171–180 of 195 posts
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I don't think several orders of magnitude is really true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE is slower than a modern house, but not that slow. Further, with just hand tools the Amish where known for raising a barn in one day.
Did they build those hand tools by hand? Honest question.
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Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge. Another way of looking at this is that we weren't ever under threat of millions of displaced horses rising up and overthrowing the system. Since that is a possi…
People absolutely are tools in the eyes of their employers. I've never been at a company and not heard them refer to employees as "resources" when talking about scheduling and allocation of people. There's nothing special about humans in a factory compared to robots other than our ability to adapt and learn. But as robotics and AI/ML get better that gap narrows until you reach a point that the robot is "good enough".…
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From people trying to protect their own ass by not telling her that Watson doesn't work.
I'm not familiar with Watson. Why do you say it doesn't work? Does it fall short compared to other offerings in this space?
Rometty doesn't even know that Watson is a vaporware boondoggle, so how would she know what's going to happen when AI impacts society. She is probably the least qualified person at IBM to talk about AI, and IBM itself is one of the least qualified companies practicing "AI". She too far removed from the trenches. But IBM has excellent PR, and this is the line I would take if I were betting my company on AI services.
What part is vaporware? I've used the AlchemyAPI bits they acquired in building https://www.findlectures.com , and it's useful, albeit way oversold.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3065339/mind-and-machine/can-ibm...
> A doctor reads about a half dozen medical research papers in a month, Meyerson says, whereas Watson can read a half million in about 15 seconds. From that, machine learning (one of the key types of artificial intelligence today) can suggest diagnoses and the most promising course of treatment.
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You could also have much better safety systems - I.e. total oxygen evacuation for grease fires. No need to worry about people getting hurt. In fact, you might be able to make food in a 100% neutral environment (N2?) and have no fire risk at all. Then, you can use closed-loop air filtration and not exhaust grease and combustion byproducts into the atmosphere. OTOH, the nice dining experiences will be done by people wh…
No need for total oxygen evacuation. You actually just have to drop oxygen content in the air down from 21% to 15% to make most substances (including oil and grease) inflammable, and this air is perfectly safe to breathe for humans. In fact, if you consider the partial oxygen pressure (which is what matters for your lungs), this air is no worse than the air you find inside an airplane, or at a 2500m (8200 ft) mountai…
There's a lot believers in technological unemployment here on HN and one thing I think that viewpoint misses is just how darn resilient humans are to changes in the economy. In the past 150 years, we've seen human manual labor replaced by mechanical labor. Think about that -- a lot of early California settlers walked here, and now you're commanding power roughly equivalent to 100 horses when you hop into your car. Ag…
* Delocalization of work. The need for physical proximity is still a pervasive bottleneck. As that further relaxes (VR, remote work), what changes? Think "N weeks to get there" Roman empire vs current "call/email/tweet the world". Maybe a world without commutes? Without two-body problems?
* More richly interwoven human/machine-learning hybrid work processes. Say CEO compensation plummets as you get jit virtual "CEO"s. What happens when most businesses can afford competent leadership? Management? Even if the number of businesses increases by an order of magnitude? Or three?
* What does an economy look like if most people are scrambling, looking for opportunities, not working n-hour "jobs"? Where you can again pick up a "help wanted" "paper", and have a work a few hours later?
Yes, it's easy to imagine dystopias. Especially with resurgent aristocracy, regulatory capture, a patent system I expect to remain broken my entire professional career, and so on. But it's also easy to forget just how much potential change is inbound. Modulo the usual dangers of stagnation and wreckage, "you've not seen anything yet". Maybe.
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> Putting aside my dislike for considering horses as tools Well, I labeled humans as tools as well, so I'm not treating horses any differently in that respect than I am people, so I think you inferred a slightly different connotation for tool than I meant. Interestingly, the ability to see horses as non-tools is possible largely because their usefulness as a tool was surpassed by other technology. The same with cats…
>" Interestingly, the ability to see horses as non-tools is possible largely because their usefulness as a tool was surpassed by other technology." For you maybe, I'd say it's largely because they're sentient beings we share this planet with. >"when the populace cares enough, that disproportionate influence is a drop in the bucket compared to the influence of an incited populace." It's a nice idea, but compassion fat…
And my point is that a view such as this is a luxury people can now have because they are no longer required for survival. There have of course been people in the past that did not view these animals as tools, but for the vast majority of our history the vast majority saw them at least partially as a tool. The vast majority of people were seen as tools as well. Again, what I mean when I say tool and what you interpret when you read tool are very likely subtly different, otherwise I don't think you would have much objection. As I stated, I'm not treating them any different than people in this specific respect.
> It's a nice idea, but compassion fatigue is a real phenomenon.
Which doesn't really matter all that much when the whole point is that it may affect massive amounts of people. If it's affecting that many people, it's not compassion that's being tapped, but the changing circumstances of yourself and your immediate loved ones. Compassion isn't called for when it's happening to you; you don't become inured to pain like that when it's your own pain.
> I don't think we can rely on mobilising the population into action over every injustice.
I'm not proposing we do or can, for every injustice. I'm just noting that the people still have a massive amount of power, and when things affect them enough, they create change. The recent election is proof of this. People felt a change was needed, and felt they weren't being represented (whether true or not), and now we're in for something different. I don't think that necessarily means better, but I doubt it will be the status quo.
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I hate those self checkout machines. They are slow and constantly try to error out and alert a human to help me. I'm capable of bagging groceries, just let me do it. still, there is rarely a line.
They are incredibly simple to use if you follow the 3 instructions. But hey, people can't even signal when turning reliable, of course a lot of people are going to have problems with these machines.
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The 'unemployment rate' is fictional, and it takes a lot of hand waving to get to 5% unemployment rate. Some of which justified, but it's only useful for year to year comparisons not decade to decade as the number keep changing. Right now there are 121.5 million people working full time in the US. The population is 320 million people and 250 million adults and 200 million adults under 65. So actual employment is arou…
It does not take any hand waving -- you're trying to redefine a standard variable. U-3 is the 'headline' unemployment number which is near 5% right now. There are plenty of other ways to calculate it, including at least 5 published by the BLS. All of them tell the same story: people who want jobs, historically and barring recession, have been by and large able to get them, even if the job itself is not ideal. Your 50…
Further just looking at the published unemployment rate in the US there has been several changes to the definition over time. On top of that other countries use different metrics. So no you can point to U3 and call it a day.