Architects in the early 20th century came up with an interesting solution to this: use a third dimension, and install elevators. Now you can walk horizontally in two dimensions, and travel up/down, bringing a large company's employees all within relatively short distances of each other.

It's also a completely different problem from information retrieval in a messy domain like "all documents on the internet". Watson is built mainly out of more structured data: dictionaries, almanacs, atlases, Wikipedia infoboxes, etc. It turns this into a huge database of knowledge, and then does inference on that database to try to answer Jeopardy-style questions posed in natural language. But this doesn't even try to tackle the other side of the natural language problem, which is parsing not only a natural-language query, but the entire contents of the internet.

In short, Watson might compete in the Wolfram Alpha space, of retrieving structured knowledge from databases, but not, at least not without a major overhaul, in the general document search space.

Maybe they're including the cost of treatment for all the new "learning disorders" that will be invented.

IMHO, there is no communism without the first industrial revolution. Marx is a consequence of technology.

Interestingly, Marx himself believed something along those lines, that communism would be the product of certain tensions produced by the (then-)modern industrial economy. That's one reason that orthodox Marxists (like Kautsky) were very skeptical of the Russian Revolution. If you believe that communism is the result of tensions within an industrial economy, led by the urban proletariat produced in factories, then a communist revolution without first having industrialization doesn't make sense: the Leninist ideas of a vanguard party that would seize power, crash-industrialize an agrarian economy, etc., and then usher in communism, ends up seeming very ahistorical and strange.

That's one way of defining the average (mean) standard of living, yes. But that does not necessarily mean that the median standard of living also increases in the same scenario, without stronger assumptions on the distribution.

But what happens computers are as good as people in most of all the things that qualify as jobs nowadays?

Science fiction writing covers the two limit cases pretty well. Let's say machines can now account for all basic human needs, producing food, clothing, shelter, etc. sufficient for the whole human population. Then at the dystopian and utopian extremes, we have:

Possibility 1: These machines are owned by a small ruling class, who uses their control over this vast pool of robot labor to rule the world, and over the impoverished underclass who own no robots.

Possibility 2: These machines provide for everyone's needs, freeing up humans for a glorious age of space exploration, science, what-have-you.

The basic parameters of the argument are clear, sure, and have been clear for a few hundred years: automation may replace large numbers of jobs with machines controlled by a smaller number of people, but may also create new jobs, either directly working on the technology involved, or indirectly in other areas. The more difficult questions are in the details. Do the numbers always match up, and what factors influence whether they match up? Does automation lead to more general shifts in the economy, e.g. either concentration of wealth or decentralization of wealth? If it could do either, what factors influence that?

My own view is to be rather skeptical that there is a universal answer. These kinds of articles give off a whiff of a kind of Panglossian view that the technology/economy ecosystem is in a Gaia-like eternal balance, and I don't see a strong reason to believe that's true. Instead I think we need to look at specifics to determine what effects a given technological advance, within a particular existing economic situation, will have.

Nah, our representation is still getting paid too, alas.

To be somewhat more precise, there isn't a mandated price, in the sense of formal price controls. But the federal helium reserve accumulated huge stockpiles, and has been slowly selling them off since 1996, which has kept the price low by flooding the market. On the one hand, that discourages private investment, but on the other hand, it's not clear it's entirely a bad thing: if we don't actually need this helium reserve lying around forever, selling it off slowly seems like a reasonable thing to do.

What about your fellow humans, and their kids, you psychopathic nut?

Given how broadly the computer-crime laws are written, they're lucky they didn't get thrown in jail for that "advanced IP spoofing"...

For those wondering where it's from, here's an explanation from Per Egil Hegge, via this thread (in Norwegian):

In his book Katta i sekken, Kjell Ivar Vannebo writes that the origin is German, and comes from the fact that Germans often drank from a cup which was shaped like a shoe. Drinking over a shoe meant drinking too much. Later it became "low shoe", and the phrase was also expanded to include performing activity other than drinking, at a level far above normal or acceptable.

The title of that book, by the way, translates to "cat in a sack", but is not related to the English idiom "let the cat out of the bag"... instead it's the Norwegian version of the English idiom pig in a poke.

Nobody else gets to vote themselves a raise, create their own health plan, retirement, etc.

Um, that's pretty much how C-level executives work at large companies. They are nominally under the control of the board, who is nominally the elected representatives of the shareholders, but like with our elected political representatives, in practice they have quite a bit of unrestrained control over things like voting each other raises and approving golden-parachute contracts (formally on behalf of the shareholders who voted the board in, of course).

Back in February, IEEE Spectrum reported that Willow Garage was shutting down, which led to a rebuttal from WG in which they said that they were changing, not shutting down. I guess the change wasn't profitable enough.

It's true Bach didn't perform on a piano, though to be pedantic, the word clavier doesn't denote a specific kind of instrument. It's just a traditional name for keyboard instruments, and sometimes the piano is considered in the family. Bach himself apparently performed on both the harpsichord and clavichord, though his work is most associated with the harpsichord.