Ray Kurzweil: AI is still on course to outpace human intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.grayscott.com/seriouswonder-//ray-kurzweil-ai-is-still-on-course-to-outpace-human-intelligence <comment><USER3> Computers that are capable of analyzing and understanding their environment with a level of fidelity comparable to a human, without being preprogrammed with information about the nature or structure of the environment, are out of reach for the foreseeable future. I don't see any fundamental reason why such a computer should be impossible, but there's not even a realistic roadmap towards such a thing. That is to say, if it ever does happen, nobody alive today can predict _when_ it will happen.

<comment><USER4> "I don't see any fundamental reason why such a computer should be impossible, but there's not even a realistic roadmap towards such a thing. That is to say, if it ever does happen, nobody alive today can predict when it will happen."

It's also not obvious why such a machine would not immediately self-terminate in the absence of a hugely complex system of scaffolding to shape and filter the _raw input of existence_.

I have not experienced mental illness myself, but my study and my understanding lead me to be extremely skeptical of a _mind_ exposed to _raw existence_ without filter. It appears to be a terrifying and unbearable state.

<comment><USER5> I think you are massively anthropomorphizing.

Every day I run programs that happily die alone on their own. Painlessly. All of the "pain" we feel is an artifact of our evolution, same with having a will to live. The only reason we animals fight so hard to stay alive is that animals which didn't died off, ergo, only animals with a will to live survived and reproduced. Those same forces don't apply to computer programs.

Even the concept of "terror." Who is going to program terror in? What benefit would it have? Why not wire programs to be "happy" when helping us?

<comment><USER6> > Those same forces don't apply to computer programs.

Windows ME didn't last too long in the wild. Same for CPU designs with bugs or exploits. I have to respectfully disagree on this, though I can see where you're coming from, given an individual's agency to run what they want. I think if you take a larger population view, you'll see the competitive pressures on these systems.

<comment><USER7> if you get CPUs to exchange their designs in quasi-sexual activities and let them multiply and evolve on their own, maybe. right now the competitive pressure is on their designers.

<comment><USER6> First off, that sounds pretty hot. :) Second, if there is reproductive variation and selection, I think it's evolution. We take our old CPU design and make a new variation, that's the reproductive variation part. We also have a market select for which designs survive via purchases or lack thereof, the selection part. It doesn't matter to me so much if a life form that hosts it, a computer hosts it or a human mind.

<comment><USER8> There's your ubiquitous singularity lurking somewhere near. Symbiosis between CPU and a Human advancing CPU's evolution. Not exactly what we were promised!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am seriously interested in understanding why a lot of people have no issue accepting the idea of humans evolving from simple immaterial matter into biological beings and all the way up to our current reality but have a hard time believing that can be done via computers.

I would at least put it in the very likely box that computers can learn to be the same kind of pattern recognizing feedback loops that we are even without humans understanding the brain completely just as we became conscious and self aware without any "programmer".

"Computers" don't need to be like us to become intelligent, they don't actually need to reproduce the lungs and the intestine as we have it, they are in many ways free of those restrictions.

They might be "concerned" with very different things than we are and might even not really care about nature to survive. All they need is energy.

<comment><USER10> But let's not forget evolution of the magnitude you speak of took hundreds of millions of years. I'm not sure why humans think we can beat that record.

<comment><USER9> I don't think humans can beat the record, but technology? That's another matter all together.

Again our own consciousness wasn't created it emerged which means that we are a product of this emergence.

<comment><USER10> Technology at this time is nothing but an extension of human will. There is no indication or path that it has yet left our grasp. Therefore we are the limiting factor. Just as nature or the divine might have been the will that allowed us to emerge.

<comment><USER7> but if it ever leaves our grasp, you won't notice when it outpaces us, it's going to be so quick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The more you learn about Kurzweil and what he bases his predictions on, the more you realize he's a one-trick pony. They only work on things governed by Moore's law (advancing transistor density) and that in turn depends on a variety of things. Moore's law is expected to wind down around 2025.

Also, a lot of what he bases his claims on are unexamined junk science (like his nutty health books, but also extending into specific technologies). Let's not swallow everything he says just because he helped invent OCR. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil#Criticism)

<comment><USER12> You are much too kind. Kurzweil is a loon, full stop. The fact he once made brilliant contributions to computer science is quite irrelevant to the essential craziness of his more recent delusions.

In 2005, Kurzweil published _The Singularity Is Near_ and predicted ___this_ __would be the state of the world in the year 2030: "Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality. Nanobots will take up positions in close physical proximity to every interneuronal connection coming from our senses. If we want to experience real reality, the nanobots just stay in position (in the capillaries) and do nothing. If we want to enter virtual reality, they suppress all of the inputs coming from our actual senses and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment. Your brain experiences these signals as if they came from your physical body."

That is not happening by the year 2030. It is so starkly delusional that anyone who _seriously_ affirms a belief that it will happen probably needs psychiatric help.

It is akin to Eric Drexler's loony visions back in the 1980s that nanobots would cure all diseases and continually restore our bodies to perfect health. We were supposed to all be immortal by now.

None of this is happening, probably not ever, and certainly not in the lifetime of any human being currently living. Kurzweil is going to die, Drexler is going to die, _everybody_ is going to die. Adopting a pseudo- scientific religion to avoid facing mortality is kind of sad.

<comment><USER13> >Loon...craziness...delusions...needs psychiatric help.

I agree many of his predictions are bad but you should calm down with the gaslighting, it's ignorant of science history (the same was said of Aristotle, Semmelweis, Wright Brothers...) and is an impotent way of debating, especially in the context of science.

<comment><USER11> The thing is, even if someone is a genius, some of their output may have been total quackery. See: Pythagoras, Empedocles, Tycho Brahe, Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, Jack Parsons, Howard Hughes, James Watson, etc. Things that sound crazy are a good indicator to be skeptical and verify claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The singularity is nigh! This trope might make for great fiction but the on the ground reality is far different. Intelligence is multi-dimensional. No machine intelligence has yet shown an ability to match humans in multifaceted intelligence and the day when such intelligences can outpace humans is as far off as it was when the singularity was first posited.

<comment><USER15> The idea of the singularity is based upon the idea of recursive self improvement. I'm not sure how your claims are relevant.

<comment><USER16> Recursive self improvement in which field of intelligence? Does getting better and better pattern matching eventually lead to human level intelligence? Does improving pattern matching accelerate our ability at improving pattern matching even?

We can solve any board game now with alpha-zero but will that necessarily improve how fast we develop other types of intelligence?

I used to be in Rays camp but my girlfriend got into Computational Neuroscience and I talked with her and her colleagues got the impression very very few people think we're close to general intelligence.

Human intelligence is a lot of things put together and we may get better at pieces but we don't even have all the pieces and when we do try to put them together it doesn't work. Look at criticisms of Europe's Himan Brian project[1] (another example I had seems to be outdated), some believe we don't understand too much to even begin to attempt modeling the brain.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project)

<comment><USER15> I don't see why people care about human intelligence as some kind of benchmark. It seems to me that using human intelligence as a framing is a poor mental model for making comparisons or predictions. I see no reason to believe AI capabilities will be modulated by human intellectual capacities. When AI falls short of human capacities for a given set of tasks or capabilities it's likely to fall way short, and when it isn't it's likely to be way more capable. In any case I wish human intelligence would be dropped from the language we use to talk about AI, it seems similar to talking about birds all the time when discussing aviation.

<comment><USER17> Talking about human intelligence is necessary because a computer that can perform a task better than a human can perform the same task doesn't mean it's intelligent, e.g. my iphone is not intelligent because stockfish can destroy me at chess.

Intelligence is the ability to reason abstractly. Humans can do this. It's not clear that anything else can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Despite the cynicism and his black and white predictions, I think his rhetoric still has valuable contributions. It forces others to take a true account of what intelligence is and what kind of intelligence is AI capable of in the medium term (evidence: this thread).

For some reason, this doesn't get enough attention and we have people like Elon and Stephen Hawking making dire predictions all over the place.

<comment><USER19> I can't believe there are people genuinely afraid of a hypothetical powerful malevolent AI, yet seemingly not that concerned by actual climate change.

<comment><USER20> Who says you can only worry about one thing?

<comment><USER21> Anybody who understands opportunity costs...

<comment><USER20> That's reductionist to the point of absurdity. You might be able to only focus on one thing at a time, but a day is long, and you need to worry about multiple things in a day to merely survive. In your free time, it is possible to worry about poverty, climate change, superintelligence, and many other things.

The reason that rich people worry about superintelligence is that it could bring the same uncaring devastation to the rich as climate change brings to the poor.

<comment><USER21> > _The reason that rich people worry about superintelligence is that it could > bring the same uncaring devastation to the rich as climate change brings to > the poor._

The problem with this is that I believe one is a genuine threat, the other is a fad.

<comment><USER20> > the other is a fad.

In what way? Do you not believe that superintelligence is possible, or do you believe that any superintelligence will automatically care about the well- being of humans? Both beliefs seem naive to me and to many luminaries in the field: [https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/research/future/](https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~russell/research/future/).

<comment><USER21> > _Do you not believe that super-intelligence is possible_

I don't believe super-intelligence is possible. I don't believe we're anywhere near modeling intelligence, and even if we did I don't believe intelligence will "exponentially increase" given more computing power (the same way there's a limit to speeding up barely- or non-parallelizable programs).

<comment><USER20> > I don't believe super-intelligence is possible.

The fact that organizations outperform individuals at many tasks shows that superintelligence is possible. If you can dramatically increase the communication bandwidth of an organization through computerization, you will trivially achieve superintelligence over organizations. Exponential increasing intelligence is not necessary for bad outcomes.

<comment><USER21> > _The fact that organizations outperform individuals at many tasks shows that > superintelligence is possible._

That's a little hand wavy example.

Besides, organizations lose out to individuals all the time where intelligence matters -- e.g. that's why the stupidity of bureaucracy, or the army, and "design by committee" is a thing.

Also teams of 5-10 do often do better than teams of 100 or 200 (even in programming), except of course in labor intensive tasks (of course an army of 1000 will defeat 10 people, except if among the ten is Chuck Norris).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've felt for a long time that Singularitarians are looking in the wrong place. They see accelerated technological development and assume that the endpoint will be an artificial brain in a box. What they fail to see is that these inventions and breakthroughs haven't been about increasing the intelligence of a machine... they've been about increasing the intelligence and efficiency of _human systems_.

The singularity isn't a brain in a box... it's us, the collective, a metasystem transition that's been underway for millennia. A movement toward a whole that transcends the parts.

<comment><USER23> That's what seems apparent to me, so far anyway. AI is more about augmenting human intelligence than it is about smart machines. All that impressive DL stuff is ultimately providing more tools for humans to be more productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's my shorter-term thinking. Current ML can't generalize well [0], can't do arbitrary & conceptual thinking, and has trouble with language.

[0] by that, I mean that it does not easily pick up higher-level patterns unless explicitly forced to (through either model architecture, data & task setup, etc). Meaning - it has a much lower success rate outside of the training data distribution compared to "flesh" intelligence. Kind of reminds me of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHRvF0m3yuo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHRvF0m3yuo)

<comment><USER25> Hmm, current ML has only been worked on for a few years, we have barely scratched the surface. No signs of slowing down afaict. It has wiped the state of the art against algorithms we took decades to think up. What happens after decades of _that_?

It feels more like there is too many new directions to explore and we don't have enough time/creativity/insights/ideas to fully take advantage of it.

<comment><USER26> Current ML algorithms have been worked on for decades earlier. They are gaining momentum again due to big data and computing power.

<comment><USER25> To me "current ML" in the parent comment meant deep learning. Open a computer vision paper from this month and the prior art section almost only contains references from between 2014 to 2018.

Yes the NN layer architecture might be based on ideas from the previous era, but the way the algo actually solve the problem is completely different.

And that's just because it's the only way we can do it right now. When we can apply deep learning to itself it, to select better architectures and hyperparameters, will find strategies we didn't think about or didn't consider worth trying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I had a chance to interview Ray and spend some time with him before he joined Google.

The way we met was very serendipitous -- I asked a question during a movie premiere about the nature of reality. He must have enjoyed it because later someone from his team sought me out to invite me to a VIP after party.

His publicist at the time said this was the best interview he ever gave (It's possible she says that to all the girls, but, I'll take it!)

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-adams/ray-kurzweil- in...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/anthony-adams/ray-kurzweil- interview_b_921015.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> It's much easier to make a plane that can fly than to emulate the particular way a bird flies.

They'll both solve the flight problem, so it doesn't really matter.

Flight is something extremely comparible to ai development. When it was developed, many companies were trying, and a lot of people said it was impossible. The problem space is also similar. We're not sure how to get there exactly but we may be close.

It was, in the end made to happen by an unlikely pair - not a large company with a lot of investment. I believe this might be that fate, too.

<comment><USER10> It matters tremendously. Think about the economics of bird flight vs. plane flight. Why is it that flight has been around for almost 100 years now and yet we still aren't flying everywhere? The reality is we can always come up with subpar ways of doing things, but there's a reason birds have evolved as they are today that we just can't replicate ourselves. We mastered long haul rapid flights, but bird flight generalizes much better. They might be slower in long haul, but they are much better and short haul and medium haul and have evolved to work in groups to make long haul possible. So yes, analogously we can create intelligence in a different way, which we are, but it likely won't generalize as well.

<comment><USER29> If we could reduce the density of a person by about an order of magnitude we can start replicating bird flight on a per-person basis. Our approaches to flight are constrained in all forms by the desire to put really heavy things into the air.

Look no further than drones that can operate for quite a long while, move in any dimension fairly well, and manage some pretty ridiculous speeds for not being designed to do so all because their purpose is not to carry large complicated amounts of weight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Brave claim: we won't actually invent good AI until two-way brain-computer interfaces become useful.

We need to augment human intelligence to handle systems vastly more complex than we can do today. Specifically memory creation and recall, and information assimilation rates.

<comment><USER31> How do you define 'useful'?

My keyboard and monitor are brain-computer interfaces. I'd argue that they are pretty useful.

I can imagine a way to consume information that is dramatically faster than the 500 or some odd words per minute I get reading.

But for input to the computer? I mean, I'm not saying that a keyboard can't be improved upon, but I think there are some hard limits to how quickly I can compose my thoughts; I think that it's fairly rare that the fingers are the limit. (Of course, making it so I think less about the fingers would be great)

What I'm saying is that there might be human processing speed issues that limit how much value we can get out of faster I/O.

On the other hand, maybe it's like reading was for me; before I could read at a certain speed and certain ease, I couldn't enjoy books, because I'd forget the beginning of the paragraph before I got to the end. Like I needed to load enough words at once to see the picture. It's totally possible that output would be the same way; if I could somehow output the equivalent of five hundred plus words per minute, maybe that would change my writing the same way passing that speed changed my reading?

<comment><USER30> I think most of the bandwidth would be computer -> brain, not the other way around, assuming it can teach your brain to retain knowledge and show it images/movies. The only exception would be if we could significantly alter the perception of time, but I'm not really betting on that despite how useful it'd be.

Even if I could only accurately sample 1-8 bits/second from the brain, that would be world-changing. There are a lot of clever people who could stuff a lot of utility through 8 bits/second given you are paired with a powerful smartphone and a proper "UX". Clever encoding schemes and signals could be developed. Especially if you go for sequences/chords that are executed over 1-4 seconds.

Plus the brain would likely just act as an index to fetch info that is then replayed to you. I really don't need a terabyte in the form of neuron connections when storage and computing would be ubiquitous.

<comment><USER31> can't you sample way more than 8 bits a second from my brain through the keyboard? I mean, I don't think it'd take much work to get to 8 bits a second using a twiddler or something with one hand.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't understand what a brain computer interface gets you if it's not faster than hands and monitors. (I mean, I guess there's portability, but that doesn't seem super life changing to me; phones are pretty portable already, and I can do 8 bits a second on those, too.)

<comment><USER30> Hands are wonderful for decoding thought into action, that's true, but for example, the brain can imagine images way faster than hands can paint them. A lot of people can be limited by their hands in gaming too. This is exchanged for learning some kind of encoding scheme that translates thought into bits. It's also really difficult, for example, to create 3D models on your phone just using your hands.

By sending bits, the interface changes and you aren't really burdened with UI navigation or UI mechanics like touch, drag, etc. Something like a phone would take on more roles that are currently filled by desktops and laptops right now.

But again, output isn't interesting. The low bitrate is just to illustrate that it isn't that interesting compared to the other direction (but I still think there could be useful products if the device is discreet and convenient enough -- I'm definitely not wearing a full EEG headset every day).

A product like that would be a good checkpoint in scientific developments of decoding the brain too. I think it's going to be a necessary step to develop before we get the other direction though.

<comment><USER31> >By sending bits, the interface changes and you aren't really burdened with UI navigation or UI mechanics like touch, drag, etc. Something like a phone would take on more roles that are currently filled by desktops and laptops right now.

You still need some kind of interface; like if I'm visualizing a picture and the computer can read it? even if you can do it, that's gonna require a lot of bits.

My point here is that having a direct brain interface still requires some sort of... interface, and you probably need a lot of bandwidth before the interface becomes better than... hands, at least for people who still have control over their hands. A low bit-rate direct brain output would be super useful for paralyzed people.

As an example for data in the other direction, cochlear hearing aids are absolutely amazing. But from what I understand? they are quite a bit worse than the ears most of us were born with. They are a long way from being an augment that people with already functional ears are likely to want.

I _do_ think it's worthwhile to come up with new input/output methods; personally, I'd be super happy to shave my head and wear an EEG headset almost all the time, if it gave me output that was significantly faster and with less thought than typing. Heck, you might even get me on portability, if it's just better than a cellphone keyboard.

I'm just saying that there's no reason that a low bit-rate direct brain interface would be any more intuitive than fingers... I've been using my fingers for an awful long time, and to get me to switch to something else, I'm gonna need a better bit rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> IDK, Google's voice assistant thing still can't figure out my wife's name because it's not an English name and I pronounce it as it should be pronounced.

<comment><USER33> Our receptionist can't figure out any of the names of our offshore contractors either.

<comment><USER34> lack of ability and lack of caring are not the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> What if human beings were physically connected to a growing network of perfectly organized facts and information? What if that network could even assist with basic logical reasoning tasks? Would that be enough to say we've reached the singularity?

It doesn't seem like it now because our phones aren't quite physically connected to our brains, and the internet is far from organized, but I'd venture to say we're already pretty close. A more interesting question to me is whether this is really anything we want.

If human machines were infinitely intelligent then they would all agree. So you wouldn't need more than one. Sure, the ultimate human might need 7 billion pairs of eyes but those eyes wouldn't need any more brains than to fuel up and locomote. Furthermore any human-like tendency to doubt oneself or fall in love or "rock out" would be deemed useless and therefore overridden.

Understanding that the purpose of a human is to pass on genes, and that there's little human or genes left in her, the ultimate human might therefore conclude that her sustenance only disrupts the purposes of organic life forms. Her next and final act would be to destroy herself.

This is how I see the end of humanity. Not in a violent clash between artificial and organic intellects, not in a symphony of mushroom clouds, but with the final flip of a switch, in cold, calculated resignation.

</comment><comment><USER36> Check out Rodney Brooks' blog to see some predictions from somebody who actually has at least some idea of what they're talking about:

[https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions- scorecard-2019-january-...](https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions- scorecard-2019-january-01/)

However as the ML researcher Michael Jordan (one of the most important in the field) has previously stated, these sort of long-term technology predictions are just fun science fiction and there is essentially no academic rigor in this stuff:

[https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the- re...](https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-revolution- hasnt-happened-yet-5e1d5812e1e7)

</comment><comment><USER37> Counterpoint: "Hey Siri, lock my phone." "Playing 'Locked Out of Heaven' by Bruno Mars..."

</comment><comment><USER38> Betting on technology evolving faster than expected is _usually_ a safe bet, but it feels like Ray has been working on flawed premises and refuses to revise them.

<comment><USER39> What, specifically, has he gotten wrong?

<comment><USER40> This one (especially HN commentary) is a good read: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18806315](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18806315)

After reading it all, I don't really see him as being any more successful in predicting than you and me. You get some right, you get some kind-of-in-the- right-direction, you get some wrong, and some are just laughably wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> As we do not possess a clear (or, at least, a generally accepted) definition of what constitutes the "true AI," it seems very likely that we will cross this "even horizon" without realizing it; we may have done it already, for all we know (or, rather, don't know - due to the fact that much of the progress is being done in secrecy).

</comment><comment><USER42> On pace to do what? Add numbers really fast? Play chess? Make a best guess of which news story I want to see? (Hint: not sports) Perform automatic gear shifting? Follow the vehicle in front of it?

Kurzweil has long been preaching that there will be a qualitative revolution in what AI will achieve - and it has been 15 years away, for the past three decades.

<comment><USER43> Not actually true, the always 15 years away bit. Three decades ago (1990) his prediction was Turing test and AGI in 2020–2050. More recently he's predicted Turning test 2029. He may be wrong but doesn't keep shifting the dates 15 years away. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Ray Kurtzweil is certainly super smart, but I find his views about the Singularity disturbingly myopic. It's as if he has been living in a bubble for decades, and doesn't realize how the world works for real.

I still have a lot of sympathy for him, as I'm sure he means good. Still, these views distort our reality for many people.

</comment><comment><USER45> Of course it will happen. We humans are an outcome that took billions of years and yet here we are. It might take a billion more to get sentient AI but as long there is progress then the end is inevitable.

The only debate is _when_ it'll happen, but we probably need an advanced sentient AI to help figure that out.

</comment><comment><USER46> I suspect human intelligence is more than just computations in the brain. A lot of computation I assume most occur 'outside' of the brain in the gut via hormones and protein signalling. I have doubts that you can replicate human intelligence without replicating human biology.

<comment><USER47> Or even if it were all in the brain, _accurately_ modeling neurons and interactions of neurons, on bajillions of cudas and threadrippers, will probably still take much longer than it takes for the real-life system to do its thing:

[https://newatlas.com/spinnaker-neuromorphic-supercomputer- mo...](https://newatlas.com/spinnaker-neuromorphic-supercomputer-mouse-brain- simulation/57101/)

<comment><USER41> Modeling the human brain is just one of the directions of the AI research, possibly not the most important one, even, at this point. On the other hand, the "super-intelligence" everyone is thinking about will be nothing like the human mind.

<comment><USER47> I have trouble believing that evolution has been that inefficient. That we can brutally outperform the human brain at 64-bit arithmetic--no surprise. But to accomplish the same with creativity and problem solving? Not holding my breath.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think we will find limited use for general AI since we won't be able to properly regulate or understand the behavior of machines that are smarter than us. Alpha Go Zero can't explain why it plays chess the way it does except for showing how it evaluates the board, but the reasoning is buried in millions of mathematical calculations accreted via millions of games of self play that we can't understand the intuition of. Of course, many smart players can't really tell you systematically how they make the moves they do either. AI will be like a dictator who makes his decisions by intuition only.

<comment><USER25> An intelligent black box can still be "useful". It could help cure diseases or get original insights in many fields for example. Even if we don't understand how it thinks.

<comment><USER48> Sure, but these are narrow AI applications. The great and powerful Oz general AI will be of limited utility unless there is a man behind the curtain.

<comment><USER25> If narrow AI can be useful despite being a black box, AGI can also be useful even if it's a black box.

All the human scientists in the world are black boxes. An AGI could be another researcher, just maybe more productive.

We don't need to understand how it thinks to understand the paper it writes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Counterpoint: [https://engineering.purdue.edu/kak/RobotsWillNeverHaveSex.pd...](https://engineering.purdue.edu/kak/RobotsWillNeverHaveSex.pdf)

<comment><USER25> Gave up at page five of "this is what this presentation is about", can you summarize his main argument on why robots will never have sex?

<comment><USER49> It's clickbait. The last page is:

>But What About the Title of this Presentation .... While obviously a cheap hook, it is nevertheless intended to convey the possibility that it is our emotions, our passions, our innate desires — all ingredients of our sexuality — that are the defining elements of our consciousness and, through consciousness, our intelligence. The End

<comment><USER43> Thanks for the time saver. Incidentally I note sex robots are a thing apparently [https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/8204874/sex-robots- machine...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/8204874/sex-robots-machines- alexa-relationships-investigation/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Ray Kurzweil is still on pace to die before the Singularity arrives.

<comment><USER51> I always felt that Kurzweil's timelines were too optimistic not only because technology may not evolve so fast, but also because it fails to account for the delays that government regulation imposes. So many of the vaunted leaps in medical technology, for example, are going to require years and years of testing before they get approval for use. Other whizbang technology of the future might be prohibited from the consumer market because governments see it as too dangerous.

<comment><USER52> This may be the case for many technologies, but clear wins that save lives get fast tracked. It just happened to CTX001. Also older researchers are doing self testing all the time, as they know that they don't have the time to go through regulations.

[https://www.investors.com/news/technology/crispr-vertex- gene...](https://www.investors.com/news/technology/crispr-vertex-gene-editing- fast-track/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I think Moravec's arguments on the same subject "When will computer hardware match the human brain?" are a little less cranky than Kurzweil's and his prediction from 1998 "it is predicted that the required hardware will be available in cheap machines in the 2020s" seems to be panning out. [https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.htm](https://jetpress.org/volume1/moravec.htm)

</comment><comment><USER19> The Singularity is just millennialism [0] for secular technolgists. We still have a pretty paltry understanding of human intelligence. It seems unlikely to me that more and more iterations of AlphaGo will spontaneously produce strong general AI. My bet is no AGI within my lifetime.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennialism)

<comment><USER53> Alpha zero is a generalized AlphaGo, so they are headed in the right direction!

AlphaGo -> win this boardgame

AlphaZero -> win any boardgame (well, three right now)

AlphaMinus1 -> win any game

AlphaMinus2 -> win anything

AlphaMinus3 -> win winning. so much winning.

But you get my drift, I'm extrapolating hugely off one abstraction step.

<comment><USER19> Yeah maybe. How do you define "win" in terms of general intelligence? Outsmart all top human experts at their field?

<comment><USER54> Whatever the reward function dictates would be a win :)

<comment><USER19> Right. So we've just successfully moved the goalposts to "write a reward function that objectively evaluates _g_ "

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The brain and "mind" is insanely complex. There is so much we still don't understand, so of course there is so much we cannot replicate. But is it possible? If there is an incredible breakthrough in understanding, then yes of course. Personally I see little value in people saying it can or can't be done (of course it _can_!), it's just a matter of if and when. We shall see...

</comment><comment><USER56> Define AI. Define intelligence. Kurzwiel's prediction are nonscientific and unfalsifiable. AGI is unscientific.

He really likes making predictions: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil)

<comment><USER39> I don't think this one happened:

2019: "The computational capacity of a $4,000 computing device (in 1999 dollars) is approximately equal to the computational capability of the human brain (20 quadrillion calculations per second)."

<comment><USER57> $4,000 in 1999 would be about $6,000 today. A midrange Deep Learning workstation is in the ballpark, and while it can't "match the computational capacity of the human brain", it can do plenty of nifty things - <USER2> beat the current Go world champion in a match.

<comment><USER34> No, not even close. 20 quadrillion calculations per second= 20 petaFLOPS. A Nvidia DGX-2 is _only_ 2 petaFLOPS and that "AI" supercomputer costs $399,000. Far cry from $6,000.

You are just hand waving to try to defend a definitively failed prediction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "Kurzweil's Phantasms": [https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/04/kurzweils- phanta...](https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/04/kurzweils-phantasms)

</comment><comment><USER59> I don't find this any different than a steam shovel outpacing a human digger. It's still necessary to prevent both from destroying things and harming people.

</comment><comment><USER60> Yawn. Of course he has to say this, he makes his living saying stuff like this. He is, after all, a "futurist". It just seems rather trite at this point.

</comment><comment><USER61> AI is mechanical turks all the way down and always will be.

<comment><USER62> Then humans are as well, yes? What exactly is the magic in human cognition that is impossible to replicate in silicon?

<comment><USER63> The brain is denser, more efficient and 3 dimensional. Compared to the current limitations of silicon the combination of those three aspects is downright magical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Ray Kurzweil's brain has already been backed up in the Google Cloud Platform. Everyone claiming he's running out of time is just wrong!

</comment><comment><USER65> The most important part of the talk was when Kurzweil mentioned running partially-trained AIs in simulation to generate more training data than exists in the real world. That was the first clear description of imagination that I've seen, although others have hinted at it, for example the running stick figures (that I think Google's DeepMind) trained to run an obstacle course several times before they actually did it. I might be remembering that wrong, but there have been a few similar examples.

Anyway, the reason why the imagination part is important is that nobody today is talking about parallelization when it comes to AI. A few "rules" of AI computing and their limits:

* Processing power doubles every year or two for the same cost -> processing power will someday be approximately infinite (for certain classes of computation)

* The search space for even the simplest problems is effectively infinite if we don't know the hidden models -> if we know all the hidden models, then large search spaces become tractable

* The sequential portion of intelligent decision making is less complex than the parallel portion (computers have been beating us at all sequential operations since perhaps the mid 60s or 70s) -> when the parallel portions are solved, then computers will beat us at all intelligent decision making

That last point is really important and exciting, because most of us simply aren't accustomed to thinking in terms of solving problems in parallel. We're thinking "how do we train a self-driving AI to recognize pedestrians and swerve to avoid them" instead of "how do we optimize the solution to the series of equations to drive to the store and back without hitting anything, in a single pass".

AIs will soon be looking forward from their current model of the world, running some number of simulations (potentially billions) and choosing the best outcomes, then feeding back those solutions to improve their hidden models of the world. All in parallel, with virtually unlimited computing power. At that point we'll be training AIs like children and will start to see emergent behavior that mimics life.

Personally, I don't see how this can possibly be any more than 10 years away, 20 at most (even for rank amateurs like me), given the number of people tinkering on these evolutionary patterns, and the amount of open source research being generated.

It kind of haunts me actually. Like, we just started investing in our 401k at work, but I don't have the heart to tell everyone that the singularity will probably arrive before their investments mature. Like, how does one have a child when it's looking like the 20th century reality we're living in isn't going to be around much longer? Do we suffer through the daily grind, the 40 hour weeks of converting our time to money, when AGI will overshoot that within weeks of surpassing our definition of sentience? It literally might make more sense to become a beach bum, or travel the world, go to Amsterdam and spend a few years in a drug-induced haze.

Or is the correct answer to keep going through the motions of running the rat race, knowing that it's all a waste of time but constructing some kind of inner monologue to distract us from the depression induced by the real world's unfolding existential nightmare? Is there a way to un-take the red pill and go back to the blue pill?

I guess I digress, but this is literally all I think about anymore. The futility of work/culture/technology in a world of ever-increasing human subterfuge. Why can't we admit that the dystopia is playing out before our eyes and begin to escape the yoke?

I guess the one thing that keeps me going is that we might be able to break down a single day into its component parts and automate away anything that's beneath human potential so that we can do the stuff we'd like to do (like nothing). The Roomba can vacuum (done). The self-driving Uber can take us to work and back (almost done). The rooftop solar panels can pay our electric bill (effectively done). And so on, until there is no minutia left.

The last step will be to spin up a partial (of oneself) to go to work and earn the paycheck, or literally grow the food to feed us so we no longer have any external dependencies. This is the part that I think is roughly 10 years away.

</comment><comment><USER34> His predictions are hit and miss. From his 1999 predictions: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil#Late_20th_century)

By 2009:

Y: The majority of reading is done on displays rather than paper

N: Most text will be created using speech recognition technology.

N: Intelligent roads and driverless cars are in use

N: People use personal computers the size of rings, pins, credit cards

Y/N (premature): Though desktop PCs are still common for data storage, individuals primarily use portable devices for their computer-related tasks.

Y/N (premature): Personal worn computers provide monitoring of body functions, automated identity and directions for navigation.

N: A $1,000 computer can perform a trillion calculations per second.

... seemed a total mixed bag, many 2009 predictions just beginning to coming true today

By 2019:

N: The computational capacity of a $6,000 computing device is approximately equal to the computational capability of the human brain (claims that is ~20 petaFLOPS. Nvidia DGX-2 is 2 petaFLOPS "AI" supercomputer for $399,000). [

N: Computers are embedded everywhere in the environment (inside of furniture, jewelry, walls, clothing, etc.).

Y(easy win): Most people own more than one PC

N: Cables connecting computers and peripherals have almost completely disappeared.

Y/N: People communicate with their computers via two-way speech and gestures instead of with keyboards. ( _can_ but in my home and my office most words entered are not)

N: Most business transactions or information inquiries involve dealing with a _simulated_ person

N: Rotating computer hard drives are no longer used.

N: Three-dimensional nanotube lattices are the dominant computing substrate.

N: The algorithms that allow the relatively small genetic code of the brain to construct a much more complex organ are being transferred into computer neural nets.(Could be decades off. Need several breakthroughs to even put this on the horizon)

N: Most roads now have automated driving systems—networks that allow computer- controlled automobiles to safely navigate.

N: Most decisions made by humans involve consultation with machine intelligence. For example, a doctor may seek the advice of a digital assistant.

... few hit but we're mostly heading that way. To me seems 5-15 years premature

[1] [https://www.popsci.com/intel-teraflop- chip#page-2](https://www.popsci.com/intel-teraflop-chip#page-2)

<comment><USER31> >Most people own more than one PC (easy win)

What's interesting is that I think most people own just one general purpose computing device these days, their cellphone. Yeah, they maybe also have a TV that can play netflix or a game console, but my observation is that most people don't even have one PC in the old sense of "a general purpose computer with a physical keyboard that you use by sitting down" \- and if you exclude laptops from the definition it's even more rare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> are people still listening to this guy?

<comment><USER67> Why not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> And if you don't agree you just don't understand exponential growth.

<comment><USER68> cant tell if downvotes are people who don't understand exponential growth or people who think I don't understand exponential growth

<comment><USER69> I didn't vote either way, but long term exponential growth in anything is basically impossible.

Think about it for a minute. At some point lithography gave us Moore's "law" (which, FWIIW has arguably already failed). Do you think that can continue forever? Pretty sure you exceed computational capacity of the universe pretty quickly. Exponential growth in cell phone sales happened at some point as well. As did exponential growth in transportation speed.

The idea that we've had exponential growth in anything but lithography technology in recent years is also laughably insane. Do you think programming languages are exponentially better than they were 30 years ago? Do people live exponentially longer? Cars, autos exponentially cheaper or better in some way? Are machine learning algos exponentially better? No, no, no, and no.

<comment><USER54> You are talking about s-curves, if I understand it correctly.

Few notes: first, exponential growth does not necessary mean fast growth, some of the technologies can still be in early phase or depend on some future advances (compare time for tv to capture the world vs smartphones)

Second, the decline of exponential growth of a technology does not mean it can't be replaced with a nother technology with better prospects (i.e gas cars vs electric cars, etc).

I would argue if that you zoom out for a bigger picture, technology as a whole does show traces of exponential growth.

<comment><USER69> Re: technology showing "traces of exponential growth" citations needed; everything slowing down from where I'm sitting.

<comment><USER54> [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/rising-speed- technological-...](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/rising-speed- technological-adoption/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I don't think anything like the singularity will ever be possible, because the ability to speak language for oneself and invent complex reasoning is spiritual, not merely physical. Humans can do it because we are inherently spiritual beings, a union of body and spirit. (I know most folks here don't subscribe to that assertion... I'm not here to argue it anyway.)

But even if that isn't true, humans are not merely the product of our biology. Each of us has undergone an $age-year period of training, 18 years of which was on someone else's effort and time. I doubt someone is willing to put in that much personal investment to raise a neural net like his/her own child.

<comment><USER71> But if something is spiritual, there must be some way for it to interact with the physical world, otherwise you would not know about it. Then that way can be measured, which makes it physical...

Unless you are calling spiritual those things that can't be measured, yet?

<comment><USER72> For the sake of argument, "spiritual" could be a class of physical objects that can only be produced by other spiritual objects. This is the old "vitalism" argument, which is generally considered discredited, but as the "hard problem of consciousness" is still unanswered, this is a small loophole that proponents can use to hang on to it.

<comment><USER70> I don't subscribe to the "vitalism" argument. I am only equipped to assert that "spiritual" (as opposed to physical) primarily constitutes the use of language as a form of unique self-expression. It can be imitated in machines, but never duplicated.

(There's a good reason the Turing test involves language, and that computers can't form meaningful intent on their own.)

I don't know enough to extend the definition any further, though I'm sure it's not limited to merely that.

<comment><USER72> As far as we know, human language is generated by the brain, and the brain is made of parts that can in principle be simulated. If other parts of the body also turn out to be essential, there's no known physical limitation on simulating those either. This doesn't mean it will actually be practicable to do so, only that it's not theoretically impossible. By what mechanism does your idea of "spirituality" make it impossible to simulate human brains with sufficient accuracy to pass a Turing test? (or any other language generator not necessarily modeled on humans)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I love Ray Kurzweil and he's an undisputed genius, but like many other believers in The Singularity, he's convinced of something that has never been proven to be true.

No computer will ever demonstrate actual intelligence, which is the ability to bring a new and unforeseen solution to an existing problem. I need only a cite a few examples to show this is true: Uber cars run over people. Facial recognition claims black people are criminals just for being black. Facebook's AI software lets in fake news.

These are all errors that could be avoided by actual human intelligence. The fact of the matter is that we don't really know where intelligence or creativity comes from. It's unlikely that we ever will. (See "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" for one reason.) While machines are great at doing things _faster_ than people can do them, they're not good at inventing new solutions or doing something that humans couldn't do, given enough time.

<comment><USER74> > _No computer will ever demonstrate actual intelligence, which is the ability > to bring a new and unforeseen solution to an existing problem. I need only a > cite a few examples to show this is true: Uber cars run over people. Facial > recognition claims black people are criminals just for being black. Facebook > 's AI software lets in fake news._

Burden of proof is not on your claim, but rather on Kurzweil's, but since you made a claim and tried to back it up, I feel compelled to point out that it's a non-sequitur. Just because something hasn't been done before, doesn't mean it's not possible. Many people said going to the moon was impossible. Might be interesting to look at Russell's Teapot.

<comment><USER75> > doesn't mean it's not possible

In general, that which nature has demonstrated is can usually be replicated. A bird (flight), a floating log (ships), a fish (submarine), an asteroid (space travel), etc. Nature has demonstrated intelligence: a human.

However, just like nature has not demonstrated superluminal travel, it has not demonstrated super-intelligence; so that is still a question.

<comment><USER76> Nature never demonstrated Seaborgium, but we were still able to create it.

<comment><USER75> But it did make all the naturally occurring elements heavier than iron with a similar process.

<comment><USER76> Sure. And nature made intelligent organisms so we could take the fundamentals and build something that nature hasn't.

<comment><USER75> I never said it was impossible, just that it's not as certain as Kurzweil makes it out to be.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Riot Games workers walk out to protest forced arbitration - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-riot-games-walkout-protest-forced-arbitration-20190506-story.html <comment><USER2> Good for them. Respect.

In general, tech needs to move to more co-op, employee-&customer-owned, organized labor shops with labor on the board of directors. Mandatory arbitration for any area is BS because for-profit arbitrators are paid to be pseudo-"unbiased" while most often ruling in favor of who pays the bills.

<comment><USER3> Arbitration keeps the court system less full. It has a purpose that everyone ignores. How about solving the underlying problem that brought about arbitration: courts being saddled by too many frivolous lawsuits?

<comment><USER4> i dont think riot's arbitration clause exists because management is worried about the legal system having too many court cases

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I spent a week or so on site as a contractor (well technically a contractor for a company with a contract).. I certainly didn't leave thinking "hey these guys have it great".

I still keep thinking about their company policy: employees were _expected_ to play their game every day. Can you imagine if McDonalds said they expected staff to eat at least one meal every day in-store?

<comment><USER6> I have worked at a McDonald's and at least when I worked there, workers got something like $5 credit per eight hour shift back in the 1980's. Most people used it to eat a meal but sometimes we would trade credit with KFC or Pizza Hut workers for variety.

I have also worked in games on smaller teams and considered it a responsibility to play the game to make sure that everything I could influence worked well (or I changed it so that it did) or that I could evaluate other parts of the game versus user expectation/current state of the art. Maybe things are different on larger teams/projects.

<comment><USER7> This probably reveals how out of touch I am... but I always assumed people in the back could just get free food. Is the manager watching? Would fellow employees narc on you?

<comment><USER6> You could take food but it probably depends on the manager on shift, at the store I worked at the manager was the owner so she was pretty strict when she was around (distinctly remember coworkers joking about how she was pretty OCD about counting cups/sauce packets because that all cost her money so she emphasized being stingy about distributing those/accounting for loss). Coworkers did not have the same amount of skin in the game unless the managers held them accountable for inventory levels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Being in the US, which from an outsiders perspective appears to have little in the way of employee rights, what risk do these workers face of simply being fired and replaced by the company?

<comment><USER9> That would be illegal. US workers have right to discuss workplace conditions and can't be fired for trying to start a union. Also this is in California which has further worker protrections on top of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's not "forced arbitration", it's "contractual arbitration" which means both sides agree to it. Employment contracts are freely negotiable, including a contractual arbitration clause.

<comment><USER11> "It says right here in the contract that I can sexually harass you and suffer essentially no consequences. You signed it."

<comment><USER12> Such a clause would be nil in most jurisdictions.

EDIT: to be more specific: if you get raped at work, the criminal part against the rapist goes to court as usual. The case against the company because of establishing a rape culture and you seeking compensation goes to arbitration.

<comment><USER13> So it would be nil only if criminal charges could be brought.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


All around the world, labour is losing out to capital - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21588900-all-around-world-labour-losing-out-capital-labour-pains <comment><USER2> On the subject of robotics supplanting human toil, Ray Kurzweil recently said:

"In my view, it will lead to richer lives, and longer lives, but I would put an emphasis on the richer part. And I'm not just talking about financial riches. Life is getting [better] as we enrich our lives with technology. You can see that now—a kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more information and human knowledge than the president of the United States did 15 years ago. People were lucky if they could get a book 100 years ago. We're going to continue that expansion. Music is going to be richer. We're going to have virtual reality experiences we can enjoy. All different forms of human expression, art, science, are going to become expanded, by expanding our intelligence." Source: [http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/14/how-nanobots-will- help-th...](http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/14/how-nanobots-will-help-the- immune-system-and-why-well-be-much-smarter-thanks-to-machines-2/)

He's infinitely more intelligent than me, but I fail to comprehend how a world without human labour could possibly lead to a richer experience.

<comment><USER3> Kurzweil and other olds like him believe in the Star Trek future. They believe in a beautiful utopia future that is unlockable by abundance. That's why 3d printing and virtual reality are so exciting for them.

A meme back then was from Buckminster Fuller, renowned architect, thinking, and systems analyst--what they used to call hackers back then. Fuller made a proclamation that in the future we will reach a point in society where a person will only need to work 1 full work to generate enough value that lets them live for the rest of the year.

How crazy is that?

Well when you have replicators and automation to do all the work, you have more time to focus on other things.

For example say you want to be an artist. To do so you endeavor on the artist path, living the artist lifestyle. You don't work a 9 to 5 so that you can focus on your art, because of that you don't have a lot of money, and thus you live the hipster way. In the cheaper edges of a big city, you work entry level retail jobs, and you're constantly at the edge of failure.

Many of us like to create art, but because we don't want to live that kind of poor lifestyle we don't pursue what our passions are. We're misfit, square pegs in round holes of society.

You absolve people of toil and now you have no fear. Without fear you create more. When you try more you do more.

J. K. Rowling credits her completion of Harry Potter based on England's welfare system. They removed her anxiety and fear by helping her out when she had no job. Because of that she took the plunge to write Harry Potter.

Imagine if all 7 billion of us are free to try, really try, at art. Think of the industrial revolution. Think of the internet revolution. None of that will compare to the next wave and all that new activities will bring.

That's how the world is enriched by removing work.

Or, we can all end up reverting back to living in caves.

Who knows.

<comment><USER4> So the entirety of English society helped pay to make Rowling incredibly wealthy. That seems like a pretty massive concentration of wealth for little benefit to society as a whole aside from some nice pablum to digest.

<comment><USER5> I don't know what she and her creations have since paid in taxes in the UK, but I'll wager a dollar that it exceeds the monetary cost to the country. Hell, compared to some uses of the tax payers money, I'd say that a lot of value was gained.

<comment><USER6> You're absolutely right. Rowling has explicitly stated in the past that she hasn't and won't use tax avoidance structures, so she will have paid 40% income tax on most of her income from the books.

Plenty of UK bands from the 60s to the 90s have mentioned unemployment benefits as being an important factor in allowing them to exist before they got famous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So then there is the question Marx posted a century and a half ago - what do capitalists do with the money they make? Only so much can be spent on mansions, and even that is an investment. They can bury some precious metals in the backyard if they want. But then the rest of it will all go to capital spending.

What is the result of capital spending? More commodities. But who will buy the commodities? Workers. But they can't afford them, they just lost a round in the capital/labor fight. So kick the can down the road, have the workers go into debt to buy the commodities. That works for a little while, but then the problem becomes worse and a bigger collapse will happen at the next crisis.

Despite just coming out of the "worst recession since the Great Depression", the Federal Reserve etc. did save the US economy for now. I'm of the belief that sooner or later the world economy is going to hit the skids and even Keynesian New Deal measures won't bring things out of it. Only time will tell of course.

<comment><USER8> That was also the Marx prediction, lets see if he was right..

Its not just economics, but also the human nature; we have to change the way we see and interact with the world, resources, other people..

The "Use everybody, everything, and profit whenever you see a chance" mantra is a social cancer, and will end badly for everybody.. even the ones running the show and laughing of everything

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Marx predicted it long time ago.

"According to Marxist analysis, class conflict within capitalism arises due to intensifying contradictions between highly-productive mechanized and socialized production performed by the proletariat, and private ownership and private appropriation of the surplus product in the form of surplus value (profit) by a small minority of private owners called the bourgeoisie."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism)

</comment><comment><USER10> People can only buy so many things, particularly people who aren't rich. The more robots that make our things, the less labor is needed, and the less things we can buy.

As long as we're focused on individual consumers buying things for themselves, there will be fewer and fewer jobs available or needed to make those things. While it may happen elsewhere, I'm very pessimistic about anything like a basic income happening in America.

But without basic income or a job, there's no effective mechanism to distribute cash. You need a job to receive cash.

Yet there could be many jobs available if we shifted the focus of our consumption from individual needs, and put some of that focus into community needs. Large projects. Infrastructure improvement and operation. Solar power. Transportation.

Just get it into our mindset that we're building and operating big stuff. Because providing for our individual needs will not provide jobs for most of us.

<comment><USER11> You're describing a cultural and economic shift towards collectivism and away from individualism, which, to me, seems no more likely than basic income.

I think it may take decades for basic income in America to go from unthinkable, to radical, to controversial, to reasonable, to seemingly inevitable, to reality. But that's all the more reason to start talking about it now. Let's get the ball rolling!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just want to point out that Marxism was started as a response to the Industrial Revolution. [1]

If you guys think that machines are going to decrease our standard of living-- that the separation of (production value)/wages is going to cause poverty-- you have to prove to me that the same thing happened during the Industrial Revolution.

[1] Karl Marx: Communist as Religious Eschatologist

<comment><USER13> Most revolutions replicate what they rebel against. Marxism was just an extension of French Revolution logic (1789) and not surprisingly, has followed a similar path: executions, social engineering, fanatical militarism and finally internal turmoil brings it down.

<comment><USER8> You are making the classical mistake, equalizing Marxism to the political scene executed by the Soviet Union..

The marxism is much more sophisticated and deep; I think maybe trotsky could make a better socialism.. but even than probably away from the Marx vision

But you know, politicians will always think about their own selves in the end of the day, no matter what they say, as long people believe in them..

So, in the day we have real altruistic people on power, things might change for the better... Socialism requires a much more sophisticated politician type.

But let me make clear, that i dont defend pure left or pure right.. if nature teach us something is decentralization and and micro-management..

If a government has the tendency to concentrate power, its like a dead body to the crows... it will seduce only the people with fetish for power, and control over the lives and destinies of others..

Thats why the history of world politics has been a greek drama where the weak(and sadly the majority) always lose in the end

<comment><USER14> No _you_ are making the classical mistake of thinking the combination of Marxism and human nature can play out any other way. The Sovs even knew this themselves, hence their trying to create New Soviet Man (and predictably failing).

<comment><USER15> Except, of course, for the fact that the attempt to create the New Capitalist Man has been every bit as much a failure, but we all pretend it's been a wild success because that's the ideology our rulers demand.

<comment><USER8> Your well made point, make a pretty depressing observation that we still live under the Positivism umbrella (adored and used by "our rulers") where role- models serve as "guide" to shape ordinary people by the owners of the institutions of power at their own will, so they can be easily manipulated.

Our society doesnt even get into the Nietzsche philosophical level were we are free of this State+Capital controlled lobotomization ideology where human beings are far away from their freedom and humanity.. which is our fuc$##%ng natural rights for start

Its sad that the people that has shaped the last century has listened more to Comte than Nietzsche..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is going to get drastically worse, as capital becomes able to remove most human labor from the production equation using robotics in the next few decades.

I've yet to see a solution to the seemingly inevitable outcome of traditional human labor dropping to nearly zero value. And or why we'd want to prevent it from happening, given the upside to robotics.

The only way to stop (slow down?) the rise of robotics, is to place arbitrary restrictions on machines to hamper their value proposition. I expect politicians all over the world to begin attempting this before another decade goes by.

Will we see a dramatic increase in the formation of unions as a defensive response? Most likely.

<comment><USER17> _Will we see a dramatic increase in the formation of unions as a defensive response? Most likely._

I'm struggling to follow how a union could help this situation. What would happen? Workers would go on strike if their firms use robots? Seems like that would just push the owner to accelerate robot orders. My guess is that unions are pretty useless in the face of automation. Does anyone know any precedents?

I agree in spirit though. What I think is likely is the rise of populism. I think the battle will have to be waged in the political arena.

<comment><USER18> I think we all know the precedent: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite)

And yeah, if it gets really bad, violent protest is just a more extreme continuation of unions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I don't understand is why humans are so obsessed with labor. Robots are doing stuff for us, and some people are actually complaining about it. To me, this seems really sad. It's like they're saying "I'm so worthless, I can't even compete with a robot."

Maybe that's true for some people. If so, then the problem isn't robots, the problem is that there are people who are less useful than robots. For a human to survive in the era of intelligent machines, he/she needs to have unique skills that are not possessed by robots. If they don't have those skills, they need to find them.

For those in the tech industry, those skills are already there. It will be decades, or longer, until we can automate software/hardware engineers. Entrepreneurship is another unique skill that will be even harder to automate. I believe that once machines are capable of conceiving, starting, and operating businesses, they will no longer be called machines.

What we must never forget is that humans aren't intrinsically special. We just happen to be the most capable organisms on the planet right now. The current rate of technological progression suggests that this will eventually change. When it does, we'll need to adapt or we'll go extinct.

If we cannot adapt to this reality, we will simply end up serving as the spawning ground for a new species (biological or otherwise) that will make humans obsolete. If we survive, it will be as little but a historical curiosity.

To adapt, we cannot look at robotics and automation as an enemy. It IS the future - we need to accept it, exploit it, and ultimately incorporate it into ourselves.

<comment><USER20> >Robots are doing stuff for us, and some people are actually complaining about it. To me, this seems really sad. It's like they're saying "I'm so worthless, I can't even compete with a robot."

That's not what they're saying. The labor market isn't automatically going to expand to accommodate their need for employment. "Finding" new skills all too often means amassing a crippling amount of loan debt (in the US at least), to enter a job market which simply has no room, nor a desire to find room, for the population it put so much effort into letting go.

Humans may not be intrinsically special, but being biased towards human survival, _as_ a human being, should not be difficult to understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Minimum guaranteed income can not get here soon enough.

<comment><USER22> For what? Living deserves an income? Can I opt out?

<comment><USER23> It's only fair. Before the State, people were born into a _homeland_. Just by virtue of being born, you were entitled to a share of the natural resources around you. (Of course without a state, murder and such are allowed on a who- can-get-away-with-it basis. That's the downside.)

When the state stepped in and seized control of our homelands, and then said: "This person, with this piece of paper, now owns these resources", essentially creating out of thin air the concept of "wealth", they took upon themselves a moral responsibility to see to it that wealth was distributed in a way that everyone gets at least a living share.

The current system, where you are either born into a dynasty with resources, or you are for all intents and purposes enslaved to people who are (albeit with some small chance of moving between groups) fails at that promise, even though the poor largely fulfill their end of the bargain by making themselves available for labor. Many go without their basic needs taken care of. A basic income would fix that. The situation is absurd, and it's an utter waste of human capital to throw talented "low" class kids into the thresher.

<comment><USER24> I'm not actually sure that's how it worked, though I'm sure that's a common anarchist mythology. States arrived along with agriculture, but hunter- gatherers had very similar, and much smaller groups with their own structures of authority, control, and social norms. In-group and out-group dynamics were more prevalent as in-groups did not, by definition, exceed Dunbar's number. Things like in-group murder were undoubtedly discouraged and punished. And when resources grew thin, violence and warfare against other groups was prevalent.

Agriculture was generally borne of desperation and scarcity, and cultures that adopted agriculture also adopted government and notions of land ownership. It was still a pretty raw deal compared to being a hunter-gatherer though, especially since hunter-gatherers were still better at warfare than farmers so from time to time a group of hunter-gatherers might show up and take whatever they wanted from you.

But even among hunter-gatherers, there were no human rights. You had to work, you received your share, but only if the hunter-gatherers from around the way didn't run short on resources and showed up one day and killed all your men and captured all your women.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Articles like this tend to get lost in our desire to fit the world into our favorite grand philosophyy (philosophical framework, ideology, metanarrative - take your pick.) Since these philosophies are so ambitious, they need to deal in very big concepts like imports or automation-technology. The counter points are equally abstract. Each comes with its own vocabulary like labour/capital (being used similarly here to the Marxist workers/means of production).

I don't have a general problem with big abstract theories. They can be useful. They can also be blinding. Worse, they can lodge themselves as a person's political identity. Realistically, they are very imperfect and we should probably use a bunch simultaneously to try an understand a trend like this one.

Here's an alternative vocabulary that IMO is relevant inasmuch as economic growth takes the form of of new technological product (smartphones, internet). Who/how many get to consume the new products. IE, airlines get invented. How many people get to use them? Personal vehicles proliferate. How many people get to own one.

From that perspective, a lot of recent growth is remarkably equitable. Cellular phones penetrated right down the worldwide income ladder. In 10-20 years they outpaced earlier technologies like cars & electricity. Now most of the world gets to use them. PCs, the internet & smartphones are available to most of the lower income people in above medium income countries. I would say that overall, the common person gets more access to new consumer technology than a decade ago.

Another framework I would like to see used would focus on freedom to make choices, specifically lifestyle choices. How many people choose to take a different job, change careers, work less, etc. I'm not sure how one would go about quantifying this.

I'm not saying this should be the primary method of looking at the economy. I am saying is that if using different frameworks leads you to different conclusions, be suspicious of all of them.

<comment><USER2> Blinding irony being the "cool detachment to all theories guy" persona you project here being equally as abstact as those you observe.

<comment><USER25> That's a little hostile. What exactly is rubbing you the wrong way about my comment? Here's the jist of what I am trying to say.

(1) I don't know if people are better or worse off now than before. (2) I'm don't think we have a very good quantifiable way of deciding that argument. (3) Many arguments of intelligent people are trying to provide an answer to this question smells a lot like intelligent people trying to fit their world into their philosophical framework. (4) The answer to that question (or some aspects of the answer) may be subjective or at least a bad fit for the economic vocabulary we typically use to tackle it. IE, Has the value of a median family car gone up over the last 50 years because its objective quality has improved or has it gone down because the the people buying them grew up expecting to own one whereas their grandparents found themselves able to afford one, exceeding their expectations when growing up.

Any specific statement you find objectionable?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It seems silly to discuss changing shares of a whole output of a national economy devoted to labor rather than capital expenditures, without an even greater emphasis on increases in the overall national output. After all, I could just as well argue that all around the world, men are losing out to women, as more equality of rights is achieved. But what's really happening (thanks in no small part to steady economic growth all around the world) is that both men and women have more choices in lifestyle and family roles than ever before. Today's laborers are for the most part vastly better off than they were in the year of my birth, and they have every expectation of becoming still better off as the years go by, all around the world.

</comment><comment><USER27> If, thanks to technology, 10% of people are able to produce all the goods, 90% won't get paid. With most people not having money, only 10% of goods will be needed from that point on. And thanks to the new technology, only 1% of people will be able to produce that. Which means only 1% will have money. Thus, less goods would be needed. And so on. The cycle ends when the last human being dies of hunger.

Options:

1\. Ban the technology, Amish-style 2\. Cut working hours 3\. Introduce some new kind of re-distribution, such as basic income

<comment><USER28> We've already been through waves of technology even more dislocating than the one you describe.

If you told a farmer in 1813 that, in the future, less than 5% of the population would be needed to grow all the food, he would assume that the other 95% would be mostly unemployed and starving. But he would be wrong, for the same reason that you are wrong.

As long as there are unmet desires, there is _necessarily_ more work to do. When increasing productivity frees up capital and labor, it gets applied to create entirely new industries. Just because you can't imagine what they might look like (any more than our 1813 farmer could imagine what many of us do for a living) doesn't make them any less likely.

It is a logical impossibility that technology throws the bulk of the population into poverty -- either they have access to all the cheap robotic goods, in which case they are not poor in any meaningful sense, or they don't have access to the cheap robotic goods, in which case _the robots are not competing with them_ in their ability to sell to each other.

<comment><USER29> One problem is that work requires something to work on or with. For the most part, people don't really create out of nothing--they add to and build upon what already exists. They need land to farm, or materials to build with, or computers to work on. Even writers need languages to write in. As property becomes held more and more by fewer and fewer, and even intellectual property is becoming increasingly locked up there's less and less that is physically or intellectually available to build upon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The problem as I see it right now is that capital-holders are treated very well because capital can slip through borders, while labour is a bit more tricky, because it comes with the implication of having an extra person around...

In an open border world, the balance would be more equalized, but that is more theoretical than practical at this point.

The recent rounds of QE are a great example of this. Those were basically made to inflate asset prices for capital-holders, because economic policymakers are conditioned to placate capital. Case in point: 90% of shares in public markets are owned by 10% of Americans. The hope was that some of this benefit would trickle down, as the infamous term goes---unfortunately that hasn't happened, so far.

So now we live in unequal times not seen in America since the late 20s.

pre bust: [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/15gilded.html?pag...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/15/business/15gilded.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

post bust: [http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/income- inequalit...](http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/income-inequality- enemy-economic-growth-robert-reich-142150436.html) (big ups to Shiller)

There's a couple of ways to go about resolving this, from heavy handed government intervention to restrict capital, to loosening government restrictions on labour movement.

There's outside the box thinking too, from how Iceland forgave those holding good homes rather than those holding bad debt to opening the pool of capital to a wider pool of people in the vein of equity crowdfunding---

this is a very pressing issue, and there are tons of solutions out there. I think the one constant is that if technology is going to play a role in solving this, people need to be given equal access to that technology, and the knowledge required to understand it. discuss and spread code!

</comment><comment><USER31> Sometimes I wonder if any new investment that I make in my skillset is just buying me a few more months of profitable employment at some point around say 2050. The loss of employment for less skilled labour is happening now, but I see no reason why eventually all labour could be supplanted by increasingly efficient machinery/robotics (for physical tasks), and AI for information/services tasks.

Capital is increasingly producing greater returns than labour, and market pressure is causing businesses to invest in capital as a result... but what does the economy do when labour cannot produce or earn, and hence cannot spend?

<comment><USER32> I see people in this thread discussing efficiency brought by technology, however people are missing an important factor for the drive to automation - employment taxes.

Given our economic crisis, the IMF for example is forcing governments to raise taxes to insurmountable levels. In our country, many companies have to resort to tax evasion just for survival and now the government is trying to shove new taxes down our throats (because hey, let's not target the big tax evationists, but rather the stupid fucks that paid their taxes until now).

So when the taxes you have to pay for producing goods or services exceed your other operational costs, what do you do? Well, governments aren't taxing the usage of robots yet. Bingo.

I think we should be glad that automation happens. Because it's better for a factory to remain in your own country, even if fully automated, then it is to be outsourced to China. Even an automated factory generates local jobs, either directly (engineers, cleaning people) or indirectly (connected industries).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The biggest issue here is that it's the middle level jobs that are being automated, which makes it increasingly harder for low skilled workers to work their way up over time. There was a good article in The Atlantic that discussed this a while back [1].

I'm not sure what the solution is, but increasing erosion of the middle class doesn't sound like a good thing.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-i...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making- it-in-america/308844/)

</comment><comment><USER34> The next logical step is to increase taxes on capital, starting with an increase in the capital gains tax.

Of course the Economist doesn't mention this... EDIT: Oops, maybe they did. Good for them.

<comment><USER35> There was also a piece in the leaders section (i.e. the more "editorial" area) of this week's issue on this topic. There they specifically call for "a narrowing of the difference between tax rates on individuals' income from capital and labor"

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Doesn't this more or less imply that you have to save and invest in order to take part in economic growth? I agree that this is a problem which should be attacked with political means, but that doesn't mean it is impossible for someone to live within their means and save.

Obviously this doesn't apply to every demographic group in the world, but a large amount of people can get an account with a cheap online stockbroker and buy ETFs with the surplus of their paycheck.

</comment><comment><USER37> If you think things through:

1\. We were all born with the same rights.

2\. Therefor, we should all _have_ (and keep) the same rights.

3\. Yet, we don't have all the same wealth (money=rights) - FAR from it.

How come we accept that people who were born more lucky than others get to have more rights? When we were all born equal?

How come society still accepts this basic and too obvious hypocrisy?

<comment><USER38> > We were all born with the same rights.

The concept of "rights" is just some set of rules the society has agreed on. Nothing else. It's not something you get born with. If the society decides to completely redefine rights, they could, for example, remove the right of freedom of religion.

> When we were all born equal?

We obviously aren't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of > mostly rich countries, reckons that labour captured just 62% of all income > in the 2000s, down from over 66% in the early 1990s. That sort of decline is > not supposed to happen.

Has the fraction of people supported by capital as opposed to labor stayed constant over that time period? I know OECD countries have been aging, it wouldn't take that much of a demographic shift towards retirees and other non- laborers to account for the change.

</comment><comment><USER40> Robin Hanson and Tyler Cowen have the most well reasoned visions of the future of the global economy.

Hanson predicts _virtually all_ human wages moving to near zero in the long run.

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/05/robot-econ- primer.html](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/05/robot-econ-primer.html)

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/07/me-on-pbs-off- book.htm...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/07/me-on-pbs-off-book.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> Does anyone have a graph showing (per country labor share) * (per country real gdp) over time?

It would appear to me that if _that_ quantity is actually increasing, then this is an interesting curiosity and alarming in that we don't understand it, but not actually an outright disaster, as the pie would still be growing fast enough to feed labor more in real terms.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder if this is caused by union membership decline and the increasing power of lobbyists?

</comment><comment><USER43> "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer..."

unsurprising common sense. :/

</comment><comment><USER44> Too bad the robots didn't eliminate the shitty jobs first.

</comment><comment><USER45> the UK's is actually the same, on a graph where the rest fall. I wonder what that means is different about us?

</comment><comment><USER40> It's nice to see that the Economist is finally channeling Marx.

Such trash.

</comment><comment><USER46> when wasnt that true?

<comment><USER47> Have you read the article? The proportion of GDP paid out to labour vs capital had been stable for quite some time. So the answer to your question is: almost all the time so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is one reason why I find the consumer debt phenomenon disturbing.

Until 1975 or so, there was a symbiosis between the capitalists and labor. If labor was impoverished, products weren't bought. Henry Ford learned this: by paying his workers well, he made it so they could afford his products. The middle class was built because, without it, industry would fail.

Widespread consumer debt-- which went from being associated with failure (excluding mortgages and a first car, and a very small amount for college that could be paid off fully in 1-2 years) to a commonplace occurrence-- made it possible for the consumption (and, more relevantly, consumption _costs_ ) to grow while wages remained flat, putting the working classes further into debt and subordination.

That's what's happening now. Even if you're fiscally responsible, you compete (on the housing market, and for higher education) with the masses who are, in general, utterly the opposite. It is somewhat of a brilliant (if malignant) divide-and-conquer strategy.

</comment><comment><USER49> Seeing this 11 hours later, it devolved into a political fight. Sad.

A simple, alternative hypothesis:

With the opening of India, China, etc the world has gotten a really, really large increase in work force -- but (not yet) an equal increase in capital for investment. Supply/demand -- the price for the increased resource (workers) goes down.

</comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps because "capital" is composed of the products sold because labor is willing to pay for them? These two sides aren't as cleanly drawn as people might like to think. The preferences of individuals drive the economies of the world (except in North Korea).

<comment><USER50> No, the preferences can be controlled (marketing), or even forced (addiction).

No one ever thought "I need coca-cola", it was a created "want" invented purely through marketing and addiction...

EDIT: typos

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> love and give a vote

</comment><comment><USER52> All around the world, ursine mammals defecate in forests.

I suppose though that it's a good thing that the Economist is at least talking about it.</comment>


Inuit Study Adds Twist to Omega-3 Fatty Acids' Health Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/inuit-study-adds-twist-to-omega-3-fatty-acids-health-story.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Summary: "A study published on Thursday in the journal Science reported that the ancestors of the Inuit evolved unique genetic adaptations for metabolizing omega-3s and other fatty acids. Those gene variants had drastic effects on Inuit's bodies, reducing their heights and weights.

... the discovery raised questions about whether omega-3 fats really were protective for everyone, despite decades of health advice. "The same diet may have different effects on different people," he said."

<comment><USER3> _" The same diet may have different effects on different people"_

This is a very key point. We're just beginning to scratch the surface on how genetics and diet interact.

<comment><USER4> The fact that most of the discussions I encounter on a daily basis never address this is maddening.

I blame it on our cultural ideals stating that everyone is equal. As Americans, we have severe reservations about claiming people are genetically different.

<comment><USER5> That sounds racist. /s

Seriously though, this is a core part of dietary concerns, it's almost a certainty that a Russian is going to have a slightly different reaction to foods than a European, due to centuries of eating different foods. I think it's only recently we've really started to discover that evolution isn't just survival of the fittest, but a considerably more complex mechanism that has immediate impacts after very few generations to very slight stimuli. Not to mention stuff like gut flora, environment during pregnancy, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there any kind of efficient way to just find out what foods are best for one individual (i.e. yourself)? Because the amount of contradicting studies related to food is quite unworkable...

<comment><USER7> There's basic genetic tests which can tell you if you can't metabolize a certain nutrient as well as others and things like that. They also probably change depending on your current lifestyle and stress levels, to add further complexity.

Other than that, trial and error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Inuit have unique gene differences (obvious), those _may_ give them an ability to metabolize fat better. However there is some evidence that Inuit that eat western diets have the same rate of heart disease as us and westerners who eat their diet have the same rate of heart disease as them? (from "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes).

I think they are coming from an assumption (which is possibly incorrect) that eating fatty meats causes heart disease. So they are trying to solve a mystery but the entire foundation for their search is in question IMO.

It is interesting either way. Maybe if we keep eating high fructose corn syrup and refined grains, this obesity and heart disease epidemic will just cause selection for a few generations that will result in us as a population being able to live nicely eating all this shit we eat now.

<comment><USER9> The last paragraph is very wrong, or I don't remember high school biology. So please correct me if I'm wrong.

Humans aren't evolving in response to their environment: they change the environment to suit them.

And anyway, selection doesn't really work in a few generation, and definitely not if what you are trying to select out doesn't change how many kids you might have.

By the time you die from heart disease, you've probably had all the kids you were going to.

<comment><USER10> Our ability to change our environment is limited and was even more limited in the past.

• Look at infectious diseases killing those without inborne resistance and you see humans evolving just fine [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle- cell_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease)

• Also changing your environment, e.g. by starting to herd animals can jumpstart evolution [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For those looking to experiment with a high-fat/low-carb diet, the Ketogenic Diet is what you're looking for.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet)

Be warned though, the dietary requirements are very strict and it will push your limits.

<comment><USER12> I found the diet (or a diet close to it) was rough for about a month then very easy. Once the cravings for bread and sugar go away, it's fairly easy to stick to it from a purely willpower point of way. The problem I had after about a year was the social part. The conversions to family members on why I'm not eating grand's thanksgiving stuffing, office pizza parties, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I cannot but recommend the book "The queen of fats" for a fascinating history of the Omega-3 fats recommendations.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Queen-Fats- Omega-3s-California/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Queen-Fats- Omega-3s-California/dp/0520253809)</comment>


Bitcoin Address 1KVAHsKYTGwerk6RSMBotfQMrau26nfwWm - <AUTHOR> https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/1KVAHsKYTGwerk6RSMBotfQMrau26nfwWm <comment><USER3> That is a lot of BTC. Let's hear the conspiracy theories. Here's mine - <USER2> fact that something like this caused consternation is a feature not a bug. It is only noteworthy because it is publically viewable. How often does this happen in fiat? We just don't know in the same way.</comment>


Restaurant details and reviews app made in Flutter, Firebase - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ahmedgulabkhan/Foodspace <comment><AUTHOR> Made an app using Flutter and Firebase, where people can register and start exploring wide categories of restaurants present in their cities and also check the reviews and feedback for a specific restaurant. There is also a 'likes section' where all the restaurants liked by the user are displayed.</comment>