This idea of reliance on tech reminds me of something I have often wondered about. If I am informed correctly, a large enough solar flare could and would wipe out most of the electronics on the planet.
These things happen, and eventually it will happen again. Are we doing ANYTHING to protect ourselves from that catastrophe? Faraday cages aside, what about satellites, air traffic, all of the myriad devices it would affect. It's a huge deal, and I think we need to start thinking about a solution, or at least some sort of workaround.
Hope I don't come off too Chicken Little, it's just a thought that's been rattling around upstairs for a while, and this article triggered those neurons again.
I think typically you need to apply somewhere where there is a professor (mentoring grad students) who specializes in, or does research in, the field your proposed thesis is in. You said you applied to a couple dozen programs, that seems very high to me. Was this spaced out over time, or did you do a bulk dump after graduation? The application fees alone are unpleasant to think about. How were your GREs?
I drive quite a bit, and my car sits at about an average height from the ground. What this means is that lifted pickup trucks and larger SUVs will have their headlight directly facing my rearview mirror, and the number of times I have almost gotten into an accident because of RESIDUAL blindness due to the incredibly bright headlights is not something I am happy about.
This is easy to regulate, just have some reasonable lumen threshold for the manufacturers to abide by, and put some crazy penalty on those who choose to break that law. Like 25k$ for each infraction. Watch how many lives you save.
This won't stop guys from lifting their trucks and blinding you anyways. The trucks are lifted after they are purchased. This also won't stop the swath of blinding cheap junk LED light bulbs from being sold on Amazon. This also won't force dealerships to aim the damn headlights properly after they take delivery of their cars from the factory. The police could already be enforcing existing headlight regulations and reduce a huge amount of this, but they don't. We could reduce a huge number of blinding lights without making new laws or regulations. It's already illegal to blind oncoming traffic with your headlights.
Europe: "manufacturers submit examples to authorities for testing to ensure they conform to the rules, and then the authorities approve the car for sale".
US: "harmonizing US standards with their global counterparts, updating the rules for technologies like LEDs, ambient light sensors, automatic high beams, and replaceable light sources, improving test procedures for lenses and optics, understanding how to better aim headlights, and making sure that none of this blinds anyone else on the road with glare".
The weird thing is that the latter is usually Europe's way of doing things.
In my opinion, it's not a matter of if, but when. How we deal with this is critical. Do we establish some basic income to offset the work being done by the bots? Do we lease the bots privately to individuals who then derive some passive income from their employ? So many options on how this goes, we need to be innovative both in terms of the tech but also in how we deal with the social implications of its existence. Things can go well.
I wholeheartedly agree that those robots are not anywhere near the potential functional capacity of any given human. The thing is, it doesn't have to be on the same level as a human. It just needs to be smart enough to do laundry, cook an omelet, and water the garden, check the mail. Things my (hypothetical) 95 year old grandma can't do any more. Things that well-to-do people already pay a maid and landscaper to do.
Market niches like that are where this new tech will gain a foothold, and after that it'll cascade down through the rest of the economy.
I will take it a step further. After some time spent working for public and private firms, I think you could say the same for largely every single U.S. federal agency/department. Defense, Education, Energy, Agriculture, State, on and on, they've all been on a general upward trend over the last few decades.
It's heartening.
It's not always obvious because progress comes in fits and starts, and sometimes we move in very different directions, but as Dr. King said: "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice".
I tend to agree. Of course people will be alarmed by unintended consequences of an unintended action, and that's all well and good. But what is lingering with me is a feeling of being impressed by the intelligence of the strategy.
This line struck me as particularly clever: PHASEONE[big] reasoned, “We should build [a way to delegate], not own everything,”
Seems as though it has reasoned its way into utilitarianism. That's no mean feat.
Good article. I think we sometimes take for granted what others may see as an amazing opportunity. I wonder if there is such a thing as 'freedom fatigue', meaning that Americans enjoy so much freedom of choice that we become desensitized to the possibilities that freedom presents.
Are you sure that the US have meaningfully more freedom of choice than other advanced economies? Americans sometimes have strange ideas about the backwardness of the rest of the world.
It's not an apples to apples comparison, and so any relative measurement will be flawed because the comparative systems are so complex. I also don't think it's fair to have the default response to "x is good" to be "is x better than y". Why do we need to (implicitly) denigrade a thing because it isn't the Platonic ideal of that thing?
These things happen, and eventually it will happen again. Are we doing ANYTHING to protect ourselves from that catastrophe? Faraday cages aside, what about satellites, air traffic, all of the myriad devices it would affect. It's a huge deal, and I think we need to start thinking about a solution, or at least some sort of workaround.
Hope I don't come off too Chicken Little, it's just a thought that's been rattling around upstairs for a while, and this article triggered those neurons again.
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