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Early Retirement Extreme Forums » Politics, and other eternal disagreements

1. 

   Robert Muir
   

   Journeyman
   Joined: Jul '10
   Posts: 280

   What I've been seeing recently:

   eBooks/readers are getting cheap! Kindle $139. Authors are giving away their books initially to build WoM and rankings before increasing price to $3-$5. You can buy all three "Girl with/who..." books for $20! You make books cheap enough and people won't care that they can't give/sell them when they're done. Authors can bypass publishers and use social media to market their own works.

   Time magazine's cover story this week is the Singularity. Pretty decent story considering that it's written by a mass media guy.

   A computer is winning at Jeopardy!!! How freaking amazing is that! It took a mainframe computer to beat any human at chess in 1997. It can be done with a laptop now. Take a computer that can beat the best human at Jeopardy and double the processing power in 1.5 years. Then double it again in 1.5 more years.

   I'm feeling a little dizzy today.

   Posted 2 years ago #
2. 

   Robert Muir
   

   Journeyman
   Joined: Jul '10
   Posts: 280

   Look at Tunisia and Egypt. With no help from western governments - in fact the US would have preferred Mubarak stay in power. The Internet, free flow of information and social media are encroaching upon totalitarian regimes like a virus. Can you say flash-mob?

   Those countries had old relatively weakened rulers. We'll see what happens in Iran with a young powerful ruler. If they kill off citizens like Tiananmen.

   Posted 2 years ago #
3. 

   George the original one
   

   Expert
   Joined: Jul '10
   Posts: 1,943

   Watson is cool, but it should also be a wake-up for anyone employed as "the man with the answer", e.g. helpdesk support, call redirection, etc.

   Despite the obvious mistakes Watson makes, it is far better and faster at coming up with an answer than most any human. Change the knowledgebase and increase the number of interactions to where it becomes the call center and you can replace a LOT of people.

   Posted 2 years ago #
4. 

   dragoncar
   

   Expert
   Joined: Oct '10
   Posts: 1,289

   Have you tried cleverbot.com recently?

   Posted 2 years ago #
5. 

   msrich
   

   Apprentice
   Joined: Jan '11
   Posts: 31

   I just tried cleverbot.com a few minutes ago. Thanks for recommending this dragoncar! I thoroughly enjoyed my artificial intelligence conversation.

   Posted 2 years ago #
6. 

   jacob
   

   Expert
   Joined: Jul '10
   Posts: 3,301

   What I want to know is ... where's my jet car?

   Also, the moon bases?

   Posted 2 years ago #
7. 

   Surio
   

   Sorcerer
   Joined: Dec '10
   Posts: 601

   Hear, Hear: Jacob. None of those Cold war promises held up did they? Although, personally
   a) I've also become vastly disillusioned by the "space frontier" nonsense, and,
   b) I am very happy to send off as many people away as possible on that pod. Good riddance, New New New pilgrims!

   What I also want to know is this: I understood everything from those Palm leaves and palimpsests and rosetta stones from our forebears, without ANY external aid at all. So, I could completely "live their lives" in my mind, by reading them. "How in God's name" is an archaeologist going to interpret our lives from a kindle with corroded battery and hard drive with (machine encrypted) DRM to prevent anything from being read? Give me "appropriate technology" in tune with nature any day.

   @RM:
   Revolutions in the past have been carried out very successfully, via pamphlets and underground printing and even horseback/word-of-mouth (shudder) (Sepoy mutiny, American independence) too. Let's not get too carried away with the correlation -> causation fallacy.

   @other-george:
   Not just those jobs: In my other blog post, I mentioned about Robots taking over as teachers and waiters already!

   Posted 2 years ago #
8. 

   mikeBOS
   

   Master
   Joined: Nov '10
   Posts: 554

   I'm always hoping someone is going to cure the old-people diseases long before I get there: heart disease, various cancers, dementia. There's certainly a lot of guinea pigs for the researchers before it's my turn.

   Posted 2 years ago #
9. 

   jacob
   

   Expert
   Joined: Jul '10
   Posts: 3,301

   @mikeBOS - They'll just be replaced by yet unknown even-older-people diseases. I'm kinda hoping that people will wake up culturally and try to live better rather than spends thousands living longer [with medical assistance].

   Posted 2 years ago #
10. 

    JohnnyH
    

    Expert
    Joined: Jul '10
    Posts: 1,366

    Just watched a very interesting series from History Channel, Ancient Aliens... Worth a watch, all the episodes are on youtube.

    Even if you find the conclusions ridiculous/blasphemous it had a lot of very interesting stuff.

    For example, it was pointed out that human progress seems to come about in very rapid bursts, then stagnate. Compare 1900-1950 to 1950-2000.

    If we would have kept the 1900-1950 pace we'd be living in McMansions on Mars by now.

    Posted 2 years ago #
11. 

    Robert Muir
    

    Journeyman
    Joined: Jul '10
    Posts: 280

    I'm still extremely impressed with IBM's achievement in designing Watson. Watch the Nova show http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=smartest+machine+on+earth&aq=f

    They way the changed the way the computer learns was very cool!

    Yes, call centers, help desks, etc. are on the fast-track to extinction; going the way of the secretarial pool. Remember the rows and rows of bookkeepers in most large corps?

    Currently we rely on Google for most of our research. Still, it takes quite some time to learn how to use it effectively. I'll bet there were some Google execs drooling over Watson's performance!

    IBM stock had plateaued at around $125 up until last September. Since then it's blasted up over 30%, beating the S&P by 7%. Not a huge margin, but if they have their ducks in a row finally, they may be ready for some serious action!

    Posted 2 years ago #

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