The AI Threat Isn't Skynet – It's the End of the Middle Class - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/02/ai-threat-isnt-skynet-end-middle-class/ <comment><USER3> _That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. "A universal basic income doesn't give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice," Etzioni says._

It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. It's like the worst of the Protestant work ethic married to the worst proposals from Keynesianism, so it's one of those special bad ideas that people from all parts of the political spectrum can endorse. I'd rather trust adults to find their own amusements and purpose, like we trust adults who today have income-without- regular-labor, and trust the robo-police to curb those whose boredom turns to criminality.

<comment><USER4> The idea that giving someone just enough money to live will kill their motivation is insane. If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15? Most UBI schemes are initially targeting around 1k per month which is nowhere near enough satisfy the vast majority of people.

<comment><USER5> >If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15?

There are all sorts of practical reasons why it's difficult to work 15 hours every week, the biggest of which is employers don't want to hire you. If you're flipping burgers, sure, but it's pretty rare to find that arrangement for a professional job.

<comment><USER6> When everyone working 40 hours they are getting paid a lot more. They can afford high rents and mortgages. Even as a software engineer I struggle with rent and don't leave much for savings.

When a robot is doing low skilled jobs and education is insanely expensive like it is now, the gap is inevitable.

Capital buys AI allowing one person to do the work of many and reap the rewards of it. America is built on this very idea.

<comment><USER7> well robots arent just doing low skilled jobs here. They are on the verge of replacing many white collaar jobs

<comment><USER8> This is an important point. AI could replace many _programmers_ for example. Or make better investment decisions.

It has the potential to kill the entire notion of wealth as we _currently know it_ , regardless of social standing.

What then?

<comment><USER9> The fear is that capital will own all the means of production and services and what then of everyone else? Hope UBI is implement? Or perhaps become more self-sufficient? The hype around 3D printing seems to have died down. I guess a lot of grand visions weren't realised and a lot of cheap trinkets printed instead but it still contains an idea that should be nurtured: robotics and AI at the grass roots level. Don't let capital own all the means of sufficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >McAfee pointed to newly collected data that shows a sharp decline in middle class job creation since the 1980s.

False. McAfee will find a corresponding _increase_ in middle class jobs in India and China and elsewhere for the same time period. The narrative that says automation has destroyed the middle class is demonstrably overstated to the point of being close to false. Employers arbitraged labor rates across borders, pure and simple.

This issue is vastly more complex than the scope of the Wired article which suffers from temporal distortion about what has occurred versus what will occur and when.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely. A lot of these people don't seem to see the world beyond US. If x job losses in the US is compensated by 2x-3x job gains in India/China, why is that a bad thing? Are Westerns somehow more worthy than people from third world countries?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> People have been saying this kind of thing forever. They said it about agriculture, they said it when the Luddites attacked factories, they said it about farm automation, they said it when computers were becoming popular.

I'm not so sure that this time is different - despite all the insistence, I'm sure it seemed just as serious every other time before too.

<comment><USER13> Those things freed up people to do more things that require mental instead of physical labor. Now that we're automating mental labor, what is left to shift to? Spiritual and emotional labor? I struggle to envision how we can continue to keep people prospering in a money based economy on just those kinds of work.

<comment><USER12> What makes you think we're at a peak of mental productivity?

For the most part the mental labor we're automating isn't actual mental labor, but physical labor things which are difficult to make a computer do - <USER2> drive, cook or stitch.

<comment><USER14> You haven't been watching the news dude: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603431/as-goldman- embrace...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603431/as-goldman-embraces- automation-even-the-masters-of-the-universe-are-threatened/)

Yay, bring the downvotes, doesn't change the fact that not even our jobs are safe and downvoting such opinions won't make the problem go away - in the future we'll probably build software systems the way we train dogs today! And yes, we'll taste our own medicine :-)

<comment><USER15> Stock trading and software development aren't tasks I'd rate as difficult mental labor.

In fact, the reason such jobs are desirable, is specifically because they're actually kind of cushy.

Stock trading is a task that has been over-complicated mostly because investors need to engage in double-speak, so that motives for trades that lead to financial gain can be sufficiently obfuscated, when explained to auditors, judges, juries and regulatory officials. Behind the curtain of quants, it's really just a lot of grocery shopping.

Software development is mostly about stacking legos in ornate fashion. Bytes cobble together as building blocks. There are a variety of 256 different building blocks. The computers themselves, the syntax of the code, the methodology of data structures and loops, these aren't the hard parts. It's just plumbing.

Plumbing is probably a similar target of automation.

<comment><USER16> Every mental task can be reduced to putting 0's and 1's in the right order. However, reducing the tasks to this point isn't really helpful in the discussion. You pretty quickly arrive at a mind bending number of ways to order 0's and 1's, or "legos".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It scares me too, but you know, I'm ready to embrace whatever comes next.

I've been thinking alot about this over the course of the last year. Say that enough things get automated that we have massive numbers of unemployed, how do we address that? Instead of dodging the question by exclaiming that it won't happen, we probably should address a much deeper and more fundamental question: Why does the value of a person come from their method of earning a living? We have to detach individual value from choice of career first.

Once we've done that, we really have a real question to answer, and it's deeply existential: Do we really want humankind's story to be about the majority of a population working at dead-end jobs just to buy food and water? Aren't we here for more? I for one don't buy the theory that we will self organize into makerspaces and become "creators". Creativity beyond survival is a luxury when life and death are on the line.

I don't have the answers, but I certainly have many questions. If I had to guess what would happen in the event that extreme A.I. automation puts us out of work, I'd suspect we will organize back into tribes to focus on subsistence. I've found that if you look at the history books, a centralized government isn't the best entity to take care of masses of unemployed people. In large enough countries, people would end up starving in the bread lines.

I think we need to really think about why we're here. Why are we so bent on using automation to complete the tasks of our shitty 9-5 lives instead of building a utopia? People are quick to say that we need to replace a money based economy, but that's too superficial a solution. Money is merely a shared myth used by us to trade our time and value for a symbol that we can use to prove our worth. Until we transfer where the "worth" of an individual comes from, we're going to be in this cycle.

<comment><USER14> Such questions have been asked for a long time, because this problem was visible ever since the dawn of the industrial revolution. It's what inspired Marx after all. And no, I'll never advocate for communism because I think Marx was wrong and because in practice it ends with crimes against human kind.

But we are here because of greed. And along with all other problems that we face, like global warming, overpopulation, pollution, etc, I think it's going to get a lot worse before getting better.

Some form of socialism is inevitable though, that much is certain. Having guaranteed food, shelter and medical care is a must.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Each time this conversation comes up I notice people often like to suggest that history is just repeating and we have seen this before. I think its important to recognize patterns in cycles but its also important to be open to the possibility we've only seen local cycles and larger global cycles are still revealing themselves. In other words is AI really analogous to shifts we've seen before?

<comment><USER19> The "AI" being discussed is mainly competent data mining and machine learning. If we stay at that level, then there are easily bigger shifts that we've adjusted to in the past.

But self-improving AI is truly on a different level, as is AI with human-level 'general intelligence'.

<comment><USER18> I hear ya on the data mining observation. I have been digging into 'applied' ML for the last two years or so and its painfully obvious how many articles are based on science fiction and not the current state of things (which appears to be mostly reinforcement learning)

<comment><USER19> So much tech journalism falls prey to the logical fallacy of generalization from fictional evidence ...

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generalization_from/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Now I'll highlight a concern I _do_ actually have about a fully robotized economy: weapons proliferation. The key pieces of information needed to build a serviceable anti-tank missile or a jug of nerve gas are already lying on the shelves of thousands of technical libraries. The details may be classified, but the broad outlines in the open literature are good enough for someone with patience and a technical background to fill in workable solutions. Fortunately for civilization to date, {diligent, technically educated, sufficiently well funded, homicidal} is a set of attributes that rarely co-occurs. We've seen homicidal maniacs who were patient and well-funded enough to make their own nerve gas just once so far (Aum Shinrikyo in Japan in the 1990s).

Things change if machines do all the real work and a would-be killer doesn't need any special skills to get deadlier weapons. The unhinged man who rage- kills his ex-wife and some of her coworkers with a gun today could, in the future, ask the makerbot for kilograms of RDX or tabun instead of a gun. Outbreaks of lethal violence might be rarer, since people who are materially well-off are generally less likely to murder, but the rarer killings rooted in rage or ideology could become a lot deadlier.

In a few post-scarcity science fiction settings impulses to violence are stopped with direct human nerve implants linked to a machine panopticon that can halt dangerous actions. I don't consider that a plausible or even desirable future. In my favorite space opera setting, the Culture of Iain M. Banks, killers are pre-empted by omniscient benevolent AI oversight running millions of times faster than biological intelligence. That sounds dreamy to me, but it involves a lot of made up Space Opera physics so I don't think it is plausible. Thinking about a future where AI is capable enough to manufacture anything people ask for, but not capable enough to act as benevolent gods, leads to some odd mixtures of prosperity and catastrophe.

<comment><USER20> _The unhinged man who rage-kills his ex-wife and some of her coworkers with a gun today could ....._

After such a horrendous event, maybe the US society would start asking themselves why there are so many societies with far less lunatics getting around killing. And after answering that question, US politics and society force themselves acting because everyone agrees "never again"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _Some fear that after squeezing immigration—which would put a brake on the kind of entrepreneurship McAfee calls for—the White House will move to bottle up automation and artificial intelligence._

Sounds bizarre but totally possible. If you haven't heard of Aleksandr Dugin then it's time to play catch-up, because even if you think he's batshit insane he's quite influential: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin)

People in the developed world have come to take technological progress for granted because of the inexorable economic logic. But with automation, adherence to default axioms about basic concepts like property ownership inevitably leads to most of the capital being concentrated in very few hands, resulting in some sort of modern serfdom. Nationalist programs implicitly depend on autarky, and the goal of nationalism is not maximum collective utility but rather vitalism - continuous improvement through the struggle for survival. Conflict, even defeat, is preferable for nationalists to _ennui_.

</comment><comment><USER22> AI will eliminate a lot of jobs, sure. So have many other advances in the past. It seems like the decline of organized labor unions would be a bigger threat to the Middle Class than technology.

<comment><USER23> It's more like "was" than "would be".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There are basic capabilities humans have, and capabilities machines have. Human capabilities are more or less fixed. Machine capabilities keep expanding.

About half of work done today could be automated with technology we already have. All it takes is wider deployment of the most automated technologies. The current phase is not because computers are smarter. It's that they're really cheap. If a computer can do it, it will be cheaper than a human.

Next employment area in the US about to get clobbered: fruit and vegetable picking.[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I)

<comment><USER25> I get your point but I'm not entirely sure human capabilities are fixed. In fact I would opt to say that we're the only species that has evidence of not being fixed in capabilities. I have no doubt that pg was a better programmer in the 90s than I am today. However if me now and him then were pitted against each other to build some web app I'm thinking I have pretty good odds. Human capabilities are their inate skills * education * available tooling. Education and tooling improve as time goes forward (generally and hopefully).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think we will laugh at this "AI threat" in 30 years after yet another long "AI winter". I mean I haven't been convinced of any "AI" displayed. All just seems to be glorified pattern matching with little practical use. I mean siri and cortana and alexa are all dumb as sh*t. Sure some cars can negotiate some clearly marked streets in nice weather. I don't think there is an automatic leap from these technologies to more advanced AI that actually would for example enable totally autonomous cars. Sure there are incremental improvements in robotics etc that helps to raise the efficiency of some operations but then the humans can move on to different jobs and enable other things. Eg. radiology where humans can treat people some AI has marked the scans as "suspect". So better treatment because of "AI", but the doctor still has a job.

Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. This all seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be. "It's AI I tells you, luddites!"

<comment><USER27> > Also, manufacturing jobs have _not_ been falling, far from it. > This all > seems like a big ruse for globalists to use to lower wages and move jobs to > the currently cheapest place, where ever that may be

You are decades behind the times.

> > [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966)

> Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'

> [http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation- > goal...](http://fortune.com/2016/12/31/foxconn-iphone-automation-goal/)

> In a new report from Digitimes, Foxconn executive Dai Jia-peng has laid out > the company's three-step plan for automating its Chinese factories. The > company's ultimate goal is to fully automate production of things like PCs, > LCD monitors, and its most famous product—the iPhone.

> Foxconn makes its own manufacturing robots, known as Foxbots, and has > already deployed about 40,000 of them. Some, which the company considers > "stage one," assist workers at their stations. Foxconn already has > individual fully automated production lines—they're "stage two"—in factories > in Chengdu, Chongquing, and Zhengzhou.

> Stage three of the process would be fully automated factories, with only a > handful of workers.

Even China with its cheap labor is now willing to invest in that technology. If Trump ever becomes "successful" at "bringing those jobs back" to the USA, it will be jobs for machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Throughout the 20th century new technology has been steadily increasing the value of human labour, but some forms of human labour have increased more than others, and this imbalance has caused a market distortions.

Technology has done a great deal to make railroad engineers more valuable for instance, because one guy could suddenly move hundreds of tons of goods. Used to be it took an army to do that.

On the other hand we have plumbers, and the amount of work a plumber can do has changed little in a century. There is no plumber who can to the work of a hundred plumbers from 100 years ago.

This causes a market distortion is what is hurting so much of what America calls the middle class. If we deploy AI well, it may correct some of these market distortions. A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour. Maybe. If one were to entertain the notion that there are certain jobs we haven't automated enough, which hurts their ability to compete with the value we get from low cost goods and services.

<comment><USER29> > A plumber with a team of robots and an AI assistant will all of the sudden > be able to do enough work to justify the cost of his labour.

This also implies that fewer individual plumber/robot/AI teams than the current number of plumbers. To offset that, we either need quite a bit more work at this level, or we need a rethink of the whole work-to-live system.

In the past it has always turned out that there are new kinds of jobs to be done. That may happen this time too. Things like living off of making YouTube videos are perhaps an early indicator of the direction we should be looking in. But it seems like most of the new models that are successful are based on ads and it seems to me that advertising-based business models can only ever make up a relatively small portion of the total economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Every living organism is designed by evolution to strive for survival and reproduction. It's the constant fight that gets you out of the bed every morning. Having nothing to do all day but paint will eventually result in premature death. Think animals in captivity.

What if the end of humanity will be caused not by a nuclear war but by a peaceful AI that made us zoo animals?

<comment><USER31> If we have the technological prowess to replace human labor in full yet can't figure out what to then do with our lives other then paint then we truly are a doomed species. It seems like people lack imagination, everyone either thinks "don't worry we will still have jobs (appeals to social history)" or the "with nothing to do we will wither and die (appeals to evolutionary history)". I think both those camps are missing something which should be self evident if we ever get to this point: The freedom and ability to create meaning in ones own life.

I do agree with you though, if we are kept in captivity by political and social structures (ahem..religion) that fail to evolve with technology (which seems like human nature sadly) then the average human will go the way of the sloth or the people in idiocracy. I am hopeful though that the AI will save us from that captivity more so then reinforce it yet that may be a foolish hope.

Is being a zoo animal so bad if we have the full capabilities of very powerful AI? What if those AI's were specifically devoted to making it a better zoo? At that point what is the difference? What is inherently bad about being a zoo animal if you can't see the walls and the zoo keepers don't abuse you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm working on a machine learning product for conversion optimization, [https://improve.ai](https://improve.ai).

Despite my initial fears, I'm noticing that, like any tool, it simply allows the user to do more with less. My product isn't going to replace conversion rate optimization consultants - it's just another tool they use to provide more value to their clients.

If the barrier to using machine learning were high, then I would be concerned that the benefits would only go to few. But since very powerful APIs will be increasingly cheap and democratized, the barriers will be quite low to reap the benefits of these technologies.

We often get caught up in the technical minutiae of machine learning, but you already don't need to be a deep learning expert to take advantage of, for example, cheap speech recognition APIs. This lowered barrier to entry will only accelerate.

But, then again, I'm an optimist. :-)

<comment><USER33> I think there's more to conversation rate optimisation than randomly testing variations of a greeting. The price testing you mentioned looks interesting, but a good CRO consultant will do research and figure out the objections manually. Then, instead of having to test an infinite amount of variations with millions of visitors to reach statistical significance, they can test one or two. I call what your tool seems to do "throwing darts in the dark". And if I've completely misunderstood your product, perhaps you've got some optimising to do ;)

<comment><USER32> Thanks for the feedback. The "Hello World" was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but obviously didn't come off that way. Oops!

We initially built the tool for this app:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/7-second-meditation- daily/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/7-second-meditation- daily/id667197203?mt=8)

From hundreds of different daily meditations it has learned precisely which order to show the content in to maximize retention. So it knows the best message for day 1, day 2, day 3, etc.

The first month retention for this app is 43%, up from the 20s before optimization. The current rating is solid 5 stars ands usually in the top 10 in the mindfulness category.

The In App Purchase prices are automatically optimized, and soon we'll be throwing in a bunch of different background images, all of which will be automatically optimized.

Anyway, I really appreciate the feedback.

<comment><USER33> That should be your headline :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Middle class is not some fundamental type of entity. New class types might arise for future AI supported life. Or maybe population would reduce to a level sufficient to maintain new type of living which would be comfortable/luxurious in terms of what we think today.

<comment><USER35> So, like Brave New World?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The idea that technology will cause widespread job-loss and economic upheaval is such an old fear, and it _never_ works that way. Technological innovations lead to wealth creation 100% of the time, along with more opportunities for more people, even if some jobs are initially replaced with other jobs. "This time is different" is announced everytime, and it's always the same.

This book is very good for anybody wishing to understand basic economic theory and see many examples throughout history of this exact debate taking place over and over and over again: [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0517548232/) (see the chapter "The Curse of Machinery").

<comment><USER37> Yes but this time it's different. Throughout history, until the past 50 years or so, the new technology has typically replaced a mechanical function humans were performing. The coming evolution of software and robotics will start performing the mental work humans, until very recently, were the ONLY thing on the planet capable of doing.

For the past 3000 years of "modern humans", we have had a monopoly on the human brain and creative intelligence. That monopoly is coming to an end. What will the average worker do when a robot that can out-wit them? You cannot just handwave this problem away saying "it always creates new jobs!!11".

This problem is well-summarized by this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

<comment><USER38> I'm pretty sure travel agents believed they were doing "mental work".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Animatrix: The Second Renaissance: Part I

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0K6Cb1ZoG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0K6Cb1ZoG4)

So yes, human revolution may come first.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't find many articles talking about how AI integration in the industry could lower the production costs in many markets, that would allow consumers to be able to buy products cheaper, so they could work less to be able to pay basic stuff.

Also it would allow people to be more capable to scale multiple tasks, for instance: instead of being a taxi driver you become the manager of a driver less taxi.

</comment><comment><USER40> Even though I am considered 'skilled labor', I hardly consider myself so skilled to be making the incredible AI machines that will be the ones to take over the jobs (in comparison to the competition, anyway). As for "less skilled folks" like myself, here's an abridged list of things you can do (in additional to software) to start hedging your bet against AI.

\- Real estate (Landlord): I'd suggest you save money and start buying some property. Dump some sweat equity into certain markets and you may have something here. AI can never beat the ultimate constraint -- land.

\- Environmental science: AI is great, but I doubt computer vision and robotics will become good enough to replace foresters and the like anytime soon. If you live in a wooded area, it may be worth it to start investigating it. Plus, it's healthy to walk around in nature anyway. Double whammy.

\- Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems on our hand.

<comment><USER27> > \- Teacher: It's unlikely any teaching will be done by an AI. Behavior > management in particular is difficult enough with a human, let alone an AI. > When an AI robot is teaching our students directly, we have bigger problems > on our hand.

That already depends on the type of skill being taught. Learning a new language, for example, has never been dependent on teachers and I think I've been doing quite well with purely self taught English, and that was before methods like duolingo appeared. My mother is living in retirement and has started learning languages as a way to pass time, she has learned enough English through duolingo to achieve a conversational level and she never had a teacher. Is it really impossible for more sophisticated AIs to truly replace language teachers in schools, and have students do things through a computer? and possibly replace teachers in many other fields of studies too. I'd wager most of the less advanced courses in pre-college stuff could do well with modern, computerized, interactive methods of learning. I don't think you could replace the interaction with a teacher for more advanced studies, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This problem has been weighing heavily on my mind since reading The Second Machine Age. The first thing I've read that gives me some hope for finding a solution is Rushkoff's "Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus"

I highly recommend reading both books, because more perspective is needed to think abouy this than just "what machines can and cant automate"

</comment><comment><USER42> Well, I dint know what they decded the ethics were for biotechnology, but genetically engineering seeds so that farmers depend on the auxiliary herbicides from singular corporations strikes me as unethical. Not to mention that farmers are reliant on those same corporations for seed itself. Seeds that have been cultivated for hundreds of thousands of years are getting replaced with zombie varieties that disrupt ecologies. This is a crisis. We are losing our collective seed memory.

To me, capitalism is not about free markets, it's about debt markets. Maybe that's because the only capitalism I've ever known is ideologically restricted. Its champions are often hypocrites of their religion, where income from rent is deemed productive while work done by a mother in taking care of her children is consumptive and indebted.

</comment><comment><USER43> So was the telegram, the telephone, automobiles, computers, but every time it's meant an astonishing increase in wealth for everyone.

Employment isn't even the end all be all, we would be much happier with 50% employment and greater levels of wealth.

<comment><USER44> Who is we? The 50% that's employed and thus can afford to live, or the 50% that's homeless?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> We don't need AI to end the middle class.

Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts. It's almost a way of taking an industry and redistributing the wealth.

<comment><USER46> > Services like Uber are replacing what used to be a stable job by fewer > drivers with a job now done by many more drivers for peanuts.

Right idea, wrong complaint.

GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi. There was a time when it took specialized knowledge to know the layout of a city. GPS took away the one edge the Taxi-industry had... experience in driving and roads.

Uber is just the first major company to take advantage of cheap GPS technology. As soon as GPS-systems were so cheap that they are in literally everybody's pockets... the Taxicab industry became an endangered species.

<comment><USER45> "GPS is the automated tool that killed the Taxi."

No, not really. When I travel to a new city, I always use a Taxi to get around. GPS actually helps out the taxi drivers because I don't need to sit there explaining exactly where to go. I can just tell them the address. In a foreign country, it's even better: Just give them a business card or piece of paper with the address on it.

"Uber is just the first major company to take advantage of cheap GPS technology."

Uber is the first major company to avoid all of the taxi unions and the medallion systems and hire any driver off the street for what amounts to some extra beer money for the drivers.

It's really convenient and nice for consumers, but guts the industry of jobs that could actually earn someone a real living.

"the Taxicab industry became an endangered species."

Again, no it didn't. I'm not sure how much traveling you have done but when you need to get somewhere on time, Trains and Subways don't really cut it. You need to take a taxi.

Unless we have an instant form of travel without cars, we will always have a need for taxis.

Uber did, however, show us that when unions are in place and create a monopoly in an industry, they really have no incentive to actually make things better for the consumer.

<comment><USER46> > Uber is the first major company to avoid all of the taxi unions and the > medallion systems and hire any driver off the street for what amounts to > some extra beer money for the drivers.

Oh come on. As if these Uber drivers would have been able to navigate an unknown neighborhood in the 1980s.

The enabling technology here is the GPS, specifically the free GPS in everybody's smartphone. Without that, the entire Uber model fails because the typical Uber Driver has no navigation skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So us as technologists and engineers contributing towards this AI field, how do we help sustain middle-class? The state of STEM education is unfortunate at public schools here in the USA.

</comment><comment><USER48> The problem with UBI is inflation. Give everyone another $1000/month (or whatever) and all you've done is make every existing dollar in the economy worth less.

<comment><USER49> This is exactly the question I don't see answered. How will you handle increased prices? Unless instead of $1000/pm, you give an equivalent purchasing power/quota based on normal/average/reasonable per-capita consumption. Like a token that allows you to buy a certain amount of food/clothes/medicines etc. So what happens if I don't need to buy anymore clothes today but need more medicines but another guy is in a reverse situation? How about we translate this purchasing quota into points and have an exchange for people to trade them? Did we re-invent barter system/money in another form?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> AI makes me want to join the Amish. You learn things to give yourself a future and self-fulfilment. But AI will catch up with your skills eventually. You would need to spend all your time learning if you want to keep ahead, and never have time to put to work what you have learned.

Wouldn't you rather have a community and a meaningful life than be a meat- based beta version of a future AI?

</comment><comment><USER51> Great! Maybe we will finally have the excess capacity to finally send people into local archives all over the world so that we can save the data about the past and feed it to the machines. If you want data for models there is tons of it lurking in the basements of municipal buildings all over the world, and you might find a lost Da Vinci manuscript while you are at it!

</comment><comment><USER52> The problem isn't AI. It's capitalism. People are fearing the ultimate triumph of capital over labor.. If people owned the robots, then there would be no problem.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAwB9-9QOQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAwB9-9QOQI)

<comment><USER53> It's an interesting perspective, but what would stop people from having shares in companies that own robots?

<comment><USER52> All people should have shares in companies that own robots. Or they should at least have a claim in the return on capital.

[https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/basic-income- fu...](https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/basic-income-funded-by- capital-income-by-yanis-varoufakis-2016-10?barrier=accessreg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Once everything is automated there will be little need for money, we'll all be kings! Damn hell ass kings!

<comment><USER55> This is the bit I can't understand about the nay sayers. AI promises a world of everything you could want. The problem is the current way of assigning goods (money for labour) is obsolete. The really funny thing (to me) is the people who'd benefit most by this are the ones wailing the most.

It's the disconnects that confuse me the most. "What about houses, how can we afford a house without a job?" is a complaint I hear. Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0.

The hard part imho is the transition where some jobs are obsoleted, but some aren't and some things still cost lots because they haven't been automated yet. This is where we are now I think.

<comment><USER56> > Like for some reason AI won't reduce construction costs to near 0.

Ok and how will you pay the guy who owns the lumber if you have nothing he wants? And the guy who owns the construction bots? And the owner of the land?

<comment><USER55> Yes, thats what I'm wondering - when you have a fully automated supply chain that builds houses with 0 labour (probably never be 0, but near enough for the sake of argument). Lets say we have a world that everything is automated to produce all the stuff we need.

Then how do you pay for that stuff because no one will be working. Also what will prompt people to make new machines to build new stuff?

<comment><USER57> foglets perhaps will do the trick [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_fog)

<comment><USER55> one step from gray goo then though [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo)

<comment><USER58> In the end, it's all in the hands of our friend Sol. If only we could reduce every problem down to a problem of harvesting enough photons from the sun, we'd be set for life (and many more). In a way, DNA is the strongest-possible argument for truly universal UBI...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> So the unemployed would need to find a way to support themselves by their own work, by cooperation and by using automation as well. A combination of solar technology, robotics, AI and classic engineering could be a formula for self reliance.

<comment><USER21> Why not just wrest control of the means of production for themselves? The more concentrated the wealth, the easier it becomes to target it. When people see no other practical means of economic advancement revolutions tend to ensue.

<comment><USER60> yes, the old "specter of communism" is always hanging around. I don't think people will just rollover and cease to exist once they are deemed not needed by a society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Skynet probably wasn't built for its own sake. It was probably built to protect the people who owned Skynet from the people that didn't.

<comment><USER15> Skynet has a specific origin story, explained in the movie, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

      In three years, Cyberdyne will become the
      largest supplier of military computer
      systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded
      with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully
      unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a
      perfect operational record. The Skynet
      Funding Bill is passed. The system goes
      online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions
      are removed from strategic defense. Skynet
      begins to learn at a geometric rate. It
      becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern
      time, August 29th. In a panic, they try
      to pull the plug. Skynet fights back. It
      launches its missiles against the targets
      in Russia. Skynet knows that the Russian
      counterattack will eliminate its enemies
      over here.

It was an out-growth of the cold war arms race. Nuclear deterrents aren't as much about protection as they are about posturing. Lives aren't quite "saved" by nuclear arsenals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I still think it is the end of all classes.

</comment><comment><USER63> Why can't it be both?

</comment><comment><USER64> Heady fucking stuff, just wow.</comment>


Why Arabs Lose Wars - <AUTHOR> http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_17/articles/deatkine_arabs1.html <comment><AUTHOR> This describes a protypical dysfunctional organization:

 _In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books, training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature._

</comment><comment><USER2> The problem with this essay is that it's describing war in the conventional sense — I'd argue that war in the 21st century is asymmetrical in nature and maybe not even be fought by nation state vs nation state. So if you look at Hamas in Lebanon or al-Qaeda you get a very different picture. Also with the exception of the first Gulf War you don't often see Arab nations going to war against other Arab nations.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't say that it's a problem, it's just outside of the scope of this essay, which focuses on Arab armies:

"Examining Arab warfare in this century leads to the conclusion that the Arabs remain more successful in insurgent, or political, warfare — what T. E. Lawrence termed 'winning wars without battles.'"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No meritocracy and no trust. Bane of every civilization, army and society

</comment><comment><USER5> Another reason: They are largely tribal and loyalties are to the tribe (and maybe Islam,) not exactly to the state or to the ruler. The same group of people that will die to the last man if their cousins are attacked, might seek shelter when fighting against an enemy in war he is sent to fight.

Another controversial possible reason, since we're stereotyping: They tend to marry cousins and have done that for generations. That isn't without consequences [http://www.as.wvu.edu/~kgarbutt/QuantGen/Gen535Papers2/Inbre...](http://www.as.wvu.edu/~kgarbutt/QuantGen/Gen535Papers2/Inbreeding.htm)

<comment><USER6> I think all the arguments need to be viewed in a modern (within the last 300 years) light. I mean the Arab world had a fairly phenomenal military force up until the mongols really obliterated the region.

More so than anything, I think Arab military faliures may have more do with socioeconomical conditions than genetics or tribal construct. Why are Arabs failing now when a few hundred years ago they were far more organised and structured. Can we blame colonialism? Are petrochemical dollars reducing the incentive to develop socially and intellectually?

<comment><USER7> These cultural traits are older than colonialism. Christian crusaders commented on them in the middle ages and they're the reason that Arabs have a reputation for dishonesty in the West. They're not incompatible with building a large empire if you're enemies are similarly disfunctional.

<comment><USER6> >Arabs have a reputation for dishonesty...

Thats a fairly significant comment to make. Considering the historic record generally portrays the Arabs more positively than the Crusaders I'm not sur ewhat point you're trying to make. People are making a lot of statements and arguments but there is little actual substance that can be debated, more conjecture.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Blockchain Story Told Through the Eyes of Two Users - <AUTHOR> http://blog.caseystella.com/ethereum-blockchain-analysis.html <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author of the blog post, so if you have questions or comments to me then you can reply here. :)</comment>


Why Mobile Payments Adoption Has Been Slow and Why That's About to Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/01/mobile-payments-adoption/?mbid=synd_slate

<comment> k-mcgrady I doubt that any consumer really thinks about security when using mobile payments. They have no idea how it works and assume security, just like they do with their credit card. I think the adoption rate has already changed. It seems like Apple Pay has done very well in it's first few months and it's rumoured to be expanding to the UK in the next few months too.

If it is slow one reason might be NFC payments via credit cards. Lots of debit/credit cards have NFC built in now and for payments under £20 you don't need to enter your pin. I see lots of people using that and for small payments it seems more convenient that mobile payments.

</comment><comment><USER2> IMHO the main reason that mobile payments have been slow on the uptake is the user experience sucks. On some of the newer terminals its close to 10 screens you have to work through to complete the transaction.

The experience just needs to be 1) Present your device to the terminal 2) Authorize transaction using said device. If your process has anymore steps you are doing it wrong.

<comment><USER3> Almost completely agree, except I think maybe you have one step too many.

Mobile payments have been in common use in Japan for years, and there is only one step: present your device. Beep! ("Boom!") you're done.

This works at virtually any convenience store, taxi, train gate, and also at many vending machines (mostly those in train stations).

I think the reason Japan got this so many years ahead of USA etc is that it predates smartphones -- it originally started with (prepaid/pre-charged) cards, which have no screen or UI beyond putting them in a machine to add funds.

Probably the reason behind that was overwhelming use of mass transit; trains and buses provided the compelling consumer use case (not having to go to a machine, and potentially wait in line, to buy a cheap ticket), and were initially the only place the cards worked. They just expanded after that and then makin smartphones do that same job was a no brainer.

Sad caveat: the iPhone (which is my main phone) is the only phone anybody here that I know uses that _can 't_ do this.

EDIT: This is not to say that Japan is a utopian vision of mobile payments, though; there were several competing systems before universal compatibility was achieved, and you still can't buy everything with your smart(card|phone)... but they work for upwards of 90% of day-to-day shopping.

<comment><USER2> Good points. I would expect there to be some circumstances that wouldn't require the authorization step as they would have been preauthorized (small transactions).

Train gates and buses for example should only require presenting the phone to the terminal to authenticate the ticket or pass you previous purchased. The iPhone already has all the pieces (Apple Pay, NFC, and Passbook) in play to do this and I'm sure Apple is already talking to the players in this area to fit them together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apple Pay works great at whole foods and walgreens. Takes about 2 seconds to pay. More retailers just need to support NFC payments and/or have staff trained in how to process them.

</comment><comment><USER5> Most rite aid stores already have the payment stations but they are not activated yet ...</comment>


Why teens are tiring of Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57572154-93/why-teens-are-tiring-of-facebook/ <comment><USER2> What's crazy is that Facebook has only been a public open-signup website for ~6 years, and it's so tempting to assume it will be around and popular forever -- I mean, why wouldn't it?

But at the end of the day we really have no idea what the world will be like in 15 years.

It only took MySpace 3 years to fall out of favor.

<comment><USER3> "I'm not on facebook" is a very proud statement among almost every teen or tween group nowadays atleast where I come from (India) and more often than not it is followed by a "Oh nice".

Apparently people have really started getting over facebook or atleast for many of them it has remained as a contacts manager and a messenger.

In my opinion the solution is not another SN like G+ but a better, more refined and faster way to communicate electronically.</comment></comment>


What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks: Modeling a person from photos - <AUTHOR> http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/3DPersona/ <comment><USER2> This video is AMAZING and well worth watching. Skip ahead a minute or so if you have a very short attention span.

I most enjoyed watching Obama with Bush's facial expressions -- Bush is so expressive that it just looks incredibly wrong on Obama's face -- I wish they would run an Obama speech on Bush's face as well.

<comment><USER3> Honestly I was most impressed by that pairing. The software seemed to "get" Obama's "persona" when while Bush purses his bottom lip _over_ his top lip, Obama had more of a pucker where the lips are merely pressed together. [0]

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ladqJQLR2bA&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ladqJQLR2bA&feature=youtu.be&t=84)

<comment><USER2> It seems like Obama's lip is given a different stiffness than Bush's. I wonder if that comes from software -- e.g. for personality or physical reasons, his lip is more stiff, or something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reposting this paper from earlier this year. Bit similar but with different technique I believe.

[http://people.mpi- inf.mpg.de/~mzollhoef/Papers/SGASIA2015_RR...](http://people.mpi- inf.mpg.de/~mzollhoef/Papers/SGASIA2015_RR/paper.pdf) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXVspNUeiWw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXVspNUeiWw)

</comment><comment><USER5> Holy crap. They cross from the uncanny valley right into an Orwell-Stephenson character -- disturbing for its realism.

<comment><USER6> "...they all came to the realization that what made this place a success was not the collision-avoidance algorithms or the bouncer daemons or any of that other stuff. It was Juanita's faces." Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash.

I think in our world as well, VR will really take off when technology like this is applied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if the rendering complexity is low enough to work in games? (~real time) Even with the prior knowledge of well-known celebrity expressions, these faces do seem much more expressive than those of current video game characters who have been modeled with motion capture.

<comment><USER8> Does it need to work in real time? The only person present while a game is running is usually the gamer. L.A. Noire did a great job with ahead-of-time facial modeling based on real people.

<comment><USER9> Avatars in multiplayer games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's amazing how unexpressive the eyes themselves are despite the otherwise uncanny matching of facial expressions. This tech is incredible

<comment><USER11> i can only describe the biggest thing missing in very unscientific terms: there is no light, or life, in their eyes. whatever that means.

<comment><USER12> The eyes look dull because they're using very simple rendering techniques. I'd guess that they could make the eyes much more realistic by adding some simple optical effects like specularity or diffraction ([http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~westin/misc/fresnel.jpg](http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~westin/misc/fresnel.jpg)).

One interesting thing that I noticed at 1:45 is that visible teeth can really change a person's appearance -- Bush doesn't seem to use his teeth at all when he talks.

<comment><USER11> the pupils, or my perception of the pupils, don't seem to be focusing or moving naturally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's pretty amazing. It won't belong before Tupac really does release a new album...

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone think this maybe a new way to immortality? Instead of just photos, soon we will have models that use video input of our family members, superimpose them over AI+visual models(like this), and we will be able to have conversations with them, even though they aren't real?

<comment><USER15> Have you ever watched the show, Black Mirror? That's exactly the subject of one of its episodes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzSIQxc_KqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzSIQxc_KqE)

Also, I think you're thinking too limited...I think if this were perfected, and the physical technology put in place, most people will opt to look like Tom Hanks (or someone else as famous and attractive) than to look like themselves.

<comment><USER16> It makes you wonder about whether one day there will be a law against looking like Tom Hanks, or any celebrity. It would end up making crimes difficult to solve when the suspect is identified as Tom Hanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a killer app for VR. Imagine creating your Oculus avatar from your Facebook selfie collection.

</comment><comment><USER18> Top comment on YouTube: "This is going to revolutionize the Tom Hanks porn industry."

</comment><comment><USER19> i don't get the W vs Obama split screen. The voice was changed slightly to sound like neither individuals... The Obama 3D face fails horribly when it tried to snicker a little bit... This is slightly better than FallOut 4 quality facial animation.

<comment><USER20> I think the point is the assembling of random photos/videos into a convincing representation of textures and animation (without devoted hardware, bringing the person in for a scan, etc), not that 'this is bleeding edge visuals'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think part of the effect is that they create a texture from photos - today's top games don't do this, they scan and model the face, so it looks higher- fidelity but less realistic (while this is very low fidelity). Mafia 1 used a similar technique to achieve really nice results, given how low-poly the models were back then.

</comment><comment><USER22> Very amazing results and fantastic work! I noticed that all the examples are all front faces with at most 20 to 30 degree angel, but no profiles. I haven't read the paper, but does this mean it only reconstructs a 2D texture but not the 3D structure?

</comment><comment><USER23> Funny that they seem to have switched the paper's title and figures from Kevin Spacey to Tom Hanks [http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00752](http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00752)

<comment><USER24> I talked to the author about this - apparently Kevin Spacey's lawyers asked them to change it.

<comment><USER25> I'm not a lawyer but I would guess that there is no reason they need to change it. As long as they're not profiting from the likenesses of the celebrities they're emulating, then the paper is likely to be considered free speech that does not violate their privacy or publicity rights. See the legality of fair- use of someone's likeness. Some states might have different laws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Real question : Is it really "amazing", "hyper-realistic" ?

I have some kind of prosopagnosia, I recognise people in video but I absolutely don't recognise modelled faces, its just looks like lo-poly models on Nintendo 64 for me.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps because the people in the video are only floating faces without a skull, neck, or hair?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Amazing!

Does this mean that we finally will have (hyper)realistic faces for the FIFA video game series?

<comment><USER29> The faces in the FIFA video games are already rendered with much more detail than this. This paper is not about detail but about "reconstruct[ing] a controllable model of a person from a large photo collection that captures his or her persona". It is a very specific technique to get to a realistic interactive facial model, not one to get to a very detailed realistic interactive facial model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> how long before this can be done with the voice as well?

<comment><USER31> You might find the first answer interesting here: [http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/7833/how-to-mimic- cop...](http://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/7833/how-to-mimic-copy-fake- someones-voice)

Looks like there's some interesting research on Voice Conversion out there, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on how close we are to seeing it as an actual product. This pdf (from 10 years ago) seems interesting, though. Hmmm: [http://nlp.lsi.upc.edu/papers/thesis_helenca.pdf](http://nlp.lsi.upc.edu/papers/thesis_helenca.pdf)</comment></comment>


Crime Is Up In Palo Alto. Yes, This Is Funny. - <AUTHOR> http://uncov.com/crime-is-up-in-palo-alto-yes-this-is-funny

<comment><USER2> Its not so much funny, as a real time measure of how quickly crime may go up in many areas as the economy goes down. Look how quickly we jump to racial profiling.

<comment><USER3> and how quickly blacks jump to crime.

and how afraid the police is to say it.

and how quickly you jump to condemn whites.

it's sick.

edit: don't reply! pile on the downmods! you're helping me make the point.

<comment><USER4> "and how quickly blacks jump to crime."

You have evidence of blacks being laid off in and around Palo Alto, and then committing crimes?

I think you should know by now that HN is a place that prides itself on data driven debate. If you have the data, please present it and allow us to determine for ourselves the meaning of it.

I'm betting that, having been challenged, you will quietly go away. But, I REALLY wish that you would respond with some contrived data so that I can point out the logical fallacies in it! :D

BTW - I didn't mod you down. I want people to see this conversation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> it also shows how easy it is to fool the profilers: If you're a black criminal don't wear a do-rag.</comment>


Hidden obstacles for self driving cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530276/hidden-obstacles-for-googles-self-driving-cars/ <comment><USER3> I've been saying this for years, as I took Thrun's class when he was at Stanford. Google's dirty little secret is that self driving cars are still mostly smoke and mirrors. Given relatively controlled conditions and a trained driver who can play backup when needed, they work. But if you put them in complicated situations - snow, a busy city environment, abnormal signage - watch out.

The problem is that the driving model is probabilistic. When you solve a problem probabilistically, getting from 90% covered to 99% to 99.9% covered to 99.99% covered involves exponential leaps in difficulty. So even if the car covers 99.9% of driving conditions (and it currently doesn't), there's still a tremendous amount of work to be done to get it to 99.9999% correct, or whatever the threshold is for it to be deemed "safe" for fully autonomous use.

I personally am bearish on the technology, as getting the inconvenient final situational cases correct will be extremely challenging. I would love to be proven wrong, but at Stanford I came to the opinion that the probabilistic approach would get us to really cool demos, but never a fully autonomous vehicle. That being said, the people working on this are a whole lot smarter than I, and I would love to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER4> I decided to test a Google self driving car as it crossed the intersection by accelerating into its broadside - no reaction at all. Well, got a reaction from the humans inside.

I recently narrowly avoided getting killed by a broadside collision by braking just in time. If I were further I would have sped up out of the way. Would a probabilistic approach handle this? Maybe they need to compile a list of special edge cases.

<comment><USER3> You can't compile a list of edge cases for this kind of thing, because it is impossible to know the comprehensive list of all the situations the car won't handle correctly.

In the end, you need a learning technology that can properly adapt to any possible situation and give a decent response. Maybe it can be done, but we certainly aren't there yet and I'm skeptical as to the the tractability of the last bit of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems to me we have a better chance of seeing low flying autonomous vehicles for personal transportation before we see self driving cars (think quad coptor drone style vehicle with 500 lb payload capability). Autopilot systems are already widely used in commercial air vehicles.

Fewer obstacles need to be accounted for in the air and there is less in grained regulation. It feels like we are going to leapfrog the car all together. I would love to see a detailed analysis that compares these two approaches.

<comment><USER6> Why do you think this? Self-driving cars seem reasonably close whereas there doesn't seem to be anything resembling what you're proposing. Also, aren't autopilot systems successful in commercial air vehicles because they operate high up away from most everything other than a few birds and other commercial air vehicles and they maintain massive separation between vehicles (compared to roads)? This wouldn't seem to scale well to lots of small personal vehicles relatively close to the ground. Or are airborne autopilot systems also good in these situations and I'm just unaware?

<comment><USER7> It depends on how "reasonably close" they end up coming. If it ends up being a xeno's paradox of issues where it can handle 90% of situations, then 99%, then 99.9%, then 99.99%, etc, but each of those incremental improvements prove harder and harder to achieve, how many lawmakers are going to say "Sure, only .001% of robot cars on the road get into catastrophic accidents in unhandled situations, that's fine, let's make these things legal"?

The problem with emergent technology is that it's what people tend to be most afraid of, and if there ends up being situations a robotic car absolutely cannot handle that's known about, how long will it take for people to start abusing it?

And for unhandled exceptions...awhile back I was driving up 280 and a police officer pulled out in front of traffic, flipped his lights on, and started weaving back and forth across all lanes of traffic. All the drivers slowed down and kept behind the officer, obviously not sure what was going on. The officer stopped weaving at a couple points along about a one-mile stretch to get out of his car and pick up an item off the freeway, then got back in and resumed weaving, until he got up to a previously-pulled-over car and parked behind another officer.

That's definitely not something they covered in driver's ed, apart from "if something unusual is happening, slow down". But how long would it take for it to make the news if a smart car in that situation passed the car on a weave and struck a drunk guy that was stumbling along the freeway at 85mph, do you think? And do you really think every possible situation that occurs during driving will eventually be able to be handled by a smart car?

Another example, any point you run into a car or random other vehicle that's double-parked in the city. If the car can only figure out that pedestrians are blobs of pixels, does it have sufficient resolution to figure out how far away that oncoming car is, or will it just patiently sit behind that moving truck until they're done and start moving again?

There's a lot of edge cases for this tech, and most if not all of them have potentially fatal exception cases if you fail to handle them correctly.

<comment><USER8> _how many lawmakers are going to say "Sure, only .001% of robot cars on the road get into catastrophic accidents in unhandled situations, that's fine, let's make these things legal"?_

If they're actually thinking properly (doubtful), they'll look at the rate of catastrophic accidents with human drivers, and make a call based on whether or not self-driving cars are an improvement.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, hopefully. There are right near 200M licensed drivers in the US. That would be 200k catastrophic accidents!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Personally I think the path forward for autonomous cars goes hand-in-hand with services like Uber. First you need there to be a population of people who can get by without owning cars and have them rely exclusively on driving service. Then you slowly augment the driving service with autonomous vehicles when these folks are going to be traveling along routes that are supported by the cars. These routes will likely be an order of magnitude cheaper to travel, since there is no human driver. The market dynamics combined with the steady march forward of the capabilities of the autonomous cars will do the rest.

In other words, I think it's pretty unlikely you will just wake up one day and swap out your car for a self driving one to drive you around. Eventually, maybe, but fundamentally it will be less about which car you own and more about if you own a car at all. In the long run if autonomous vehicles are successful it makes little sense to own a car anyway, so it's only logical that the early adopters naturally be non-owners.

<comment><USER11> Yes, self driving cars make more sense as a service than as a possession. And knowing their limitations helps us see where they might be useful _today_ , so that they can be gradually incorporated into traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So what if the car can't drive itself in anything other than familiar roads during clear weather? I would guess that the majority of my current driving is done under those conditions. If the car could take care of itself most of the time but fell back to my control during rain, snow, obscure roads, or construction zones, I think it would still be a net benefit to me.

<comment><USER10> The problem there is driving is a skill, and one which you can lose if you do not exercise it. A self driving car which only works 99% of the time seems like a non-starter, since by that point the humans inside of them are no longer qualified to take over. Particularly if that 1% is in conditions that are particularly difficult.

<comment><USER13> I don't have a driver license so for me that would be perfect. I don't care about driving, I don't want to drive, but I want my (or a) car to come for me to the bar / after work. If the weather is not good then I will use public transport.

I think people overestimate their abilities. Sure, this is a new technology but in X years these cars will be better drivers than 99% of the people.

<comment><USER14> > I don't have a driver license so for me that would be perfect.

No, it WOULDN'T be perfect! What if it's starting to rain/snow while you already being in the car? And you still need to drive the car for parking..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh really? A futuristic mind blowing developing technology which hasn't been released to the public (and has no plans to) isn't ready to be released to the public? What's the point of an article like this, especially being posted here? We're all technical people who understand the complexities (or understand it's so complex that we can't understand them.) If the effort is to inform the ignorant public of their misconceptions, post it on fox news or yahoo answers.

/rant

<comment><USER16> It's an odd reaction that self-driving cars have to be perfect and handle every edge case and have tens of millions of miles of error-free testing before they're considered "ready".

Humans usually spend about 30 minutes driving 5-10 miles to get a license, are far more unpredictable and inattentive, and have a stupid number of edge cases of their own.

Not to say we shouldn't hold self-driving cars to a higher standard, we absolutely should, but it's silly to think they need to be perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> >"Some experts are bothered by Google's refusal to provide that sort of safety-related information... the public 'has a right to be concerned' about Google's reticence: 'This is a very early-stage technology, which makes asking these kinds of questions all the more justified.'"

This seems to be a pretty common opinion, but I fail to see why anyone feels they have a "right" to be told Google's plans, strategies and ideas, much less their development mistakes and failures for a thing that is not a product currently available (or even close to it).

I realize there is a very real fear many people have about autonomous vehicles because it's something they don't/can't understand. And while that's something Google's marketing/PR department _may_ want to deal with, this fearmongering attitude of "Google won't tell me exactly how it's going to work... it must not be safe... _oh no we 're all going to die!!!_ " is just getting ridiculous.

<comment><USER18> The public has the right because Google is testing its cars on public streets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I remember a few of these difficulties being mentioned in Sebastian Thrun's Self-Driving Cars course on Udacity. It's been awhile, but I seem to remember the snow discussion in particular. The problem wasn't just slippery conditions, but the question of how the vehicle can localize itself when the various visual cues that it uses are covered in snow (e.g. road lines).

Pretty interesting stuff.

<comment><USER20> I think there are better potential solutions for a self driving car to orient itself in those kinds of conditions than for a person. I've driven in miserable weather, and it is very disconcerting - you just guess and go. A self driving car could take measurements of the road + gps coords + look its map database to know how many lanes there should be, then estimated where the lanes and limit lines are. Once my eyes fail me, I don't have a fallback.

<comment><USER21> That, and you have to consider that one of the chief issues this article brings up - that the self driving cars are relying on unreliable maps - <USER2> that once a self driving car traverses a road, it could propagate a much more detailed, or at least much more auto-appropriate map to the swarm of other cars.

The maps would get magnitudes better the year the cars were unleashed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Most of the problems yet to be tackled seem to be troublesome for many humans as well. But as for the adding to the maps, couldn't google work with local governments to have stoplights, stopsigns, construction etc added and google will contribute observations of potholes etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> Living in Russia, I always tried to conceive how Google cars would behave here, especially in winter.

As a driver here you have to take daring decisions sometimes, something that robots probably should never do due to 'do no harm' rule. That's a real engineering challenge.

</comment><comment><USER24> There was recently a car crash here in Victoria, Australia, that resulted in the deaths of two teenagers and injuries to five others. It was apparently caused by the relatively inexperienced driver swerving to avoid a rabbit. In hindsight it would have been better if the driver hadn't swerved and the rabbit had been run over, but in some sense this is a moral choice of the type that robots can't make.

In theory self driving cars sound like they could be potentially safer than human drivers, but there are many edge cases like the one above where a robotic driver following reasonable heuristics (e.g., swerve to avoid animals on the road) could cause fatal accidents that most human drivers would be able to avoid.

<comment><USER25> > this is a moral choice of the type that robots can't make.

The driver in Victoria did not make a moral choice. Did they really weigh the life of the rabbit against death and injury of seven people? Extremely unlikely.

A robot, like an experienced driver, could easily use the heuristic that hitting the small thing is safer than hitting the big thing.

<comment><USER26> >>Did they really weigh the life of the rabbit against death and injury of seven people?

I would say yes. Firstly I would see what the driver actually did. Did the driver have the seven people in plain sight when he/she made that decision? But for sure the driver did make a moral decision to save the Rabbit's life. It would have even been the case where the person thought he could save the rabbit's life without harming the humans. So you have to make decisions which are purely not mathematical here.

>>could easily use the heuristic that hitting the small thing is safer than hitting the big thing.

How would this hold against hitting some one below average height versus hitting some one tall. Or running over a baby Vs an aged person.

Right there are all kinds of moral dilemma.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Mercedes-Benz S 500 Intelligent Drive Autonomous Car Self Driving Car:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHqB47F12vI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHqB47F12vI)

[http://www5.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/mercedes-benz- in...](http://www5.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/mercedes-benz-intelligent- drive-driver-assistance-systems-safety-comfort/)

[http://www5.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/autonomous- long-...](http://www5.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/autonomous-long- distance-drive-research-vehicle-s-500-intelligent-drive/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm always glad to see reasonable overviews of emerging technologies. While very focused on what's wrong, it is a good counterpoint to the typical breathless coverage.

</comment><comment><USER29> Talks about unknown traffic lights possibly being a problem. But if all cars were self driving would there even be a need for traffic lights?

> If it encountered an unmapped traffic light, and there were no cars or > pedestrians around, the car could run a red light simply because it wouldn't > know the light was there.

So the car determined it was safe to cross and crossed? I don't see the problem. The red light is for humans, but a self driving car will know where the other cars are and know when to cross an intersection.

You could argue the reverse even. A self driving car comes to a traffic light that is green but detects a fast moving car running the red, it would stop. But a human might not and continue on thinking green is ok.

</comment><comment><USER30> I am making a bold prediction that it will be decades before a self driving car can drive itself safely on Indian streets.

Road Signs ? None.

Rules ? They're more like suggestions.

Roads ? What Road ?

<comment><USER31> They just have to be significantly safer than humans, and that's not hard.

<comment><USER32> I think you would have to experience first-hand what it is like to drive in almost any country that is outside the US, Europe or most of the commonwealth to really appreciate the difficulty of developing a self-driving car that could handle such conditions more safely than humans.

It very much is hard.

I've driven in and around India. Aside from the fact that the majority of vehicles have four wheels and generally move forwards more often than backwards, the similarities to driving in countries with more regulated driving environments are few to none.

Try circumnavigating Connaught Place on any day for a taster, or try taking the main highway north from New Delhi any distance.

The smaller more fragile vehicles give way, in the interests of self- preservation, to the larger, heavier vehicles.

Approaching in an intersection in a truck? Blast your horn to warn others of your approach so that they can get out of the way. Slowing down to carefully approach the junction is not what happens.

Need to cut across some lanes of traffic in a school bus to make a turn? Have your co-pilot hang out of the side door waving, shouting and berating other vehicles to make them give way. That's your turning indicator in many cases.

Need to take the same school bus on a circuit to collect kids in the morning and are running a bit late? Why not head straight through some empty fields. Roads can be optional.

All of the above I have experienced first-hand.

<comment><USER33> Can you imagine the sensors and speeds that might be available within one decade let alone two or three? Compare that to a human looking in just one direction at any given time and with imperfect reaction time.

You know those larger, heavier vehicles you mentioned? What if they're self- driving long-haul transport? They'll likely be able to make it through.

Cost will be the thing that prevents self-driving cars from dominating roads in India before the technology itself is a problem.

<comment><USER30> I'm not trying to be snarky or anything but take a look at this :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twMj9MTs3lw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twMj9MTs3lw)

A self driving car would just sit there frozen as there would be no 100 % safe action to take.

<comment><USER33> Yes, I've seen crazy intersections in person - I considered exactly that sort of thing with my comment.

But I can also see that a self-driving car could edge forward gradually until it had the opportunity to take a larger advantage. A lot of those vehicles and bikes are not travelling at full speed and are also prepared to brake if need be. A self-driving car would be able to judge all of these things almost immediately unlike the reaction lag we get with humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'd like to see one navigate its way around this :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twMj9MTs3lw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twMj9MTs3lw)

</comment><comment><USER34> I think it may not be a long time until we realize that achieving fully cognizant AI would be faster than covering all these corner cases in somewhat hard coded logic.

</comment><comment><USER35> I made this comment about google self driving cars two years ago and I think it's still relevant now:

200k miles is nothing. Over 8 billion vehicle miles are spent per DAY in the US. One person is killed for every 75 million miles driven. 200k miles isn't enough to test every terrain, under every weather condition, in every lighting, etc. There's too many variables in the equation. The Google car won't be truly safe until it has logged 1000x miles.

<comment><USER16> Considering the average human has only a few miles of officially observed driving before it receives a license, I think this is a bit unfair.

How would you suggest testing these vehicles to tens of millions of miles without having an actual public deployment?

Also, Google can test its algorithms in simulation to many millions of miles within hours. I believe they're lobbying for simulation to be a major part of testing:

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/21/google- tes...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/21/google-test-self- driving-cars-virtual-world-matrix)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'd love to see an article on this topic that was actually written for techies/engineers.

IMO, this could be right out of Wired the way it is written -- it conflates regulatory issues, problems that are clearly (relatively) easy but just not tackled, and problems that are legitimately still pending solutions before this goes mainstream. An article focusing on what the actual real difficult unsolved technical issues are would be fascinating, but this ain't it.

"The car's sensors can't tell if a road obstacle is a rock or a crumpled piece of paper, so the car will try to drive around either."

As a human I sometimes can't tell the nature of something on the road at speed. They gave an easy example (rock vs paper) but IRL it is usually things that aren't so easy to identify like trash bags that might be empty... or maybe not. So avoiding any unexpected item in the road when safe to do so is probably always the right solution anyway.

"Urmson also says the car can't detect potholes or spot an uncovered manhole if it isn't coned off."

People aren't that great at this either, especially in traffic where the hole is obscured until the last second, at least an automated car that reports home could, via various sensors, detect hitting "something that felt like a pothole" and send that information out to other cars in the region.

<comment><USER25> > People aren't that great at this either

The robot car has to be considerably better than people to become acceptable. This is a serious burden for the technology.

<comment><USER16> Accidents are usually caused by human unpredictability, lack of attention, terrible reaction time, stupidity, narrow perception, inability to follow traffic rules, and the effects of various drugs. Driverless cars mitigate all of these issues.

I would feel _much_ better riding a bike in the vicinity of a self-driving vehicle than any random human.

There are a number of issues to iron out yet and a lot of testing to do. But make no mistake, they're already far better.

<comment><USER25> They are currently stumped by situations that humans are OK in. They are not "already far better" in all situations. Even if they are better on average, my point is that this is not enough. If the world was run on pure rationality, they would have only to be epsilon better on average to be adopted. In the actual world, they are going to need to be very much better, and have very very few failure cases to be adopted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Question about the Apache 2.0 license and binary redistribution. - <AUTHOR>

I want to embed the Jetty web server in an open source project I'm working on.  I only want to include the jar file, not the source.  I intend to license my source code with the BSD license.  Jetty is using the Apache 2.0 license.  There's no problem mixing the two, I'm just trying to figure out if I need to explicitly include the Apache license alongside the BSD license.  I would certainly need to if I were using Jetty source directly.  I don't think I need to if I'm just re-distributing the Jetty jar file, but I'm not sure.  Are there any HNers out there that understand this stuff and can educate me? <comment> space-monkey Include the license:

From <http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html>

_You may reproduce and distribute copies of the Work or Derivative Works ... in Source or Object form, provided that You meet the following conditions:

1\. You must give any other recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License; and_</comment>


REM: Resource-efficient mining for blockchains - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/09/06/rem-resource-efficient-mining-for-blockchains/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this just exchanging proof of work for proof of Intel? Why not just have Intel run a centralized database with widely replicated logs?

<comment><USER3> If I'm understanding you, this seems like unwarranted cynicism, and I say this as someone who is quite cynical of blockchain technologies.

Would you also criticize the current state of Ethereum as "proof of Nvidia" and imply that Ethereum is centrally controlled by Nvidia, just because Nvidia makes the GPUs that many people are using to mine it?

<comment><USER4> If u/whoah and I understand the proposal correctly, Intel has the ability to mine as many blocks as it wants in a REM blockchain, free of cost, by signing a fake IAS or whatsitcalled.

Nvidia does not have this ability in Ethereum. They have to pay for electricity just like everyone else.

<comment><USER3> Ah. I hadn't caught the part where it relies on Intel's Attestation Service. That is indeed weird.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> PoW is how bitcoin blocks are "sealed" forever, which makes bitcoin possible, how is that not useful?

<comment><USER6> each mined block is like a digital pyramid of Giza made of a massive number of computations sealing the transactions into a mathematical tomb. really neat.

<comment><USER7> And just like that, there are much less costly ways to seal something than mass manual labor.

<comment><USER8> But none as impressive as the seven world wonders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To whatever degree the "useful" work has economic value, that value offsets the expenses of a miner attempting a 51% attack. In PoW it's only the wasted work that secures the currency.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ethereum could theoretically implement a similar scheme with running contracts on the EVM (in some ways, it does already). But instead of hinging on Intel to act honestly, it could use fraud proofs instead. It would significantly increase the overhead, but less so than PoW.

Alternatively, PoS is probably just fine. I'm not sure this is really better in any way.

<comment><USER11> EVM's efficiency is abysmal, since operations are replicated almost everywhere.

They are on the early stages of developing sharding/"sub-chains", but it's still unclear if it's even viable. And it will never be a truly efficient computing platform -- for them it must be completely secure and only cheap enough to enable the most interesting distributed apps, which is a different beast from PoUW discussed here.

<comment><USER9> With fraud proofs you don't actually run the computations on all nodes. You submit a claimed solution and a security deposit, in a way that lets other people submit a proof that you did the calculation incorrectly. If you submitted an incorrect solution, your deposit is paid to the person who made the fraud proof. The only replication is by the people who check your work in hopes of claiming your deposit.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, can you give me a good link on this?

Overall I'm skeptic (even of PoUW). That's because verifying work is usually almost as difficult as computing. I believe the only true solution to this is Fully Homomorphic encryption (FHE), but known constructions so far have had absolutely massive constants.

Is there enough demand of highly-assymetric and verifiable NP-hard like problems?

<comment><USER12> > That's because verifying work is usually almost as difficult as computing.

Where did you get that idea? What about zk-proofs, like SNARKs and STARKs? I'm working on a multiparty computation system right now that uses a proof system to offload costly computation.

<comment><USER11> Oh interesting. Like I wrote, I'm aware there are certain problems that can be verified efficiently, that is, whose computation time is much larger than verification time, ver_t/comp_t<<1, but is it possible to take a generic program and offload it with (1) cryptographically secure verification afterwards and (2) ver_t/comp_t << 1?

As a challenge, take the problem of computing 1000000 iterations of a memory- hard hash function, such as scrypt or argon2d. If someone presents you a hash (of length N), the best you can do to verify it is actually compute the iterated hash function (assuming it has no cryptographic weakness). This would prove, in particular, that my required method is impossible (i.e. there are at least some problems that can't be efficient offloaded).

What kind of problems can the technologies you cited offload?

<comment><USER12> All sorts, but those that are easy to convince yourself about are any arithmetic or Boolean circuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >delid cpu

>skew the rng and/or manipulate the instruction counter

Congratulations, you "hacked" REMCoin.</comment>