Can people pick holes in this please?

[TangerineSteve17]

Part of the answer to that question Tange depends upon where we were starting from.

If we were starting from now, then assuming there were no other initiatives being implemented to redistribute wealth, then I guess it would just drain away from the people who didn't deserve to be paid as much (according to the new rules).

If this was how it all started however, if we think about it (...ahem, some more...,) <-- you condescending me? :) then I suppose the money would do the same as it does now and would eventually do the same long term as above - accumulate with those who put the most effort in according to the rules. Someone does something for someone else and gets paid a certain amount for it. It's the same principle re: trading money for goods/services/effort, only the new system would provide a fixed and constant level of reward for everything traded or bit of effort that took place, no?

The only reason the current system is like it is is that some people have prospered through various combinations of physical and mental effort and luck. We would just be recalibrating the reward system for the effort and removing some of the luck element.

That's a great post, (thanks for taking the time) I couldn't get there I guess. That is all sense. Thanks.

Ha, no condescension intended mate. Was playing around with the concept and just hit a rare moment of clarity

A moment of clarity? Sounds suspicious. I get something similar but I call them anti-epiphanies. Just when I think I've got it figured out, some twat comes along and patronizes me out it :)

It doesn't matter mate, patronize away! I embrace it. I asked for holes to be picked.

 

[Balti]

lol

 

[Damocles]

<a class="postlink" href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27485-autonomous-truck-cleared-to-drive-on-us-roads-for-the-first-time.html?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=SOC&utm_campaign=twitter&cmpid=SOC%7CNSNS%7C2015-GLOBAL-twitter#.VUzGU_lVhBd" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... UzGU_lVhBd</a>

Autonomous truck cleared to drive on US roads for the first time

The next big thing in autonomous vehicles really is big. At a ceremony at the Hoover Dam last Wednesday, automotive manufacturer Daimler unveiled a self-driving truck – the first to be cleared to drive on US roads.

For the freight industry, the Inspiration Truck holds the promise of a future with fewer accidents, lower fuel costs and well-rested drivers.

Over the past few years, autonomous trucks have drawn the attention of companies that repeatedly use the same routes or encounter few people or other vehicles. Some farms use autonomous grain harvesters or planters. Mining company Rio Tinto has more than 50 self-driving vehicles hauling iron ore at a remote site in Western Australia. In Texas, the US military has been working on trucks that can navigate battle zones.

The Inspiration is different, designed to travel on the highway alongside regular cars and trucks. With clearance to drive on Nevada's highways, this could be big news for the trucking industry, which struggles to find drivers to do the exhausting work. If successful, other big self-driving vehicles could follow, such as garbage trucks or city buses.

Autonomous convoy

Autonomous trucks have a few potential advantages over their hands-on counterparts. For one, they could help cut fuel use, as they accelerate and decelerate more gently than a human driver might. Programming multiple trucks to travel in convoys would be beneficial, too: one truck could draft behind another, reducing air resistance and so using less fuel. The trucks would communicate, telling each other when to slow down or to speed up.

And the trucks could slot easily into an industry that has already embraced robotic help. In the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, containers are lifted off ships by robotic cranes and slotted into the right stacks with the help of automated trolleys. Last year, the Netherlands announced a five-year plan to prepare the country for vehicles like the Inspiration.

Proponents of self-driving vehicles also tout their safety benefits. According to one study, about 90 per cent of road accidents are caused by human error. Artificial intelligence takes those mistakes out of the equation.

"A car never gets tired. It doesn't have any emotions when it's driving home from a break-up with its girlfriend. It doesn't get drunk or old and slow," says Patrick Vogel at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.

The Inspiration trucks know how to stay in lane, change speed and avoid collisions. A camera mounted above the dashboard has a range of 100 metres which can recognize pavement markings and keeps the truck in its lane. Radar monitors the road up to 250 metres ahead to spot other vehicles and the truck also automatically complies with any speed limits.

Not totally driverless

But they are not totally driverless. A human driver still sits behind the wheel, ready to take over in case of a lane change or unexpected hazard.

With vehicles that are only partially autonomous, the safety benefits may not be so clear-cut, says Steven Shladover of the University of California at Berkeley.

"There is a risk that drivers will become overly dependent on the system, or that drivers may try to cheat a little bit and try to use the system in situations in which it was not intended to be used," he says. "If that happens, there could actually be safety problems."

Like other self-driving vehicles, the Inspiration truck is still years away from commercial release. Now that they're licensed, Daimler plans to conduct tests on Nevada's roads, collecting real-world data to help improve the truck further.

In the meantime, several issues still need to be addressed. It is not yet clear how insurance companies might cover self-driving vehicles, for instance, or where blame would be attributed in a road accident.

And the long-term implications of swapping out low-tech trucks for those using artificial intelligence are not yet clear - like what effect this will have on truckers' jobs or roadside businesses like motels and truck stops.

"Before it became clear that the technical issues could be addressed, these were academic exercises," says Peter Stone, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. "Now, they've become very real questions."

I keep telling you lot that this stuff is coming and we should be ready economically for it.

 

[TangerineSteve17]

The robot revolution :) I have told my lads that building things is the way forward. My generation was told computers are the big deal.. Well I didn't absorb it. Told my boys that engineering, coding, science and in general advancing our abilities is the way forward. They say they want to do what I do :( Paint bridges!? Dumbasses. Gotta be cruel to be kind I guess, they're gonna do something meaningful.

 

[Damocles]

The robot revolution :) I have told my lads that building things is the way forward. My generation was told computers are the big deal.. Well I didn't absorb it. Told my boys that engineering, coding, science and in general advancing our abilities is the way forward. They say they want to do what I do :( Paint bridges!? Dumbasses. Gotta be cruel to be kind I guess, they're gonna do something meaningful.

I've been asked a few times which trades I think are "safe" from the oncoming robotics revolution and can never answer the question.

This would be like asking somebody in the 1800s which trades would be safe from industrialisation. None of them really because it will touch in some way every part of society in ways nobody can really predict. The only ones I can think of is sales - tell them to go into sales.

Industrialisation replaced the idea of using muscled labour with using engineered machines. We no longer could get a job because of the size of our muscles, we had to become smarter and use our brains instead. Robotics will replace the idea of using thinking humans with thinking machines.

The important thing to remember is repeatability. If your job is more than 95% repeated action where that be decision making or physical action, then we could probably already build a computer program that will do it just as well as you. If your job is in some way predictive then we can already build a computer program that can do your job better than you as it has the capacity to process large blocks of data and extrapolate trend much better and to be honest computer modelling of scenarios is already super advanced in scientific circles but is only just leaking into the public's peripheral vision. I know some law offices now use programs rather than clerks to search for specific case histories that are like their current case.

The first ones to go with definitely be the ones that require three or four decisions made consistently. These are your painters, bricklayers, general tradesmen. Seem to think that building companies are already starting to look at this in the US with automatic bricklaying and there's a robot that will come along and build an entire house from flatpack.

But even Doctors and programmers like myself aren't safe.

Humans are from one perspective just biochemical machines. What we call education I could call importing data into a database. What we call decision making I could call branching tree structuring through elimination. Imagination is generally taking two unrelated ideas and combining them in a new way. Our entire brain is built on the idea of repeatable tasks and logic forming the basis of how we think, it's really no wonder that we built machines who are even better at it than we are. The Robo-Doctors are already here in some respect and that computer that beat Kasparov at Chess is now working in diagnosis, taking tens of millions of patient files and symptoms and pattern matching to make a "diagnosis helper" for Doctors. Again it is much better at it than humans according to the accuracy tests as it parses these millions of files in a very short time and doesn't remember things incorrectly or "have a gut feeling" about things.

 

[TangerineSteve17]

The robot revolution :) I have told my lads that building things is the way forward. My generation was told computers are the big deal.. Well I didn't absorb it. Told my boys that engineering, coding, science and in general advancing our abilities is the way forward. They say they want to do what I do :( Paint bridges!? Dumbasses. Gotta be cruel to be kind I guess, they're gonna do something meaningful.

I've been asked a few times which trades I think are "safe" from the oncoming robotics revolution and can never answer the question.

This would be like asking somebody in the 1800s which trades would be safe from industrialisation. None of them really because it will touch in some way every part of society in ways nobody can really predict. The only ones I can think of is sales - tell them to go into sales.

Industrialisation replaced the idea of using muscled labour with using engineered machines. We no longer could get a job because of the size of our muscles, we had to become smarter and use our brains instead. Robotics will replace the idea of using thinking humans with thinking machines.

The important thing to remember is repeatability. If your job is more than 95% repeated action where that be decision making or physical action, then we could probably already build a computer program that will do it just as well as you. If your job is in some way predictive then we can already build a computer program that can do your job better than you as it has the capacity to process large blocks of data and extrapolate trend much better and to be honest computer modelling of scenarios is already super advanced in scientific circles but is only just leaking into the public's peripheral vision. I know some law offices now use programs rather than clerks to search for specific case histories that are like their current case.

The first ones to go with definitely be the ones that require three or four decisions made consistently. These are your painters, bricklayers, general tradesmen. Seem to think that building companies are already starting to look at this in the US with automatic bricklaying and there's a robot that will come along and build an entire house from flatpack.

But even Doctors and programmers like myself aren't safe.

Humans are from one perspective just biochemical machines. What we call education I could call importing data into a database. What we call decision making I could call branching tree structuring through elimination. Imagination is generally taking two unrelated ideas and combining them in a new way. Our entire brain is built on the idea of repeatable tasks and logic forming the basis of how we think, it's really no wonder that we built machines who are even better at it than we are. The Robo-Doctors are already here in some respect and that computer that beat Kasparov at Chess is now working in diagnosis, taking tens of millions of patient files and symptoms and pattern matching to make a "diagnosis helper" for Doctors. Again it is much better at it than humans according to the accuracy tests as it parses these millions of files in a very short time and doesn't remember things incorrectly or "have a gut feeling" about things.

You're a demon! How do us labourers retain meaning in our lives?

:) I've read enough and seen enough futuristic material to agree. It is discerning.

Some things are coming to an end. My trade, and others.. I see it thankfully. The rhetoric is "as long as you have trade - you'll always be in work''

that is not true.

We are our brains and not much else and I only see this being more apparent in the future. (except for sexual attraction (which with skin, will die out too))

the generation of my sons... their kids.. in 2040 or something.. scary stuff,,