http://t.co/gRLVKtzfgR
"With 99 percent of everything is still unconnected, connecting things over the Internet is creating the next industrial revolution."
I remain sceptical, weather all that connecting will actually create any benefit without practical intelligence. Because controlling things with a smart-phone is a novelty feature, not a must have revolution.
Cheap & Practical AI that actually can understand the context of a situation and then instruct devices to do useful things, is probably a century away.
I can see a brain-scanned copy of the human mind being simulated in a super-computer in 20-30 years. But going from there to a stable commercial AI for the masses, is going to take a gazillion iterations.
I think that many are overestimating our future capabilities, just like the people in the 70's thought we'd be colonizing Mars by now.
I think all those connected smart devices will be gimmicky privacy annihilators. My things won't join the internet, unless they really are smart & also loyal to me.
I think that many are overestimating our future capabilities, just like the people in the 70's thought we'd be colonizing Mars by now.
To be fair, the reason we haven't started colonizing Mars by now isn't because of technological limitations, it's more because we stopped focusing on ambitious space endeavors after we beat the Ruskies to the Moon. The Space Race was essentially over, and we scaled everything back. The Shuttle came in, and wound up costing a metric fuck ton more than it was supposed to, both in construction and operation... so that's where all the money went. Little money was left for deep space exploration, and the political will to push forward dried up as well.
If the Soviets had been able to keep up, we may well have an established colony on Mars, a research station on the Moon and an expedition gearing up for Titan. But, that's not how things panned out. Our generation got to watch man do nothing more than endlessly orbit the Earth. Not a single person has left low Earth orbit in my lifetime. Granted, some good science was done, but still. Ambitious it was not. Now, robotic probes get to have all the fun. It's cool, but just not the same.
Agreed, there was simply no need to when america won the space race against the USSR. I still dont trust them, sounds like a cartel where they have already publicly stated that they will collude openly to set the national and international standards and control the way the internet is operated.
It doesn't help that our government virtually stopped funding NASA.
Well "too expensive" is another way of describing technology that isn't evolved far enough. If our technology were evolved to make a mars colony cheap enough, we'd have a Mars colony. Even without an enemy to defeat.
By the way when 70's people said mars colony they meant colony, not tiny outpost.
We definitely don't have the tech to do something on this scale. Even if the nuclear Propulsion (Orion-dive i think) would have been implemented. That Japanese Physicist whose name I can't recall said that Fusion power is the minimum requirement for practical colonization of other planets in our Solar system. The reason for that is the energy requirement for either transportation or generation of building material & life-support.
Yup, investing in progress and development, that's the way the US should go! Even IBM has complained about the absolute lack of focus and motivation of its own carefully selected workforce. Intel has sacked a lot of its US devs and moved development to China, AMD is just a commercial front for an Arabian-European company, companies like JPL or Boeing have been making a fool of themselves in comparison to what European or Asian companies can achieve, and that's all just sad stuff.
The US public voted Jimmy Carter out of office because he told the truth that nobody wanted to know, and is now paying the price for that. This is from 1979, but it's even more relevant now than it was back then:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kakFDUeoJKM
It's still the only US president ever to get a Nobel prize, it's still the only US president that made international friends instead of enemies, it's still the only US president that right now tells the truth about the state of US democracy... but the majority of the US public doesn't want to know, they want to watch heavily censored media, pay monster interests, drive gas guzzling unsafe cars, walk around in pyjamas and flip-flops or sneakers, concentrate as little as possible, and get as much superficial entertainment as possible, all of that to forget that every single US citizen bears a burden of about 50.000 USD of national debt on his/her shoulders, and over the EAP, that's de facto a lot more. It's not because Microsoft says "first world progress" when they present the next useless commercial extortion model product, that the US isn't hanging on by the skin of their teeth to remain a first world country. Look at how easily Putin has made Obama lose face in front of the world. The US commands no respect any more, because they don't prove anything, because they are not on the forefront of scientific innovation, because the only way they have not forgotten on how to create added value, is by spying upon other countries' industries and universities, using military force to secure natural resources in other countries, and repress their own citizens. It's just really sad how unfocused the US is, really really sad. It become a breeding ground for extremist ideas and totalitarian organizations of all kinds, a playground for ruthless corporations that really annoy the hell out of the rest of the world, etc...
And if we had put more time/money into it, we probably could have been there by now.
Yeah if the Steam-engine of the Greek Mathematician Heron in the 1st century Roman Egypt, had caught on, the industrial revolution would have happened over 1500 years earlier and we would probably be an interstellar Species today. But it didn't because they failed at fully utilizing their potential.
You also have to consider that running a civilization properly is part of our technological capabilities. And we definitely haven't gotten that part of the equation right.
Would we? The space program became bloated. Things cost waaaaaayyyyyyy to much to be sustainable, but that wasn't going to change because the money came from government, there was no need to improve our technologies because we can pay for their cost. SpaceX has done more for pushing space flight in the last few years than what NASA has done in that same time. They've done all of that on a budget rivaling NASA's so why didn't NASA improve its tech as well? You say we need more time and money, but in reality we don't need more of either. Unlimited budgets and time never gets anything done.
Nowhere did I say to just throw money at NASA without thinking.
Although I did not fully explain my idea either.
If we had put the money toward the right thing, it could have drastically changed.
Not "Heres a billion dollars, make me a spaceship" but "Here's a billion dollar reward to whomever can make a spaceship that costs x amount of money to produce" or "Here's a billion dollars to whomever can develop interstellar space travel."
Instead of lining the pockets of NASA, give the money to people like SpaceX, to people who actually CAN make a difference.
Just because the government hires greedy psudo-scientists, doesn't mean more time and money wouldnt make advancements.
I would not agree that the government hires greedy pseudo-science. First of all the government does not at all fund pseudo-science which is" "a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method."
Second there is a ton of review. Having a dad whose job it is to find credible projects to persue and having worked at a national lab myself I can speak from experience. Alot of the funding comes from non-govermental grants. Which means that people outside goverment review also have to think its viable. This has increased since the national science foundation grants have been decreasing.
For who they give the money too, they are more likely to give grants to science seniors, people proven that they know what they are doing.
Now the real question is, is giving money to a bunch of scientists really worth it. Does giving a bunch of money really give more discoveries with 100% return investment? Well thats just silly, of course every project cant succeed. Its also not like here is 1 million dollars, now discover a battery that can last for a year straight. There is alot of review internally how money actually should be spent. Its mostly to fund the ability to keep the labs running and pay the people working there.
I would not agree that the government hires greedy pseudo-science.
Then why is it that almost every major discovery, or breakthrough, comes from an independent research group or area? I'm not saying that all scientists that are hired by the government are like that. But there is a large portion of them. They can become corrupted very easily. Example. Why I believe there will be no cure for cancer very soon. Because if you can cure cancer, then the government will lose tons of money they get for the treatment of it.
The breakthroughs you hear about the cure? Those come from people not sponsored by the government.
they are more likely to give grants to science seniors, people proven that they know what they are doing.
A science senior didn't come up with a new method of space travel. A child did.
A 13 year old boy? Built a fusion reactor.
If people like THAT, had more money, more resources, they could drastically change everything.
Does giving a bunch of money really give more discoveries with 100% return investment?
That type of thinking is exactly why it's failing. Science does not, and has never, worked like that.
Its also not like here is 1 million dollars, now discover a battery that can last for a year straight.
That is not what I said. I said to use the money as an incentive. Offer money as a "reward" for a certain project. I'll go off of yours. A year long battery. They could put out an article, or a statement, saying that anyone that CAN make a year long battery will get x amount of money.
Or if they have a viable theory, or some proof of concept, that they could join a think-tank with others, and get something done.
I agree with the general direction of your comment, but the reason why there won't be a cure for cancer anytime soon is the same reason there won't be a "cure" for software bugs.
Keep in mind that there are thousands of different types of cancer & all of em are the result of a complex interaction of genetics & environment. As advanced our information digestion technology might seem, we barely have scratched the surface.
If you listen to medical researchers, they predict that cancer will be conquered by fixing the "software"-errors in the genetic-code of our descendants before they are born.
I think phantom makes alot of good points here, the problem with programs like nasa is that they are inefficient (instead of giving grants to truly independent buisiness/scientitst, its given to the big-boys club), and that they have a focus on material stuff rather than developing the technology required to do cool things like go to mars, build an entire city, or a massive space station, or mine asteroids, or build a ring of solar panels arround the sun to provide enormous ammounts of electricity.
So even if we did have alot of funding for NASA it would not achieve much, NASA needs to open itself up, put contracts out for competition, and distribute more of its funding as research grants. Think about it, like phantom was saying it wasnt untill someone like Elon Musk that space freight costs really started to decrease, yet nasa has spent many, many billions of dollars, why is this?
Think about it, one of these launches is what, 300Million or something? How many scientists could you hire, and fund for a year, on research into propulsion technology, material science (which would be usefull for space travel), on generating an excitement about space (through media, through talks at schools, etc..etc..).
Whats going to result in the better long term outcome, a 300million dollar space trip for 4 scientists to the ISS, or hiring and funding like 1000 scientists for a year to work on propulsion technology and material science?
I can't deny that you are correct. I was using it as an example more than anything, but I probably should have used something like HIV or AIDs.