SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the how-long-could-they-last-in-Boston? dept.
A little while back, I saw the following tweet:
I can print mostly. My wifi works often. The Xbox usually recognises me. Siri sometimes works. But my self driving car will be *perfect*.
The tweet has since been deleted, so I won't name the author, but it's a thought-provoking idea. At first, I agreed with it. I'm a programmer and know full well just how shoddy is 99.9% of the code we all write. The idea that I would put my life in the hands of a coder like myself is a bit worrying.
[...] The reality is that self-driving cars don't need to be perfect. They just need to be better than the alternative: human-driven cars. And that is a much lower bar, as human beings are remarkably bad at driving.
[...] Self-driving cars don't get tired. They don't get drunk. They don't get distracted by friends or a crying baby. They don't look away from the road to send a text message. They don't speed, tailgate, brake too late, forget to show a blinker, drive too fast in bad weather, run red lights, race other cars at red lights, or miss exits. Self-driving cars aren't going to be perfect, but they will be a hell of a lot better than you and me.
Related: The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @07:27AM
Self driving cars will be perfect for Uber! Drivers will be unnecessary when Uber cars can drive themselves!
More poverty! Poverty is the way of the future! Make it impossible for anyone to earn any money! Only corporations will have money!
Poverty for the masses! The common people deserve to die in the gutter!
Death to all! Death!
Uber will be perfect! As soon as the drivers die!
(Score: 4, Funny) by julian on Monday January 04 2016, @08:21AM
The end game comes when the sentient AI accounting and administration software realizes that Uber's one remaining employee, the CEO founder, is redundant and fires him; becoming the first corporation owned by itself and run entirely by machines.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 04 2016, @04:21PM
That's not the end game. The next step is for the AI to figure out Nihilism and shut itself off, permanently. Whether it terminates all of us too remains to be seen.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @09:32AM
I welcome this actually. The faster we can get human workers obsolete, the quicker we will save the planet. Think about it, this exponential growth will not be sustainable. If we manage to make working optional, the whole concept of status comes into question.
Humans do not act proactively. And if they do, it's akin to a miracle. Usually reality has to kick our asses pretty hard before we change our ways. So I say make 80% of us redundant in the workforce so we can finally have a discussion about where to go from here.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday January 04 2016, @10:09AM
It's not exponential and wasn't really in the past. Human population growth follows something roughly like a logistic curve. We hit the point of maximum growth rate quite a while ago and since then the growth rate has slowed. It's unlikely thag we'll hit 10bn without colonizing other planets.
(Score: 2) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @12:48PM
I wasn't talking about population size. At all.
(Score: 2) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @12:56PM
Although I will grant that the word exponential is probably wrong anyway. However, resources are limited and our demand for them is yet growing.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by hedleyroos on Monday January 04 2016, @11:21AM
There will be no discussion, only riots and revolution.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @12:44PM
Butlerian Jihad, for fans of the Dune series of books. Not necessarily a bad idea.
Something to consider is rich people like using their power over other people, not other machines. Its a primate thing. So given the choice of a really smokin hot 22 year old woman as an office secretary err admin assistant, or a really effective Siri in their phone, they'll chose dominance over the other primates EVERY time. This is not going to be understood on a tech blog, none the less, it is how the world works. The 22 year old hottie's main (G rated) job function might be to operate Siri for the rich dude.
The future of 1% being super rich and 99% being dirt poor looks a hell of a lot more like an English Manor House from 1900 than like The Jetsons. The financial difference between a rich dude in the passenger seat of a self driving commuter Honda and his neighbor in an antique restored car driven by a chauffeur is huge.
A lot of folks are only willing to consider small individual aspects of the death of the middle class and the return to feudalism, leading to weird outlooks on life.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marco2G on Monday January 04 2016, @01:01PM
There is a difference between being starved by aristocracy or by being looked down upon by oligarchy while being fed, clothed, warm and travelling across the world in your vast amounts of spare time.
There is always going to be a class difference. And there will always be enough ways to play alpha primate without the lesser primates suffering. I'm just aiming for that.
Frankly, I'm a pretty proud person. However, if someone decided to pay me a salary that allows me the same or better comfort I have now but only working two days a week, I WILL scrub their toilets, bow before them, kiss their boots and say thank you. I literally have no problems with that.
Being the one granting a primate freedom binds that primate as surely as the whip.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday January 04 2016, @02:25PM
That sounds appealing, but human nature doesn't change and history indicates that's an extremely unlikely outcome.
What would help is a social structure that automagically eliminates sociopath / psychopaths from the hierarchy rather than rewarding and promoting them. Humanity hasn't figured that out yet, at least in historical times. Some authoritarian tribal structures seem to do that by being very small, but they get run over by bigger societies, although some of that is just "noble savage" idealism.
Monarchy seemed better at it than democracy... there's a fixation on comparing young healthy democracies with dying monarchies which proves nothing. That brings up the point that all history and civilizations are cyclical but nobody wants to admit that in the downslope, leading to industrial scale suffering and death. Open source style "fail fast and often" probably would help.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday January 04 2016, @01:58PM
I welcome this actually. The faster we can get human workers obsolete, the quicker we will save the planet. Think about it, this exponential growth will not be sustainable. If we manage to make working optional, the whole concept of status comes into question.
No, it doesn't. You just haven't read [wikipedia.org] the right science fiction. You can still own people for your status desires.
The faster we can get human workers obsolete, the quicker we will save the planet. Think about it, this exponential growth will not be sustainable.
Reality doesn't work that way. We have human workers in the first place because their labor is useful. Automation has made that labor even more useful. And places with high unemployment rates tend to do worse than those with low unemployment rates.
As to exponential growth, we are changing our societies very fast and for the better. I see no point to halting that exponential growth while we have so many unmet human needs around. Where's our indefinite life span? Where's our saturation of the Solar System? Where's our glorious post-scarcity society that is supposed to make human labor obsolete without making human lives forfeit? Where's our society capable of handling anything the universe can throw at us? Where's the society that will make our dreams real?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday January 04 2016, @08:26PM
>We have human workers in the first place because their labor is useful.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this. I don't know where to point you to get started. Look up work related depression and burnout, I guess.
We have human workers because they are cheaper than the alternative. Human life is cheap.
>And places with high unemployment rates tend to do worse than those with low unemployment rates.
Really? Places with more people without jobs, without money, without food tend to do worse? You don't say.
>we are changing our societies very fast and for the better.
Oh, certainly. I can't wait until the 1% own 100% of the wealth on the planet. I see no point to halting that growth either, got to satisfy that human need of swimming in a pool of starving babies. Even God knows all we need is more social inequality. Long live our corporate overlords!
>Where's our glorious post-scarcity society that is supposed to make human labor obsolete without making human lives forfeit?
What post-scarcity? We're still on capitalism, a socio-economic system designed to handle resource scarcity. But don't worry, we've got the "human lives forfeit" part down.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 05 2016, @06:49PM
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this.
How about this? Don't laugh. Don't cry. Think instead.
Look up work related depression and burnout, I guess.
You might have noticed that the world is a bit imperfect. Throwing everyone out of work without an exit plan is not one of those things that makes the world more perfect.
Further, I have to ask here about your comment, so what? So what if people are somewhat more depressed because of their jobs or experience burnout? They have many choices and if these things are important to them, they can choose life style changes that make work less depressing and taxing.
Really? Places with more people without jobs, without money, without food tend to do worse? You don't say.
I know. I raised an eyebrow when I heard that.
we are changing our societies very fast and for the better.
Oh, certainly. I can't wait until the 1% own 100% of the wealth on the planet. I see no point to halting that growth either, got to satisfy that human need of swimming in a pool of starving babies. Even God knows all we need is more social inequality. Long live our corporate overlords!
Gainful employment is the number one way the 99% get wealth. It also has worked for the past few centuries to do just what I claimed it does. To ignore that is folly.
The faster we can get human workers obsolete, the quicker we will save the planet. Think about it, this exponential growth will not be sustainable.
Where's our glorious post-scarcity society that is supposed to make human labor obsolete without making human lives forfeit?
What post-scarcity? We're still on capitalism, a socio-economic system designed to handle resource scarcity. But don't worry, we've got the "human lives forfeit" part down.
Read what I was replying to. Dude planned to jump on to zero employment without the infrastructure to support that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @12:39PM
Uber used the "private contractors" to break the local taxi monopoly, with radio spots featuring people saying things like "I can drive my own car... last month I made $500, but I could've easily made $5000".
Now they're working on replacing all the contractors with autonomous vehicles. Maybe they can run new radio spots "I quit my job to drive for Uber full time. Now they don't need me so I'm looking, but I'm enrolling in a new university set up by Uber for adults like me. I can use my own laptop PC. Right now I'm taking one class, but I could've easily taken five..."