Comment Well bridge the gap someday! (Score 1) 73
At some point we'll invent an AI that can be bitchy and condescending, and slap around old people when nobody is looking.
(Tongue firmly in cheek. I know good nurses.)
At some point we'll invent an AI that can be bitchy and condescending, and slap around old people when nobody is looking.
(Tongue firmly in cheek. I know good nurses.)
It's like those horrific days in the distant past when music was unusable and pointless.
You know... radio.
What savages we were. Certainly we were incapable of singing along unless somebody published the words in the newspaper.
Definitely humans provide care in a way an algorithm cannot. On the other hand, when the summary does get around to mentioning what Kaiser is actually doing, it's monitoring sensors. Computers are pretty damn good at maintaining vigilance in sensor monitoring, in a way people are not. That's why we have fire alarms even though humans can also feel heat and smell smoke.
I don't have any reason to upgrade my iPad. And I use it quite a lot. When I bother to take the time to close all the apps, I find there are at least 10 of them open.
Lots of people have the arrogance to assume that just because they don't "get" it, there must be nothing to get. But I am as technical as anybody, and I find it amazingly useful.
I had one major annoyance... the iPad wouldn't use my Bind9 server for resolution, no matter what I did, which meant it couldn't resolve my internal servers by hostname. Even went to experimental builds to try to resolve it. But apparently somebody somewhere threw enough of a fit that in the last couple of releases it was quietly corrected.
Now it's just one of my many tech tools quietly existing in my ecosystem.
If I remember right, it's a pretty simple swap. Nothing crazy wired into the wall. Frankly, if any smart devices last 16 years I'm blown away by the longevity.
I've fired every last smart device I tried for being incompetent at being the thing they're trying to be "smart" about.
They will push the AI angle until maybe 1.5 years from now, when it falls out of fashion.
My knowledge of customer feedback from the spate of AI helpers from Microsoft, Google and others is that they kinda work sometimes and that mostly, customers hate it. It's like turning on FSD in the middle of a city in my Tesla. You put more effort into monitoring and checking the AI's output than you would just driving.
Similarly with writing a document, or writing code. There is no AI that can help me write the stuff I write. It's mired in company secrets that no AI is trained on and the AI can't put together cogent technical arguments that cover more than a single sentence. It's like having an illiterate child writing over your sheet of paper.
This isn't a value prop for customers and it won't turn out to be one. AI will bury itself in the fabric of the world in the form of classifiers, human language parsers and image/data enhancement but no one is going to pay for that, it'll just be an additional cost on businesses that need to have these convenience functions to feature match the competition.
Although, they make some nice non-OLED screens too.
The Soviet Union wasn't building "Communism", so it could not fail at it
I guess you don't understand what "nominal" means, hence the confusion. See here for the full definition and examples. Also check the de jure vs de facto distinction. Afterwards, if you re-read my replies, my meaning will become clearer.
You had a point that the Soviet ideological goal was Marxist Communism
No, I said it was Socialist and Marxist, but not Communist, and that it had as its nominal goal bringing about Communism. The inheritance Socialism -> Marxism -> Leninism -> Stalinism isn't disputed by any scholar, at most they discuss how much Russian political traditions influenced the way the latter two' approached Marx's ideas (example), so I'm not sure what your point is. A contrarian position, maybe?
They'd disclosed it but the first one hadn't finished testifying under oath about it. And that matters. The latter has status as evidence in court.
I've lived through the best years of the "Socialist Camp" myself, although not in the SU itself, so I know how it was first-hand.
Therein lies the issue. I don't doubt your experience was between really bad and horrible, but you're doing a different comparison than the one I'm doing.
Your perspective is contrasting a) the Socialist system you lived through versus how b) democratic societies of the time were. This is a fair comparison, and it's undoubtful the first was, in comparison to the later, bad. Really, really bad.
What I'm arguing is different though. I'm doing a comparison between what your reality was (or, more precisely, what the URSS reality was) versus c) what it would have been had Tzarism continued, by extrapolating from the later based on how other feudal societies historically developed over similar timespans.
A third possible comparison is between what Russia became versus d) what it would have become had it gone through a Liberal revolution in 1917, rather than a Communist one, that is, a revolution that had embraced Classic Liberalism in economy, Representative Liberal Democracy in politics complete with multiple political parties, full freedom of the press, full free speech rights, full human rights with a comprehensive bill of rights, limits on central power with a fully enforced Constitution government branches couldn't ignore, pulverization of power via federalist mechanisms of governance, and so on, and so forth. It doesn't matter much if it'd have turned Republican or remained as a Constitutional Monarchy, as the long as the remaining of the list had been adopted and kept running.
Hence, what I'm arguing, basically, is that, in terms of best to worst, we have this hierarchy:
i) Already established Western Liberal societies (case "b") would have remained better in comparison due to already existing, already working, and already having established self-reinforcing mechanisms, to continue doing what they were doing.
ii) A hypothetical Liberal Russia (case "d") would have been the best possible scenario had it happened. Liberal 1950s' Russia would still be behind older Liberal democracies, but way ahead of what Socialist Russia achieved, all without so many deaths and misery.
iii) Actual Socialist Russia (case "a") was bad, but better than a straight continuation of Tzarist Russia would have become.
iv) Lastly, a hypothetical Tzarist Russia that continued into the 1950s would have been the worst possible scenario. It'd have failed to industrialize and would have become a producer of grains and of raw minerals. A small industry would exist, but by and large it'd have turned into an importer of added-value goods, with little hope of turning out better due to an ever-widening gap between its low technological reality and the high technological one of Liberal countries.
Hence, as before, it isn't as much that we're disagreeing, but that we're focusing on different sides of the same issue.
It is a safe bet it would have happened anyway, but it might have taken longer without the propaganda race (...)
True. Probably much longer, but the seeds already existed in the welfare system implemented by Bismarck in Germany in the second half of the 19th century.
Interestingly, Marx himself was intensely opposed to such welfare systems, and argued bitterly against reformist, anti-violent revolution group that departed the then workers' movement to eventually become Social-Democracy. His argument, in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", was that providing such welfare for workers would make proletarians comfortable enough in their lives that it'd defuse their revolutionary spirit, perpetuating Capitalism.
Most ignored this argument until the Russian Revolution happened. Then everyone went back, looked at it with much renewed interest, looked at what Bismarck had done, noticed how the later had shown increases in productivity, noticed how Germany hadn't gone through a Communist revolution despite everyone but the kitchen sink believing the first big one would happen there, put 2+2 together, and began implementing welfare programs all around, which really did dampen that revolutionary spirit and prevented Communist revolutions from popping up everywhere.
Too bad modern Neoliberals, Libertarians and US-style Conservatives seem to have forgotten the lessons of 100 years ago, and are doing all they can to break apart the welfare system. The growing inequality is reigniting that very revolutionary spirit, as wished by Marx. If this idiotic anti-welfare impetus isn't quelched ASAP, the next few decades will see Communism returning in force. After all, what will the dispossed have to lose by embracing it?
If you're hiring somewhere you don't sell anything, that's definitely offshoring.
It is much harder to find a job than to keep one.
