The "atoms in the observable universe" school of thought holds considerably less merit these days, now that know we'll eventually be able to cheat with quantum computers:)
Without knowing what frequency the memory bus is running at, you can't make that calculation. And without saying more about cache hits/misses, pipeline refresh times, and how many cycles it takes to chew a given opcode, you can't really say the core is sitting idle, waiting for more data to arrive.
Besides, your concept of how the speed of light affects a computer is broken. The memory can't beat c, but neither can the core, so once the stream of data begins, there's no easy way for the core to outrun it. You're confusing latency with computational work.
I'm not seeing how writing to flash cards would stop piracy. If they're already mass producing copied hardware and software, what's to stop them from reverse engineering the custom flash card writer? What's to stop the pirates from running a business selling the service of writing games to your card for 50 cents each?
Hell, this might make it *easier* to pirate by making it all digital. Customer supplies all the equipment, pirate vendor downloads all the games, and the flash writer is probably cheaper than a cd burner and stockpile of CDs, too. They wouldn't need to haul a cart full of CDs around, just a laptop.
The short lifespan of the mouse is exactly the reason why we try things on them first. We get useful results in a useful time span! Getting mice to live to 6 years might take a decade (but at least 6 years), but getting bats to live to 35 could take a century (or at least 35 years).
Not surprisingly, the people seeking immortality today want it soon enough to be able to use it on themselves:) Spending decades watching to see if a bat has died yet won't help those the bat outlives.
"we do enough damage in the short lives we already have. I don't see much point in longer lives untill we have grown enough to do positive things with that time."
Turn the question around. Ask yourself if unthinking people who live only in the short term would change if they knew with absolute certainty that they would have to live with all their decisions - forever. Experience the results firsthand by living it yourself and seeing your descendants suffer, and feel them secondhand through the wrath of your peers if you've really botched things. Physical, mental, and social feedback.
It's been argued before that the ultimate lack of accountability that death grants is part of why people are so irresponsible. Party today, for tomorrow we die.
"Even scarier, we're several thousand years past due on the next ice age. This "global warming" thing could actually be the precursor to the beginning of the next, depending on which cadre of scientists you believe."
The ice age stats aren't quite that precise - there are up to tens of thousands of years of wiggle room. I'm more worried about the vast amounts of fresh water dumped into the arctic by this - fresh and salt water in the arctic actually stay seperate, and if the fresh water flow pushes far enough south it'll change the warm/cold ocean currents. It might not cause a global ice age, but it sure could make a big chunk of Europe uninhabitable (by making it as cold as other places at the same latitude are).
"They could have spelled out exactly what the president could and could not do in Iraq and exactly what the goals were"
Not really. They set the budget, and they had the power to give (or withhold) permission for Bush to attack. The votes on Patriot act, Afghanistan, and Iraq were seperate, by the way, and Iraq didn't have the same level of support the others did. The Iraq vote was 77-23 in the Senate and 296-133 in the House (source: http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/11/iraq.us/ ).
Because of that, Congress got to set prerequisites that had to be met before an attack, but they can't tell the President what to do once it's begun - he's the commander in chief. Hence, while Congress can't bitch about letting him attack, those who voted against it can, and those who voted for it can still bitch about the execution of that attack.
"And even then WHAT IS THE POINT? It seems like people just do this because THEY CAN and are not asking whether they SHOULD be doing this?"
What, should they not? These guys aren't patching together corpses and giving them inhuman life. They're messing around with computer hardware. The most they'll get out of it is a funny looking computer. There are plenty of more dangerous hobbies you could be complaining about.
Hmm. There's not nearly enough information in that article for us to judge. However, I'm leaning towards the opinion that if it's work on public buildings, and the game has those buildings in it, then his art's allowed to be shown. I don't think you can copyright the likeness of a building... and even if you could, as it's in public, showing the building as it is in real life would be Fair Use.
Further, if it's under a pseudonym in the first place, then 1) if they've got the signature in the game also then they're even giving him credit (attributing the work to him) and 2) he's got an uphill battle proving something is his and not the work of a copycat.
Further still, if he sprayed that stuff on the buildings without permission, he's shit out of luck. You can't copyright a crime, even if it counts as art and you're famous.
Man, people who complain about games not being hard anymore aren't challenging themselves or playing the right games. Try unlocking all the features of the new stuff sometime, for example.
I'm gradually finishing up the Weapon Master mode of Soul Calibur 2, and it's hard as hell. The further you go, the more the odds are stacked against you. It's like the Tetris of fighting games. Sure the first missions were easy... but the entire second half when they all reset to harder versions? ugh...
Extending the "we already have cars that drive themselves" line further, from a past perspective, we've had them even without the auto-parking ones.
The vast majority of modern cars have electric starters, cruise control, and a good automatic transmission (or even a continuously variable one). Many now have some form of all-wheel drive controlled automatically by the car, and anti-lock brakes. Most have speed limiters (though in the US the cap is set very very high).
Luxury models have electronic road maps of the entire country, which mark your current location in real-time based on your GPS coordinates. Some will let you pick a location and then draw you a route, and project arrows onto the windshield when you should turn (or speak "turn left"). Some are even tied into live traffic systems and will route around congestion.
Luxury models also often have proximity warnings, and the newest of the new will tap on the brakes for you, and, as in the parent post, park for you.
You still need to turn to wheel sometimes, but the rest of the driving is done for you.
I live in Rhode Island. In the RI/CN/MA area the minimum wage has been steadily rising for as long as I can remember. It just went up again recently in RI, it's higher in Massachusetts, and it's going to break $7 in Connecticut in a few months. The restaurant owners scream every time, but they also lose every time, and they're all still in business - they tend to employ a lot of school kids part-time anyway, who they're allowed to pay less. http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm is my source on the minimum wages. It also notes that some of the state rates (such as in Washington and Oregon) have been tied to rise with inflation. Using the inflation calculator at http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/inflateCPI.html , I note that the minimum wage increases in the last few years in RI have met inflation (and exceeded it in MA/CN).
Oh, it wouldn't be raised by law. It'd go up, basically, because all the *real* minimum wage jobs would vanish (the robots do those now, remember?). The remaining jobs would (theoretically) pay as much as they do now (more than minimum). The raise is a statistical illusion.
As for big business... well, the minimum wage already exists, so they've already mostly lost that battle. In some places there are actually "living wage" laws on top of that, pushing wages higher. Trying to *lower* the minimum wage is political suicide no matter how big a campaign donation it might buy you - and there's always someone willing to run against you on a "raise the minimum wage" platform if it'll get them elected.
Ah, but the European immigration right now is encouraged only because it benefits both parties - the Europeans get cheap workers for the menial jobs and the immigrants get better living conditions (and work). If they had robot workers, there go all the jobs the immigrants would be taking. Therefore, no more mass immigration.
In the nations that could afford to be buying up these robots, women *do* have a choice. In most of the cultures where they do not, welfare (and charity in general) are alien concepts. And in China, the government already limits reproduction (there, the birth control would not only be free, it would be mandatory).
Fire safety laws (and sanitation laws) would not allow three families in one room:)
I suppose it really depends on how cheap and effective the robots are. If they were VERY cheap and VERY effective, everyone in the world would have personal servants. In that case, we'd get the population problem without even having welfare (each adult would be able to support more children).
I should point out, though, that without freely allowed immigration, the world's population cap is effectively much lower than it would appear. Crowded regions would not be able to overflow into emptier-but-fertile regions. There would be wars instead, reducing the healthy/breeding population. The wars would be brutally asymmetrical, too - the invaders can't use the really big weapons (which would destroy the land they wish to take), but the defenders would have no such logical restrictions. This is excaberated by the near-future world economy - the fertile underpopulated regions are immensely wealthy compared to the overpopulated regions that would be invading them, and the invaders, suffering from their overcrowding, would by definition be less healthy, less well armed, less trained, etc. Further, the overcrowded regions would probably have been buying food from the other regions, who would of course stop providing it if invaded, starving off the attackers. It would be an incredibly nasty war.
Indeed. The level of "welfare" I'm envisioning, if it could even be called that, is one of bare subsistance if the recipient doesn't also work. A single small room, enough bland food to not starve, and plain servicable clothes (so as to not be nude). A living situation that'd barely be tolerable even today, even for the modern welfare system.
It's based on the assumption that 1) with robots doing all the work, the handouts are essentially free anyway, and 2) social pressure would be such that, ideally, no one would want to live that way. You're living in a closet eating rations while everyone else has all this cool stuff you can't afford - and even if you could, you couldn't fit it in your dingy little room. You're given enough to subsist, and if you're earning any money at all, you'll want to move out of that closet ASAP. You crave better food, and the pitying looks others give you as you walk by in your standard-issue government handout clothes is a constant motivator to better your situation. But at the same time, you know you won't starve, or freeze to death, so you've got a chance to follow your dreams.
Ideally, birth control would be free also. That, combined with being in a modern (and fairly rich and healthy) society, solves the population issue. This is already the case in Europe/USA/Canada, where the "natives" are barely having enough children to replace the elderly, and population growth is mainly a product of immigration. Ideally, the rest of the world will reach a similar situation as it all modernizes. Theoretically, some day having children will be *encouraged* in order to keep the population stable; or we'll all be immortal and it won't matter much anymore.
Yes, I'm seeing this from a USA-centric perspective, but the article is already assuming that the robot boom would start here. I'm just playing it forward to a science-fiction-y future.
This article's meat is based on some critical assumptions - flawed ones.
Firstly, like most doom-and-gloom technology-obsoletes-humans and technology-steals-jobs articles, the writer assumes all these jobs will be replaced *instantly*. This is clearly wrong, for several reasons.
First, the major corporations that'd be buying the robots are risk-averse. They'll let someone else try - and be burned by - such a scheme before they try it themselves. This might take place over ten or more years.
Secondly, he assumes that this entire block of jobs can be replaced all at once, which is also clearly wrong. They all require varying sophisticated levels of working artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot assume robots will become capable of handling *all* these jobs at the same time. AI is like nuclear fusion power plants, in ever since the 1950s experts have been saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and ten years later they're still saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and so on. It is likely that improvements will continue to be incremental, as they have been so far with industrial robots. Robots capable of taking voice orders from anyone who walks in the door, making your burger, and working the register are the kind of robots that will be perfected *last*.
Third, he assumes that a robot worker will be cheaper than a human worker, and that the rise of robots will not create any jobs to replace those jobs they displace. This is also clearly wrong. Human replacement will take more than a 1-to-1 ratio at first, as the first ones will not be as versatile as humans - they'll be more customized towards doing a specific task. Checkout line robots won't also be pulling shopping carts out of the parking lot and stocking the shelves, you'll need a few custom bots for each job. If the cost of buying and supplying power to a bunch of robots is more than the cost of a minimum-wage human employee, the robots won't get bought. Plus the diversity of robot types would slow the economy of scale of production, keeping the prices up until their widespread adoption.
When robots DO start to become worth buying, they'll need humans to keep them in service - robot repair is a hard enough AI problem that, again, that'd be the *last* type of job robots would be able to replace. As an additional bonus, the human repairmen would probably make a better salary than the minimum wage jobs being lost. There will also, of course, be a spike in the number of robot engineers and robot programmers and robot company advertising firms and robot company markters and salesmen and managers and so on. There will be more business for insurance companies - hey, you want to protect that robot investment! bots make great vandalism targets and it'll probably be illegal for them to defend themselves. There will be more business for lawyers - hey! this robot rolled over my foot, this robot dripped oil in my burger! - as, again, we expect the first models to be imperfect. And as human jobs would be those requiring more skill, there would be more teaching jobs.
Fourth, he forgets that such a massive change in our economic structure would also likely affect the minimum wage. If there are no grunt-work jobs left, then the new jobs would require a level of skill such that the minimum wage would be raised quite a bit - a huge benefit to those human workers with jobs one tier up from those being filled by robots.
Fifth, he doesn't look long term enough. Total automation of all the grunt work would increase the overall efficiency of the system to a level where it would become attractive to shift our economy to a slightly different system altogether. Sort of a hybrid socialist one - hey, if the farms are nearly free to run, might as well give every citizen some free rations of staple foods every month. If construction is nearly free, why have homelessness? Give those who can't afford a house a one-room economy apartment. The economy would still be capitalist at heart - because if you want to improve your situation, you'v
That's true. I kind of expect that these new uberchips will throttle down depending on the load they're under, though, like current laptop chips. Not only does it save power, it gives the thing some time to dissipate heat. While the diamond itself is great at that, there's still a bottleneck to how fast that can be transferred to the air/water being used to cool the chip.
It's really three taxes - federal income tax, state income tax, state sales tax, which is the only reason why it works at all. The feds get all their budget from income tax, and the states get it from both sides of local commerce.
So why is it fair for states to still doubletax? It's because they have no power to tax commerce outside their jurisdiction. So they tax ANY income earned in their jurisdiction (including that of "people who live in another state but work here") and ANY sales in their jurisdiction (including "people who live elsewhere but went shopping here"). Income/sales tax rates self-balance and you can't avoid paying state taxes by being clever and living (and shopping) in a no-sales-tax state and working in the neighboring no-income-tax state, which if done en-masse would cripple the budgets of both states. In theory the sum of the two taxes equals a fair amount, no matter what state you work in and what state you shop in.
Consolidating ALL taxes won't work. You'd have to basically eliminate the states entirely by passing an amendment to the constitution stripping the states of the right to collect taxes. Only reps/senators from the top 10 most populous states would support that - hence it is impossible for that amendment to pass in Congress (2/3 vote) or state convention (3/4 vote). Even if it did pass, would YOU trust the feds to collect the taxes fairly and then fairly distribute some of the haul back to the states?
Adding to the "universal logic" virus thought, that's an incredibly good idea Clarke had. I imagine the "universal logic" starts out by stating some basic principles and then building enough language from that to define a program.
The beauty of it? The halting problem:). For all but the simplest of programs, it's computationally impossible to tell if it'll crash. It follows from this that it would be very to even tell what it does, especially in this case where every program would be in a custom language learnable only by another computer.
In other words, the only way to find out what it does is to run it (working it out by hand, even for our current software, is already impossible)... and if you run one that's a virus, it becomes a battle of your security systems vs the virus. It's VERY possible to get shafted by an alien program in that way. Maybe it can't get access to your weapons, but if the sandbox you're trying to run it in isn't very good (or you didn't use a sandbox at all) BAM there go all your system resources and maybe all your memory, which might even fry some of the connected devices...
How many people like only one kind of gaming and have only one hobby? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Yeah, that's what I thought. This reads like it was written in the early 90s, and the "author" merely updated the names of a few games. It was narrow-minded then, and it's narrow-minded now.
Barring competing alien life and/or faster-than-light travel, the speed of light and the expanding universe make space effectively infinite. The bounds are moving away from us faster than we will ever be able to advance.
Matter is finite, but even the quantity in our solar system dwarfs that of the Earth. Plenty of room in this system for the near term - and I measure the near term on the scale of a thousand years - and there's a whole galaxy beyond that.
"Will the future of space exploration be dominated by names other than Russia and the USA?"
Why would the addition of new spacefaring nations exclude others? There is plenty of room in space. It is not a zero-sum game - successes do not have to come at the expense of others. Let all who have the desire to reach for the stars do so.
Slashdot Mirror
The "atoms in the observable universe" school of thought holds considerably less merit these days, now that know we'll eventually be able to cheat with quantum computers :)
Without knowing what frequency the memory bus is running at, you can't make that calculation. And without saying more about cache hits/misses, pipeline refresh times, and how many cycles it takes to chew a given opcode, you can't really say the core is sitting idle, waiting for more data to arrive.
Besides, your concept of how the speed of light affects a computer is broken. The memory can't beat c, but neither can the core, so once the stream of data begins, there's no easy way for the core to outrun it. You're confusing latency with computational work.
I'm not seeing how writing to flash cards would stop piracy. If they're already mass producing copied hardware and software, what's to stop them from reverse engineering the custom flash card writer? What's to stop the pirates from running a business selling the service of writing games to your card for 50 cents each?
Hell, this might make it *easier* to pirate by making it all digital. Customer supplies all the equipment, pirate vendor downloads all the games, and the flash writer is probably cheaper than a cd burner and stockpile of CDs, too. They wouldn't need to haul a cart full of CDs around, just a laptop.
The short lifespan of the mouse is exactly the reason why we try things on them first. We get useful results in a useful time span! Getting mice to live to 6 years might take a decade (but at least 6 years), but getting bats to live to 35 could take a century (or at least 35 years).
:) Spending decades watching to see if a bat has died yet won't help those the bat outlives.
Not surprisingly, the people seeking immortality today want it soon enough to be able to use it on themselves
"we do enough damage in the short lives we already have. I don't see much point in longer lives untill we have grown enough to do positive things with that time."
Turn the question around. Ask yourself if unthinking people who live only in the short term would change if they knew with absolute certainty that they would have to live with all their decisions - forever. Experience the results firsthand by living it yourself and seeing your descendants suffer, and feel them secondhand through the wrath of your peers if you've really botched things. Physical, mental, and social feedback.
It's been argued before that the ultimate lack of accountability that death grants is part of why people are so irresponsible. Party today, for tomorrow we die.
"Even scarier, we're several thousand years past due on the next ice age. This "global warming" thing could actually be the precursor to the beginning of the next, depending on which cadre of scientists you believe."
The ice age stats aren't quite that precise - there are up to tens of thousands of years of wiggle room. I'm more worried about the vast amounts of fresh water dumped into the arctic by this - fresh and salt water in the arctic actually stay seperate, and if the fresh water flow pushes far enough south it'll change the warm/cold ocean currents. It might not cause a global ice age, but it sure could make a big chunk of Europe uninhabitable (by making it as cold as other places at the same latitude are).
"They could have spelled out exactly what the president could and could not do in Iraq and exactly what the goals were"
/ ).
Not really. They set the budget, and they had the power to give (or withhold) permission for Bush to attack. The votes on Patriot act, Afghanistan, and Iraq were seperate, by the way, and Iraq didn't have the same level of support the others did. The Iraq vote was 77-23 in the Senate and 296-133 in the House (source: http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/10/11/iraq.us
Because of that, Congress got to set prerequisites that had to be met before an attack, but they can't tell the President what to do once it's begun - he's the commander in chief. Hence, while Congress can't bitch about letting him attack, those who voted against it can, and those who voted for it can still bitch about the execution of that attack.
"And even then WHAT IS THE POINT? It seems like people just do this because THEY CAN and are not asking whether they SHOULD be doing this?"
What, should they not? These guys aren't patching together corpses and giving them inhuman life. They're messing around with computer hardware. The most they'll get out of it is a funny looking computer. There are plenty of more dangerous hobbies you could be complaining about.
Hmm. There's not nearly enough information in that article for us to judge. However, I'm leaning towards the opinion that if it's work on public buildings, and the game has those buildings in it, then his art's allowed to be shown. I don't think you can copyright the likeness of a building... and even if you could, as it's in public, showing the building as it is in real life would be Fair Use.
Further, if it's under a pseudonym in the first place, then 1) if they've got the signature in the game also then they're even giving him credit (attributing the work to him) and 2) he's got an uphill battle proving something is his and not the work of a copycat.
Further still, if he sprayed that stuff on the buildings without permission, he's shit out of luck. You can't copyright a crime, even if it counts as art and you're famous.
Man, people who complain about games not being hard anymore aren't challenging themselves or playing the right games. Try unlocking all the features of the new stuff sometime, for example.
I'm gradually finishing up the Weapon Master mode of Soul Calibur 2, and it's hard as hell. The further you go, the more the odds are stacked against you. It's like the Tetris of fighting games. Sure the first missions were easy... but the entire second half when they all reset to harder versions? ugh...
A testament to SCO's PR *failure* maybe. Unless their goal was to get everyone to hate them :)
No, it *is* scary to them, because it demonstrates that the manufacturer can use the free bios too. Then Phoenix doesn't get paid anymore.
Extending the "we already have cars that drive themselves" line further, from a past perspective, we've had them even without the auto-parking ones.
The vast majority of modern cars have electric starters, cruise control, and a good automatic transmission (or even a continuously variable one). Many now have some form of all-wheel drive controlled automatically by the car, and anti-lock brakes. Most have speed limiters (though in the US the cap is set very very high).
Luxury models have electronic road maps of the entire country, which mark your current location in real-time based on your GPS coordinates. Some will let you pick a location and then draw you a route, and project arrows onto the windshield when you should turn (or speak "turn left"). Some are even tied into live traffic systems and will route around congestion.
Luxury models also often have proximity warnings, and the newest of the new will tap on the brakes for you, and, as in the parent post, park for you.
You still need to turn to wheel sometimes, but the rest of the driving is done for you.
I live in Rhode Island. In the RI/CN/MA area the minimum wage has been steadily rising for as long as I can remember. It just went up again recently in RI, it's higher in Massachusetts, and it's going to break $7 in Connecticut in a few months. The restaurant owners scream every time, but they also lose every time, and they're all still in business - they tend to employ a lot of school kids part-time anyway, who they're allowed to pay less. http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/america.htm is my source on the minimum wages. It also notes that some of the state rates (such as in Washington and Oregon) have been tied to rise with inflation. Using the inflation calculator at http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/bu2/inflateCPI.html , I note that the minimum wage increases in the last few years in RI have met inflation (and exceeded it in MA/CN).
Oh, it wouldn't be raised by law. It'd go up, basically, because all the *real* minimum wage jobs would vanish (the robots do those now, remember?). The remaining jobs would (theoretically) pay as much as they do now (more than minimum). The raise is a statistical illusion.
As for big business... well, the minimum wage already exists, so they've already mostly lost that battle. In some places there are actually "living wage" laws on top of that, pushing wages higher. Trying to *lower* the minimum wage is political suicide no matter how big a campaign donation it might buy you - and there's always someone willing to run against you on a "raise the minimum wage" platform if it'll get them elected.
Ah, but the European immigration right now is encouraged only because it benefits both parties - the Europeans get cheap workers for the menial jobs and the immigrants get better living conditions (and work). If they had robot workers, there go all the jobs the immigrants would be taking. Therefore, no more mass immigration.
:)
In the nations that could afford to be buying up these robots, women *do* have a choice. In most of the cultures where they do not, welfare (and charity in general) are alien concepts. And in China, the government already limits reproduction (there, the birth control would not only be free, it would be mandatory).
Fire safety laws (and sanitation laws) would not allow three families in one room
I suppose it really depends on how cheap and effective the robots are. If they were VERY cheap and VERY effective, everyone in the world would have personal servants. In that case, we'd get the population problem without even having welfare (each adult would be able to support more children).
I should point out, though, that without freely allowed immigration, the world's population cap is effectively much lower than it would appear. Crowded regions would not be able to overflow into emptier-but-fertile regions. There would be wars instead, reducing the healthy/breeding population. The wars would be brutally asymmetrical, too - the invaders can't use the really big weapons (which would destroy the land they wish to take), but the defenders would have no such logical restrictions. This is excaberated by the near-future world economy - the fertile underpopulated regions are immensely wealthy compared to the overpopulated regions that would be invading them, and the invaders, suffering from their overcrowding, would by definition be less healthy, less well armed, less trained, etc. Further, the overcrowded regions would probably have been buying food from the other regions, who would of course stop providing it if invaded, starving off the attackers. It would be an incredibly nasty war.
Indeed. The level of "welfare" I'm envisioning, if it could even be called that, is one of bare subsistance if the recipient doesn't also work. A single small room, enough bland food to not starve, and plain servicable clothes (so as to not be nude). A living situation that'd barely be tolerable even today, even for the modern welfare system.
It's based on the assumption that 1) with robots doing all the work, the handouts are essentially free anyway, and 2) social pressure would be such that, ideally, no one would want to live that way. You're living in a closet eating rations while everyone else has all this cool stuff you can't afford - and even if you could, you couldn't fit it in your dingy little room. You're given enough to subsist, and if you're earning any money at all, you'll want to move out of that closet ASAP. You crave better food, and the pitying looks others give you as you walk by in your standard-issue government handout clothes is a constant motivator to better your situation. But at the same time, you know you won't starve, or freeze to death, so you've got a chance to follow your dreams.
Ideally, birth control would be free also. That, combined with being in a modern (and fairly rich and healthy) society, solves the population issue. This is already the case in Europe/USA/Canada, where the "natives" are barely having enough children to replace the elderly, and population growth is mainly a product of immigration. Ideally, the rest of the world will reach a similar situation as it all modernizes. Theoretically, some day having children will be *encouraged* in order to keep the population stable; or we'll all be immortal and it won't matter much anymore.
Yes, I'm seeing this from a USA-centric perspective, but the article is already assuming that the robot boom would start here. I'm just playing it forward to a science-fiction-y future.
in other news, many job openings posted today for selling anti-robot insurance to the eldery...
This article's meat is based on some critical assumptions - flawed ones.
Firstly, like most doom-and-gloom technology-obsoletes-humans and technology-steals-jobs articles, the writer assumes all these jobs will be replaced *instantly*. This is clearly wrong, for several reasons.
First, the major corporations that'd be buying the robots are risk-averse. They'll let someone else try - and be burned by - such a scheme before they try it themselves. This might take place over ten or more years.
Secondly, he assumes that this entire block of jobs can be replaced all at once, which is also clearly wrong. They all require varying sophisticated levels of working artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot assume robots will become capable of handling *all* these jobs at the same time. AI is like nuclear fusion power plants, in ever since the 1950s experts have been saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and ten years later they're still saying "it'll be ready in 10 years", and so on. It is likely that improvements will continue to be incremental, as they have been so far with industrial robots. Robots capable of taking voice orders from anyone who walks in the door, making your burger, and working the register are the kind of robots that will be perfected *last*.
Third, he assumes that a robot worker will be cheaper than a human worker, and that the rise of robots will not create any jobs to replace those jobs they displace. This is also clearly wrong. Human replacement will take more than a 1-to-1 ratio at first, as the first ones will not be as versatile as humans - they'll be more customized towards doing a specific task. Checkout line robots won't also be pulling shopping carts out of the parking lot and stocking the shelves, you'll need a few custom bots for each job. If the cost of buying and supplying power to a bunch of robots is more than the cost of a minimum-wage human employee, the robots won't get bought. Plus the diversity of robot types would slow the economy of scale of production, keeping the prices up until their widespread adoption.
When robots DO start to become worth buying, they'll need humans to keep them in service - robot repair is a hard enough AI problem that, again, that'd be the *last* type of job robots would be able to replace. As an additional bonus, the human repairmen would probably make a better salary than the minimum wage jobs being lost. There will also, of course, be a spike in the number of robot engineers and robot programmers and robot company advertising firms and robot company markters and salesmen and managers and so on. There will be more business for insurance companies - hey, you want to protect that robot investment! bots make great vandalism targets and it'll probably be illegal for them to defend themselves. There will be more business for lawyers - hey! this robot rolled over my foot, this robot dripped oil in my burger! - as, again, we expect the first models to be imperfect. And as human jobs would be those requiring more skill, there would be more teaching jobs.
Fourth, he forgets that such a massive change in our economic structure would also likely affect the minimum wage. If there are no grunt-work jobs left, then the new jobs would require a level of skill such that the minimum wage would be raised quite a bit - a huge benefit to those human workers with jobs one tier up from those being filled by robots.
Fifth, he doesn't look long term enough. Total automation of all the grunt work would increase the overall efficiency of the system to a level where it would become attractive to shift our economy to a slightly different system altogether. Sort of a hybrid socialist one - hey, if the farms are nearly free to run, might as well give every citizen some free rations of staple foods every month. If construction is nearly free, why have homelessness? Give those who can't afford a house a one-room economy apartment. The economy would still be capitalist at heart - because if you want to improve your situation, you'v
That's true. I kind of expect that these new uberchips will throttle down depending on the load they're under, though, like current laptop chips. Not only does it save power, it gives the thing some time to dissipate heat. While the diamond itself is great at that, there's still a bottleneck to how fast that can be transferred to the air/water being used to cool the chip.
It's really three taxes - federal income tax, state income tax, state sales tax, which is the only reason why it works at all. The feds get all their budget from income tax, and the states get it from both sides of local commerce.
So why is it fair for states to still doubletax? It's because they have no power to tax commerce outside their jurisdiction. So they tax ANY income earned in their jurisdiction (including that of "people who live in another state but work here") and ANY sales in their jurisdiction (including "people who live elsewhere but went shopping here"). Income/sales tax rates self-balance and you can't avoid paying state taxes by being clever and living (and shopping) in a no-sales-tax state and working in the neighboring no-income-tax state, which if done en-masse would cripple the budgets of both states. In theory the sum of the two taxes equals a fair amount, no matter what state you work in and what state you shop in.
Consolidating ALL taxes won't work. You'd have to basically eliminate the states entirely by passing an amendment to the constitution stripping the states of the right to collect taxes. Only reps/senators from the top 10 most populous states would support that - hence it is impossible for that amendment to pass in Congress (2/3 vote) or state convention (3/4 vote). Even if it did pass, would YOU trust the feds to collect the taxes fairly and then fairly distribute some of the haul back to the states?
Adding to the "universal logic" virus thought, that's an incredibly good idea Clarke had. I imagine the "universal logic" starts out by stating some basic principles and then building enough language from that to define a program.
:). For all but the simplest of programs, it's computationally impossible to tell if it'll crash. It follows from this that it would be very to even tell what it does, especially in this case where every program would be in a custom language learnable only by another computer.
... and if you run one that's a virus, it becomes a battle of your security systems vs the virus. It's VERY possible to get shafted by an alien program in that way. Maybe it can't get access to your weapons, but if the sandbox you're trying to run it in isn't very good (or you didn't use a sandbox at all) BAM there go all your system resources and maybe all your memory, which might even fry some of the connected devices...
The beauty of it? The halting problem
In other words, the only way to find out what it does is to run it (working it out by hand, even for our current software, is already impossible)
How many people like only one kind of gaming and have only one hobby? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Yeah, that's what I thought. This reads like it was written in the early 90s, and the "author" merely updated the names of a few games. It was narrow-minded then, and it's narrow-minded now.
Barring competing alien life and/or faster-than-light travel, the speed of light and the expanding universe make space effectively infinite. The bounds are moving away from us faster than we will ever be able to advance.
Matter is finite, but even the quantity in our solar system dwarfs that of the Earth. Plenty of room in this system for the near term - and I measure the near term on the scale of a thousand years - and there's a whole galaxy beyond that.
"Will the future of space exploration be dominated by names other than Russia and the USA?"
Why would the addition of new spacefaring nations exclude others? There is plenty of room in space. It is not a zero-sum game - successes do not have to come at the expense of others. Let all who have the desire to reach for the stars do so.