jal278

15 ms·

91.
by jal278 12y ago
It's interesting -- I would imagine a minority of Americans would support developing killer drones, because it is a terrible slope for the world as a whole to go down, yet our military -- largely because of game theory, will continue t
92.
by jal278 12y ago
Insofar as the algorithmic government was democratic and optimized public opinion, there is no reason to expect it will be better at long-term planning, which is largely a human logical deficiency; we know the likely dangers of global warmi
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by jal278 12y ago
Of course there is an inherent conflict between profitability and social benefit: The morality of raw profit optimization is indifferent to human concerns. For example, it made more financial sense for a tobacco company to generate FUD abou
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by jal278 12y ago
For the record, it sounds like this particular algorithm is pretty rudimentary, and it is mostly a PR stunt; as the article states, many corporate decisions are already the direct result of quantified information. In practice I bet this wou
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by jal278 12y ago
Not sure if the cookie cutter form letter has less impact than other approaches, but I liked that it made me consider my personal reasons for supporting net neutrality: The success of the internet and the incredible rate of its innovation r
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Dear FFC,(dearfcc.org)
17 points by jal278 12y ago|7 comments
97.
by jal278 12y ago
The way I would interpret the phrase 'apes with shiny toys' (although it was not me who used that phrase in this thread) -- is that we are slightly-evolved apes who have become infatuated with our technology. Thoreau said: "O
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by jal278 12y ago
We surely have invented amazing things -- and we are intelligent -- and yet our brains aren't that far removed from our ape ancestors. These brains of ours really are not well-suited for considering really-long-term abstract uncertain
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by jal278 12y ago
I agree that humanity has a strong track record of overcoming challenges, and of course, that's a great thing! And I'm not saying that climate change will be something we'll be unable to overcome. However, it's unwise to
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by jal278 12y ago
There's a seemingly reasonable fallacy embedded in the argument that so far technology has been able to dig us out of the holes that it itself digs: That past performance is indicative of the future. Of course, the past often does pred
101.
Technology as a Bear Trap(worldbetter.svbtle.com)
2 points by jal278 12y ago|0 comments
102.
by jal278 13y ago
Right, I am agreeing that innovation deserves compensation, and as a result you'll have inequality. But the degree of that inequality overall in society is separable from technological progress -- i.e. through progressive tax rates or
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by jal278 13y ago
Interesting difference of opinion: "According to the World Values Survey, 60 percent of Americans believe that the poor could become rich if they just tried hard enough. In Europe, however, the number of individuals who hold similar be
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by jal278 13y ago
I agree that currently the populace at large might not understand what is going on, but if structural employment continues to grow, then I think the nature of the problem will become more clear. In the limit, if the percentage of displaced
105.
by jal278 13y ago
Explanation and analysis of the idea of a 'post-employment economy', i.e. increasing corporate profits and decreasing employment, is given in 'The Lights in the Tunnel' by Martin Ford (which I found to be a good read, al
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Surviving the post-employment economy(aljazeera.com)
26 points by jal278 13y ago|43 comments
107.
by jal278 13y ago
I agree that overall the modern poor are likely doing better than they have historically -- although I disagree that they "never get poorer"; the trend in the last few decades as minimum wage has remained the same is would seem to
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by jal278 13y ago
The top 0.1% is not by definition harmful to society, but harm can come from when the 0.1% controls an increasingly disproportionate share of wealth. But of course, income inequality is not bad by axiom either. The rub of increasing income
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by jal278 13y ago
When talking about income inequality it may be too narrow to only look at "how poor are the poorest people," because what's important in an inequality is the increasingly vast disparity between the poorest and the richest. Fo
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by jal278 13y ago
A practical suggestion Kay makes is that one way to brainstorm start-ups is to think of technological amplifiers for human universals [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals
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by jal278 13y ago
> With technological progress worker roles are eliminated, but the idea is that the market has demand for new currently non-existent things and as the progress enables those things to come into existence creating new jobs as it goes. The
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by jal278 13y ago
Perhaps a disclaimer on F2P games might help: "Knowledge of the presence of persuasive mechanisms in a technology may sensitize users to them and decrease their efficacy. Therefore, in some cases, such knowledge might diminish the effe
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Righteous nerd rage and the electoral college(blog.joellehman.com)
1 points by jal278 13y ago|0 comments
114.
by jal278 13y ago
The problem is that it reduces the capability of the population as a whole to make informed political decisions. The more distracted we are by superficial things, the less outrage we might express over abuses of power. In other words, if mo
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by jal278 13y ago
Although I am not advocating a technological slowdown (nor do I think one is even possible) -- I think a wiser people would inhibit technology "until we're ready." If the result of technological growth vastly outpacing our ab
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by jal278 13y ago
While the gap between moral and technological progress may be known, the argument here is that it becomes increasingly dangerous as technological progress accelerates relative to moral. I think it would be a huge mistake to assume that the
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by jal278 13y ago
I agree completely that this is a delicate issue; my main hope is to raise some awareness that the disconnect between technological progress and progress in morality/ethics deserves greater research focus. I am not in favor of blindly
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by jal278 13y ago
While I fix my cache: TLDR: Don’t give a toddler a flamethrower. In more detail: The letter makes an argument for allocating more funds towards solving less immediate causes of human suffering. In particular, one emerging problem is that we
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The Morality Apocalypse: An Open Letter to Bill and Melinda Gates(blog.joellehman.com)
56 points by jal278 13y ago|77 comments
120.
by jal278 13y ago
I agree with you in essence, that large companies are intelligences built upon the substrate of many human minds, and that a company's motivations often diverge from those of the humans that compose them. I'd go further and say th

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