throwawaykeno

> but having a proof that humans can reason through from beginning to end makes people feel more comfortable.

Saying that humans can't reason about computer-checked proofs is like saying humans can't reason about source code; which is to say, it's obviously false in the general case.

Your parent already answered that question (although I don't blame you for not noticing):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_notwithstanding_verdi...

From a developer perspective, the ideal and just end result has always seemed rather obvious. However, the multi-year history of this case demonstrates the correct legal answer not so obvious, at least from a legal perspective.

For example, settling the issue on fair use was definitely not how most people thought/hoped this would shake out way back in the beginning of the law suit(s).

I don't remember that being part of the conclusions.

Also, it's hard for me to take that study seriously. Good state schools can be as good as or better than Harvard. Basically I took the conclusion to be "there's a lot of greatness outside of the ivys"

But it is just interesting, from a technical/hacker perspective, that good barista work is a pretty hard robotics problem!

The idea that everything will work out because working people can just become capital owners ignores the obvious fact that working people work precisely because they don't have capital.

McDonalds has to compete with other chains and prices are already bottom barrel. In McDonal's case, taking human interaction out of the equation seems like a losing proposition.

More-over, I hardly think a tariff on the output of robotic labor applied only to expats who left the country for tax reasons is going to cause a trade war...

1. Security

2. Friends

3. Family

4. Security

Totally. But the current generation of dead-reckoning-and-maybe-a-bit-of-very-simple-sensing style of control for grinding/tamping/steaming/pouring won't be sufficient. I would be unsurprised if substantially improved sensors (perhaps even vision) are necessary before we see computers over-taking the best baristas in an abssolute sense.

And unfortunately I don't think there's much demand for that sort of investment for the reasons outlined in other posts on this thread (even if robotic baristas could smash the human competition in coffee making, they still wouldn't displace the neighborhood coffee shops.)

He also foresaw the shift from manual labor to intellectual property as the essential component in production.

Is this true?

I'm mostly convinced about the brewing part (except that even the most meticulous machine will make mistakes, and a good barista will throw out a bum shot whereas a machine probably won't know the difference).

But I'm not convinced about the milk part. Do you have links?

(FWIW I totally agree with the tone and overall thesis of your post. And I really wish someone would deploy freshly ground-or-vacuum-sealed/fresh milk machines in airports/cafeterias/hotels/anywhere there's only a starbucks. But I also feel like better-than-average humans are still better than state-of-the-art machines.)

* A good barista will notice when they screw up the shot and pull pull another.

* A good barista will not burn or under-steam milk.

* A good barista will make sure you have the proper amount of milk and foam. (Getting a perfectly consistent result when steaming milk isn't really possible using a dead-reckoning controller or when using simple sensors like temperature AFAICT.)

* A good barista will make sure the drink looks as good as it smells and tastes.

  * A good barista will have no problem customizing drinks.

These are, fundamentally, political-economic questions. Not merely one or the other.

I think a lot of the service sector automation that will happen in the next 20+ years is analogous. Anything customer-facing is bound to stick around as long as people have spending money, while anything that's not customer-facing will slowly become automated.

E.g. The person at the counter in a McDonalds is the easiest person to replace -- all you really need is an iPad and a couple accessories. But if I were a betting man, I would bet that McDonalds will replace food prep jobs before replacing humans with kiosks in most locations.

Exactly. It's amazing to me that people claim there just isn't enough work. There is more than enough work -- there's always some way to make the world a better place. And in the USA there are fairly obvious things, from social services (in the broadest sense) to mundane upkeep to large infrastructure improvements.

The problem is that there isn't enough work that's motivated by profit motive in the near-term.

10-15 years ago, researchers working on self-driving cars weren't in-demand engineers. They were academic robotics researchers primarily subsisting on grants rather than capital. And CMU isn't in the business of venture capital. They're in the business of doing the research that results in the innovation that venture capital then develops into products.

To put it in SV terms:

* Saying that NREC employees were under-valued during the early days of self-driving is kind of like saying that an early-stage startup was undervalued with ten years of hind-sight.

* Saying that NREC should have increased their pay for those employees to work on (new, different) research projects is kind of like saying that early-stage startups should match Google's salaries for their employees working on a (new, different) startup.

In other words: maybe scientists are underpaid, but the fact that successful researchers can leave academia and make more money is basically a tautology.

Disincentivizing people from volunteering at a school by forcing them to surrender biometric data to the FBI for inclusion in a database that is normally only used to catalog information about convicted criminals is insane.

More systemically, routine background checks on people who are not suspected criminals should be handled by an independent organization outside of the FBI.

Gotta make sure we keep tabs on those shady volunteers... Jesus.

I.e., don't send unsolicited email.

I.e., don't send spam.

FWIW in months when I buy expensive plane tickets or make reimbursed purchases I skip paying rent with the CC.

Still, putting only rent on a CC = 1k+/mo where I live.

That is amazing and terrifying.

I typically have an outstanding balance in the 3-4 figures on my credit card because I pay for rent, gas, and airline tickets with credit. However, it gets paid off every month. I guess that's technically debt, but it's not problematic or anything...

I feel like the majority of credit card debt is the type of "debt" that I incur every month.

But not actually. Program synthesis is hard even if you have perfect formal requirements. In practice, gathering formal requirements is by far the most difficult task. You're probably better off building a system using modern development practices than trying to collect formal requirements Let alone translating those requirements into code, which is easier than coming up with the requirements but still difficult.

> Recently AI has proved...

FYI, it's not as if the program synthesis folks haven't heard of neural nets... you're giving researchers who actually do this stuff all day surprisingly little credit.

It's also a meaningless distinction.

The point of contention is the bias, not whether the bias is imposed by an algorithm or by a human. People would still be complaining if Facebook had tweaked its algorithm to achieve identical outputs instead of employing humans to do it manually.

The truth seems to be somewhere in-between -- it was algorithmically generated and then the output was human-modified.

In general, I think the response to this post demonstrates the prevalence of magical thinking about computers, even by people who ought to know better. Bias is bias regardless of whether it's explicitly programmed behavior, emergent behavior from a carefully trained neural net, or enforced in human processes post-hoc. Distinguishing between these on the basis of where the behavior came from -- rather than whether or not there's a bias -- misses the point.

> I don't see any assertion that there's a legal problem in the parent.

The point of my post wasn't to contradict the parent post. There certainly are people who do claim it's a legal problem.

We can argue about whether there's an ethical problem, but the assertion that there's any sort of legal problem seems completely arbitrary and partisan IMO.