It's hard to believe that some parenting activity like never letting your child experience a negative emotion is actually causing a increase in violent crime, especially since, from everything I've heard, overall violent crime is down significantly. Also, if there are lots and lots of kids getting this type of parenting, we certainly aren't seeing a cause-effect relationship here, because otherwise there would be millions of murderous little bastards running around, and we just don't see that. Seems much more likely that there are (and have always been) some people with mental illnesses, and some of them are liable to do nasty things that most of us would never do. Your argument is nothing more than the get-off-my-lawn variety (and I'm an old guy who likes to push my kids to experience failure once in a while).

The only useful comparison would be against a print-edition encyclopedia. What percentage of medical articles in a typical encyclopedia contain errors? The other thing is, just because it contains "an error" doesn't mean it isn't useful. We get through most days with a fairly flawed view of reality (most of us anyway).

Stop with the "3 laws" nonsense. Asimov's "laws" were never intended as actual laws, they were a plot device, and they're certainly not something you "delete" because they were never there in the first place. We already have regulations about machine safety (I work with them every day). The laws govern the control of hazardous energy in a system, with various guarding and interlocks being required to protect humans from injury when they interact with the system, and design constraints determined by how likely certain safety critical component failure is, and redundancy, etc.

Nobody building a killer robot is going to be worrying about any laws, pretend or otherwise. They're worried about how many units they can sell.

The withholding of the drugs didn't "cause" the execution. If I was going to shoot you, and someone took away my gun, so I stabbed you instead, does that mean the person who took away my gun caused you to be stabbed?

Anyone who has used a 3D printer (I have a RepRap style one) knows that the killer app is rapid prototyping. Lots of people already use 3D printers to print out prototypes of parts to test them out or focus group them before sending them to production. You pretty much *have* to be a designer to be able to make use of a 3D printer right now, and I'm sorry but 3D CAD software has come a long way but it's too expensive and complicated for a home user. You'd need to come up with a Tony Stark-like CAD system for under $100 before it'll be ready for home use. Meanwhile, those of us who know our way around a CAD program are quite happy with our 3D printers, thank you very much.

It's reminiscent of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse in which 114 people died and 216 were injured. From wikipedia: Havens Steel Company, the contractor responsible for manufacturing the rods, objected to the original plan of Jack D. Gillum and Associates, since it required the whole of the rod below the fourth floor to be screw threaded in order to screw on the nuts to hold the fourth floor walkway in place... This design change would prove fatal.

People don't fail the driver test because they're bad drivers (they're almost all substandard drivers at age 16). They fail because of technicalities, and the mood of the person giving the test. Case in point, I went to a small town near where I live to get my license, passed the first time, but he was *very* lenient, in my opinion. My wife took her tests in a city and failed 3 times and 2 of those were for minor technicalities. She finally paid for one driver's ed. lesson with CAA (Canadian version of AAA auto club) and they let her drive their car, and suddenly the evaluator was all nice and she passed no problem.

I don't think you'll have a lot of top-notch research scientists applying for those jobs. Just like it's hard to attract doctors to rural areas, it's hard to attract the majority of people away from population centers, especially if you're looking for the best and brightest.

Depends what you get in trade. Maybe it's another kind of ride.

I thought this was called the Human Calendar.

What you're describing is socialism, and is probably the only way out of the mess, but it's one of those things you can easily take too far. If you take it even close to communism, the people who can do stuff just won't. They need really good incentives to keep producing. Those incentives have to come from having a substantial share of the production, and none of that production is being produced by this ever-growing out-of-work slice of the population. If 10% of the populace had to work 80 hour weeks to support the other 90% without living like absolute kings, then I don't think that would work. Maybe that will be how it works, but somehow the 90% is always going to moan and whine about not having what the 10% has.

In fact, is it even fair that the people doing all the automating are the ones who have to keep working? I've been doing automation for 15 years now, and I'd love to "automate" my way down to a 4 day work week, but somehow the more I do, the more demand there is for my work. Not in the nice pay-you-more demand way either. At my last job, I was making decent money because I was paid overtime and there was a lot of demand for me on various projects, but the suits told me I *had* to change my remuneration to base+bonus (against my wishes) and suddenly I ended up making less money, but they expected me to work as many hours. I quit and found another place that paid overtime. Still, people laugh at me when I say I want a 4-day work week, even if I'd be willing to take a paycut. There just isn't any employer offering that kind of job.

Um, running the world to suit mobs of idiots is called democracy, and that's already how it's done.

It doesn't have to even be a moral decision; it can be very pragmatic. A country with 30% unemployment (under a mostly capitalist system) isn't politically or socially stable. Capitalism works if everyone has a chance to participate in production or has capital. If that's not the case, it won't work. You're looking at a revolt.

I work in industrial automation, so I do PLC programming, robot programming, control system integration, etc. I've been doing it over 15 years now. For the first 10 years I bought the whole "luddite" argument, and figured that automation only displaced people to other, ultimately higher paying jobs.

However, in recent years I've really started to worry. Imagine the person who is barely functional: they can follow instructions but you have to repeat yourself a whole bunch of times, and even then they still make lots of mistakes. My experience tells me this is around 30% of the workforce, at least. Back when everyone was in agriculture, these people couldn't really do too much damage, and if they were strong, they were useful. The magic of the industrial revolution was that we were able to both magnify the strength of everyone, *and* reduce the chance of making errors by (a) breaking things down into tiny tasks so people only had a very very simple thing to do (tighten nut A on bolt B all day long), and (b) designing things such that they couldn't assembled incorrectly (the modern term is poka yoke). This "lower" 30% of the workforce became very productive, and they joined labor unions and owned big houses and boats. They retired with nice company pensions. Their kids got much better educations than they did.

So, if you look at the things that these people made lots of money doing (something extremely simple, repetitive, and designed to be error-proof), then that's exactly what is simple enough to automate with a robot. We recently had a job that was taking 3 operators to do and produced parts at the rate of about 3 parts per minute, and they couldn't meet the production numbers even with 2 shifts (total 6 people). We replaced all 6 of those people with a single robot, and we're up to about 8 parts per minute so we probably only need to run about 1 shift.

The difference is that this new robot assembly cell requires a semi-skilled operator to run it. They need decent troubleshooting ability, with a bit of mechanical knowledge and decent computer skills (not programming, but basic stuff like navigating screens, understanding slightly more abstract concepts, etc.). They need to be able to look at the robot gripper and determine if anything's worn and needs replacement. We happen to have someone who's almost overskilled for the position. So we keep shuffling those other 6 people around in the plant, trying to find something for them to do, and almost always realizing that whatever they're doing could be automated. Plus, I really need to stress that these aren't people with decent troubleshooting skills, computer skills, etc. Any process we put them in requires us to remove all human decision making, because we can't tolerate errors (or they're very expensive).

My point is that unskilled laborers are a hassle to employ. We have a hard time thinking up things for them to do, and we'd love to find something because, well, they're so cheap! (And we already have $10/hr+ minimum wage here.) But so are robots. It used to be that a bare robot (uninstalled) cost $50,000. Integration costs might push that to $125,000 or $150,000. That really limited the choices... you pretty much had to eliminate one operator for 3 shifts to make it a valid investment. Now those costs are almost cut in half. The robots are well under $30,000 and integration is getting cheaper, plus we're just getting better at it.

As we transition into this "new economy" where there are no unskilled manufacturing jobs left, I really don't know where these people are going to find employment. I don't just see it happening in manufacturing either. I'm pretty sure that truck drivers and taxi drivers will be the first to get automated by the kind of auto-drive technology that Google's working on. We're already seeing automated forklift trucks in factories. I just don't know.

Well that would be great for US exports now, wouldn't it? Might bring back the manufacturing economy.