Microsoft has a unique talent for taking obvious, useful or innovative technology and then either making it unusable (Winoows 8), or unsalable (Any Windows phone incarnation). In this case, the latter turned out to be cheaper.
I agree with this on principle, however, in practice, it would mean we don't deal with any other country outside of Europe. Impractical.
The world has different ideas of morality than Americans. Even Americans have different ideas about morality within the country. Tolerance, oddly enough, means tolerating the intolerant.
...when you can fuck up the world? Yes, let's put an MBA with a BA in philosophy and medieval history in charge of the USA. I mean, wouldn't *you* give the nuclear codes to the MBAs in your company? What could possibly go wrong?
Their whole mindset still makes me want to puke.
Obfuscated crap. Techno-machismo teens playing games trying to get their code into the least number of characters and the least amount of memory. I've had to fix or test so much of this junk and it's still just plain stupid.
The *human* part of the system is what *matters* and that includes the code interface. First, I want comments not about *what* is happening. I can read that. I need to know *why* it was done, so I don't undo it, or I can do something different safely. Comments should be one liners, limited to "why" and sometimes "how".
If adding a variable aids readability, add the fucking variable! Shove all the results into a meaningful, readable variable name and then shove *that* into your function argument, not some long series of nested function. It's not the 90s. You don't have to save memory! Memory is there to make your code readable. Use it!
Ok, rant over. I'm going back to work now.
Somehow, the actual answer, commonly referred to as, "money" never seems to come up.
If STEM salaries are low COMPARED TO THE LOCAL COST OF LIVING, then there will be few interested in STEM careers. A smart person can become an engineer (relatively low pay) or a doctor (relatively high pay) or a Wall Street trader (relatively high pay). Hell, even Dentists and Optometrists can sometimes beat a starting engineer's salary.
Maybe, just maybe, capitalism is working and people are choosing to put their efforts where the money is. Maybe, just maybe, people are choosing NOT to compete with workers in India making $10 an hour when they could be choosing a career that generates $100 an hour.
Maybe, just maybe, the fucking morons who keep writing these hand-wringing articles should learn to see the the obvious thing in front of their noses.
FTFY
Social media trolls have been with us for years. On the good side, they're trivial to spot and ignore - a fact completely lost on their employers.
The DHS has quietly become the KGB, with all that this implies.
There's a reason that the current Russian dictator comes directly from the old KGB. There's a reason that one of our recent former presidents came directly from the CIA.
For this reason, I'll make a big bet, that no matter what kind of election carnival is held, Jeb Bush gets elected as the next president. As the former CIA director's son, he's on their team. He's already vetted. No candidate, at this point, has a chance of winning unless they're security service friendly.
It's evolution that will fundamentally change the way our economy has to work, and we're not even close to having a model in place for dealing with it.
Quite so. The nice thing is that *we* won't have to figure it out. That's what AIs are for. Figuring things like that out.
Humans may indeed become useless for problem solving tasks in comparison. So what? I don't see how that prevents anyone from living a long fulfilling life. Moreover, AIs will be able to afford to be generous to us. We won't be competing for resources in any significant way. I don't see why we wouldn't co-exist happily. For that matter, AIs won't have the motivations of organically evolved beings that create competition. Neither self replication nor persistent existence will be *inherently* important to them.
It's only a matter of when. Even if all strictly computational AI research stops tomorrow, we'll be able to genetically enhance human intelligence by and by, even if it takes several thousand genetic manipulations to do it.
When direct neural I/O becomes a thing, millions (or billions) of people will be directly, electronically linked via the internet. Tell me that's not a new form of intelligence.
For that matter, we'll almost certainly develop at least one form of AI the way nature did. We'll cobble up some genetic algorithms primed to develop the silicon equivalent of neurons, give them some problems to solve, and perhaps a robot or two to control, and we eventually "grow" an AI that way.
But look, it's not the end of us, or anything else. We merge with the things. Our thoughts become linked with theirs. If we can transfer all memory, then eventually we *become* the AI, perhaps with a few spare physical copies of ourselves kept for amusement purposes.
Will AIs fight? There will be conflicts, of course. There always are. Resource conflicts, however, will be minimal. An AI doesn't need much, and can figure out how to get enough more efficiently than we can. Conflicts will be over other matters and are unlikely to be fatal.
Wozniak, et. al. need to chill. It's just evolution.
No, they don't. I maintain however, that "moral validity" rarely has significant real world consequences, or is used to justify a change in economic conditions that inevitably benefit the wealthy.
This technology will be developed to the point where traits like intelligence, disease resistance, emotional stability, beauty, et. al. will be almost guaranteed. If it's outlawed in one nation state, wealthy people will just have it done in another. Their children will benefit. The poor will be at a financial AND genetic disadvantage.
The hand wringing ethical concerns of "scientists" will have no effect on this whatsoever.
Let's hope he becomes the Windows designer in chief.
He's right. The rest of you who, like me, grew up reading science fiction, are wrong.
We run out of hydrocarbons of all types before this century is out. They become too expensive to be useful long before then. We use up the popular fissionables too. We have some hope of maintaining industrial scale electricity if we start developing thorium generators - like, yesterday. If we don't, you can pretty much kiss industrial civilization at the current scale goodbye before the century is out.
All of this information is available to anyone with google and a calculator. For the unusually lazy, start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... (and buy the book.).
Billions will starve by 2100. Ecological overshoot happens to all species eventually. It's happened to local populations countless times before. It just happens to be occurring on a global scale for the first time. After it's all sorted out, the remaining 250 million (or less depending on the number of nukes involved), will be unusually sensible.
It's not the end of the world, per se, but it's the end of the world we grew up in. The one we dream of, with FTL, space colonies and the like will be stillborn. We blew our resources on ipads, pet food and television, instead of large scale nuclear power, sustainable agriculture and social, political and economic systems that don't involve large numbers of nuclear weapons in the hands of testosterone soaked sociopaths.
Cheers!
The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- B. Franklin
