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Serpent » July 28th, 2017, 12:55 am wrote:Mossling » July 27th, 2017, 9:49 am wrote: Nature delivers fresh reources all the time. Just open up nets where you are and harvest it. You don't need to expand territory.
[This is plainly incorrect. ]
Why?
For a great many factual reasons we don't have time to go into here, including physics, biology and history.
I contend that capitalism as we have known it depends on expansion and growth, and that there is a definite limit to both; that Earth and nature are finite, while human greed has so far shown no similar constraint. People keep multiplying and wanting more stuff.
I do not see what will alter that trajectory.
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Mossling » July 24th, 2017, 9:42 pm wrote:LOL, nothing to see here, folks?
This is NOW, wake up:
And people are thinking about in 20 years time maybe robots or maybe not. Haha.
Just think about what you see in the above video being extrapolated over 5 years of progress in automation and AI application, let alone 10 years.
And those few humans that do appear in that vast warehouse look pathetic - like the people who had to do the nightshift while everyone else was enjoying a good night's sleep.
Hard demoralizing labour is going to be a thing of the past.
Just wow. Science rocks.
But maybe the next big Infowars and Breitbart headline will be: 'Science and robots is a Liberal Agenda!' - I would not be surprised.
EDIT: And this was 2014:
Now things are probably even more sophisticated.
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Mossling » July 27th, 2017, 10:27 am wrote:Serpent » July 28th, 2017, 12:55 am wrote:Mossling » July 27th, 2017, 9:49 am wrote: Nature delivers fresh reources all the time. Just open up nets where you are and harvest it. You don't need to expand territory.
[This is plainly incorrect. ]
Why?
For a great many factual reasons we don't have time to go into here, including physics, biology and history.
I contend that capitalism as we have known it depends on expansion and growth, and that there is a definite limit to both; that Earth and nature are finite, while human greed has so far shown no similar constraint. People keep multiplying and wanting more stuff.
I do not see what will alter that trajectory.
I believe that it will be the same thing that has altered every other unsustainable trajectory humans have taken - the raw economics of staying alive. And we've already learnt from many many many delusion and ignorance-driven mistakes that we've made in the past. There's no reason why unsustainable expansion driven by greed (and maybe apocalypticism) will not be just another one.
Patriarchy, Divine Royalty, Slavery, Social Darwinism - all significantly out of favor now. Special interest and democracy high on the agenda - draining the swamp, 'post-truth' and so on. We do live and learn, my friend.
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Mossling » July 27th, 2017, 6:24 am wrote:Sivad wrote:‘fixing markets’ rather than co-creating and shaping them, has justified risks to be socialised while profits are privatised. It is this, not the “robots", that are leading to the problematic relationship between innovation and inequality.
Right. So it will be interesting to see how and when things are going to change. It seems that the governments should already begin taxing robots, but maybe this should have started a long, long time ago - before even ATMs replaced bank tellers, and so forth, when technology was bypassing 'middle men', for example. Perhaps Duggie and Uggie should have been taxed by their tribe as soon as they had invented a new more efficient flint blade/point?
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Athena » July 27th, 2017, 9:35 am wrote:
The first video was many humans working, and the second one looked very much like a pear packing plant I worked in, full of conveyor belts. The little moving boxes that moved shelves are more robotic than a human driving a fork lift, but I am not seeing a frightening change. The decision making was still done by humans and does not take a college degree, and for the system to work efficiently, the humans using the system, that is the customers, need to understand how the system works to avoid delays as humans have to process mistakes that taken out of line for special processing.
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Serpent » July 27th, 2017, 10:14 am wrote:Seems it will all turn out fine. Corporations will happily fork over an ever-increasing portion of their income to finance welfare; venture capitalists will peacefully morph into hunter-gatherers; The fracking, deep ocean drilling and tar-sands extraction will cease, when it's pointed out that these things harm the environment; the arms manufacturers will convert to ploughshare-making as soon as they realize that getting blown up is bad for little children and other animals.
How soon can my pet lion come over for a play-date with your lamb?
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Sivad » July 28th, 2017, 6:08 am wrote:You could go back to promo videos from the 50's showing fully automated kitchens and restaurants, and that future was just around the corner. I've worked in factories with automated systems, they constantly break down, they always have to be repaired/re-calibrated, you have to watch them constantly for any jamming or malfunction, and most of them still need at least one human operator for some stage of their routine.
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Mossling » July 27th, 2017, 4:37 pm wrote:Sivad » July 28th, 2017, 6:08 am wrote:You could go back to promo videos from the 50's showing fully automated kitchens and restaurants, and that future was just around the corner. I've worked in factories with automated systems, they constantly break down, they always have to be repaired/re-calibrated, you have to watch them constantly for any jamming or malfunction, and most of them still need at least one human operator for some stage of their routine.
Apparently AI is the big game changer - it's a new kind of resource, not a machine, but a brain of sorts.
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Sivad » July 28th, 2017, 9:54 am wrote:Mossling » July 27th, 2017, 4:37 pm wrote:Sivad » July 28th, 2017, 6:08 am wrote:You could go back to promo videos from the 50's showing fully automated kitchens and restaurants, and that future was just around the corner. I've worked in factories with automated systems, they constantly break down, they always have to be repaired/re-calibrated, you have to watch them constantly for any jamming or malfunction, and most of them still need at least one human operator for some stage of their routine.
Apparently AI is the big game changer - it's a new kind of resource, not a machine, but a brain of sorts.
I get that, but it's not here yet. It's still a ways off.
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Sivad » July 27th, 2017, 5:29 pm wrote:It's clearly going to get very bad before it gets any better, but intelligent life is so adaptable that there's a fair chance it will survive into a new age. Human existence has always been generally awful, but we keep moving forward because what else is there? Pessimism is pointless.
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Serpent » July 27th, 2017, 7:13 pm wrote:Sivad » July 27th, 2017, 5:29 pm wrote:It's clearly going to get very bad before it gets any better, but intelligent life is so adaptable that there's a fair chance it will survive into a new age. Human existence has always been generally awful, but we keep moving forward because what else is there? Pessimism is pointless.
Pessimism forces you to face decisions. Optimism allows you to defer them.
Something has to change - I mean, really change - before it gets better. Trusting that it will all work out; that bau/sop is just fine, will keep putting off the decision until it's too late.
Intelligent life is resilient, and I'm sure the rats will be very successful - because they have no faith to hinder their rational decision-making.
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Sivad » July 27th, 2017, 4:29 pm wrote:Serpent » July 27th, 2017, 10:14 am wrote:Seems it will all turn out fine. Corporations will happily fork over an ever-increasing portion of their income to finance welfare; venture capitalists will peacefully morph into hunter-gatherers; The fracking, deep ocean drilling and tar-sands extraction will cease, when it's pointed out that these things harm the environment; the arms manufacturers will convert to ploughshare-making as soon as they realize that getting blown up is bad for little children and other animals.
How soon can my pet lion come over for a play-date with your lamb?
It's clearly going to get very bad before it gets any better, but intelligent life is so adaptable that there's a fair chance it will survive into a new age. Human existence has always been generally awful, but we keep moving forward because what else is there? Pessimism is pointless.
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Sivad » July 27th, 2017, 10:07 pm wrote:Serpent » July 27th, 2017, 7:13 pm wrote:Sivad » July 27th, 2017, 5:29 pm wrote:It's clearly going to get very bad before it gets any better, but intelligent life is so adaptable that there's a fair chance it will survive into a new age. Human existence has always been generally awful, but we keep moving forward because what else is there? Pessimism is pointless.
Pessimism forces you to face decisions. Optimism allows you to defer them.
That's not true, optimism is expansive, it looks for the best possible option, pessimism is enervating and self-defeating. Pessimism quits before the optimal way forward is discovered.Something has to change - I mean, really change - before it gets better. Trusting that it will all work out; that bau/sop is just fine, will keep putting off the decision until it's too late.
Intelligent life is resilient, and I'm sure the rats will be very successful - because they have no faith to hinder their rational decision-making.
We're highly adaptable, we'll learn as we go and change with the circumstances. Like we've always done. I don't think you're really grasping what we've already survived. We made it through the Toba eruption bottleneck, the pleistocene-holocene transition which saw a mass extinction, the Black Death, the Cold War. We're better equipped than ever to survive. We've made a long bloody slog through endless shit, I have to believe we're gonna make it.
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Braininvat » July 29th, 2017, 1:19 am wrote:I'm optimistic regarding what Sivad has characterized as human adaptability. The point where my optimism falters a little is in regard to experiments gone awry. I knew the LHC at CERN wasn't going to make a tiny black hole and swallow the Earth, at least I was pretty sure. But I am not as sure that nanotechnology research couldn't accidentally craft a rogue nanomachine that gets out of the lab, reproduces wildly and turns the biosphere into "gray goo." Whenever research goes in a direction of something that can self-replicate, extreme caution is needed. The optimist in me says that the worst scenarios of proliferating nanos or artificial bugs are yet another good reason to further our efforts at a viable colony on another planet. IIRC, around 650 is the number of persons needed to survive a population crash (if they aren't all part of one extended family) and emerge from the bottleneck with sufficient genetic diversity to keep going as a species.
If there were a "gray goo" catastrophe, I would be glad of the Seed Banks that have been established at various locations around the globe in the past few decades. Survivors (if there were underground havens with enough food stocks) might have some hope of deactivating the nanoculture and reestablishing native flora. (especially if there were robots to help out with the planting....) Now that's the optimist talking.
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Someday soon your Domino’s Pizza could be delivered to you — without an actual delivery person.
Ford and Domino’s are testing out a specially-equipped Ford Fusion that comes not only with self-driving technology but also an oven. It sounds cool but there is a catch — there’s no one to walk the pizza to your front door and ring the bell. That’s what Ford and Domino’s say they’re really testing.
[...]
Ford has been using Fusion sedans for some time to test self-driving technology. Experts have said that delivery services will likely be among the first industries to widely adopt self-driving vehicles.
Ford and Domino’s did preliminary testing for the human-free delivery process at Mcity, a simulated city environment on the campus of the University of Michigan. During testing on the college campus, the cars were allowed to drive themselves although humans were still in the driver’s seat.
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Braininvat » September 5th, 2017, 11:27 pm wrote:http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/04/technology/culture/elon-musk-ai-world-war/index.html
"So long, Mom, I'm off to drop dot-com..."
Musk believes AI will lead to WW3.
The dire prediction was in response to a recent comment from Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia but of all of mankind," Putin said. "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world."
At the moment, the United States, China and India are the three countries leading the AI race, according to one top tech industry executive.
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plenty of tasks in fulfilment centres, they say, are still too complex for robots: checks on quality, the quick assembly of cardboard boxes, the careful packing of items.
But for how long? For the past three years, the company has organised a competition, the Amazon Robotics Challenge, in which entrants have to come up with a robot that “identifies objects, grasps them, and then safely packs them in boxes”. This year, £60,000 in prize money was won by a team from the Australian Centre For Robotic Vision in Brisbane, who invented Cartman, which uses “suction cups and a two-fingered claw to grasp and manipulate items”; one of the team was swiftly hired. Meanwhile, Amazon’s experiments with drones are well known (it officially launched a drone-based delivery method called Prime Air in 2013, though it is unlikely to become a reality until 2020 at the earliest). The company is also said to be researching the use of driverless vehicles.
“We’re taking the kinds of techniques and processes that have been long established in manufacturing and applying them to a service industry,” says Roy Perticucci, Amazon’s European vice-president for customer fulfilment. “That causes a reallocation of resources, and it’s really a third or fourth wave of industrialisation: it started in manufacturing, and it continued through to everything else.”
[...]
Like Harari, Perticucci uses the example of the Industrial Revolution, but with a positive spin: “In the end, almost everyone involved was far better off, and the quality of whatever was being provided was better than what had been there before.”
[...]
Swedish academic Carl Benedikt Frey. Working at Oxford University’s Martin School, which describes itself as “a world-leading centre of pioneering research that addresses global challenges”, Frey has been intensively researching the relationship between automation and human employment since 2011. He now spends 90% of his professional life working on the subject, and his findings do not make for comforting reading.
[...]
Although the technology is only just starting to be implemented, the same effect is set to tear through unskilled or semi-skilled work in services.
This, Frey insists, may not entail mass unemployment. “There will always be jobs if people are prepared to work for sufficiently low wages,” he says, matter-of-factly. “But the big question is whether people are going to be better off as a result of automation in the future.” He pauses. “Some will. Some won’t.”
His research points to widening inequality. “A lot of people who are highly skilled will gain from automation. Lower-skilled workers are likely to lose out.” In time, he says, generations with more tech skills and an adaptable attitude to work may ease the birth pangs of this new world; but if you’re a 55-year-old who has lost their job to a robot, things are likely to be bleak. There may be work in fields that require “complex social interactions” – he mentions fitness trainers, beauticians and carers – but it may well be poorly paid and not suited to everybody.
When is the kind of disruption he predicts?
“I think when we have autonomous vehicles on the road, then we will know,” Frey says. This may not be as far off as it sounds: transport minister Chris Grayling said recently that the first autonomous cars will be commercially available in 2021.
[...]
Looking around, I get the same feeling of future-shock I experienced at Amazon and Ocado: a sense of hardware and software whirring away, and all those people clutching phones and coffee cups planning more of the innovations that are disrupting the world of work as never before.
Some of Quotemehappy’s operations are dealt with by Aviva staff in Perth and Norwich, but to all intents and purposes, it is run from here. It has one million customers, and is growing fast. Its workforce totals 25.
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Braininvat » November 26th, 2017, 11:50 pm wrote:I found Max Tegmark's new book rather thought-provoking.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ ... ark-review
Tegmark thoroughly covers the bases, in terms of possible AI futures, both benign and dark.
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Braininvat » November 28th, 2017, 2:12 am wrote:
We need to start figuring out now, if we want AIs to be our assistants....or our descendants. Or other scenarios, which are detailed in the book.
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Densely-populated Singapore hopes driverless technology will help the country manage its land constraints and manpower shortages.
"The autonomous vehicles will greatly enhance the accessibility and connectivity of our public transport system, particularly for the elderly, families with young children and the less mobile," the Transport Minister Khaw Boon Wan said.
Advertisement
The autonomous buses are expected to complement existing manned bus services, and will initially operate during off-peak hours.
Additionally, the government plans to let commuters hail on-demand shuttles using their mobile phones.
[...]
Singapore has less traffic congestion compared to many other cities in Southeast Asia, due to road tolls and policies that promote public transport.
The country also hopes to become a leader in driverless technologies.
[...]
At least 10 companies are currently testing driverless car technology in Singapore, Mr Khaw added.
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