Absolutely true, but I'd be interested in the latency in the new device compared to a pancreas. Existing pumps and continuous monitors have some latency associated with them, which means they'll never do quite as well as an actual pancreas if you're suddenly going to change your rate of glucose rise/fall.

And therefore there never will be one?

That's a bit like saying that aircraft will never be invented because there was no progress on the topic between 350AD and 390AD.

I don't consider either Siri or Google to be examples of AI per se. I think that when AI does come along it might end up incorporating some of the concepts that go into them, but it is hard to say at this point since nobody really knows how to build an AI.

Agree somewhat. There are a fair number of human jobs that can probably be automated in the fairly near future as "AI" has been getting better, especially for problems like visual/speech recognition which traditionally was a barrier to automation.

An AI that actually can innovate and is self-aware/etc would be a barrier to eliminating many jobs. At some point I think we'll cross that threshold and we'll see almost every job go away almost overnight (since such an AI could be used to improve itself and rapidly develop specific automation solutions for every job). However, that is of course a major advance and it is really hard to say how soon it will come.

No, I think that most whose jobs are lost to automation are incapable of learning another job.

I don't get why you consider this insulting. I think that my job will be automated one day, and I'll be incapable of getting a job. That is just reality - it isn't an insult that I'm going to be outsmarted by some super-human AI.

Not sure what is "limited" about it. I'd consider a world where nobody has to work a paradise. It is only a problem if you expect people to earn their way through life. I think people have value beyond what they can "earn."

You said, "Not all jobs are well-paying, but they pay enough to live on."

You said that not all jobs are well-paying. You also said that all jobs pay enough to live on. Or were you trying to say not all jobs pay enough to live on? I'll admit that english is a bit ambiguous in this statement. I'm asserting that not all jobs pay enough to live on. If you disagree, then I'll cite the walmart example. If you agree with me, then I'm not sure why you're so obsessed with people getting jobs and not getting public assistance.

Sounds like you're agreeing with me that simply having a job isn't really helpful, if it isn't well-paying. That was why I brought up the statistic.

Walmart is the sort of job that anybody can do, but it is only that way precisely because it is so low-paying. If they had to pay more, they would probably automate more.

You seem to think that I have a low view of "common" people. I've known many people I'd put into that category over the years and I don't have a low view of them at all. I've just observed that they toil constantly to barely make the rent, and many fail to even do that. You only consider that observation insulting because you seem to equate employ-ability with worth.

I think the day will come when nobody is employable. We're not there yet, but there is no reason to think that there is an upper-limit on the ability of AI, and plenty of reason to think that there is an upper-limit on human ability (short of humans modifying themselves, and basically becoming AI themselves). The problems of unemployment that are becoming increasingly worse are just the first signs of this.

A cellphone and internet access are common basic necessities these days. Sure, you could line poor people up in honeycombs and stick tubes for food, air, and waste into them and they could probably live somewhat-normal-duration lives at a minimal cost to society. I don't really see the point in that, when it is not particularly expensive to allow them to live at a somewhat higher standard of living.

Of course not, if it were actually possible for them to learn another well-paying job. I assert that for most this is not the case. Unless you are fairly advanced in age already, I suspect that within our own lifetimes all people may become unemployable, as there is no function you or I perform which is not capable of being automated, and I can say that confidently not knowing what you do for a living. There is no artist, composer, scientist, programmer, or philosopher who has some ability that cannot be performed by a sufficiently advanced machine, since that is really all our brains are.

All jobs pay enough to live on? That's a pretty bold assertion, considering that it has been estimated that something like 15% of the Walmart workforce receives food stamps.

Certainly the argument can be applied to every skillful activity. My sense is that talent is a combination of predisposition and development. It has been demonstrated that learning skills at an early age can actually result in visually-observable changes in brain appearance (learn the violin at a young age and you can actually develop folds in the brain that look different), so there is obviously a learned component of talent. On the other hand, it is less clear to what degree those benefits are fixed at an early age, and whether some are fixed during embryonic development, or even by genetics.

At the very least, if you're born with severe mental disabilities, you probably won't be writing code anytime during your life.

I can also look back at my own life. There were many subjects where I excelled with ease compared to my classmates. I could walk away with an A on a test without studying at all, where others struggled to get Cs with extensive effort to learn the material. I doubt this was merely a matter of test-taking skills as the same applied to practical application of the material, and certainly there are other subjects where I find myself in the role of having to work hard to earn a mediocre grade.

Then I can look at people I know who have had brain injury. The brain isn't some magical concept - it is a physical machine. If you physically damage it, there are remarkable effects on everything from ability to personality. Somebody who was very intelligent before, and to a great degree after, will find themselves cut off from talents they had until that point. Is it so much of a stretch to think that some brains are born with varying degrees of talent, when we know there is natural variation in every other aspect of the human body?

I doubt he was intending to imply otherwise. You both agree that teaching kids coding skills is useful, but you disagree in your reasoning.

You likely believe that people should be exposed to a variety of disciplines because they're capable of excelling at any of them, and thus they should have the opportunity to decide what interests them most and pursue it.

He (and I) probably believe that people should be exposed to a variety of disciplines because that will help them to determine what they are capable of excelling at, and because they can probably master them to a degree where they can utilize them even if it isn't their primary focus.

Either way, we probably all agree that having an understanding of programming is important in almost any discipline one wants to work in. You would probably say that this creates an opportunity for everybody. I would tend to say that this will likely impose limits on many people regardless of their level of interest or effort, though in practice for many they'll be able to scrape by. There is no question that my view is more cynical/pessimistic, but I think this is really just a product of outmoded expectations. I have no expectation that a great artist should be forced to get a job working for Google to pay his bills. I have no expectation that that somebody with severe mental disabilities be able to get a job anywhere to pay his bills. I believe that we all should enrich society with whatever contributions we can make, and that society should accept us for who we are, and not what is most pragmatic.

I'm not convinced that your sentence isn't perfectly grammatical, but I'm not enough of a grammar nazi to diagram it. :)

Of course, and the same is true for me. However, I'm not average, and I suspect you aren't either.

If one of my more-average peers worked just as hard as I do and tried to get my job, it is unlikely that they would be hired. They're just not as capable of doing what I do for a living.

That doesn't make them any less valuable. It just makes them less employable.

I don't think it is anybody's responsibility to hire them. They should simply be given enough to live on somewhat comfortably, without having to work.

Most simply aren't employable, no matter how hard they try.

The average kid in my high school class could barely grasp algebra. There are still a few good-paying jobs for people like this, but they're rapidly being eliminated, and only the most senior can hold them down. The ones who make a decent living tend to be exceptional in some way. That might be how well they communicate, how nice they look, how athletic they are, etc. However, it seems to me that average kids these days end up working retail for a wage that isn't even survivable without public assistance.

Of course nobody is going to walk up to them and offer them a well-paying job. It is also true that anybody hiring somebody for a well-paying job is unlikely to hire most of the folks you were complaining about.

Most people performing tasks that are replaceable by automation will not be capable of performing any job which is not also replaceable by automation. Of course, some will be, but that minority is unlikely to be unemployed.

Actually, I am asserting that they're disabled, though not in any form that currently is granted a disability pension in most societies. The disabilities vary, but they're mostly mentally disabled, in the sense that their intelligence is not fairly well above-average, which is what is required to obtain a well-paying job. Granted, there are also many well-paying jobs that depend less on intelligence and more on other attributes, but for the most part those attributes are also fairly rare.

Take somebody who is completely paralyzed and unable to move, and also completely mentally retarded and unable to do more than maybe digest food spooned into their mouth. They lie on one end of a continuum. On the other end would be somebody with the intelligence of Steven Hawking and the prowess of an Olympic athlete. Virtually everybody falls somewhere in-between. At all points in time there has been a boundary below which people were simply unemployable. As technology advances, that line moves - people who were perfectly employable 1000 years ago are not employable today, because the jobs they were able to do are automated. For example, somebody who was mentally disabled and unable to even remember their name might still be able to earn a living wage by digging ditches 500 years ago. Today that would be unlikely - there is so little demand for manual labor that employers looking for such work can be more picky about who they hire.

At some point in time automation will get to a point where no human is employable - we'll simply be weaker and dumber than machines.

First, I said "well-paying jobs" and not "jobs." I'm not interested in how many average people can hold down a minimum wage job. Such persons are going to require the public assistance you seem to be decrying in any case.

From my observation, it does not seem like most average kids are getting well-paying jobs these days. With the general advance of technology it seems likely to me that the bar for getting a well-paying job will continue to rise, as it should. It doesn't make sense to hire people to do work that a machine can do more efficiently. The problem isn't with the fact that many are unable to work productively, but rather with those who insist that they should be punished for this perfectly normal condition.

The second seems rather incorrect to me.

It might be easier to just pick a word which is strictly an adjective, such as:

Billboard Advertising Illegal Products in Russia Hides if it Recognizes Cops.

Or, even simpler:

Billboard Advertising Illegal Products Hides if it Recognizes Cops

The problem is that "banned" can be a verb or a participle. "Illegal" is strictly an adjective.

That is because we're taxing the wrong things. Earned income is not the lion's share of income in the US, and it tends to be the main source of income for people who have limited means.

But, the folks who pay income tax can't afford armies of lobbyists so that is where the taxes fall.

Just make the tax rate something like 0% below $50k/yr, 10% from $50-100k, 20% from $100k-500k, and then have it go up exponentially from there. Somebody making $1M/yr might have a 40% tax, somebody making $10M/yr might have an 80% tax, somebody making $100M/yr might have a 90% tax, somebody making $1B/yr might have a 99% tax, and so on.

Another option is to just tax all money transactions. Anytime money changes hands just charge 0.1% or something like that. For the poor, they'll end up paying an unintended 0.2% tax on the money they make and spend. Something like the financial sector will pay a much higher effective rate, and that is something like a third of the economy.

Did you offer them a well-paying job? Chances are, neither has anybody else.

The days when you could tell whether somebody was capable of getting a job ended with the development of automation.

Think of the average kid you went to high school with (assuming you went to an average public school as I did). Do you REALLY think they're capable of holding down a job in the modern world?

Agree. It seems like a simple solution is to unbundle the testing and interpretation.

This is really no different from any other area of testing. A lab can assay the creatinine in my blood, or the microalbumin in my urine, or the concentration of glucose in my blood. Those results are likely to be very accurate and reproducible unless the lab is just criminally negligent.

What those results mean is an entirely different matter. A doctor will certainly utilize those results as well as the results of many other tests, history, interviewing the patient, and so on to make a diagnosis, and refine it as more data comes in.

Just make the labs, well, labs. Now you can certify them far more objectively.