You are proposing the idea that we can understand emergent features that capture the important global features without including the details. In some cases this works. You can understand fluid flow if you know viscosity without considering all the molecular motions. But in many other cases you get vague generalizations about how things usually go rather than predictive understanding. Take a hurricane for instance. You kind of know it will keep rotating and increase in strength when it passes over warm water, but the best models only predict its path and its intensity for a few days because it is part of a complex weather system whose global properties depend on details because of the butterfly effect.
This seems right that complexity like this is likely unavoidable. Evolution has a fairly reliable way to deal with this. Complexity is allowed to grow unchecked but every generation of a species is required to be able to survive and reproduce or it goes extinct. That seems to be pretty much what is happening with software.
There seems to be a dream that there is a simple theory of everything that humans can understand and that will allow us to do what we want in our complex world and still understand it. But it seems not to be founded in reality. The biological human mind can't and won't understand many of the complex systems we rely on to survive. Software complexity adds another entry to an already long list of complex systems we rely on but don't understand including ecosystems, brain function, microbiome, etc.
Very interesting. The abstract of the paper is somewhat more clear than the summary on Slash Dot. We need to teach the public about how these simple simulations relate to reality and help avoid the magical thinking that 'the simulation finds this effect' so it must be the key to the story when the effect was basically put into the simulation. The key piece of rigorous thinking that justifies putting this paper in PNAS is that using a simple model with empirically measured fishing rates for various sizes of Cod, they reproduce 70% of the observed deepening of large fish, suggesting that selective fishing is the largest contributor to the observations that led to Heincke's Law.
Anybody who was developing "faith" in self driving cars was in trouble from the beginning. They are not a salvation. They are simply a technology that will soon be safer than humans at driving. Along the way they will introduce a whole host of new issues and changes in society and weighing whether the net effect is good or bad will occupy the pundits for a century. And anyone whose "faith" in this technology is strongly affected by the inevitable spurts of progress and setbacks needs to study a little history. We are starting a process that will extend over decades during which autonomous systems will take over driving duties from humans.
You are touching on an important issue here. 'Real-time' and 'Ray-Tracing' are both open to definition: At what screen resolution, frame rate, and number of rays? And is it a hybrid or full ray tracing solution? That asked, I am very interested to know the answer in the original post: Is this a tipping point where they finally decided the hardware is good enough to market the ray tracing they have been working on or is there some substantial improvement in algorithms or in custom hardware dedicated to ray tracking?
Conceiving of a transporter as a physical rather than magical process must involve ripping matter apart, either quark by quark and electron by electron, or atom by atom, or group of atoms by groups of atoms. Then either the mass of the person is transported (which would require a physical path with acceleration etc which isn't a part of a Star Trek transporter) or more likely the mass is converted into energy and information, the energy and information are transported, and then the person is reconstructed physically at a new location. This is an enormous amount of energy (I estimate m*c^2=10^18 Joules or 10^17 Watts for 10 seconds. Current world electricity generation is on the order of 10^13 Watts, so it would take something like 10,000 times total world electrical power output for the 10 seconds it was turning energy into matter). The simplest concepts of transporters make 'copies' of the person and so if the technology were perfected it could be used to make many copies of a person. I don't see a fundamental physical reason that any one of them should be any more or less 'the same person' than the initial person. (Although errors in the copying would likely be unavoidable so practically they would be somewhat different). It is just that our conceptions of personhood have been built in a biological context where persons and their memories are constrained to certain patterns of continuity. But transporting of humans isn't happening in any foreseeable future. Not only is the basic physics of converting matter totally to energy (and back) practically unworkable. If it were possible to construct an intelligent system in a new location out of just energy, it would also be possible to construct a modified version equally easily. The evolutionary options open to a system that can iterate intelligence that quickly would make biological humans completely obsolete in just a few years.
Exactly right cosmicl. Slashdot needs to filter out these throw away stories that make up some kind of imaginary problem for some emerging technology. Of course they get lots of comments...because people here often believe in the future of these technologies and like to propose solutions to whatever problems might be standing in the way. But using automated car washes is easily solved, both by modifying the car and modifying the car wash. And people are shallow enough that the take away message is often that there is some deep problem that will keep the technology from being developed.
Thanks. As the post says: "Our fears ultimately should be of ourselves and other people." Tim O'Reily seems to have great optimism about the outcome of "weaving our intelligence together into a greater whole." But misses two major problems: 1) there will be a lot of dysfunction and evil woven into that whole and 2) what emerges from weaving of our intelligence together will not be controlled or even really accessible to individual humans. Biological minds have been individual for hundreds of milliions of years. Industrial civilization has been a traumatic adaption for humans, but basic continuity in family bonds, rewards for labor, and coherent strands in scholarship and art have allowed humans to adapt. I am not afraid of the coming AI. I am afraid of what humans will do as they are they are displaced as the most effective intelligence on the planet and as their evolved minds and cultures become yet less well adapted to the world they live in.
There is a backlash that is continuing to build against technology and business models that make our lives worse while making their developers and owners rich. I see the anti-globalist political movements as partly and somewhat incoherently built on this issue. The process has been going on for at least two centuries, and the future is very hard to predict, but I think we can be essential certain that the outcome isn't going to be a peaceful transition to an era dominated by a greater emergent intelligence.
Seems they are claiming that a perfect simulation is impossible. But I don't think they have a strong case. If they are claiming they show our reality is not computable and therefore we can't be in a computation, the question comes down to the definition of computability. Why can't an exponentially increasing amount of computational resources be used? And why can't other methods (quantum computation for example, but likely others that we haven't conceived of yet) handle these problems without resources that are exponential in the number of particles?
Have a look at his original staff and check who is left: http://time.com/4658499/donald...
Of those who sometimes communicated their own opinions rather than simply defending Trump, there is only Kushner (family) and Pence (elected VP). Those that left include Bannon, Priebus, Flynn, McFarland, Walsh, Dubke, Spicer, Scaramucci, and more. https://www.bustle.com/p/all-t...
We are looking at 3.5 more years of a delusional President who chooses divisive people for his staff and then fires anyone who gets under his thin skin. I can't see how competent people would agree to work there given what we know thus far.
My thoughts exactly. They say 72% of them are handheld, but that is 700 cameras per hand to hold them. If they meant 14 billion, that might be about right.
Yes, the article linked in the original post paints the whole thing in a pretty shallow manner which seem likely to mostly draw out gut reactions to both of them. The truth is that this is a very important and nuanced topic. Surely both of them realize that the possibility of machine intelligence that can upgrade its own capabilities rapidly represents a totally new era. And that likely humans will not do well in this era. But everyone's understanding of AI is extremely limited. We don't know how far we are from making machines that can upgrade their own intelligence, and we know very little about the diversity of kinds of intelligence that are possible. Hopefully the public conversation can go deeper than pitting two tech superstars against each other.
This is a normal e-waste issue. The original post comparing it to nuclear waste is just badly reasoned sensationalism. The e-waste problem is easily solved. In fact it is much easier to solve than the energy supply problem that solar PV is attempting to address. The solution is to require recycling costs to be included in the purchase price. The cost of recycling silicon solar PV panels is a tiny fraction of the purchase price. (CdTe panels are a different issue...and maybe a bad idea because of the recycling problem just like nuclear power is a bad idea because of nuclear waste.) If suppliers have to include recycling costs in what they charge, then they will start making even more easily recyclable panels But including recycling costs in the purchase price requires planning 20 or 30 years into the future and writing careful regulations. Most governments around the world seem to be inept at planning and regulating, largely because many voters seem to believe that the future is not their problem. But no matter what governments do, I can assure you that coal and petrochemical pollution will still be a much bigger problem than unrecycled solar panels and even nuclear wastes for at least the next 100 or 200 years. The real problem is that these poorly reasoned articles confuse people and keep them from making the switch to renewable energy that humanity has to make it we intend to keep 7 to 10 billion people living with modern comforts on planet earth over the next 100 years.
Gweihir is mostly right. Of course there will still be humans involved. The question is whether the number of new jobs exceeds the number of jobs lost. When cars replaced horses, we had to build, maintain, and drive the cars as well as build the roads etc mostly using human labor. But self-driving cars will be largely built by machines (check out a Tesla factory), driven by machines, repaired by machines, and even the banking interactions for paying for the cars will mostly be done between machines. Eventually there no longer is a second order effect on jobs for humans. New possibilities only create new ways to use machines.
Self-driving will come...probably more slowly than this article proposes. But self-driving electric cars don't make oil prices collapse. If they keep oil prices low, that will allow a lot more Chinese and Indian buyers to buy their first gasoline car. And while it is easy to see how self-driving electric cars can replace $35k cars for commuting in US and Europe when oil is $70 per barrel, it is harder to see the economics working for electric cars replacing $12k first cars for families in Asia when oil is $30 per barrel.
I agree. Kelly explains why naive versions of the superintelligence hypothesis don't make sense, but ignores the main points. The brilliant minds (Gates, Musk, etc) did not claim to prove that human like superintelligence was about to take over. The identified the proliferation of tasks in which machines outperform humans as a threat to the stability of human society and eventually a possible existential threat in some possible scenarios. Kelly's article in no way counters the strength of their arguments.
Imagine a fish that identified in 1800 that humans posed a threat to the ocean ecosystem. It would have been laughed out of the water..."humans can't even swim well, and they can only remain submerged for a few minutes..." But in fact, humans represented a very different kind of marine presence that has indeed destabilized many parts of the ocean ecosystem. Machine intelligence is very different from human intelligence. We don't know what it will become. But most clear minded reasoning about the next few centuries recognizes that the proliferation of machine intelligence represents a dangerously large possibility of destabilizing human society. Exactly as StormReaver says, there are too few important niches in which humans are assured to remain superior to machines for centuries.
I think it is pretty hard to disrupt a drone that was designed to withstand EMP. It doesn't take a very heavy conducting shield to protect integrated circuits. And the penetration depth means it is exponential decay inside the shielding so you can't overcome it by simply using "more juice" unless you can create exponentially more juice. Jamming communication might be more effective. But autonomous systems are not so dependent on communication. And there are counter-measures to most common jamming methods. In short, the main vulnerability of drone air forces seems to be cost to engineer and build robust survivable drones. And I fear that vulnerability is not going to be enough to keep them from becoming very common.
This is the obvious path toward future warfare. F-16s are just an easy transition technology. The real goal is many small drones with a smaller but still redundant number of support and control craft. A future air force that can tolerate significant losses because drones are cheap and don't have families, is much more powerful than current air forces as it can overwhelm most existing defenses. The main question is whether such a system can be reliable and cost effective. The network, control, and autonomous maneuvering technology are mostly in existence. We can't yet build them at scale in a reliable and cost-effective way, but that should be coming soon. The problem with a transformational new military technology like this is that inevitably someone overestimates the superiority it gives them and we end up with a major war.
I see...Artificial general intelligence is hard so anyone worrying about its consequences is uninformed. Wait. What?
And as long as it doesn't have artificial general intelligence, there shouldn't be any problems with giving a machine control over lethal weapons. Wait. What?
Maybe instead artificial general intelligence is a long term existential threat independent of whether current technology is particularly close to achieving it, and Elon Musk knows a little more than they give him credit for. And maybe the transfer of decision making about the use of lethal weapons to machines is always a very bad idea. Unless you hope to make money from selling such devices to the military. In which case, this report sounds like an excellent strategy.
This is going to come back to bite them. Their ipods and iphones were able to acquire market share rapidly because they combined innovative design with the reputation of the company that had the best laptops of their era. The company that overtakes Mac as the main laptop of serious computer users will have a platform from which to dominate more lucrative markets as well.
Clearly the singularity often becomes a 'rapture for nerds'. But there is something unique they are trying to comprehend. When human intelligence reaches a level of understanding of the universe that it is able to make intelligence better than human intelligence, and soon after when that intelligence starts to upgrade itself, then we have reached a milestone on par with the origin of life or the origin of consciousness. The short term consequences are inevitably less dramatic than the fans at singularity hub fantasize about, but the long term consequences are almost by definition bigger than any of us can comprehend.
AI will change "the Nature of the Applications that developers Build?" Sure the first step will be to replace coding teams with a developer who uses AI to generate the code. (cutting jobs) But the next step is to replace the manager plus developer with a single AI manager who tells the AI what code needs to be built. (cutting jobs) And then the AI will be deciding for itself what kind of code it wants to build. (eliminating the need for any people at all)
Yes economics is a difficult subject for which our theories are not very successful. But they are not apologists. The problem is they don't have first principles to work with, so they can only study what humans do in actual situations and so their theories are rooted in existing power structures. There are theories that clearly explain why Marxist, authoritarian, and other non-market economies usually fail.
You should check you utopian idealism about leisure from machines doing the work and markets being harmful against history. Humans don't cope well without meaningful work. They also don't cope well with non-market organization of economic activity. Name a successful economy that wasn't mostly market based. There are of course different levels of central planning, regulation, and intervention, but the left wing dream of human harmony in a post market economy just never works. If you are convinced you have solved the age-old problem of how to untie humans in harmony without them competing economically in a market economy, please demonstrate your ideas in some voluntary utopian community.
There is good logic in "When you try new things, there will be errors, and a main purpose of defense spending is to find and resolve these errors so that our capabilities can remain ahead of our enemies". But there is also a point at which staying ahead of our enemies in high tech weaponry can makes us vulnerable to lower cost ways to win wars. Right now it seems clear to me that the US is erring toward high-tech highly fragile military systems. The future is probably very high tech, but it will be high tech simple, redundant and cost effective systems. Maybe it will be unmanned submarines with large tender subs. Or maybe it will be swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles with mobile landing zones for support. But it seems unlikely to be small numbers of large surface ships. They are just too vulnerable to missile and drone attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
You are proposing the idea that we can understand emergent features that capture the important global features without including the details. In some cases this works. You can understand fluid flow if you know viscosity without considering all the molecular motions. But in many other cases you get vague generalizations about how things usually go rather than predictive understanding. Take a hurricane for instance. You kind of know it will keep rotating and increase in strength when it passes over warm water, but the best models only predict its path and its intensity for a few days because it is part of a complex weather system whose global properties depend on details because of the butterfly effect.
This seems right that complexity like this is likely unavoidable. Evolution has a fairly reliable way to deal with this. Complexity is allowed to grow unchecked but every generation of a species is required to be able to survive and reproduce or it goes extinct. That seems to be pretty much what is happening with software.
There seems to be a dream that there is a simple theory of everything that humans can understand and that will allow us to do what we want in our complex world and still understand it. But it seems not to be founded in reality. The biological human mind can't and won't understand many of the complex systems we rely on to survive. Software complexity adds another entry to an already long list of complex systems we rely on but don't understand including ecosystems, brain function, microbiome, etc.
Very interesting. The abstract of the paper is somewhat more clear than the summary on Slash Dot. We need to teach the public about how these simple simulations relate to reality and help avoid the magical thinking that 'the simulation finds this effect' so it must be the key to the story when the effect was basically put into the simulation. The key piece of rigorous thinking that justifies putting this paper in PNAS is that using a simple model with empirically measured fishing rates for various sizes of Cod, they reproduce 70% of the observed deepening of large fish, suggesting that selective fishing is the largest contributor to the observations that led to Heincke's Law.
Anybody who was developing "faith" in self driving cars was in trouble from the beginning. They are not a salvation. They are simply a technology that will soon be safer than humans at driving. Along the way they will introduce a whole host of new issues and changes in society and weighing whether the net effect is good or bad will occupy the pundits for a century. And anyone whose "faith" in this technology is strongly affected by the inevitable spurts of progress and setbacks needs to study a little history. We are starting a process that will extend over decades during which autonomous systems will take over driving duties from humans.
You are touching on an important issue here. 'Real-time' and 'Ray-Tracing' are both open to definition: At what screen resolution, frame rate, and number of rays? And is it a hybrid or full ray tracing solution? That asked, I am very interested to know the answer in the original post: Is this a tipping point where they finally decided the hardware is good enough to market the ray tracing they have been working on or is there some substantial improvement in algorithms or in custom hardware dedicated to ray tracking?
Conceiving of a transporter as a physical rather than magical process must involve ripping matter apart, either quark by quark and electron by electron, or atom by atom, or group of atoms by groups of atoms. Then either the mass of the person is transported (which would require a physical path with acceleration etc which isn't a part of a Star Trek transporter) or more likely the mass is converted into energy and information, the energy and information are transported, and then the person is reconstructed physically at a new location. This is an enormous amount of energy (I estimate m*c^2=10^18 Joules or 10^17 Watts for 10 seconds. Current world electricity generation is on the order of 10^13 Watts, so it would take something like 10,000 times total world electrical power output for the 10 seconds it was turning energy into matter). The simplest concepts of transporters make 'copies' of the person and so if the technology were perfected it could be used to make many copies of a person. I don't see a fundamental physical reason that any one of them should be any more or less 'the same person' than the initial person. (Although errors in the copying would likely be unavoidable so practically they would be somewhat different). It is just that our conceptions of personhood have been built in a biological context where persons and their memories are constrained to certain patterns of continuity. But transporting of humans isn't happening in any foreseeable future. Not only is the basic physics of converting matter totally to energy (and back) practically unworkable. If it were possible to construct an intelligent system in a new location out of just energy, it would also be possible to construct a modified version equally easily. The evolutionary options open to a system that can iterate intelligence that quickly would make biological humans completely obsolete in just a few years.
Exactly right cosmicl. Slashdot needs to filter out these throw away stories that make up some kind of imaginary problem for some emerging technology. Of course they get lots of comments...because people here often believe in the future of these technologies and like to propose solutions to whatever problems might be standing in the way. But using automated car washes is easily solved, both by modifying the car and modifying the car wash. And people are shallow enough that the take away message is often that there is some deep problem that will keep the technology from being developed.
Thanks. As the post says: "Our fears ultimately should be of ourselves and other people." Tim O'Reily seems to have great optimism about the outcome of "weaving our intelligence together into a greater whole." But misses two major problems: 1) there will be a lot of dysfunction and evil woven into that whole and 2) what emerges from weaving of our intelligence together will not be controlled or even really accessible to individual humans. Biological minds have been individual for hundreds of milliions of years. Industrial civilization has been a traumatic adaption for humans, but basic continuity in family bonds, rewards for labor, and coherent strands in scholarship and art have allowed humans to adapt. I am not afraid of the coming AI. I am afraid of what humans will do as they are they are displaced as the most effective intelligence on the planet and as their evolved minds and cultures become yet less well adapted to the world they live in.
There is a backlash that is continuing to build against technology and business models that make our lives worse while making their developers and owners rich. I see the anti-globalist political movements as partly and somewhat incoherently built on this issue. The process has been going on for at least two centuries, and the future is very hard to predict, but I think we can be essential certain that the outcome isn't going to be a peaceful transition to an era dominated by a greater emergent intelligence.
Seems they are claiming that a perfect simulation is impossible. But I don't think they have a strong case. If they are claiming they show our reality is not computable and therefore we can't be in a computation, the question comes down to the definition of computability. Why can't an exponentially increasing amount of computational resources be used? And why can't other methods (quantum computation for example, but likely others that we haven't conceived of yet) handle these problems without resources that are exponential in the number of particles?
Have a look at his original staff and check who is left: http://time.com/4658499/donald... Of those who sometimes communicated their own opinions rather than simply defending Trump, there is only Kushner (family) and Pence (elected VP). Those that left include Bannon, Priebus, Flynn, McFarland, Walsh, Dubke, Spicer, Scaramucci, and more. https://www.bustle.com/p/all-t... We are looking at 3.5 more years of a delusional President who chooses divisive people for his staff and then fires anyone who gets under his thin skin. I can't see how competent people would agree to work there given what we know thus far.
My thoughts exactly. They say 72% of them are handheld, but that is 700 cameras per hand to hold them. If they meant 14 billion, that might be about right.
Yes, the article linked in the original post paints the whole thing in a pretty shallow manner which seem likely to mostly draw out gut reactions to both of them. The truth is that this is a very important and nuanced topic. Surely both of them realize that the possibility of machine intelligence that can upgrade its own capabilities rapidly represents a totally new era. And that likely humans will not do well in this era. But everyone's understanding of AI is extremely limited. We don't know how far we are from making machines that can upgrade their own intelligence, and we know very little about the diversity of kinds of intelligence that are possible. Hopefully the public conversation can go deeper than pitting two tech superstars against each other.
This is a normal e-waste issue. The original post comparing it to nuclear waste is just badly reasoned sensationalism. The e-waste problem is easily solved. In fact it is much easier to solve than the energy supply problem that solar PV is attempting to address. The solution is to require recycling costs to be included in the purchase price. The cost of recycling silicon solar PV panels is a tiny fraction of the purchase price. (CdTe panels are a different issue...and maybe a bad idea because of the recycling problem just like nuclear power is a bad idea because of nuclear waste.) If suppliers have to include recycling costs in what they charge, then they will start making even more easily recyclable panels But including recycling costs in the purchase price requires planning 20 or 30 years into the future and writing careful regulations. Most governments around the world seem to be inept at planning and regulating, largely because many voters seem to believe that the future is not their problem. But no matter what governments do, I can assure you that coal and petrochemical pollution will still be a much bigger problem than unrecycled solar panels and even nuclear wastes for at least the next 100 or 200 years. The real problem is that these poorly reasoned articles confuse people and keep them from making the switch to renewable energy that humanity has to make it we intend to keep 7 to 10 billion people living with modern comforts on planet earth over the next 100 years.
Gweihir is mostly right. Of course there will still be humans involved. The question is whether the number of new jobs exceeds the number of jobs lost. When cars replaced horses, we had to build, maintain, and drive the cars as well as build the roads etc mostly using human labor. But self-driving cars will be largely built by machines (check out a Tesla factory), driven by machines, repaired by machines, and even the banking interactions for paying for the cars will mostly be done between machines. Eventually there no longer is a second order effect on jobs for humans. New possibilities only create new ways to use machines.
Self-driving will come...probably more slowly than this article proposes. But self-driving electric cars don't make oil prices collapse. If they keep oil prices low, that will allow a lot more Chinese and Indian buyers to buy their first gasoline car. And while it is easy to see how self-driving electric cars can replace $35k cars for commuting in US and Europe when oil is $70 per barrel, it is harder to see the economics working for electric cars replacing $12k first cars for families in Asia when oil is $30 per barrel.
I agree. Kelly explains why naive versions of the superintelligence hypothesis don't make sense, but ignores the main points. The brilliant minds (Gates, Musk, etc) did not claim to prove that human like superintelligence was about to take over. The identified the proliferation of tasks in which machines outperform humans as a threat to the stability of human society and eventually a possible existential threat in some possible scenarios. Kelly's article in no way counters the strength of their arguments.
Imagine a fish that identified in 1800 that humans posed a threat to the ocean ecosystem. It would have been laughed out of the water..."humans can't even swim well, and they can only remain submerged for a few minutes..." But in fact, humans represented a very different kind of marine presence that has indeed destabilized many parts of the ocean ecosystem. Machine intelligence is very different from human intelligence. We don't know what it will become. But most clear minded reasoning about the next few centuries recognizes that the proliferation of machine intelligence represents a dangerously large possibility of destabilizing human society. Exactly as StormReaver says, there are too few important niches in which humans are assured to remain superior to machines for centuries.
I think it is pretty hard to disrupt a drone that was designed to withstand EMP. It doesn't take a very heavy conducting shield to protect integrated circuits. And the penetration depth means it is exponential decay inside the shielding so you can't overcome it by simply using "more juice" unless you can create exponentially more juice. Jamming communication might be more effective. But autonomous systems are not so dependent on communication. And there are counter-measures to most common jamming methods. In short, the main vulnerability of drone air forces seems to be cost to engineer and build robust survivable drones. And I fear that vulnerability is not going to be enough to keep them from becoming very common.
This is the obvious path toward future warfare. F-16s are just an easy transition technology. The real goal is many small drones with a smaller but still redundant number of support and control craft. A future air force that can tolerate significant losses because drones are cheap and don't have families, is much more powerful than current air forces as it can overwhelm most existing defenses. The main question is whether such a system can be reliable and cost effective. The network, control, and autonomous maneuvering technology are mostly in existence. We can't yet build them at scale in a reliable and cost-effective way, but that should be coming soon. The problem with a transformational new military technology like this is that inevitably someone overestimates the superiority it gives them and we end up with a major war.
I see...Artificial general intelligence is hard so anyone worrying about its consequences is uninformed. Wait. What? And as long as it doesn't have artificial general intelligence, there shouldn't be any problems with giving a machine control over lethal weapons. Wait. What? Maybe instead artificial general intelligence is a long term existential threat independent of whether current technology is particularly close to achieving it, and Elon Musk knows a little more than they give him credit for. And maybe the transfer of decision making about the use of lethal weapons to machines is always a very bad idea. Unless you hope to make money from selling such devices to the military. In which case, this report sounds like an excellent strategy.
Don't you just love articles about "planned technology"!
This is going to come back to bite them. Their ipods and iphones were able to acquire market share rapidly because they combined innovative design with the reputation of the company that had the best laptops of their era. The company that overtakes Mac as the main laptop of serious computer users will have a platform from which to dominate more lucrative markets as well.
Clearly the singularity often becomes a 'rapture for nerds'. But there is something unique they are trying to comprehend. When human intelligence reaches a level of understanding of the universe that it is able to make intelligence better than human intelligence, and soon after when that intelligence starts to upgrade itself, then we have reached a milestone on par with the origin of life or the origin of consciousness. The short term consequences are inevitably less dramatic than the fans at singularity hub fantasize about, but the long term consequences are almost by definition bigger than any of us can comprehend.
AI will change "the Nature of the Applications that developers Build?" Sure the first step will be to replace coding teams with a developer who uses AI to generate the code. (cutting jobs) But the next step is to replace the manager plus developer with a single AI manager who tells the AI what code needs to be built. (cutting jobs) And then the AI will be deciding for itself what kind of code it wants to build. (eliminating the need for any people at all)
Yes economics is a difficult subject for which our theories are not very successful. But they are not apologists. The problem is they don't have first principles to work with, so they can only study what humans do in actual situations and so their theories are rooted in existing power structures. There are theories that clearly explain why Marxist, authoritarian, and other non-market economies usually fail. You should check you utopian idealism about leisure from machines doing the work and markets being harmful against history. Humans don't cope well without meaningful work. They also don't cope well with non-market organization of economic activity. Name a successful economy that wasn't mostly market based. There are of course different levels of central planning, regulation, and intervention, but the left wing dream of human harmony in a post market economy just never works. If you are convinced you have solved the age-old problem of how to untie humans in harmony without them competing economically in a market economy, please demonstrate your ideas in some voluntary utopian community.
There is good logic in "When you try new things, there will be errors, and a main purpose of defense spending is to find and resolve these errors so that our capabilities can remain ahead of our enemies". But there is also a point at which staying ahead of our enemies in high tech weaponry can makes us vulnerable to lower cost ways to win wars. Right now it seems clear to me that the US is erring toward high-tech highly fragile military systems. The future is probably very high tech, but it will be high tech simple, redundant and cost effective systems. Maybe it will be unmanned submarines with large tender subs. Or maybe it will be swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles with mobile landing zones for support. But it seems unlikely to be small numbers of large surface ships. They are just too vulnerable to missile and drone attacks.