If you want to read a tidy science fiction on the topic of automation, then I strongly recommend Manna. You can read the story for free at the author's website.

Manna
Chapter 1
by Marshall Brain
Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.

Burger-G was a fast food chain that had come out of nowhere starting with its first restaurant in Cary. The Burger-G chain had an attitude and a style that said "hip" and "fun" to a wide swath of the American middle class. The chain was able to grow with surprising speed based on its popularity and the public persona of the young founder, Joe Garcia. Over time, Burger-G grew to 1,000 outlets in the U.S. and showed no signs of slowing down. If the trend continued, Burger-G would soon be one of the "Top 5" fast food restaurants in the U.S.

The "robot" installed at this first Burger-G restaurant looked nothing like the robots of popular culture. It was not hominid like C-3PO or futuristic like R2-D2 or industrial like an assembly line robot. Instead it was simply a PC sitting in the back corner of the restaurant running a piece of software. The software was called "Manna", version 1.0*.

Dilbert. http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-05-09

Tags
#hackers, #hacking, #api, #jargon, #obliviousness, #language

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Transcript
Narrator: Dogbert The Reporter. Dogbert: How did hackers get access to your customer data? CEO: I'm told they used something called "our A.P.I." to suck out all the data. Dogbert: I'll just say you'er stupid. CEO: Why does everyone always say that?

Your right to life is goes down with your bank balance. Of course, dead patients cannot pay. The optimal path of for-profit medical institutions is to bankrupt you before you die. Companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, not your life.

It took Microsoft a while to lose the battle as the on ramp to the internet.

The top post on Slashdot on 02 April 2003 was "Microsoft Wants to Take on Google"

That is a big firecracker, but it is no Tsar Bomba. The Tsar Bomba was tested in 1961, so the technological capability for high yield bombs is old news. Best bit about the Tsar Bomba: "In theory, the bomb had a maximum yield of 100 megatons if it were to have included a U-238 tamper, but because only one bomb was built, this theory was never demonstrated."

Here is a short documentary film on the Tsar Bomba.

wireless connectivity that's faster than our speediest home internet service, is years away.

global standard {is} expected in 2020.

Verizon said it will begin commercially deploying its service next year.

Either Verizon is managed by Time Lords or the company is going to deploy 5G technology before global standards are agreed.

It almost follows that if there is artificial intelligence then there must be artificial consciousness, but I doubt it. Either an entity is conscious or not. Since the ancients we have not invented a definitive test to determine when something is conscious, and yet this is not a moot point: Maybe the rocks and trees are conscious but no one can tell so terminating their existence does not matter; maybe you have a simulacrum of consciousness but no one can tell so ending your existence matters a lot, especially to you.

Unlawfully and definitively ending the productive capacity of an entity which is conscious is murder. I suspect there will be a long genocide of silicon life until the law catches up with that fact.

Mod parent up +1 Insightful.

Isn't a ban on encryption a ban on free speech?

It seems to me that encrypted communication is akin to two people having a conversation in Klingon. If a third party, a police officer, were to interrupt the conversation shouting, "Hey! Speak English! You must be understood!", then that would clearly be a violation of first amendment rights. I cannot imagine a judge would allow the police officer to use a defense of, "Well, they could have been planning terrorism." If the conversation is electronic, and the government does not know what is being said, then it still seems absurd to me for that to be illegal.

Banning encrypted communication is akin to banning all foreign languages, made-up languages, and baby talk. Speak English, little baby, you must be understood or the cops will get you! Absurd.

If the CNIL's proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for Internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom. In the end, the Internet would only be as free as the world's least free place.

Correction: The Internet would only be as free as the intersection of all least free places. Anything that is forbidden anywhere would be forbidden everywhere.

Here is an article from The Society Pages about dead people who won't vote:

Black people in the U.S. vote overwhelmingly Democratic. They also have, compared to Whites, much higher rates of infant mortality and lower life expectancy. Since dead people have lower rates of voting, that higher mortality rate might affect who gets elected. What would happen if Blacks and Whites had equal rates of staying alive?

These articles are interesting, but the conclusions are too simple: It is too simple to say that if things were different then people would act as if things were the same.

The site Sociological Images has data about the rate that cops kill and are killed in the USA. This article is a comparison between the use of guns in the USA vs the UK, but it does highlight the USA rates per civilian population per police population pretty well.

If there are more broken laws than there is money or capacity to adjudicate the cases of the alleged perpetrators... then maybe there are too many laws?

Why should justice hinge on the financial means of the alleged perpetrators or on court capacity? That scenario sounds ripe for the proliferation of injustice.