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I am just wondering, could Apple's partnership with IBM got them access to TrueNorth chips to gain competitive advantage against Googles car?
While that makes sense on paper, in practice do those chips provide better support for networked, autonomous activities? I haven't heard much about their usages just some PR things about them so I'm genuinely curious.
The machine learning people I know have been very unimpressed with it. From the little I understand, it cannot run the style of neural network that have been breaking records.
Hmm that sounds unfortunate. I'll have to try to look into it further because I didn't even know about them before and they sound really interesting.
TrueNorth chips would probably be a competitive disadvantage. I found Yann LeCun's critique[0] compelling. In short, simulating the brain via spiking neurons is less efficient than just doing the floating point math like regular neural nets do.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10152184295832143
It's just normal now for huge companies to meet with government "regulators" who have the power to empower or disable their business model and that of their competition.
Was it ever not normal?
I really don't know. I assume that you are correct that it has been normal at various times throughout history - the railroads come to mind for sure.
But it seems to me - and I have no special insight on this per se - that technology companies have dramatically increased their reliance on insider contacts in government in the past... I dunno, 5 years? Something like that? Maybe 10?
I sat through pitch week at BluePrint in NYC and I was absolutely floored at how many companies (seriously almost every single one) openly described the advantages they thought they had as a result of odd or even outright unethical health-care 'regulations.'
How else do you propose new technology become legal if not by meeting with government regulators to promote change? You can't just sell self driving cars because you want to, the law must first be addressed.
I propose that "legal" is the default state for new inventions.
The time and manner of invention and evolution do not yield to government nor even recognize its purview. I think it's becoming clear to all of us that the internet will not abide government and I really don't want it to have to come to a head in the form of violence.
Think about it this way: Seven generations hence, do you really think that internet will be a triviality to be 'regulated' by cronies?
Legal is the default state for devices that don't use public roads, public airwaves, etc.
This is a no true Scotsman fallacy. There's no reason that roads and airwaves need to be managed by violence.
How do you suggest dealing with drunk drivers or getaway cars?
Law doesn't require reason, it's a popularity contest, not a theorem.
Surely you realize that this position is not universally held? For a primer on an alternative view, start with The Law:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44800/44800-h/44800-h.htm
Universally held or not, it's a fact, not a matter of belief; laws are passed by popular consent, not by adherence to reason.
Of course there is. They are common goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_good_(economics)
Well you must be rather young and have no idea of the history of the Internet that some of us here have lived through (or you're old and are just oblivious).
All changes to the Internet's root zone need approval by the US Department of Commerce. That's because the Internet is an invention of the US government. It is government's purview since it's government's creation.
You can go out to an audience of laymen and probably fool them, but I remember when there were hosts still manually mapping name to IP in /etc/hosts, before switching over to pointing to sri-nic.arpa. As do others here. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're just ignorant of what you're talking about, as opposed to being deceptive. Either way, this is the wrong crowd to try to fool with this - many of us were there when it happened.
I might be neither misinformed nor disingenuous. Perhaps instead I have a different assessment than you.
I find your position to be equivalent to saying that, because the government dropped an atomic bomb on people, it invented periodicity and the nuclear forces and retains perpetual say-so over their function and mechanics.
But it isn't, so that proposal doesn't mean anything; if you want self driving cars, you must convince government to allow it. Vehicles require state approval, you can't drive an unlicensed vehicle and the state won't license vehicles they don't know are safe and haven't been approved yet.
It's abiding by government just fine.
Actually, the constitution is written so that things are legal by default. All rights not explicitly granted to the national government go to the states or to the people. Edit: in the United States.
To the states or to the people, and the states have chosen to not make those things legal by default.
Is it?! It seems to be increasingly in a state of tension as governments flailingly attempt to censor and surveil.
Content whose distribution is prohibited on "copyright" grounds is very widely available. My understanding is that drugs and illicit pornography are available on ongoing dark net markets, which are now stronger and more numerous than in the silk road days.
Jobs are routinely outsourced as remote work to the other side of the world, in violation of the spirit of labor laws.
The EFF and other organizations are in a constant cycle of litigation to ward off more impotent laws that threaten to criminalize or civilly sanction already widespread behavior on the internet.
In what ways is the internet abiding the government?
Those things are all still quite barely used by the masses, government control is still firmly in place of the majority of people who abide by the law. Pointing out exceptions to the rule doesn't invalidate the rule.
It's pretty ironic to direct an anarchist screed at something (roads and cars) that wouldn't exist without the threat of government violence (either government road construction or exercise of eminent domain in favor of private road builders).
Also, cars are the archetypal example of externalized violence that must be countered with government violence. They impose violence on the public and the environment by spewing pollution into the air, and create externalized risk for everyone in their vicinity.
As I'm sure you already suppose, an anarchistic assessment of this results in a different conclusion.
Name one anarchist civilization that has created sophisticated road networks, even in antiquity?
Road construction is the archetypal government activity. You go back to 3000 BC and look at ancient Egypt's sophisticated infrastructure. How did they do it? Government. And compare that to what contemporary societies without government have left us. Pottery fragments.
I acknowledge that absence of government hasn't worked well during history. However, what I'm saying (perhaps in fact the whole point) is that we are leaving the period called history and entering a very different space, as evidenced by the rapidity of the internet.
In other words, I assert that the time for peace without government is ahead, not behind.
The stagecoach roads of the American West? (Often un-deeded right-of-ways through private lands, many now home to paved roads.)
Name one anarchist civilization that has created sophisticated road networks, even in antiquity?
"Wenzhou has become one of the richest cities in China under a regulatory regime that borders on anarchism.... for the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure."[1]
[1]https://reason.com/archives/2011/11/15/chinas-black-market-c...
This is a pretty ridiculous concept.
It would just encourage dodgy entrepeneuers to rapidly produce disruptive products without any care for safety or public benefit. Some things need to be thoroughly tested before releasing them into the public e.g. milk formulas, vaccines, cars otherwise they could kill masses of people before anyone has a chance to stop it.
And in fact a place already exists with lax regulations: China. And look what's happened there over the last few decades. So bad in fact that the public desperately looks to Western countries for food and health products.
Just so I understand: You are holding up China as a refuge from totalitarian tendencies?
When it comes to economic rules, China went from a centrally-controlled economy to a shockingly unregulated (by Western standards) market economy. If you want to speak up against the government you're out of luck, but if you want to sell baby formula without inspections it's much easier than in the States.
I'm saying: obviously China, which is an environment of dreadful rights of expression of all sorts, is not a good example of the potential of innovation sans government.
Yes... China is about as unregulated w.r.t. to industry as you can get. Have you ever seen the air quality in Beijing? Do you remember the air quality in LA in the 80s before stricter CARB standards? (Or are you too young to?)
I never visted LA in the 80s. I have two friends who live in Shanghai and complain about the air quality.
Regardless, the state is no friend to the environment.
And as I said to the other commenter, I don't think it's reasonable to hold up China, a huge and corrupt state with no meaningful rights to expression, as an example of innovation sans government.
Actually that's pretty much one of the key philosophical tenets of the U.S. Constitution. The idea being that 300 million free individuals can come up with many more good ideas than a few heads of state, and they shouldn't have to wait for some gov regulator to give them the ok to try an idea first.
I have sympathy for your views - those states which by default declare anything illegal until regulated are slow to innovate.
However, roads and traffic is one area where even the most limited government fan will typically agree that regulation provides benefits well outside the cost. Well regulated road networks provide large economic benefits even to people who don't directly use them.
Eh, I think it will be done better once the government is gone.
I see bungling, overpriced and late construction projects. I see utter callousness toward the environment. I see a relentless yielding to more and more and more cars along with cordoning off of pedestrians. I see languishing rails, with road-based competition receiving an effective subsidy (and also no competition at all on the rails, with amtrak, also government-subsidized, having an effective monopoly for passenger traffic).
There is no doubt in my mind that the internet will do roads better than government.
Some things can't work like that, for good reasons. In the case of cars or drones the main reason would be safety. In the case of a lot of IoT things the issue is going to be spectrum.
“My vehicle can drive itself” was the default state until Ford, Panhard, Bugatti and Rolls-Royce came with horse-less carriages. It wasn’t ideal: horse, oxen and asses got mad and rumbled into crowd regularly so it was far from ideal, but dandies needn’t no permission to get drawn by a new animal, be it a camel, and ostrich or tortoise.
Then, with mechanisation drive-through lattes and texting, a little too many kids were crushed to death, with their severed limbs thrown in the air into their parents’ faces — so we had to change that state of affairs. We ask people to prove they realised they were sitting in armoured tanks, and make sure those tanks acted like expected. When the expectation is “you can go back to texting and sipping your latte, your tank will swerve when needed” that bar is, expectedly, incredibly high.
You are more welcome to introduce any self-driving vehicle that is not independently powered with so much energy that it can kill on impact: clubs who make recumbent bikes are a good example of where to look for hackers in that area.
Your brevity and weird use of quotation marks makes your comment somewhat ambiguous, and I can come up with a few interpretations: 1) that the government should not have the power to enable or disable this new business model, or 2) that it's inappropriate for companies to have such access with the "regulators" as they may inappropriately influence the regulators outside of public discussion.
Regarding one, it has to be completely appropriate for entry into an existing field that has proven to be highly dangerous and is therefore highly regulated field.
Secondly, it also appropriate for those who are entering the field with a new technology to be able to explain to regulators about the new technology. In highly regulated fields like pharmaceuticals, those proposing new products for approval have many such meetings, and these meetings have not led to the appearance or accusations of undue influence. Rather in that field the problem has been deceit or misinterpretation of statistics.
California allows autonomous vehicles, but the manufacturer has to take responsibility for any damage or injuries, and report all accidents to DMV. That's reasonable. While some auto companies would like to continue the current "blame the driver" model, that isn't going to work with full autonomy.
Early commercial self-driving cars will probably be leased, with terms that include insurance. That eliminates any arguments over who pays in an accident.
Interesting; I wonder if they'll actually attempt to go to market with this thing or if it's just one of their many experimental projects that never sees the light of day. I'd love to see more competition in this space regardless.
To me it feels Apple and Uber are years behind Google. Today it's not very difficult to build a self driving car. But over the years Google developed a gigantic network of all kinds of data used by the cars.