Listen now | Noah Smith & Brad DeLong's 30:00 < [Length of Weekly Podcast] < 60:00. We get nerdier! Be warned! Key Insights: Brad cannot, in fact, reliably and accurately multiply two-digit numbers in his head… When people comment on twitter that we are a nerdy podcast, we respond by going nerdier..
Towards the end, there is an interesting discussion of whether infantry should be robots driven by AI or controlled by a human. It could well be a combination of both. In terms of speed, we have seen that an AI simulation air battle reliably beats a very good human pilot. OTOH, we have legions of players of "shoot 'em up" video games with quite realistic combat situations. It would be very "Ender's Game" for nations to train kids to be really good infantry housing videogames, then have them control battlefield robots, while letting AIs take over for some functions to increase speed of response against similarly equipped battlefield robots. If robots fight robots, are we back to wars of attrition? Will robots fight humans, e.g. wealthy nations fighting poor nations? I can't help feeling this is a poor use of robots.
If you have such technology, why not apply it in more work areas once the technology becomes cheap enough? The awful movie "Surrogates" shows a world where everyone is effectively controlling a human-like robot. A good movie is "Sleep Dealer" where poor country workers control robots in dangerous jobs in the rich world (the pay differential is still advantageous).
While wealthy people might well prefer real human servants, might most other people pay for cheap labor to control household robots to do all those things that you want to make life easier without having to have appliance automation? Asimovian robots but with much human wetware rather than positronic brains controlling the robot, or at least carefully managing it. Allowing an AI to take over for the tedious tasks, a single person could control many robots all from their place of residence. True "Mechanical Turks" using telechirics plus AI could have a huge future.
Indeed they could. Already, I think, Google self-driving cars in Arizona have one human minder for every 49 vehicles for the highly unusual situations, which are thus largely but not completely autonomous...
Robots already pursue people. In 3rd world countries and in Gaza. And the metric applied in evaluating the whole mess is now the ratio of hostiles to innocents killed. Once the other side gets their robots up to speed, how will they use them? I think the interesting question is not ordinance deployment but operation in an urban environment and how the two sides become more equal.
I'm not sure what you mean by "ordinance deployment" exactly, but I do see it as force projection. Empires expand when force projection is cheap and very effective, and then contract again as the "enemy" deploys similar technology that makes force projection very expensive. US force projection is very expensive, and increasingly so, hinting at a retreat from foreign entanglements. Robots (including drones) are one way to reduce casualties although I fear even more expensive. Humans will prove very ingenious at destroying robots (even without Jedi skills) and will also manufacture their own, cheaper versions to fight back where appropriate. Don't humans always manage to beat the ostensibly superior terminators in the movies? ;)
"ordnance deployment" is precision placement of bombs too small to require an F-16 to deliver them. But drones that circle overhead of an urban environment for surveillance (that's the skies over Gaza) are an annoyance. When they also carry weapons and replace the police on the beat, that's unexplored territory. And feasible.
Finally, a reasonable discussion of Rainbow’s End. I’ve been wanting to talk about Vinge’s AR vision of the near future, but never encountered anyone who’d heard of it, let alone read it. It seems to me that “provenance” or “certification” of transactions were a memorable part of that vision.
Also, Brad could definitely do Pfizer ads and I hope he doesn’t.
Great reference to electricity at Hatfield House. Tech matured through the accretion of layers of abstraction
Towards the end, there is an interesting discussion of whether infantry should be robots driven by AI or controlled by a human. It could well be a combination of both. In terms of speed, we have seen that an AI simulation air battle reliably beats a very good human pilot. OTOH, we have legions of players of "shoot 'em up" video games with quite realistic combat situations. It would be very "Ender's Game" for nations to train kids to be really good infantry housing videogames, then have them control battlefield robots, while letting AIs take over for some functions to increase speed of response against similarly equipped battlefield robots. If robots fight robots, are we back to wars of attrition? Will robots fight humans, e.g. wealthy nations fighting poor nations? I can't help feeling this is a poor use of robots.
If you have such technology, why not apply it in more work areas once the technology becomes cheap enough? The awful movie "Surrogates" shows a world where everyone is effectively controlling a human-like robot. A good movie is "Sleep Dealer" where poor country workers control robots in dangerous jobs in the rich world (the pay differential is still advantageous).
While wealthy people might well prefer real human servants, might most other people pay for cheap labor to control household robots to do all those things that you want to make life easier without having to have appliance automation? Asimovian robots but with much human wetware rather than positronic brains controlling the robot, or at least carefully managing it. Allowing an AI to take over for the tedious tasks, a single person could control many robots all from their place of residence. True "Mechanical Turks" using telechirics plus AI could have a huge future.
Indeed they could. Already, I think, Google self-driving cars in Arizona have one human minder for every 49 vehicles for the highly unusual situations, which are thus largely but not completely autonomous...
Robots already pursue people. In 3rd world countries and in Gaza. And the metric applied in evaluating the whole mess is now the ratio of hostiles to innocents killed. Once the other side gets their robots up to speed, how will they use them? I think the interesting question is not ordinance deployment but operation in an urban environment and how the two sides become more equal.
I'm not sure what you mean by "ordinance deployment" exactly, but I do see it as force projection. Empires expand when force projection is cheap and very effective, and then contract again as the "enemy" deploys similar technology that makes force projection very expensive. US force projection is very expensive, and increasingly so, hinting at a retreat from foreign entanglements. Robots (including drones) are one way to reduce casualties although I fear even more expensive. Humans will prove very ingenious at destroying robots (even without Jedi skills) and will also manufacture their own, cheaper versions to fight back where appropriate. Don't humans always manage to beat the ostensibly superior terminators in the movies? ;)
"ordnance deployment" is precision placement of bombs too small to require an F-16 to deliver them. But drones that circle overhead of an urban environment for surveillance (that's the skies over Gaza) are an annoyance. When they also carry weapons and replace the police on the beat, that's unexplored territory. And feasible.
IMO you started at the wrong end. The easy route is:
50 x 50 =2500
47 x 50 = 50 x 50 - 3 x 50 = 2350
47 x 47 = 47 x 50 - 3 x 47 = 2209
But perhaps the hard route was the point. Because it's there!
Well, yes... but toughness builds neuronal connections, perhaps...
Finally, a reasonable discussion of Rainbow’s End. I’ve been wanting to talk about Vinge’s AR vision of the near future, but never encountered anyone who’d heard of it, let alone read it. It seems to me that “provenance” or “certification” of transactions were a memorable part of that vision.
Also, Brad could definitely do Pfizer ads and I hope he doesn’t.
They have not come knocking :-)...