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"Expelling a projectile with enough force to penetrate a human being to the depth of 17 centimeters"
I hate to point this out, but my *cock* does that....and talk about unforeseen consequences.....Hope it's not the next thing they want to make illegal.
Only if you equip it with a high-capacity magazine, or modify it to fire more than one shot per pull.
In a bit of convenient timing, found this news story via Instapundit a few minutes ago, about medical use of a 3-D printer saving a baby suffering from a rare lung ailment.
With hopes dimming that Kaiba would survive, doctors tried the medical equivalent of a “Hail Mary” pass. Using an experimental technique never before tried on a human, they created a splint made out of biological material that effectively carved a path through Kaiba’s blocked airway.
What makes this a medical feat straight out of science fiction: The splint was created on a three-dimensional printer.
Here's hoping that the competition helps stuff like this.
I really, really want to be for this. Not because I have anything against 3D-printed guns, I'm all for those, but because some of the things on their list are good ideas and make sense. Some of the other stuff is pure nonsense, however.
"Low-cost medical devices." Excellent idea. "Tools to help people out of poverty." Also excellent. Lots of potential in both of these to improve, and in many cases save, people's lives.
But then we get to "Designs that can reduce racial conflict." Err, what? Someone is waaay overestimating how effective their "Coexist" bumper sticker is. It would be nice if 3D printers could produce some sort of object for people to brandish at racists like crucifixes at vampires, but it's not going to happen. "Tools that would reduce military conflict and spending while making us all safer and more secure." Look, I'm for reducing conflict and increasing safety and security, too, but if an object to do that hasn't been created using more-mundane fabrication methods, a 3D printer won't be able to make it, either -- and there aren't any such objects, unless (like me and apparently unlike the folks sponsoring this) you think that being armed makes you more secure.
This is being run by Michigan Tech's Department of of Material Science and Engineering, but it looks like someone from one of the squishy majors snuck in and added items to the list. I hope there are a lot medical and tool ideas submitted (pity they don't have a way to donate money to increase the prize), but I really wish they hadn't included the silly, groan-inducing stuff.
You might not think of a janitor, truck driver, factory worker, or McDonalds worker as particularly intelligent.
I did not mean to imply that opinion at all. I find that most people are more intelligent that they're given credit for -- especially more than we techies tend to give them. Hence the underlying "what will these morons do once the robots take their jobs?" tone in the discussion.
What happens when computer image processing reaches the point where the average blue-collar worker has NO talents that a robot cannot do for cheaper?
Those workers (and more importantly, the next generation of them, since this is 30 years down the line by the article's assumptions) will need to learn new skills, just like the former farm workers and their successors did. The average farm worker in 1870 didn't know how to repair machinery or type, either.
Humans have many extra costs - housing, transportation, food, bathrooms, breaks, social life, vacations, unpredictable emotions and behavior - that robots do not. Will fuzzy traits like "flexibility" be enough to compensate for all these?
Point taken, but that's what I meant by "things we haven't thought of yet." The fuzzy traits won't be enough to compensate in the cases of jobs that don't utilize those traits, but since those traits are valuable, use will be made of them, and many of the uses are things that won't occur to us now.
Point taken about the article's vagueness, though they did say “if not any work that humans can do, then, at least, a very significant fraction of the work that humans can do.”
And to reiterate, I'm not saying this transition would be painless, or that it wouldn't involve major societal displacements and other changes. Going back to the agriculture example, that involved a large portion of the population moving from the countryside into the cities. Another possible basis for comparison is the collapse of the communism in Eastern Europe and the elimination, restructuring, or repurposing of all of the inefficient state-run factories, except that the automation scenario would be less sudden (the article is talking about 2045).
Back the late 1800s, agricultural work required about 3/4 of the US's population. Now it's about 3%. If, back then, you'd asked "what would happen if 96% of the farming jobs vanished?", you'd probably have gotten predictions of doom similar to this one. But what actually happened was that those people (or their descendants, rather, since this change didn't happen overnight) got employed doing other things, most of which people in the late 1800s couldn't have anticipated. The same thing will happen here. Human intelligence, creativity, and flexibility are valuable, and valuable stuff tends not to sit idle. People figure out something to do with it. There are temporary displacements and adjustments, but overall, automation doesn't idle people, it frees them up to do new things.
Note that I'm not talking about a situation where the machines are actually creatively intelligent, in contrast with something like Deep Blue being programmed ahead of time to do a highly-specific task. If we get to that point, all bets are off, but then we're venturing into singularity territory at that point, anyway.
Native Americans smoked the heck out of it for centuries, and you never really hear about them dying in droves from lung or other cancer caused by smoking tobacco.
Given the low average life expectancy of people living that close to nature, or in pre-industrial society in general, I doubt any negative effects of tobacco would have had any statistically-significant impact. Same with genetic tendency of people from sub-Saharan Africa towards higher rates of heart disease -- the vast majority of people didn't live long enough for that to matter. Likewise with lactose tolerance -- when food is chronically scarce, the extra calories from being able to consume dairy products are much more important than the drawbacks of the accompanying increase in saturated fat consumption. It's only in the last couple centuries or so that things like heart disease, stroke, and cancer have climbed up the causes-of-death list, because people have (mostly) stopped dying of starvation, malnutrition, and water/airborne diseases.
If someone can scam a theory that space travel for a week or two extends your life by a year or 2, watch the lemmings line up like there's no tomorrow.
Even if it did, though, I'm curious how much the stress of getting into orbit would be, for folks who haven't fully trained for it. I presume there would be some sort of recommended work-out regimen beforehand, but astronauts and fighter pilots do a whole lot of that to withstand g-forces.
The pilots of those actual Falcons never called their fighters by the AF-approved name. They called it the Viper.
Named after the original Battlestar Galactica fighters, by the way.
Crew-assigned nicknames are almost always better and/or more-colorful than the official ones. For instance:
B-1: Lancer vs. Lawn Dart
B-52: Stratofortress vs. Big Ugly Fat Fucker (BUFF)
C-5: Galaxy vs. Fat Albert or Linda Lovelace (I presume that last comes from the fact that the C-5 can tilt the nose section upward to, err, "swallow" large items of cargo.
F-105: Thunderchief vs. Thud or Lead Sled.
F-111: No name at all! vs. Ardvaark or Switchblade.
If you give Congress a chance to vote on both sides of an issue, it will always do it. -- Les Aspin, D., Wisconsin