Re: If, if, and more if's....
"a human driver could presumably be in a control centre, enabling a pool of drivers to deal with "stuck" situations for a much larger pool of vehicles"
yes that could solve it
2280 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Apr 2011
By stuck I don't mean careering off the road or colliding with something - which a computer is very good at avoiding, but the car being literally stuck behind something and unable to progress due to being unable to take the initiative needed to proceed.
For example when a driver encounters parked cars on their side of the road or a slow cyclist they have to decide whether and when it is safe to move into the oncoming lane and pass them. That includes being able to move into oncoming traffic based on judging distances. it isn't enough to simply brake behind the parked car ahead and wait for the road to be entirely clear - on some roads at busy times you'd end up stuck.
These companies working on self driving cars are not required to fully disclose their research and have no incentive to admit how impossible the task of making self driving cars actually is. They possibly even delude themselves, or perhaps hope legislation will allow them to sell the technology with no liability for accidents.
Getting a car to follow lane markings is pretty achievable, so is detecting an obstacle ahead and braking before hitting it (couldn't both be done 40 years ago?). But as soon as the situation becomes a little different, a little more complicated, then you find you have to start throwing more complicated rules into the AI, and in turn those complicated rules open up more vulnerabilities, which require even more complex rules to patch up.
IMO you need artificial general intelligence to drive cars autonomously, by which point self driving cars would be the least of our concerns.
Clearly you need a new Intelligent Microwave fitted with Personal Assistant Artificial Intelligence. All you then need to do is install our new app to your Smart Phone and register your Twitter handle because of course you are on Twitter. Then your microwave will send you automatic tweets throughout the day intelligently informing you that either "Your microwave is not on fire" or "Your microwave is on fire".
Or get a microwave with a timer.
When AI becomes so loose a term that any program with a conditional branch is "intelligent".
Dumb programs are somewhat predictable in terms of input->output. Programs that appear smart tend to be unpredictable input->who knows. Like self-driving cars and the example Andrew pointed out in the article about an intelligent oven that can auto-start a house fire. When AI doesn't work it kills people and when it does work it will kill everyone.
"That's why the old raw(ish) temp.datasets got pulled around 2005 and why they have been replaced with models"
Which only begs the question what data you are using to declare global temperature stopped increasing in 1998 and has been dropping since 2000! Because by your loose definition all temperature datasets will be "models" - hence your admission in brackets.
It's easy to say, but Microsoft gets blamed if a popular application doesn't work on a new version of Windows, even if the fault is that dev hooked into and relied on a non-documented internal feature that no longer exists in the new OS. Microsoft can either let the application or driver crash for users and invariably take blame and media reports of the new OS being unstable, or they can write a hack specific to that application or driver to make it work.
You only need a Dyson sphere if you can't control your population size. Which is surely an absurd flaw for a highly developed civilisation to have. Unless there's some kind of moral imperative to bring as many sentient beings as possible into existence, there's just no need for an entire Suns worth of output.
Population capped at 1 million, fusion reactors and everyone plugged into a sim world. You'd only need an area the size of London for your civilisation and could probably set it up in the midst of the void away from dangerous things like stars and planets.
I don't see a moral problem with eating humans per se. If they are of low intelligence it doesn't matter morally. Many children, especially mentally disabled children are no more intelligent than adult dogs or pigs. So as long as they are raised with good welfare and then slaughtered humanely with a tractor logo on the packaging I don't see a problem with farming them.
We could raise a breed of disabled humans, slaughter them at age three or so. Would be good business, good profit. Put it on countryfile on BBC so we can meet the hard working child farmers doing their bit for Britain. Celebrities binding with the children in the field and crying when they are sent to slaughter - shows compassion - but then a quick joke about loving human bacon for breakfast too much to care.
Good I am fed up of seeing vapers everywhere. They a a total eyesore. Let's get out of the EU and back to a country of real British people smoking packs of real cigarettes. I would also like to see tobacco advertisements on TV again and the age of purchase reduced to 14. If kids can vote and enjoy fighting for this country shouldn't they have a right to enjoying a good smoke too?
Disclaimer: I have shares in a tobacco company I once worked for, but that hasn't shaped my view whatsoever. I am making this disclaimer because I am ethical
At a previous job in a call center we kept having problems with customers ringing up and requesting their data under the data protection act, so I wrote a script that would temporarily delete a customer's data when a request ticket for data was created. That way support would just tell the customer there was no data stored in the system. Basically it worked by emailing the customer data to a gmail account I set up before deleting it from the database. That way the customer data was off the company systems. Then I'd just have to remember to log into the account occasionally and reply to the mails to get the customer back on our system. I would prefer to think the CIA were using something similar rather than assuming they are being unethical.
I heard a percentage of Monsanto seeds harvest into what appear to be fully formed human bodies which when fully grown replace the farmers in the night and the next day the land is mysteriously sold to Monsanto at a ridiculously low price. Just one of the horror stories I've heard from farmers
A package vanishing from a repository is just one of the myriad of types of shit-that's-annoying that I've had to deal with on a weekly basis for the last 10 years. i no longer give a shit about this software politics kind of stuff
There's little recognition of the pain in the ass fragmentation is having on software development. While a Microsoft monopoly would be bad for innovation the complete opposite in which there are 100 shitty forked ways to do 1 thing is similarly bad
Developers wasting time learning how to use the reinvented wheel rather than developing an expertise in a few tools
back then people didn't have the internet. Leaving earth without faster than light communication is basically saying goodbye to an internet connection, which I think is going to become ever more part of human life. So the only people leaving will tend to be doing it for reasons that overcome that which is why I said political escape/hermitism. Arguably people leaving england for the new world were doing it for political escape. I just don't think humans are going to turn into a spacefaring species, the vast majority will cluster where the entertainment is.
"Is it idiotic to not virtualise and realise self sustaining extraordinarily rendered internet working terrestrial colonies will both ensure, assure and insure beautifully fair survival for a species which has lost its way and knows not the way of making ways with IT?"
I imagine all civilizations are initially be lured by the idea of spacefaring only to shortly realize the folly of space exploration (there's nothing much out there, every star, planet, etc is just the same kind of thing in different configurations) and will eventually come to hunker down in one place and create worlds in VR that are far richer than what is out there in space.
Spreading out through the galaxy has the drawback of messing up communications, unless the light speed limit for communications can be overcome. Having a 60000ms ping to mars, or whatever it is, that changes depending on time of years of both planets is just a pain in the ass for maintaining any kind of commerce or internet. It's just creating a problem that would be avoided by everyone clustering in the same place, around the same planet. For all the romance of going out into space the only real benefit would be some kind of political escape/hermitism to break away from the main cluster of civilization.
"Better to have the ability to haul any potential asteroid-mitigating technology inro orbit, and / or wirk towards a self sustaining extraterrestial colony. Once wehave assured our survival we can tgen work towards making it a fair and beautiful survival."
Our survival isn't really threatened by asteroids. The one suspected of wiping out the dinosaurs wouldn't wipe us out. It would push us back to the stone age, but we'd rapidly return to present technology levels, we wouldn't be starting from total scratch, we'd have notes and memories of things like rockets and aircraft are possible and how they generally work. There is great competitive advantage for a group to learn how to make firearms and rockets and computers again. I reckon it could be less less than 300 years we'd be back manufacturing computers.
I suspect actually the biggest threat isn't from asteroids, but from the very technology we would develop to repel them. Once we get a better control and footing in space it will lead to a militarization that hasn't yet happened. Id be more worried from a species survival aspect about a future war in which nukes or something nastier pour from orbit onto Earth, Mars and other colonies than about the danger of a single giant asteroid hitting us today.
"No population / government / state / civilisation anywhere in history has ever solved this problem. I fear that's just how we (i.e. this species) are built."
No population / government /state /civilization anywhere in history has ever put me in power.
1. Mass building program of free residential areas. Just churn them out. That money we spend on trident or on HS2? Spend it on building underground accommodation units throughout cities and towns. They are small, but people can apply to live there and the rent is dirt cheap, like £20 a month.
This will collapse the rental housing market and cause house prices in general to plummet all over the country. A whole bunch of people will no longer be wasting large amounts of their paychecks on rent or long commutes, because they can very easily move into accommodation in the city they work in. People could even rent units in different cities, or choose to live in different place at the weekend.
Traffic all over the country will plummet, because there is less need to travel.
2. Abolishment of the 9-5 working day. Make it law that employees can choose the times they work, where applicable, including being able to choose to work 4 day 10 hour day weeks. I don't care what the repercussions are really, employers will adapt. A lot of the current system is about employers not trusting their staff which is really the employer's failure. Having a fixed working day is like fixing prices in an economy, it's stupid. If employees are left to decide on their hours they will naturally move to avoid things like rush hour, such that rush hour will greatly diminish. It will also combat the current stupidity of shops opening in the week while people are at work and cannot use them.
The amount of money and time wasted through the rent based housing system, mortgage slavery, and commuting is ridiculous. If people have more money to spend - and more time to spend it - on other areas of life those other areas will boom. All the bars and pubs and shops will likely be boosted and improve. Rather than in our current economy all the money flows through landlords, banks and train companies.
The idea of a nearby alien civilisation being coincidentally at the same early technology level as us at the same time as us is ridiculous. I have no idea why seemingly sensible people have this idea that nearby intelligent life would be relatable enough to us to be detectable.
The undisturbed 500+ million year history of life on Earth is testament to the lack of anyone out there showing any interest. I doubt the physical world holds much interest to any civilisation for more than a thousand years after the discovery of radio. By the time we are able to start "colonising the galaxy" we won't want to any more.
VR taking on is much more plausible than driverless cars.
This is probably the step to establishing VR as a thing you can buy. After that there is probably going to be a new moore's law for immersion, with every few years bringing improvements in resolution, headset weight, controllers, etc and of course cost. I wouldn't be surprised to see devices for other sensory inputs such as touch, smell, being introduced too. At some point the level of immersion will reach a point where it hooks enough people to lead to a culture shift where people become glued inside the internet instead of being glued to screens looking into it. The resulting network will probably have a different name (VRnet?) to distinguish it from the internet.
2015 is the hottest on record in all records except the lower troposphere records. It beats both 2010 and 1997.
That's land surface, sea surface and ocean heat.
curiously sceptics only see fit to ever quote the lower troposphere records as the single source of truth. Never mentioning that the most serious errors found in any records were in those lower troposphere records, which are just as heavily adjusted as the surface records.
As I said before the whole data adjustment conspiracy theory is politically motivated by sceptics straining for a justification for why they cherrypick the record that is most convenient to their argument. That's also why sceptics never question the adjustments made to the lower troposphere records. They could do so easily, but it wouldn't be politically expedient for the lobbyist funded think tanks (GWPF, Heartland Institute, SEPP) who churn out the sceptic memes for media consumption to do so.
Another thing is that only a few years ago sceptics were actively citing the other records to claim there was a pause in warming. It's only since additional time in a warming world has demolished the idea that the world has stopped warming that they are now disowning those records and clinging on to one. I expect the lower troposphere will go the same way soon too. All the indexes are heading upwards, it's only a matter of time.
Even sea level which is a proxy of thermal expansion and therefore (although just a few years ago sceptics were even trying to claim that had paused).
All the failed predictions seem to be stacking up on the side of the sceptics. Including their global cooling "it's going to cool down any day now" ideas.
Only the fervent believers among sceptics are going to be able to keep it up in coming years, probably trying to whitewash the history of pause advocacy in the process. We'll have another arctic sea ice record minimum in years to come and these sceptics will be desperately trying for a THIRD time to claim it's the last one and that ice is not heading towards zero. Really don't think the wider world is going to buy such insane repeatedly demonstrated wrong denial.
Perhaps this was why lewis page was disposed of. Afterall republican anti-science conspiracy theory style tabloid trash about "hoaxes" of adjusted data and new world order puppet masters is in stark contrast to decent scientific reporting such as:
http://arstechnica.co.uk/science/2016/01/thorough-not-thoroughly-fabricated-the-truth-about-global-temperature-data/
Perhaps the register doesn't want to be associated with trump-like reality bending stupidity anymore.
"computer models all predict far too much warming - two, three, even more, times what is actually found on a long-term basis"
They do appear to show too much warming, but it isn't two or three times higher. It's more like 10-40%, which doesn't invalidate the theory that human emissions are warming the earth anymore than punctuated equilibrium invalidated the theory of evolution.
"none of the climate scientists predicted the pause, which has lasted for 18 years an 8 months now."
Actually the pause no longer exists in most datasets. Meaning it never existed. It was a statistical anomaly. Some scientists did warn sceptics that starting trends in 1998 over a short period was a bad idea. They didn't listen though.
I would say the fact warming has continued is probably the best example now of a prediction that AGW theory has got correct, mainly because it's detractors cannot claim it was an easy prediction to make. A potential falsification and the theory passed.
The sceptic tactic of at one moment saying they accept the world is warming but dispute the cause of it, and then next moment going back to disputing the world is warming and claiming it's all data manipulation is wearing thin.
Over a dozen measures of different properties of the earth by many independent scientific groups from different countries around the world show the Earth has continued warming since the 70s.
https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/gwp/temp/ann_wld.html
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/image/d/2/hadcrut4_graph_small.jpg
http://www.aviso.altimetry.fr/en/data/products/ocean-indicators-products/mean-sea-level.html
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_ocean/ytd/12/1880-2015
http://berkeleyearth.org/berkeley-earth-temperature-update/
No objective person would look at this mass of data and conclude anything but the world is warming. Additionally with each passing year of continued warming the idea that this is just some natural cycle becomes less credible.
I really don't understand the obsession with denying that the vast majority of climate scientists believe man is warming the climate. If I walked into a pub with 20 in I'd expect to be hard pressed to find just 1 who didn't think man was responsible. Is that really so threatening to skeptics? I guess so