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Comment Re: Eventually that will trickle up to everybody (Score 1) 160

There are several companies making really good progress on humanoid robots. Combined with good enough ai, those will be able to fix your toilet or lay mortar at a construction site. When they get good enough, they will be able to do practically any job a human can do.

AI-enhanced robotics will replace humans on a number of manual labor positions, but adoption will be a matter of scale. Because mobile robotics will always be expensive, they'll only be adopted where each can do the job of 10+ humans on a near 24 hour basis. Farming is a good example of where mobile robots will eventually be widely adapted. They'll pretty much pay for themselves on very large farms. But your plumbing contractor will never reasonably be able to afford them considering how much work each employee gets. You can only work on one toilet at a time, one house at a time. The scaling simply isn't there for small businesses with skilled workers. Same thing for small to medium scale construction contractors. You might see robots supplementing men on big city skyscraper projects, but not doing home renovations or pouring a new driveway at someone's house.

Comment Re:Eventually that will trickle up to everybody (Score 1) 160

Companies will find that because they replaced all the younger workers with AI, there aren't enough experienced ones. Unless AI dramatically improves, it's going to be a repeat of what happened with on-the-job training. Everyone needs a degree now because companies decided they didn't want to train them.

Everyone needs a degree now because we watered down high school and made it worthless, then we banned companies from using IQ tests to select workers, and so the college degree became a stand in for "He's probably smart enough to do this". But now we're watering down the Bachelor's Degree, too, because it's unfair if everyone doesn't have a college degree or some nonsense.

Comment Re:Eventually that will trickle up to everybody (Score 2, Insightful) 160

The goal here isnt to replace jobs, its to suppress wages.
 

That is flat out wrong. The goal was specifically to replace human beings in a wide swath of positions.

What makes AI unique is that, unlike say, the spreadsheet, it wasn't created to make workers more productive with some skill training. It was created to completely replace a major chunk of knowledge workers, maybe most of them. And it will. AI is a jobs extinction level event. Manual work will be unaffected... AI can't fix your toilet or lay mortar in a construction site, but it's going to be the asteroid that kills off most coding jobs, financial analyst jobs, and a huge chunk of administrative jobs. The software dev positions that remain will mostly be for maintaining AI. All that "learn to code" advice from just a few years ago? Unless you're going into a hyper-specialized software field, requiring years of education and training, you're pretty much going to be obsolete, soon. And I mean soon as in "this decade", not some ambiguous date down the road. So not only will fields like software completely change, but the education ecosystem that served them is going to undergo a serious culling as well. No more coding camps, boys.

Comment Re: I don't have any sympathy (Score 1) 129

He's had super-model wives

And cheated on all of them.

As if powerful men haven't done this since, oh, Eternity.

Forget that he's Donald Trump for a second. With his wealth alone, he has a status that 99.999 percent of men will never have. And such men have legions of young, hot women just waiting to take the place of the current model on his arm. It's human nature, and it'll never end. High status men will always attract flocks of willing young women that will do anything to be on their arm and in their bed.

Comment Re:Africa Least Distorted and Centred (Score 2) 259

People tend to greatly under-estimate the size and potential of Africa.

But I'm at a complete loss as to why you think estimating the size of Africa has anything to do with estimating the potential of Africa. Centuries of history provide strong evidence that size of countries/continents/islands has very little correlation to what they have the potential to accomplish.

The Netherlands has 3 times the GDP of the largest economy in Africa. $1.228 Trillion compared to South Africa's $410 million. If you add Africa's total GDP up, the Dutch alone make almost half that. Their land area is about 16K square miles. Africa is almost 12 million square miles.

In wealth production, land size doesn't necessarily matter.

Comment Re:Africa Least Distorted and Centred (Score 2) 259

"Large population willing to work hard will mean economic growth."

We'd all like to believe that, but sadly, it's not true. A corrupt leadership means the population will never get out of poverty no matter how hard they work.

The leadership is a reflection of the culture at large. It starts at the very bottom. If a young man decides to better his station in life, and start a business, the first time he starts getting ahead, his father will swoop in and claim it. Because the culture says that the head of the clan owns everything his wives and offspring produce.

It wasn't westerners that came up with the expression "Africa wins again". It was Africans.

Comment Re: Counterintuitive (Score 1) 72

It's pretty dishonest for the link to group auto accidents with armed robberies, assault, rape, etc. Violence, as a legal definition, is intentional. Accidents, by their very definition, are not.

Comment Re:There's no clutter in space (Score 1) 38

There's no "clutter" in space. There are 316,700 bald eagles just in the continental USA -- presumably about a 1/20th of them would be in the air at a given time. Would you say the sky is cluttered with bald eagles?

Bald eagles in the sky are a natural occurrence. Coms satellites are not.

Spacefaring nations should be held responsible for hauling their dead orbital junk out of the sky. You could do that now with robotic "pusher drones" launched into orbit that are guided from place to place and nudge dead junk into burning up over the ocean.

Comment Re:Most privacy rights end at death (Score 1) 71

You're full of shit. As usual.

Example. Don't bother reading it. It's beyond your extremely limited intellect.

I did read it. It doesn't state that the dead have rights. It's an argument that they should. And it'll go nowhere. It's not going to turn over centuries of legal standards.

The dead have no rights. Their successors who hold their estate have rights, but not the dead themselves.

Comment Re:Funny Yesterday this (Score 3, Informative) 58

Hydrogen is eventually coming one day. Just not for cars. Your grandkids will probably fly on airliners running hydrogen fuel, and there will probably be big power generation facilities running it. But running it on common automobiles cheaply and efficiently is just too big a hump to get over. It's a lot easier for an airport to manage hydrogen than a gas station on the Interstate. As the Japanese have proved, you can do hydrogen automobiles, it's just really, really impractical at that vehicle size. Kind of like Chrysler's 1960's experimentation with gas turbine engines in cars. You can do it, and people will go "Oh, neat", but no one is going to buy one with the hassles involved.

Comment Apparently, it's too much to ask for (Score 4, Interesting) 107

All I want is a mainstream-supported fast, simple, clean browser with an efficient rendering engine. That's it. I don't want an AI "helper". This isn't an Iron Man movie where I'm Tony Fucking Stark talking to JARVIS. And if I wanted an AI to talk to, it wouldn't be a component in my goddam browser.

Build a web portal for that shit and otherwise leave us be.

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