What you’re saying is that America has not yet entirely revoked the entirety of the New Deal, but you’ve got to admit: we’ve made great strides, especially in the area of union-busting, revoking the 40 hour work week, putting an end to that annoying “raise” thing, and getting the minimum wage down below livability standards. Social Security and Medicare are the next goal for the Republicans, and believe me, they are on it. That’s what the next round of debt ceiling squabbling is going to be about.
I know lot of people who believe as you do, but the reality is that our system is far more progressive than during the New Deal.
Another drop in the bucket, literally. Robot trucks outperform human driven trucks in mines. I’m sure this information is not being lost on transportation firms.
I am not sure what you mean by that. What period are you referring to, and in what respects?
I’m saying that the entirety of our government’s regulatory apparatus and safety net right now is more progressive than it was during any part of the New Deal (even if you broadly extend the definition of “New Deal” to the '50s or '60s). From environmental protection (EPA), to workplace safety (OSHA), to protection of the rights of the disabled (ADA), women (Lily Ledbetter Act, Roe v. Wade), gays and lesbians (too many to list), not to mention the larger percentage of GDP spent on social programs, it’s just a total fallacy to argue that the New Deal has been mostly (or even partly) “rolled back”.
Sorry for the slow reply, I did intend to get back to this one but it slipped my mind (cybernetically enhanced memory and perfect recall? Sign me up!)
I’ve seen this discussed before, though not usually in the context of AI’s. I’m in the camp that I really don’t see what advantage a ‘memory wipe’ is, the person/entity is still going to feel the pain and torture at the time. And with a sentient AI (or human mind running on software) you could get into some really sick and twisted stuff. At least as humans now we know that no matter how bad it gets you can only be killed once.
This subject is part of the novels ‘Surface Detail’ by Iain M. Banks and ‘Altered Carbon’ by Richard Morgan. I’d actually forgot the name and title of the latter but a quick google search of ‘sci-fi noir’ brought it up. The internet really is awesome.
I actually came across the concept of ‘philosophical zombies’ only recently, I think its one of those things that is interesting to consider but not possible to prove either way.
And I think that’s a really strange way to look at things (the more I read about Roger Ebert the more I question why he was so respected), there is no reason without appealing to the supernatural that conciousness can’t be artificially created if only we had the knowledge to know how to do so.
Personally I think that if something appears to all purposes sentient and self-aware we should treat it as if it is even if we or it can’t prove it (we have difficulty enough defining out own conciousness). If it isn’t concious and we treat it as it is there’s no harm done, if it is concious and we treat it as if it isn’t then we’re potentially mistreating and abusing another self-aware being.
Which isn’t cool in every respect.
I think that’s questionable, the ‘more skilled conversationalists’ part certainly, but I have a self-imposed ban on discussing gender issues so I’ll leave it at that. Thanks for the answer though!
I think I would be so screwed! I am having a hard enough time with the robots
answering machines ! I can’t ask the damn machine to repeat itself but they can
keep saying “I can’t understand you” ! No shit I have a speech defect and when I say ‘sit’ it sound like ‘shit’ something ! So I could end with a bag of shit
instead of a bag of chips ! LOL!
Purplehearingaid, it’s an interesting point. Not just with AI, but with many aspects of large-scale industrialization, it is often people outside the center of the bell curve that get screwed over. (Think about someone with an unusual body shape, after tailoring clothes went by the wayside and people just had to look for standard-sized clothing off the rack.)
I like this rule of thumb.
Interesting article on the new “sharing economy.”
The author sees the rise of new programs like Uber, Task Rabbit and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (he could have and should have mentioned Fiverr) as further weakening of the position of workers wrt maintaining steady employment. It’s a further demonstration to me that the One Percent will happily let people starve to death rather than share in the wealth produced by automation and robotics.
I was thrown for a loop a couple days ago when my Google Inbox app started suggesting short replies to emails. I had previously been fairly impressed by Apple’s word suggestions when composing emails, but this was on another level. It really seemed to “understand” what the content and even tone of the email was about in suggesting replies.
So I found a fascinating Popular Science article about the AI behind this new feature, which I highly recommend reading. I was particularly amused/flabbergasted by this part:
Uhhh…am I the only one who translates that last sentence as “In the end, they modified the AI to be a billion fucking times more intelligent and sophisticated”?!? Oh yeah, sure: just tweak it a titch to make it “gauge the tone of the email”, no biggie, whatevs. :eek:
You can even have the AI talk to another iteration of itself: I sent my wife the Popular Science link along with a few of my own comments about the article. She wrote back, adding a wink to let me know she was using the auto-replier: “This is great, thanks for sharing!” to which I auto-replied “Glad you like it!”
It’s not hard to imagine this evolving to be more and more sophisticated, and doing more and more of the work of keeping up our correspondence (and along the way, making plans with people and duly updating our calendars) until we are just herded around all day by our smartphones or their descendants, who become to some extent our keepers or minders.
BTW, you also do *not *want to miss another Popular Science article linked in the above. Some coder at Google figured out that if you reverse their Image Search algorithm, you can make the computer “draw” its Platonic ideal of what something (a banana, a starfish, or a dumbbell) looks like. Those attempts are a little trippy/freaky. But then when it tries to find the pattern of one thing in another (like taking a leaf for a bird) it gets even more uncanny. And when they set it to work on white noise, trying to discern patterns in the chaos (what they call the AI’s “dreams”)…whoa. That has to be seen to be believed or grokked in any way. Just completely mindblowing and thought-provoking. Even if you don’t think this is even a smidgen of a scintilla of the way toward evolving sentience, the pure brute computer force displayed there is stunning.
Wow, those pictures are genuinely stunning, especially the white noise ones! Thank you for linking to that 
I agree, and you’re welcome. They probably deserve their own thread; if you start one, please link me.
People will need to polish their robot washing skills to have a purpose.
I’m not sure what those images mean, but they are thought-provoking.
Right, and their enigmatic nature is a big part of that. Something that is kind of wild to ponder is that the coders presumably did not know what they were going to get back when they set the AI to “dreaming”.
The chief economist for the Bank of England says that 80 million jobs in the US and 15 million jobs in the UK are in danger of being lost to automation.
Cite.
You know, when staid bankers are making these projections, people should really start taking notice.
Farming robot capable of recognizing and killing weeds may make pesticides a thing of the past.
It’s the shape recognition software that’s the key, and that, combined with increasingly skilled robot manipulators, will displace all manual labor eventually.
Wow, automation in farming. That’ll kill us all. **Because we’ve never used machines to eliminate farm labor before.
**
This is getting comical.
And think of all the jobs lost building that wall that will no longer be necessary!!
Sure, Rick, we all know the history of farm labor being made unnecessary by machinery. That’s why I pointed this out as an interation of the development that will make ALL forms of manual labor unnecessary. I LIKE the idea of farmers being able to grow crops without pesticides without anyone having to do the backbreaking manual labor involved in weeding, I think it’s a GOOD thing. I’m just worried about job losses down the road due to all sort of labor being replaced by machinery, and none of those jobs being replaced. I know, I know, the invisible hand of the marketplace will magically pull jobs from the sky when the time comes. I have no faith in the invisible hand of the marketplace. To me you sound like one of those bankers in 2006 saying, “Real estate will NEVER go down in value.”
The Luddites were RIGHT as far as their own personal fates went: they DID suffer massive economic disruptions, losing homes and families, when the automated mills made their jobs obsolete. But nobody seems to have noticed, or cared about that.