Otherwise what are we to make of a "cotton picking machine?" Is it a machine that picks cotton (a cotton-picking machine) or a machine that picks and is made out of cotton (a cotton picking-machine?)
Well there has been so much news about AI about doing things better and cheaper then a person could do. It is important to show that it isn't a human replacement, just a human supplement.
It is both. Kind of like how the factory system supplemented humans, it made the human operators much more efficient than they could have been at manual craft manufacture. But many fewer of these supplemented humans were required.
The "few" things that AI (actually machine learning) is good at happens to cover a lot of work that humans are now earning salaries to do.
Or just drive across the country and record times of sunrise/sunset. I don't think there's any shortage of ways to prove it.
No there isn't.
Slashdot has had a flat earther posting here pretty often recently (as an AC of course) and he scoffs at such esoteric tools as geometry and arithmetic. He could not provide a coherent explanation of why Eratosthenes was wrong, he just dismissed the proof as "obviously wrong", but couldn't explain this "obviousness".
600 meters much less than he'd get from riding in an airplane. If he didn't trust the windows on those things, and wanted a definite unobstructed view, he could just get into a normal hot air balloon - those tend to go up a little more than 600 meters, on average.
Or just climb one of the local mountains which go up to a about 2000 meters. From the top of one you can look down on him as he reaches the apex of his little trip (and I do mean little).
He would do far better with a lawn chair, weather balloons and some tanks of helium.
That raises the question; since you yourself are pushing a conspiracy theory alleging that the government created the conspiracy theories, does that mean you're a government agent promoting conspiracy theories?
That possibility is on the table. Stranger things have happened.
I wouldn't be so certain about that. One time pads have existed as long as writing itself, yet ciphers were always far more commpn for cryptography, only being replaced by computer-based cryptography. If unbreakable one-time pads were universal what were all those code breakers doing? The (now) famous Venona operation was engaged in breaking spy codes. The Walker Ring used a rotor encipherment gadget.
Generation and management of one time pads is a huge pain in the ass. It is much easier now because - computers. But it is also mostly unnecessary now because - computers.
There is some historical precedence to suggest that they're not just making up unreasonable nonsense. You can look back to the start of the industrial revolution and how increases in productivity changed markets that were limited by human labor capacity. A good example is the textile industry where machines were able to replace unorganized individual labors. People always wanted more shirts, more socks, more dresses, but they just couldn't afford them because human labor limited supply and made these goods costly.
Suddenly you had a situation where dozens or even hundreds of these individual laborers could be replaced by a single machine. You might think that this would cause mass unemployment, but it had the opposite effect. Because the cost of cloth and clothing fell, people started buying more of it and the increased demand from consumers resulted in a need for factories the hire more laborers.
Except that did happen
The factories only employed a very small fraction of the cottage manufacturers, and whom by the way were part of a highly organized piecework network of "putters out" and factors - a different sort of organization but not exactly "unorganized".
Sure sales of thread and cloth (separate commodities at the time) skyrocketed (more on that in a moment). But employment in Britain was still devastated. The major occupation of thread spinning was wiped out in a decade between 1770 and 1780, weaving took a bit longer as it is more complex. Cotton got so cheap it wiped out the woolen industry hitting sheep farmers as well wool processors. Huge numbers of potential factory workers were created by the jobs lost, but only a fraction of factory jobs replaced them. In 1812 textile factories employed 350,000, but the livelihoods of about two million people (out of 11 million) had been ruined. The enormous increase in poverty strained Britain's society for 70 years. In 1820 20% of the entire population of Britain received aid though the Poor law (at a time when any king of assistance from government was an extraordinary measure) and in 1832 the unemployment rate of the 4.5 million urban working class was 50% out of a population of 12 million.
But the growth of cotton manufacture was indeed spectacular. Between 1760 and 1790 alone cotton imports (as Britain grew none) increased 16 times. By that time it was exporting 2/3 of its production (it would eventually rise to 95% or so). Here is the really amazing thing. Britain didn't just wipe out the employment of home spinners and weavers in Britain, it did it throughout the entire world, deindustrializing (as indeed home production is productive industry also) India and China, who had been the world's exporters of cotton cloth for a few thousand years. But despite producing most of the fabric in the world in the early 1800s, it still wasn't enough to employ Britain's working class as productivity had increased 370-fold. Then, as now in the U.S. since 1970, productivity increases were enjoyed by the business.
Note that the automation of truck driving has limited capacity to increase employment through knock-on factors. Sure, as shipping gets cheaper, its use will increase to some extent. But people aren't going to just be getting "stuff moved" because shipping is cheap. For the most part cost of shipping is found in the cost of products you buy. Reducing that cost will increase profits/reduce prices to some extent, but is that going dramatically increase the amount of stuff you buy? No it is not.
And unlike the British cotton that could be sold all over the world, shipping in the U.S. is not an exportable commodity (though it will make our overall economy somewhat more competitive.
And there are a coupe of other things that makes me very suspicious about this "truck driving will increase overall".
First there is a trial of such a system operating right now and the truck drivers are "drone operators", sitting in an office. The arrival time of trucks (and their delivery schedule) is well known, so
Any system trading in hundred of billions of dollars (or even ones that don't) are at perilous risk if the depend on people's faith in a private company, that was just recently created, and operates without significant oversight.
The presumption that everybody in town has a prescription for a very powerful narcotic (instead of say, codeine) is the presumption that this is a "pill mill", rather that proof to the contrary.
National dispensing rates are something like 0.75 prescriptions per person per year, so this town would have had 22,000 units dispensed over the ten year period. People are not picking up bottles of 900 pills. Even assuming the rate for this town due to its composition is higher than normal, this is a factor of at least ten fold too high. And these opioid prescription rate are for all opioids not just these powerful and addicting ones. Most opioid prescriptions would normally be for less potent ones like codeine, propoxyphene (Darvon), and tramadol. So getting this much oxycodone and hydrocodone is something like a factor of 100 too high.
I expect that cultured meat has the same potential to bring down the cost of meat.
Thanks to the cyanobacteria that provide the food, it looks like cultured meat has a very good environmental footprint, the only rival is poultry.
But that does not mean it will be cheap. There is a lot more expensive high tech involved in this that raising cows. I'm not seeing any predictions right now that it will even reach the price of real beef.
However, while I can't recall what it's called right now, there is an effect known in economics that making a product more efficient actually ends up using even more energy because more efficiency means cheaper cost to the consumer and that in turn drives more consumer use.
Jevons "Paradox". I put that in quotes because it has been hard to find good demonstrations of its existence, and no a priori reason to believe it is any sort of "law". Lower prices (from efficiency gains) will increase use, but the prediction that it will always, or usually, or even often, exceed efficiency gains is not well founded, nor well documented. It glaringly fails with domestic refrigerators for example (a five fold improvement in energy efficiency did not lead to a six fold increase in the number of refrigerators).
We hit peak oil in 2009 exactly as Hubbert predicted. And yes, the world underwent some very important readjustments as a result.
Hubbert analyzed oil extraction histories from oil fields, and regions, around the world and devised a model that is both descriptive and predictive of how oil production (and resources production in general) changes over time with intensive extraction efforts. Though initially applied to oil, it is general in nature. Hubbert modelling correctly predicted peak oil arriving in the U.S. in 1970.
So how is that U.S. oil production has climbed back up to nearly (but not quite) the same peak as before, 45 years later? Because what is now being produced is not the same resource that Hubbert modeled. Hubbert was talking about conventional oil, from conventional oil fields. What is now being produced in the U.S. is "oil" not oil. When the world hit peak oil in 2009 (an event blunted by the Great Recession) oil prices sky-rocketed and commodities that were not conventional oil (natural gas condensates, tar sands, shale oil) started being reformed, or produced and pushed into the supply line to replace it. These are substitute commodities, made possible by the high price brought about by the lack of sufficient conventional oil - which is what Hubbert predicted. Oil prices hit their all time peak just before the Great Recession hit, and then climbed back nearly as high as soon as recovery commenced. Only the combination of alternative "oil" production, and Saudi deliberate over-production, brought the price back down to a lower stable, but still historically high, level.
Farmers pumping the Ogallala Aquifer dry are welcome to try to come up with a (much higher priced) substitute water that still allows them to raise cows profitably.
Nearly all of that comes straight from the sky or from local wells...
About that "free" water from local wells. The main beef raising states are (in order): Texas, Nebraska and Kansas. These three states get a large part of their agricultural water from the Ogalala Aquifer, which is (was) filled with fossil water hundreds of thousands of years old with a zero recharge rate under present conditions.
Texas was the first such state to hit "peak water" and that was almost 20 years ago. Its water extraction rate is now declining, a trend that will never be reversed. It is literally running out of water in the high plains. Kansas hit peak water in 2010. Its available water is also dropping annually.
That was the maddening thing at the time - the UNIX wars which prevented it from becoming the standard OS. That was a war in which everybody lost. For desktop computing UNIX and OS/2 were the only decent OS's (looking to the future) available. All of the other proprietary OS's had no potential for long term use - being tied to their particular proprietary platform, or just outright sucking (or both).
At the time I thought that the biggest challenge facing the desktop computer industry was settling on a dominant OS. Unfortunately the winner was MSDOS, and then Windows 3.1.
The rise of Linux is proof of the failed opportunity of the proprietary UNIX warriors.
Correct. This is a leadership and organization screw-up. It is on them to lay down the rules about what devices and activities go on in forward or combat zones, and to see that they are enforced.
Ditto. In evaluating smart phone apps for diet and exercise I found that a majority of them require, as a first step to using the app, creating a personal account on a website/server. That automatically moved them to the reject pile.
Mod this guy up someone! There are far too many posters here opining that "but the Russians and Chinese know these bases are there anyway". Anything that discloses operational patterns direct or indirectly is a security risk.
Normally intelligence outfits build up pictures of the entity of interest one piece at a time.
It is really the responsibility of the organization to lay down the rules, and see that they are enforced. Don't allow devices into the field that can compromise operations security. Have them checked in and held until the deployment is over. This article suggests to me that the military itself is unaware of the risks of these devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Otherwise what are we to make of a "cotton picking machine?" Is it a machine that picks cotton (a cotton-picking machine) or a machine that picks and is made out of cotton (a cotton picking-machine?)
Neither. It is colloquial expression for a machine of little value, or located where it does not properly belong (although it should have a hyphen).
If you just watch the pin when you put the brooch on you won't have to worry about punctuation.
Or possibly with an even more severe misspelling "pundits".
If it's not better than a Human with an IQ of no less than 135 at literally everything it's not AI.
So it has to outperform 99% of all humans? I guess you are saying that less than 1% of all humans possess intelligence.
I think Musk just launched your goal posts toward Mars.
Spot on!
Well there has been so much news about AI about doing things better and cheaper then a person could do. It is important to show that it isn't a human replacement, just a human supplement.
It is both. Kind of like how the factory system supplemented humans, it made the human operators much more efficient than they could have been at manual craft manufacture. But many fewer of these supplemented humans were required.
The "few" things that AI (actually machine learning) is good at happens to cover a lot of work that humans are now earning salaries to do.
Or just drive across the country and record times of sunrise/sunset. I don't think there's any shortage of ways to prove it.
No there isn't.
Slashdot has had a flat earther posting here pretty often recently (as an AC of course) and he scoffs at such esoteric tools as geometry and arithmetic. He could not provide a coherent explanation of why Eratosthenes was wrong, he just dismissed the proof as "obviously wrong", but couldn't explain this "obviousness".
600 meters much less than he'd get from riding in an airplane. If he didn't trust the windows on those things, and wanted a definite unobstructed view, he could just get into a normal hot air balloon - those tend to go up a little more than 600 meters, on average.
Or just climb one of the local mountains which go up to a about 2000 meters. From the top of one you can look down on him as he reaches the apex of his little trip (and I do mean little).
He would do far better with a lawn chair, weather balloons and some tanks of helium.
So... you are saying that maybe they are all the same turtle! Consider my mind blown!
Maybe he is related to Slater.
That raises the question; since you yourself are pushing a conspiracy theory alleging that the government created the conspiracy theories, does that mean you're a government agent promoting conspiracy theories?
That possibility is on the table. Stranger things have happened.
I wouldn't be so certain about that. One time pads have existed as long as writing itself, yet ciphers were always far more commpn for cryptography, only being replaced by computer-based cryptography. If unbreakable one-time pads were universal what were all those code breakers doing? The (now) famous Venona operation was engaged in breaking spy codes. The Walker Ring used a rotor encipherment gadget.
Generation and management of one time pads is a huge pain in the ass. It is much easier now because - computers. But it is also mostly unnecessary now because - computers.
Bingo! You posted this before I finished my (carefully researched) post here which includes this crucial observation.
Dang it: Except that did NOT happen of course.
There is some historical precedence to suggest that they're not just making up unreasonable nonsense. You can look back to the start of the industrial revolution and how increases in productivity changed markets that were limited by human labor capacity. A good example is the textile industry where machines were able to replace unorganized individual labors. People always wanted more shirts, more socks, more dresses, but they just couldn't afford them because human labor limited supply and made these goods costly. Suddenly you had a situation where dozens or even hundreds of these individual laborers could be replaced by a single machine. You might think that this would cause mass unemployment, but it had the opposite effect. Because the cost of cloth and clothing fell, people started buying more of it and the increased demand from consumers resulted in a need for factories the hire more laborers.
Except that did happen
The factories only employed a very small fraction of the cottage manufacturers, and whom by the way were part of a highly organized piecework network of "putters out" and factors - a different sort of organization but not exactly "unorganized".
Sure sales of thread and cloth (separate commodities at the time) skyrocketed (more on that in a moment). But employment in Britain was still devastated. The major occupation of thread spinning was wiped out in a decade between 1770 and 1780, weaving took a bit longer as it is more complex. Cotton got so cheap it wiped out the woolen industry hitting sheep farmers as well wool processors. Huge numbers of potential factory workers were created by the jobs lost, but only a fraction of factory jobs replaced them. In 1812 textile factories employed 350,000, but the livelihoods of about two million people (out of 11 million) had been ruined. The enormous increase in poverty strained Britain's society for 70 years. In 1820 20% of the entire population of Britain received aid though the Poor law (at a time when any king of assistance from government was an extraordinary measure) and in 1832 the unemployment rate of the 4.5 million urban working class was 50% out of a population of 12 million.
But the growth of cotton manufacture was indeed spectacular. Between 1760 and 1790 alone cotton imports (as Britain grew none) increased 16 times. By that time it was exporting 2/3 of its production (it would eventually rise to 95% or so). Here is the really amazing thing. Britain didn't just wipe out the employment of home spinners and weavers in Britain, it did it throughout the entire world, deindustrializing (as indeed home production is productive industry also) India and China, who had been the world's exporters of cotton cloth for a few thousand years. But despite producing most of the fabric in the world in the early 1800s, it still wasn't enough to employ Britain's working class as productivity had increased 370-fold. Then, as now in the U.S. since 1970, productivity increases were enjoyed by the business.
Note that the automation of truck driving has limited capacity to increase employment through knock-on factors. Sure, as shipping gets cheaper, its use will increase to some extent. But people aren't going to just be getting "stuff moved" because shipping is cheap. For the most part cost of shipping is found in the cost of products you buy. Reducing that cost will increase profits/reduce prices to some extent, but is that going dramatically increase the amount of stuff you buy? No it is not.
And unlike the British cotton that could be sold all over the world, shipping in the U.S. is not an exportable commodity (though it will make our overall economy somewhat more competitive.
And there are a coupe of other things that makes me very suspicious about this "truck driving will increase overall".
First there is a trial of such a system operating right now and the truck drivers are "drone operators", sitting in an office. The arrival time of trucks (and their delivery schedule) is well known, so
If traders lose faith in tether...
Any system trading in hundred of billions of dollars (or even ones that don't) are at perilous risk if the depend on people's faith in a private company, that was just recently created, and operates without significant oversight.
The presumption that everybody in town has a prescription for a very powerful narcotic (instead of say, codeine) is the presumption that this is a "pill mill", rather that proof to the contrary.
National dispensing rates are something like 0.75 prescriptions per person per year, so this town would have had 22,000 units dispensed over the ten year period. People are not picking up bottles of 900 pills. Even assuming the rate for this town due to its composition is higher than normal, this is a factor of at least ten fold too high. And these opioid prescription rate are for all opioids not just these powerful and addicting ones. Most opioid prescriptions would normally be for less potent ones like codeine, propoxyphene (Darvon), and tramadol. So getting this much oxycodone and hydrocodone is something like a factor of 100 too high.
I expect that cultured meat has the same potential to bring down the cost of meat.
Thanks to the cyanobacteria that provide the food, it looks like cultured meat has a very good environmental footprint, the only rival is poultry.
But that does not mean it will be cheap. There is a lot more expensive high tech involved in this that raising cows. I'm not seeing any predictions right now that it will even reach the price of real beef.
However, while I can't recall what it's called right now, there is an effect known in economics that making a product more efficient actually ends up using even more energy because more efficiency means cheaper cost to the consumer and that in turn drives more consumer use.
Jevons "Paradox". I put that in quotes because it has been hard to find good demonstrations of its existence, and no a priori reason to believe it is any sort of "law". Lower prices (from efficiency gains) will increase use, but the prediction that it will always, or usually, or even often, exceed efficiency gains is not well founded, nor well documented. It glaringly fails with domestic refrigerators for example (a five fold improvement in energy efficiency did not lead to a six fold increase in the number of refrigerators).
We hit peak oil in 2009 exactly as Hubbert predicted. And yes, the world underwent some very important readjustments as a result.
Hubbert analyzed oil extraction histories from oil fields, and regions, around the world and devised a model that is both descriptive and predictive of how oil production (and resources production in general) changes over time with intensive extraction efforts. Though initially applied to oil, it is general in nature. Hubbert modelling correctly predicted peak oil arriving in the U.S. in 1970.
So how is that U.S. oil production has climbed back up to nearly (but not quite) the same peak as before, 45 years later? Because what is now being produced is not the same resource that Hubbert modeled. Hubbert was talking about conventional oil, from conventional oil fields. What is now being produced in the U.S. is "oil" not oil. When the world hit peak oil in 2009 (an event blunted by the Great Recession) oil prices sky-rocketed and commodities that were not conventional oil (natural gas condensates, tar sands, shale oil) started being reformed, or produced and pushed into the supply line to replace it. These are substitute commodities, made possible by the high price brought about by the lack of sufficient conventional oil - which is what Hubbert predicted. Oil prices hit their all time peak just before the Great Recession hit, and then climbed back nearly as high as soon as recovery commenced. Only the combination of alternative "oil" production, and Saudi deliberate over-production, brought the price back down to a lower stable, but still historically high, level.
Farmers pumping the Ogallala Aquifer dry are welcome to try to come up with a (much higher priced) substitute water that still allows them to raise cows profitably.
Nearly all of that comes straight from the sky or from local wells...
About that "free" water from local wells. The main beef raising states are (in order): Texas, Nebraska and Kansas. These three states get a large part of their agricultural water from the Ogalala Aquifer, which is (was) filled with fossil water hundreds of thousands of years old with a zero recharge rate under present conditions.
Texas was the first such state to hit "peak water" and that was almost 20 years ago. Its water extraction rate is now declining, a trend that will never be reversed. It is literally running out of water in the high plains. Kansas hit peak water in 2010. Its available water is also dropping annually.
That was the maddening thing at the time - the UNIX wars which prevented it from becoming the standard OS. That was a war in which everybody lost. For desktop computing UNIX and OS/2 were the only decent OS's (looking to the future) available. All of the other proprietary OS's had no potential for long term use - being tied to their particular proprietary platform, or just outright sucking (or both).
At the time I thought that the biggest challenge facing the desktop computer industry was settling on a dominant OS. Unfortunately the winner was MSDOS, and then Windows 3.1.
The rise of Linux is proof of the failed opportunity of the proprietary UNIX warriors.
Correct. This is a leadership and organization screw-up. It is on them to lay down the rules about what devices and activities go on in forward or combat zones, and to see that they are enforced.
Ditto. In evaluating smart phone apps for diet and exercise I found that a majority of them require, as a first step to using the app, creating a personal account on a website/server. That automatically moved them to the reject pile.
Mod this guy up someone! There are far too many posters here opining that "but the Russians and Chinese know these bases are there anyway". Anything that discloses operational patterns direct or indirectly is a security risk.
Normally intelligence outfits build up pictures of the entity of interest one piece at a time.
It is really the responsibility of the organization to lay down the rules, and see that they are enforced. Don't allow devices into the field that can compromise operations security. Have them checked in and held until the deployment is over. This article suggests to me that the military itself is unaware of the risks of these devices.