When I was getting my degree, I had to take an "ethics" class geared towards CS students. Towards the end of the semester, we started discussing AI and how morality may or may not apply to it. The half of the class who had actually done some machine learning and had backgrounds in AI got really annoyed with it because 100% of the hand wringing in the assigned reading was done by philosophers and "futurists" with horrible track records.

The worst part about it is that to someone who's actually worked with this kind of stuff, the doomsday people look about as silly as that one senator who was afraid an island might tip over if they landed too many marines on one side of it. It's just so stupid that it tends to put one at a loss for words on how to even begin refuting it.

I don't really see this as being a problem. It might temporarily displace some people when some new kind of automation replaces something (and change can be scary), generally the same advancing technology that caused the displacement opens up opportunities elsewhere.

The easiest kinds of jobs to automate are usually the most menial. Generally the automation of those kinds of jobs will cause the market to open up new job opportunities elsewhere. e.g. automating an automotive assembly line will initially displace those workers, but it also makes cars a lot cheaper, meaning more cars and more demand for the infrastructure to support them (roads and road maintenance, fuel, mechanics).

If you're getting a $350 smartwatch with a battery that barely lasts a day "just to know the time", then I really don't know what to tell you.

If they just wanted the time (and maybe some useful stopwatch and timer functions), they'd get a $12 casio.

It's profit based in a system where there's no incentive to lower price, and lots of incentive for people to rack up huge bills with no immediate consequences. Someone could run crying to the doctor because they have a cold, demand every test and scan in the book be run, and it's less than $100 in co-pays with insurance. It's easy for them to rationalize it becuse "this is what I pay all this money every month for and I want to get the most out of it". The insurance buracracy doesn't really care as long as all the Is are dotted and Ts are crossed, but the accountants notice rising costs and make it harder for people with legitimate issues to get tests run next year.

watermelons are my trigger you insensitive clod!

What I mean is that in hindsight, it should have been completely predictable. The only reason it wasn't predicted was because of some false assumption, overlooked fact, or incorrect data.

But when you examine the accident after the fact, it usually turns out that it did happen in an incredibly predictable and controlled fashion. It's just that the events leading up to it weren't immediately obvious before the accident happened.

Yes, but you missed the point. The solution of pushing a fat guy in front of the train isn't believable. People hear it and get a gut feeling of "then it'll kill the fat guy plus the people on the tracks". That's where the hesitation comes from, not from the fact that they need to push the guy.

As someone who worked in IT and was usually the guy who got assigned all of the tricky problems, I never really saw anything not work in a predictable controlled fashion (at least once all of the facts were known, which wasn't always straightforward).

I took an ethics class as a required part of my CS degree, and this was pretty much the conclusion everyone came to after reading the sections about robot morality. The computer scientists have enough trouble understanding how an AI would work in reality, let alone some random philosopher whose only experience with robots and AI is what they've seen on TV.

The reason people struggle with it is because the scenario doesn't make a ton of sense. Everyone has seen videos of trains smashing cars like the car isn't even there, it's hard to believe that a fat guy would be heavy enough to stop the train. What if I push him, the train hits him and then continues on to hit the people? And if the fat guy is heavy enough to stop the train, doesn't that mean he's going to be too fat for me to push? I'm a skinny guy, physics wouldn't be on my side here. What if I try to push him, fail, and then he turns around and wonders why the hell I was trying to push him into a train? And even if it works, people might think I pushed the guy because he was fat, rather than to save the people.

All of that compared to me flipping a switch to save 4 people at the cost of 1. If I flip the switch the outcome is pretty set.

It might be better to pose the fat guy variant of question as "there's some dynamite near the track and someone is sitting there eating their lunch on it, do you blow it up to stop the train, killing the fat guy in the process?"

Throwing money at the problem would work in the case of your school because it's not top heavy with administration. It wouldn't work work in other schools which are top heavy with administration. As such, if you're going to throw money at the problem, it would be best to do so on a case by case basis or not at all. Otherwise you're just encouraging top heavy administrators.

Right. So the school system in your area isn't dystopian and therefore does ok for itself. It kind of supports the guys point.

But does the school system there work well?