Not a huge loss for the US, but I will probably never go back due to this. Even if you have insurace, your life will be hell for a while due to having to fight your insurance company over a tremendous bill. I don't want to have to think twice if I should bring in my son to the hospital or not, and frankly, the US doesn't have anything unique enough to offer to offset that risk. I'm also doing my best to stay away from conferences, preferring instead Canada, European or Asian destinations.
That's a very good analogy. Just don't underestimate how quickly the tech can progress in this day and age, I did that mistake myself. Less than two years ago I was very excited about the Rift and bought a dev kit. As someone who works in computer vision etc, I was convinced though that good tracking would be many years out, and then suddenly there were the lighthouse solution from Valve. Now I've had the same thought about inside-out tracking (by means of vision), but even that seems to be arriving much faster than I initially anticipated. Today every big tech company from MS, Google, Facebook, to Valve, and hardware companies such as Samsung, HTC and Nvidia/ATI manufacturers are pushing hard on every frontier of VR. I agree the form factor has to change to allow mass adoption, but expect much faster progress than what happened with phones in the 80s.
Wii and Kinect sucked because they tried translating predefined motions to button-presses, with no added benefit over pressing that button on a controller. And they weren't particularly good at it. You don't see how VR is different, have you even tried the Vive?
For the record I was hugely bearish on the Wii, Kinect, 3D tv and movies, and rightly so. But there is no question in my mind that VR will be huge.
They have a powerful authoritarian regime run by engineers. In cases where there is a need to act quickly and decisively, that is an advantage. No need to convince the public (which in this case is already on board).
Of course there might be new occupations around the corner, but given that most of every material and cultural need is already satisfied, except for eternal life, I don't see what occupations billions of people could transition to that people or businesses would pay money for.
> but given that most of every material and cultural need is already satisfied
Couldn't that be said in every point in history?
Were the farmers losing their jobs in the early 1900s thinking to themselves, "man, I could really go for an interconnected network of computers right now"? I'd be surprised if it even crossed their mind. But eventually, with not having to work on the farm anymore, they had the time to sit back and come up with the idea and implementation. Now, in 2016, it is difficult to imagine living without it.
I find it hard to believe we've reached the pinnacle of human achievement.
The pinnacle of human invention will be that which our (automated, intelligent) children invent. We will be indirectly responsible, but we won't be able to compete. We can already this happening eg in healthcare technology, or with AlphaGo. It's not hard to imagine many of the greatest discoveries will be via abstractions we can't even grok, and will need to be "translated" for us to even begin to understand, much like with the cutting edge of mathematics and physics.
For the vast majority of humans, what they can reasonably accomplish in their lifetimes is surpassed by automated systems today, at least that which pertains to the things that in the past were requisite for everything to function (farming, transportation, common services like cooking, cleaning, etc).
It's not hard to imagine the need for paying jobs will drop to zero as everything humans normally need is captured by monopolistic automated systems. From whence comes the need to take care of our own? What's to stop most humans from becoming like the horse, that which no longer has capitalistic meaning? Our overwhelming love for each other (/sarcasm)?
That's an exaggeration. As of the 2014 per capita CO2 emissions in the US was 2.2 times Chinese (16.7mt vs 7.6).
And this gap is rapidly closing: Chinese per capita emissions are up 150% in the past 10 years while US are down 15%. China could easily exceed the US by this metric inside of a decade. Keep in mind that China already emits twice as much CO2 in total as the US.
I'm not sure those number take into account all the stuff that China is manufacturing for the US, that is not consumed locally. Yes, that CO2 is released in China but it's paid for by USD.
No, lip reading was just an single ability of the machine. What distinguished it was, at least apparent, consciousness about itself and desire for self preservation.
Google was working, using Stanford resources, before it was funded. Low investor technical risk. Also, Google's founders had patent coverage of their idea.
