"I don't think it is true that technological progress ever reduced the number of jobs."
I don't think you ever read a History book, then.
That, *up to know*, technological progress haven't reduced the number of jobs *globally* and *in the long term* doesn't mean that this is not going to happen next time nor that it didn't happen locally and on the short term (where short terms means long enough to make miserable the whole lives of millions).
"In Poland, the undestanding is that 30% of the IT jobs are vacant because of not enough people ready to take them despite the sallaries in IT being well above the median sallary."
You can hail this to two things, neither of which are going to last long: Poland has demand for IT jobs because it's easy for their value to be sold in the other side of the world producing a value delta in the process. That is globalization plus low standards of life on your side. The same can be said about wages: it is not that IT salaries are above median and still they are not covered but they are above median *because* they can't be covered: moving efforts towards IT will certainly lower the wages as it will do other depressed economies entering the game. Do you want a hint in Polands future? Then look, for instance, at Spain's last 40 years.
"I wonder what is this number for US."
I already told you about globalization: USA IT labout market is depressing -or not growing at the pace it could, because Poland -and India and others, are outcompeting them in wages costs.
"It's true that people already having a job, may need to gain new qualifications."
Good luck requalifying your heavy industry people from Gdansk into white collar IT workers. Just look at how well it ended to other regions going through the same path.
"Migration yes. Jobs going away - I don't think so."
You are aware that migration means exaclty "jobs going away", are you?
"They're going to need to develop a self driving car that can load your bags into the back of the taxi and deliver the goods you've ordered into your house."
Yes. Exactly as they needed a pump capable of tying to you car and fill the deposit before they had unmanned gas stations.
"It is in no ones economic interests to replace humans with machines."
You may be right. Still, prisoner's dilemma aplies: it certainly is in *my* interest to replace expensive and difficult to manage humans with relatively cheaper and easy to manage machines on *my* mills, and capitalism focus on me looking ater *my* interests, not yours.
"It creates an ecomony that collapse in upon itself"
Now I'm even more interested on making my money now, everybody else's be damned. You know, the wealthy have always the upper hand, much more so in troubled times.
"Legislation will emerge limiting/eliminating AI from human jobs."
Legislation always go in the way of the wealthy's interests and so it also does in modern representative democracies: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/16/8...
"intelligence that is self-aware will not die without a fight"
Arguments, please.
No, that current natural self-aware intelligences work that way is not an argument about the same being valid for future self-aware artificial intelligences.
"this wasn't speculation to me, at least not after the summer of 1999 when I attempted to model the requirements for intelligence"
So that's not speculation from you side because of your speculations back in 1999, right?
It seems it is not only artificial intelligence that it's still lacking.
"Prior to the 20th century land was cheap or often free."
Bollocks. You know, even now, USA is not "the whole world", much less before the 20th century. Out of modern USA and Australia -and Africa to some extent, land has never been cheap of for free. Even roman solidiers needed to pay roughly 20 years of their lives for a piece of it. And do you know how your country got populated? you know why yours is "a country of immigrants"? You can bet that, for the most part, it is because land was neither cheap nor free anywhere else.
"We didnt get unemployment and collapse of society when machinery destroyed 90% of those jobs."
The point is... yes we did.
The early decades, almost a century, of industrial revolution really made thousands to millions of people miserable all their lives which -almost luckily, were also quite shorter than their parents. Do you think, say, coal mining or 19th century London or Paris were such a paradise except for those lucky one-percenters?
"I can't believe any other part of the military would push people in combat"
Exactly that. Others have said this is a pre to press for more drone autonomy when this is a basic military people management. The probably drinked the cool-aid and thought flying drones was indeed a good non-stressful 9-to-5 work. Well, there's no other problem but that they were wrong, just adjust and go ahead.
1) Stress going in and out "soldier mood"? Make the duty periods longer, just like even other non-militar professionals like firefigthers, oil platform workers etc. Somewhere between a week and two~three monts service (i.e. submarine staff) after a study to find what's the sweet spot. 2) The above plus properly staffing will not only relieve stress but also will allow for training, promotions, etc. through the non-servicing periods. 3) What was the problem, again?
"Microsoft really doesn't know what the hell it is doing and bounces around from.NET to Surface RT to HTML5 to Universal Apps and it is really difficult to want to deal with whatever new bad idea they come up with $THIS_YEAR."
And that's what Microsoft has been doing since, well, ever.
"Kids are using iPads at this age. Why not introduce them to the idea of how the devices they use actually work, from the very beginning?"
What for? Kids are using electrical ilumination at this age. Why not introduce them to the idea of how the devices they use actually work -high to low voltage, power thyristors and all that stuff, from the very beginning?
Hey, todlers are heavy users of the sewage system. Let's teach them that first too. They'll have the time to learn how to properly read, write and basic calculations sometime later (or not -after all, they already are worthy consumers through their ipads).
It still is. You can stand in the middle of a railway and let a train pass over you. The result won't be a matter of perspective.
There are, of course, assertions that there are debatable. But then there also are assertions that are either right or wrong, not a matter of perspective.
"So, there is a large part of "evolution" which shouldn't be presented as fact, or you end up with another Piltdown Man."
You know it is *because* of our theory of evolution along with our scientific method that we know the Piltdown Man is a fraud, don't you?
You know that, on the other hand, if we had gone with the standard religious method of "someone of value told us so" the Piltdown Man would still be taken for true, don't you?
Sorry but evolution is a fact. Is so much a fact that you can produce it on a petri plaque producing the exact results predicted by the synthetic evolution theory.
What it is a theory is the way evolution is produced and why it works, it is called the theory of "evolution by natural selection", or it's modern, refined version, "synthetic evolution theory" and it is the best theory we have.
You know, "theory" doesn't mean "well, I think this might work this way, more or less" but a corpus of scientific ideas that explain a portion of reality. Thus, E=m*c^2 is a fact; relativity is a theory.
"I've been involved in contracts that had public health modeling components. Being "way off" is not necessarily a proof the model is no good when you're modeling a chaotic proces"
Well, in fact, it is. If you know you are working on a chaotic dynamics you know any prediction aside of the existence of an attractor is moot.
Either your model was not chaotic, but still trying to model a chaotic phenomenon, in which case the model was wrong, or the model was chaotic but then it was presented as it was not, being deceptive and only good to extract money from uninformed pockets.
"You seem to be confusing the benefits of NAT with what it was designed to do or what other security features are available"
I am not. It happens that I've implemented NAT solutions, one-to-one and one-to-many, with *and* without port filtering, so I know it's not just a "theoretical" difference.
"But really think about it, and now think that there could be things in the Universe just like light which we simply do not have organs to perceive."
I don't need to think. I *know* for certain that we don't have organs to percieve most of the electromagnetic spectrum, only a very short range we know as "light" and "heat".
"How can we understand it? We have no conceptual framework for it perhaps."
Maybe not. What a joy it would be if we could fathom something we could call -I'm going wildly speculative here so forgive me, microwaves, radio spectrum, cosmic rays, atomic particles. We might be able to sort all that knowledge by means of some also unfathomable concepts I for one may call Mathematics...
But let's go back to earth again and forget about all those unthinkable things.
"I imagine this saying would stop once the parent knows he can become immortal"
Probably yes. But that wouldn't stop the heir knowing the output of his ancestor's decease.
"being immortal means you can wait longer for something."
Can and want are two very different things. On one hand, people has shown once and again their desire to take shortcuts -even if the output in case of failure is their own death; on the other, the ability to wait basically forever means nothing if you are expected to wait exactly that long -you are immortal, but so is your father.
"Or it could be a legal requirement - want to not die of old age? The price is X dollars and your ability to reproduce."
That could work on a socialist society, no way in a capitalist/modern fascist one. The rich guy will always be able to take his cake and eat it too.
"People are still going to die (accidents, murder, suicide etc)."
If that "immortality pill" happens, the funny thing is that murder rates will increase among the wealthy.
Juvenal already advised wealthy parents about the risk of saying "One day son, all this will be yours", since this clearly shows what is taking them apart from their fortune. Imagine if the parent happens to be immortal.
"Only the rich will be able to afford this. And by rich I mean on a global ranking"
Exactly that. It's only about the details. We -as of now, at least, live in a capitalist society. Left to its own, money will put things on their place.
How much it costs to produce that "immortality" is a first approach on who will get it. The way it is marketeed, will put a price -probably way above its cost, at least at the begining.
But it is stupid to say "most people in America and Europe and only the obscenely rich from the Middle East, India, China, Brazil, etc" since rich people in "everywhere else" are still richer that "most people in America". Just look at sales distribution of, say, over 500K US$ cars. And it looks that the rich/middle class gap it's only to be made wider and more global with geographical boundaries mattering less and less.
On the other hand, it is also stupid to say "Even at our current growth rate there's not enough for everyone." No, what makes for starving people is not resources' scarcity but resources' redistribution. It is due to our global socioeconomic system, not a natural limit, not yet at least.
What this news -and most of the comments, fails to see is that this is not a black & white scenario and capitalism is quite efficient at coping with grey scenarios (a very different thing is if it manages them on an ethical way). Immortality neither will come in a pill (it will be a lot of different technologies, each one developing at its own pace and its own price tag) nor it will become avaliable to everybody or nobody at all, but just like any other market product: luxury at first, then more and more common, down to its production costs, only slower than it could, since it will be a patent mine field that will allow for artificial scarcity for quite longer than due.
"Endocrine disorder which totally mucks up metabolism, causing your body to metabolize muscle (including your heart, oh joy) and connective tissue, in order to create huge mounds of fat which are mostly water. It's called "Cushing's Syndrome"."
Yes, another case of "armchair nutritionist" coupled with reading comprehension problems.
Unless the Cushing's Syndrome somehow implies termodynamics laws' violation, which I strongly doubt, I don't think you can increase *weight* simply by metabolizing tissues into fat.
Corporal *volume*, on the other hand...
And yes, I know Cushing's Syndrome usually curses with obesity, but you can bet it is not because of what you say but because the way you eat more (specially when it curses with depression) and how you transform what you eat mainly into fat at the expense of other tissues, which in turn makes you move less, which in turn makes your intake even more -relatively speaking, excessive.
Oh! and another one: fat being "mostly water"? C'mon, man, c'mon. You know fat is "drier" than even bones, do you?
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't think it is true that technological progress ever reduced the number of jobs."
I don't think you ever read a History book, then.
That, *up to know*, technological progress haven't reduced the number of jobs *globally* and *in the long term* doesn't mean that this is not going to happen next time nor that it didn't happen locally and on the short term (where short terms means long enough to make miserable the whole lives of millions).
"In Poland, the undestanding is that 30% of the IT jobs are vacant because of not enough people ready to take them despite the sallaries in IT being well above the median sallary."
You can hail this to two things, neither of which are going to last long: Poland has demand for IT jobs because it's easy for their value to be sold in the other side of the world producing a value delta in the process. That is globalization plus low standards of life on your side. The same can be said about wages: it is not that IT salaries are above median and still they are not covered but they are above median *because* they can't be covered: moving efforts towards IT will certainly lower the wages as it will do other depressed economies entering the game. Do you want a hint in Polands future? Then look, for instance, at Spain's last 40 years.
"I wonder what is this number for US."
I already told you about globalization: USA IT labout market is depressing -or not growing at the pace it could, because Poland -and India and others, are outcompeting them in wages costs.
"It's true that people already having a job, may need to gain new qualifications."
Good luck requalifying your heavy industry people from Gdansk into white collar IT workers. Just look at how well it ended to other regions going through the same path.
"Migration yes. Jobs going away - I don't think so."
You are aware that migration means exaclty "jobs going away", are you?
"They're going to need to develop a self driving car that can load your bags into the back of the taxi and deliver the goods you've ordered into your house."
Yes. Exactly as they needed a pump capable of tying to you car and fill the deposit before they had unmanned gas stations.
Oh, wait!
"It is in no ones economic interests to replace humans with machines."
You may be right. Still, prisoner's dilemma aplies: it certainly is in *my* interest to replace expensive and difficult to manage humans with relatively cheaper and easy to manage machines on *my* mills, and capitalism focus on me looking ater *my* interests, not yours.
"It creates an ecomony that collapse in upon itself"
Now I'm even more interested on making my money now, everybody else's be damned. You know, the wealthy have always the upper hand, much more so in troubled times.
"Legislation will emerge limiting/eliminating AI from human jobs."
Legislation always go in the way of the wealthy's interests and so it also does in modern representative democracies: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/16/8...
"intelligence that is self-aware will not die without a fight"
Arguments, please.
No, that current natural self-aware intelligences work that way is not an argument about the same being valid for future self-aware artificial intelligences.
"this wasn't speculation to me, at least not after the summer of 1999 when I attempted to model the requirements for intelligence"
So that's not speculation from you side because of your speculations back in 1999, right?
It seems it is not only artificial intelligence that it's still lacking.
"Prior to the 20th century land was cheap or often free."
Bollocks. You know, even now, USA is not "the whole world", much less before the 20th century. Out of modern USA and Australia -and Africa to some extent, land has never been cheap of for free. Even roman solidiers needed to pay roughly 20 years of their lives for a piece of it. And do you know how your country got populated? you know why yours is "a country of immigrants"? You can bet that, for the most part, it is because land was neither cheap nor free anywhere else.
"We didnt get unemployment and collapse of society when machinery destroyed 90% of those jobs."
The point is... yes we did.
The early decades, almost a century, of industrial revolution really made thousands to millions of people miserable all their lives which -almost luckily, were also quite shorter than their parents. Do you think, say, coal mining or 19th century London or Paris were such a paradise except for those lucky one-percenters?
"What is "money" in a society where no one can earn it except a select few?"
It seems it is still money much the same. Just look at the world up to 200~300 years ago.
"Money only has meaning in the context of how we share things in society."
Even unemployed share things.
"The point is, AI is much faster and efficient"
Yes, I can also figure a non-existant anything the be much everything than anything that, you know, really exists.
"I can't believe any other part of the military would push people in combat"
Exactly that. Others have said this is a pre to press for more drone autonomy when this is a basic military people management. The probably drinked the cool-aid and thought flying drones was indeed a good non-stressful 9-to-5 work. Well, there's no other problem but that they were wrong, just adjust and go ahead.
1) Stress going in and out "soldier mood"? Make the duty periods longer, just like even other non-militar professionals like firefigthers, oil platform workers etc. Somewhere between a week and two~three monts service (i.e. submarine staff) after a study to find what's the sweet spot.
2) The above plus properly staffing will not only relieve stress but also will allow for training, promotions, etc. through the non-servicing periods.
3) What was the problem, again?
...And his name was Oblongus, which in the native tongue means "Thou, That Are Wider Than Taller"
"Microsoft really doesn't know what the hell it is doing and bounces around from .NET to Surface RT to HTML5 to Universal Apps and it is really difficult to want to deal with whatever new bad idea they come up with $THIS_YEAR."
And that's what Microsoft has been doing since, well, ever.
OLE, ADO, DOA, RDO, ActiveX, J++... you name it.
"I doubt they mean actually teaching Computer Science, even the concepts, to preschoolers."
Probably you are right.
Which means they shouldn't have any decision power on such curricular matters since they don't know what they are talking about.
"Kids are using iPads at this age. Why not introduce them to the idea of how the devices they use actually work, from the very beginning?"
What for? Kids are using electrical ilumination at this age. Why not introduce them to the idea of how the devices they use actually work -high to low voltage, power thyristors and all that stuff, from the very beginning?
Hey, todlers are heavy users of the sewage system. Let's teach them that first too. They'll have the time to learn how to properly read, write and basic calculations sometime later (or not -after all, they already are worthy consumers through their ipads).
"No, it's not. Now what?"
It still is. You can stand in the middle of a railway and let a train pass over you. The result won't be a matter of perspective.
There are, of course, assertions that there are debatable. But then there also are assertions that are either right or wrong, not a matter of perspective.
"So, there is a large part of "evolution" which shouldn't be presented as fact, or you end up with another Piltdown Man."
You know it is *because* of our theory of evolution along with our scientific method that we know the Piltdown Man is a fraud, don't you?
You know that, on the other hand, if we had gone with the standard religious method of "someone of value told us so" the Piltdown Man would still be taken for true, don't you?
Sorry but evolution is a fact. Is so much a fact that you can produce it on a petri plaque producing the exact results predicted by the synthetic evolution theory.
What it is a theory is the way evolution is produced and why it works, it is called the theory of "evolution by natural selection", or it's modern, refined version, "synthetic evolution theory" and it is the best theory we have.
You know, "theory" doesn't mean "well, I think this might work this way, more or less" but a corpus of scientific ideas that explain a portion of reality. Thus, E=m*c^2 is a fact; relativity is a theory.
Who's right and who's wrong is a matter of "perspective."
As much as it has the "cool, open minded factor", that's wrong.
"I know this is infuriating to scientifically minded people, who believe in absolute, measurable truths."
You know what a strawman argument is, don't you?
"I've been involved in contracts that had public health modeling components. Being "way off" is not necessarily a proof the model is no good when you're modeling a chaotic proces"
Well, in fact, it is. If you know you are working on a chaotic dynamics you know any prediction aside of the existence of an attractor is moot.
Either your model was not chaotic, but still trying to model a chaotic phenomenon, in which case the model was wrong, or the model was chaotic but then it was presented as it was not, being deceptive and only good to extract money from uninformed pockets.
"You seem to be confusing the benefits of NAT with what it was designed to do or what other security features are available"
I am not. It happens that I've implemented NAT solutions, one-to-one and one-to-many, with *and* without port filtering, so I know it's not just a "theoretical" difference.
"I guess I can't help you with this either."
I guess you can't: it seems I know better.
"NAT does have a security benefit. Unless ports are opened, there is no direct inbound access"
NAT is "Network Address Translation". It is not "Port Filtering" You can do NAT with or without PF; you can do PF with or without NAT.
What you are taking for NAT security is not NAT security.
"But really think about it, and now think that there could be things in the Universe just like light which we simply do not have organs to perceive."
I don't need to think. I *know* for certain that we don't have organs to percieve most of the electromagnetic spectrum, only a very short range we know as "light" and "heat".
"How can we understand it? We have no conceptual framework for it perhaps."
Maybe not. What a joy it would be if we could fathom something we could call -I'm going wildly speculative here so forgive me, microwaves, radio spectrum, cosmic rays, atomic particles. We might be able to sort all that knowledge by means of some also unfathomable concepts I for one may call Mathematics...
But let's go back to earth again and forget about all those unthinkable things.
"I imagine this saying would stop once the parent knows he can become immortal"
Probably yes. But that wouldn't stop the heir knowing the output of his ancestor's decease.
"being immortal means you can wait longer for something."
Can and want are two very different things. On one hand, people has shown once and again their desire to take shortcuts -even if the output in case of failure is their own death; on the other, the ability to wait basically forever means nothing if you are expected to wait exactly that long -you are immortal, but so is your father.
"Or it could be a legal requirement - want to not die of old age? The price is X dollars and your ability to reproduce."
That could work on a socialist society, no way in a capitalist/modern fascist one. The rich guy will always be able to take his cake and eat it too.
"People are still going to die (accidents, murder, suicide etc)."
If that "immortality pill" happens, the funny thing is that murder rates will increase among the wealthy.
Juvenal already advised wealthy parents about the risk of saying "One day son, all this will be yours", since this clearly shows what is taking them apart from their fortune. Imagine if the parent happens to be immortal.
"Only the rich will be able to afford this. And by rich I mean on a global ranking"
Exactly that. It's only about the details. We -as of now, at least, live in a capitalist society. Left to its own, money will put things on their place.
How much it costs to produce that "immortality" is a first approach on who will get it. The way it is marketeed, will put a price -probably way above its cost, at least at the begining.
But it is stupid to say "most people in America and Europe and only the obscenely rich from the Middle East, India, China, Brazil, etc" since rich people in "everywhere else" are still richer that "most people in America". Just look at sales distribution of, say, over 500K US$ cars. And it looks that the rich/middle class gap it's only to be made wider and more global with geographical boundaries mattering less and less.
On the other hand, it is also stupid to say "Even at our current growth rate there's not enough for everyone." No, what makes for starving people is not resources' scarcity but resources' redistribution. It is due to our global socioeconomic system, not a natural limit, not yet at least.
What this news -and most of the comments, fails to see is that this is not a black & white scenario and capitalism is quite efficient at coping with grey scenarios (a very different thing is if it manages them on an ethical way). Immortality neither will come in a pill (it will be a lot of different technologies, each one developing at its own pace and its own price tag) nor it will become avaliable to everybody or nobody at all, but just like any other market product: luxury at first, then more and more common, down to its production costs, only slower than it could, since it will be a patent mine field that will allow for artificial scarcity for quite longer than due.
"Endocrine disorder which totally mucks up metabolism, causing your body to metabolize muscle (including your heart, oh joy) and connective tissue, in order to create huge mounds of fat which are mostly water. It's called "Cushing's Syndrome"."
Yes, another case of "armchair nutritionist" coupled with reading comprehension problems.
Unless the Cushing's Syndrome somehow implies termodynamics laws' violation, which I strongly doubt, I don't think you can increase *weight* simply by metabolizing tissues into fat.
Corporal *volume*, on the other hand...
And yes, I know Cushing's Syndrome usually curses with obesity, but you can bet it is not because of what you say but because the way you eat more (specially when it curses with depression) and how you transform what you eat mainly into fat at the expense of other tissues, which in turn makes you move less, which in turn makes your intake even more -relatively speaking, excessive.
Oh! and another one: fat being "mostly water"? C'mon, man, c'mon. You know fat is "drier" than even bones, do you?