Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[Corey Murtagh]

Cyrus Levesque wrote:
--------------------------
It isn't a theory at all. It is a knowledge that people will finally
arrive at this mode of government and society, because it is the only
direction in which human progress exists. All other directions lead
to horror and degradation of the human species. It is SO obviously
so that it CANNOT EVEN *BE* regarded as any mere "theory", it is The
Knowledge, The Truth.

Oh, so it's just another religion.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

I'm still waiting for the translation of Aristotle that supports your
ridiculous claims in that arena.

--------------------
I don't do cites, do your own homework. It's there.

Your political views are so intrinsically vicious

[snip]

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Oh, so it's just another religion.

-----------------------
Nope, religion doesn't bother to justify anything, it's all about
nonsensical belief and obedience to anti-humane dogmas based on
the belief that humans are evil and hateful and God vicious,
incompetent, erratic, and unimaginative.

My TRUST that the human species will perfect itself in this way I
described because it is the ONLY direction of ethics, morality,
and goodness, so it can best ONLY be correctly termed: HOPE!

Now the bible says that faith is the hope for things not seen.

But then again, the true Faith is surely NOT any stupid anti-humane
sheepfucker rag-head religion that believes in things that are so
old and ignorant of science and invariably polluted by lies, and
which were so OBVIOUSLY developed to frighten and control slaves.

Any Gawd worth a damn would either talk to everyone equally, and
not pick favorites, and ALSO do so in every era of humankind, or
such a Gawd wouldn't have said anything at all.

The latter is much more plausible than believing God is vicious,
anti-humane, unfair and incompetent.

-Steve

 

[Corey Murtagh]

-----------------------
Nope, religion doesn't bother to justify anything, it's all about
nonsensical belief and obedience to anti-humane dogmas based on
the belief that humans are evil and hateful and God vicious,
incompetent, erratic, and unimaginative.

Thus far you've met almost every request for more information with
either a stream of abuse or a demand that the querant look things up for
himself.

My TRUST that the human species will perfect itself in this way I
described because it is the ONLY direction of ethics, morality,
and goodness, so it can best ONLY be correctly termed: HOPE!

You, steve, are a prime example of why that hope is terribly unfounded
and must ultimatly lead to disappointment. Your very nature, as
expressed during your many, many posts to this thread, precludes the
possibility that what you profess to desire will /ever/ happen.

 

[Gerry Quinn]

[snip extreme leftist rant]

Could you clarify in what respects (if any) your program differs from
that of Pol Pot?
I'm not aware of Pol Pot having a "program" that in ANY way resembled
mine.

It seems nearly identical, from the equalisation of workers to the
slaughter of dissenters. A little more agrarian in emphasis, but
perhaps that just means Pol Pot thought things out a little better.

-----------------------------
Better? You have to be kidding. His was a war of revenge against the
powerful families represented ancient hatreds, and the blood of
thousands of years, it was a tribal genocide, it didn't even resemble
a revolution, it was merely bloody mindless revenge. His wasn't any

So far, your program qualifies on all grounds.

"communism", his was meting our equality through death. He believed

Please re-read your post.

that "socialism" (his word) was incompatible with industrialized
civilization, which he saw as inherently evil more than he saw socialism
as a good, which was an old Cambodian village religious superstition,
and he forcibly ruralized the entire population and
simply killed any of them who seemed inept or unable to cope with
forced labor.

Or who looked like they might dissent - something you repeatedly
specified also. Pol Pot's ideology was a version of Maoism, and in fact
the North Vietnamese had a very similar program (they were his allies
initially, remember). However, the Vietnamese were never so extreme,
and a further degree of pragmatism set in in Vietnam after a few years
of death camps. (Though Vietnam remains a severely impoverished
country.)

Doing away with Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' (also specified by you)
will soon guarantee poverty. Something to do with people knowing what
they want better than bureaucrats, perhaps? Does this reality even
register with you?

It's pretty unrelated to anything actually, and the US support of
the Sihanouk's city rule and the US carpet bombing of the countryside
is blamed for this gout of revenge spurting in SE Asia.

Oh dear, once again the US gets the blame for communist death camps.

I'm not posting further here, I think you are sufficiently up to your
neck in it.

- Gerry Quinn

 

[Edward G. Nilges]

... long harangue snipped

This does seem to be the crux of the matter. When someone complains
about an author it's of mild interest that they actually
know who they are talking about. It lends a tiny bit of

I was in fact an avid reader of science fiction as a youth but made a
conscious decision that it was a waste of time. Your argument can be
turned around: IF the literature has on balance a bad effect, causing
the reader to be desensitized to better books, then the reading can
bias the reader, in its favor, and render him, with equal force,
incapable of meta-discussion.

It is absurd to rate your judgement of a critic on whether he is
steeped in a literature he rejects, and gives coherent reasons for
rejection, as I have, because his decision is that the literature is a
waste of time.

On the model, of a reader, as an uncritical reading-machine, then the
only critic, with a right to criticize would be an omnivorous idiot
savant who reads everything and suspends his judgement.

Science fiction fans resent it seems the canon in favor of a populism.
But in so doing they become tools themselves, not of the canon, but of
the basically commercial interests behind science fiction.

Therefore the question remains and this is whether science fictions
are a waste of time.

credibility to their discussion. I actually prefer
to start with facts rather than hypotheses. As far as I can
tell there were three facts discussed in the post I originally
replied to. Two of them were incorrect (Clarke as the author
responsible for the laws of robotics, and the dissolution
of the Ross Ice shelf), one was at best half right (Clarke did

We've collectively arrived at a correct picture, so this issue is
dead. And, you failed to mention that last spring's collapse in the
Antarctic was followed by this fall's collapse in the Arctic, which is
unprecedented, and from which we can conclude that the space ladder is
probably a waste of time. Technical abilities and the ability to
provide the correct facts, such as yours, should not be thrown away on
such projects when you are needed to fix the consequences of existing
technology.

write about though he did not support building an orbital tower).

Now some things, the nature of intelligence may well be one,
require going beyond the facts. However, under the common notion
of intelligence, intelligent and moral men -- say Abraham Lincoln,
Woordrow Wilson, FDR as examples -- have acted in ways they knew
would kill many people. So it is observed that intelligence does
not equate with an axiomatic rejection of killing. Other intelligent
men have indeed come to the conclusion that killing is wrong under
all circumstances but they are in fact in the great minority.

To say that Presidents "killed" in these cases is a sloppiness of
political thinking which is often found in technical circles. In fact,
if Abe "killed" then we kill in ways described by Peter Singer because
just as Abe made decisions THAT LED TO death, we make consumption
decisions (for example to buy a Hummer or an SUV) THAT LEAD TO DEATHS.

Therefore there probably is a distinction between the moral act "I
shall now kill x, a person I have identified" and more diffuse
decisions, such as were made by Lincoln such as "I shall have to
enforce the Bigod Constitution because that's what they elected me to
do."

In all your precision of fact you have neglected a simple distinction.
Abe, after the death of Anne Rutledge, resolved to be, at one and the
same time, a good and public man and carry out a political program of
eradicating scalawags first in his home town, and then in DC. In so
doing he realized that in an inperfect world he might get men killed,
in part because of the slave question.

But it probably remains true that intelligence INCLUDES a refusal to
flip people off unnecessarily when driving to work (a deliberately
immoral act without a "double effect" of a good purpose and partly
evil result) or to kill individuals one on one, or to kill them
wholesale in a terrorist act.

What intelligence insists upon is what Kant identified in the
beginning of the Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals and this is
having a good will. A good will, like Lincoln, is able to realize that
it's powerless over some evil while still able to act for good, in
Abe's case, the preservation of the Constitution.

What's interesting is that the situation is more grammatical and
demands a form of parsing, and cannot be approached as a series of
atomic and unrelated issues such as a monadic intelligence, versus
goodness.

You may wish to work with an uncommon definition of intelligence.
Your definition of intelligence might well lead to a rejection of
homicide in all circumstances. But then you cannot directly compare
your quantity with other authors' discussions of intelligence
since they are not talking about the same thing you are.

I am not thinking in terms of quantity at all, but of qualities
thought by technicians to be without meaning DESPITE the fact that
they have both a logic and a grammar.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

Thus far you've met almost every request for more information with
either a stream of abuse or a demand that the querant look things up for
himself.

 

[R. Steve Walz]

[snip extreme leftist rant]

Could you clarify in what respects (if any) your program differs from
that of Pol Pot?
I'm not aware of Pol Pot having a "program" that in ANY way resembled
mine.

It seems nearly identical, from the equalisation of workers to the
slaughter of dissenters. A little more agrarian in emphasis, but
perhaps that just means Pol Pot thought things out a little better.

-----------------------------
Better? You have to be kidding. His was a war of revenge against the
powerful families represented ancient hatreds, and the blood of
thousands of years, it was a tribal genocide, it didn't even resemble
a revolution, it was merely bloody mindless revenge. His wasn't any

So far, your program qualifies on all grounds.

--------------------
Your assertion is nothing but loose garbage. Pol Pot wanted to kill
everyone in the cities because he blamed Sihanouk and all rich city
dwellers for the miserable American carpet bombing of the jungle and
rural Cambodia that massacred thousands. He assumed this was something
Sihanouk had asked the Americans to do to him and the people of the
country and jungle.

Please re-read your post.

------------------
Don't lie like that, you shit-mouth.
Quote it all, don't try to be creative, you're NOT!

Or who looked like they might dissent

--------------
No, he just worked them to death in the country and then starved or
shot them. It was revenge!! He didn't wait for "dissent"!!


- something you repeatedly

specified also. Pol Pot's ideology was a version of Maoism,

----------------
More pseudo-religion of revenge. Understandable as revenge, but it's
NOT Communism.

and in fact
the North Vietnamese had a very similar program (they were his allies
initially, remember).

-------------------
Garbage, Pol Pot was terrified of the Vietnamese! He was paranoid and
afraid they were after him during the biggest of his pogroms.

And Ho Chi Minh wrote a socialist constitution that was a cross
between that of the USA and the parliamentary government of the UK!!
He didn't even WANT to be called a "communist"!

However, the Vietnamese were never so extreme,
and a further degree of pragmatism set in in Vietnam after a
few years of death camps.

----------------
That's a lie! Amnesty International were forced to admit that they
had innocuous prisons by comparison to western hell-holes, and that
they maintained careful stewardship toward their political criminals.

(Though Vietnam remains a severely impoverished
country.)

------------------------
They are a jungle country, and they aren't interested in ruining their
people or their countryside with strip mining or massive agribusiness,
so that's inevitable.

Doing away with Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' (also specified by you)

-----------------------
There isn't any, rather it doesn't belong merely to Capitalism, it
is the natural feature of any supply and demand system, even Communism.
That's why it's such a stupid lie! It's not "unseen", NOR Capitalist
alone. It's merely a fanciful propagandistic lie.

will soon guarantee poverty. Something to do with people knowing what
they want better than bureaucrats, perhaps? Does this reality even
register with you?

-------------------------
Your ranting phony erroneous dogma.

Oh dear, once again the US gets the blame for communist death camps.

-------------------------
There were no "communist death camps" in Cambodia, because it wasn't
"communist"!!

I'm not posting further []
- Gerry Quinn

 

[Tom McGlynn]

I was in fact an avid reader of science fiction as a youth but made a
conscious decision that it was a waste of time. Your argument can be
turned around: IF the literature has on balance a bad effect, causing
the reader to be desensitized to better books, then the reading can
bias the reader, in its favor, and render him, with equal force,
incapable of meta-discussion.

It is absurd to rate your judgement of a critic on whether he is
steeped in a literature he rejects, and gives coherent reasons for
rejection, as I have, because his decision is that the literature is a
waste of time.

I have no problem with anyone thinking science fiction to be shallow,
overly optimistic, even immoral based upon either what they have personally
read or reviews they have seen. However attacking a particular author
with regard to views that author has not espoused -- i.e.,
Arthur Clarke with regard to general laws of robotics --
shows a general lack of credibility. Were I to make
a statement criticizing Nietzsche (rather than say Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas)
for the espousing the doctrine of natural law, my lack of competence
to cricitize philosophers would be manifest. You've established
a lack of credibility in criticizing science fiction thought, but you are
surely free to dislike it -- even revile it -- on general principles.

....

We've collectively arrived at a correct picture

We? Interesting viewpoint. I suppose you're right. I wouldn't
have sent a correction if someone (i.e., you) hadn't published
false information.

... so this issue is
dead. And, you failed to mention that last spring's collapse in the
Antarctic was followed by this fall's collapse in the Arctic, which is
unprecedented, and from which we can conclude that the space ladder is
probably a waste of time.

Interesting jump... Hmmm. I didn't mention a lot of things, but
I was the one that brought up the Arctic ice.... But what does
it have to do with a space ladder (which no one is trying to build
anyway), and what does that have to do with the laws of robotics.


.... Technical abilities and the ability to

provide the correct facts, such as yours, should not be thrown away on
such projects when you are needed to fix the consequences of existing
technology.


To say that Presidents "killed" in these cases is a sloppiness of
political thinking which is often found in technical circles. In fact,
if Abe "killed" then we kill in ways described by Peter Singer because
just as Abe made decisions THAT LED TO death, we make consumption
decisions (for example to buy a Hummer or an SUV) THAT LEAD TO DEATHS.

Could be... Who kills: the bomb, the bombadier, the pilot, the general
who orders the mission, the president who authorizes bombing a city?
Who has the most autonomy? The bomb doesn't... The pilot and bombadier
would be imprisoned and replaced if they resisted. The general and
the president are the ones that seem to have real autonomy and the
chance to make a difference here.

Did Hitler kill in World War II? Not by this logic.
Nor Himmler, Doenitz, Goebbels or Goering.

I don't think FDR would have denied being responsible for the deaths of
thousands. He believed that the those deaths were justified
by the intent and circumstances of his action. He clearly
did not agree with an axiomatic rule that one should not kill.

But it probably remains true that intelligence INCLUDES a refusal to
flip people off unnecessarily when driving to work (a deliberately
immoral act without a "double effect" of a good purpose and partly
evil result) or to kill individuals one on one, or to kill them
wholesale in a terrorist act.

Well now we're a lot less clear aren't we... We don't kill
gratuitiously. But we can kill in a variety of societally sanctioned
circumstances... Self defense, sometimes defense of property, defense
of others, to stop intolerable pain, in many situations
in warfare... The circumstances vary by society, in some places
as punishments for crimes, infanticide is widely practiced in some
cultures, killing of unfaithful spouses -- or their partners, ...
All of these have been practiced by intelligent men and women.

And many who have killed in a horrific and gratuitious ways are
not lacking in intelligence as commonly used. Certainly many of
these criminals would pass a Turing test... Were John Gacy
and Ted Bundy not intelligent? The press frequently
indicated they were. Somehow they did not
find it axiomatic that they should not kill.

You may choose to use the word in a different way,
but as used and meant in common
parlance, intelligence does not preclude concluding that one
should -- and will-- kill, neither in contexts where
killing may be ethical, nor in the foulest of circumstances.

Regards,
Tom McGlynn

 

[Chris Malcolm]

Phlip wrote:

No, their relative speed. And since the doppler shift affect the
frequency of the transmissions, the amount of doppler shift has to be
discovered in order for the receiver to lock in to the transmission
and decode it. As a side effect the GPSR can calculate its own
velocity without having to differentiate position, and more accurately
than would be possible by that method.

GPS uses the /transit/ time of a signal from a satellite to figure out
the distance between the transmitter on the satellite and the receiver
in your hand-held GPS unit. Given the /accurate/ distance from three
(yes, three) satellites, information on the orbits of those satellites,
and a very accurate clock, it is possible to trilaterate the location of
the receiver.

So... a GPS receiver must have a list of the orbital parameters of each
of the satellites in order to figure the location of each, and a very
accurate time measure ... better than the quartz crystal timing.
Updates to the orbital parameters are sent via the satellites
themselves, and the receiver's clock is updated constantly by reference
to at least four satellites... where the error is averaged to update
your clock.

It would be more accurate to say that it needs four satellites because the
precision of the timing references required, and the dependence of
positional information on it, mean that the GPSR is having to solve
for four independent variables, one being time.

 

[soft-eng]

(e-mail address removed) (Tom McGlynn) wrote in message
[snipped references to a "space-elevator"]

Well he did write a book about it. He's also written wonderful books
about the need to cherish the Earth's resources. However I don't
believe he is (was?) involved in any serious attempt to build such
a tower. It's not technically feasible with currently available
materials (As Clarke recognized -- his novel is based on a fictitious
fiber that has far more strength than any currently available even
in the laboratory). It appears that because we do not live
in paradise, you wish no one to dream...

The "space elevator" is in the
http://tinylink.com/?vFn8Wq8rys

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=624&e=1&u=/ap/20031014/ap_on_sc/space_elevator

Now if they could also run with the other major idea
of a significant advance that Clarke championed -- taming
of the ocean as living space... Oodles and oodles of it.

 

[soft-eng]

Oops, the tinylink should be
http://www.tinylink.com/?vFn8Wq8rys

 

[Wouter Lievens]

Yes, and many of the more intelligent animals seem to have a sense
of humor. I read recently about dolphins sneaking up on pelicans
and pulling their tail feathers.


It would seem that it was. Humans aren't very fast or strong.
We don't have eagle eyes or dog noses and hearing. Yet we kinda
took over the world.


Personally, I would consider that a plus!


Eh? Except for truly deviant people, I've never heard such a thing.
The hunters I know try to kill in the fastest possible way.

Those truly deviant people control about half the governments of this
world...

 

[Wouter Lievens]

The discussion is about the _definition_ of intelligence!

Define intelligence?
Most people of this planet CANNOT post here!

 

[Wouter Lievens]

----------------------------
Gee, 20 words, is consciousness even possible with only 20 words?
No, anything stuck with 20 words is still a non-conscious device
that only communicates like a machine by instinct, and has no
internal self-modeling.

-Steve

Have you determined exactly how many words a species would need, then???

 

[Wouter Lievens]

So, what are you going to do when somebody shows you an example of
a human culture that does not contain all those things ?

I don't think it's a requirement that intelligence do ALL of them.
They're presented as a possible list of things to look at and think
about.

I wonder, would Aboriginals count as having commerce and economy
without money (before we forced this stuff one them) ?

They had trade. It's one of the oldest activities of man.

You think that no animals are aware of the fact that we are smarter
than them ?

[grin] I've often wondered what my dog makes of my ability to turn
on lights and provide food. Does think me a god?

A measure of Intelligence in my eyes is a description of how fast
and how much an individual human or animal can learn.

I think that's a very good measure. Maybe not the only one, but
a very good one.

OK So: you're in the body of a sperm whale. How do you tell people
not to kill you in time ?

Can I communicate with other sperm whales? Maybe together we can
do something clearly highly intelligent. What if we swam in a
formation such that we formed numeric series? One whale, two whale,
three whale, four. Make it more an more complex until it's pretty
clear it's not instinctive or accidental. Form a Fibonacci sequence...

You're making a major error here, by thinking as a human.
Do we consider whales to have human intelligence? No.
Does our definition of intelligence imply that intelligence is de facto
human? If so, then this discussion is pointless.
I personally think that intelligence has a broader definition than just our
human intelligence.

If you are interested in this matter, google a bit on professor Luc Steels.
He has done quite some research about language, and intelligence, using
computational models.

 

[Wouter Lievens]

True, but one question I'm posing is: ARE these qualities that
might be universal to (high) intelligence. Another way to put
it is: do we do these things because we are human, or because
we are intelligent?

Excellent question, imho, and nicely put.

You will find most of them in most cultures, though. I selected
them *because* we find them so frequently. As others have pointed
out, we even find some of these to some extent in animal "cultures".


I would call it plain stupid, rather than humanocentric.

It's called anthropocentric, by the way...

I certainly agree with sliding scale, but based on species I donno.
Are you saying that, for example, some dogs are smarter than other
dogs?

Yes of course, just like people are.

Nobody has seemed to ask himself this pivotal question:

If humans are intelligent, and dogs are not, then there must be a biological
difference in the brain!
Is there, or are human and dog brains made of the same stuff?
It seems they are. So a logical conclusion must be that they have the same
capacity, only humans have developed those much stronger.

If humans are 'intelligent' and dogs are not, it means they must have a
fundamentally different brain, which they don't!

EXACTLY!! That's why I suspect these are NOT uniquely human traits.
True.


Even lemmings? (-:


I agree completely.

Me too.

 

[Arthur T. Murray]

Those truly deviant people control about
half the governments of this world...

Therefore we should use a parallel-with-us robot society based on
http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/theory5.html to save the world.

http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/java.html is the key to coding
robot AI Minds for a cybernetic "Prosperity Engine" that will NOT
eventuate in robots stealing our jobs, but rather in robots
freeing us humans to engage in truly humane careers such as
caring for the young and the elderly, artistic endeavors, and
the full development of each human life as a precious value.

 

[Robert J. Kolker]

eventuate in robots stealing our jobs, but rather in robots
freeing us humans to engage in truly humane careers such as
caring for the young and the elderly, artistic endeavors, and
the full development of each human life as a precious value.

I don't know about you, but I would rather be aloft in a sail plane than
baby sitting or changing bedpans for codgers. Not that there is anything
wrong with babies mind you, or codgers.

Bob Kolker

 

[Roedy Green]

robots
freeing us humans to engage in truly humane careers such as
caring for the young and the elderly,

Robots caring for the elderly is one of the main applications.
With the aging population, everyone will need at least one robot to
help care for them.

We are in the same sort of position we were with telephones where if
we continued the same way with plug boards every single female in the
country would have had to be employed as an operator.

Things like preparing meals, lifting out of bed, turning, doing
housework, monitoring health, preparing medications and seeing they
are taken on time, cleaning up bathroom accidents, reading to the
person could all potentially be handled by specialised robots.

Visiting and listening may be the jobs that humans will continue to
do. That may even be handled by picture phones and the internet. The
elderly visit each other.

You could probably pull off something even with today's technology
with a special fridge with TV dinner slots, and standardised
packaging.