“The remarkable aspect of this graph is that it shows four periods of sustained use of the terms Luddite and Luddites after the initial movement subsided. The late 1960s peak can be understood as part of the rising green, ecological movements, and the 1830s due to Captain Swing, but I can’t see easy explanations for the other periods. Perhaps the 1880s relates to the ‘new unionism’, and the 1930s the great depression and a corresponding lack of faith in progress. The 1930s also see the first concerted use of the term ‘Luddism’, as a theorization of their practice. There’s also a jump in the late 1940s; a consequence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki perhaps? One of the problems of this data is it’s not clear who is using the word, or how; is it a smear thrown at one’s enemies, or a claiming of one’s own tradition? (The results pre-1810 are due to Google’s dodgy metadata.)” - Anterotesis.
“At the site where the robot is deployed, even though some jobs are replaced by robots, many jobs are preserved from moving to lower cost labor factories offshore. There is much evidence proving that with more robots, fewer jobs are lost. That’s why Germany, with it’s hourly rates almost 50% greater than in the US, has remained competitive: they have twice as many robots per employee as do the Americans. There are also ancillary jobs created at educational institutions that teach robotics, at robot component suppliers, and at engineering and consulting companies that provide integration services and equipment.” - Singurality Hub.
A guy back in 2007 told me that robotic mosquitos were going to be made to depopulate the planet. I didn’t believe him. He said it was the Japanese who were going to do it.
While an industry is growing, everything looks positive for those involved in it and the money ensures that the media keeps it looking that way. They get very enthusiastic and turn away from any negative concerns. And as long as that industry isn’t very significant to the health of Man, those who didn’t get along with the changes die out and those who did, survive. The result again appears positive … to those who survived.
The issue here is not as it has been ever before. Although robotics is just another industry, it is not as tame as mere automation, pharmaceuticals, eugenics, or nuclear weapons. It is the development of an entirely new species that is far, far superior to Man which has all of the knowledge that Man has and far more than Man can conceive.
It is militarily critical that machines know how to fake out an adversary (tactical psychology and diplomacy), whether other machines or people.
The rise of the machine world is analogous to the rise of fourth dimensional beings in that they will have an insight that Man simply cannot track or comprehend. Man will not be able to comprehend where he is going wrong, just as if some fourth dimensional being was strategically interfering in the world of Man. Machines will soon know what Man could never have known, just as Man knows so many things that chimpanzees could never comprehend.
A needle which mimics the mosquito’s unique “stinger”, making injections painless, was developed by microengineers.
Contrary to popular belief, a mosquito can stab you with its proboscis without you feeling a thing. It then injects anticoagulant saliva to stop your blood clotting while it feeds, and it is this that carries the bacteria that cause irritation and pain.
This is an easy question to answer actually… human genetic code can match machine code, it just depends on whether we engineer humans to be as smart or smarter than machines. That should take all the hype away. I just recently read Gates and hawkings warnings… nonsense, we can engineer humans to control robots with their minds.
Yes, yes. Pardon any confusions my way of participating leads to. I think that if you are a modern rationalist (small r) you should think that machines or some kind of artificial mixed thingy humans and then mixed things make, will replace us. So when I see arguments against this that I think are being made by people who have, given their system of beliefs, a good reason to doubt this, I press for the yes position. I see this as wishful thinking and denial on their part. An unwillingness to grapple with the consequences of what they take as normal and rational and the at worst nature of corporations and those with power. I might react similarly to a Christian asserting that they knew they were going to heaven and were clearly relishing the thought of their opponents going to Hell. IOW I see this as a problematic moral position for a Christian. With the rational often materialist modernists I see logical, perceptual and intuitional weaknesses when they think machines will not replace us. Not having their system of belief I have reached another conclusion.