"Let's start praying" is the go-to response for people in situations where they feel impotent. There will certainly be people wanting to capitalize on these fears. I'd like to take an optimistic view of the level of altruism in the AI church, assume that they have people's best interests at heart... Then I look at the other examples given (Mormonism and Scientology), and frankly most other examples in history, and my gaze is adjusted.
When people think their best shot at peace or success is to pray to the AI-god, that works out very well for those in power. It implies that nobody is really responsible for AI and how it gets used. It implies that any attempts to regulate the use of AI are futile. Founding this church is actually a *bet* that things will play out in that manner. Its a bet that, before too long, we will have churches full people flogging themselves asking the AI-god why they can't get hired anywhere, or accepted for job training, or find a workable shelter, etc.
It's a rebranding of "faith" that appeals to the technically-minded and agnostic of the Xbox generation. Christianity has been archaic and square for a long time. Scientology's aesthetic is a little too 1950s sci-fi. New Age lost its cool around the same time the Bee Gees did. But now we have a new iteration, this one focused on mentally surviving videogame capitalism. Giving some kind of hope the developers will fix their hit detection or debuff the other guy's noob tube, so that one day you can make it off the first level.
Now, there are a lot of stupid people in the world, and for many of them, some kind of belief system and faith is beneficial psychologically. That is why we have had religions for all of human history, despite the problems they bring. But the Church of AI is NOT the way to go about it. Slavoj Zizek has spoken about ecology being used as the new religion, and he has his own problems with that. Namely, it seems to have a numbing effect, allowing people to think "I have recycled my soda can, now I don't need to push to have the coal plant shut down"... This is true I think, and very similar to what being in the Church of AI would do to someones mind. But I think ecology as religion would do way better than AI as religion... AFTER we fix all the big, systemic problems. THEN people can rest easy in their faith, when the soda can really is the biggest problem in our society.
It may not have officially-declared protection by a national army, but there's plenty of arms circulating among the drug cartels, Asian and Eastern European oligarchs, who have taken a keen interest in this currency. Not to mention the "legit" Western financial interests who are starting to do the same.
There are *plenty* of people willing to scheme, fight, and die over Bitcoin. It's just not the traditionally-deliniated one-to-one relationship between a nation and a currency. It's a more tangled web of intrigue.
Entrenched internet businesses like Netflix are lobbying against the changes because they won't like paying rent to the ISPs any more than the rest of us. I don't see any mortal threats to their dominance regardless of what the FCC does. And neither do they. Neutrality *is* key for giving new or smaller businesses a chance to compete, but it's certainly not a guarantee of their success. Unlike Ajit's proposed change, which guarantees plenty of new revenue for the ISPs, zero of which will get plowed back into infrastructure upgrades, or anything useful to anybody, besides Pai's buddies.
Crony capitalism at it's purest. Gives a bad name to the whole ideology. Now, that doesn't affect me much, as an independent thinker. So yes, I do want the organization that gave us the seven dirty words to protect us from from monopoly-abusing telecoms. That is a critical part of their job, and NOBODY else can do it. I advocate evaluating individual regulations based on what good they do for the people of this country, not how closely they hew to some inflexible pseudoreligious ideology, or someone's idea of polite conversation. Maybe if everyone took that approach, government could do something *useful*. Imagine that - a government that works for its people, not for its officeholders and special interests.
I'm curious where those numbers come from, and if they include netbooks. I'd argue that netbooks, especially Chromebooks, are more comparable to tablets than PCs or laptops. Form factor is part of it, but more important is how they get *used*, and who is doing the buying... Those are the things that, for me, determine which "market" a product is in. If I were "in the market" for an audio production workstation, I wouldn't consider a Chromebook. If I were in the market for a Christmas present that lets my nephew watch YouTube, I absolutely would consider one.
Ah, and who do you think runs the Taxi Commission?
Legality aside, I'm not convinced that Uber is any *morally* worse than the guys they replace. Of course, both organizations are in dire need of improvement. The question for the rest of us is: which business model is easier to regulate, sue, whatever, into a state of fairness? I haven't been convinced that that's the commission-and-medallion model... LONG history of problems there. But I'm willing to hear arguments...
Somehow I don't think India's stance on net neutrality contributes to the high overall level of corruption in their government, or any of the other things you mentioned. But it is pretty clear that the Americanized Ajit picked up some very ah, narrow, specialized interests during his tenure at Verizon and has zero problem using the arm of government to pick winners and losers in our economy. (Hint: The winner is Verizon et al, and the loser is nearly everyone else)
I'm starting to see a common thread of fearmongering about Pence becoming president, and it's really starting to look like an idea that's being ah... Artificially disseminated. Nobody wants to see Pence as president, and the calculation is that we have now become so weary to Trumpism that we will just accept it as the new normal. Painting Trump as the devil we know and Pence as the devil we don't.
Well, we know both of them. We know how specially and uniquely rotten Trump is, and we know how averagely, status-quo rotten Pence is. In the choice of the lesser of two evils, it's clear who is the lesser and more easily contained. And it's clear that action must be taken. Do not become complacent. Do not accept the death of our nation and all its values. Do not give up on impeachment.
Notice who is the one that needs to get all defensive when "their man" is threatened. The person you are replying to didn't even mention Hillary, and there is nothing in the post to suggest that he voted for or otherwise supported her. Not that it would make a damn bit of difference to his actual argument. You see, some people just like to be partisan cheerleaders, hoping that the star quarterback for Their Team steals the show. And some people actually devote deep, independent, often painful thought to what our government should be doing to effectively run the nation. Guess which end of the spectrum you fall on.
It's more like: The market worked. Then the market quit working so well, due to anticompetitive practices. Then net neutrality regulations ensured the market would continue to work. Now Ajit "Verizon" Pai is dragging us backwards to more a more anticompetitive internet. And yes, the answer to anticompetitive behavior is government.
I remember wild strawberries in the middle latitudes of Finland being crazy awesome. They were quite a bit smaller than the ones you buy in stores - is that what you mean by grow well?
The MBTI doesn't require skill - of the similarities I noted, that wasn't one of them. The comparison I was trying to make was that both of these tests have their limitations and paint an incomplete picture of what they are trying to measure. And that a lot of people, from employers to Slashdot posters, would do well to keep that in mind.
When the cost of education has been rising steadily for decades, but we only see this precipitous drop in the past year or so, I think that's not a bad hypothesis.
I think it's pseudoscience on the same level that the MBTI is pseudoscience - not so much in what it does, as what people *think* it does. An MBTI or IQ test very accurately measures... your ability to take an MBTI or IQ test. The basic premise behind the tests - that personality can be reduced to four scores on four linear axes, or problem-solving ability reduced to a score on one linear axis - seem to be gross oversimplifications. Incomplete pictures, vis-a-vis the Platonic ideals you think you are measuring with these tests. Which is not to say that you won't find all sorts of correlations between peoples' MBTI and/or IQ, and how their lives turn out. It *is* to say that those correlations don't mean what you think they mean. An IQ test measures very specific types of problem solving, taken in a bubble, in a manner that almost no real-world problems are presented to a person.
FWIW, since you wanted to make this personal, I assume I did quite well on the IQ tests I was given in school. The result was always that they wanted to put me in GT or AP courses. But I am lacking in the sort of narcissism that would prompt me to go out of my way to take an IQ test at age 28, or join Mensa, or make a post like yours on Slashdot.
But our watch will be beautiful. It will be so big, and so beautiful, the people will have no choice but to buy it. Apple will be the #1 in portables... wearables... cybers... It's the greatest, believe me.
What I understand is that the main problem with Project Orion was radiation exposure on the ground. For a Mars mission, might it be possible to send the nuclear propulsion system up in pieces on conventional rockets, assemble them in space, and then let loose with the nukes when you are clear of Earth?
The book doesn't say anything about it directly. But there are a segment of Christians that honestly believe what he is saying - that physics itself is a manifestation of God. It's a progression from the watchmaker idea, where God creates physics and sets the world in motion, but isn't actually part of the watch himself. The honest/self-consistent Christians (there are very few) who believe this have had to forsake Biblical literalism as well, since a literal interpretation of the Bible contradicts with physics.
IIRC the iPod Touch didn't come out until after 2007. Sounds like he is trying to do this with the "classic"-style iPods that were even more walled off than the ones running iOS. Probably would be *easier* to junk everything and buy into whatever system Apple is offering this year. It would be *cheaper* to ditch Apple entirely and build a system based on Raspberry Pis or something else without a logo tax and planned obsolescence.
You're assuming there is some singular RPGesque attribute called Intelligence which governs every decision a person makes. Physically, that would manifest itself as something like more robust connections between brain neurons... I just pulled that out of my ass, but if there's a better explanation for the mechanism that governs singular intelligence, I'd love to hear it.
The other view is that "intelligence" refers to aptitude for a particular task. To me, that model more accurately describes what we see. You see people who pass calculus with honors, but they can't determine what to say to potential dates. You see people who can balance the books of their company, but they fail to grasp the basic principles (rules and physics) of driving. You see people who can design and build houses, but they can't give you a geopolitical analysis of the wars in Afghanistan. Even when all these people have access to the same information.
There is no doubt that a person's DNA can affect their aptitudes for these various tasks. But when you say there is some singular variable that raises or lowers all these aptitudes simultaneously, that seems like a coarse simplification. Ignoring the nuances does a disservice to your understanding.
What you have described is just the classical retail business being consolidated into a few big players, and then the various ups and downs those players have had. The business they all are in, retailing, hadn't changed significantly. With online retailers, it has. Not that traditional retailers won't have a place in the future, but they might only have half the revenue to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
They "print" money in the same way you "hit the gas" on a Tesla.
"Let's start praying" is the go-to response for people in situations where they feel impotent. There will certainly be people wanting to capitalize on these fears. I'd like to take an optimistic view of the level of altruism in the AI church, assume that they have people's best interests at heart... Then I look at the other examples given (Mormonism and Scientology), and frankly most other examples in history, and my gaze is adjusted.
When people think their best shot at peace or success is to pray to the AI-god, that works out very well for those in power. It implies that nobody is really responsible for AI and how it gets used. It implies that any attempts to regulate the use of AI are futile. Founding this church is actually a *bet* that things will play out in that manner. Its a bet that, before too long, we will have churches full people flogging themselves asking the AI-god why they can't get hired anywhere, or accepted for job training, or find a workable shelter, etc.
It's a rebranding of "faith" that appeals to the technically-minded and agnostic of the Xbox generation. Christianity has been archaic and square for a long time. Scientology's aesthetic is a little too 1950s sci-fi. New Age lost its cool around the same time the Bee Gees did. But now we have a new iteration, this one focused on mentally surviving videogame capitalism. Giving some kind of hope the developers will fix their hit detection or debuff the other guy's noob tube, so that one day you can make it off the first level.
Now, there are a lot of stupid people in the world, and for many of them, some kind of belief system and faith is beneficial psychologically. That is why we have had religions for all of human history, despite the problems they bring. But the Church of AI is NOT the way to go about it. Slavoj Zizek has spoken about ecology being used as the new religion, and he has his own problems with that. Namely, it seems to have a numbing effect, allowing people to think "I have recycled my soda can, now I don't need to push to have the coal plant shut down"... This is true I think, and very similar to what being in the Church of AI would do to someones mind. But I think ecology as religion would do way better than AI as religion... AFTER we fix all the big, systemic problems. THEN people can rest easy in their faith, when the soda can really is the biggest problem in our society.
It may not have officially-declared protection by a national army, but there's plenty of arms circulating among the drug cartels, Asian and Eastern European oligarchs, who have taken a keen interest in this currency. Not to mention the "legit" Western financial interests who are starting to do the same.
There are *plenty* of people willing to scheme, fight, and die over Bitcoin. It's just not the traditionally-deliniated one-to-one relationship between a nation and a currency. It's a more tangled web of intrigue.
Entrenched internet businesses like Netflix are lobbying against the changes because they won't like paying rent to the ISPs any more than the rest of us. I don't see any mortal threats to their dominance regardless of what the FCC does. And neither do they. Neutrality *is* key for giving new or smaller businesses a chance to compete, but it's certainly not a guarantee of their success. Unlike Ajit's proposed change, which guarantees plenty of new revenue for the ISPs, zero of which will get plowed back into infrastructure upgrades, or anything useful to anybody, besides Pai's buddies.
Crony capitalism at it's purest. Gives a bad name to the whole ideology. Now, that doesn't affect me much, as an independent thinker. So yes, I do want the organization that gave us the seven dirty words to protect us from from monopoly-abusing telecoms. That is a critical part of their job, and NOBODY else can do it. I advocate evaluating individual regulations based on what good they do for the people of this country, not how closely they hew to some inflexible pseudoreligious ideology, or someone's idea of polite conversation. Maybe if everyone took that approach, government could do something *useful*. Imagine that - a government that works for its people, not for its officeholders and special interests.
I'm curious where those numbers come from, and if they include netbooks. I'd argue that netbooks, especially Chromebooks, are more comparable to tablets than PCs or laptops. Form factor is part of it, but more important is how they get *used*, and who is doing the buying... Those are the things that, for me, determine which "market" a product is in. If I were "in the market" for an audio production workstation, I wouldn't consider a Chromebook. If I were in the market for a Christmas present that lets my nephew watch YouTube, I absolutely would consider one.
the only question is, will that be before or after they realize dollars are just tulips? Paper tulips at that!
Ah, and who do you think runs the Taxi Commission?
Legality aside, I'm not convinced that Uber is any *morally* worse than the guys they replace. Of course, both organizations are in dire need of improvement. The question for the rest of us is: which business model is easier to regulate, sue, whatever, into a state of fairness? I haven't been convinced that that's the commission-and-medallion model... LONG history of problems there. But I'm willing to hear arguments...
Somehow I don't think India's stance on net neutrality contributes to the high overall level of corruption in their government, or any of the other things you mentioned. But it is pretty clear that the Americanized Ajit picked up some very ah, narrow, specialized interests during his tenure at Verizon and has zero problem using the arm of government to pick winners and losers in our economy. (Hint: The winner is Verizon et al, and the loser is nearly everyone else)
I'm starting to see a common thread of fearmongering about Pence becoming president, and it's really starting to look like an idea that's being ah... Artificially disseminated. Nobody wants to see Pence as president, and the calculation is that we have now become so weary to Trumpism that we will just accept it as the new normal. Painting Trump as the devil we know and Pence as the devil we don't.
Well, we know both of them. We know how specially and uniquely rotten Trump is, and we know how averagely, status-quo rotten Pence is. In the choice of the lesser of two evils, it's clear who is the lesser and more easily contained. And it's clear that action must be taken. Do not become complacent. Do not accept the death of our nation and all its values. Do not give up on impeachment.
"you guys", "your side", etc etc...
Notice who is the one that needs to get all defensive when "their man" is threatened. The person you are replying to didn't even mention Hillary, and there is nothing in the post to suggest that he voted for or otherwise supported her. Not that it would make a damn bit of difference to his actual argument. You see, some people just like to be partisan cheerleaders, hoping that the star quarterback for Their Team steals the show. And some people actually devote deep, independent, often painful thought to what our government should be doing to effectively run the nation. Guess which end of the spectrum you fall on.
Jobs threw a chair too? Or did you mean Ballmer.
It's more like: The market worked. Then the market quit working so well, due to anticompetitive practices. Then net neutrality regulations ensured the market would continue to work. Now Ajit "Verizon" Pai is dragging us backwards to more a more anticompetitive internet. And yes, the answer to anticompetitive behavior is government.
I remember wild strawberries in the middle latitudes of Finland being crazy awesome. They were quite a bit smaller than the ones you buy in stores - is that what you mean by grow well?
INTP/INFP myself, depending on what mood I'm in when I take the test, and who wrote/administered the test.
The MBTI doesn't require skill - of the similarities I noted, that wasn't one of them. The comparison I was trying to make was that both of these tests have their limitations and paint an incomplete picture of what they are trying to measure. And that a lot of people, from employers to Slashdot posters, would do well to keep that in mind.
When the cost of education has been rising steadily for decades, but we only see this precipitous drop in the past year or so, I think that's not a bad hypothesis.
I think it's pseudoscience on the same level that the MBTI is pseudoscience - not so much in what it does, as what people *think* it does. An MBTI or IQ test very accurately measures... your ability to take an MBTI or IQ test. The basic premise behind the tests - that personality can be reduced to four scores on four linear axes, or problem-solving ability reduced to a score on one linear axis - seem to be gross oversimplifications. Incomplete pictures, vis-a-vis the Platonic ideals you think you are measuring with these tests. Which is not to say that you won't find all sorts of correlations between peoples' MBTI and/or IQ, and how their lives turn out. It *is* to say that those correlations don't mean what you think they mean. An IQ test measures very specific types of problem solving, taken in a bubble, in a manner that almost no real-world problems are presented to a person.
FWIW, since you wanted to make this personal, I assume I did quite well on the IQ tests I was given in school. The result was always that they wanted to put me in GT or AP courses. But I am lacking in the sort of narcissism that would prompt me to go out of my way to take an IQ test at age 28, or join Mensa, or make a post like yours on Slashdot.
But our watch will be beautiful. It will be so big, and so beautiful, the people will have no choice but to buy it. Apple will be the #1 in portables... wearables... cybers... It's the greatest, believe me.
What I understand is that the main problem with Project Orion was radiation exposure on the ground. For a Mars mission, might it be possible to send the nuclear propulsion system up in pieces on conventional rockets, assemble them in space, and then let loose with the nukes when you are clear of Earth?
The book doesn't say anything about it directly. But there are a segment of Christians that honestly believe what he is saying - that physics itself is a manifestation of God. It's a progression from the watchmaker idea, where God creates physics and sets the world in motion, but isn't actually part of the watch himself. The honest/self-consistent Christians (there are very few) who believe this have had to forsake Biblical literalism as well, since a literal interpretation of the Bible contradicts with physics.
IIRC the iPod Touch didn't come out until after 2007. Sounds like he is trying to do this with the "classic"-style iPods that were even more walled off than the ones running iOS. Probably would be *easier* to junk everything and buy into whatever system Apple is offering this year. It would be *cheaper* to ditch Apple entirely and build a system based on Raspberry Pis or something else without a logo tax and planned obsolescence.
You're assuming there is some singular RPGesque attribute called Intelligence which governs every decision a person makes. Physically, that would manifest itself as something like more robust connections between brain neurons... I just pulled that out of my ass, but if there's a better explanation for the mechanism that governs singular intelligence, I'd love to hear it.
The other view is that "intelligence" refers to aptitude for a particular task. To me, that model more accurately describes what we see. You see people who pass calculus with honors, but they can't determine what to say to potential dates. You see people who can balance the books of their company, but they fail to grasp the basic principles (rules and physics) of driving. You see people who can design and build houses, but they can't give you a geopolitical analysis of the wars in Afghanistan. Even when all these people have access to the same information.
There is no doubt that a person's DNA can affect their aptitudes for these various tasks. But when you say there is some singular variable that raises or lowers all these aptitudes simultaneously, that seems like a coarse simplification. Ignoring the nuances does a disservice to your understanding.
Bingo... Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't spacial/vision tasks comprise a huge chunk of IQ tests anyway?
What you have described is just the classical retail business being consolidated into a few big players, and then the various ups and downs those players have had. The business they all are in, retailing, hadn't changed significantly. With online retailers, it has. Not that traditional retailers won't have a place in the future, but they might only have half the revenue to work with.
Maybe if all the images are content-free memes, and you read at a second grade level.
Actually, that sounds exactly like Twitter.