How many people work on Bitcoin (mining, exchanges like Coinbase etc)? What's the number of transactions (money transfers, loans etc) per employee in banking vs Bitcoin ecosystem?
I think in this context it's about businesses built on top of the platform and their direct revenue.
A person brushing teeth is not building a business and generating revenue.
The thing I don't get about these stories: don't you have a contract specifying working hours? My contract says 8 hours a day, for x$ per month, this is what we agreed to and this is what I deliver. Asking me to do 12h instead of 8h would be the same as paying me 66% of my salary at the end of the month instead of 100%. That's a blatant breaking of our contract, why would I agree to that?
> It's not possible to engineer an autonomous system that never fails, but it is possible to engineer one in such a way that it never fails to detect that it has failed.
That sounds highly dubious. Here's a hypothetical scenario:
there's a very drunk person on the sidewalk. As a human driver, you know he might act unexpectedly so you slow down and steer to the left. This will help you avoid a deadly collision as the person stumbles into the road.
Now let's take a self driving car in the same scenario, where, since it doesnt have general intelligence, it fails to distinguish the drunk person from a normal pederstrian and keeps going at the same speed and distance from the sidewalk as normally. How, in this scenario, does the vehicle 100% know that it has failed (like you say is always possible)?
An even more extreme example: suppose someone on the sidewalk suddenly whips out a bazooka and shoots it at you. Does your failure to anticipate this contingency count as a failure?
"Failure" must be defined with respect to a particular model. If you're driving in the United States, you're probably not worried about bazookas, and being hit by one is not a failure, it's just shit happening, which it sometimes does. (By way of contrast, if you're driving in Kabul then you may very well be concerned with bazookas.) Whether or not you want to worry about drunk pedestrians and avoid them at all possible costs is a design decision. But if you really want to, you can (at the possible cost of having to drive very, very slowly).
But no reasonable person could deny that avoiding collisions with stationary obstacles is a requirement for any reasonable autonomous driving system.
Way to dodge the question.
And how did we get from always knowing when you're failed to "just drive very, very slow when", when dealing with situations that human drivers deal with all the time.
Let's not pretend that anticipating potentially dangerous behaviour from subtle clues is some once-in-a-lifetime corner case. People do this all the time when driving -- be it a drunk guy on the sidewalk, a small kid a tad bit too unstable when riding a bike by the roadside, kids playng catch nex to the road and not paying attention, etc etc. Understanding these situation is crucial in self driving if we want to beat the 1 fatality per 100M mile that we have with human drivers. For such scenarios, please explain how the AI can always know when it failed to anticipate a problem that a normal human driver can.
> how did we get from always knowing when you're failed to "just drive very, very slow when", when dealing with situations that human drivers deal with all the time
You raised this scenario:
> there's a very drunk person on the sidewalk. As a human driver, you know he might act unexpectedly so you slow down...
I was just responding to that.
> Let's not pretend that anticipating potentially dangerous behaviour from subtle clues is some once-in-a-lifetime corner case.
I never said it was. All I said was that "failure must be defined with respect to some model." If you really want to anticipate every contingency then you have to take into account some very unlikely possibilities, like bazookas or (to choose a slightly more plausible example) having someone hiding behind the parked car that you are driving past and jumping out just at the wrong moment.
The kind of "failure" that I'm talking about is not a failure to anticipate all possible contingencies, but a failure to act correctly given your design goals and the information you have at your disposal. Hitting someone who jumps out at you from behind a parked car, or failing to avoid a bazooka attack, may or may not be a failure depending on your design criteria. But the situation in the OP video was not a corner case. Steering into a static barrier at freeway speeds is just very clearly not the right answer under any reasonable design criteria for an autonomous vehicle.
My claim is simply that given a set of design criteria, you cannot in general build a system that never fails according to those criteria, but you can build a system that, if it fails, knows that it has failed. I further claim that this is useful because you can then put a layer on top of this failure-detection mechanism that can recover from point failures, and so increase the overall system reliability. If you really want to know the details, go read the thesis or the paper.
These are not particularly deep or revolutionary claims. If you think they are, then you haven't understood them. These are really just codifications of some engineering common-sense. Back in 1991, applying this common sense to autonomous robots was new. In 2018 it should be standard practice, but apparently it's not.
You don't even need to go to the level of a drunk person. Imagine driving down a suburban street and a small child darts out onto the road chasing after a ball.
How has it not ever happened? China, who essentially blocked Google, Amazon et al, now have Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and other massively successful tech companies, while EU is stuck with aforementioned monopolies with near-zero chance of a local competitor competing with them.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc. are still there. The US can still produce steel and computer chips. Other countries subsidising domestic production of software, steel and computer chips did not lead to the US being unable to do so.
And amazon is pretty big in China, taobao and jingdong are just bigger and better.
Yes, they are still there, but the protectionism is what allowed the local companies (Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba etc) to compete initially and be better in the end. Whereas in EU, local competition has been crushed and it is now stuck with the monopolies.
Baidu is still not better than Google, even in Chinese, for what it’s worth.
Infant industry protection may make sense in some cases but it’s more commonly used as a smokescreen for corruption. It was used as a justification for high tariffs and low quality domestically produced goods all over the world throughout the 50s to at least the 80s.
If the EU doesn’t have much in the way of domestic IT companies so what? They’re still rich. The fact that others are getting rich in other, different ways does not make them poorer.
Overrating domestic value creation is how you end up being a third world country. I think you are oversimplifying free market dynamics. Free market doesn't magically create optimal results for consumers (see monopolies and the resulting lack of competition and suboptimal results for consumers as one example). Similarly it doesn't magically create optimal results for maximising the well being of a country.
Noone is restricting trade, they are simply saying that the fact that you are "far away" doesn't give you the right to dodge taxes that local companies have to pay. If anything it levels the playing field.
It is the government that is threatening force (fines, jailtime) if the company/people do not hand over a portion of their hard earned cash.
These same thieves/politicians are the ones that wrote the laws and made these exceptions.
The companies are under an obligation to their families, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and the community at large to maximize value.
Or so you think that a government committee could build a cheaper, better, nicer iPhone?
Do you think a group of bureaucrats would make a cheaper, better, more efficient Tesla Vehicle?
We laugh at this, because we know the government is a bunch of people that on the whole have never employed people and created value from launching their own businesses. They do not know how to maximize wealth creation.
Why do we think that the government raking in Billions more is going to be put to create better, faster, cheaper and more efficient goods ands and services than a company like Tesla, Apple or Amazon?
Here's what's going to happen:
Billions will be raked in. And billions will be spent on duds. Look at Canada spending 1B on a scheduling app that got scrapped because government workers didn't give a shit.
Look at US gov spending on the billion dollar website.
The money will go to the pockets of more lobbyists, politicians, and will flow back to the companies.... and less quality service will be delivered , and at a higher price.
These companies employ so many people (who pay income tax from said revenues) and all kinds if intermediate taxes are paid in acquisition, and distribution of raw materials to final product to the door of the customer.
Quite literally a $700 iPhone would cost less than $200 had the government not levied/taken profits at each step from:
Land development, ore mining, glass and silicon manufacturing, assembly, distribution, packaging, shipping.
And then they want to stifle growth further and take a 3% cut of gross revenues?
I'm all for their cut during trade and VAT (20%!) But taking your hard earned profits to spend in wasteful ways while lining the surveillance communist state's pockets via broken and inefficient products is disgusting.
This will not end well. The EU is well on it's path to full blown centrally planned totalitarianism and communist level controls. You will see.
