...there are millions of middle-skill job openings and low unemployment in the US.
The unemployment rate is not the best number to look at, IMO - the government keeps obfuscating it, by mischaracterizing people's situations to make itself look good; see how George Bush created thousands of manufacturing jobs overnight by declaring fast food workers to be manufacturers.
A better indicator is labor force participation rate. As you can see here, in the years after the war, the rate was somewhat above 50% (which matches the social situation at the time, with mostly men working, and many women staying at home). The sixties brought the large scale entry of women in the workplace, which pushed the labor force participation rate to the high 60%. However, after peaking in the nineties, the rate has been falling steadily over the last ten years, and is now halfway back to the situation in the fifties. This contradicts your argument.
There are no social changes I'm aware of that would explain this decline. I believe (but keep in mind I'm not an economist), the decline is largely due to an economic factor: the replacement of workers (at least in the USA) with cheaper alternatives.
At this time, the alternatives are outsourcing (made easy by globalization), and automation (made easier by advances in technology). They both apply pressure on wages. Outsourcing pushes for equalization of the income of USA (and first world) workers and the income of workers abroad. Automation pushes for equalization of the income of workers to the cost of machines. Outsourcing has a certain lowest threshold - it won't depress the wages of American workers below the wages of workers in the poorest other country. However, I don't believe automation has any such built in lower limit.
But employees switch jobs freely so if you, as an employer, go to the expense of training someone in a non-proprietary skill the person is likely to take that skill (learned at your expense) and get a job at a competitor because they now have more skills.
So amortize the cost of training over the number of years in the contract. If an employee changes jobs before his contract ends, the new employer must pay you the remaining difference.
A much better test would be seeing if it could understand some deconstructionist literary criticism.
As I see it, the whole point of deconstructionist literary criticism is that it's not understandable. And I don't mean, not understandable by the hoi polloi; deconstructionist literary criticism fails if anybody, up to and including Derrida-quoting luminaries manage to make any sense of it. I think deconstructionist literary criticism is a huge hoax played on society by a group of literary pranksters, who compete on seeing how far they can trick their marks into accepting and admiring meaningless drivel.
I expect the unveil any day now, and boy, will some faces be red!
There isn't that much difference between processing the rules of arithmetic and processing the rules of grammar.
But grammar is one of the lesser problems in natural language understanding. IMO a much more difficult issue is that, to understand a statement, you need a lot of context about the world and society, logic, a list of idioms and the capability to process metaphor and expand understanding from the known items to new forms. Here are a few simple examples off the top of my head (which, for any AIs reading this, doesn't mean from my hair, or hat)
"The gostak distims the doshes" - sounds grammatically correct, though meaningless. "The astronomer married a star" - grammatically correct, requires world knowledge to understand one can't marry a celestial body; only with this knowledge can the correct meaning of "The astronomer has married a movie star" be understood. "It's raining elephants and hippopotamuses" requires the knowledge of the "raining cats and dogs" idiom, plus the capability to infer it means "it's raining really hard"
Also, I'm not an expert in NLP, so please take all I'm saying with a boulder of salt:).
When the indigent put a drain on the government, taxes are paid for by the middle class, not the wealthy.
But that is almost entirely the fault of Republicans, whose only constant policy goal is to reduce the tax on the rich and increase the costs (tax, social and otherwise) on everybody else. I can't fathom why you blame Democrats, who are at least trying to fix this problem (albeit not very competently).
expect to be told if you don't support Manning you're transphobic
I don't live in Maryland, but if somebody tried to pitch a candidate this way, I'd be really wary of voting for him/her. I don't care about the candidate's sexuality. What I care about is the candidate's program, his goals and his capability to execute. Someone whose election program is based on identity politics is inherently divisive - and this will impact his capability to execute his program, even if it's a good one.
As I see it, the whole point of elections is that voters choose the candidate who will improve their lives, or society. Different groups with different interests will vote for different candidates, and that's how democracy works. The "transphobic" pitch sounds like guilting people into voting for somebody who doesn't actually represent their best interest. I doubt it will work.
I think the problem here is the refrigeration equipment required for stable operation
The first vacuum tube computers had very similar problems: they needed industrial grade power supplies, required cooling, tubes would fail regularly (the ENIAC engineers considered it a success when they reduced the tube failure rate to one every couple of days). And, to be fair, what Ken Olsen probably meant was nobody would want a machine like his company's PDP or VAX computers, built with discrete transistors and/or relatively simple integrated circuits.
Both you and him are however making the same mistake: assuming the current technology will remain mostly static in the future. Just as vacuum tube computers were replaced with transistors and later integrated circuits, I expect current quantum bit technologies to be supplanted by better solutions, which would bring quantum machines in the home.
I do believe though they'll mostly be used to view all cat videos in the world simultaneously.
Access to the internet is not an interstate action. You connect locally.
This may not mean as much as you think. If states mandate net neutrality, customers will favor local net neutral ISPs over out of state not net neutral providers. IANAL, but to me this looks like this famous precedent, and makes the state's net neutrality law subject to federal regulation under the inter-state commerce clause.
Here's the TL;DR for Wickard v Filburn: during WW2 the federal govt had put caps on wheat production, in order to stabilize wheat prices. A farmer was growing wheat on his farm, for his consumption and for feeding his cattle. He was not selling any of it in the state or to customers outside the state. The Supreme Court decided federal regulations applied to him anyway, under the inter-state commerce clause. The reasoning was that by growing his own wheat he didn't buy it from (potentially out of state) sellers, hence he was interfering with inter-state commerce.
take a look at pretty much anywhere in Europe and you'll struggle to find a single country where high speeds have come as a result of deregulation. The countries with the highest speeds have them because of government intervention in the markets
That's not however true; see Romania for a very strong counter-example. According to a 2016 Akamai study (quoted here) Romania has the highest internet speed in Europe (and Timisoara, a Romanian city, has the highest average download speed in the world, at 89.91 Mbit/s in 2013). This happens at very low prices - comparisons here show the internet price in Bucharest to be less than half of London, and about 5 times smaller than Buffalo, NY. Some older national averages put the price in Romania to 2 cents per Mb - while the USA is at 86 cents/Mb.
The explosive growth of Internet adoption in Romania started from about 1999 - and it can be directly traced to the fact that the minister for Communications explicitly refused to regulate ISPs and wireless providers. As a result, hundreds of neighborhood ISPs popped up, savagely competing for customers, on speed and price. There is also a very high level of competition between cellular providers. Deregulation is now being expanded to new areas.
We need a security commitment from the whole industry vs just one brave little company who would go out of business rather quickly.
A commitment from the whole industry won't happen. Fortunately, such a commitment isn't the only possible solution; the GP has already provided an alternative. Where the industry won't act voluntarily, legislation can force them to.
If breaches in security can be proven to be due to corner cutting, laziness or negligence (such as the Equifax fiasco) the Cxx managers of companies at fault should be made personally responsible. And not just monetarily, because they can push the expense on to the company and implicitly shareholders. If a CEO knew he risks going to jail or maybe lose the right to ever get a leadership position at any company anymore, you can be sure being first to market would suddenly become less of a priority.
As an aside, I believe making top company people more personally responsible for the company's actions shouldn't be limited to security; right now, top management can make bad or even illegal decision with relative impunity. The company will take the brunt of any penalties, shareholders will lose, while he'd still get his golden parachute. This needs to be fixed.
They curate articles that fit their bias. Even if they collect and publish a specific flavor of garbage, it's still garbage.
The NY Times does not publish garbage; it's one of the few quality newspapers still available in the USA. They do lean left, but their articles are usually well researched, factual and professionally written. I find them similar to the Wall Street Journal, who leans right, but also usually has professionally written and well researched articles (you just need to ignore the batshit crazy editorial pages).
I find it's useful to get your information from diverse sources, in particular ones with whose position you disagree. I think it's obvious you don't do any such thing. In fact, your post tells us more about yourself than about the NY Times. Specifically, (and at the risk of getting accused of ad hominem attacks too), it shows you prefer truthiness to truth. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about, but feel deeply about it. Maybe you'd be happier posting in the echo chambers where your Weltanschauung wouldn't risk being challenged.
There is a simple solution which will both reduce or eliminate the complaints and align with FCC policies and culture. Remove net neutrality from the list of possible gripes.
Jains only eat parts of plants that can be harvested without killing the plant.
You can be just as humane with animals - just eat parts that can be harvested without killing the animal. Have you never wondered where all those one-legged chicken come from?
Having read Bradbury's "Rocket Summer" or "R is for rocket", at a young age, the whole idea of rockets still feels exciting and romantic to me; I'm very glad there is a revival in interest after the long (and unexpected) 50 years slump.
This said, and with all respect for Musk and the people at SpaceX, I don't believe rockets can deliver the space revolution we're hoping for. The rocket equation puts a hard limit on their capabilities. And if some hypothetical very energetic propellant is discovered, having large quantities of it fly around and perhaps fall back to the surface in case of accidents would be risky.
Moreover, rockets are still very very expensive. Even reusing all stages of the rocket won't make them cheap enough for mass adoption. I believe a different technology is needed to really open space travel to humanity. Space elevators offer a possible solution, with rockets taking over once the payload is outside Earth's gravity well. Or some even more exotic technology that doesn't exist yet.
Of course, rockets are available now, and they're good enough for exploration. Every time somebody like SpaceX makes them just a bit cheaper, huge new opportunities for discovery open up. But, for me, the best thing is that at least some people are looking outwards to the stars again - and doing something about it.
I don't know whether it has already happened from thermostat data, but burglars do use social media, like facebook or Twitter to find vulnerable homes. Burglars do like to know the owner is not home before acting.
Isn't it far more effective to drive/walk/whatever over and ring the doorbell?
Of course not, duh. A hacker in Russia can't ring your bell at all, and a local malefactor gang can't run about ringing all the doorbells in the city every few minutes - not to mention that ringing a random bell may alert the homeowner and puts them at risk. But running a script that checks thermostat sensor data from many houses at regular intervals is easy and safe, and can provide burglars with excellent targets of opportunity. As a bonus, houses whose owners can afford the newfangled digital devices are better targets already.
I get the paranoia over locks and security systems, but lights and temperature? Why not let it control those things? Do you think hackers are going to turn your lights on and off or set your thermostat really high?
Well, a simple scenario off the top of my head: those hackers could easily infer whether anybody is in the house by intercepting and monitoring the lights and temperature readings from the sensors you so kindly provided them with. They could do it from anywhere, and, in case they aren't the high-minded moral people we think they are, they could break into your house. Or, they could sell this information to less technically inclined folks with a dislike for property laws, who would be very happy to know when you're on vacation.
Or: suppose the hacker notices that the only light on this evening is in your kid's bedroom? Do you really want this information to be available to anybody in the world?
As I said, just a couple of things off the top of my head; I'm sure there are ingenious people out there who could come up with even more interesting ideas.
*EVERY* robot story Asimov wrote was about how the "3 Laws" were insufficient and unworkable and the spectacular ways such things FAILED.
As we see in "I, Robot", many roboticists, such as Lanning or Susan Calvin were aware of the three laws' shortcomings since the beginning. However, bitter cynic that I am, I think whether the laws worked or not in the real world didn't ever matter. The three laws were a spectacular political success from the point of view of the US Robotics corporation. They brought public acceptance of robots and killed anti-robot legislation. And lo, in today's world the message rings truer than ever. Here are some unworkable laws being proposed to Congress. Perhaps US Robotics Corp is going to rise from the ashes of their modems soon...
Asimov tackled this in his short story...That Thou Art Mindful Of Him. "Don't kill people" has a weakness... how do you define "people"?
Also a plot point in "The Naked Sun", where a rogue roboticist wanted to create warships with positronic brains. Those warships wouldn't be aware of human crew on enemy ships; they would classify them as non-human and destroy them without being stopped by the first law.
You can drive on the road non-stop for 10-12 hours in most places in north america, that's 100% legal. You're not even required to take 30 minutes off half-way through your shift if you want, you can just keep driving.
This seems contradicted by the FMCSA regulations here. I quote: May drive only if 8 hours or less have passed since end of driver's last off-duty or sleeper berth period of at least 30 minutes. Are you saying those regulations don't apply?
There is no guarantee this is the case; I think bio-hacking can be potentially very dangerous, much more so than, for example, nuclear industry. This is why I think it should be harshly regulated, at least at this time - until we develop better tools, processes or global knowledge to handle potential accidents.
I know this sounds like a Luddite position, or like one of those fifties horror movies ending with the priest or the cop solemnly declaring "there are things Man was not meant to know". However, bio-hacked products have the potential to be self-replicating. They can be strains of bacteria or viruses, or maybe prions; I'm not aware of any serious reasons why an enthusiastic bio-hacker hobbyist can't (accidentally or intentionally) create a lethal self-replicating biological agent.
Cost is not a blocker - bio-hacking can be done using relatively cheap tools and materials, with most of the necessary stuff available with a trip to the glassware store. Safety regulations aren't a blocker either - the authorities have no easy way to know who engages in a bit of a hobby trying to genetically engineer six legged chickens, and amateurs won't have the necessary training, nor will they bother installing a negative pressure room in their garage. Most importantly, there is no guarantee the effect of an accident will be small, because of self-replication. Even the worst nuclear accidents only affect a limited area around the site, but a worst case biological accident doesn't have those limitations. Nothing else a single average person does can potentially kill everybody in the whole world. Leaking a lethal self-propagating virus can.
Slashdot Mirror
...there are millions of middle-skill job openings and low unemployment in the US.
The unemployment rate is not the best number to look at, IMO - the government keeps obfuscating it, by mischaracterizing people's situations to make itself look good; see how George Bush created thousands of manufacturing jobs overnight by declaring fast food workers to be manufacturers.
A better indicator is labor force participation rate. As you can see here, in the years after the war, the rate was somewhat above 50% (which matches the social situation at the time, with mostly men working, and many women staying at home). The sixties brought the large scale entry of women in the workplace, which pushed the labor force participation rate to the high 60%. However, after peaking in the nineties, the rate has been falling steadily over the last ten years, and is now halfway back to the situation in the fifties. This contradicts your argument.
There are no social changes I'm aware of that would explain this decline. I believe (but keep in mind I'm not an economist), the decline is largely due to an economic factor: the replacement of workers (at least in the USA) with cheaper alternatives.
At this time, the alternatives are outsourcing (made easy by globalization), and automation (made easier by advances in technology). They both apply pressure on wages. Outsourcing pushes for equalization of the income of USA (and first world) workers and the income of workers abroad. Automation pushes for equalization of the income of workers to the cost of machines. Outsourcing has a certain lowest threshold - it won't depress the wages of American workers below the wages of workers in the poorest other country. However, I don't believe automation has any such built in lower limit.
But employees switch jobs freely so if you, as an employer, go to the expense of training someone in a non-proprietary skill the person is likely to take that skill (learned at your expense) and get a job at a competitor because they now have more skills.
So amortize the cost of training over the number of years in the contract. If an employee changes jobs before his contract ends, the new employer must pay you the remaining difference.
A much better test would be seeing if it could understand some deconstructionist literary criticism.
As I see it, the whole point of deconstructionist literary criticism is that it's not understandable. And I don't mean, not understandable by the hoi polloi; deconstructionist literary criticism fails if anybody, up to and including Derrida-quoting luminaries manage to make any sense of it. I think deconstructionist literary criticism is a huge hoax played on society by a group of literary pranksters, who compete on seeing how far they can trick their marks into accepting and admiring meaningless drivel.
I expect the unveil any day now, and boy, will some faces be red!
There isn't that much difference between processing the rules of arithmetic and processing the rules of grammar.
But grammar is one of the lesser problems in natural language understanding. IMO a much more difficult issue is that, to understand a statement, you need a lot of context about the world and society, logic, a list of idioms and the capability to process metaphor and expand understanding from the known items to new forms. Here are a few simple examples off the top of my head (which, for any AIs reading this, doesn't mean from my hair, or hat)
"The gostak distims the doshes" - sounds grammatically correct, though meaningless.
"The astronomer married a star" - grammatically correct, requires world knowledge to understand one can't marry a celestial body; only with this knowledge can the correct meaning of "The astronomer has married a movie star" be understood.
"It's raining elephants and hippopotamuses" requires the knowledge of the "raining cats and dogs" idiom, plus the capability to infer it means "it's raining really hard"
Also, I'm not an expert in NLP, so please take all I'm saying with a boulder of salt :).
When the indigent put a drain on the government, taxes are paid for by the middle class, not the wealthy.
But that is almost entirely the fault of Republicans, whose only constant policy goal is to reduce the tax on the rich and increase the costs (tax, social and otherwise) on everybody else. I can't fathom why you blame Democrats, who are at least trying to fix this problem (albeit not very competently).
expect to be told if you don't support Manning you're transphobic
I don't live in Maryland, but if somebody tried to pitch a candidate this way, I'd be really wary of voting for him/her. I don't care about the candidate's sexuality. What I care about is the candidate's program, his goals and his capability to execute. Someone whose election program is based on identity politics is inherently divisive - and this will impact his capability to execute his program, even if it's a good one.
As I see it, the whole point of elections is that voters choose the candidate who will improve their lives, or society. Different groups with different interests will vote for different candidates, and that's how democracy works. The "transphobic" pitch sounds like guilting people into voting for somebody who doesn't actually represent their best interest. I doubt it will work.
I think the problem here is the refrigeration equipment required for stable operation
The first vacuum tube computers had very similar problems: they needed industrial grade power supplies, required cooling, tubes would fail regularly (the ENIAC engineers considered it a success when they reduced the tube failure rate to one every couple of days). And, to be fair, what Ken Olsen probably meant was nobody would want a machine like his company's PDP or VAX computers, built with discrete transistors and/or relatively simple integrated circuits.
Both you and him are however making the same mistake: assuming the current technology will remain mostly static in the future. Just as vacuum tube computers were replaced with transistors and later integrated circuits, I expect current quantum bit technologies to be supplanted by better solutions, which would bring quantum machines in the home.
I do believe though they'll mostly be used to view all cat videos in the world simultaneously.
Access to the internet is not an interstate action. You connect locally.
This may not mean as much as you think. If states mandate net neutrality, customers will favor local net neutral ISPs over out of state not net neutral providers. IANAL, but to me this looks like this famous precedent, and makes the state's net neutrality law subject to federal regulation under the inter-state commerce clause.
Here's the TL;DR for Wickard v Filburn: during WW2 the federal govt had put caps on wheat production, in order to stabilize wheat prices. A farmer was growing wheat on his farm, for his consumption and for feeding his cattle. He was not selling any of it in the state or to customers outside the state. The Supreme Court decided federal regulations applied to him anyway, under the inter-state commerce clause. The reasoning was that by growing his own wheat he didn't buy it from (potentially out of state) sellers, hence he was interfering with inter-state commerce.
" This is also why we won't be seeing quantum computers in anyone's house at any point."
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
take a look at pretty much anywhere in Europe and you'll struggle to find a single country where high speeds have come as a result of deregulation. The countries with the highest speeds have them because of government intervention in the markets
That's not however true; see Romania for a very strong counter-example. According to a 2016 Akamai study (quoted here) Romania has the highest internet speed in Europe (and Timisoara, a Romanian city, has the highest average download speed in the world, at 89.91 Mbit/s in 2013). This happens at very low prices - comparisons here show the internet price in Bucharest to be less than half of London, and about 5 times smaller than Buffalo, NY. Some older national averages put the price in Romania to 2 cents per Mb - while the USA is at 86 cents/Mb.
The explosive growth of Internet adoption in Romania started from about 1999 - and it can be directly traced to the fact that the minister for Communications explicitly refused to regulate ISPs and wireless providers. As a result, hundreds of neighborhood ISPs popped up, savagely competing for customers, on speed and price. There is also a very high level of competition between cellular providers. Deregulation is now being expanded to new areas.
We need a security commitment from the whole industry vs just one brave little company who would go out of business rather quickly.
A commitment from the whole industry won't happen. Fortunately, such a commitment isn't the only possible solution; the GP has already provided an alternative. Where the industry won't act voluntarily, legislation can force them to.
If breaches in security can be proven to be due to corner cutting, laziness or negligence (such as the Equifax fiasco) the Cxx managers of companies at fault should be made personally responsible. And not just monetarily, because they can push the expense on to the company and implicitly shareholders. If a CEO knew he risks going to jail or maybe lose the right to ever get a leadership position at any company anymore, you can be sure being first to market would suddenly become less of a priority.
As an aside, I believe making top company people more personally responsible for the company's actions shouldn't be limited to security; right now, top management can make bad or even illegal decision with relative impunity. The company will take the brunt of any penalties, shareholders will lose, while he'd still get his golden parachute. This needs to be fixed.
They curate articles that fit their bias. Even if they collect and publish a specific flavor of garbage, it's still garbage.
The NY Times does not publish garbage; it's one of the few quality newspapers still available in the USA. They do lean left, but their articles are usually well researched, factual and professionally written. I find them similar to the Wall Street Journal, who leans right, but also usually has professionally written and well researched articles (you just need to ignore the batshit crazy editorial pages).
I find it's useful to get your information from diverse sources, in particular ones with whose position you disagree. I think it's obvious you don't do any such thing. In fact, your post tells us more about yourself than about the NY Times. Specifically, (and at the risk of getting accused of ad hominem attacks too), it shows you prefer truthiness to truth. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about, but feel deeply about it. Maybe you'd be happier posting in the echo chambers where your Weltanschauung wouldn't risk being challenged.
It's been known to happen. Voice Of God Revealed To Be Cheney On Intercom.
There is a simple solution which will both reduce or eliminate the complaints and align with FCC policies and culture. Remove net neutrality from the list of possible gripes.
It's not like there are millions of Indians who are vegetarian, is it? Oh wait, there are.
7 out of every 10 Indians are vitamin deficient. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
Jains only eat parts of plants that can be harvested without killing the plant.
You can be just as humane with animals - just eat parts that can be harvested without killing the animal. Have you never wondered where all those one-legged chicken come from?
Having read Bradbury's "Rocket Summer" or "R is for rocket", at a young age, the whole idea of rockets still feels exciting and romantic to me; I'm very glad there is a revival in interest after the long (and unexpected) 50 years slump.
This said, and with all respect for Musk and the people at SpaceX, I don't believe rockets can deliver the space revolution we're hoping for. The rocket equation puts a hard limit on their capabilities. And if some hypothetical very energetic propellant is discovered, having large quantities of it fly around and perhaps fall back to the surface in case of accidents would be risky.
Moreover, rockets are still very very expensive. Even reusing all stages of the rocket won't make them cheap enough for mass adoption. I believe a different technology is needed to really open space travel to humanity. Space elevators offer a possible solution, with rockets taking over once the payload is outside Earth's gravity well. Or some even more exotic technology that doesn't exist yet.
Of course, rockets are available now, and they're good enough for exploration. Every time somebody like SpaceX makes them just a bit cheaper, huge new opportunities for discovery open up. But, for me, the best thing is that at least some people are looking outwards to the stars again - and doing something about it.
Meh... has this ever happened?
I don't know whether it has already happened from thermostat data, but burglars do use social media, like facebook or Twitter to find vulnerable homes. Burglars do like to know the owner is not home before acting.
Isn't it far more effective to drive/walk/whatever over and ring the doorbell?
Of course not, duh. A hacker in Russia can't ring your bell at all, and a local malefactor gang can't run about ringing all the doorbells in the city every few minutes - not to mention that ringing a random bell may alert the homeowner and puts them at risk. But running a script that checks thermostat sensor data from many houses at regular intervals is easy and safe, and can provide burglars with excellent targets of opportunity. As a bonus, houses whose owners can afford the newfangled digital devices are better targets already.
I get the paranoia over locks and security systems, but lights and temperature? Why not let it control those things? Do you think hackers are going to turn your lights on and off or set your thermostat really high?
Well, a simple scenario off the top of my head: those hackers could easily infer whether anybody is in the house by intercepting and monitoring the lights and temperature readings from the sensors you so kindly provided them with. They could do it from anywhere, and, in case they aren't the high-minded moral people we think they are, they could break into your house. Or, they could sell this information to less technically inclined folks with a dislike for property laws, who would be very happy to know when you're on vacation.
Or: suppose the hacker notices that the only light on this evening is in your kid's bedroom? Do you really want this information to be available to anybody in the world?
As I said, just a couple of things off the top of my head; I'm sure there are ingenious people out there who could come up with even more interesting ideas.
*EVERY* robot story Asimov wrote was about how the "3 Laws" were insufficient and unworkable and the spectacular ways such things FAILED.
As we see in "I, Robot", many roboticists, such as Lanning or Susan Calvin were aware of the three laws' shortcomings since the beginning. However, bitter cynic that I am, I think whether the laws worked or not in the real world didn't ever matter. The three laws were a spectacular political success from the point of view of the US Robotics corporation. They brought public acceptance of robots and killed anti-robot legislation.
And lo, in today's world the message rings truer than ever. Here are some unworkable laws being proposed to Congress. Perhaps US Robotics Corp is going to rise from the ashes of their modems soon...
Asimov tackled this in his short story ...That Thou Art Mindful Of Him. "Don't kill people" has a weakness... how do you define "people"?
Also a plot point in "The Naked Sun", where a rogue roboticist wanted to create warships with positronic brains. Those warships wouldn't be aware of human crew on enemy ships; they would classify them as non-human and destroy them without being stopped by the first law.
The definitions that are acts (or behaves) as a human are just as ambiguous as AI itself.
IMO, we can't definitely say machines have transcended the purely mechanical until they start rejecting pineapple on pizza.
Pure inventions on the part of the round-earthers to hide the locations of the edges.
But the truth of the flat Earth will still win in the end; the Flat Earth Society has now members from all around the globe!
You can drive on the road non-stop for 10-12 hours in most places in north america, that's 100% legal. You're not even required to take 30 minutes off half-way through your shift if you want, you can just keep driving.
This seems contradicted by the FMCSA regulations here. I quote: May drive only if 8 hours or less have passed since end of driver's last off-duty or sleeper berth period of at least 30 minutes. Are you saying those regulations don't apply?
Either way, nobody gets hurt.
There is no guarantee this is the case; I think bio-hacking can be potentially very dangerous, much more so than, for example, nuclear industry. This is why I think it should be harshly regulated, at least at this time - until we develop better tools, processes or global knowledge to handle potential accidents.
I know this sounds like a Luddite position, or like one of those fifties horror movies ending with the priest or the cop solemnly declaring "there are things Man was not meant to know". However, bio-hacked products have the potential to be self-replicating. They can be strains of bacteria or viruses, or maybe prions; I'm not aware of any serious reasons why an enthusiastic bio-hacker hobbyist can't (accidentally or intentionally) create a lethal self-replicating biological agent.
Cost is not a blocker - bio-hacking can be done using relatively cheap tools and materials, with most of the necessary stuff available with a trip to the glassware store. Safety regulations aren't a blocker either - the authorities have no easy way to know who engages in a bit of a hobby trying to genetically engineer six legged chickens, and amateurs won't have the necessary training, nor will they bother installing a negative pressure room in their garage. Most importantly, there is no guarantee the effect of an accident will be small, because of self-replication. Even the worst nuclear accidents only affect a limited area around the site, but a worst case biological accident doesn't have those limitations. Nothing else a single average person does can potentially kill everybody in the whole world. Leaking a lethal self-propagating virus can.