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 Overread wrote:
It might have improved in the years since I spoke to him, but that it was like that to start with clearly shows why many people can end up on disability or other allowances and are not encouraged to work; because taking up the entry level jobs and pay can put them financially behind where they were doing nothing.

Nope, this hasn't changed at all. There's a guy at my work who works one day a week, because if he works two days he looses all his benefits and becomes homeless.

That's a pretty common story. You need to have a very small income to qualify for most welfare programs such as food stamps or Medicaid; so small that having pretty much any full-time job will disqualify you. So, depending on where you live, it might be safer not to work and collect benefits and assistance compared to working full time and not making enough to meet the local cost of things like housing and medicine.

There isn't one state in america where a 40 hour a week job at minimum wage can pay the rent on a family dwelling.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html?fbclid=IwAR3hho0NADMGlpyCocqts5He5ibACdVVw7UnhrUgvKqaUuqbuiTiMwoKADY

Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars

.....
Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

 reds8n wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html?fbclid=IwAR3hho0NADMGlpyCocqts5He5ibACdVVw7UnhrUgvKqaUuqbuiTiMwoKADY

Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars

.....
Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

Gotta give them robots a real scare, y'know?

Best part is where the quoted problem with the vehicles is that they are following the law instead of flaunting it like a normal human being.

 reds8n wrote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/31/us/waymo-self-driving-cars-arizona-attacks.html?fbclid=IwAR3hho0NADMGlpyCocqts5He5ibACdVVw7UnhrUgvKqaUuqbuiTiMwoKADY

Wielding Rocks and Knives, Arizonans Attack Self-Driving Cars

.....
Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighborhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

Yeah. As I said in the self-driving car thread, not everyone is just going to accept self-driving cars. Self-driving cars (and artificial intelligence in general) is going to be meeting lots of resistance down the road. Especially if there are more deadly accidents or other ways AI gets into the news in a negative manner. AI is scary after all, and so it won't take much for people to become antagonised towards it. Especially among working-class people who are already afraid that AI is going to be replacing them. Not to mention that AIs are being developed and pushed by major corporations such as Google, which really are scary.

Fortunately we have prisons to deal with resistance. Once automated vehicles demonstrate their superiority and become required by law we can start arresting and charging anyone who continues to attempt to drive a car manually or attacks an automated vehicle or whatever. I can understand why a company that is depending on cooperation from local governments would go easy on these criminals, but once mass adoption begins that will no longer be necessary.

Many of the fears about self driving cars are the same once people had about cars in general a century ago. Cars took many years to proliferate and become ubiquitous, there were lots of bumps along the way, and I suspect the same will hold true of AI driven cars. For places where transportation of people is not concerned, i expect we'll see this trend appear first, stuff like self driving trucks hauling cargo in networked caravans to achieve peak fuel efficiency. I don't expect I'll be able to buy a self driving car in the immediate future, but I expect that I won't be driving myself in 30 years either.

 Peregrine wrote:
Fortunately we have prisons to deal with resistance. Once automated vehicles demonstrate their superiority and become required by law we can start arresting and charging anyone who continues to attempt to drive a car manually or attacks an automated vehicle or whatever. I can understand why a company that is depending on cooperation from local governments would go easy on these criminals, but once mass adoption begins that will no longer be necessary.

Yeah, that is a great way to bring about dystopia and revolutions. That is not worth it over a stupid car. These people often have legitimate grievances that can be dealt with in a much friendlier and more productive way than by throwing everyone in prison, and these grievances need to be assuaged anyways or else there will never be any mass adoption. Trying to force automatic cars on people would be a good way to ensure that technology ends up in the dustbin of history. For a technology to become widely adopted it needs widespread public support.
The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

We should make a start-up company to automate prisons.

Let's not start this again.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
Fortunately we have prisons to deal with resistance. Once automated vehicles demonstrate their superiority and become required by law we can start arresting and charging anyone who continues to attempt to drive a car manually or attacks an automated vehicle or whatever. I can understand why a company that is depending on cooperation from local governments would go easy on these criminals, but once mass adoption begins that will no longer be necessary.

Yeah, that is a great way to bring about dystopia and revolutions. That is not worth it over a stupid car. These people often have legitimate grievances that can be dealt with in a much friendlier and more productive way than by throwing everyone in prison, and these grievances need to be assuaged anyways or else there will never be any mass adoption. Trying to force automatic cars on people would be a good way to ensure that technology ends up in the dustbin of history. For a technology to become widely adopted it needs widespread public support.
The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

You must not be familiar with peregrines pathological worship of artificial intelligence.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

It feels a little surreal when people talk about the coming automation crisis, because it's always presented as an inevitability, like the robots are going to rise up of their own accord and take away our jobs at gunpoint. When there's nothing stopping us from, you know, choosing not to have a crisis. Because we totally could. We could decide "let's hold off on replacing everything with computers until we have a solution for the employment problems".

Of course, I'm joking. Technological progress doesn't work like that because it's driven by profit and by fear (the colonial age taught us what happens if other countries get too far ahead technologically), and progress is a goal unto itself, even when nobody seems clear on what we're meant to be progressing towards.

At present machines are still not totally better than humans. One aspect companies have found in the medium to long term is that whilst machines can work longer and faster than humans; is that significant changes to the design of the product can mean that the factory has to be rebuilt - for major changes it might be from the ground up. As opposed to humans who would just require retraining in new methods.

So right now machines can be a big investment that saves money and generates additional production for a period of time; but in the long term can set a company up for a big investment need to remain current.


The big game changer will come when machines can more readily adapt themselves without requiring a huge outlay in rebuilding by humans. Of course such machines are going to come with a huge price on them so it might well be that there's a significant lag time between having the technology and it actually having an impact. Alongside that you've got a rise in requirements of resources for rare metals and a rise in electricity prices. So power for all those machines and components for them are going to be big considerations.

Idiocracy is all too likely, but i think under it mass starvatiuon would kill a lkot of people quickly so it would not last.

 Elemental wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

It feels a little surreal when people talk about the coming automation crisis, because it's always presented as an inevitability, like the robots are going to rise up of their own accord and take away our jobs at gunpoint. When there's nothing stopping us from, you know, choosing not to have a crisis. Because we totally could. We could decide "let's hold off on replacing everything with computers until we have a solution for the employment problems".

Of course, I'm joking. Technological progress doesn't work like that because it's driven by profit and by fear (the colonial age taught us what happens if other countries get too far ahead technologically), and progress is a goal unto itself, even when nobody seems clear on what we're meant to be progressing towards.

But you can't say that, because you just get called a luddite, or worse.

This was from a 30's buck rogers comic.

Of course it has always been acceptable for upper class women not to work, since they are maintained by their rich husbands, and society doesn't see this as a problem of idleness.

To be un-sexist, no doubt there are also upper class men sustained by their rich wives.

There are a few things we can learn from Idiocracy, number 1 is basically, let's make the smartest person president and assign people jobs based on their ability.

 Elemental wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

The issue is bigger than just AI-driven cars though. The issue is increased automation in general. As AI continues to advance, more and more people will lose their jobs, and unlike AI, people have an upper limit as to the degree to which they can develop themselves in order to be able to get a new job. In other words, a large part of the population is going to be without job if automation continues. Prisons can't deal with that. Social reforms are going to be necessary before automation becomes too widespread, or else we will repeat the mistakes of the Industrial Revolution.

It feels a little surreal when people talk about the coming automation crisis, because it's always presented as an inevitability, like the robots are going to rise up of their own accord and take away our jobs at gunpoint. When there's nothing stopping us from, you know, choosing not to have a crisis. Because we totally could. We could decide "let's hold off on replacing everything with computers until we have a solution for the employment problems".

The trick being that the people driving the automation trend see the elimination of employment as a feature, not a flaw.

Which is itself flawed.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Which is itself flawed.

No argument there, but the Golden Rule applies here, and they have the gold...