Once again, you have produced an essay of astounding length and intricacy.
While I can't possibly answer to all the nuances of your argument, I agree that our social structure is based on scarcity. We are quickly approaching a post-scarcity society - through labor replacements, more efficient technologies and the potential for superstructures such as solar power satellites, space elevators and so on.
I don't think that decisions about the social aspects of this work lie in the hands of the roboticists, though they probably understand more than anyone the long term potential for their machines to replace all labour. I think that those decisions lie with the general populance.
I for one would love the transition to a gift economy (or perhaps something more like the Star Trek economy) - our capitalistic society has worked well for us so far, but soon the few things that humans can UNIQUELY do will have to be encouraged. Capitalistic mechanisms are very good at keeping the rich rich, like you say. Much better to free people from the need to get enough food and shelter to survive and then to capture the public imagination with mega projects that really do require human involvement.
My main point is that we shouldn't fear technology. I agree with the thesis of your argument which seems to be that massive change is coming, so we better embrace it and prepare for it.
It really is just a matter of time until all the unskilled labor is replaced. I hope at this point that every human whose job is threatened is capable of finding a calling that is uniquely human.
Woah. I'll have to come back to this one. But you present a compelling case in both posts Paul.
In general I'm against the idea that there is a limit to how far we can go. There is a lot of uncharted territory, that is for sure. We certainly have come up with ways to keep ourselves busy - ways that seemed unimaginable 100 years ago when industrialization greatly reduced the requirements for raw labor.
We cannot be sure that we don't come up with another higher calling that robots can't do over the next 100 years.
If you are the sort of knowledge worker who can program robots, your labor is not in competition with the abilities of this robot.
In general, people in modern countries are expected to constantly do more and more complex things for the same pay. Think of it as a physical Turing test.
There is no upper limit on how much work there is to do, as you said there is no scarcity - of work. Don't worry about robots making us all jobless.
My startup, GridSpy is a web based power monitoring system and I think that you are totally right.
Most homeowners are relatively minor power users and probably have a fairly good idea where the power is going already. Like you say, the cost of a monitoring solution is more than the likely savings over the course of a year.
However, there are lots of exceptions where power monitoring is useful. You might be considering upgrades to your house and you want to know where to put the money in. If your bill is mostly hot water heating, you might install solar hot water. Perhaps the heating turns out to be the major power hog so you improve your insulation and install a new heat pump.
After you have made these changes, it is very difficult to actually prove that there was an improvement unless you are monitoring the power for the related circuits. GridSpy is perfect for this.
I think that the value add is even more evident for industrial scale power users or for off-grid homes, where the power cost is high enough to dwarf the cost of the monitoring equipment.
My startup Gridspy also helps you to track your power usage, but with a web focus. You can see your power usage online, and the install is simple (you do it at the breaker box) so it doesn't require new appliances.
A robot does fine at packing uniform objects into uniform packages, but good luck finding one that can pack your shipment from Amazon.com, or do basic construction work, or pull the ingredients for 50,000 gallons of Coca Cola off of shelves in a warehouse and mix them all together for you. There is still a lot of dull, brain-killing, menial work for humans to do. If you work in an office and have never set foot in any kind of industrial operation, you'll probably be surprised at how much stuff still needs to be done by humans.
There are already automation systems for warehouses, for instance robotic forklifts http://www.inro.co.nz/
Humans are great at packing odd shaped stuff. But when you have a lot of regular objects, look out for robots. This is just a matter of low hanging fruit - why make a flexible robot when simple robots are cheaper and the market is still huge and unsatisfied.
Grabbing large quantites of ingredients is a large scale logistical exercise. There are very few "moves" and a lot of small difficulties. Humans make sense here.
Construction is moving more in the direction of prefabed portions, where the tree was cut robotically by an operator assisted machine. The frames assembled in a factory under robot control. Humans on the job site are doing less and less of the raw, repetitive framing work - again we are well suited to decision making.
I like to think that Robots are doing all the boring stuff so we can do the fun stuff.
If you watch the video you'll see that the destination platform is under computer control. The pick and place machine probably knows (well in advance) where the wiimote commands have told the platform to move. There is a 100-500ms latency between tilting the controller and the platform velocity changing.
If the platform was attached to a long handle that a human could pull back and forth quickly I'd be more impressed. The platform could have a sensor underneath to tell the robot where it was or you could make the platform trackable by camera (which would add considerable latency).
However, most robots have well defined workspaces that don't have outside influences. A robot doesn't have to pass such a test to be useful.
It would be great to group all emails marked as spam by gmail into one folder, group it by spammer (or just main contents of message) and make those emails available to lawyers / forensics experts hoping to do some investigative research and bring a class action lawsuit.
If they simply picked the most "popular" spam message every week and got an award of $1000 per email when they located the spammer (keeping say 10%) it would be a nice profitable business.
The hash collision between the DNA fingerprint of two individuals could be detected as data is added to the system. Those two individuals could then have a second fingerprint calculated to resolve the collision or could simply have a note attached to their file.
Obviously this only works if they achieve the 100% coverage that they are aiming for.
If the US starts printing a lot of money, the value of the Greenback will plummet. Investors in the US dollar will sell up and buy Gold, Euros or similar. This will cause the value of the US dollar fall even further. Suddenly everything in the US gets expensive to buy with the now worthless dollar and you have got nowhere.
In some ways the US is extremely exposed because many foreign players have a lot of US dollars that they will sell at the first sign of trouble (some are already doing so).
As for the load on the primary increasing as secondary coils are added, see the First law of thermodynamics. " The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings. "
Secondary coils drawing power are causing the primary coil to do work.
The way this stuff works in practice is that the primary coil makes a field that adds power...to the primary coil. This feedback loop reduces the power consumption of the primary coil. Secondary coils make this field weaker (by drawing power from it). The primary coil then has a lower positive feedback from its own field, so draws more power. This is the principle that makes electric motors draw more power when stopped / under load.
Electric toothbrushes can be charged using inductance, as they are incredibly close to their base station when put down. A simple solution would have the brush dropped into a plain circular hole in the base, with no exposed contacts, just a drainage hole. The base has a wire-wrapped core wrapped around this hole. there is matching coil in the brush. The two create a transformer when the brush is in the socket, transmitting the electrical power.
What is special about this system is the long range. I am sure it trades off efficiency, size and manufacturing complexity to get it. Long range is a very very compelling feature.
That could be financial ruin for a company built around one artist's output. Say I create art and sell it. If I have a gallery that sells my art, the day that I die the gallery is financially in jeopardy. Maybe a 6 month grace period would suffice.
Which artist counts when a creation is a collaborative effort (i.e the LOTR movie)? Death of every single participant?
I like to think of all programming languages as a way to translate our requirements into a highly explicit form that the computer can understand. We then choose how explicit we want to be (assembly -> C -> Python (say) -> ?)
It is easy to create a single worker thread that does some offline processing, say creating a document to print. It is harder to split a task into n threads where n scales over time (years after your program was shipped) to match the number of available cores in the machine. Harder still to ensure that all these threads are kept busy with low synchronisation overhead.
I argue that a program gets more "Parallel" as it becomes more scalable in the sense I just described.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, you have produced an essay of astounding length and intricacy.
While I can't possibly answer to all the nuances of your argument, I agree that our social structure is based on scarcity. We are quickly approaching a post-scarcity society - through labor replacements, more efficient technologies and the potential for superstructures such as solar power satellites, space elevators and so on.
I don't think that decisions about the social aspects of this work lie in the hands of the roboticists, though they probably understand more than anyone the long term potential for their machines to replace all labour. I think that those decisions lie with the general populance.
I for one would love the transition to a gift economy (or perhaps something more like the Star Trek economy) - our capitalistic society has worked well for us so far, but soon the few things that humans can UNIQUELY do will have to be encouraged. Capitalistic mechanisms are very good at keeping the rich rich, like you say. Much better to free people from the need to get enough food and shelter to survive and then to capture the public imagination with mega projects that really do require human involvement.
My main point is that we shouldn't fear technology. I agree with the thesis of your argument which seems to be that massive change is coming, so we better embrace it and prepare for it.
It really is just a matter of time until all the unskilled labor is replaced. I hope at this point that every human whose job is threatened is capable of finding a calling that is uniquely human.
Woah. I'll have to come back to this one. But you present a compelling case in both posts Paul.
In general I'm against the idea that there is a limit to how far we can go. There is a lot of uncharted territory, that is for sure. We certainly have come up with ways to keep ourselves busy - ways that seemed unimaginable 100 years ago when industrialization greatly reduced the requirements for raw labor.
We cannot be sure that we don't come up with another higher calling that robots can't do over the next 100 years.
If you are the sort of knowledge worker who can program robots, your labor is not in competition with the abilities of this robot.
In general, people in modern countries are expected to constantly do more and more complex things for the same pay. Think of it as a physical Turing test.
There is no upper limit on how much work there is to do, as you said there is no scarcity - of work. Don't worry about robots making us all jobless.
My Startup GridSpy is based around this sort of monitoring, but making it easier to install and use.
My startup, GridSpy is a web based power monitoring system and I think that you are totally right.
Most homeowners are relatively minor power users and probably have a fairly good idea where the power is going already. Like you say, the cost of a monitoring solution is more than the likely savings over the course of a year.
However, there are lots of exceptions where power monitoring is useful. You might be considering upgrades to your house and you want to know where to put the money in. If your bill is mostly hot water heating, you might install solar hot water. Perhaps the heating turns out to be the major power hog so you improve your insulation and install a new heat pump.
After you have made these changes, it is very difficult to actually prove that there was an improvement unless you are monitoring the power for the related circuits. GridSpy is perfect for this.
I think that the value add is even more evident for industrial scale power users or for off-grid homes, where the power cost is high enough to dwarf the cost of the monitoring equipment.
Shameless Plug:
My startup Gridspy also helps you to track your power usage, but with a web focus. You can see your power usage online, and the install is simple (you do it at the breaker box) so it doesn't require new appliances.
I've also written about how GridSpy works
A robot does fine at packing uniform objects into uniform packages, but good luck finding one that can pack your shipment from Amazon.com, or do basic construction work, or pull the ingredients for 50,000 gallons of Coca Cola off of shelves in a warehouse and mix them all together for you. There is still a lot of dull, brain-killing, menial work for humans to do. If you work in an office and have never set foot in any kind of industrial operation, you'll probably be surprised at how much stuff still needs to be done by humans.
There are already automation systems for warehouses, for instance robotic forklifts http://www.inro.co.nz/
Humans are great at packing odd shaped stuff. But when you have a lot of regular objects, look out for robots. This is just a matter of low hanging fruit - why make a flexible robot when simple robots are cheaper and the market is still huge and unsatisfied.
Grabbing large quantites of ingredients is a large scale logistical exercise. There are very few "moves" and a lot of small difficulties. Humans make sense here.
Construction is moving more in the direction of prefabed portions, where the tree was cut robotically by an operator assisted machine. The frames assembled in a factory under robot control. Humans on the job site are doing less and less of the raw, repetitive framing work - again we are well suited to decision making.
I like to think that Robots are doing all the boring stuff so we can do the fun stuff.
If you watch the video you'll see that the destination platform is under computer control. The pick and place machine probably knows (well in advance) where the wiimote commands have told the platform to move. There is a 100-500ms latency between tilting the controller and the platform velocity changing.
If the platform was attached to a long handle that a human could pull back and forth quickly I'd be more impressed. The platform could have a sensor underneath to tell the robot where it was or you could make the platform trackable by camera (which would add considerable latency).
However, most robots have well defined workspaces that don't have outside influences. A robot doesn't have to pass such a test to be useful.
It would be great to group all emails marked as spam by gmail into one folder, group it by spammer (or just main contents of message) and make those emails available to lawyers / forensics experts hoping to do some investigative research and bring a class action lawsuit.
If they simply picked the most "popular" spam message every week and got an award of $1000 per email when they located the spammer (keeping say 10%) it would be a nice profitable business.
Further - they cannot afford to do this sort of investigation on every single one of the millions of videos on Youtube.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/every-minute-just-about-a-days-worth-of-video-is-uploaded-to-youtube/
I imagine that they have only had the resources to investigate a sample of the alleged videos well after the fact.
The hash collision between the DNA fingerprint of two individuals could be detected as data is added to the system. Those two individuals could then have a second fingerprint calculated to resolve the collision or could simply have a note attached to their file.
Obviously this only works if they achieve the 100% coverage that they are aiming for.
Also, I am totally against this scheme.
Sounds like we found the explanation for the Norfolk issue:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/17/196230/Time-Bomb-May-Have-Destroyed-800-Norfolk-City-PCs-Data
If the US starts printing a lot of money, the value of the Greenback will plummet. Investors in the US dollar will sell up and buy Gold, Euros or similar. This will cause the value of the US dollar fall even further. Suddenly everything in the US gets expensive to buy with the now worthless dollar and you have got nowhere.
In some ways the US is extremely exposed because many foreign players have a lot of US dollars that they will sell at the first sign of trouble (some are already doing so).
It sounds like the developers choose to use the fastest and most reliable Windows version available for development.
It was both super cute and super annoying when my little 1 year old "drove" his Cars DVD around on the floor, complete with "brrrm brrrm" noises.
Usually with these devices, there are losses in the primary coil due to the current rushing around, but much less than you might expect - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductor#Stored_energy.
As for the load on the primary increasing as secondary coils are added, see the First law of thermodynamics.
"
The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings.
"
Secondary coils drawing power are causing the primary coil to do work.
The way this stuff works in practice is that the primary coil makes a field that adds power...to the primary coil. This feedback loop reduces the power consumption of the primary coil. Secondary coils make this field weaker (by drawing power from it). The primary coil then has a lower positive feedback from its own field, so draws more power. This is the principle that makes electric motors draw more power when stopped / under load.
[nitpick]
How do you connect the superconductor to the grid? Is that connection also superconducting?
[/nitpick]
@2gravey - the impedance of the cord is nothing to the impedance of the transmission mechanism (those power pylons and transformers)
Electric toothbrushes can be charged using inductance, as they are incredibly close to their base station when put down. A simple solution would have the brush dropped into a plain circular hole in the base, with no exposed contacts, just a drainage hole. The base has a wire-wrapped core wrapped around this hole. there is matching coil in the brush. The two create a transformer when the brush is in the socket, transmitting the electrical power.
What is special about this system is the long range. I am sure it trades off efficiency, size and manufacturing complexity to get it. Long range is a very very compelling feature.
Where are mod points when I need them
That could be financial ruin for a company built around one artist's output. Say I create art and sell it. If I have a gallery that sells my art, the day that I die the gallery is financially in jeopardy. Maybe a 6 month grace period would suffice.
Which artist counts when a creation is a collaborative effort (i.e the LOTR movie)? Death of every single participant?
Obviously too many people comparison shopping.
Indeed. A perfect search engine would return one and only one result, and it would be exactly what you were looking for every time.
I like to think of all programming languages as a way to translate our requirements into a highly explicit form that the computer can understand. We then choose how explicit we want to be (assembly -> C -> Python (say) -> ?)
It is easy to create a single worker thread that does some offline processing, say creating a document to print. It is harder to split a task into n threads where n scales over time (years after your program was shipped) to match the number of available cores in the machine. Harder still to ensure that all these threads are kept busy with low synchronisation overhead.
I argue that a program gets more "Parallel" as it becomes more scalable in the sense I just described.
Still not stealing.
In this case you are acquiring access to classified data. You are not stealing it (i.e you are not physically walking off with blueprints).
Imagine I took a photo of a bomb. Did I just steal it?