Oh! This is new! Meeks says the world ended because of Brexit and sliced bread won't taste the same! Alastair you are 'too negative all in one go'.
Even if it's only for your own sanity find some positives about where we find ourselves. Many may not like it but endless gloom seems no recipe for the future.
@Plato, @Pagan I agree that the doubling of a low rate seems dramatic but is meaningless, and almost certainly the margin of error actually means you can't conclude any such thing at all. However if your cancer risk is say 0.1% per year and it rises to 0.5% per year because you eat albatrosses then that's big - and how do you convey a quintupling without just saying it?
It's called relative risk.a useful concept
Sorry charles that is bollocks
a doubled chance from 25% to 50% is a huge difference from a doubled chance from 0.00001% to 0.00002%
Which is why you use relative risk not absolutecrisk (you are quoting a doubling of absolute risk). @foxinsox suggested it earlier although I personally find NNT unintuitive
Agreed with this post until paragraph 4 - "this will inevitably reduce the collective effectiveness of all Western Governments. So Western governments will be weaken relative to other countries."
This is speculation at best, and there are good historical/economic reasons to believe the West could collectively end up relatively stronger. The West has been collectively weakening against the Rest for the last 50 years, including (and perhaps especially) the period of globalisation and British membership of the EU. Economic and political cooperation has not stemmed the decline of the West, and the biggest beneficiaries of Western cooperation to promote globalisation have been non-western countries - think China, Brazil, etc.
Historically, a large factor in the rise of Europe was the competition between rival states and the benefits this delivered vis-a-vis the rest of the world at the time. Political competition rather than cooperation can deliver the same benefits as market competition - fitter actors more effective at winning trade/business/favours.
Separately, I also disagree with the point re large corporations - there will be more political pressure to avoid being seen to give them a good deal, and recover more tax from multinational profits. This was an ongoing trend even under Obama/Cameron (eg Osborne's Google tax) but will surely accelerate now.
And very doubtful that intelligence and police services will stop cooperating in the same way as present. The public mood has swung to the right and a common theme has been improving security.
So I'm afraid I think you're wrong Alastair.
In fact the inter-EU cooperation between police and intelligence agencies is considerably worse than the communication between the same countries via non-EU specific institutions.
This upsets the EU minded nations, because they see themselves as being kept in the dark by the "players".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was it not on the Titanic that people kept dancing for some time after the collision because the ship was supposed to be unsinkable?
When advised to head for the lifeboats they apparently replied "We have had quite enough of experts'...
The UK has abandoned ship. Hopefully others will follow suit before it's too late.
Just dropping by. I'm unsurprised to find out that Leavers are firmly of the belief that it'll be ok because reasons. I was hoping that a few Leavers could give some explanations why increased dissension and division among western states was good news. Few have even attempted to do so.
To answer a few of the points made:
1) The words "This is not a new trend" should have been a clue to others that I didn't think that this was a new trend.
2) An article about the Titanic that concentrated on the fresh supply of ice cubes for the first class lounge would not, even though optimistic, have been conducive to sanity. Sometimes grim inevitability needs to be stared in the face.
3) Anyone interested in considering counterfactuals is encouraged to write their own article on the subject.
4) An article about the consequences of Brexit and Donald Trump is sadly unlikely to cover technological changes in any depth, however interesting @SeanT might find them, sober, drunk or hungover.
On point (4) - It is going to be very interesting in the next decade, watching the German motor industry. In many ways it resembles the film camera industry - the revolution won't happen, we are too big not to be the winners, if it happens we will get round to it when it is important etc etc.
Not enough being made of the fact the Ft Lauderdale gunman was a crap soldier named Santiago... maybe people just cant handle the truth!
The disappointment for many is that he is not an Arab or from North Africa or a Muslim from anywhere. Puerto Rican makes the story almost boring. These kind of fatalities happen in any large US city almost daily, thanks to the 2nd amendment.
I think I see far more posts commenting on this supposed disappointment than posts where any sort of disappointment could be implied.
The dearth of posts about the gunman after he was identified as Hispanic/PR compared to the flood of hysterical posts beforehand speculating on a possible ISIS/Muslamic connection certainly implies something.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was it not on the Titanic that people kept dancing for some time after the collision because the ship was supposed to be unsinkable?
When advised to head for the lifeboats they apparently replied "We have had quite enough of experts'...
The ship had been designed by (expert) naval architects to be unsinkable, and was staffed by a master and crew who were experts in navigation and seamanship. But you don't see that if the story is a fable, it is a fable about the limitations of expertise.
Of course you don't.
Had it (and its sister ships) been designed to be 'unsinkable' ?
I've read that the unsinkable stuff was a myth created after the sinking. In which case it's a fable about the media inventing stuff ...
Incidentally, this entire threader is the most egregious piffle, as it ignores the overwhelming impact of the new tech revolution, from driverless cars to AI to VR to robotisation to drones to voice-command computers to t'internet of tings.
All these are gonna arrive AT ONCE - in the same generation. This is what will transform lives, not the loosening of a European trading bloc.
I read an article today, for instance (sorry I forget where, bit hungover, probably something like the FT) which said that nearly-flawless real-time computer translation - Babelfish in a set of ear-pods - is now just years away. This is, by the by, something I predicted on PB about five years back, and was roundly pooh-poohed at the time. Turns out I was right.
As the article says, this will be revolutionary. It will make the learning of languages pointless, and it will also transform the way we travel, educate, and interact with foreigners.
That's just one huge change out of dozens, coming to us all very quickly.
It is amazing that we are living at the most pivotal moment in history since that hominid did the thing with the bone at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cash money, and writing stuff on paper, vanishing in a generation after 5000 years of being the only game in town; Kitty Hawk to the moon in a lifetime. Banal but still deeply striking.
My great-grandfather lived from the 1870s to the 1960s. In that time he probably saw the greatest period of compressed change in history: electricity to the home, cars, flight, wireless/radio, space travel, the nuclear age, TV and so much more. The difference in lifestyle from his childhood to his old age dwarfs what we are experiencing today.
As another example: my dad, born in 1936, learnt to plough a field with a team of horses. a grand-uncle was one of the last captains routinely qualified to skipper sail, steam and diesel ships.
The questions are how long this trend can continue, and whether it will shift onto other areas. Moore's law is dying and tech is becoming increasingly expensive to develop. The low-hanging fruit has been plucked, whether in autonomous driving or in translation. Further developments become increasingly difficult. It's easy to prototype; the real work is in making deployable systems.
I still think people are being far too optimistic over these things, and are being wowed by smoke and mirrors.
There is also the problem of ever-decreasing benefits; how many more functions do we need in our mobile phones? But we can expect more convergence, and there will always be the unexpected world-changing new technology. Cold fusion anyone?
as another elite dangerous player just a heads up if you havent been following, first contact made two days ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was it not on the Titanic that people kept dancing for some time after the collision because the ship was supposed to be unsinkable?
When advised to head for the lifeboats they apparently replied "We have had quite enough of experts'...
The thing is, not all experts are the same. Expertise is some areas is easily demonstrated (engineering for example). However in economics (which is what most of the arguments in the media around Brexit were over) it is much harder to demonstrate expertise, and the state of the profession has changed a lot over the years. Many things which were widely accepted previously are now thought to be incorrect.
And expertise is not predictive anyway. I am dreading the day when Scott_P meets an expert on Peruvian marmalade mines, who advises Scott to put his pension into shares in Peruvian marmalade mines. Because who could disregard an expert?
I agree, there is a case to be made that competition and conflict between European nations was a spur to innovation. It was also quite a casualty toll on the continent, and even more so in the rest of the world that we conquered!
I do not fear the Russians, Chinese, Indians, SE Asians, Hispanics or Africans. All these places are travelling more or less in the direction we have gone. To the end of history: Liberal capitalism with increasingly functional democracies. We have little to fear from that. MENA is a different story, but part of the problem there is a form of Islam that resists and conflicts with the modern world.
Not enough being made of the fact the Ft Lauderdale gunman was a crap soldier named Santiago... maybe people just cant handle the truth!
The disappointment for many is that he is not an Arab or from North Africa or a Muslim from anywhere. Puerto Rican makes the story almost boring. These kind of fatalities happen in any large US city almost daily, thanks to the 2nd amendment.
I think I see far more posts commenting on this supposed disappointment than posts where any sort of disappointment could be implied.
The dearth of posts about the gunman after he was identified as Hispanic/PR compared to the flood of hysterical posts beforehand speculating on a possible ISIS/Muslamic connection certainly implies something.
That a mass killing by someone who is mentally ill has less global significance than a terrorist attack on US soil?
You may wish it were otherwise, but I think that's a statement of fact.
Just dropping by. I'm unsurprised to find out that Leavers are firmly of the belief that it'll be ok because reasons. I was hoping that a few Leavers could give some explanations why increased dissension and division among western states was good news. Few have even attempted to do so.
To answer a few of the points made:
1) The words "This is not a new trend" should have been a clue to others that I didn't think that this was a new trend.
2) An article about the Titanic that concentrated on the fresh supply of ice cubes for the first class lounge would not, even though optimistic, have been conducive to sanity. Sometimes grim inevitability needs to be stared in the face.
3) Anyone interested in considering counterfactuals is encouraged to write their own article on the subject.
4) An article about the consequences of Brexit and Donald Trump is sadly unlikely to cover technological changes in any depth, however interesting @SeanT might find them, sober, drunk or hungover.
On point (4) - It is going to be very interesting in the next decade, watching the German motor industry. In many ways it resembles the film camera industry - the revolution won't happen, we are too big not to be the winners, if it happens we will get round to it when it is important etc etc.
The German manufacturers have always been very keen on autonomous driving (*), and the German government might well be the most advanced in getting the legalities of them sorted out - insisting on black boxes and talking about the legal framework they will require. From what I've been told they also hold some rather important patents in the area.
I wouldn't write-off Merc, VW and BMW. Not by a long shot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was it not on the Titanic that people kept dancing for some time after the collision because the ship was supposed to be unsinkable?
When advised to head for the lifeboats they apparently replied "We have had quite enough of experts'...
The ship had been designed by (expert) naval architects to be unsinkable, and was staffed by a master and crew who were experts in navigation and seamanship. But you don't see that if the story is a fable, it is a fable about the limitations of expertise.
Of course you don't.
Had it (and its sister ships) been designed to be 'unsinkable' ?
I've read that the unsinkable stuff was a myth created after the sinking. In which case it's a fable about the media inventing stuff ...
I am dreading the day when Scott_P meets an expert on Peruvian marmalade mines, who advises Scott to put his pension into shares in Peruvian marmalade mines.
as another elite dangerous player just a heads up if you havent been following, first contact made two days ago
I've seen that thanks.
It's been brilliantly handled by Frontier. I haven't been able to play since, but when I get a few hours I'll be taking my 'conda to Merope. Hopefully the aliens will still be about.
Incidentally, this entire threader is the most egregious piffle, as it ignores the overwhelming impact of the new tech revolution, from driverless cars to AI to VR to robotisation to drones to voice-command computers to t'internet of tings.
All these are gonna arrive AT ONCE - in the same generation. This is what will transform lives, not the loosening of a European trading bloc.
I read an article today, for instance (sorry I forget where, bit hungover, probably something like the FT) which said that nearly-flawless real-time computer translation - Babelfish in a set of ear-pods - is now just years away. This is, by the by, something I predicted on PB about five years back, and was roundly pooh-poohed at the time. Turns out I was right.
As the article says, this will be revolutionary. It will make the learning of languages pointless, and it will also transform the way we travel, educate, and interact with foreigners.
That's just one huge change out of dozens, coming to us all very quickly.
It is amazing that we are living at the most pivotal moment in history since that hominid did the thing with the bone at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cash money, and writing stuff on paper, vanishing in a generation after 5000 years of being the only game in town; Kitty Hawk to the moon in a lifetime. Banal but still deeply striking.
Yeah, the era of well paid CDE jobs is history, ad does also drive the current populism.
The Eloi wiil prosper, the Morlochs less so.
On the other hand we could invent new jobs, as we have done right since the dawn of the machine age.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was it not on the Titanic that people kept dancing for some time after the collision because the ship was supposed to be unsinkable?
When advised to head for the lifeboats they apparently replied "We have had quite enough of experts'...
The Titanic was comprehensively designed by experts to stay afloat long enough in the event of a collision/accident to "act as it's own lifeboat"
The "lifeboats" were supposed to be used to transfer the passengers to the rescuing ship - over a period of many hours.
The bulkheads aft of the extreme forward "collision bulkheads" didn't extend any higher than E deck.
The crew were either ill-trained or lacked initiative in launching the lifeboats. 2 hrs 40 mins passed between the iceberg impact and the stern section sinking.
It is amazing that we are living at the most pivotal moment in history since that hominid did the thing with the bone at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cash money, and writing stuff on paper, vanishing in a generation after 5000 years of being the only game in town; Kitty Hawk to the moon in a lifetime. Banal but still deeply striking.
My great-grandfather lived from the 1870s to the 1960s. In that time he probably saw the greatest period of compressed change in history: electricity to the home, cars, flight, wireless/radio, space travel, the nuclear age, TV and so much more. The difference in lifestyle from his childhood to his old age dwarfs what we are experiencing today.
As another example: my dad, born in 1936, learnt to plough a field with a team of horses. a grand-uncle was one of the last captains routinely qualified to skipper sail, steam and diesel ships.
The questions are how long this trend can continue, and whether it will shift onto other areas. Moore's law is dying and tech is becoming increasingly expensive to develop. The low-hanging fruit has been plucked, whether in autonomous driving or in translation. Further developments become increasingly difficult. It's easy to prototype; the real work is in making deployable systems.
I still think people are being far too optimistic over these things, and are being wowed by smoke and mirrors.
There is also the problem of ever-decreasing benefits; how many more functions do we need in our mobile phones? But we can expect more convergence, and there will always be the unexpected world-changing new technology. Cold fusion anyone?
as another elite dangerous player just a heads up if you havent been following, first contact made two days ago
history shows us the pace of change only accelerates, moores law is the confinement on where we are now but just like inventions like the telephone, aeroplanes etc I see no reason why we wont get more breakthroughs. For recorded history tech change has been logarithmic
Agreed with this post until paragraph 4 - "this will inevitably reduce the collective effectiveness of all Western Governments. So Western governments will be weaken relative to other countries."
This is speculation at best, and there are good historical/economic reasons to believe the West could collectively end up relatively stronger. The West has been collectively weakening against the Rest for the last 50 years, including (and perhaps especially) the period of globalisation and British membership of the EU. Economic and political cooperation has not stemmed the decline of the West, and the biggest beneficiaries of Western cooperation to promote globalisation have been non-western countries - think China, Brazil, etc.
Historically, a large factor in the rise of Europe was the competition between rival states and the benefits this delivered vis-a-vis the rest of the world at the time. Political competition rather than cooperation can deliver the same benefits as market competition - fitter actors more effective at winning trade/business/favours.
Separately, I also disagree with the point re large corporations - there will be more political pressure to avoid being seen to give them a good deal, and recover more tax from multinational profits. This was an ongoing trend even under Obama/Cameron (eg Osborne's Google tax) but will surely accelerate now.
And very doubtful that intelligence and police services will stop cooperating in the same way as present. The public mood has swung to the right and a common theme has been improving security.
So I'm afraid I think you're wrong Alastair.
While I am unpersuaded, welcome to the site and thank you for being one of a handful of posters to take the trouble to address the thinking behind my post rather than complain that they don't like its conclusions.
But this poster has at least sited the history of Europe in his defence. I read your thread with an open mind, but as is often the case, it was a nice sounding argument with very little in the way of historical examples, facts and figures, or sources to support it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was it not on the Titanic that people kept dancing for some time after the collision because the ship was supposed to be unsinkable?
When advised to head for the lifeboats they apparently replied "We have had quite enough of experts'...
The ship had been designed by (expert) naval architects to be unsinkable, and was staffed by a master and crew who were experts in navigation and seamanship. But you don't see that if the story is a fable, it is a fable about the limitations of expertise.
Of course you don't.
Had it (and its sister ships) been designed to be 'unsinkable' ?
I've read that the unsinkable stuff was a myth created after the sinking. In which case it's a fable about the media inventing stuff ...
Agreed with this post until paragraph 4 - "this will inevitably reduce the collective effectiveness of all Western Governments. So Western governments will be weaken relative to other countries."
This is speculation at best, and there are good historical/economic reasons to believe the West could collectively end up relatively stronger. The West has been collectively weakening against the Rest for the last 50 years, including (and perhaps especially) the period of globalisation and British membership of the EU. Economic and political cooperation has not stemmed the decline of the West, and the biggest beneficiaries of Western cooperation to promote globalisation have been non-western countries - think China, Brazil, etc.
Historically, a large factor in the rise of Europe was the competition between rival states and the benefits this delivered vis-a-vis the rest of the world at the time. Political competition rather than cooperation can deliver the same benefits as market competition - fitter actors more effective at winning trade/business/favours.
Separately, I also disagree with the point re large corporations - there will be more political pressure to avoid being seen to give them a good deal, and recover more tax from multinational profits. This was an ongoing trend even under Obama/Cameron (eg Osborne's Google tax) but will surely accelerate now.
And very doubtful that intelligence and police services will stop cooperating in the same way as present. The public mood has swung to the right and a common theme has been improving security.
So I'm afraid I think you're wrong Alastair.
While I am unpersuaded, welcome to the site and thank you for being one of a handful of posters to take the trouble to address the thinking behind my post rather than complain that they don't like its conclusions.
I think you rightly praise Tor91 - he/she has read through your article. I can only speak for myself, but in trying to read through it I found an initial pre-concieved hurdle. That makes it hard to read beyond. I think I'm probably being unfair, but when you can't get beyond the second sentence of any paragraph before there's an anti-brexit theme it's tough.
I was only vaguely pro-Brexit. I found it a very hard decision to make. I positively hate your article - I think you're misrepresenting. That's clearly quite an extreme view for a person that was broadly on the fence. Think from where we are rather than where we were and I'll read your words eagerly. Hunker down in the past and I really have no time.
It is amazing that we are living at the most pivotal moment in history since that hominid did the thing with the bone at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cash money, and writing stuff on paper, vanishing in a generation after 5000 years of being the only game in town; Kitty Hawk to the moon in a lifetime. Banal but still deeply striking.
My great-grandfather lived from the 1870s to the 1960s. In that time he probably saw the greatest period of compressed change in history: electricity to the home, cars, flight, wireless/radio, space travel, the nuclear age, TV and so much more. The difference in lifestyle from his childhood to his old age dwarfs what we are experiencing today.
As another example: my dad, born in 1936, learnt to plough a field with a team of horses. a grand-uncle was one of the last captains routinely qualified to skipper sail, steam and diesel ships.
The questions are how long this trend can continue, and whether it will shift onto other areas. Moore's law is dying and tech is becoming increasingly expensive to develop. The low-hanging fruit has been plucked, whether in autonomous driving or in translation. Further developments become increasingly difficult. It's easy to prototype; the real work is in making deployable systems.
I still think people are being far too optimistic over these things, and are being wowed by smoke and mirrors.
There is also the problem of ever-decreasing benefits; how many more functions do we need in our mobile phones? But we can expect more convergence, and there will always be the unexpected world-changing new technology. Cold fusion anyone?
as another elite dangerous player just a heads up if you havent been following, first contact made two days ago
history shows us the pace of change only accelerates, moores law is the confinement on where we are now but just like inventions like the telephone, aeroplanes etc I see no reason why we wont get more breakthroughs. For recorded history tech change has been logarithmic
Not necessarily. The Giza Pyramids were among the earliest pyramids built in Egypt. Pyramids built by later dynasties were inferior in quality.
Agreed with this post until paragraph 4 - "this will inevitably reduce the collective effectiveness of all Western Governments. So Western governments will be weaken relative to other countries."
This is speculation at best, and there are good historical/economic reasons to believe the West could collectively end up relatively stronger. The West has been collectively weakening against the Rest for the last 50 years, including (and perhaps especially) the period of globalisation and British membership of the EU. Economic and political cooperation has not stemmed the decline of the West, and the biggest beneficiaries of Western cooperation to promote globalisation have been non-western countries - think China, Brazil, etc.
Historically, a large factor in the rise of Europe was the competition between rival states and the benefits this delivered vis-a-vis the rest of the world at the time. Political competition rather than cooperation can deliver the same benefits as market competition - fitter actors more effective at winning trade/business/favours.
Separately, I also disagree with the point re large corporations - there will be more political pressure to avoid being seen to give them a good deal, and recover more tax from multinational profits. This was an ongoing trend even under Obama/Cameron (eg Osborne's Google tax) but will surely accelerate now.
And very doubtful that intelligence and police services will stop cooperating in the same way as present. The public mood has swung to the right and a common theme has been improving security.
So I'm afraid I think you're wrong Alastair.
While I am unpersuaded, welcome to the site and thank you for being one of a handful of posters to take the trouble to address the thinking behind my post rather than complain that they don't like its conclusions.
I think you rightly praise Tor91 - he/she has read through your article. I can only speak for myself, but in trying to read through it I found an initial pre-concieved hurdle. That makes it hard to read beyond. I think I'm probably being unfair, but when you can't get beyond the second sentence of any paragraph before there's an anti-brexit theme it's tough.
I was only vaguely pro-Brexit. I found it a very hard decision to make. I positively hate your article - I think you're misrepresenting. That's clearly quite an extreme view for a person that was broadly on the fence. Please think from where we are rather than where we were, and I'll read your words eagerly. Hunker down in the past and I really have no time.
Agreed with this post until paragraph 4 - "this will inevitably reduce the collective effectiveness of all Western Governments. So Western governements will be weaken relative to other countries."
This is speculation at best, and there are good historical/economic reasons to believe the West could collectively end up relatively stronger. The West has been collectively weakening against the Rest for the last 50 years, including (and perhaps especially) the period of globalisation and British membership of the EU. Economic and political cooperation has not stemmed the decline of the West, and the biggest beneficiaries of Western cooperation to promote globalisation have been non-western countries - think China, Brazil, etc.
Historically, a large factor in the rise of Europe was the competition between rival states and the benefits this delivered vis-a-vis the rest of the world at the time. Political competition rather than cooperation can deliver the same benefits as market competition - fitter actors more effective at winning trade/business/favours.
Separately, I also disagree with the point re large corporations - there will be more political pressure to avoid being seen to give them a good deal, and recover more tax from multinational profits. This was an ongoing trend even under Obama/Cameron (eg Osborne's Google tax) but will surely accelerate now.
And very doubtful that intelligence and police services will stop cooperating in the same way as present. The public mood has swung to the right and a common theme has been improving security.
So I'm afraid I think you're wrong Alastair.
While I am unpersuaded, welcome to the site and thank you for being one of a handful of posters to take the trouble to address the thinking behind my post rather than complain that they don't like its conclusions.
I think you rightly praise Tor91 - he/she has read through your article. I can only speak for myself, but in trying to read through it I found an initial pre-concieved hurdle. That makes it hard to read beyond. I think I'm probably being unfair, but when you can't get beyond the second sentence of any paragraph before there's an anti-brexit theme it's tough.
I was only vaguely pro-Brexit. I found it a very hard decision to make. I positively hate your article - I think you're misrepresenting. That's clearly quite an extreme view for a person that was broadly on the fence. Think from where we are rather than where we were and I'll read your words eagerly. Hunker down in the past and I really have no time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but was it not on the Titanic that people kept dancing for some time after the collision because the ship was supposed to be unsinkable?
When advised to head for the lifeboats they apparently replied "We have had quite enough of experts'...
The Titanic was comprehensively designed by experts to stay afloat long enough in the event of a collision/accident to "act as it's own lifeboat"
The "lifeboats" were supposed to be used to transfer the passengers to the rescuing ship - over a period of many hours.
The bulkheads aft of the extreme forward "collision bulkheads" didn't extend any higher than E deck.
The crew were either ill-trained or lacked initiative in launching the lifeboats. 2 hrs 40 mins passed between the iceberg impact and the stern section sinking.
The engineers and stokers however were heroic, they closed down the boilers in a controlled manner as the icy water entered, preventing explosions that would have sunk the ship much more quickly.
history shows us the pace of change only accelerates, moores law is the confinement on where we are now but just like inventions like the telephone, aeroplanes etc I see no reason why we wont get more breakthroughs. For recorded history tech change has been logarithmic
"For recorded history tech change has been logarithmic"
Has it?
How have (say) power transmission systems improved in the last fifty or hundred years? The HVAC cables and pylons strung around the countryside are remarkably similar to the ones made in the 1930s. Or power generation: the steam cycle is still well under 50% efficiency, as it was many decades ago. No logarithmic progress there.
I agree that there is massive changes in individual areas, but the improvements eventually slow as they become harder and more expensive to get - and less worthwhile to have.
If it is 'logarithmic', do you expect it to continue forever (a physical impossibility), or will it slow down sometime? If so, then you need to ask when.
I am dreading the day when Scott_P meets an expert on Peruvian marmalade mines, who advises Scott to put his pension into shares in Peruvian marmalade mines.
Agreed with this post until paragraph 4 - "this will inevitably reduce the collective effectiveness of all Western Governments. So Western governements will be weaken relative to other countries."
Historically, a large factor in the rise of Europe was the competition between rival states and the benefits this delivered vis-a-vis the rest of the world at the time. Political competition rather than cooperation can deliver the same benefits as market competition - fitter actors more effective at winning trade/business/favours.
Separately, I also disagree with the point re large corporations - there will be more political pressure to avoid being seen to give them a good deal, and recover more tax from multinational profits. This was an ongoing trend even under Obama/Cameron (eg Osborne's Google tax) but will surely accelerate now.
And very doubtful that intelligence and police services will stop cooperating in the same way as present. The public mood has swung to the right and a common theme has been improving security.
So I'm afraid I think you're wrong Alastair.
While I am unpersuaded, welcome to the site and thank you for being one of a handful of posters to take the trouble to address the thinking behind my post rather than complain that they don't like its conclusions.
I think you rightly praise Tor91 - he/she has read through your article. I can only speak for myself, but in trying to read through it I found an initial pre-concieved hurdle. That makes it hard to read beyond. I think I'm probably being unfair, but when you can't get beyond the second sentence of any paragraph before there's an anti-brexit theme it's tough.
I was only vaguely pro-Brexit. I found it a very hard decision to make. I positively hate your article - I think you're misrepresenting. That's clearly quite an extreme view for a person that was broadly on the fence. Think from where we are rather than where we were and I'll read your words eagerly. Hunker down in the past and I really have no time.
What do you think I'm misrepresenting?
The position as we stand. I'm sure that if push came to shove you'd stand alongside me and present a rather vulnerable wall against our enemies. Our collective will though is something of worth. If you and I stand shoulder to shoulder then there's quite a lot we can do. Brexit may just work because the people that are Brexit-ing are worthy of a challenge.
This is bollocks. Talk to a black cab driver. In five years time, talk to a lorry driver.
I am now actively dissuading my daughters from any nonsense about "learning Mandarin". It's completely POINTLESS.
A new wave of change is happening now, and it is accelerating, and you can feel it. You can see it all around you. Uber is an incredible change in the warp and weft of urban living. So is Airbnb. And these are relatively trivial, compared to what's coming down the line.
I think you're wrong, and also don't know much about tech. You're buying into the dream rather than the reality. But in the long run we'll see who is right.
As an aside, why discourage your child from learning something, assuming they enjoy it? Someone who can speak natively will always be preferred over someone relying on a flawed, hackable translator.
The big picture is that the centre of gravity of humanity, both in terms of economics and demographics, is shifting steadily away from the West. And will probably continue to do so over the next 30-40 years until some new form of global equilibrium is reached.
Western nations will have an ever declining proportion of the global human population (<10% by 2050, possible less, and possibly before), with economies that no longer dominate the globe, nor set the rules, although they will probably remain comparatively well-off, albeit rather stagnant, to attract immigrants in very large numbers. In addition, technological change will continue to reshape the very definition of "work", which will pose its own rather difficult challenges.
But the very term "West" is in itself anarchic in that its political use derives from defining Western developed, Eastern communist - and then the "3rd world" undeveloped - nations divide from the time of the Cold War. It is at least 20 years out of date, and probably longer. In the future, alliances and geopolitics may work very differently, both across, within, and without, nations and regions all across the world, rather than in tight geopolitical blocs. And national interests will change accordingly.
In the context of this, because it will happen regardless, Brexit is noise. The question is what use we choose to make of it in forging new international alliances, and maintaining older ones.
There are those, who continue to advocate Remain, who argue the best way to do that is to hunker down in regional political and economic unions for strength in numbers, and others, including many Leavers, who argue that it demands more national independence and flexibility, and is an opportunity, not a threat.
You can argue the former is as much protectionist as it is collaborative, and the latter is more open-minded about cooperation.
The "right" political model will always be up for debate, and rightly so.
Agreed with this post until paragraph 4 - "this will inevitably reduce the collective effectiveness of all Western Governments. So Western governements will be weaken relative to other countries."
Historically, a large factor in the rise of Europe was the competition between rival states and the benefits this delivered vis-a-vis the rest of the world at the time. Political competition rather than cooperation can deliver the same benefits as market competition - fitter actors more effective at winning trade/business/favours.
Separately, I also disagree with the point re large corporations - there will be more political pressure to avoid being seen to give them a good deal, and recover more tax from multinational profits. This was an ongoing trend even under Obama/Cameron (eg Osborne's Google tax) but will surely accelerate now.
And very doubtful that intelligence and police services will stop cooperating in the same way as present. The public mood has swung to the right and a common theme has been improving security.
So I'm afraid I think you're wrong Alastair.
While I am unpersuaded, welcome to the site and thank you for being one of a handful of posters to take the trouble to address the thinking behind my post rather than complain that they don't like its conclusions.
I think you rightly praise Tor91 - he/she has read through your article. I can only speak for myself, but in trying to read through it I found an initial pre-concieved hurdle. That makes it hard to read beyond. I think I'm probably being unfair, but when you can't get beyond the second sentence of any paragraph before there's an anti-brexit theme it's tough.
I was only vaguely pro-Brexit. I found it a very hard decision to make. I positively hate your article - I think you're misrepresenting. That's clearly quite an extreme view for a person that was broadly on the fence. Think from where we are rather than where we were and I'll read your words eagerly. Hunker down in the past and I really have no time.
What do you think I'm misrepresenting?
The position as we stand. I'm sure that if push came to shove you'd stand alongside me and present a rather vulnerable wall against our enemies. Our collective will though is something of worth. If you and I stand shoulder to shoulder then there's quite a lot we can do. Brexit may just work because the people that are Brexit-ing are worthy of a challenge.
You duck the question. What bit of "The position as we stand" do you think I misrepresent?
So do we look forward to a future where our population, however highly educated, simply seek entertainment all day?
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
The big picture is that the centre of gravity of humanity, both in terms of economics and demographics, is shifting steadily away from the West. And will probably continue to do so over the next 30-40 years until some new form of global equilibrium is reached.
Western nations will have an ever declining proportion of the global human population (<10% by 2050, possible less, and possibly before), with economies that no longer dominate the globe, nor set the rules, although they will probably remain comparatively well-off, albeit rather stagnant, to attract immigrants in very large numbers. In addition, technological change will continue to reshape the very definition of "work", which will pose its own rather difficult challenges.
But the very term "West" is in itself anarchic in that its political use derives from defining Western developed, Eastern communist - and then the "3rd world" undeveloped - nations divide from the time of the Cold War. It is at least 20 years out of date, and probably longer. In the future, alliances and geopolitics may work very differently, both across, within, and without, nations and regions all across the world, rather than in tight geopolitical blocs. And national interests will change accordingly.
In the context of this, because it will happen regardless, Brexit is noise. The question is what use we choose to make of it in forging new international alliances, and maintaining older ones.
There are those, who continue to advocate Remain, who argue the best way to do that is to hunker down in regional political and economic unions for strength in numbers, and others, including many Leavers, who argue that it demands more national independence and flexibility, and is an opportunity, not a threat.
You can argue the former is as much protectionist as it is collaborative, and the latter is more open-minded about cooperation.
The "right" political model will always be up for debate, and rightly so.</p>
Virtually all of the inventions and IP comes from the west. In addition much of the developing world only survives on aid from the west. In particular Africa. The harsh reality is the population in Africa would be much lower without food and medical aid from the west.
So do we look forward to a future where our population, however highly educated, simply seek entertainment all day?
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
The utopian theory has always been, at least since Wilde's Soul of man under Socialism, that we will all chill and do Open University courses and stuff, living off a universal wage. The way things are going it seems more likely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and are kept from eating the rich by gated communities and bread and circuses.
So do we look forward to a future where our population, however highly educated, simply seek entertainment all day?
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
The utopian theory has always been, at least since Wilde's Soul of man under Socialism, that we will all chill and do Open University courses and stuff, living off a universal wage. The way things are going it seems more likely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and are kept from eating the rich by gated communities and bread and circuses.
Yes, I'm no Utopian. In the long term I am very hopeful we will prosper mightily, but I reckon things could get nasty, in the short-medium term, as we ride the waves of change.
Take, for instance, taxi drivers. A huge proportion of UK minicab and Uber drivers are immigrants. They could all lose their jobs in the next 5-10 years. Imagine tens of thousands of families - Pakistani, Bangladeshi - without a breadwinner.
Great. Not.
Have you read that Caldwell book yet? He reckons one of the reasons Muslim men are so insecure and backward is that the women were cleverer and got better jobs than them
This is bollocks. Talk to a black cab driver. In five years time, talk to a lorry driver.
I am now actively dissuading my daughters from any nonsense about "learning Mandarin". It's completely POINTLESS.
A new wave of change is happening now, and it is accelerating, and you can feel it. You can see it all around you. Uber is an incredible change in the warp and weft of urban living. So is Airbnb. And these are relatively trivial, compared to what's coming down the line.
I think you're wrong, and also don't know much about tech. You're buying into the dream rather than the reality. But in the long run we'll see who is right.
As an aside, why discourage your child from learning something, assuming they enjoy it? Someone who can speak natively will always be preferred over someone relying on a flawed, hackable translator.
To grasp the tech you just have to think. I thought about computerised translation, years back - and predicted this, much to the derision of pb-ers. But I was right.
If my daughter really really wants to learn Mandarin, I wouldn't discourage her. There is great pleasure in mastering a language (so I understand, never managed it) then being able to explore the literature, converse like a local.
But if she just wants to spend years mastering Mandarin because it might be "useful" - God no.
Leaning a foreign language will soon be like learning calligraphy, or mastering life-drawing, or trying to memorise vast tracts of rhymed verse. Enriching and "nice", but very peripheral.
"To grasp the tech you just have to think."
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are largely being sold smoke and mirrors. There is some substance behind the artifice, but nowhere near as much as is being sold. This is especially true about autonomous cars (especially level 5), speech recognition and translation. They've done the easy 50% (if that). The next 40% is much more difficult. The final 10% will be the killer.
Th question is whether 90% is good enough. In the case of translation, it probably will be for most cases. In the case of autonomous cars, no way.
Heck, I get excited by technology. I rave about technology. But I am well aware of its limitations.
So do we look forward to a future where our population, however highly educated, simply seek entertainment all day?
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
The utopian theory has always been, at least since Wilde's Soul of man under Socialism, that we will all chill and do Open University courses and stuff, living off a universal wage. The way things are going it seems more likely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and are kept from eating the rich by gated communities and bread and circuses.
I recall reading a sci-fi story as a lad in the 70s. The main theme of the story was a World Without Work, where those who still had jobs (even if it was just ten hours a week) were seen as the enviable elite, with a purpose in life. Everyone else had a nice, basic income, and plenty of food and shelter - but no inner purpose. Life had no meaning beyond reproduction.
Incredibly prescient, looking back.
Imagine being policed, doctored, nursed, by robots.
So do we look forward to a future where our population, however highly educated, simply seek entertainment all day?
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
The utopian theory has always been, at least since Wilde's Soul of man under Socialism, that we will all chill and do Open University courses and stuff, living off a universal wage. The way things are going it seems more likely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and are kept from eating the rich by gated communities and bread and circuses.
I recall reading a sci-fi story as a lad in the 70s. The main theme of the story was a World Without Work, where those who still had jobs (even if it was just ten hours a week) were seen as the enviable elite, with a purpose in life. Everyone else had a nice, basic income, and plenty of food and shelter - but no inner purpose. Life had no meaning beyond reproduction.
Incredibly prescient, looking back.
Imagine being policed, doctored, nursed, by robots.
Maybe jobs like servants, drivers etc will come back
Not enough being made of the fact the Ft Lauderdale gunman was a crap soldier named Santiago... maybe people just cant handle the truth!
The disappointment for many is that he is not an Arab or from North Africa or a Muslim from anywhere. Puerto Rican makes the story almost boring. These kind of fatalities happen in any large US city almost daily, thanks to the 2nd amendment.
I think I see far more posts commenting on this supposed disappointment than posts where any sort of disappointment could be implied.
The dearth of posts about the gunman after he was identified as Hispanic/PR compared to the flood of hysterical posts beforehand speculating on a possible ISIS/Muslamic connection certainly implies something.
If I had written that the bully boys would have been out big time. I remember something similar happened when the Norwegian nutter, Anders Breivik, turned out to be not a blood thirsty Islamist. There was almost disappointment.
Anyone looking for "evidence", just look up PB minutes after the incidents and hours later.
Leaning a foreign language will soon be like learning calligraphy, or mastering life-drawing, or trying to memorise vast tracts of rhymed verse. Enriching and "nice", but very peripheral.
You can't really 'master' life drawing; if you can't draw in the first place, you can work very hard and you just might manage to get to the stage of producing anatomically correct but crap/mediocre life drawings.
So do we look forward to a future where our population, however highly educated, simply seek entertainment all day?
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
The utopian theory has always been, at least since Wilde's Soul of man under Socialism, that we will all chill and do Open University courses and stuff, living off a universal wage. The way things are going it seems more likely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and are kept from eating the rich by gated communities and bread and circuses.
I recall reading a sci-fi story as a lad in the 70s. The main theme of the story was a World Without Work, where those who still had jobs (even if it was just ten hours a week) were seen as the enviable elite, with a purpose in life. Everyone else had a nice, basic income, and plenty of food and shelter - but no inner purpose. Life had no meaning beyond reproduction.
Incredibly prescient, looking back.
Imagine being policed, doctored, nursed, by robots.
So do we look forward to a future where our population, however highly educated, simply seek entertainment all day?
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
The utopian theory has always been, at least since Wilde's Soul of man under Socialism, that we will all chill and do Open University courses and stuff, living off a universal wage. The way things are going it seems more likely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and are kept from eating the rich by gated communities and bread and circuses.
I recall reading a sci-fi story as a lad in the 70s. The main theme of the story was a World Without Work, where those who still had jobs (even if it was just ten hours a week) were seen as the enviable elite, with a purpose in life. Everyone else had a nice, basic income, and plenty of food and shelter - but no inner purpose. Life had no meaning beyond reproduction.
Incredibly prescient, looking back.
Imagine being policed, doctored, nursed, by robots.
Well, police speed traps have been robots for what, 25 years now? And have you ever had a CT or MRI scan? The scanner is doing all the heavy lifting; the radiographers and doctors are just its servants.
So do we look forward to a future where our population, however highly educated, simply seek entertainment all day?
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
The utopian theory has always been, at least since Wilde's Soul of man under Socialism, that we will all chill and do Open University courses and stuff, living off a universal wage. The way things are going it seems more likely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and are kept from eating the rich by gated communities and bread and circuses.
I recall reading a sci-fi story as a lad in the 70s. The main theme of the story was a World Without Work, where those who still had jobs (even if it was just ten hours a week) were seen as the enviable elite, with a purpose in life. Everyone else had a nice, basic income, and plenty of food and shelter - but no inner purpose. Life had no meaning beyond reproduction.
Incredibly prescient, looking back.
Imagine being policed, doctored, nursed, by robots.
So do we look forward to a future where our population, however highly educated, simply seek entertainment all day?
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
The utopian theory has always been, at least since Wilde's Soul of man under Socialism, that we will all chill and do Open University courses and stuff, living off a universal wage. The way things are going it seems more likely that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and are kept from eating the rich by gated communities and bread and circuses.
Yes, I'm no Utopian. In the long term I am very hopeful we will prosper mightily, but I reckon things could get nasty, in the short-medium term, as we ride the waves of change.
Take, for instance, taxi drivers. A huge proportion of UK minicab and Uber drivers are immigrants. They could all lose their jobs in the next 5-10 years. Imagine tens of thousands of families - Pakistani, Bangladeshi - without a breadwinner.
Great. Not.
Have you read that Caldwell book yet? He reckons one of the reasons Muslim men are so insecure and backward is that the women were cleverer and got better jobs than them
Not yet. It's in a short queue.
The theory, taken at face-value, makes a lot of sense.
Muslim men, on the whole, are badly educated and certainly incurious. They don't read. They don't self educate. Travel the Muslin world and the chances of seeing a Muslim man deep in a (non-religious) book are tiny. They play Candy Crush on their smartphones.
In fact, in 30 years of travelling the world, I cannot think of a single moment when I saw a Muslim man voluntarily reading a non-religious text. Which is pretty striking.
The one place they're in total control is the mosque... the less enlightened the better for them
Not enough being made of the fact the Ft Lauderdale gunman was a crap soldier named Santiago... maybe people just cant handle the truth!
The disappointment for many is that he is not an Arab or from North Africa or a Muslim from anywhere. Puerto Rican makes the story almost boring. These kind of fatalities happen in any large US city almost daily, thanks to the 2nd amendment.
I think I see far more posts commenting on this supposed disappointment than posts where any sort of disappointment could be implied.
The dearth of posts about the gunman after he was identified as Hispanic/PR compared to the flood of hysterical posts beforehand speculating on a possible ISIS/Muslamic connection certainly implies something.
If I had written that the bully boys would have been out big time. I remember something similar happened when the Norwegian nutter, Anders Breivik, turned out to be not a blood thirsty Islamist. There was almost disappointment.
Anyone looking for "evidence", just look up PB minutes after the incidents and hours later.
The 26-year-old from Anchorage, Alaska, reportedly walked into the FBI office in Anchorage in November to say that the US government was controlling his mind and making him watch Islamic State videos.
This is bollocks. Talk to a black cab driver. In five years time, talk to a lorry driver.
I am now actively dissuading my daughters from any nonsense about "learning Mandarin". It's completely POINTLESS.
A new wave of change is happening now, and it is accelerating, and you can feel it. You can see it all around you. Uber is an incredible change in the warp and weft of urban living. So is Airbnb. And these are relatively trivial, compared to what's coming down the line.
I think you're wrong, and also don't know much about tech. You're buying into the dream rather than the reality. But in the long run we'll see who is right.
As an aside, why discourage your child from learning something, assuming they enjoy it? Someone who can speak natively will always be preferred over someone relying on a flawed, hackable translator.
To ge. Enriching and "nice", but very peripheral.
"To grasp the tech you just have to think."
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are ltechnology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language#section-4
As ever. the Economist's technology quarterly section is excellent.
Five years ago I was derided on PB, by people like you, for suggesting computers would nail translation. Now it is accepted, by people like you, that I am probably right.
Read across. I'm right now, too.
It's bleedin' obvious to be fair. Computers can now, pretty much, pass the Turing Test. They are becoming self aware (without consciousness) and they are able to learn from their mistakes. That's the key. Self aware, self improving computers: this goal is now within reach.
It changes EVERYTHING. As intellectual middle class workers we are best advised to accept and adapt to this huge change. It is exactly like loom-workers who eventually had to accept that machines could weave cloth more cheaply.
People will still pay a premium for a bit of hand-woven silk or wool, but it is a niche product, aimed at the rich. Most is done by machines.
In the future, rich people will pay for artisanal driving, or personal cooking, or "hand crafted" journalism or lawyering or accounting or engineering or translating, but it will be niche. The vast bulk will be done by machines.
If jockeys are replaced by robots, why not horses too? Will there be anything left to bet on?
This is bollocks. Talk to a black cab driver. In five years time, talk to a lorry driver.
I am now actively dissuading my daughters from any nonsense about "learning Mandarin". It's completely POINTLESS.
A new wave of change is happening now, and it is accelerating, and you can feel it. You can see it all around you. Uber is an incredible change in the warp and weft of urban living. So is Airbnb. And these are relatively trivial, compared to what's coming down the line.
I think you're wrong, and also don't know much about tech. You're buying into the dream rather than the reality. But in the long run we'll see who is right.
As an aside, why discourage your child from learning something, assuming they enjoy it? Someone who can speak natively will always be preferred over someone relying on a flawed, hackable translator.
To ge. Enriching and "nice", but very peripheral.
"To grasp the tech you just have to think."
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are ltechnology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language#section-4
As ever. the Economist's technology quarterly section is excellent.
Five years ago I was derided on PB, by people like you, for suggesting computers would nail translation. Now it is accepted, by people like you, that I am probably right.
Read across. I'm right now, too.
It's bleedin' obvious to be fair. Computers can now, pretty much, pass the Turing Test. They are becoming self aware (without consciousness) and they are able to learn from their mistakes. That's the key. Self aware, self improving computers: this goal is now within reach.
It changes EVERYTHING. As intellectual middle class workers we are best advised to accept and adapt to this huge change. It is exactly like loom-workers who eventually had to accept that machines could weave cloth more cheaply.
People will still pay a premium for a bit of hand-woven silk or wool, but it is a niche product, aimed at the rich. Most is done by machines.
In the future, rich people will pay for artisanal driving, or personal cooking, or "hand crafted" journalism or lawyering or accounting or engineering or translating, but it will be niche. The vast bulk will be done by machines.
If jockeys are replaced by robots, why not horses too? Will there be anything left to bet on?
The bookies have been offering virtual racing for years
I think you're wrong, and also don't know much about tech. You're buying into the dream rather than the reality. But in the long run we'll see who is right.
As an aside, why discourage your child from learning something, assuming they enjoy it? Someone who can speak natively will always be preferred over someone relying on a flawed, hackable translator.
To grasp the tech you just have to think. I thought about computerised translation, years back - and predicted this, much to the derision of pb-ers. But I was right.
If my daughter really really wants to learn Mandarin, I wouldn't discourage her. There is great pleasure in mastering a language (so I understand, never managed it) then being able to explore the literature, converse like a local.
But if she just wants to spend years mastering Mandarin because it might be "useful" - God no.
Leaning a foreign language will soon be like learning calligraphy, or mastering life-drawing, or trying to memorise vast tracts of rhymed verse. Enriching and "nice", but very peripheral.
"To grasp the tech you just have to think."
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are largely being sold smoke and mirrors. There is some substance behind the artifice, but nowhere near as much as is being sold. This is especially true about autonomous cars (especially level 5), speech recognition and translation. They've done the easy 50% (if that). The next 40% is much more difficult. The final 10% will be the killer.
Th question is whether 90% is good enough. In the case of translation, it probably will be for most cases. In the case of autonomous cars, no way.
Heck, I get excited by technology. I rave about technology. But I am well aware of its limitations.
As ever. the Economist's technology quarterly section is excellent.
Because some predictions dont come true does not mean we arent on a curve. Compare my youth and I am not 50 yet. We had tv with 3 channels, we were unusual in that we had a phone, our phone number in fact had 4 digits. Now we have the internet, x million channels of tv, we have phones that fit in a pocket. Tech will continue to advance though not always in the ways predicted
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are ltechnology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language#section-4
As ever. the Economist's technology quarterly section is excellent.
Five years ago I was derided on PB, by people like you, for suggesting computers would nail translation. Now it is accepted, by people like you, that I am probably right.
Read across. I'm right now, too.
It's bleedin' obvious to be fair. Computers can now, pretty much, pass the Turing Test. They are becoming self aware (without consciousness) and they are able to learn from their mistakes. That's the key. Self aware, self improving computers: this goal is now within reach.
It changes EVERYTHING. As intellectual middle class workers we are best advised to accept and adapt to this huge change. It is exactly like loom-workers who eventually had to accept that machines could weave cloth more cheaply.
People will still pay a premium for a bit of hand-woven silk or wool, but it is a niche product, aimed at the rich. Most is done by machines.
In the future, rich people will pay for artisanal driving, or personal cooking, or "hand crafted" journalism or lawyering or accounting or engineering or translating, but it will be niche. The vast bulk will be done by machines.
If jockeys are replaced by robots, why not horses too? Will there be anything left to bet on?
The bookies have been offering virtual racing for years
If a translation service can do 90% of the work, it's fairly probable that:
a) The human race will try to render the remaining language redundant - far fewer synonyms etc; b) Some people will invent new language for the purpose of concealment;
It's the progress of automation and technology into the professions that will truly frighten the well off in society as they see their trades taken away from them.
Aumotated healthcare diagnostics has the potential to be an enormously profitable market, and infinitely more efficient than the existing error-strewn, excessively human system.
We're floating around the edges with some tests, net doctor, telephone diagnoses etc. I imagine that our grandchildren will look back and imagine us as primitive.
This is bollocks. Talk to a black cab driver. In five years time, talk to a lorry driver.
I am now actively dissuading my daughters from any nonsense about "learning Mandarin". It's completely POINTLESS.
A new wave of change is happening now, and it is an incredible change in the warp and weft of urban living. So is Airbnb. And these are relatively trivial, compared to what's coming down the line.
I think you're wrong, and also don't know much about tech. You're buying into the dream rather than the reality. But in the long run we'll see who is right.
As an aside, why discourage your child from learning something, assuming they enjoy it? Someone who can speak natively will always be preferred over someone relying on a flawed, hackable translator.
To ge. Enriching and "nice", but very peripheral.
"To grasp the tech you just have to think."
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are ltechnology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language#section-4
As ever. the Economist's technology quarterly section is excellent.
Five years ago I was derided on PB, by people like you, for suggesting computers would nail translation. Now it is accepted, by people like you, that I am probably right.
Read across. I'm right now, too.
It's bleedin' obvious to be fair. Computers can now, pretty much, pass the Turing Test. They are becoming self aware (without consciousness) and they are able to learn from their mistakes. That's the key. Self aware, self improving computers: this goal is now within reach.
It changes EVERYTHING. As intellectual middle class workers we are best advised to accept and adapt to this huge change. It is exactly like loom-workers who eventually had to accept that machines could weave cloth more cheaply.
People will still pay a premium for a bit of hand-woven silk or wool, but it is a niche product, aimed at the rich. Most is done by machines.
In the future, rich people will pay for artisanal driving, or personal cooking, or "hand crafted" journalism or lawyering or accounting or engineering or translating, but it will be niche. The vast bulk will be done by machines.
If jockeys are replaced by robots, why not horses too? Will there be anything left to bet on?
The bookies have been offering virtual racing for years
Yes to keep the shops open for FOBTs, as you know a far more insidious robot.
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are ltechnology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language#section-4
As ever. the Economist's technology quarterly section is excellent.
Five years ago I was derided on PB, by people like you, for suggesting computers would nail translation. Now it is accepted, by people like you, that I am probably right.
Read across. I'm right now, too.
It's bleedin' obvious to be fair. Computers can now, pretty much, pass the Turing Test. They are becoming self aware (without consciousness) and they are able to learn from their mistakes. That's the key. Self aware, self improving computers: this goal is now within reach.
It changes EVERYTHING. As intellectual middle class workers we are best advised to accept and adapt to this huge change. It is exactly like loom-workers who eventually had to accept that machines could weave cloth more cheaply.
People will still pay a premium for a bit of hand-woven silk or wool, but it is a niche product, aimed at the rich. Most is done by machines.
In the future, rich people will pay for artisanal driving, or personal cooking, or "hand crafted" journalism or lawyering or accounting or engineering or translating, but it will be niche. The vast bulk will be done by machines.
If jockeys are replaced by robots, why not horses too? Will there be anything left to bet on?
The bookies have been offering virtual racing for years
I think you're wrong, and also don't know much about tech. You're buying into the dream rather than the reality. But in the long run we'll see who is right.
As an aside, why discourage your child from learning something, assuming they enjoy it? Someone who can speak natively will always be preferred over someone relying on a flawed, hackable translator.
To ge. Enriching and "nice", but very peripheral.
"To grasp the tech you just have to think."
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are ltechnology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language#section-4
As ever. the Economist's technology quarterly section is excellent.
Five years ago I was derided on PB, by people like you, for suggesting computers would nail translation. Now it is accepted, by people like you, that I am probably right.
Read across. I'm right now, too.
It's bleedin' obvious to be fair. Computers can now, pretty much, pass the Turing Test. They are becoming self aware (without consciousness) and they are able to learn from their mistakes. That's the key. Self aware, self improving computers: this goal is now within reach.
It changes EVERYTHING. As intellectual middle class workers we are best advised to accept and adapt to this huge change. It is exactly like loom-workers who eventually had to accept that machines could weave cloth more cheaply.
People will still pay a premium for a bit of hand-woven silk or wool, but it is a niche product, aimed at the rich. Most is done by machines.
In the future, rich people will pay for artisanal driving, or personal cooking, or "hand crafted" journalism or lawyering or accounting or engineering or translating, but it will be niche. The vast bulk will be done by machines.
If jockeys are replaced by robots, why not horses too? Will there be anything left to bet on?
The bookies have been offering virtual racing for years
Yes to keep the shops open for FOBTs, as you know a far more insidious robot.
nothing wrong with fobt machines they have a fixed payout. The problem with them is the other side of the screen
I think you're wrong, and also don't know much about tech. You're buying into the dream rather than the reality. But in the long run we'll see who is right.
As an aside, why discourage your child from learning something, assuming they enjoy it? Someone who can speak natively will always be preferred over someone relying on a flawed, hackable translator.
To ge. Enriching and "nice", but very peripheral.
"To grasp the tech you just have to think."
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are ltechnology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language#section-4
As ever. the Economist's technology quarterly section is excellent.
Five years ago I was derided on PB, by people like you, for suggesting computers would nail translation. Now it is accepted, by people like you, that I am probably right.
Read across. I'm right now, too.
It's bleedin' obvious to be fair. Computers can now, pretty much, pass the Turing Test. They are becoming self aware (without consciousness) and they are able to learn from their mistakes. That's the key. Self aware, self improving computers: this goal is now within reach.
It changes EVERYTHING. As intellectual middle class workers we are best advised to accept and adapt to this huge change. It is exactly like loom-workers who eventually had to accept that machines could weave cloth more cheaply.
People will still pay a premium for a bit of hand-woven silk or wool, but it is a niche product, aimed at the rich. Most is done by machines.
In the future, rich people will pay for artisanal driving, or personal cooking, or "hand crafted" journalism or lawyering or accounting or engineering or translating, but it will be niche. The vast bulk will be done by machines.
If jockeys are replaced by robots, why not horses too? Will there be anything left to bet on?
The bookies have been offering virtual racing for years
Yes to keep the shops open for FOBTs, as you know a far more insidious robot.
nothing wrong with fobt machines they have a fixed payout. The problem with them is the other side of the screen
It is a tricky one. On the one hand it is up to people to self-regulate and it's a free country. On the other, these things do demonstrable harm to those who cannot cope.
For a measure of how far we've come - without realising - smartphones are WAY in advance of the original Star Trek "communicator", which was pretty much a walkie-talkie, and that's it. The smartphone is so much more.
There's a sense that progress has slowed down because expected things - like Martian settlements, or inter-stellar exploration - haven't happened. But progress hasn't really slowed down that much, it's just gone in unexpected ways, following the technology. And it is now, clearly, on the cusp of a huge new leap, in terms of the lived human experience.
And on that positive note, nighty night.
And yet the two things I've been waiting for for donkeys' years still haven't been invented. The teleport and the Tardis technology. We've had the concepts for ages.
It's the progress of automation and technology into the professions that will truly frighten the well off in society as they see their trades taken away from them.
That's certainly my view. It's easy to be blasé about other peoples jobs being replaced, particularly if those jobs aren't attractive, but it's a different matter when it is your cushy and currently lucrative job that will be on the line.
A lot of the press coverage about AI is focused on self-driving cars, because it is easily understood and easy to demonstrate, and a lot of high profile companies are pursuing such ideas. Alongside the high profile research there is a huge amount of work going on to automate relatively boring, repetitive, but skilled work that will sweep away millions of jobs, and many of those jobs fall squarely into the "good job" category. I think that there are lot of well educated middle-class people who are completely unaware that the robots will be replacing them as well as the Uber drivers.
Five years ago I was derided on PB, by people like you, for suggesting computers would nail translation. Now it is accepted, by people like you, that I am probably right.
Read across. I'm right now, too.
It's bleedin' obvious to be fair. Computers can now, pretty much, pass the Turing Test. They are becoming self aware (without consciousness) and they are able to learn from their mistakes. That's the key. Self aware, self improving computers: this goal is now within reach.
It changes EVERYTHING. As intellectual middle class workers we are best advised to accept and adapt to this huge change. It is exactly like loom-workers who eventually had to accept that machines could weave cloth more cheaply.
People will still pay a premium for a bit of hand-woven silk or wool, but it is a niche product, aimed at the rich. Most is done by machines.
In the future, rich people will pay for artisanal driving, or personal cooking, or "hand crafted" journalism or lawyering or accounting or engineering or translating, but it will be niche. The vast bulk will be done by machines.
You're not right, at least not to the level you're extrapolating to. Machine translation has progressed better than I thought they would, but translators are still required; just look at job sites. They haven't 'nailed' translation. There's no guarantee that the progress we have seen so far will continue.
As for passing the Turing test ('pretty much' or otherwise): firstly, I doubt you actually know what the Turing test means, and its limitations. Secondly, they haven't. They're nowhere close. Just look at the following: http://www.cleverbot.com/
Why is this? It's because these tasks require real, deep AI, and what we have is extremely shallow, fake-AI. Real, deep AI will be the gamechanger. Until then it'sf all smoke and mirrors; brute force attacks on narrow problems.
You have contacts. Go and find some people working non-commercially in this area. I might tentatively suggest some of the guys and gals at the Leverhulme Centre for the future of intelligence:
"University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white "- Daily Telegraph.
Robot philosophers will no doubt one day complain about learning — "it took nearly a microsecond, what a waste of time" — about dead human philosophers.
"University students demand philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from syllabus because they are white "- Daily Telegraph.
What a bunch of racists....
The stuff about rankings which place significant weight on student satisfaction ratings is a terrible idea. On top of the concern about not offending students etc etc etc, it is totally flawed because unless you are an extremely uncommon student who has attended many different universities and studied similar set of degrees, you have bugger all idea about how your course material really stands against others out there.
Five years ago I was derided on PB, by people like you, for suggesting computers would nail translation. Now it is accepted, by people like you, that I am probably right.
Read across. I'm right now, too.
It's bleedin' obvious to be fair. Computers can now, pretty much, pass the Turing Test. They are becoming self aware (without consciousness) and they are able to learn from their mistakes. That's the key. Self aware, self improving computers: this goal is now within reach.
It changes EVERYTHING. As intellectual middle class workers we are best advised to accept and adapt to this huge change. It is exactly like loom-workers who eventually had to accept that machines could weave cloth more cheaply.
People will still pay a premium for a bit of hand-woven silk or wool, but it is a niche product, aimed at the rich. Most is done by machines.
In the future, rich people will pay for artisanal driving, or personal cooking, or "hand crafted" journalism or lawyering or accounting or engineering or translating, but it will be niche. The vast bulk will be done by machines.
You're not right, at least not to the level you're extrapolating to. Machine translation has progressed better than I thought they would, but translators are still required; just look at job sites. They haven't 'nailed' translation. There's no guarantee that the progress we have seen so far will continue.
As for passing the Turing test ('pretty much' or otherwise): firstly, I doubt you actually know what the Turing test means, and its limitations. Secondly, they haven't. They're nowhere close. Just look at the following: http://www.cleverbot.com/
Why is this? It's because these tasks require real, deep AI, and what we have is extremely shallow, fake-AI. Real, deep AI will be the gamechanger. Until then it'sf all smoke and mirrors; brute force attacks on narrow problems.
You have contacts. Go and find some people working non-commercially in this area. I might tentatively suggest some of the guys and gals at the Leverhulme Centre for the future of intelligence:
For a measure of how far we've come - without realising - smartphones are WAY in advance of the original Star Trek "communicator", which was pretty much a walkie-talkie, and that's it. The smartphone is so much more.
There's a sense that progress has slowed down because expected things - like Martian settlements, or inter-stellar exploration - haven't happened. But progress hasn't really slowed down that much, it's just gone in unexpected ways, following the technology. And it is now, clearly, on the cusp of a huge new leap, in terms of the lived human experience.
And on that positive note, nighty night.
No. Some areas have accelerated: technology based on silicon chips have taken advantage of Moore's Law. Other areas of technology have stagnated: twenty years ago you could cross the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound. Nowadays you can not. That's regression.
The areas that rely on Moore's Law will slow down as the brilliant chip designers (yay!) find it increasingly hard to fab them - the initial yields from one of the newest plans were disastrous (boo!). They are reaching fundamental limits. Unless, that is, we make a breakthrough in parallel processing or deep AI.
Take batteries. Yes, we are getting better capacity from batteries all the time; but the progress is slow and hard-won, especially compared to other parts of computing. Again, they are fighting against fundamental limits.
The same is true of so many areas. Ben Goldacre covers this a little in Bad Pharma.
I see SeanT doesn't understand the difference between the progress made in Machine Learning via Deep Learning (which is actually based on work that is 20+ years old, but we now have the computation ability to go beyond toys games) and proper Artificial Intelligence.
I was at an academic talk before Christmas given by one of the world leading machine learning experts and he said despite great progress being made in Deep Learning via Neural Networks, it isn't THE solution and still miles off. DL via NN provide a good framework to certain types of pattern recognition but have fundamental flaws (which are above the level of this site).
I see SeanT doesn't understand the difference between the progress made in Machine Learning via Deep Learning (which is actually based on work that is 20+ years old, but we now have the computation ability to go beyond toys games) and proper Artificial Intelligence.
I was at an academic talk before Christmas given by one of the world leading machine learning experts and he said despite great progress being made in Deep Learning via Neural Networks, it isn't THE solution and still miles off. DL via NN provide a good framework to certain types of pattern recognition but have fundamental flaws (which are above the level of this site).
Terminology problems: I call the current DL tech 'shallow' AI, and human-level AI as 'deep' AI. That's slightly confusing of me.
I see SeanT doesn't understand the difference between the progress made in Machine Learning via Deep Learning (which is actually based on work that is 20+ years old, but we now have the computation ability to go beyond toys games) and proper Artificial Intelligence.
I was at an academic talk before Christmas given by one of the world leading machine learning experts and he said despite great progress being made in Deep Learning via Neural Networks, it isn't THE solution and still miles off. DL via NN provide a good framework to certain types of pattern recognition but have fundamental flaws (which are above the level of this site).
Terminology problems: I call the current DL tech 'shallow' AI, and human-level AI as 'deep' AI. That's slightly confusing of me.
I tend not to call either "AI", instead sticking to Machine Learning for what 90%+ of the field is doing at the moment.
The media's reporting of this stuff is shocking though, which leads to SeanT's impression of the state of the art.
It's the progress of automation and technology into the professions that will truly frighten the well off in society as they see their trades taken away from them.
That's certainly my view. It's easy to be blasé about other peoples jobs being replaced, particularly if those jobs aren't attractive, but it's a different matter when it is your cushy and currently lucrative job that will be on the line.
A lot of the press coverage about AI is focused on self-driving cars, because it is easily understood and easy to demonstrate, and a lot of high profile companies are pursuing such ideas. Alongside the high profile research there is a huge amount of work going on to automate relatively boring, repetitive, but skilled work that will sweep away millions of jobs, and many of those jobs fall squarely into the "good job" category. I think that there are lot of well educated middle-class people who are completely unaware that the robots will be replacing them as well as the Uber drivers.
As I posted earlier exactly the reason why a universal basic income is inevitable, people will have to retrain and become more creative in the work they can do but it is unlikely they will be doing a 9-5 job in exactly the same work
Comments
This upsets the EU minded nations, because they see themselves as being kept in the dark by the "players".
I've read that the unsinkable stuff was a myth created after the sinking. In which case it's a fable about the media inventing stuff ...
I agree, there is a case to be made that competition and conflict between European nations was a spur to innovation. It was also quite a casualty toll on the continent, and even more so in the rest of the world that we conquered!
I do not fear the Russians, Chinese, Indians, SE Asians, Hispanics or Africans. All these places are travelling more or less in the direction we have gone. To the end of history: Liberal capitalism with increasingly functional democracies. We have little to fear from that. MENA is a different story, but part of the problem there is a form of Islam that resists and conflicts with the modern world.
You may wish it were otherwise, but I think that's a statement of fact.
I wouldn't write-off Merc, VW and BMW. Not by a long shot.
(*) e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project
I have no feel for how reliable a source this is.
Because I beat you to the punch, perhaps...
It's been brilliantly handled by Frontier. I haven't been able to play since, but when I get a few hours I'll be taking my 'conda to Merope. Hopefully the aliens will still be about.
The crew were either ill-trained or lacked initiative in launching the lifeboats. 2 hrs 40 mins passed between the iceberg impact and the stern section sinking.
I was only vaguely pro-Brexit. I found it a very hard decision to make. I positively hate your article - I think you're misrepresenting. That's clearly quite an extreme view for a person that was broadly on the fence. Think from where we are rather than where we were and I'll read your words eagerly. Hunker down in the past and I really have no time.
Has it?
How have (say) power transmission systems improved in the last fifty or hundred years? The HVAC cables and pylons strung around the countryside are remarkably similar to the ones made in the 1930s. Or power generation: the steam cycle is still well under 50% efficiency, as it was many decades ago. No logarithmic progress there.
I agree that there is massive changes in individual areas, but the improvements eventually slow as they become harder and more expensive to get - and less worthwhile to have.
If it is 'logarithmic', do you expect it to continue forever (a physical impossibility), or will it slow down sometime? If so, then you need to ask when.
As an aside, why discourage your child from learning something, assuming they enjoy it? Someone who can speak natively will always be preferred over someone relying on a flawed, hackable translator.
Western nations will have an ever declining proportion of the global human population (<10% by 2050, possible less, and possibly before), with economies that no longer dominate the globe, nor set the rules, although they will probably remain comparatively well-off, albeit rather stagnant, to attract immigrants in very large numbers. In addition, technological change will continue to reshape the very definition of "work", which will pose its own rather difficult challenges.
But the very term "West" is in itself anarchic in that its political use derives from defining Western developed, Eastern communist - and then the "3rd world" undeveloped - nations divide from the time of the Cold War. It is at least 20 years out of date, and probably longer. In the future, alliances and geopolitics may work very differently, both across, within, and without, nations and regions all across the world, rather than in tight geopolitical blocs. And national interests will change accordingly.
In the context of this, because it will happen regardless, Brexit is noise. The question is what use we choose to make of it in forging new international alliances, and maintaining older ones.
There are those, who continue to advocate Remain, who argue the best way to do that is to hunker down in regional political and economic unions for strength in numbers, and others, including many Leavers, who argue that it demands more national independence and flexibility, and is an opportunity, not a threat.
You can argue the former is as much protectionist as it is collaborative, and the latter is more open-minded about cooperation.
The "right" political model will always be up for debate, and rightly so.
What will be the point of educating people at all?
And yet all these high-tech solutions won't be deployable all over the world in sort order. Some places/people are going to be left behind, wanting people to do stuff and therefore be trained to do it.
Seems to me as though some of us will be born to a life of boredom whilst others still need to scratch a bare living from the soil.
To grasp the tech you just have to know a little about science and engineering.
I can imagine you would have been saying the same about flying cars in the 1950s: look! We have prototypes! Why bother building motorways!
You are largely being sold smoke and mirrors. There is some substance behind the artifice, but nowhere near as much as is being sold. This is especially true about autonomous cars (especially level 5), speech recognition and translation. They've done the easy 50% (if that). The next 40% is much more difficult. The final 10% will be the killer.
Th question is whether 90% is good enough. In the case of translation, it probably will be for most cases. In the case of autonomous cars, no way.
Heck, I get excited by technology. I rave about technology. But I am well aware of its limitations.
There are a couple of good articles about this in the latest Economist:
http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language#section-3
http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2017-05-01/language#section-4
As ever. the Economist's technology quarterly section is excellent.
Anyone looking for "evidence", just look up PB minutes after the incidents and hours later.
http://news.sky.com/story/british-great-grandmother-among-five-dead-at-florida-airport-10721845
a) The human race will try to render the remaining language redundant - far fewer synonyms etc;
b) Some people will invent new language for the purpose of concealment;
It's the progress of automation and technology into the professions that will truly frighten the well off in society as they see their trades taken away from them.
Aumotated healthcare diagnostics has the potential to be an enormously profitable market, and infinitely more efficient than the existing error-strewn, excessively human system.
We're floating around the edges with some tests, net doctor, telephone diagnoses etc. I imagine that our grandchildren will look back and imagine us as primitive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_racing
1) Islam
2) too many people
A nuke on mecca would sort out both issues 1) the impact on islam , 2) the ensuing war would get rid of excess population
A lot of the press coverage about AI is focused on self-driving cars, because it is easily understood and easy to demonstrate, and a lot of high profile companies are pursuing such ideas. Alongside the high profile research there is a huge amount of work going on to automate relatively boring, repetitive, but skilled work that will sweep away millions of jobs, and many of those jobs fall squarely into the "good job" category. I think that there are lot of well educated middle-class people who are completely unaware that the robots will be replacing them as well as the Uber drivers.
As for passing the Turing test ('pretty much' or otherwise): firstly, I doubt you actually know what the Turing test means, and its limitations. Secondly, they haven't. They're nowhere close. Just look at the following: http://www.cleverbot.com/
Why is this? It's because these tasks require real, deep AI, and what we have is extremely shallow, fake-AI. Real, deep AI will be the gamechanger. Until then it'sf all smoke and mirrors; brute force attacks on narrow problems.
You have contacts. Go and find some people working non-commercially in this area. I might tentatively suggest some of the guys and gals at the Leverhulme Centre for the future of intelligence:
http://lcfi.ac.uk/
But in many ways I hope you're right and I'm wrong. They'll be very exciting times.
The stuff about rankings which place significant weight on student satisfaction ratings is a terrible idea. On top of the concern about not offending students etc etc etc, it is totally flawed because unless you are an extremely uncommon student who has attended many different universities and studied similar set of degrees, you have bugger all idea about how your course material really stands against others out there.
Clever Bot. LOL.
A short extract from what I just typed:
MH: How about a game?
CB: Okay.
MH: What do you want to play?
CB: Nothing.
MH: How do you play that?
CB: Wait, are you a girl?
But you cannot deny that (e.g.) Google Translate has come on in leaps and bounds.
The areas that rely on Moore's Law will slow down as the brilliant chip designers (yay!) find it increasingly hard to fab them - the initial yields from one of the newest plans were disastrous (boo!). They are reaching fundamental limits. Unless, that is, we make a breakthrough in parallel processing or deep AI.
Take batteries. Yes, we are getting better capacity from batteries all the time; but the progress is slow and hard-won, especially compared to other parts of computing. Again, they are fighting against fundamental limits.
The same is true of so many areas. Ben Goldacre covers this a little in Bad Pharma.
I was at an academic talk before Christmas given by one of the world leading machine learning experts and he said despite great progress being made in Deep Learning via Neural Networks, it isn't THE solution and still miles off. DL via NN provide a good framework to certain types of pattern recognition but have fundamental flaws (which are above the level of this site).
The media's reporting of this stuff is shocking though, which leads to SeanT's impression of the state of the art.