[vox_mundi]

It's replicant Roy Batty's birthday

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n the Blade Runner universe the Nexus 6 replicant calling itself Roy Batty rolled off the production lines of the Tyrell Corporation today.

At the time Blade Runner was made, mainstream computing was in its infancy. IBM had just brought out its first PC, chip manufacturers weren't even close to gigahertz speeds, and the rest of computer hardware like memory and hard drives were (comparatively) huge, slow, and very expensive.

Batty was listed as a high-performance combat drone, with excellent intellectual abilities that would have put it in genius mode.



Batty: Questions... Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates?
Hannibal Chew: Don't know, I don't know such stuff. I just do eyes, ju-, ju-, just eyes... just genetic design, just eyes. You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Batty: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes!



Sure; it doesn't look impressive, but don't get it pissed in a bar fight.

[vox_mundi]

Robots. Machine learnin', 3D-printin' AI robots: They'll take our jobs – Davos

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')

Robot overlords will cause a net loss of over five million human jobs by 2020, according to analysis by the World Economic Forum (WEF) from Switzerland's Davos ski resort.

Dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a mixture of artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, nanotechnology and 3D printing – when combined with advances in genetics and biotechnology and significant demographic changes – will "transform the labour markets in the next five years", stated The Future of Jobs report published by the WEF today.

In total, 7.1 million jobs will be lost to the machines, whether through redundancy, automation or disintermediation (cutting out the middle men), with office and admin roles set to be hit hardest.

[vox_mundi]

In a driverless future, what happens to today's drivers?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'L')et us imagine a not too distant (and quite likely) future where the majority of vehicles on the roads drive themselves. Those cars are networked together – they communicate information about their position, speed, traffic and hazards around them. You don't need to stop at junctions if you know there's no traffic approaching. A large traffic management system keeps cars moving, finding the best route.

An entire system of transportation that manages itself, reduces traffic, accidents, emissions – and all for a lower cost. How long before people not only accept this but even prefer it? Though many are quick to claim no one will want it, how many people still ride a horse-drawn carriage?

The implications of driverless cars are huge because the transportation industry is huge, employing almost five million people in the U.S. alone. Suddenly you don't need drivers for taxis, buses, garbage trucks, deliveries, you name it. Not just cars either – boats, planes, anything that moves could be completely automated. Once this process begins, it's likely to happen quickly, because there's an incredible amount of money to be saved this way. What happened to the horses when we didn't need them to pull carts?

The people who today drive these vehicles are currently some of the most valuable to society. Modern life would grind to a halt if they all suddenly disappeared. Together, these millions of people move food to our supermarkets, take garbage from our houses and take our children to school. What happens to all those people, who through no fault of their own, find themselves unemployed with a skill set society no longer wants or needs?

[AgentR11]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vox_mundi - article', 's')uddenly you don't need drivers for taxis, buses, garbage trucks, deliveries, you name it. Not just cars either – boats, planes, anything that moves could be completely automated.

[AgentR11]

UK/US intellectual property tied folks really try hard to avoid the issue, pretend its irrelevant, but a huge thing is missing from this chart.

And that's open source software. Most of it is quite viral, and impossible to undo. No matter what law gets written; there is no undoing the penetration of compilers, libraries, OS's, and encryption; all in source form, copy-able not hundreds of time, or thousands of times, but billions upon billions of times. These toolsets are now truly massive.

If Jokelandia gets it in their head to make a self directed killer robot that can talk to other robots, and make more of itself, as well as reprogram any other robot it can get physical connectivity with... They don't start at square one. They click "install" and begin their process with millions of man hours of research and development, before they even learn how to write "hello world" in C++. And there is absolutely nothing we can do that would make that not so.

To OS religion fanatics, this is not an invitation for an Windows-is evil, Unix-is good; the problem is actually cross platform. I use as much open source code under MS Windows, as I do with *nix.

[vox_mundi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vox_mundi - article', 's')uddenly you don't need drivers for taxis, buses, garbage trucks, deliveries, you name it. Not just cars either – boats, planes, anything that moves could be completely automated.

[vox_mundi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', '.')..a huge thing is missing from this chart.

And that's open source software.

[AgentR11]

Vox, these folks don't even have bank accounts. There is no debitting anything. There is huge cash only economy, and it will not be going away any time soon. There are millions of people in the US who can not get bank accounts of any sort; they work for cash, they buy their groceries with cash, and they pay their cab driver in cash.

And yes, they ride taxis. Alot.

Oh.. and after your robotic vehicle finishes torturing Bob, the owner of the vehicle will be writing a several million dollar check to whichever attorney (of the hundreds that will call Bob or his family). That isn't cost saving at all.

All of your counters rely on physically punishing Bob the vandal. No company is going to want to go anywhere NEAR such a thing, because they will be sued, each and every time, and they will occasionally lose. They will not be able to get insurance; and then the next time an honest accident occurs, they go out of business.

Also, if your cab has to drive in for service every time someone sticks some gum in something, or breaks a card reader, its a money loser in almost every location in the US that taxis are well used. Do you know who many broken external card readers and phone tap devices are dangling from fast food restaurants around Houston. Almost all of them have been smashed, gooped, or otherwise broken... by customers.

The kind of automation that is available is simply not suitable to most customer/cashier interactions. Automation in the case of these services can be seen as an assist to a human operator, they can not replace.

[vox_mundi]

Agent - sometimes you have to take what I post with a couple grains of salt

(is why I started the reply with "I don't entirely disagree with you but ..." )

Hell, Skynet will probably nuke us before the first autonomous taxi pulls out of it's charging bay.

[AgentR11]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vox_mundi', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', '.')..a huge thing is missing from this chart.
And that's open source software.

[AgentR11]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('vox_mundi', 'H')ell, Skynet will probably nuke us before the first autonomous taxi pulls out of it's charging bay.

[vox_mundi]

If Wall-E was made by Skynet ...

[vox_mundi]

Housekeeping ATLAS-style w/Video

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')img]http://img.techxplore.com/newman/gfx/news/2016/569d59720f938.jpg[/img]

Sweeping up, tidying up, pushing the handle of a cleaner back and forth, kneeling for a stray paper and depositing it into a wastebasket, YAWN.

This is the household stuff we do without much thought but for the model ATLAS, fundamental housecleaning tasks pose agility and manipulation challenges.

IEEE Spectrum's Evan Ackerman asked, "why the heck IHMC is teaching ATLAS to clean house, and sadly, the answer is not "because we're about to announce the availability of that robot butler you've always wanted." Rather, it's because ATLAS needs to be run often to make sure that code updates don't break anything, and running the same tasks (like DRC tasks) over and over again gets boring."

[vox_mundi]

Memory capacity of brain is 10 times more than previously thought

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '&')quot;This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. "We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."

[vox_mundi]

Robotics, AI Revolution to Benefit the Rich, Increase Inequality - UBS

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he world's so-called fourth industrial revolution, to be focused on the development of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), will benefit society's richest and lead to a further widening of global inequality, a new report has warned.

Research from Swiss bank UBS, published to coincide with the 2016 Davos summit, has warned that while the increase in prevalence of AI and robotics will lead to a number of opportunities, it will also result in a number of global challenges.

UBS warned the fourth industrial revolution, which comes after historical developments in steam power, electricity and electronics, will have a greater effect on emerging markets in places like South America and India, as the increased use of robots and AI will undercut the competitive advantage of cheap labor.

The report found that the world is headed for a polarization of the workforce, particularly in regards to low-skilled jobs, which will lead to "larger gains for those at the top of the income, skills and wealth spectrums."
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]"Many labor-­intensive firms should be able to boost profit margins as they substitute costly workers for cheaper robots or intelligent software," the report added.

[AgentR11]

The "replaced by a robot" doom theme is a long way off.. but its also basically inevitable if civilization survives long enough.

Since I've spent my entire adult life leveraging CPU's and code to delete jobs, I think about this next question from time to time...

What does the world look like when the entire real national production of the United States is accomplished by the action of 1,000 humans and the robotic and computational tools at their command?

Not 1,000 owners. But 1,000 professional employees / operators paid by the ownership class. I'm skilled enough to survive in the 1,000,000 employee version; and that world is scary enough to contemplate; but this thing creates its own positive feedback loop; it gets easier/unit the higher the unit count goes, each step on the path leverages all that went before with less and less effort.

Seriously, how do we manage to allocate food, and shelter, and recreation to 500 million people, when only 1,000 of them produce all of the food, and shelter, and all of the physical components of the recreation they all indulge in?

Why will the 1,000 keep working?

If they live worse, they stop; if they live better, they get lynched...

[Shaved Monkey]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AgentR11', '
')Seriously, how do we manage to allocate food, and shelter, and recreation to 500 million people, when only 1,000 of them produce all of the food, and shelter, and all of the physical components of the recreation they all indulge in?

Why will the 1,000 keep working?

If they live worse, they stop; if they live better, they get lynched...

[Cog]

There will always be a 1%. Even after you lynch the current 1%.

[Shaved Monkey]

Thats not why there not being lynched though