h a l f b a k e r yI think, therefore I am thinking.
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Those "woke" companies like Nike, that lecture us on
how
politically correct and virtuous they are compared to us
need to make lots of money selling sneakers to poor
middle
city kids for hundreds of dollars a pair so their parents
who
are on food stamps can contribute what little money
they
have to the mighty Nike fortune. To turn this profit they
crave, those child labor factories in China have to keep
humming, those sneakers that cost a buck each to make
aren't gonna stitch themselves.
So how does the west compete and free the children
from
the Nike work motivation whip? Automation of course,
but
to do so we'll need to rank the robots doing this work by
how well they compete against their human child labor
counterparts.
Introducing the "FCLR" system, the Forced Child Labor
Ranking system that is used to gauge how many kids can
be
replaced by a single unit. So if a sneaker making robot
has
a "14 child hour FCLR" it can make as many sneakers in
an
hour as 14 child slave laborers.
It would also have a threshold indicator showing that it's
making more money than the slavery factories so even
Nike
might consider it at some point because it would
increase profits. Although it would have to be a
whooooole lot
cheaper to get Nike on board.
You also gotta wonder about a company whose slogan
was inspired by the last words of a convicted murderer.
robots can't sew clothes
https://twitter.com...1166772162721656838
[calum, Feb 17 2020]
[link]
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The free market says that human labor will always
be cheaper than robot labor [-] |
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That's incorrect, [snin]; there are some functions where human labour is never able to compete effectively with mechanization. The Industrial Revolution proved that conclusively. For weaving, printing, cutting, making small metal components, precisely and repeatably, indeed any simple repetetive task, a purpose designed machine will always outperform humans, which begs the question "Why are their no robot politicians ?" Probably because a robot that can tell lies glibly and convincingly time after time hasn't been developed yet. |
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// we'll need to rank the robots doing this work by how well they compete against their human child labor counterparts. // |
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This already happens. But the pressure will always be to install those robots in the same low-cost low-regulation geographies, to maximise revenues and minimise costs; that way, you need fewer child slaves to load, service and maintain the robots. So some ex-slaves starve, of course, but that's not your problem. |
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// You also gotta wonder about a company whose slogan was inspired by the last words of a convicted murderer. // |
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Wonder what, exactly ? "Is this an opportune time to buy more shares ?" |
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I mean in general, people gotta eat, so people will
find some job to do at a salary which is slightly
cheaper than a robot for that job. |
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Modest proposal: ensure the 1st and 2nd
amendment rights of every human on Earth by
giving every human (regardless of age, race, sex,
origin, etc.) an Internet connection and a firearm.
Help people help themselves. |
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//The free market says that human labor will always be
slightly cheaper than robot labor.// |
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Well, tell the free market I said it's wrong, but do it
nicely, I don't want to hurt its feelings. I have a Roomba
style automated vacuum that I paid for one time. It cost
me about the same as two cleaning person visits to my
house. Plus I don't have to wear pants when it's
vacuuming. I do, but I don't have to and that's important
to me. |
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Automation or robots will eventually replace all manual
labor jobs. When robots start making robots the cost will
plummet. Remember, this technology is in its infancy.
Give it 600 years and all work will be optional. |
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//Modest proposal: ensure the 1st and 2nd amendment
rights of every human on Earth by giving every human
(regardless of age, race, sex, origin, etc.) an Internet
connection and a firearm. Help people help
themselves.// |
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Wait... I shot my first gun at about 5 or 6, I think that's
probably an appropriate age to become versed in
firearms. |
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You're assuming perfect interchangeability, which doesn't exist. |
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A machine to (for example) coil small springs will have a high capital cost, but will produce better product at a lower unit cost and a higher speed than human labour. Humans literally can't compete and still earn enough to live. |
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A fully automated machine to sew a shoe together is much more challenging, so humans remain competitive. |
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Currently, a human taxi driver still competes effectively with an autonomous vehicle, but that's changing ... |
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That's probably about an order of magnitude too long. |
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It took about 300 years for the West to go from a largely subsistence agrarian economy to an industrialized semi mechanized economy (1650 -1950). |
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The technology itself is a force multiplier. Compare 1950's systems with current ones. It only took 66 years between the first powered flight and the first moon landing. There were humans for whom both events took place within their memory. |
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You need to lose your sense of proportion.... |
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// Give it 600 years and all work will be optional. // |
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That's the optimistic scenario. More likely, a single
monopolist will have enslaved the entire world. |
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I'm optimistic that we'll overcome our issues and be freed
from the shackles of labor by our tools, in this case robots,
so we can get about the business of colonizing the stars.
We'll, the planets around the stars anyway. |
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I hope you're right. I suppose since there's no animal
monopoly, it suggests some hidden rule in nature
that preserves competition between different
animals. |
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// freed from the shackles of labor by our tools, in this case robots, // |
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You'd be better to start rehearsing your grovelling technique for when you abase yourself before your new metallic overlords. |
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// there's no animal monopoly // |
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Yes there is, one of the playing pieces is a scotch terrier. |
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//It only took 66 years between the first powered flight
and the first moon landing. There were humans for whom
both events took place within their memory.// |
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Many of whom traveled on jet airplanes later in their
lives. The read about man achieving powered flight, they
watched man walk on the moon (on a television set) and
they looked down on
the Earth as they flew on a jet aircraft from one city to
another at
hundreds of miles per hour while sipping wine. |
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I'm hoping there's another generation that'll match that
amazing experience. |
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Not if the eco-fascists get their evil way and stifle innovation and experiment. |
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Naa, they'll cause problems but lose eventually.
They're
mindless little drones just doing what their told.
Free
people will get fed up and pull their plug. |
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OK, let's look at a theoretical person born in 1884.
There
have to have been many people who did all the
following: |
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Born into a world where there was no such thing as
a
bicycle, on their 1 year old birthday, it's invented.
There
are no cars. At 2 years old, Benz patents the first
practical auto, the Motorwagon. |
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At 11, the radio is invented. |
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At 14 plastic is invented. |
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At 19 the first airplane takes flight. |
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At 24 they drove the first widely available car. |
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At 30 they flew on the first commercial propeller
driven
airplane service. |
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At 34 they had electricity in their home. |
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At 35 they purchased a radio and listened to radio
shows. |
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At 54 they bought a television. |
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At 70 they flew on a jet airliner. |
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At 85 they watched man walk on the moon on
another
television. |
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At 87 they bought a pocket calculator. |
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And at 100, a relative handed then the first
cellphone and
said "Go ahead and make a call. There are no
wires!" |
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There is no rational causal association between past and
future progress. |
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And by the way, the "environmental movement" is just re-
branded totalitarianism. Fascists never package the new
and improved fascism the same. |
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Ask the progressives why they're shutting down nuclear
energy. It's because they need to tax carbon fuels, clean,
safe nuclear energy doesn't make them any money. They
don't give a damn about the environment. Their followers
do, but the power mad megalomaniacs behind the
movement couldn't care less. Happiness for one of those
guys is flying in their gas guzzling private jet over
thousands of people waiting in soup lines. What's the
point of being rich if everybody is rich? It's only fun if
people besides them are suffering. |
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//There is no rational causal association between past
and future progress.// |
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I'm just wondering if there will ever be a group of
people who will experience the amount of progress like the
example of the kid in a world without cars or even bikes
that grew up to fly on jets, watch man walk on the Moon on
their TV and use a computer. |
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//most progress in science and industry comes from
improving on and expanding what has been done before.// |
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This is true. But what I meant (should have said) is the
*speed* of said progress. It's impossible to predict how long
it will take to accomplish a given scientific or engineering
breakthrough. Past performance is not an indicator of
future results. We could be on the Kurzweil timeline or
progress may peter out entirely for a variety of reasons.
Look at the progress in processors for example. We're
getting half the speed improvements we used to. The only
sign it will speed up again is the repeated S curve pattern
in the past. But no one has started engineering to mass
produce post-silicon processors, and the physics police are
getting pretty adamant about smaller features on
traditional chips. We could go full 3-D but the heat problem
hasn't been solved. So there's no way to look at that
incredible improvement and thereby predict future
progress. We can only look at the industry as it stands for
that. |
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Sometimes there is a step-function. The transition from "natural" energy sources (animals, wind, waterwheels) to steam power. The largely unanticipated jump from thermionic devices to solid state. The leap from piston engines and propellers to gas turbines ... |
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Waterwheels never went away; the Pelton wheel continues to serve with distinction in hydroelectric schemes. Thermionic emission persisted in the form of CRT for decades and then nearly vanished from the mainstream in a few years. |
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While it is not possible to say how long it will be before everyone's zooming round in flying cars, wearing one-piece silver suits, and living on one-a-week nutrition tablets, it is possible to not only say "the future will be different" - which was not the case until about 1700 - but also "the future will be very, very different, and in your lifetime". |
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Innovation begets innovation. The power and density of CPUs doesn't need to go up much, if indeed at all ... what matters is that the unit cost comes down. Near-supercomputer power becomes ubiquitous. All sorts of tasks become trivialized (just look at the computing power crammed into an cellular phone handset or a games console - an entertainment system, not a tool). Then, the interval between a theoretical advance and its practical implementation drops from decades to months ... |
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How fast could Boulton & Watt have innovated better steam engines if they had had a CAD system driving a CNC lathe and 3D printers ? The inspiration -> design -> build -> test -> rollout process becomes very short. |
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And if you invent a better mousetrap, your collaborator on the other side of the planet can now duplicate your design the same day. |
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Of course, the social consequences of this are unquantifiable. |
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I think it's fair to say that technical advances lead
to
other technical advances exponentially rather than
in
steps. So an innovation or new technology isn't just
another step on a ladder going up, it's more
horsepower
added to a car already going forward creating
cumulative
results of all the technologies going before it. |
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The water wheel was built using simple mechanics
and
wood craft but walking on the Moon was the
cumulation
of advances in rocket, computer and materials
sciences to
name just a few. In other words, walking on the
Moon
wasn't invented like the wheel or the bow and
arrow.
Likewise future breakthroughs will be an
amalgamation of
previous steps causing progress to accelerate like
the car
analogy rather than move up another step like the
ladder
example. |
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This actually needs to be in the Age of Ascendance
post. |
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Most advances are incremental; some - rarer, but more significant - are step changes. |
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Electricity was a step change, biggest since the
wheel or mastery of fire, but following
advancements that branched off from electricity,
radio, TV and the computer for instance were were
linked to that core invention and basically
happened almost all at once. |
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So while the discovery and research into electricity
took hundreds of years, the harnessing and
application of it for all these related technologies
happened within a very short period of time. |
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The computer doesn't fit in that group, although it uses electricity. Computers are data processors, and fit not with electricity but with the likes of the Babbage engine and Hollerith machines. |
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Electricity is just an enabling technology in that case - it's the advance in information theory that's the true innovation. |
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Point is the modern computer and the internet are
manipulated electrical signals. |
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So Nike schools teaching life,social interaction robotics and shoe making. Manufacturing better human beings. |
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The ones in control, paid the big bucks possibly because of brains, have the reigns to morally decide and evolve how they want shoe the globe's society. |
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// Manufacturing better human beings. // |
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"More human than human", according to Eldon Tyrell, and Rachel ... |
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Since the universe doesn't really do perfect loops but rather spirals, visions of the future will always be slightly skewed. |
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//the power mad megalomaniacs behind the movement couldn't
care less// |
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OK, it appears there must be several steps to establish this
claim, viz.,
1. Establish that there are powerful individuals behind the
movement (rather than running opportunistically alongside it).
2. Establish that they are substantially homogeneous in their
outlook (as opposed to having a range of different motivations
and intentions).
3. Establish that they don't care.
4. Establish that other participants in the movement are
substantially under their control - that is, that they are indeed
"followers".
5. Work out how to get people to follow you while staying behind
them - which, if real, would be a most useful trick. (Pioneering
work in this field was done by the Duke of Plaza Toro, but it's not
clear how well his method performed under stress). |
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Of these steps, #3 is probably the easy one. The others call for
positive evidence; would you care to present any? |
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He didn't say they're working together or in lockstep. |
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Read the title and said "My god! Who would be evil enough to suggest such a thing? Oh, me." |
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Then I remembered why I wrote the title that way, to get people's attention. |
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Some classic moments with 8th in this one, thank you for pulling this up V. |
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