wickes

I'm not convinced nationality or accents have much to do with it, the overwhelming majority of American English speakers I know also can't use voice tools on their phones. My American English is pretty regular and it certainly never works for me. I suspect the common factor here is that the voice tools are junk, not that groups of people lie outside its area of function.

By contrast, I use VoiceAttack to tie voice commands to keyboard macros on my desktop, and it does what it's supposed to most of the time (but I bet it wouldn't if I had an accent.) Voice control definitely isn't an unsolvable problem, but it sure seems like one whenever I try to use it on my phone.

The only way you'd ever get users to disable their ad blockers on your website would be injecting them with a fast-acting poison and publishing directions to the antidote. If a regular publisher of article-based content tried this, they would just end up with no readers.

>America has also had public execution pretty much since day one. Hanging was our preferred method before the electric chair, and then lethal injection. We make sure that both the families of the victims can witness these deaths, as well as other witnesses, and they're widely covered in the news media. We are still the only Western nation left that practices capital punishment, mainly because people here love it so much that they can't seem to pass a law banning it or follow the UN resolutions that ban it.

Let's make this abundantly clear: the United States of America categorically does not execute criminals because "people here love it so much." Nothing about that idea is even slightly correct. Capital punishment is not used at all in several of the states, and in the ones where it's a valid sentence (or on the federal level,) your likelihood of ever actually being executed is excessively low. Since 1950, the Federal government executed 26 people. The entire country executed 35 people over the whole of 2014. Those 35 were in just five states. What a truly bloodthirsty culture.

As for executions being "public," there haven't been any of those since 1936. There is certainly room to argue that subsequent events stretched the definition of the word "private," but the day has long since passed where you could just show up at the town square on the scheduled day in your commemorative "I <3 watching people die" hoodie and watch the Man give someone the needle. The reason witnesses are present to view modern "private" executions is because having the government kill convicted criminals where nobody is allowed to see it happen is an absolutely terrible idea that defies common sense. Like, duh.

If Americans love watching their public executions so much, why do they never get around to actually doing it, and why aren't citizens allowed to just show up and take pictures?

LIBOR doesn't demonstrate that banks rely on trust. None of the involved banks or brokers trusted that anyone else was actually being honest about LIBOR submissions or predictions.

Even if there were any system safeguarding LIBOR whatsoever, a blockchain wouldn't have helped. The reason it was so easy to falsify your bank's LIBOR submission was because they were essentially made up. Submitters produced the number by talking to brokers and then making a decision. A blockchain wouldn't have made any difference. You'd put your submission on the blockchain, and you wouldn't be able to change it later if things didn't turn out how you liked, but you had made up the submission anyway. Nobody would ever be able to point to some number on the blockchain and say definitively that your reported LIBOR figure for today should have been X but in fact it was Y and therefore you're a crook, because the figures were never verified. They'd only be able to say "There's no record, so you could easily have just made up the number," and you'd say "I did make it up, that's how you do it, everyone else made theirs up too," and that would pretty much be it. The only way to catch someone being dishonest was to find records of employees talking about it; the Hayes case and others like it are based on the fact that bankers incriminated themselves by discussing the manipulation with each other.

By contrast, when banks transfer specific quantities of money, they absolutely are not relying on a trust-based system. I owed you X, I sent you X, and I swear to God if you come to me later and say I only sent Y and I owe you more dosh there will be a fight. If you produce internal records kept by your accountants that say I totally only sent Y, no bank would take your word for it under any circumstances. Similarly, if there was a mixup and some of my assets ended up with you by accident, my chances of convincing you that I should get them back are nonexistent if I don't have some outside system demonstrating that I'm not lying. In real life, financial institutions rely on third-party businesses to be that "outside system." A blockchain would help solve our problem without those businesses. I wouldn't need to trust you, the transaction would be recorded on our blockchain, and if either of us thought the other could falsify the blockchain we wouldn't have agreed to use it. If the blockchain says I really didn't send enough money, I'll probably say something about a technical glitch and give you the cash while I grumble about how much I hate technology. Neither of us have to trust each other any more than we already don't, and we don't have to involve some kind of trust or clearing business.

>What I think is the same philosophically though, is ceding the power over fundamental activities/interactions for functionality.

I'm not sure what this means. If you're referring to the fact that groups are usually required to make everyday society work, that's not a useful example of ceding power. Everyone at the train company has essentially welded their power together in a Captain Planet or Voltron sort of deal to make rail transport work, but that doesn't make anyone else less powerful. It makes the train people highly interdependent both on each other and on everyone else to use the trains to go to the farms or the medicine factory or whatever and make the other parts of society work. They can't tell everyone else to sod off because they've got some magic spell that makes the trains work. The trains are run by regular chumps without any magic, and any other regular chump could be made to replace any one of them. Even if they were special, their special-ness wouldn't make them any less dependent on anybody else since they still just run the trains. By contrast, the Minds are totally required for the Culture to maintain their shiny post-scarcity status quo, no human effort could ever replace the Minds, and the Minds are not dependent on the efforts of any humans. The Culture's people have actually ceded power over all sorts of everyday stuff to the Minds. The Minds could tell everyone else to stuff it if they wanted to, and nobody would be able to do anything about it.

>When real AGI comes, if it comes well, then it has the possibility to look like the pinnacle of functionality, just like our tools are now. So it is definitely exponentially more powerful, but for the average person it will look like magic, much like most technology does now to the under-informed.

>...and given that we would have built it, it won't be black magic either - just so totally far removed from the average person that it will look like magic.

How much it resembles magic to the under-informed is irrelevant. The under-informed aren't uninformable, they just haven't been sufficiently informed yet. I know lots of people that are convinced they can't be sailors because spending weeks on a ship just seems totally beyond them, or that they can't be physicists because they had a hard time with calculus in school. It seems to them that those tasks require some ineffable qualities that can only be found in others, but they're wrong. Both calculus and seamanship are challenging to comprehend and highly impressive when applied, but they aren't "unknowable," they're just "unknown." Any given chump could learn to pull them off if they weren't doing something else. It's only unknowable magic if they couldn't ever figure it out, or if no group of people like them working together could ever replicate it themselves.

Congratulations, you've nailed down the Culture's biggest quandary in one sentence. The best answer I can give you is "good question." The best answer Banks could give you is spread out over an award-winning series of nine books, so it's probably worth a look.

For starters, Minds are fully aware of how big a deal mind reading is, and virtually never actually do it. A situation has to be ethically ridiculous before a Mind will even begin to consider it, we're talking "this person was brainwashed into hiding a nuke on the puppy daycare planet and we can't find it" sort of situations. This somewhat changes the question: "If the Mind could read your thoughts and predict your future actions, but hasn't, what does it mean to... " Again, the best answer I can give you is "good question." I suppose it's worth pointing out that if the mere possibility is enough to deprive you of free will, your universe is totally deterministic, the Mind doesn't have free will either, and you're all in the same boat. The Mind doesn't meaningfully have any "control" over you, since nobody has control over anything. The realization that you don't posses free will won't help you gain free will since that realization was itself inevitable and the actions you take as a result are too.

Further, if you know the Mind can perfectly predict your future actions when they scan your brain, does that change how you'll act? What if they scan your brain in secret and don't tell you so you don't know when their prediction was formed? I'm going to take an example from a source I'm sure we're all familiar with: the 2007 film Next, starring Nicolas Cage. The premise is that Mr. Cage's character can observe his own future for the next two minutes. The big caveat is that it only gives him a highly useful idea of what the future is probably like and not a faultless prediction. By the time he's done looking, the future has changed because he looked at it. The end result is that he never actually knows the future. His power is subject to the "observer effect:" the act of detecting the future caused it to change, so he only knows what the future would have been at the moment he used his ability. From then on, the actual future is different, and the only way to know how it changed is to use his ability again, which will yet again change the future. A simpler but less Cage-tastic example is detecting electrons. You can observe when photons interact with the electron, but the electron's path was altered by the photon, so good luck figuring out where it is now. You could wait for it to interact with another photon, but that will cause... and so on. Perhaps the Mind shooting a bunch of futuristic radio waves or whatever inside your skull alters your thinky bits, and the very act of detecting your mental state alters your mental state. The Mind will then extrapolate from data that was outdated by the very act of producing it, and his prediction will be wrong. How wrong? Wrong enough to matter philosophically? "Good question."

That's not really what he meant by "exponentially more powerful." The Culture is a helpful example, because it's a society administrated by ludicrously intelligent machines called "Minds" that are obviously and immediately more capable than a human could ever be. Their intellectual dominance cannot be overstated, and a single Mind is probably smarter than all of humanity put together. Each one is perfectly capable of observing a human's brain and accurately predicting their future actions, even though doing so is highly discouraged by social custom. They are truly "exponentially more powerful" and "potentially unknowable." A recurring theme in the stories is that the Culture's people essentially live as the Minds permit. They could not possibly sustain their post-scarcity lives without the Mind's superhuman abilities, and the Minds could trivially enslave the entire populace if they wished.

By contrast, airplanes aren't exactly black magic. Any regular adult human can figure out airplanes. They teach the prerequisite skills for flying, designing, and building aircraft in schools. The majority of humans alive today choose not to master the secrets of flight because there are only so many hours in the day and they have other stuff to do, but that's not the same as yielding any agency to someone "exponentially more powerful." They could just as easily have ended up the airplane guy if they'd made some different decisions in college. Cars, medicine, waste management, and energy are similarly things that anybody could potentially understand and work with given some reasonable amount of study. You'd run into trouble mastering all of them together, but that doesn't make the required mind "potentially unknowable." There are no supermen who enable modern human society, it's just regular chumps like me and you in organized groups. We could totally become two of those chumps! In fact, we probably are already two of those chumps.

Did movie piracy go anywhere?

>They have Windows, OSX, and Linux apps.

That's sort of a crucial distinction. You have to run the application, but pretty much everybody has something that can run it. That's very different than requiring an application that only runs on mobile devices, and even then only some mobile devices.

I'm actually not seeing a Linux version of the Airport utility anywhere, although apparently it works pretty well with WINE.

>They have Windows, OSX, and Linux apps.

That's sort of a crucial distinction. You have to run the application, but pretty much everybody has something that can run it. That's very different than requiring an application that only runs on mobile devices, and even then only some mobile devices.

I'm actually not seeing a Linux version of the Airport utility anywhere, although apparently the Windows version pretty well with WINE.