To each their own. I prefer having the ability to adjust things from 1 central source. I’m prone to losing remotes.
Also, how would you do such a remote. You would also need a screen for feedback etc, which puts you back at square 1.
Also, a remote would be considerably more expensive than the extra cost of a ZigBee/Wifi enabled microcontroller.
I’m a fan of both, but fully accept that fission is now too late to be useful. We also have fusion right on the tipping point of viability. That could likely fill the use cases of fusion quite well, with far less issues.
FYI, nuclear produces 3 sorts of nuclear waste. High activity is nasty, but short lived. Put it in a pool for a few years and it decays away. Low grade is the stuff like lab waste and contaminated pipes. You don’t really want it going in normal landfill, but it’s not going to kill anyone with radiation (heavy metal toxicity is another matter). It’s only the last type, medium activity that is problematic. It lasts a long time, while still putting out enough radiation to cause potential problems. Unfortunately, older “power” plants, were actually bomb factories. They were intended to make plutonium, and so produce a lot more of the medium activity waste than they could.
The ability to play with it, without having to fiddle with tiny switches is a big feature to many. Often these are used by people with mobility issues. The ability to add an extra feed, due to exercise, or adjust the timings to account for changes in life plans are a godsend to many.
Smart home devices are a balancing act. The extra control means more can also go wrong. Minimising that is a big part. The most critical is making it behave sanely when it suddenly goes offline. E.g. smart light switches become dumb ones, when the central hub goes down.
More a replacement brain for an EV. Compared to an ICE there is far less to manage in a hyper time critical manner. It’s a lot more viable to design a drop in replacement. Particularly if the battery bank already has its own monitoring, that just reports upwards.
You would end up with a modern EV, with many of the desired features. However, the manufacturer would no longer be able to reach in and extract data, either remotely, at a mechanic, or after an accident.
I’m hoping that someone does some reverse engineering on the engine management computers of EVs. EVs internals are a lot simpler. An open source, drop in brain is definitely not unachievable.
All the advantages of an EV with none of the corporate tracking.
If you want to get extremely pedantic, “Queens English” was defined as the reference. The rich toffs of the British empire got annoyed at their servants having various accents, and either being hard to understand, or mishearing them.
In this case however, it was meant as a local accent, so none noticeable.
I had a friend who worked at a wine shop. He was also 1/4 french, though with no accent at all.
Some other friends went in to see him at work. They found it hilarious that he had this excessive french accent. It turned out he did it as a joke 6 months before, and got a good reaction from customers. His subconscious apparently ran with this, without his notice. The more he racked it up, the better the customers respected his opinions on wine. He was, however, completely unaware he was doing it!
As a counter example, I remember listening to a radio interview with a woman who accidentally joined a boxing gym, and decided to roll with it. Even after 3 years training, it apparently took new men about 6 weeks to blast past her in strength.
And jumping back to my earlier comment. Societies tend to amplify differences. Men are stronger, so are expected to do jobs requiring strength. This, in turn leads to stronger men, reinforcing the stereotype.
In short, there’s not much baseline difference between men and women. There are however differences. Societies and cultures often amplify them, particularly when it improves division of labour. In an agrarian society they might not be able to afford the split, so the situation you read about plays out. Men can’t afford to powerhouse, while women need to pick up significant physical labour.
It’s also an unfortunate fact that testosterone makes it a LOT easier to put on muscle mass. A good chunk of men don’t take advantage of it, but the biology still holds. It’s also worth noting that men are on average taller than women. Our volume of muscle is often bigger to start with.
My wife does quite a bit more strength based exercise than I do. The force multiplier on my exercise however means I can easily out power her, when it comes to brute strength.
It’s worth noting however that a lot of the initial strength gain of exercise isn’t muscle increase, but better control. Both men and women can increase this, fairly evenly. The difference tells most once that caps out.
The 2 often feed off each other too. E.g. men are slightly stronger than women, on average. Men are then expected to take on the strong protector role, while women are expected to act weak and subservient. This amplifies the original slight difference massively, reinforcing the social stereotype.
Women seem to have a preference for cooperation, with their ranking within the group mattering most. Men seem to err towards intergroup competition, where your teams ranking matters most. These necessitate different types of social skills, which feeds the stereotype, which feeds the original difference.
The only reason I don’t currently is that my phone’s VPN connection doesn’t handle network switching gracefully. Otherwise I try and tunnel all my traffic through my home network.
As a useful side effect, I need to expose far less of my IoT devices .
The worst bit is, it seems to work. At least if it blows up in trump’s face, it’s fairly unambiguous. I’m sure America’s right wing media would spin it otherwise, but it at least makes that harder for them.
The biggest risk would be the bubble holding together and the democrats getting into power, only for it to blow up in their face immediately.
While they might deal with it a bit better than trump, the damage he is already doing could tie their hands a lot.
We all know the right would get decades of mileage out of “look look, it was all awesome under trump, then the democrats broke everything”.
AI can be a force multiplier for humans, but often can’t replace them. The current usage is often idiotic at best.
E.g. excluding the issue of data misuse, an AI system could be extremely helpful to doctors. It could flag possible issues, complications and unusual conditions in a way that would otherwise require a deep dive by a specialist doctor. A doctor or nurse could then parse the results for useful points, while filtering out hallucinations.
AI can be a force multiplier for doctors. The catch is it needs to be doctor led. It’s quite trivial for a doctor to dismiss the obvious hallucinations. If it also points them towards more subtle signs they would potentially miss, then that’s a net win.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.
Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.
It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.
In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.
I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
It’s worth noting that I think both should exist.
Agreed, I just want a ZigBee endpoint as well.
As for the smart home stuff, I already have it in place, so it’s no additional expense.
Control wise, your method would be fine for someone techie and motivated. It would annoy the hell out of some non techies, particularly if they had vision issues (think OAP). It would also close down the option of relatives helping out by monitoring it remotely.
As I said, different target audiences. Both have their places. I just wish the smart option did its job properly, rather than the half baked options we keep getting.