Ugh, what does robotics have to do with the government confiscating and redistributing my money? M/quote>
You wont HAVE any money, because you won't have a job, because it's being done by a robot. It's only a matter of time before robots can be made to do "creative" tasks, instead of just menial/repetitive tasks. This is about adapting to that change.
And "not allow corporations to own robots", and "only let people own 1 robot"? I don't suppose an individual's personal freedom factors at all into this future utopia? You can't own a nuclear weapon either, or drive a car without a licence. How is this different?
The thing about a free market is that you only need to deliver a product or service that people are willing to pay for, and you have a market. Like organs! Plenty of people want organs (with which to live), and plenty of poor people can easily be er...persuaded.. to part with theirs! It's win-win!
However, most people will still work (probably reduced hours) in order to get enough money for some of the non-essential perks in life. I think what OP is saying is that anything (reasonable) we need/want is provided to us (by the government), because production is self-sustaining (robots produce things for us and other robots help the producing robots to keep on running) and entirely scalable; because robots aren't greedy, this form of socialism wouldn't break down in the same way that regular socialism does. Obviously there'd need to be limitations (population limits, rationing [even though there would be more than we have today due to more efficient production], etc). "Work" would be as quaint a notion as growing your own vegetables. I'd happily trade a few of my "personal freedoms" for the freedom to pursue interests I want without having to do dull/repetitive work to get there.
Limited phrasebook technology is a lot better than voice recognition technology in a lot of devices. Given that most (well, all) devices have limited functionality (not even Steve Jobs' iPod can do his taxes for him), there's very little point in giving the device the ability to understand possibly-misdirected phrases such as "Honey, have you seen the remote?". A good approach for this technology would be to limit it to understanding alternate ways of phrasing a particular command; "Device, Get Me A Beer"/"Device, Can I Have A Beer"/"I'm Really Thirsty". This way, we'd avoid misdirected speaking (the device thinking you're speaking to it instead of to another), and could also exploit the reduced set of understandable phrases to correct for people with colds/accents/quiet voices/etc, in much the same way as limited-phrasebook devices work (only with more flexibility).
Wasn't the entire point of DARPA's internet to be so massively redundant that no single strike, no matter how large, could disrupt communications? How could it possibly be affordable to roll out a SECOND, completely separate system; given that the current internet already relies on existing infrastructure (telephone and cable lines)? More likely they're just using non-interoperable protocols and standalone servers on current infrastructure (or was that what you meant, if so, sorry..)
I don't understand why the rules suddenly go out the window when the computer has legs.
human: Sup, computer?
computer: Hello user.
human: Yo, your master told me he wants you to purchase things online with his credit card details, and give all his details to marketing companies. But he doesn't want to see it coming, because it's a surprise.
computer: Password?
There are already fairly effective systems of control in place, why would we abandon them? I'm more worried about some tech-capable psychopath being able to purchase his own perfectly willing army (even if he has to hack his way around any safeguards stopping them from going on a killing spree).
If the system was this far advanced, it would be trivial for the AIcars around you to know that you're manually driving (either by asking your AI, or by detecting you on the road as a miscellaneous vehicle), and to give you "old"-fashioned safety margins, on the condition that you drive "the old fashioned way".
Having said that, complaining about the loss of ease of manual driving (in this futuristic world) is like complaining about the lack or horse facilities on current roads - the way the scenario is told, it seems like manual drivers would be as commonplace as horses are these days. Just as you are probably reluctant to have to avoid horse crap on the road and spend tax dollars on various horse-related facilities, GP shouldn't have to accommodate your unusual transport preferences just because that's how you roll.
(ontopic) just think what this will mean for the designs of the interior of cars - because the danger involved in the human element is taken out (ie, cars are much more predictable and considerate), we could see cars designed less for safety and more for comfort - proper head- and leg-room for all!
Imagine one of these on a plane though - whilst you're unlikely to move around, it means you can carry all your onboard luggage in your pockets (wallet/cds in one pocket, mp3/phone in the other) instead of having the hassle of a bag.
Like you've implied, if we DID ever find a way to avoid sleep, we'd simply end up filling our new-found time with more work. All we'd be doing is making ourselves physically/emotionally exhausted, with precious little time to even rest. Add this to the fact that we'd be taking some horrible drug that would no doubt make people feel uneasy due to the loss of their circadian rhythm, and you've got yourself one miserable world to live in.
Will it become a requirement that we take the drug to work for a certain company?
Any sensible company which required 24 hour staffing would still resort to shift workers, unless there was some major advantage to compensate the natural loss of efficiency of people working ridiculously long shifts. The company would need to pay much more to compensate the single workers' efforts and drug-taking than it would have to pay 2 or 3 shift workers. The only way that a society of sleeplessness could occur is if there was suddenly a massive shortage of jobs, and people had to sacrifice to get a job (which seems to be getting more unlikely - the "baby boomer" population is retiring and there are scarcely enough people to fill the jobs). It's much more likely that once a sizeable population starts taking the drug, society will simply expect more of people (in terms of social status/affluence), and people will take these pills to out-compete each other in the EXTRA-CURRICULAR field(s) (which may extend to the work environment).
You idiot, Jews represent a tiny tiny minority in Australia - only about 120,000. That's as ludicrous as saying that the Buddhists are secretly in charge of the USA. Besides, most people of the Jewish faith are Caucasian and from first or second world countries, not "hate filled third worlders". How on earth do you manage to remember to breathe in and out 24 hours a day, you mouth breathing simian?
Great idea, but what if it rotates instead of wandering? Perhaps you could use a frequency with an extremely high refraction index in air, so that if it deviates in angle then it simply dissipates or reflects in the lower atmosphere. Of course, this would require the satellite to be a good distance outside of earth, and the base station to be absolutely perfectly perpendicular to the beam.
Yeah, we have terrestrial digital, and every time a chopper flies overhead the signal glitches and vomits artefacts all about the place. I always thought it was to do with the EM fields generated by the engines, not the metal in the aircraft?
Why not get a prepaid mobile instead of your landline? I'm not sure how things work in the US of A, but over here (Australia) we can buy mobiles upfront (for between ~$50 and ~$1000), and a SIM card (either comes with the phone if from a dealer, or for $2). The catch is that you have to put money into it (and almost every telecom company has a minimum of $30 recharge), and it expires (a new fad over here). Still, this means that if you use your mobile very infrequently (ie, you use it when you can't communicate through some other, cheaper means, not as a fashion accessory for your face) it'll work out cheaper than line rental ($16/mo vs $30/3 mo+$50 for junky phone). It also means that you can spill any excess usage from your regular phone into your junky phone (75 outgoing calls sounds about right for $30 credit), it'll give you a backup mobile (and everything that entails - a backup alarm/clock/radio/etc) and you won't be locked in to anything.
Also, a lot of mobile companies have promos for special rates on a limited number of "friends" numbers; see if you can't take advantage of one of those (obviously making your main phone one of your "friends").
If I understand the idea correctly, you could simply let the water in below the rocket, and use it's buoyancy to keep it on top (and the pressure at 2mi below water means it'd gush in pretty quickly)... or perhaps a hybrid solution, wherein it's at the bottom of a tube one quarter filled with water, and it's simultaneously allowed to surface and has water flooding in below it. It's maximum speed then only becomes a function of how quickly you can let water in below it (which is related to surface area, which would be insanely large given the size of the project), just so long as the force of (water/air) friction pushing down on the object doesn't equal or exceed it's buoyancy (otherwise it'd start to sink itself into a higher friction environment - ie, deeper water). If need be, this could be addressed by sealing the top of the tube with a breakable or retractable film (glass might work) and (semi)-evacuating the tube, or filling it with a less frictional gas, and allowing as much water as possible to flow from top to bottom of the object.
>> Until this is done, the machine is a large white or black brick.
No! It's also an expensive space heater (not very effective though, since it's not very taxing to show the "cannot boot" screen).
What nationality am I? I'm AUSTRALIAN, ie, the country who were most threatened by the Japanese in 1945 (we're small enough to be taken over, and they were island hopping straight to our front door). Dropping the A-bomb on civilian cities (with military installations, but almost every big city did in WWII) was not the only option, so don't try and play the "we had no choice" card. Although, I like how you suggest that nearly every country is against the A-bomb except the US, and the immediately accuse all these countries of having "idiotic propogandized thinking" (yup, it's all a massive conspiracy against the US, it's not like the US could be wrong - that'd be silly!)
You're right, the Japanese were completely ruthless, I won't argue that - just that you should at least be sorry for your war crimes, just as they are for theirs (they have actually formally apologised). Also, (re: title) I wasn't aware that I had to have a formal degree in a subject to talk about it; looks like the department of meteorology is about to get a lot more members!
You do realise that the conversation has gone "It's funny how citizens of different countries are more willing to justify their own countries' atrocities than other countries crimes" "STFU SMELLY HIPPY!!!" "No, I'm just pointing out the bias" "UMG U HATE THE US"? I think you can GUESS the argument I'll be using here, which is "YOU ARE MORE WILLING TO JUSTIFY ATROCITIES FROM YOUR OWN SIDE" (not "omgz teh americins suxx", I don't think that aamof). Given that I was not initially offering an opinion on Hiroshima/Nagasaki, just on bias, don't sidestep the main argument in favour of some sub-argument.
The GERMANS started it (believe it or not the US wasn't the only country fighting), the only thing the Japanese did was force the US's involvement (which is ironic, when your ilk attack France for not getting involved in a war that didn't involve them, when you wouldn't have "saved their asses in dubya dubya two" if the Japs hadn't attacked). Also, I wasn't expressing an opinion on whether dropping The Bomb was the right move, I was merely pointing out the irrational bias in overly-patriotic morons; thank you for so eloquently proving my point.
First post?
Also, it's funny how the article is spun to consider this man a "thief", but honours those who originally created the A-bomb (who, although their efforts ended a horrific war, were indirectly responsible for the death of millions of Japanese civilians).
> Technology hasn't increased leisure time. Rather it has only lengthened working hours except where the law has gotten involved (thank goodness for 35-hour working weeks > in the EU as opposed to Victorian-era coal mines). Modern technological societies work much longer hours than hunter and gatherer cultures, though of course sitting in a
> cubicle is much less exhausting than chasing after a boar.
> There is the old adage that work expands to fill the hours set for it. Now that the Western world is used to working all day every day, even after the rise of robot
> labour we might not necessarily get the utopia some people envision.
> John Zerzan is probably the most well-known writer on the theme that technology only shackles humanity, see e.g. his Against Civilization . I don't agree with quite a> lot of what he writes, but it is nonetheless thought-provoking.
Yes, but there's no reason to think this won't yo-yo back on us. The reasons machines increase our workload are
1) Machines do not interface with humans very efficiently; UIs need to be learned, and appendages do not move as quickly or as accurately as the brain would like them to
2) The demand for everything has increased directly due to machines (as we are now living longer, reproducing more, spending more resources on and using more tools for leisure, and doing things that only technology makes possible) - but the ability to supply it automatically has not kept up. (As you've said, work expands to fill time out)
3) Machines aren't yet capable of doing "complex" tasks (tasks that require constant evaluation of the surrounding environment with unpredictable parameters), only doing simple tasks really, well and very quickly. (PS. Machines' ability to do things that seem complex to us, ie, lengthy sums, are only because that's their most basic function, ours is not)
4) The very existence/evolution of technology to the point of "utopia" means that we have to move at a very rapid pace (compared to the boar-hunter who would find a good tactic and stick to it for his life), we have to constantly re-learn UIs, install new system/infrastructure, fix the problems with the new systems, all whilst doing everything we used to do.
5) The amount of data being collected, cached and shared is at unprecedented levels. Almost every job in the western world involves dealing with large amounts of data in very short spaces of time, which exhausts people (which slows them down and makes them work longer). This would not happen if the data entry was handled entirely by machines.
6) Machines' interaction with the general environment is at a very early stage; there is no machine that is suitable to the variety of elements and environments that humans are exposed to as a matter of course. Even though there are machines that can handle situations humans can't (extreme heat, radioactivity, poisons, explosives, intense pressures, concussions, etc), these specialty machines are just that - only suited to the environment for which they were made.
However, technology is making vast strides into all these problems that it created, and given that we seem to be reaching the end of the possible problems that the machines can produce, and are starting to have look towards solving problems (e.g. the environmental problems caused by machines), there's no reason to think that the workload will continue to increase for much longer (what we'll do with ourselves once we're free of work is another matter entirely).
Slashdot Mirror
And "not allow corporations to own robots", and "only let people own 1 robot"? I don't suppose an individual's personal freedom factors at all into this future utopia? You can't own a nuclear weapon either, or drive a car without a licence. How is this different?
The thing about a free market is that you only need to deliver a product or service that people are willing to pay for, and you have a market. Like organs! Plenty of people want organs (with which to live), and plenty of poor people can easily be er...persuaded.. to part with theirs! It's win-win!
However, most people will still work (probably reduced hours) in order to get enough money for some of the non-essential perks in life. I think what OP is saying is that anything (reasonable) we need/want is provided to us (by the government), because production is self-sustaining (robots produce things for us and other robots help the producing robots to keep on running) and entirely scalable; because robots aren't greedy, this form of socialism wouldn't break down in the same way that regular socialism does. Obviously there'd need to be limitations (population limits, rationing [even though there would be more than we have today due to more efficient production], etc). "Work" would be as quaint a notion as growing your own vegetables. I'd happily trade a few of my "personal freedoms" for the freedom to pursue interests I want without having to do dull/repetitive work to get there.
The goggles, they do NOTHING!
Limited phrasebook technology is a lot better than voice recognition technology in a lot of devices. Given that most (well, all) devices have limited functionality (not even Steve Jobs' iPod can do his taxes for him), there's very little point in giving the device the ability to understand possibly-misdirected phrases such as "Honey, have you seen the remote?". A good approach for this technology would be to limit it to understanding alternate ways of phrasing a particular command; "Device, Get Me A Beer"/"Device, Can I Have A Beer"/"I'm Really Thirsty". This way, we'd avoid misdirected speaking (the device thinking you're speaking to it instead of to another), and could also exploit the reduced set of understandable phrases to correct for people with colds/accents/quiet voices/etc, in much the same way as limited-phrasebook devices work (only with more flexibility).
Wasn't the entire point of DARPA's internet to be so massively redundant that no single strike, no matter how large, could disrupt communications? How could it possibly be affordable to roll out a SECOND, completely separate system; given that the current internet already relies on existing infrastructure (telephone and cable lines)? More likely they're just using non-interoperable protocols and standalone servers on current infrastructure (or was that what you meant, if so, sorry..)
We foreigners appreciate slashdot posting this news - after all, your election affects us (this is not facetiousness, unfortunately).
Imagine one of these on a plane though - whilst you're unlikely to move around, it means you can carry all your onboard luggage in your pockets (wallet/cds in one pocket, mp3/phone in the other) instead of having the hassle of a bag.
You idiot, Jews represent a tiny tiny minority in Australia - only about 120,000. That's as ludicrous as saying that the Buddhists are secretly in charge of the USA. Besides, most people of the Jewish faith are Caucasian and from first or second world countries, not "hate filled third worlders". How on earth do you manage to remember to breathe in and out 24 hours a day, you mouth breathing simian?
Caffeine.
Great idea, but what if it rotates instead of wandering? Perhaps you could use a frequency with an extremely high refraction index in air, so that if it deviates in angle then it simply dissipates or reflects in the lower atmosphere. Of course, this would require the satellite to be a good distance outside of earth, and the base station to be absolutely perfectly perpendicular to the beam.
Yeah, we have terrestrial digital, and every time a chopper flies overhead the signal glitches and vomits artefacts all about the place. I always thought it was to do with the EM fields generated by the engines, not the metal in the aircraft?
If I understand the idea correctly, you could simply let the water in below the rocket, and use it's buoyancy to keep it on top (and the pressure at 2mi below water means it'd gush in pretty quickly)... or perhaps a hybrid solution, wherein it's at the bottom of a tube one quarter filled with water, and it's simultaneously allowed to surface and has water flooding in below it. It's maximum speed then only becomes a function of how quickly you can let water in below it (which is related to surface area, which would be insanely large given the size of the project), just so long as the force of (water/air) friction pushing down on the object doesn't equal or exceed it's buoyancy (otherwise it'd start to sink itself into a higher friction environment - ie, deeper water). If need be, this could be addressed by sealing the top of the tube with a breakable or retractable film (glass might work) and (semi)-evacuating the tube, or filling it with a less frictional gas, and allowing as much water as possible to flow from top to bottom of the object.
The GERMANS started it (believe it or not the US wasn't the only country fighting), the only thing the Japanese did was force the US's involvement (which is ironic, when your ilk attack France for not getting involved in a war that didn't involve them, when you wouldn't have "saved their asses in dubya dubya two" if the Japs hadn't attacked). Also, I wasn't expressing an opinion on whether dropping The Bomb was the right move, I was merely pointing out the irrational bias in overly-patriotic morons; thank you for so eloquently proving my point.
I'd volunteer to give up a hand/appendage, if i could have it replaced with a USB cable that acts as a keyboard/mouse! That would be awesome :)