I’ve checked my memory banks, and done some google-fu. I believe (75%) it was during this interview with Adam Ford: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tngUabHOea0 or one of his singularity summit talks.
Edit: Found a transcript here: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/firstMoversTalk.html
Well, if it has the ability to clean a bathroom, similar systems could cook, clean, drive, construct, do pretty much any routine task—that sounds like a lot of jobs to me. Now, could a lizard-level intelligence clean a randomly chosen bathroom? Said robot would have to have a lot of common sense notions of how to treat objects, very good visual perception, proprioception, and object classification, even the ability to use tools. That sounds more around higher mammel intelligence to me. As I haven’t spent my life studying AI, I’m perfectly willing to replace my opinion on this with your own, but I’m having trouble seeing how cleaning a randomly-chosen bathroom is a lizard-level task.
beneath minimum wage.
Well, there’s an obvious solution for that.
To what extent are you playing Devil’s Advocate above and to what extent do you actually think that the robotic disemployment thesis is correct, a primary cause of current unemployment, not solvable with NGDP level targeting and unfixably due to some humans being too-much-outcompeted rather than due to other environmental changes like the regulatory environment etcetera?
Gwern on neoluddism: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#neo-luddism
Really? I think of roads and highways as simple prepared environments, on which even the unexpected can be handled with relatively few actions—swerve, stop. A bathroom can be messy in a ridiculous variety of ways.
There may be a difference between technologies that make workers more efficient and technologies that actually make workers less necessary.
Whoever remains after you fire all those made redundant has been made more efficient.
Here’s a very “interesting” take on this community: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ku9b-fPa1s
I once made a white board out of one of those transparent office chair mats. I just stapled it to my white wall. I never ended up using it extensively, but it worked pretty well. If you want them professional-looking at more cost and slightly more work, consider just painting the back of a piece of plexi glass white, or just the wall behind it. That’s how this institution solved the same problem
(Edit: I researched some more and, due to ghosting issues, acrylic glass (or plexiglass) is not an ideal whiteboard material.) You could make 10 giant white boards for ~1000dollars, according to this website. A cheaper, if less stylish option, buy these 4′x4′ panels for ~50 each.
If you want to go even more DIY, here’s a list of whiteboard materials:
Melamine
Painted steel
Ceramic (glass) fired onto a steel surface in a kiln. The only material which does not ghost if the ink is left on for long periods of time.
PET, Polyethylene terephthalate-on-steel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteboard#Surface_materials.
Melamine seems like the best bet. Look for melamine-laminated plywood, as it will likely be as high-quality as most store-bought boards. Here’s the type of thing you’d want, and it’s very cheap. But you’d have to find someone willing to sell it in small quantities.
Note, chalk is an option—and a cheap one. This chalkboard contact paper is very cheap and has excellent reviews:http://goo.gl/samVWk What’s that you say? You’re too cool for chalkboards? I assure you, you’re not. If you do decide to buy the chalk paper, remember it must be applied to a smooth surface—one reviewer recommends masonite board. You cannot stick it directly to a wall, unless the wall is abnormally smooth. Same goes for spray-on chalkboard coating—which works very well, too.
This guy has tested the ghosting properties of a bunch of different types of plastic, and he made himself a pretty good ghosting-free whiteboard that photographs well out of Polypropylene. He says marks can stay on for weeks and still erase completely.
I’ve done a bit more googling and I found this link. So it looks like melamine-coated plywood is available at hardware stores. It’s considerably more expensive than the first link, but still cheap. And at least the minimum order isn’t 100 cubic meters! What you might want to do is bring your dry-erase markers to a warehouse hardware store and test them on the melamine and whatever other materials look promising.
Also I forgot to include this in my last post: I used liquid chalk on glass back when I worked at a restaurant. Smiggle is the best brand, and very erasable. Some of the others are hard to erase without window cleaning fluid. I’m not sure if they sell it in the US though.
I think answers to the meaning of the wave function collapse will come more form decoherence mechanisms giving the appearance of a collapse.
Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t that the official many-world’s position—that decoherence provides each “you” with the appearance of collapse?
Just curious, whatever happened to EY’s rationality books? You invested months of effort into them. Did you pull a sunk cost reversal? Or is publishing them not on the schedule till next year.
That makes sense; are you a physicist, too?
You should consider posting the drafts somewhere. At the very least, we’ll get new material to add to the wiki. Wikis don’t need ‘magic.’
My research OCD has started to kick in again and I’ve been doing more searches on whiteboards. It seems this ghosting issue is the big problem, and some—though not all - have found it to be a problem on melamine boards. Polypropylene seems like the best bet for a full wall solution. Though for long term heavy use, the ceramic boards are starting to make sense; they last indefinably and have zero ghosting.
Now that I have received my degree in Whiteboard Science from the University of Google, my recommendation for MIRI is this: purchase one or two ceramic whiteboards for heavy daily use and then buy polypropylene (in terms of ghosting, it is almost as good as ceramic) for the remaining walls.
Believe me, Luke and I are sad beyond words every day of our lives that we have to continue recommending people read a blog to learn philosophy and a ton of other things that colleges don’t know how to teach yet. We don’t particularly enjoy looking crazy to everyone outside of the LW bubble.
One hack for this would be to roll the blogposts into an ebook. A small change in title and presentation can make a big difference in terms of perception.
This doesn’t look as bad as it looks like it looks.
Qiaochu_Yuan
I imagine you’ve read about synesthesia. Someone with synesthesia might find a particular color has texture or taste—some atypical crisscrossing between the senses. I find music (especially considering those who can’t understand music) can be well modeled as a near-universal form of synesthesia, a linking between the emotional parts of the brain and those that process auditory information. Now this analogy is not perfect, as synesthetes almost never achieve consensus; the taste and/or texture of any particular color varies wildly between synesthets. This isn’t true about music, as it doesn’t vary that much in structure; and there seems to be some consensuses on the “sadness” or “energy” of particular songs.
But still, this might be a good, non-confusing way for you to think about music. When someone describes the beauty of a song, treat their statement as you would a synesthete saying, “Wow, that sunset tastes like a cheese burger.”
If you regularly associate with people of similar intelligence, how rare can that be? Even if you are the smartest person you know (unlikely considering the people you know, some of whom exceed your competence in mathematics and philosophy), anyone with more XP in certain areas would behave unpredictably in said areas, even if they had a smaller initial endowment. My guess is your means-prediction lobe is badly calibrated because after the fact you say to yourself, “I would have predicted that.” This could be easily tested.
Vernor Vinge once said something to the effect of, “When a robot can autonomously clean a bachelor’s bathroom, then we will be very, very close to a singularity.” So he’s in agreement with you on this senero:
My God, what have we wrought! There’s going to be a massive [jainitorial] unemployment cri—FOOM
Edit, sourced qoute: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/firstMoversTalk.html
Vernor: My classic example of that is that I figured that a robot that could clean a bachelor’s unprepped bathroom
[laughter]
would be something that would be very close to satisfying the singularity.