Notice the situation we've gotten into here. "Program A is wasteful; we should cut it!" "You think A is wasteful? We should cut B instead!" "Well, what about C?"
Unless we restore the Constitutional limits of government, which would mean getting rid of programs A through Z through Omega, most of NASA included, then we're unlikely to ever contain spending until we suffer a collapse.
Eh, there's a good story buried in there. There's a movie version scheduled for next year, and apparently the people involved understand that the book has serious flaws they need to work around. Here's a case where Hollywood adaptation might actually improve the story.
The idea is that one's legal and moral obligation to pay taxes comes from allegiance to a government that in return agrees to respect one's rights and adhere to the specific powers that were granted to it. Loyalty is a contract.
The Constitution, our contract here, authorizes taxes to pay the expenses of the federal government as it exercises its lawful powers. This authority is not a general power to take an unlimited amount of money, labor, and other resources for any purpose whatsoever. (Unless you pervert the "general welfare clause" into an open-ended power that obliterates the meaning of the 10th Amendment and the ideas of enumerated powers and limited government.)
So, it's logically consistent to argue that Americans should pay their taxes but oppose forced labor on Constitutional grounds -- if you also believe that the federal government is currently spending tax money consistently with the Constitution, or at least not so abusing that spending that open tax revolt is the right way of dealing with the problem.
I don't mind that you find Finland more pleasant than America; I respect your freedom to live your life the way you choose. Because the US Constitution does not authorize federal funding of art, health care, or various other things they presumably have in Finland, shouldn't your American relatives have been working to either (A) move to Finland or (B) amend the Constitution to allow for such things?
We've subverted those mechanisms. The 10th Amendment? Irrelevant. Enumerated powers? Congress claims those, plus an all-purpose power called "interstate commerce" or "general welfare," even though the Federalist Papers explicitly called that interpretation BS. Specific rights such as freedom of speech? Those must be balanced against the need for "fairness," "redistribution of wealth," and newly invented rights such as health care. Patrick Henry rejected the Constitution, predicting that "ten thousand implied powers" would be found in it and that the other protections -- indirect election of Senators and the lack of a federal income tax -- would fail to keep the federal government in check. The US has been in an officially declared state of emergency since at least 1979. What now remains to prevent tyranny other than faith in the majority?
Armed insurrection is a terrible way to fight injustice, and complacency and voting aren't the only other options. See for instance this book. But removing the option of violence altogether eliminates what might one day be the only thing that those in power respect.
The problem with voting Republican at this point is that the R.Party has abandoned any principles of freedom and the Constitution, and so abandoned any moral high ground it had. Look at the 2008 party platform: a few sentences about "restoring constitutional government" and the like, surrounded by plans for yet more ambitious government programs and calls for things like a continued ban on Internet gambling, to protect what it sees as the stupid masses.
Despite having been a loyal Republican since before I could vote, I will be going Libertarian this time. The problem is no longer about something as minor as Bush's tax cuts, or even Iraq. Our government has become massively unconstitutional, and both parties accept that as normal. We must find a way to stop the trend.
Yup. The fact that the Constitution has been discarded as a "living" document that no longer binds government leads us to what's been called a "managerial state," in which the only real debate is over which group of experts should be given unlimited power. To speak of a Linux-like development model isn't very helpful without also considering the concept of limited government, which the Founders gave us and which we've abandoned. The applicable term from computing is "feature creep," except that the bloated system requirements come out of our hides and restrict our freedom in much greater ways than any DRM or EULA.
Because for at least one definition of the term, "emotions" are useful for problem-solving. I see AI "emotions" as biases towards certain kinds of perception and action -- that is, tendencies to do certain things in certain kinds of situations, and tendencies on how to decide what "certain kinds of situations" are in the first place. This type of emotion can be as simple as a system that makes a robot lawnmower stop mowing and seek shelter when it rains, or avoid anything that looks to its sensors as a steep slope, or avoid running over anything moving. For a human an example would be "run away from anything big and fanged." Rules like this are rules-of-thumb that help a system to survive and accomplish things, yet aren't fully rational. We humans seem to be biased towards seeing monsters in the shadows, hence being scared of the dark. A fully rational AI wouldn't... but it'd then be in more danger if there were predators after it.
Last time I checked, the sole reason for the existence of government is to be the servant of society. Why can't government do this? I mean, it's a government of the people, by the people and for the people, right?
Because under the Declaration of Independence, the purpose of government is the protection of the people's rights against oppression. The Preamble of the Constitution does give a longer list of purposes, but unless you accept a reading of the Constitution so broad as to render the "enumerated powers" list meaningless, ours is a government with limited powers, which means that it does not have the legal authority to do absolutely everything a majority votes for. In fact the Constitution is designed not to simply give people what they vote for. If it were, there would be no need for a Bill of Rights, because the people would simply be trusted never to, say, have 51% of the people vote to kill the other 49% and take their stuff. And if they did, a strict majoritarian belief would say that that's perfectly all right! So, before leaping to the conclusion that government ought to do something, we ought to consider whether it has any right to do so. Any coercive government action involves a reduction of the freedom which it's government's main purpose to protect, and so should be weighed carefully against this cost.
Another reason "why government can't do this" is practical. People are having the debate over just how effective foreign health systems are, usually comparing a pure socialist system to the half-socialist system we have now, but there's good reason for skepticism about whether giving our government more power over our money and other aspects of our lives is a good idea. See eg. China, Soviet Russia, North Korea, and other places where people were/are controlled allegedly for their own good.
On a related note, a government-run health system of whatever stripe leads logically to a system more intrusive than any existing today. If government is put in charge of your health, it has a legal and financial justification for controlling what you eat, where you live, how you work, what you do for fun, how you feel -- everything. Would you willingly submit not just yourself but everyone else to such a trend?
Get a sample of ordinary E. coli and bio-lab materials, including a supply of an antibiotic and some standard sterile petri dishes and Luria broth (bacteria chow). Let the bacteria grow on some petri dishes, then add some antibiotics. Wait. You should find that the antibiotics killed nearly all of the bacteria, but that a few survived. Transplant these bacteria to new media and let them grow on new petri dishes. Expose them again to the antibiotic. You should now find that few die. The population has changed over time to adapt to a selective pressure.
This experiment demonstrates the following principles: (1) Variations exist among a population of organisms. (2) Some of these variations are inheritable. (3) Some inheritable variations affect an individual's chance of survival and reproduction in particular situations. (4) Over time, the population will change to include greater representation of the variations that gave a survival advantage to past generations. This is evidence for the basic tenets of evolution, and I've done similar experiments incidentally as part of laboratory work.
So, evolution is testable. The above hypotheses would be disproven if we were consistently unable, say, to get a population of antibiotic-resistant bacteria despite this manipulation. What creationists object to is either the implications of evolutionary theory for human origins (ie. that you don't need a God to explain things); or the sheer magnitude of what evolution is said to produce ("all this from bacteria?!"); or the basic premise of science (relentless demand for logic and evidence as the only basis for belief). The testability of evolution sets it apart from creationism, making evolution more than just "a belief" like "there's an invisible dragon in my garage." It's a well-founded belief, with the evidence and logic behind it making it more worthy of respect than the belief that an anthropomorphic being created everything by unknowable means six thousand years ago. But you might question why we should value facts and logic instead of tradition and feelings, which is an example of the basic science/religion conflict.
Expecting very specific predictions from evolution may be asking a bit much; it's like saying, "if Newtonian physics is true, why can't you tell me exactly how that car accident happened from looking at a still photo taken years later?"
The reason for my comparison to health care was that I saw this pattern: "Industry X is substantially regulated at the federal level, and X isn't being done as well as it could be. So, the solution must be to tighten regulations." There's a cost to that even aside from the question of economic efficiency.
Doesn't your reference to Google and the fact that they're supposedly getting into the telecom business (and possibly even alternative energy) suggest that it's possible for an "upstart" to get into the industry despite all hostility from existing firms? And isn't Google's success because of a good product and shrewd business practices, rather than because Washington graciously allowed them to join the market? Google was founded in 1998, so you can't get much more upstart than that.
Coercion is bad both because of the effects of the means to its ends, the violence or threats itself, as well as its ends in forcing actions despite the target's preference.
I agree with you on that part. I think where we're differing is on when a nonviolent abuse of a favorable social/economic/etc. position becomes bad enough (by some definition of "bad") to justify actual, bayonet-style coercion.
Interesting. Would you agree with me that (1) where no scarcity of "voices" exists, as on the Net, there should be no restriction on how many channels one entity can own, how many people they can reach, or what they can say short of fraud, libel, death threats etc.? And/or that (2) to the extent that the FCC or its successor has the power to control ownership of media, it will try to use that power to control content and should be restrained from doing so?
Where I'm most likely to disagree with you here is that I'm skeptical that we'll get "a freer society" from increased government control. Look at the nature of the coercion being used by/against the media, versus the coercion involved in the American Revolution as you refer to it. In the Revolution the people our (moral) ancestors fought were literally pointing guns at them and "declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever." In the case of modern media, the abuses you seem to be referring to are corporations doing things like lying to consumers, taking bribes for good press, or trying through legal means to change how they charge for their services (the Net Neutrality issue). There's no violence involved in those actions, and not even fraud in the last one, and there's always the possibility of an upstart coming along and starting their own media organization. (Fox News, for all its faults, was built as an alternative to what was seen as a monopoly of press opinion.) So, I don't think the comparison between "taming the rampant corporations" and "stopping the British from burning our city" is fair.
On a related note, I see the US health care issue in a similar way. If the current system is so bad, with government heavily involved in it, should we be imposing greater regulation that fossilizes delivery methods (eg. enshrining the idea that employers should pay), or finding ways to encourage people to invent a new free-market model that blows the existing one out of the water?
So, if the current practice of having a federal bureaucracy that dictates who can own what and what people are allowed to say, allows the current state of the media to exist, how great is it? Might there not be more freedom of competition, and more voices, if there weren't a federal agency charged with managing our ability to talk and write? There wasn't much push for government management of the media in early America (except maybe the Sedition Act) yet even with that era's primitive tech, there were a variety of newspaper and pamphlet voices out there. (Anyone who says that modern media are biased and rabid, by the way, should read an eighteenth-century newspaper.)
As one example, what if we found a way to make the radio spectrum freely available to all without mutual interference, so that as many people who wanted to broadcast, could? If it weren't for the scarcity of usable frequencies imposed by past-generation technology, would we need or want the FCC to be telling corporations how many stations they can own in an area. And would the FCC be able to impose censorship or (currently at bay) a "fairness doctrine" using the excuse that it can impose any restrictions it wants on a limited public resource? We may actually be seeing this unlimited-resource situation in the Net;
Interesting. Doesn't that estimate assume that the only way to achieve visual input is to duplicate the structure of the visual cortex? It might be possible instead to do the same thing with ordinary software rather than a neural net, which could be far more efficient than simulating neurons. As I understand it, a lot of the processing going on in vision is a hierarchy of pattern-finding routines that detect edges, lines and other features. To the extent that we understand that system we can "do it in code."
On a related note, what about the ongoing DARPA research into prosthetic limbs? The people they're funding seem to have a first-level prototype arm tested in the human body, and a second-level prototype designed to be wired directly into the nerves instead of the kludge of attaching sensors to chest muscles. (One story about it.) Sure, vision is more complex than arm sensing/control, but doesn't this line of research raise the odds of near-future success?
I find it odd that "freedom of the press" means heavily regulating the press, especially whenever the "Fairness Doctrine" comes up. Wouldn't actual press freedom mean allowing people to own, operate and start whatever media outlets they chose, not subject to censorship by the FCC? I can understand the desire to make sure multiple voices get heard and not just a conglomerate like AOL/
Time/Warner/Newsweek/Etc., but isn't the next logical step beyond controlling ownership, controlling content more heavily? For instance, if we say there ought to be a law mandating local ownership, why not also force stations to show local programming or hire local hosts?
With modern technology, it should be possible to have an arbitrary number of channels available for various media, such that it's not physically possible to own all outlets. This is already true for newspapers, since there's always the possibility of a new one opening.
As one example, some UK researchers have been working with embryonic stem cells to treat macular degeneration; see here. The article suggests that you're right about the ES version being useful largely because it can be mass-produced more easily. If that's so, then the ES cells do have significant potential to be useful to large numbers of people. My attitude is, why close off a promising research path?
I heard a talk by Peter Ackerman of this organization, discussing the history of nonviolent revolution in the 20th Century and arguing that it's more effective than violence at replacing tyrannical governments with democratic ones. I asked him about the rise of mass surveillance and how that would affect nonviolent strategy, and his position seemed to be that people will still find a way to play cat-and-mouse with repressive governments through continued competition. (See eg. the recent article on Chinese censorship.) Still, I'm skeptical of how any resistance movement could work in a country where there's effectively a low-level AI assigned to monitoring every single person at all times. The best defense against an oppressive state may be to force transparency on government, as David Brin has argued in "The Transparent Society."
Let me come at this issue from a different angle than the argument I see in nearby branches of this thread. Is the United States' government designed to have limits other than the Bill of Rights, or to give politicians the authority to do absolutely anything that doesn't directly violate freedom of speech etc.? A reading of the document and its context suggest that it's best understood as a limited government. If phrases like "to regulate interstate commerce" and "to promote the general welfare" are understood to mean "to do anything Congress feels like doing," then why have specific "enumerated powers" such as the creation of a patent office? Those specific powers are listed as things the government is authorized to do, not as examples of things the Founders had on their to-do list.
A broad interpretation of the general welfare clause also contradicts the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people." If promoting the general welfare means Congress may do anything it wants to, then there are no powers not delegated to the federal level, and the Tenth Amendment is meaningless.
So, the most reasonable interpretation of the Constitution says that the government has only specific, limited powers, and that the government oversteps its authority when it claims to have no limits but the Bill of Rights. This overstepping has arguably happened repeatedly with the growth of the welfare state and creative abuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause.
According to Robert Zubrin's proposal for Mars exploration, which NASA's seems loosely based on, a Mars Sample Return Mission would be an important precursor to the manned mission. The reason for that would be not so much to make the geologists dance for joy, as to demonstrate the "in situ propellant production" (ISPP) technology that will generate most of the return fuel's mass from the Martian atmosphere, greatly increasing the mission's efficiency. And, of course, to demonstrate getting a spaceship back from Mars. If the dust is a concern, that's another good reason to do that mission. Bring the stuff back so we can look at it!
To be fair, the purpose isn't to "mess with nature." It's not like scientists are saying, "Let's screw up the natural order of things," right? The point of doing this, if it's even possible, would be some combination of these closely related reasons: (1) satisfying our curiosity about what these things were like, (2) giving a species a second chance to live, (3) creating something interesting that no living human has seen, and (4) profiting from building an Ice Age Park. Aren't any of those legitimate reasons?
What seems to be happening is surveillance by the government, while surveillance by the people themselves is outlawed as a violation of privacy or national security. (See Brin's The Transparent Society.)
Yeah. I don't have the link on me at the moment, but DARPA recently announced an impressive new prosthetic arm prototype with plans to build an even beter one. Apparently it's got a two-way connection, with tactile feedback to the nervous system. Great!
His prescription for humanity's emergence from this present Dark Age...
What planet is this book referring to? The problems that the writer sees may or may not be real, but they've got very little to do with those faced by people in the actual Dark Age.
Why not use this same data to control an actual robot comparable to Honda's Asimo? Sure, the reliability of it is probably terrible right now, but the machine could be made to filter out random fidgeting signals (similar to what's done with micro-surgical equipment today to cancel surgeons' normal trembling), well enough to have a mobile viewpoint in the real world with cameras, microphones, and speakers. Better than nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice the situation we've gotten into here. "Program A is wasteful; we should cut it!" "You think A is wasteful? We should cut B instead!" "Well, what about C?"
Unless we restore the Constitutional limits of government, which would mean getting rid of programs A through Z through Omega, most of NASA included, then we're unlikely to ever contain spending until we suffer a collapse.
Eh, there's a good story buried in there. There's a movie version scheduled for next year, and apparently the people involved understand that the book has serious flaws they need to work around. Here's a case where Hollywood adaptation might actually improve the story.
The idea is that one's legal and moral obligation to pay taxes comes from allegiance to a government that in return agrees to respect one's rights and adhere to the specific powers that were granted to it. Loyalty is a contract.
The Constitution, our contract here, authorizes taxes to pay the expenses of the federal government as it exercises its lawful powers. This authority is not a general power to take an unlimited amount of money, labor, and other resources for any purpose whatsoever. (Unless you pervert the "general welfare clause" into an open-ended power that obliterates the meaning of the 10th Amendment and the ideas of enumerated powers and limited government.)
So, it's logically consistent to argue that Americans should pay their taxes but oppose forced labor on Constitutional grounds -- if you also believe that the federal government is currently spending tax money consistently with the Constitution, or at least not so abusing that spending that open tax revolt is the right way of dealing with the problem.
I don't mind that you find Finland more pleasant than America; I respect your freedom to live your life the way you choose. Because the US Constitution does not authorize federal funding of art, health care, or various other things they presumably have in Finland, shouldn't your American relatives have been working to either (A) move to Finland or (B) amend the Constitution to allow for such things?
We've subverted those mechanisms. The 10th Amendment? Irrelevant. Enumerated powers? Congress claims those, plus an all-purpose power called "interstate commerce" or "general welfare," even though the Federalist Papers explicitly called that interpretation BS. Specific rights such as freedom of speech? Those must be balanced against the need for "fairness," "redistribution of wealth," and newly invented rights such as health care. Patrick Henry rejected the Constitution, predicting that "ten thousand implied powers" would be found in it and that the other protections -- indirect election of Senators and the lack of a federal income tax -- would fail to keep the federal government in check. The US has been in an officially declared state of emergency since at least 1979. What now remains to prevent tyranny other than faith in the majority?
Armed insurrection is a terrible way to fight injustice, and complacency and voting aren't the only other options. See for instance this book. But removing the option of violence altogether eliminates what might one day be the only thing that those in power respect.
The problem with voting Republican at this point is that the R.Party has abandoned any principles of freedom and the Constitution, and so abandoned any moral high ground it had. Look at the 2008 party platform: a few sentences about "restoring constitutional government" and the like, surrounded by plans for yet more ambitious government programs and calls for things like a continued ban on Internet gambling, to protect what it sees as the stupid masses.
Despite having been a loyal Republican since before I could vote, I will be going Libertarian this time. The problem is no longer about something as minor as Bush's tax cuts, or even Iraq. Our government has become massively unconstitutional, and both parties accept that as normal. We must find a way to stop the trend.
Yup. The fact that the Constitution has been discarded as a "living" document that no longer binds government leads us to what's been called a "managerial state," in which the only real debate is over which group of experts should be given unlimited power. To speak of a Linux-like development model isn't very helpful without also considering the concept of limited government, which the Founders gave us and which we've abandoned. The applicable term from computing is "feature creep," except that the bloated system requirements come out of our hides and restrict our freedom in much greater ways than any DRM or EULA.
Because for at least one definition of the term, "emotions" are useful for problem-solving. I see AI "emotions" as biases towards certain kinds of perception and action -- that is, tendencies to do certain things in certain kinds of situations, and tendencies on how to decide what "certain kinds of situations" are in the first place. This type of emotion can be as simple as a system that makes a robot lawnmower stop mowing and seek shelter when it rains, or avoid anything that looks to its sensors as a steep slope, or avoid running over anything moving. For a human an example would be "run away from anything big and fanged." Rules like this are rules-of-thumb that help a system to survive and accomplish things, yet aren't fully rational. We humans seem to be biased towards seeing monsters in the shadows, hence being scared of the dark. A fully rational AI wouldn't... but it'd then be in more danger if there were predators after it.
Last time I checked, the sole reason for the existence of government is to be the servant of society. Why can't government do this? I mean, it's a government of the people, by the people and for the people, right?
Because under the Declaration of Independence, the purpose of government is the protection of the people's rights against oppression. The Preamble of the Constitution does give a longer list of purposes, but unless you accept a reading of the Constitution so broad as to render the "enumerated powers" list meaningless, ours is a government with limited powers, which means that it does not have the legal authority to do absolutely everything a majority votes for. In fact the Constitution is designed not to simply give people what they vote for. If it were, there would be no need for a Bill of Rights, because the people would simply be trusted never to, say, have 51% of the people vote to kill the other 49% and take their stuff. And if they did, a strict majoritarian belief would say that that's perfectly all right! So, before leaping to the conclusion that government ought to do something, we ought to consider whether it has any right to do so. Any coercive government action involves a reduction of the freedom which it's government's main purpose to protect, and so should be weighed carefully against this cost.
Another reason "why government can't do this" is practical. People are having the debate over just how effective foreign health systems are, usually comparing a pure socialist system to the half-socialist system we have now, but there's good reason for skepticism about whether giving our government more power over our money and other aspects of our lives is a good idea. See eg. China, Soviet Russia, North Korea, and other places where people were/are controlled allegedly for their own good.
On a related note, a government-run health system of whatever stripe leads logically to a system more intrusive than any existing today. If government is put in charge of your health, it has a legal and financial justification for controlling what you eat, where you live, how you work, what you do for fun, how you feel -- everything. Would you willingly submit not just yourself but everyone else to such a trend?
How do you test evolution?
Get a sample of ordinary E. coli and bio-lab materials, including a supply of an antibiotic and some standard sterile petri dishes and Luria broth (bacteria chow). Let the bacteria grow on some petri dishes, then add some antibiotics. Wait. You should find that the antibiotics killed nearly all of the bacteria, but that a few survived. Transplant these bacteria to new media and let them grow on new petri dishes. Expose them again to the antibiotic. You should now find that few die. The population has changed over time to adapt to a selective pressure.
This experiment demonstrates the following principles: (1) Variations exist among a population of organisms. (2) Some of these variations are inheritable. (3) Some inheritable variations affect an individual's chance of survival and reproduction in particular situations. (4) Over time, the population will change to include greater representation of the variations that gave a survival advantage to past generations. This is evidence for the basic tenets of evolution, and I've done similar experiments incidentally as part of laboratory work.
So, evolution is testable. The above hypotheses would be disproven if we were consistently unable, say, to get a population of antibiotic-resistant bacteria despite this manipulation. What creationists object to is either the implications of evolutionary theory for human origins (ie. that you don't need a God to explain things); or the sheer magnitude of what evolution is said to produce ("all this from bacteria?!"); or the basic premise of science (relentless demand for logic and evidence as the only basis for belief). The testability of evolution sets it apart from creationism, making evolution more than just "a belief" like "there's an invisible dragon in my garage." It's a well-founded belief, with the evidence and logic behind it making it more worthy of respect than the belief that an anthropomorphic being created everything by unknowable means six thousand years ago. But you might question why we should value facts and logic instead of tradition and feelings, which is an example of the basic science/religion conflict.
Expecting very specific predictions from evolution may be asking a bit much; it's like saying, "if Newtonian physics is true, why can't you tell me exactly how that car accident happened from looking at a still photo taken years later?"
The reason for my comparison to health care was that I saw this pattern: "Industry X is substantially regulated at the federal level, and X isn't being done as well as it could be. So, the solution must be to tighten regulations." There's a cost to that even aside from the question of economic efficiency.
Doesn't your reference to Google and the fact that they're supposedly getting into the telecom business (and possibly even alternative energy) suggest that it's possible for an "upstart" to get into the industry despite all hostility from existing firms? And isn't Google's success because of a good product and shrewd business practices, rather than because Washington graciously allowed them to join the market? Google was founded in 1998, so you can't get much more upstart than that.
Coercion is bad both because of the effects of the means to its ends, the violence or threats itself, as well as its ends in forcing actions despite the target's preference.
I agree with you on that part. I think where we're differing is on when a nonviolent abuse of a favorable social/economic/etc. position becomes bad enough (by some definition of "bad") to justify actual, bayonet-style coercion.
Interesting. Would you agree with me that (1) where no scarcity of "voices" exists, as on the Net, there should be no restriction on how many channels one entity can own, how many people they can reach, or what they can say short of fraud, libel, death threats etc.? And/or that (2) to the extent that the FCC or its successor has the power to control ownership of media, it will try to use that power to control content and should be restrained from doing so?
Where I'm most likely to disagree with you here is that I'm skeptical that we'll get "a freer society" from increased government control. Look at the nature of the coercion being used by/against the media, versus the coercion involved in the American Revolution as you refer to it. In the Revolution the people our (moral) ancestors fought were literally pointing guns at them and "declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever." In the case of modern media, the abuses you seem to be referring to are corporations doing things like lying to consumers, taking bribes for good press, or trying through legal means to change how they charge for their services (the Net Neutrality issue). There's no violence involved in those actions, and not even fraud in the last one, and there's always the possibility of an upstart coming along and starting their own media organization. (Fox News, for all its faults, was built as an alternative to what was seen as a monopoly of press opinion.) So, I don't think the comparison between "taming the rampant corporations" and "stopping the British from burning our city" is fair.
On a related note, I see the US health care issue in a similar way. If the current system is so bad, with government heavily involved in it, should we be imposing greater regulation that fossilizes delivery methods (eg. enshrining the idea that employers should pay), or finding ways to encourage people to invent a new free-market model that blows the existing one out of the water?
So, if the current practice of having a federal bureaucracy that dictates who can own what and what people are allowed to say, allows the current state of the media to exist, how great is it? Might there not be more freedom of competition, and more voices, if there weren't a federal agency charged with managing our ability to talk and write? There wasn't much push for government management of the media in early America (except maybe the Sedition Act) yet even with that era's primitive tech, there were a variety of newspaper and pamphlet voices out there. (Anyone who says that modern media are biased and rabid, by the way, should read an eighteenth-century newspaper.)
As one example, what if we found a way to make the radio spectrum freely available to all without mutual interference, so that as many people who wanted to broadcast, could? If it weren't for the scarcity of usable frequencies imposed by past-generation technology, would we need or want the FCC to be telling corporations how many stations they can own in an area. And would the FCC be able to impose censorship or (currently at bay) a "fairness doctrine" using the excuse that it can impose any restrictions it wants on a limited public resource? We may actually be seeing this unlimited-resource situation in the Net;
Interesting. Doesn't that estimate assume that the only way to achieve visual input is to duplicate the structure of the visual cortex? It might be possible instead to do the same thing with ordinary software rather than a neural net, which could be far more efficient than simulating neurons. As I understand it, a lot of the processing going on in vision is a hierarchy of pattern-finding routines that detect edges, lines and other features. To the extent that we understand that system we can "do it in code."
On a related note, what about the ongoing DARPA research into prosthetic limbs? The people they're funding seem to have a first-level prototype arm tested in the human body, and a second-level prototype designed to be wired directly into the nerves instead of the kludge of attaching sensors to chest muscles. (One story about it.) Sure, vision is more complex than arm sensing/control, but doesn't this line of research raise the odds of near-future success?
I find it odd that "freedom of the press" means heavily regulating the press, especially whenever the "Fairness Doctrine" comes up. Wouldn't actual press freedom mean allowing people to own, operate and start whatever media outlets they chose, not subject to censorship by the FCC? I can understand the desire to make sure multiple voices get heard and not just a conglomerate like AOL/ Time/Warner/Newsweek/Etc., but isn't the next logical step beyond controlling ownership, controlling content more heavily? For instance, if we say there ought to be a law mandating local ownership, why not also force stations to show local programming or hire local hosts?
With modern technology, it should be possible to have an arbitrary number of channels available for various media, such that it's not physically possible to own all outlets. This is already true for newspapers, since there's always the possibility of a new one opening.
As one example, some UK researchers have been working with embryonic stem cells to treat macular degeneration; see here. The article suggests that you're right about the ES version being useful largely because it can be mass-produced more easily. If that's so, then the ES cells do have significant potential to be useful to large numbers of people. My attitude is, why close off a promising research path?
I heard a talk by Peter Ackerman of this organization, discussing the history of nonviolent revolution in the 20th Century and arguing that it's more effective than violence at replacing tyrannical governments with democratic ones. I asked him about the rise of mass surveillance and how that would affect nonviolent strategy, and his position seemed to be that people will still find a way to play cat-and-mouse with repressive governments through continued competition. (See eg. the recent article on Chinese censorship.) Still, I'm skeptical of how any resistance movement could work in a country where there's effectively a low-level AI assigned to monitoring every single person at all times. The best defense against an oppressive state may be to force transparency on government, as David Brin has argued in "The Transparent Society."
Let me come at this issue from a different angle than the argument I see in nearby branches of this thread. Is the United States' government designed to have limits other than the Bill of Rights, or to give politicians the authority to do absolutely anything that doesn't directly violate freedom of speech etc.? A reading of the document and its context suggest that it's best understood as a limited government. If phrases like "to regulate interstate commerce" and "to promote the general welfare" are understood to mean "to do anything Congress feels like doing," then why have specific "enumerated powers" such as the creation of a patent office? Those specific powers are listed as things the government is authorized to do, not as examples of things the Founders had on their to-do list.
A broad interpretation of the general welfare clause also contradicts the Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people." If promoting the general welfare means Congress may do anything it wants to, then there are no powers not delegated to the federal level, and the Tenth Amendment is meaningless.
So, the most reasonable interpretation of the Constitution says that the government has only specific, limited powers, and that the government oversteps its authority when it claims to have no limits but the Bill of Rights. This overstepping has arguably happened repeatedly with the growth of the welfare state and creative abuse of the Interstate Commerce Clause.
According to Robert Zubrin's proposal for Mars exploration, which NASA's seems loosely based on, a Mars Sample Return Mission would be an important precursor to the manned mission. The reason for that would be not so much to make the geologists dance for joy, as to demonstrate the "in situ propellant production" (ISPP) technology that will generate most of the return fuel's mass from the Martian atmosphere, greatly increasing the mission's efficiency. And, of course, to demonstrate getting a spaceship back from Mars. If the dust is a concern, that's another good reason to do that mission. Bring the stuff back so we can look at it!
To be fair, the purpose isn't to "mess with nature." It's not like scientists are saying, "Let's screw up the natural order of things," right? The point of doing this, if it's even possible, would be some combination of these closely related reasons: (1) satisfying our curiosity about what these things were like, (2) giving a species a second chance to live, (3) creating something interesting that no living human has seen, and (4) profiting from building an Ice Age Park. Aren't any of those legitimate reasons?
What seems to be happening is surveillance by the government, while surveillance by the people themselves is outlawed as a violation of privacy or national security. (See Brin's The Transparent Society.)
Yeah. I don't have the link on me at the moment, but DARPA recently announced an impressive new prosthetic arm prototype with plans to build an even beter one. Apparently it's got a two-way connection, with tactile feedback to the nervous system. Great!
His prescription for humanity's emergence from this present Dark Age...
What planet is this book referring to? The problems that the writer sees may or may not be real, but they've got very little to do with those faced by people in the actual Dark Age.
Now: Angst, ennui, malaise
Then: Plague, barbarians, famine, monarchy...
Why not use this same data to control an actual robot comparable to Honda's Asimo? Sure, the reliability of it is probably terrible right now, but the machine could be made to filter out random fidgeting signals (similar to what's done with micro-surgical equipment today to cancel surgeons' normal trembling), well enough to have a mobile viewpoint in the real world with cameras, microphones, and speakers. Better than nothing.
Oops. I meant: Have a look at this custom gaming setup.