> all these companies lock customers into binding arbitration
Don't assume this in the case of fraud or theft without speaking to a lawyer.
Usually the whole agreement is void if crimes are committed.
And you need to find a judge who agrees, not convnce the legal academy.
Yes, the damaged craft needed to be written off.
NASA beancounters and politicians took a risk. Astronauts died.
Again.
It was said at the time that the white paint on the early shuttle tanks served to also keep the foam together and reduce drag on it.
They scrapped it to save money and increase payload by a tiny fraction. But mostly to save money.
Engineers: this is necessary.
NASA Bean Counters: nah.
Every freakin' time.
These are generally all reasonable concerns/questions.
Maybe the world needs (or there is already?) the AI-focused-equivalent of Reddit's "CollapseSupport" which is to support people who believe society is about to collapse from resource issues or war or other social dysfunction?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Colla...
Although looking at it again, I see some AI threads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Colla...
Like for example: "Feeling my future is hopeless and pointless due to rise of AI"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Colla...
I don't think there are any easy answers to the questions you raise. Some are general existential questions people have asked themselves for 1000s of years related to religion and philosophy about the meaning of life. Douglas Adams even explores that satirically with has AI come up with the answer of "42".
Still, isn't being a good human friend or a good human parent something worth aspiring to even in a world of superhuman AI and robots? (Or as discussed on Slashdot a couple weeks ago, which took such questions in a different direction, considering if "reality" is a simulation -- by whom why?)
The way you frame the question may also reflect your cultural upbringing. For example, as someone raised in a evangelical Protestant tradition, I was essentially taught that meaning was imposed from a single top almighty being ("God") who gave us a "Bible" outlining our responsibilities and so on. That created issues for me about finding meaning when I moved beyond a lot of the dogma. My teenage years might have been easier if I had understood how much meaning and purpose can come from within -- or rather from an interaction with our emotions and our physical and social circumstances.
While not identical, as you point out, AI calls into question many of the beliefs people may have about meaning through various material contributions to society. There are many issues in current late-stage capitalism that are already questionable related to motivation (e.g. see the book "Bullshit jobs"), and AI will accelerate that. Related to that see Dan Pink's work, including this humorous (in parts) talk:
"RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
One comment there: "This makes perfect sense in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you make money not an issue anymore is key. If people are worried about money, How they're going to pay the bills and survive, they're not going to be able to focus on cognitive tasks and perform well. "Autonomy," "Mastery," and "Purpose" fall under the "self-actualization" capstone. Money is not as important at that level of motivation."
Star Trek also explores that theme directly in a few episodes (like when a tycoon from the 21st century is defrosted and find all the money he had -- plus trying to make more -- doesn't mean anything anymore). Could you still find purpose or meaning in life if you found yourself (and friends/family) in a Star Trek world with a matter replicator and cheap fusion power?
Related humorous sc-fi with a super-human-with-blindspots AI called "Skippy":
"Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)"
https://www.amazon.com/columbu...
"A man's voice, with a snarky attitude, rang out behind me. "Excellent! Bipedal, 1300cc brain, opposable thumbs. A hairless monkey. You can carry me out of here."
I spun around in a panic. No one was there. "Who said that?"
"Me. Here, I'm the shiny cylinder on the shelf. I unlocked that door."
"You are? You mean you're talking to me through a speaker in that thing?"
"No, I am that thing. I am what you monkeys call an artificial intelligence."
I cocked my head and examined it skeptically. "You look like a chrome-plated beer can." That was a completely accurate description. The cylinder even tapered slightly at the top, and was ringed by a ridge. "You're really an AI?"
"Yup. You should refer to me as The Lord God Almighty."
"That position is already filled. I think I'll call you Skippy."
"Don't call me that, it sounds disrespectful, monkey."
"You prefer shithead? Because that's the other option, Skippy-O.""
The book "Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan depicts a post-scarcity society where humans have learned to interact well with robots and AIs (of a limited sort).
Some quotes to ponder:
"The woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the best."
https://www.thenation.com/arti...
"I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability.
Two quotes from the book "On Caring" I mention here:
https://pdfernhout.net/reading...
"No one else can give me the meaning of my life; it is something I alone can make. The meaning is not something predetermined which simply unfolds; I help both to create it and to discover it, and this is a continuing process, not a once-and-for-all. (Milton Mayeroff, from On Caring)"
"Through caring for certain others, by serving them through caring, a [person] live the meaning of [his or her] own life. In the sense in which a [person] can ever be said to be at home in the world, [he or she] is at home not through dominating, or explaining, or appreciating, but through caring and being cared for. -- (Milton Mayeroff, from On Caring)"
https://sacred-texts.com/aor/e...
"But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. (Albert Einstein)"
Health resources I've collected over the years (made possible by the web):
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
On the rats and robots thing, here is an optimistic view of such a world (where the "Stryx" AIs are the "robots") even as there are dystopian versions in other sci-fi:
"Date Night on Union Station (EarthCent Ambassador Book 1)"
https://www.amazon.com/Night-U...
"Alien artificial intelligence has brought humanity onto a galactic tunnel network
Finding a match for the top human diplomat on Union Station is another story..."
I prefer the "Old Guy Cybertank" series though as a more realistic version of AI (even if the settings are more fantastical):
https://www.amazon.com/An-Old-...
"In the distant future mankind creates sentient cybertanks patterned on the human brain to help fight their alien enemies. Then, inexplicably, the humans vanished. They just went away. All that is left of the human empire are the cybertanks who, in their own way, keep the human civilization alive. With an intelligence based on the human psyche, the cybertanks continue to defend human space, but also perform scientific research, create art, form committees and ponder the universe. These are the stories of one of the first cybertanks, known to his friends as "Old Guy." He has outlived most of his peers, and has had a wealth of experiences over his long life, but he is starting to slowly become obsolete. Join him and his comrades Double-Wide, Whiffle-Bat, Smoking Hole, Mondocat, and Bob, as they live and love and fight alien enemies such as the Amok, the Yllg, and the Fructoids."
While I am not saying if he is right specifically in that case, there is a speech by Captain Picard about not letting computers take over everything in this episode (and similar ones in others) which leads him to manually pilot the Enterprise out of a trap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It echose a point in the previously mentioned "Skills of Xanadu" story about a world of people conflicting with a world of machines.
To some extent, as with the AI-generated song I mentioend about my sig, there is also the risk of AI becoming another "Supernormal Stimuli" or "Pleasure Trap" (see books by those names). Which may lead to an "Acceleration of Addictiveness" as with an essay by that name. And those all pose problems as our instincts in a world of abundance can lead us astray as they were adapted for material scarcity (including of a scarcity of things like fat, sugar, and salt -- plus scarce energy inclining us to be naturally lazy).
Anyway, you have your finger on the pulse of really big issues confronting our culture. All the best as you wrestle with them.
One last point to ponder is "better for whom"? Or in cost benefit analysis, who pays the costs and who gets the benefits? How do "we" ensure a good healthy balance persists over time given that systems can decay for all sorts of reasons? And that AI does not have millions of years of evolution behind it to select for some sort of stability in an ecological niche? And if "enjoyment" is part of the human experience, won't people still want to build wood bridges over Koi ponds in their backwards just because they like working with wood and enjoy taking care of fish? Is it really better for such a person to ask or let robots do all that for them? That's a bit of the same question of whether to hire a (human) landscaper and gardener to do such things for you or to do them yourself? (Which is a question many wealthy people may wrestle with sometimes even without AI and robots given other people can be tasked to do things in various cultures.)
All systems have limitations (including just from speed of light) -- which tends to support Manuel De Landa's point here:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
So, inspired by that, I don't think there will be a single "perfect" AI making all decisions anywhere any time soon. If such a thing made sense, it is likely the Earth might already have a huge centralizes intelligence. Instead in nature we tend to see "intelligence" (as decision-making) spread across the planet working to various ends, ends sometimes aligned with others around the organism and sometime not-aligned.
(Laptop power fading, so sending this even if could be better...)
Is it still forbidden for a local hospital to pay the ISP so a radiologist can get stat MRI's faster than his neighbor gets cat videos?
Some places have like 10 meg of bandwidth for the neighborhood. FCC may imagine everybody has gigabit FTTH.
I asked the developer to have some way for red/green colorblind people (9% of males, probably 8% of sysadmins) to be able to change the colors.
"What will be our purpose if robots can do everything better than we can?"
You raise interesting and insightful points and questions.
Right now there is almost always a person better than you at almost everything. And probably often a machine system too for many human activities (e.g. excavators, automated looms, 3D printers, stamping machines, combine harvesters, railroad track-laying equipment like the song about John Henry, etc.) Yet "purpose" still exists for most people.
Moss still grows even when trees tower around it. Rats still have emotions and desires and raise families in New York City surrounded by skyscrapers, buses, and people way bigger and in many ways much smarter than them individually. Which goes to show that the impulse to live and grow and thrive can come mainly from within in a healthy organism in certain environments.
A lot of people find learning to be fun -- even things like learning to weave cloth using a hand loom when automatic looms can generally do a better and cheaper job.
Raising children well is a big source of purpose for many people.
On your point on AI taking over, two thoughts.
One is that this is essentially what happened with China and the USA in many areas, with China taking over producing most goods (to the cheering of US stockholders and CEOs and others over the past few decades). The political concept is the security in someone becoming dependent on you. The game of "Go" involving encirclement is an important aspect of Eastern strategic thinking.
The other idea is what I thought about hanging out at Hans Moravec's Mobile Robot lab at the CMU Robotics Institute in the mid 1980s. While Hans came up with an intriguing idea of "Mind Children" going to explore space, it seemed alternatively plausible that humans would create robots just capable enough to cause the death of all people (e.g. an aggressive weaponized robotic cockroach) without the robots being able to perpetuate themselves or grow in any way after all the humans are gone. I've devoted my life since to trying to create a more positive future for humanity than such a dystopia.
The biggest threat from AI right now is just that technology in general is an amplifier, and AI is currently being used to amplify the worst competitive impulses in humanity related to greed and war. So while there may be other long-term issues from AI, in the short term, it is humans using AI for problematical human ends that is the most dangerous. Related writing by me on the irony of all that:
"Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"
https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
But, yes, overall, such unrecognized irony as mentioned in my sig could also potentially explain the Fermi paradox.
Here is a song about my sig written by my prompting an LLM to do so and then a friend using Suno AI to set it to music:
"Challenge to Abundance"
https://suno.com/song/d3d8c296...
To link that song experiment with your point on purpose and also AI doing things better, I am still not sure how I feel about all that in relation to making that song, involving turning a request for creativity over to AI -- which can feel paradoxically disempowering while also feeling empowered by quickly doing things I have not learned to do well...
As I initially wrote to my friend when I sent the lyrics:
========
As a tech example, after listening to those videos, and no doubt subconsciously inspired by your book idea with prompts and responses, I asked an LLM AI to write a song about my sig.
Me: Please make a song about "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
----
(Verse 1) In the 21st century, we face a paradox so clear, Technologies of abundance, yet scarcity we fear, Irony in our hands, what will we choose to see, A world of endless possibilities or stuck in scarcity?
(Chorus) The biggest challenge we face, it's plain to see, Embracing abundance or stuck in scarcity, Let's break free from old ways, embrace what could be, The irony of our times, let's set our minds free.
(Verse 2) Nanotech and automation, changing how we live, Yet some still cling to scarcity, afraid to forgive, Exponential growth in tech, a world of plenty in sight, But old mindsets hold us back, in the darkness of night.
(Chorus) The biggest challenge we face, it's plain to see, Embracing abundance or stuck in scarcity, Let's break free from old ways, embrace what could be, The irony of our times, let's set our minds free.
(Bridge) Imagine a world where all can thrive, Where abundance reigns and all can survive, Let go of the past, embrace the new, The choice is ours, what will we do?
(Chorus) The biggest challenge we face, it's plain to see, Embracing abundance or stuck in scarcity, Let's break free from old ways, embrace what could be, The irony of our times, let's set our minds free.
(Outro) The 21st century's challenge, clear as day, Abundance or scarcity, which will we sway, Let's rise above, embrace the light, The irony of our times, let's make it right.
----
Me: Thank you!
----
You're welcome! If you have any more questions or need further assistance in the future, feel free to ask. Have a great day!
----
========
I can still hope people can write a better song than that about the topic.
Bottom line: humans are adapted to our tribal hunter/gatherer roots -- involving exercise, socializing face-to-face with people we know for years, sunlight, healthy whole foods, meaningful direct hand-eye work, avoiding negative ruminant thinking, good sleep, natural surroundings, and so on. While there were bad things about such a lifestyle in the past (e.g. little emergency care for accidents), in general the further we get away from that context, the unhealthier humans tend to become. See Stephen Iliardi's writings: on that: https://tlc.ku.edu/
Also related from the 1950s by Theodore Sturgeon on machines and humans and technology (which helped inspire Ten Nelson and hypertext and the world wide web):
"The Skills of Xanadu"
https://archive.org/details/pr...
And as a cautionary tale, see "With Folded Hands" about the perils of overly helpful AI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
By me from 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni...
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working")."
My electric bill is too damn high.
Interesting.
I'm building a solar battery from LTO cells and am now wondering about adding a simple square driver.
Gotta see if they're NMC or not. 20,000 cycle rating natively might go to 40,000?
Quote:
```
The length of relaxation period was
the same as current pulse, resulting in a Duty Ratio of 50% under PC charg-
ing. The average current for all three charging modes were kept the same
(1C, i.e., 2.2 A), thus the current during PC charging (2C, i.e., 4.4 A) was
twice as large as that during CC charging.
```
> Only the Soviets were so uncaring for public safety to build a nuclear power plant like that,
Years ago a commenter here claimed to have been involved with Chernobyl and the way it went down is that a grad student in nuclear engineering wanted to run his pet theory experiment on the Chernobyl reactor.
Everybody said no up and down the chain.
Bu his father was high up in the Politburo and ordered it.
Soviets do what they're told.
It sounds plausible enough that a smart researcher could probably find the father and son from records.
Correct.
And not using radio either. The Chinese already have satellites doing some sort of quantum communication with ground stations and that much is public.
SETI should refocus to atmospheric and oceanic data analysis.
If you follow this subject long enough it is obvious that this pattern will replay.
Ten years ago it was nanotechnology that explained the Fermi Paradox.
Next decade it might be psychedelics or something.
However
> and the total lack of evidence that they do exist
That is false. There is an embargo on scientifically statistically significant evidence in the public domain (go ahead and try to FOIA it - say Nimitz/Princeton, and see what you get - it's been denied repeatedly).
The existing eyewitness testimony would win any civil or criminal court case.
Hynek reassessed based on this.
Yes, that is how Fascism operates.
Can your F-Droid download and install with one click like Play Store (without root)?
Can it install security updates for you (without root)?
Some people may not known that F-Droid can compete with Play Store but only if you're rooted to bypass anticompetitive restrictions Google places on users to ensure its market is dominant.
Regular users take risks by having to patch manually. Everybody already knows that rarely works so auto-updates are the industry standard.
Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall
