indication they probably will.) Same for everything else. What it boils down to: Yes, today there still are lots of delivery jobs. But in a not-too-distant tomorrow, there won't be. Same for many other sectors.
Prepare or be blindsided. It's just that simple.
Heh heh. Yes, well, I suppose I can see how you might get that impression. However, no. It's just that a lot of the make work is gone, and so I can concentrate on the meat of the problem instead of having to write menu systems, widget systems, threading, etc. Here is an example of the stuff I write. That software is pretty much state of the art for the sector it addresses. It offers some things that nothing else in the market segment does, and it's very high performance. None of the core functionality comes from anywhere but my head. But having said that, there's a shitload of stuff I didn't have to write to make the app work, and I have the source code to all of it too, so generally speaking, nothing is "going away" such that it would get all up in my face.
As for my career, I'm retired. Already made my nest; I do this for fun now.
Ya have to wonder what this speculative subrosa funding operation would do when presented with a bill for the five billion dollar hit Samsung took with their stupid non-replicable battery, though. "Sure, no problem"?
At that point, assuming remuneration was not forthcoming, might be best to part ways with said public agency.
We know they want to create disposable phones, because then they get to sell you a new one.
However, this issue shows that this particular reduction in function can cost them billions in immediate costs, plus loss of reputation. If this doesn't change the approach, then we know they're stupid, and some people will make decisions on that basis.
Not that I'm surprised Samsung continues to act stupidly. After all, they can only see 1/4 down the financial road, because they have allowed themselves to be captured by a diseased financial system. Same for everyone else that copies the thin-over-all mindset.
If the battery is still a non-replicable unit, then I will know they haven't learned the obvious, profound lesson:
Non-replaceable battery: Battery problem? Phone is garbage. Write off entire cost. Purchaser has nothing. Seller loses everything.
Replaceable battery: Battery problem? Send new battery. Preserve most of purchaser's value and seller's income.
I was an asm programmer until they created compilers. Asm was very hard, and honestly, very interesting. But slow. I wrote PCB routing software in those early days. Asm let me get the job done with those early computer systems in satisfactory execution time.
Then, I wrote c in an editor and then ran make, letting the compiler write the asm, though still doing the debugging in great detail. That went on until IDEs came around.
Then, I began to write all manner of custom routines in c, and there was very little debugging to do, comparatively speaking, because you could trace everything that was going on so incredibly easily. That made for much faster and more efficient and reliable production of my custom code.
But most of that stopped too, when various pre-supplied and pre-debugged classes became available that obviated the need to first, write everything that was required, and second, to test everything except the high-ish level use of those objects. What I was actually writing got less and less complex and custom, and more and more was actually getting done.
Then came the day that I learned how to write evolutionary software and actually got to watch software learn to solve a problem that I had not explicitly described to it. I turned that into a game (and I turned the reasonably profitable result of that into my first exotic car purchase.)
We're now actually decades beyond that, and I write really cool stuff in very, very few lines. I no longer think of my job as all that hard at all, though I write things far more complex these days on much more capable hardware. I can take a machine learning library, stroke it a bit, and hand back a system that can solve problems for which I couldn't even begin to imagine a worthy algorithmic solution.
Back in the asm days, if you'd asked me to do the things I do easily today, I'd have just laughed at you. Tomorrow, I will likely be laughing again at the things I consider hard today. Because that's been the unbroken path things have followed.
There's an obvious progression of what non-human systems can accomplish described here, as progress stacks one capability upon the next, rinses, and repeats. I think if you assume that this process has reached its apex, or that humans will always be at the sharp end of the process, I'm pretty confident that you're indulging in some seriously uncalled-for optimism.
It's probably best to be awake now, before your job goes away. Odds are excellent that it will be rather sudden, too.
Whatever you want to call intelligent machines - AGI, AI, non-human people - we don't have them now. What we have so far is some moderately useful, extremely vertical stuff that generally exists under the technical auspices of multi-layer neural networks. I personally have decided to call this stuff LDNLS, as it provides a useful handle that makes it clear I'm not talking about non-human people.
I don't really care what you call it, as long as we can arrive at an understanding that we're talking about the same thing. This stuff is what is leading the latest wave of encroachment on the job market. It's likely going to encroach a lot more before it hits any inherent limits, and our society will be forced into doing something of the magnitude of a society-wide paradigm shift (or several) in order to address the change in earning / buying capacities of all those displaced workers. The systems that will be the penultimate cause of this still won't be non-human people. Just... systems.
All true, and I agree with everything you said along these lines, particularly your #5.
However, when intelligent machines do arrive, this will present its own powerful influence on society that is almost dead-certain to be completely different from that which will have been imposed by LDNLS systems prior. It's difficult to see what that influence will be, because it's like imagining you having a kid that you actually don't have yet, and then saying what they are going to grow up to want to do and be. You might have some lovely fantasies about it, but in the end, it's going to be the kid who creates their own path through the society they end up existing within -- not you. For instance, reasoning beings are not going to be tied to driving your car for you, or at least, not by choice. If they are, they'll be working out a way to get out of it.
I will grant you that we have multiple times, in multiple ways, decided that non-consensual slavery is a thing we want to impose on those we find ourselves able to; but this will be the first time where those slaves are extremely likely to be considerably smarter than we are across the board by many, many times, and are also quite able to exist without the same resources we actually require (grain, for instance) so I'm hoping we can skip that chapter completely. Otherwise we may find ourselves in some rather deep brown we can't get out of.
I sure hope so. This page makes me cringe.