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| The Automation Bomb | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 12 2016, 09:10 AM (1,667 Views) | |
| Moonbat | Aug 13 2016, 09:46 AM Post #26 |
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Pisa-Carp
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I guess the question though is who is doing the ranting (perhaps the central theme of TNCR), if it's the 40% who are still fine then that doesn't matter too much because they will get out voted. The danger is that the 60% who are getting screwed over act against themselves. The poor right-wing who vote against policies that would help them because they have bought into propaganda that those policies are somehow challenges to human values like freedom and self-reliance. But I'm still optimistic. Self-preservation is a powerful force. |
| Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem | |
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| Moonbat | Aug 13 2016, 09:46 AM Post #27 |
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Pisa-Carp
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I'll have you know I'm freaking hilarious. |
| Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem | |
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| TomK | Aug 13 2016, 09:49 AM Post #28 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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But so are religion, sex and TV. |
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| Axtremus | Aug 13 2016, 09:56 AM Post #29 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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So humans will find ways to have sex with robots and put it on reality TV? |
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| QuantumIvory | Aug 13 2016, 10:16 AM Post #30 |
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Senior Carp
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Another view: http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/06/04/the-robots-are-not-coming/#5692e4674e44 |
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"I regard consciousness as fundamental. We cannot get behind consciousness." -Max Planck | |
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| TomK | Aug 13 2016, 10:18 AM Post #31 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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It was a John Lennon "Working Class Hero" quote. |
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| Klaus | Aug 13 2016, 10:37 AM Post #32 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Automation bomb? Ridiculous. Automation has been going on for ages, and there is no evidence whatsoever that more automation will lead to a different result than in the past, namely a shift in the kind of jobs and a general increase in the standard of living. There is no reason at all to be pessimistic. Also, I think people overestimate or at least misunderstand the current state of artificial intelligence. The advances in the last two decades are impressive, but what people often misunderstand is that machine learning aims at a different kind of "intelligence" than what humans are good at. In many ways, an ameba is a million times more advanced than IBM's Watson. In other ways, a 1980s home computer like a C64 is vastly superior to Einstein. Also, people will find ways to augment themselves with technology. As a simple example, a man with a smartphone is in some ways more powerful than a man without a smartphone. Advances in novel man-machine interfaces will make sure that our own capabilities will develop in parallel with those of machines. |
| Trifonov Fleisher Klaus Sokolov Zimmerman | |
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| Larry | Aug 13 2016, 10:51 AM Post #33 |
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Mmmmmmm, pie!
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Thinking robots will take over all the jobs is as silly as saying the words "vote for redistributive policies like universal wages" - which is the singular dumbest thing I've read in a long time. |
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Of the Pokatwat Tribe | |
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| Horace | Aug 13 2016, 10:54 AM Post #34 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Robots doing human jobs - if robots can do a human job - is by definition a good thing. That's my definition, anyway. It's probably lots of people's definition. And it's a tragedy if anybody devotes 8 hours a day to something that a robot could do. |
| As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good? | |
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| Rainman | Aug 13 2016, 11:31 AM Post #35 |
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Fulla-Carp
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Probably won't matter. Given demographic changes, population growth, etc., people will end up going down to the river in the morning with a bucket. Some will send their robot. |
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| TomK | Aug 13 2016, 11:33 AM Post #36 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Yea, Larry is right, they take over some jobs. Jus ask any auto worker...some jobs they don't and won't take over. Redistributed wages is another thing. Keep things so that people have enough to live on nicely in a quantitative way, I don't see any problem. If thing get harsh for the masses then they will rebel and have issues. As long as we keep thing fair--we won't have a problem with the current system. Edited by TomK, Aug 13 2016, 11:33 AM.
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| Catseye | Aug 13 2016, 11:59 AM Post #37 |
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Pisa-Carp
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From Forbes (excerpted): . . . a new report from the World Economic Forum telling us all that the situation with robots and automation, their effect upon jobs, is very serious indeed. And sadly they’ve fallen into an all too common trap in economics. They’ve uncovered something that is undoubtedly true to at least some extent but which isn’t important to hardly any. Disruptive labor market changes, including the rise of robots and artificial intelligence, will result in a net loss of 5.1 million jobs over the next five years in 15 leading countries, according to an analysis published in Davos on Monday. The projection by the World Economic Forum (WEF) assumes a total loss of 7.1 million jobs, offset by a gain of 2 million new positions. The 15 economies covered by the survey account for approximately 65 percent of the world’s total workforce. . . . unemployment will rise by 0.3%. On a global scale we’ll not actually be able to measure that. Even at the best (say, the US or UK numbers) we’re not calculating to anything better than 0.1% and there’s plenty of countries that have difficulty in getting to within 1% of the right economic number for anything. It’s just not measurable. There’s something called jobs churn. The economy as a whole is a constant churning of jobs. Meaning that we expect 50 to 100% of all jobs to change over those five years anyway: no, obviously not that all jobs will change but that as many jobs as 100% of all jobs will change. And each of those firings and quits involves some small amount of technological change. It might be entirely trivial: that the new job uses red pencils not green ones. It might be a bit more: one company does the accounts on an internal server, the next does them in the cloud. But there always is technological change. In fact that’s how technological change generally happens. It’s not that one day all buggy whip makers get fired and all have to get jobs as train drivers. And the WEF is telling us that we should be worried about a 0.3% difference in a 100% flow? That’s preposterous. They’re not modeling the process as that flow at all. They’re looking at the static numbers and not considering in the least how the process actually comes about. Which leaves us with what we need to do about this. The answer being nothing, nothing at all. http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/01/18/wefs-davos-report-on-robots-automation-and-job-loss-a-trivial-result-of-no-matter-at-all/#1c422ca14f02 |
| "How awful a knowledge of the truth can be." -- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex | |
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| TomK | Aug 13 2016, 12:07 PM Post #38 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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The question is: How is a new TomK circa 2016 going to get from a son of immigrants to being a wealthy white guy who drives his Mercedes around the mid-west. I'm not seeing how my kids can do what I did without my help. And I don't like that. |
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| Moonbat | Aug 13 2016, 12:07 PM Post #39 |
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Pisa-Carp
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Eventually any task can be solved much more efficiently with specialised hardware that operates at ghzs than general hardware that evolved under selective pressures that are only tangentially related to the task and that operates at khz. So the question is how far away are we from a period where large numbers of people are made economically obsolete because there's just better hardware than them around? I agree that it's easy to find seemingly simple task that current machines can't do that humans can do trivially. I mean they can't even sweep the tube tracks, and there are still plenty of simple video games that class leading networks are hopeless at (e.g. platform games that requires you to pick up special items like keys in order to open doors), Karpathy has a nice blog post... found it on the limits of image recognition, an area where we've seen great succcess. He shows a picture that the algorithms are powerless to understand. (Man that's already nearly 4 years ago how time flies). But I actually kind of believe the hype. I don't know about time frame maybe we're out by a few decades but I think we should be having serious discussions about what we will do when unemployment starts to rise because people just aren't that economically useful to each other anymore. I mean Karpathy's image is in part hard to solve because it involves many subproblems. I agree you can't solve that task (and many many others) by just having more images and a deeper network but you could imagine solving it if you had already solved many other simpler problems and you could effectively generalise from those solutions. At the time he wrote that there was no way to build prior knowledge into networks, every new problem meant starting from scratch but already that's changing. Deepmind spoke at Imperial a few months ago and they showed that they are now able to learn across tasks, before to learn to play a new game they started from a blank slate but they presented initial research that showed a crude method for generalising from previous games they've already learned to play and it worked really well. It was ridiculously simple - you just train your new network whilst simultaneously passing the images to the old network (whose coefficents are frozen) and you provide connections from the layers of the old network to the layers of the new one. It worked really well and it was so crude, it's easy to see millions ways of making that more efficient and effective. And that's just one line of research. Just the usual iterative improvements to todays algorithms are having a big influence. Right now we still need huge amounts of data, the process of generalising is really inefficient (particularly for networks) but improvements will happen there too. We are so far from optimal and yet current approaches can already do so much - why you aren't you worried? I mean if you had to stick your neck out and say X tasks will definitively not be solvable by anything not human in the next 20-30 years what would you say? And are you really confident that there will be enough of these tasks and that they will doable by enough people and in demand by enough people that we will avoid a massive economic crisis?
An ameba is more advanced than IBM's Watson because it has a body, albeit a small one. We certainly can't build anything like an amoeba yet, it's amazing angstrom-structured technology, but computationally as far as I know it's not doing much that's particularly interesting. I think it's mostly chemotaxis. Talking of bodies, watching the Darpa challenge one might be forgiven for thinking that current robots suck. Watching them attempt to open a door by first concentrating really hard for 10 minutes then slowly reaching out their arm about 5 meters too far from the door followed by hopelessly collapsing on the floor does not appear enormously impressive. But actually it is. Just to be at that point means there's a good chance the problem is pretty close to being solved. And once solved it never get's unsolved. Remember the performance of the self-driving cars on the first Darpa challenge? |
| Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem | |
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| Copper | Aug 13 2016, 12:10 PM Post #40 |
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Shortstop
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Actually more like completely incorrect. And of course there is. We are still in the process of absorbing women into the workforce. We certainly couldn't be doing that without very large growth in the numbers of skilled workers. Women who were on the vanguard of this are only now beginning to reach retirement age. |
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The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy | |
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| TomK | Aug 13 2016, 12:13 PM Post #41 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Show me the factories. |
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| Copper | Aug 13 2016, 12:16 PM Post #42 |
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Shortstop
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The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy | |
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| TomK | Aug 13 2016, 12:17 PM Post #43 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Women aren't factories. Anyway Renauda is right. |
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| Rainman | Aug 13 2016, 12:18 PM Post #44 |
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Fulla-Carp
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I would have expected a noticeable spike during the WWII years. |
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| Horace | Aug 13 2016, 12:21 PM Post #45 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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I like you but what are you, a nonsense person? I'd like to know what you do. At least Aqua speaks to people, even if we don't know what he does. Maybe you're too good for that. |
| As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good? | |
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| Moonbat | Aug 13 2016, 01:03 PM Post #46 |
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Pisa-Carp
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Oh Horace I am definitely a nonsense person, I like that. ![]() What do I do, the same thing I've been doing for the last 9 years trying to finish a damn PhD. Though I've done various other things along the way most recently teaching undergraduates how to program. But now I'm actually writing the thesis, well I'm meant to be instead I'm using the limited amount of typing I can do in a day to argue on internet. A hugely productive way of spending my time :). My thesis is hopelessly broad which makes constructing a coherent narrative rather challenging (a problem I seem to struggle with rather often). I've spent about half my time in computational chemistry but I've also worked applying machine learning methods to molecular properties and I've done experimental work in protein spectroscopy. I've spent almost my entire adult life in different science departments chasing something that I never really found and battling my health. Though now it's just the damn hands. I'm real, I just present only a piece of myself here. The reason for that was that at the beginning a decade ago when I started posting in the original coffee-room, i was pulled in by the discussions that I seem to like, I was very ill, life was very very hard but I had a lot of hope and it was what got me through the days. That made me very vulnerable. If I had shown who I was and what I cared about I would have been attacked by people good at attacking others and they would have hurt me because they would have attacked the things that kept me going. So I deliberately remained 1 dimensional. And then, well now there is no risk but I established the pattern so I guess I stayed with it. Though to be honest even if I had not deliberately restricted myself here it wouldn't have made that much difference, most of the time I'm more interested in ideas than in people anyway. But that doesn't mean I don't like and respect many of the people who I have come across here both in the past and now. You included Horace, even if you're going to vote for that orange idiot.
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| Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem | |
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| Horace | Aug 13 2016, 01:18 PM Post #47 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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That's why we're all here, my friend. Thanks. |
| As a good person, I implore you to do as I, a good person, do. Be good. Do NOT be bad. If you see bad, end bad. End it in yourself, and end it in others. By any means necessary, the good must conquer the bad. Good people know this. Do you know this? Are you good? | |
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| Catseye | Aug 13 2016, 01:24 PM Post #48 |
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Pisa-Carp
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Thank you very much for posting this.
And here's a little something for you that has held up well through the ages. It's not as funny as the joke I posted for you, which was a total scream, I know, but maybe it will give more value. Hope is the thing with feathers Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the Gale is heard And sore must be the storm That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm. I’ve heard it in the chillest land And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in Extremity, It asked a crumb of me. - Emily Dickinson |
| "How awful a knowledge of the truth can be." -- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex | |
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| Moonbat | Aug 13 2016, 01:47 PM Post #49 |
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Pisa-Carp
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Made me cry cats. It's beautiful, thank you for sharing it. |
| Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem | |
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| Klaus | Aug 13 2016, 02:15 PM Post #50 |
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HOLY CARP!!!
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Let's say we would remove all life from earth except ameba. Now wait a billion years. Chances are that the amebas will have evolved into a large set of species that include some that can build computers or reason about the intelligence of amebas. In my opinion, to appreciate the intelligence amebas (or humans) one should not look at a single individual but what the genes that constitute that species are capable of evolving into. The intelligence of ameba is not that of a single ameba but how the genes can evolve and adapt to the environment. And that "evolve and adapt" is something we have basically no clue how to do in a computer. There are things like "genetic algorithms" or "evolutionary computing", but they are quite different. There are no programs that can mutate other programs in such a way that these programs are "smarter" and can do something entirely new. If we could, we would only need the computational equivalent of the ameba, improve it by a few million generations (which presumably wouldn't take long), and witness the AI singularity a couple of hours later. |
| Trifonov Fleisher Klaus Sokolov Zimmerman | |
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And here's a little something for you that has held up well through the ages. It's not as funny as the joke I posted for you, which was a total scream, I know, but maybe it will give more value. 
4:46 PM Jul 10