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Comment Re:Cause it's fuckin cool bro (Score 1) 38

Yeah, this report reeks of the people promoting Lunar exploration in order to mine Helium 3: a solution in search of a problem. They already have the thing in mind that they want to happen (in this case, settle Mars) and are searching backwards for a means to justify it.

In no way, if the actual goal is "studying life", will $100B buy you more results by sending humans than by sending robots, and nor will it shorten the schedule.When you put humans into the mix, suddenly all of the resources for your project end up going to delivering, sustaining, and retrieving that "smart hammer" you're sending, rather than the actual scientific equipment.

I'm not saying that there can't be good justifications for settling other planets - their can be. Musk's is the most defensible, IMHO (that it's a long, slow, expensive project, but is needed to learn how to make this rare thing (consciousness) redundant against natural and manmade disasters (the latter risk of which grows every year), and we never know how much time we'll have left to do the very-long project needed to do so. Though Musk IMHO grossly downplays the timescales and costs for true resource-independence (or rather, independence to the degree that *if necessary*, it could develop full resource independence on its own, even if shipments of key supplies from Earth are more efficient), and his "quick terraforming" notions are fantasy.

Comment Re:People are cheap (Score 2) 14

It's this observation that makes me skeptical about the whole humanoid hype fest.

You have a strange definition of humanoid.

The second thing is that people are damn cheap.

Depends entirely where you are. Labour in our greenhouses here (Iceland) is insanely expensive and makes it difficult to compete on the global market against imports (even imports of perishable things that are expensive to ship). Replacing workers with machines on a given task might not be economical, in, say, Uganda, while it might be a complete no-brainer here.

That said, there are also things that we could do to bring labour costs down, but don't. For example, at the same time we struggle with high labour costs and shortages in fields like agriculture, we also have problems with too many asylum seekers, most of whose cases get rejected and kicked out (economic migrants), but not for many months of limbo, living at taxpayer expense, when what they really want to do is work here. The obvious solution is to make an agricultural worker visa, where while you're guaranteed the same labour/safety standards but you're not guaranteed Icelandic minimum wages and benefits - but still far better than these people would get in their homeland. The vast majority of them would be thrilled to sign up for such a thing if it would guarantee them residence. But migration-politics is such a hotbutton political issue right now globally, it's hard to do any commonsense stuff like that.

. At the moment, making such a robot that can even perform that task well, let alone be cheap and, importantly, reliable, is a very difficult problem.

I'd also add that while picking is the glamorous AI task, it's only part of the work. In greenhouses at least (I don't have field-tomato cultivation experience) we do an awful lot to manage the plants**. You have to remove the suckers at every internode on the plant (except those at the base to get the proper number of vines per plant), you have to remove the lower leaves at regular intervals, you have to wind the plants around the string that they grow up, when the plants get tall you have to slide the tops over so that they grow at a diagonal, and on and on. And that's just the management for the mature plants - you also replace your plants at regular intervals, so you have to start new plants grow them, repot them, grow them, then plant them out (not just the planting, but also replacing the growing medium) - plus all of the side stuff like cleaning, managing irrigation, and on and on. Harvesting the fruit is just one task among many.

** To anyone reading this who is surprised about all of the plant manipulation, think of it this way: you have a finite amount of surface area for light to hit, and a finite amount of root volume for each plant. So once your plants get to a size where they're basically using all the light and basically have rooted through the whole growing medium, the only way you can keep their growth in balance as they continue to grow is to keep removing old leaves. And you need to stop any branching immediately because again all that branches would do is just grow into your other plants. And once your plants are so long that they've hit the top of your wires, the only thing you can do is slide the wires over so that the plants are growing (ever-increasingly) diagonally. Nothing you can do about the fact that the stems just keep getting longer and longer as the top continues to grow except replace the plants at regular intervals - you need to let the plant continue to grow because that's how you get new blossoms for fruiting. Removing the lower leaves also has the nice side effect that the tomatoes that are maturing lower down are left fully exposed, making them easy to harvest. You harvest as they hit maturity. Once your plants have hit their max size, you top them and go hard on top/branch removal until the majority of your tomatoes left on the plant are harvest-ready, then take them all. A good trick BTW to boost flavour right before harvest is to significantly up the EC in the irrigation solution (to levels that would normally be wasteful or even detrimental to the plant), as it results in effectively "salting" the tomatoes.

Comment Re:So robots are the new fat cat capitalist class (Score 1) 14

Leave it to Slashdotters to complain about tomato-picking going from "repetitive mindless activity at maximum velocity" to "only the cases that you have to use your brain to think about because a robot isn't smart enough".

I guess we should have people manually screwing the caps onto toothpaste tubes also.

Comment Re:Or alternatively... (Score 1) 14

Every economy will always have some unemployed and underemployed people, as every economy is constantly shifting, as does people's status as to what kind of work they can carry out. That doesn't mean it's efficient or sustainable to say, "Oh, you lost your job yesterday? You're a farmer now!". Japan has an unemployment rate of ~2,5%, which is actually quite low. Japan is famous for making "busywork" jobs for people. "Oh, you have a traumatic brain injury and have trouble walking quickly? Just stand over there and hold this sign."

Comment Re:A prediction (Score 1) 113

Only Musk. All the others - Gates, Bezos, Zuckerburg,... only attended the inauguration b'cos Trump this time won the popular vote. But the personnel in their companies are pretty much unchanged, and most of these are woke Left.

On this issue of which group is more opposed to AI and Big Tech, it's the Right, not the Left. The Left pretty much has full control of things like Google, Facebook, Wikipedia.... and so have no beef w/ them. It's people on the Right who can't stand these companies

Comment Re:Not Taiwan, China Cries Censorship (Score 2) 36

No, if KMT is in power, it's due to public dissatisfaction w/ the previous DPP regime. Not b'cos they wanna be a part of China. Power alternates, and since the KMT happened to be the largest alternative to the DPP, that's who the Taiwanese elected

It may also be b'cos during the Biden regime, they were probably scared that Beijing would use any move by the DPP to move against Taiwan, and therefore elected the KMT, which has the same stance as Beijing regarding a single China. That doesn't mean that they want that for their country

Comment Re:Not Taiwan, China Cries Censorship (Score 1) 36

Just b'cos a country is a democracy doesn't mean that it has to tolerate seditious parties. Which is what the KMT now is

I don't want a DPP monopoly on power. Other political parties can vie against it for any number of reasons - ideological, economic, whatever. Only thing one would expect of them is to not pretend that they are a part of another country - in this case, China

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