I did not know they had met.

I agree it is not the tech that is the problem, it is the way in which some will choose to use it that is a problem.

Any longer privacy is just gone, the government has said we have no expectation of privacy in public places. (Washington state supreme court on a case about up skirting and that the woman who sued had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place.) Since that is the attitude that has been taken I am sure extending the same attitude to images posted to any public web site would also qualify as having no reasonable expectation of privacy as well.

Ya not surprised that the privacy advocates walked out. Actually a bit surprised they even showed up.

Smuggling was a part of the foundation of this country.

The available productivity increases are truly amazing, but only as long as men must earn in order to live. That's where the gains to be made are.

There was a meeting just this last week of a group of privacy advocates and those working in facial recognition tech. The intent was to try to develop and agree on acceptable uses and guidelines for the tech. Not surprisingly, the privacy advocates walked out of the meetings.

We developed and utilized expert systems in the late 70's and early 80's. The new is the vast increase in computing power and data for those systems to accumulate and work with. The complexity of the systems continue to grow and expand, magnitudes greater than those of 40 years ago and those magnitudes will probably continue to magnitudes we can only imagine today.

I don't fear the technology. It's simply a tool. Nor do i fear constructive destruction. What I fear is the Statists, those fearful of the individual, and the deniers of freedom and what they will do with it.

... and so automation.

No not franchise either...perhaps you may find a short video explanation if you do a youtube search of Mark Hamilton's work. I think he called it Division of Essence

Until...

The Robot has some form of artificial intelligence then the whole dynamic changes.

Using an example that is being attempted now. You develop a system with all the information you have on a specific cancer cell. Next you then add to that system the full human genome. Lastly you add all of the data available from tests that have been done against the cancer cell. You then create an analytic program that boarders on intelligence to analyze the data based on possible solutions and using a virtual model do two years of testing overnight, every night and day, refining the process. A job that took an entire team of geneticist to research now takes one. We are not here yet, but when the AI on this specific task works, we will be.

A Utah company InsideSales has used early artificial intelligence and big data to increase sales by as much as 70%. They do so by analyzing the personality of the sales person, the personality data of the customer and the buying paters of the customer. It then determines the best sales man to call and the best time to call for the best results. This allows a company to cut their inside sales staff by 50% and still increase sales by as much as double. Its a bit earlier and crude use of the AI concepts, but its a good look at what is coming in many fields.

My own company does customer experience software that works with big data. You put robots in stores and tie into our software with them and every robot would have massive information about each of your customers. Add in things like facial recognition and the robots could address every customer by name, always have a perfectly toned voice for maximizing customer satisfaction and be very cool. Again its a ways off still but coming faster than one would think.

Many technologist think 2025-2030 will be when the AI becomes capable of human like decisions. If they are right about 2040 we will see large scale application start to hit the market. I think It will be a change that makes the industrial revolution look small. The robots that are starting to emerge and the self driving Taxi's are the tip of the iceberg.

It will be a huge job shift, but unlike the industrial revolution which moved most jobs out of the home and into factories the AI and robotics revolution will eliminate many more jobs than it creates and concentrate greater wealth in the hands of a few who have government pull while leaving many more dependent on the government.

I am very intersted to see how it plays out. I have confidence it will create jobs as well, but I do not yet see where and in what markets. Industrious people come up with productive things to do. I am personally unsure what in this case, but I am sure I will spot something myself and so will most people here.

Courts no longer respect contract law enough for that to be a viable process.

If a man takes components, assembles them into a functioning device and tests it, is not that creating value? If a robot does the same thing (and they do) does that not create the same value.

Of course you can look at it in two ways. You can calculate value based on human labor in which case the robot only contributes a portion of the human labor that went into creating it and the energy that runs it. Or you can look at value as to usefulness to another human being -- in the latter case the value is the same.

Ignoring uneven distribution, we can each consume less than one person's human labor because not all people are capable of work. there are the children, the old and the infirm. This places a maximum on what we can have. However the more physical goods we can produce with that labor the more we can each have.

At some point we can all have a very large amount of goods with very little human labor at all.

I am sure any program that did the above would get an additional tax which would likely be enough to maintain about the same price even though the costs would be cheaper by a sizable amount.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E85

You hit on a major point. However I think there is a basic motivational factor that causes both a increase in population among the less affluent countries and a decrease in more affluent countries when resources shrink.

In poor countries as before the industrial age children are assets. They bring in more money for the household. If you doubt this read wealth of Nations were Adam Smith gives in great detail data around how children increase the income of a household.

As a people become industrialized and distribution of Labor kicks into a society people do not life off the production of the household, but rather the production in a job or business that is away from the household. Kids become a liability and create debits rather than credits. A few exceptions exist such as farms and family ran businesses but for the most part children are liabilities in 1st world nations.

The result is that in a first world nation as resources decrease so will births, but in a 3rd world nation the opposite is true because children represent the ability for a household to get more work done and thereby have a better life.

As a society develops distribution of labor and work becomes more focused and thereby more efficient increases affluence and resources populations decline. If resources then decline once distribution of labor is in society birth rates will decline because children are an expense now and not a credit to the household.

Where does the pay for the hours spent digging and refilling holes come from? It has little to do with virtuous work, it has to do with reality. A robot is a machine which by itself creates no value.

During the recent recession the birth-rate dropped. This is a recent and measurable example of resource-inspired population.
http://www.prb.org/publications/datashee...

Historically that has been true. But work, for it's own sake is not necessarily a virtue. If it were, then digging holes and filling them up again would qualify as virtuous work. Work is only a virtue if it produces goods and services for either the person doing the work or someone else.

My wife is a weaver. She has woven several garments. It's a hobby, although she's sold some of her work. People can no longer make a living weaving because our closets are filled with clothes beyond the dreams of medieval monarchs because automated production produces them.

At some point automated tools become so capable (robots) that the vast majority of jobs are no longer profitably done by humans. When you can produce the goods that everyone wants with a fraction of the workers, what do you do with the rest?

They could have subsidized jobs where they produce the same product that a robot could with a few cents cost and be subsidized for the rest of their needs, but that is very close to digging holes and filling them up again.

I don't think so. I think that as conscious creatures we can decide to reproduce. The places with the lowest birth rates are the ones with the most resources, where each person has access to more wealth.

It's the areas with limited resources that still see the largest birth rates.

A society that pays a third of it's population not to work is in serious difficulty. And that doesn't count children and elderly.

Tell Sub-Saharan Africa and how overpopulation will never happen. Even though certain nations' birth-rates have declined the worlds population is still increasing. Also, the nation-specific declines are not fair examples because their declines are, at least in part, influenced by contraceptives and government regulations. Still, why would anyone care to prevent birth unless there was associated hardships. Those hardships are resource-related.

This basically backs up my comment. The population is in decline. It seems we only differ on the reasons. If your numbers are accurate, I figure it results from lack of resources. Before industrialization you can just live off the Earth but in an industrialized nation you need resources brought to you and you need jobs to to trade for those resources.

If done right bio fuels would be a good thing. One does not need to burn any fuel to process the Bio fuel, we can turn to Brazil as they figured out a easy way to get the ethanol out.

Long black pipe, with a solar panel and a small fan and a temperature gauge to keep it from becoming to hot in the pipe. a drain pipe to a tank.

Sun heats up the pipe ethanol cooks out, fan keeps it from getting to warm. Truck comes buy to pump it out. very low cost.

No subsidy needed. Fact is if we quit paying people for ethanol and quit paying others not to grow anything we could remove two expenses and get ethanol crops in places where we pay to get nothing now. .

E85 engines do not get destroyed by ethanol at all, but can burn 100% ethanol just fine.

Guess what, do the above, create jobs, make cheaper fuel and reduce dependance on foreign oil. All while reducing government spending.

No negatives so it wont happen, no government cut for someones buddy is the "negative" that will make this never happen.