Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics.
Once we start proposing that life could be part of the solution to cosmic mysteries, there’s no end to the fun possibilities.
Month: November 2016
Who Will Command The Robot Armies?
The obvious question as these systems improve is whether there will ever be a moment when machines are allowed to decide to kill people without human intervention.
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I think we’ll see a similar evolution in autonomous weapons. They will evolve to a point to where they are fully capable of finding and killing their targets, but the designers will keep a single point of control.And then someone will remove that point of control.
Technologies that we develop to fight our distant wars get brought back, or leak back, into civilian life back home.
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The militarization of our police extends to their behavior, and the way they interact with their fellow citizens.
A lot of what we consider high-tech startups work by repackaging low-wage labor.
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It’s odd that this human labor is so invisible.Wealthy consumers in the West have become enamored with “artisanal” products. We love to hear how our organic pork is raised, or what hopes and dreams live inside the heart of the baker who shapes our rustic loaves.
But we’re not as interested in finding out who assembled our laptop.
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So is labor something laudable or not?
I wanted to end this talk on a note of hope. I wanted to say that ultimately who commands the robot armies will be up to us.
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The real answer to who will command the robot armies is: Whoever wants it the most.And right now we don’t want it. Because taking command would mean taking responsibility.
What we need to do is grow up, and quickly.
Like every kid knows, you have to clean up your old mess before you can play with the new toys. We have made a colossal mess, and don’t have much time in which to fix it.
Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. – NYTimes.com
Our increasing addiction to the constant stimulus of updates, likes and posts is damaging our ability to concentrate deeply and focus on work that matters.
In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable. Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable.
Professional success is hard, but it’s not complicated. The foundation to achievement and fulfillment, almost without exception, requires that you hone a useful craft and then apply it to things that people care about.
the ability to concentrate without distraction on hard tasks is becoming increasingly valuable in an increasingly complicated economy. Social media weakens this skill because it’s engineered to be addictive.
The idea of purposefully introducing into my life a service designed to fragment my attention is as scary to me as the idea of smoking would be to an endurance athlete, and it should be to you if you’re serious about creating things that matter.
A dedication to cultivating your social media brand is a fundamentally passive approach to professional advancement. It diverts your time and attention away from producing work that matters and toward convincing the world that you matter.
Source: Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It. – NYTimes.com
You Are Still Crying Wolf | Slate Star Codex
Source: You Are Still Crying Wolf | Slate Star Codex, by Scott Alexander
there are not enough organized white supremacists to make up “a lot” of anyone’s support
Let me say this for the millionth time. I’m not saying Trump doesn’t have some racist attitudes and policies. I am saying that talk of “entire campaign built around white supremacy” and “the white power candidate” is deliberate and dangerous exaggeration.
I don’t think people appreciate how weird this guy is. His weird way of speaking. His catchphrases like “haters and losers!” or “Sad!”. His tendency to avoid perfectly reasonable questions in favor of meandering tangents about Mar-a-Lago. The ability to bait him into saying basically anything just by telling him people who don’t like him think he shouldn’t.
If you insist that Trump would have to be racist to say or do whatever awful thing he just said or did, you are giving him too much credit. Trump is just randomly and bizarrely terrible. Sometimes his random and bizarre terribleness is about white people, and then we laugh it off. Sometimes it’s about minorities, and then we interpret it as racism.
Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?
Stop turning everything into identity politics.
Stop centering criticism of Donald Trump around this sort of stuff, and switch to literally anything else. Here is an incompetent thin-skinned ignorant boorish fraudulent omnihypocritical demagogue with no idea how to run a country, whose philosophy of governance basically boils down to “I’m going to win and not lose, details to be filled in later”, and all you can do is repeat, again and again, how he seems popular among weird Internet teenagers who post frog memes. In the middle of an emotionally incontinent reality TV show host getting his hand on the nuclear button, your chief complaint is that in the middle of a few dozen denunciations of the KKK, he once delayed denouncing the KKK for an entire 24 hours before going back to denouncing it again. When a guy who says outright that he won’t respect elections unless he wins them does, somehow, win an election, the headlines are how he once said he didn’t like globalists which means he must be anti-Semitic.
How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation
If whistleblowers don’t dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred of effective control over our government and institutions. That’s why surveillance that enables the state to find out who has talked with a reporter is too much surveillance—too much for democracy to endure.
To have privacy, you must not throw it away: the first one who has to protect your privacy is you.
If we don’t want a total surveillance society, we must consider surveillance a kind of social pollution, and limit the surveillance impact of each new digital system just as we limit the environmental impact of physical construction.
Most data collection comes from people’s own digital activities. Usually the data is collected first by companies. But when it comes to the threat to privacy and democracy, it makes no difference whether surveillance is done directly by the state or farmed out to a business, because the data that the companies collect is systematically available to the state.
For the state to find criminals, it needs to be able to investigate specific crimes, or specific suspected planned crimes, under a court order. With the Internet, the power to tap phone conversations would naturally extend to the power to tap Internet connections. This power is easy to abuse for political reasons, but it is also necessary. Fortunately, this won’t make it possible to find whistleblowers after the fact, if (as I recommend) we prevent digital systems from accumulating massive dossiers before the fact.
Digital technology has brought about a tremendous increase in the level of surveillance of our movements, actions, and communications. … Unless we believe that our free countries previously suffered from a grave surveillance deficit, and ought to be surveilled more than the Soviet Union and East Germany were, we must reverse this increase.
Source: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation