People have been spouting this nonsense for centuries and it keeps not coming true.

Surplus labor dissipates into increasingly bushy tech trees and middle-men ultimately resulting in whole new categories of garbage on store shelves for everyone to waste their money on.

No one ideology be it capitalism or communism has ever been worth a hill of beans by itself. Lack of evolutionary pressure is central reason too much communism turns everything it touches to shit.

Problems stemming from globalization, over-aggregation of wealth and instabilities in reserve labor market are real and important challenges for the world yet simply Invoking communism as solution is a cop out.

Imagine what fulfilling roles people might accomplish rather than soldering. Same thing was said about telephone operators, secretaries, assembly line workers in auto plants, etc. Evolve. Learn a new trade or skill. It's how it's always been and always will be.

Not everyone is losing their jobs. Technological innovation usually leads to increased employment, as lower manufacturing costs lead to increased production, and expansion of non-automated jobs. As the cost of manufactured goods fall, people will consume more of them, but also spend less on them, and spend more on services, which are much harder to automate. Currently, China has a much smaller service sector than more advanced economies. That is changing fast.

Because of the one-child policy, China's labor force is already shrinking, and a looming shortage of workers is a far more realistic scenario than "everyone loses their jobs".

I doubt if Foxconn's assembly line workers were buying many iPhones. Apple and Foxconn shareholders will have more money to spend. As profit margins go up, the incentive to design additional profitable products will increase, causing higher demand for engineers and programmers. Chinese workers will move up the value chain, just like in every other country that has industrialized.

$15/hr is the minimum wage in Seatac, Washington. There is political pressure to raise the minimum wage to $10-15 nationwide, and one likely effect of that is to increase incentives to automate those jobs out of existence.

The poverty rate is based on households, not individuals. So if you are single and making $11.50 or less, you might want to share the rent with some friends rather than getting your own place. Not every job needs to pay enough to allow a teenager to buy a house and start a family.

Viruses and prions don't fit everything in your list either, as do other things that reproduce without sex. Aliens could be alien enough to be scaled up things on those lines - which of course is also from the land of make-believe but so is all speculation about aliens when you get down to it.
Solaris is deliberately a bit of an extreme but the important question it asks is this: "What if aliens were truly alien?". The more different from us something is the more difficult it is likely to be to communicate.

Besides, willaien was discussing how to communicate with truly alien beings and I just supplied two examples from fiction. I really don't get why you jumped in to be so critical of me when they are not even my ideas.

No, because it's at odds with reality as we know it.

Space is so damned interesting because we don't even know what most of it is, just that the unknown stuff has mass and can't otherwise be observed with what we have now. It's a blank spot on the map that may as well have "here be dragons" on it. For all we know there could be asexual non-carbon based critters out there with intelligence that would just not get a lot of the concepts we see as important. Communicating with such a creature "from the land of make-believe" is unlikely to be trivial. So I gave two examples above -
1/ find a point of commonality and build a bridge (Egan)
2/ a story where the effort to find a point of commonality is still ongoing (Lem).
In Egan's novel, Diaspora, most of the human derived intelligences are quite alien to our viewpoint from fairly early in the novel as well, moreso later when some never had physical form, so a major theme is communication between different mindsets.

My interpretation of what they've done is essentially a scheduling algorithm.....

You could buy discrete ICs that modelled neurons in the 1990s

Only at a very dumbed down 1990 level of understanding based on a theoretical model. I was there and got to play with the things. They were more like using digital computing techniques to simulate some operations of analog computers than anything resembling a nervous system.

What don't we understand about individual "nerves"?

Quite a lot considering what is being published now and making it into the mainstream science press. Preconceptions are being overturned and new questions are arising. Getting to the point where nerve cells can be "printed" has taken a lot of hard work and shown we knew very little about them in the past and still have a bit to learn about them now.

the fact that you've never worked in AI

Yet I've identified issues you appear to be unaware of - so what's your excuse?

subject to the known laws of physics.

Doesn't help much when there's still a lot of unknown biochemistry to sort out.

If you disagree then I think the burden is on you to prove otherwise.

That's not how it works - it's up to the people making extraordinary claims about building machines that think to do so instead of the people who say we don't have much of a model of thinking yet. It's probably coming but we need more insight into the process of thought before it can be implemented in a machine. We can build an increasing range of rules based devices but that's no more thought than the 1800s mechanical turk.

If you are not going to switch, why should your ISP care if you complain?

What's the market share of a Bugatti Veryon" Or a Lamborghini? You "market share" drones need to move to Idaho, so you can get a license plate that brags about "Famous Potatoes" to put on your Toyota Corolla.

I think you are making a straw man. The clue is that in one sentence oyu blame the scientists, then people around here. I know scientists, and there aren't many around here.

Now if you would have said that 70 years ago, a lot of people were expecting something like Robbie the Robot from the old Lost in Space Television show, that was a gastraphagus that acted somewhat like a human, only sensed danger some how. Or C3PO from Star Wars, who thought and acted like a human, back in the 70's. Yeah, I'd believe that a lot of lay people thought that was where AI was going.

Fast forward to today, and some are still trying to apply that same metric, that unless the intelligence is a human analogue, that it can't be intelligent.

My guess is that some never will. But I suspect we're going to have something pretty close pretty soon for people to reject.

I stand corrected then. I was under the impression that they moved the fuselage assembly away when they moved headquarters.

You are refusing to acknowledge the whole issue that I originally raised: while it may be "easier than", the fact is that you still have to demonstrate, prior to any judicial proceedings, evidence that you are "innocent" before your SPEECH can be restored. This is not a theoretical argument; we know by now of a vast many people who have had their websites taken down unjustly and with no real evidence, and have had trouble getting them restored.

We also know that the "actual damages" you refer to are more theoretical than real, and require yet another judicial action to initiate.

The fact remains that the DMCA has shifted the burden not just a little, but hugely, onto the defending party. And I repeat: that's not what America is about. We know, from hundreds of years of experience, that is a bad approach to law and justice.

First, as I mentioned to you before elsewhere, it isn't an "article". It doesn't meet any standard definition of "article". It's a rambling, ongoing diatribe that reads like little more than a monument to your ego.

Second, as I have clearly explained to you several times, when I discussed this with you after that time I was also referring to LATER posts of yours, not the first one. Not that it really matters, because afterward is still afterward. You might disagree with my interpretation of "much later" in regard to the original post, but that's your opinion.

After that you gave me no notice at all of most of your distortions, in which you took even more comments of mine out of context, assigned wholly imagined meanings and motivations to them, and "argued" with them all by yourself, where you didn't have any fear of being contradicted. (Why? Because I don't care about you and don't visit your website every day... nor should I be forced to do so in order to incessantly correct your mis-characterizations of my words.)

The rest of your rant is loaded with similar bullshit. Yet again you are trying to mislead people for personal, and apparently rather strange, reasons of your own.

I will repeat what I wrote in another thread: all you are doing by indulging in this obsession is making yourself look foolish. I understand that you don't seem to think so, but that causes me some concern. Others have written about it before here, too.

This is a classic example of your attempts to distort my comments. First, I might have ignorantly denied that C02 increases were due to human activity, years ago. I have not intentionally made any such statement in recent years, since I do not believe any such thing. But more to the point is this:

The "small percentage" I mentioned was in reference to this. You can argue if you like that a ~ 27.3% increase is large but I disagree, since climate sensitivity to CO2 is widely acknowledged to be based on a geometric progression.

We also need to keep in mind, though, what percentage that is of the overall atmosphere: (CO2 % of all atmosphere. Which is a very small percentage indeed, even though Wikipedia puts it higher than NCDC does in the above page.

Further, you appear to be claiming that we have contributed about "200% of the CO2 increase" ourselves, when that is simply not logically possible. While we might have produced 200% as much CO2, if so obviously much of it has been absorbed in one way or another by the environment. While you might have a problem with that, it is a completely separate argument. It is not possible for us to have contributed "200% of the increase", because only 100% of the increase actually exists. Once again you demonstrate a bizarrely weak grasp of logic for someone who presents himself as a scientist.

If my memory serves (and it may not), I linked to that page once in the past. As for accusations of fraud, those are the words of others, not my own. It is possible that Dr. Salby was mistaken in his analysis (I have seen the criticisms of his claims.) On the other hand, I find it highly interesting that Salby's analysis constitutes basically the same criticism that Anthony Watts made of "Steve Goddard's" work. I think it is likely that one is correct, or the other, but not both. I wonder which? I'll take a "wait and see" approach to that one.

You have mentioned this to me. I don't "know" it because I haven't seen any evidence. But it could be true. I'd have to see the evidence before I made up my mind. There is still the fact, however, that nobody has so far effectively refuted the thermodynamic argument presented by Latour at PSI. When Watts tried he bungled it badly.

So while PSI may make mistakes, and even if O'Sullivan is guilty of SkepticalScience-style deliberate distortion of facts (see the "97%" debacle), they still have some strong unrefuted science on their side of the debate.

This is yet another example of the implied distortions you make, when you're not making them explicitly. This question is at the very least grossly misleading. As you admit yourself above, I discussed the Humlum situation with you on your website, and made it very clear that I have no reason to believe either Humlum OR his critics, since all reliable information I have found is behind science-journal paywalls. So since I DID mention this to you, implying that I might repeat his claims is a rather subtle but real and public insult, which I am not inclined to take lightly. THAT is NOT admirable.

Unless you want to pay for copies of those papers and send them to me so I can evaluate them you have no argument with me over this and vice versa. But based on your past behavior I am sure as hell not going to just take your word for it.

Well then we will never agree, because again, logically, we can only discuss 100% of the rise, since 100% is by definition the only rise that exists. In all honestly I don't even know what you're trying to say here. It doesn't make any sense.

But I am going to say this again, and keep repeating it until you get the point: publicly distorting my words and their clear intended meaning is WRONG. It is unethical, and socially unacceptable. You have tried to continue to argue here and on your sebsite with things I wrote 5 years ago. What do you think that accomplishes?

And yet in all this, you did not address even one thing I wrote in my actual Slashdot comment. So despite your pretense at civility and objectivity, you make it crystal clear yet again that your problem with me is personal, not scientific. If you want to have a scientific argument, then address the comments I actually make. Instead, you argue with other things that have taken place elsewhere, and at other times, in many cases years ago. For what appears to be no other reason than to try to make me look bad. But I repeat again that all you are accomplishing is to make yourself look bad.