Rock the Casbah!

I can't text and drive but my car can....

"most important thing you’ll see today" ... "this horrifying world already exists" ... other news bits on bgw: "awesome iPhone apps..." ... "Man suffers burns when OnePlus One explodes in his back pocket"

Kochs have a long history of seeing communists around every corner. I believe this comes from their father's business dealings with the Soviets. Too bad they can't let that paranoid shit go. It's making them look like dopes.

Mod parent up please, this is interesting.

And the robots were maintained by electricians - the guys who wire your house eletricians with a bit more training. No need at all for BSEEs or anything like that. One team of engineers, sales people, managers, etc ... ( what a hundred people) will replace tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands.

As white collar jobs disappear along with the need for training a workforce, there must be a tipping point past which you can no longer sustain public schools and universities. If the future demands for engineers, MBAs, lawyers etc becomes .0001% of the present, the school system will collapse. But if you still need an education for a few people where's that going to come from?

If they can collect energy, dig raw materials out of the ground, and build things themselves, then there's no costs involved.

There will be costs involved. Getting the energy won't be magically free, materials come from a finite source (sure you can lasso an asteroid but space travel has significant costs), and there's costs due to entropy -- spoilage, maintenance, storm damage, etc. Land will be finite and defending the use of the land (security) has costs. Costs may plummet significantly but I don't think they'll ever hit zero.

I believe MonsterMind is about countering cyber attacks. Not traditional ones with people and guns n' things.

I can see running households on solar, but what about things like large-scale industry, aluminum refining, stuff like that?

Not driving like a maniac and hurting people and damaging property is one thing. But because traffic tickets are a source of revenue, the city has no incentive to make traffic laws sane or simple, especially in large urban areas. In Chicago, the latest craze is speeding cameras near schools and parks because "think of the children" and any park or school is fair game. Likewise, many intersections are no right turn on red between 730am and 730pm. So if you see it's safe to turn and don't see the sign, tough sh*t buddy, you just got nailed. In many streets, it's ok to park on one side of a residential street but not the other if you don't have a permit sticker. In from out of town and take a spot on the wrong side? Tough luck. The sheer number and complexity of the rules trips up the most careful of drivers. Here's the rub... if you care about defensive driving etc and get nailed anyway, it leads to resignation and resentment; it is easy to conclude that it takes superhuman levels of awareness to avoid getting a ticket so why bother? Not conducive to traffic safety. So it's not about traffic safety, it's about cashing in on the traffic safety system, and everyone knows it.

Chicago has a streamlined form of government, having one branch: finance.

Cripes!! They could at least have thrown a tarp over it....

Dr Chun, Can you comment on the potential of machine learning? Is it theoretically possible for a "naive" AI system to undergo great qualitiative changes simply through learning? Or is this notion a fallacy? Although it is an attractive concept, no one in AI has pulled it off despite several decades of research.

"Not even wrong."

Sorry! Antimatter has positive mass. Now go look for stuff with negative mass. Thanks!