vtange

Massively further ahead or massively further behind.

Additionally, I would assume that any "first contact" with an alien entity won't be a face-to-face, lifeform-to-lifeform meet; We're more likely to meet the robotic creations of an advanced alien civilization well before actual living beings.. unless said alien had an extraordinarily long lifespan compared to us.

Any keyword that is depended on to move money will see hype waves, surfs and crashes. We are seeing/saw it with crypto, it is no different with AI.

The article presents a sort of naive assumption that if we stayed primitive we may have ended up in a more egalitarian, less brutally competitive world.

Problem is, in a less developed culture, there is still competition due to human nature and due to uncontrollable factors such as natural disasters. Pre-European-Contact Native Americans often fought against one another during periods such as drought.[1][2] Ironically one of the benefits of civilization is a stronger ability to handle situations of disaster and shortage that forces populations to go to war.

I'd also add that in a "civilized world" there are probably more avenues in life open to a person who isn't bound to the responsibility of food production (which constitutes 90% of a hunter-gatherer society). Science, history, the arts? Aside from oral traditions, all are outside the reach of a primitive society.

Oh, and at least in a modern civilization such as ours we have a small fighting chance against say, an incoming apocalyptic asteroid.

[1]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/thanksgivin... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/25cvxm/were_...

So we need to write more code to make fancy Photoshop-like editors for the average-Joe programmer who can't see the big picture? That just adds more to the code issue - even Photoshop has bugs you know.

The fact that "Few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding" is a soft-skills/experience issue that isn't specific to software. I too can use Photoshop to draw logos, maps, and diagrams, but I'm pretty sure someone out there who uses Photoshop professionally knows a lot more tricks within Photoshop and sees the bigger picture of what they want to create before starting. I generally free-hand my drawings, as opposed to the structured outlining most professional artists do.

I'm pretty sure less people would be rushing into the software engineer profession if they knew it came with the liabilities you described. That would drive up the prices of engineers.. and I'm pretty sure the industry in general doesn't want that.

Maybe that's why the free pass mentality exists

Wow this is really well written.

Sometimes I feel like this "extra layer"/middleman-adding is not only just to enable government interventions but is just fluff added so we could create jobs for those whose skills don't go beyond the typical white-collar worker. I might be wrong, but the image of extraneous University administrators and "not-enough" skilled labor kinda paints this picture.

Since we have Trump on board, the post might be even more interesting with a slide 10: let South Korea/Japan go nuclear, in face of the political issues.

The post did mention Nuclear subs. It cautioned that relying on them will add stress and risk to them since they had to be position/deployed constantly in specific areas of the Pacific to fulfill their role.

..As opposed to the even larger number of Chinese who just accept that their government is the way to go and also believe you deserve it equally, if not more?

According to many articles that's a common misconception - that younger people empowered by Tinder can bang each other more and casually.[1] From my own anecdotes Tinder is actually a hindrance, since it creates a picture-oriented, extremely competitive environment where lack of physical attractiveness effectively shuts down the world of dating to the majority of men and women who aren't 8s, 9s, or 10s.[2]

I mean, on the net you'll often hear stories about kids scoring big but that's survivor bias. You don't hear anything from those who didn't bang.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/no-sex-please-were-mill... [2] http://time.com/4435058/millennials-virgins-sex/

Isn't there a lot of talk about how today's youth is much less likely to date/engage in sexual activity?

So what you're saying is, they don't always have sex, but when they do it's unprotected? That sounds pretty normal to me.

This is how you end up with a dreary, hyper-capitalistic, race-to-the-bottom world where money trumps all and all moral lines are crossed just so a company can increase its profit margin a slight bit. So if North Korea opened its doors just enough for global corporations to exploit North Korean labor, should we just hop in?

Simply selling a product doesn't guarantee that a company will be in good standing with its customers. There are TED talks that even argue for companies to establish an identity beyond what and how they make money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw

The map really brings into light Japan's lack of presence in the tech world.. They barely register on the map.

I'm surprised India has more presence than China considering how much the news talks about places like Shenzhen.

Every nuclear power since WWII has had the ability to invade many countries with minimal fear of retaliation.. Of course, lots of fingers point to the U.S., but China and Russia have invaded places as well.

The article basically postulates that any state with nuclear weapons guarantees its basic territorial integrity. That means sure, we might have landed in Normandy and secured France and the USSR might've secured Poland, but the German heartland would've been a no-go for the Allies for fear of a nuke to Paris or London, and a safe-zone for Hitler and his agenda for Jews, etc.

The article explicitly stated how North Korea might feel free to hit or try to hit places like Guam, S.K. and Japan without fear of retaliation because the author guesses the average American would be OK with losing Tokyo and Seoul but not S.F.

Reading this makes me relieved that Nazi Germany did not obtain nuclear weapons - else a regime change ousting Hitler might not have happened at all, and it would've been free to carry on its agenda with less fear of Allied intervention.

We people are funny; We're spend so much time and effort these days making things that help us know things about others without actually talking to them.

If this system is scalable area-wise wouldn't it be a good idea to shield the ice caps with this? A 3C to 5C degree difference could mean quite a bit in preventing further ice melting, no?

Isn't IQ based on a standard deviation? If everyone had an IQ of 120, wouldn't 120 become the new 100?

The Chinese are very proud of their writing system - to the point that Chinese calligraphy is pretty much high art there. We love it when non-Chinese talk about how hard it is to learn - it gives that quick ego-boost like what you get when someone talks about how hard it is to learn something you already know.

Sometimes I think part of the reason China/Japan is so inward-looking is because they've invested a LOT of time into learning the ways of their own culture.

Probably far off in the future but assuming we perfect robotics and A.I. wouldn't it be possible to manage nuclear with no human-hands?

The thing then will be who takes responsibility for accidents caused by robots..

I kinda blame it on our sci-fi fiction: so far we cannot imagine a space adventure where there are no humans at the frontier. Even the most recent space-themed games and movies fall to this trope. It's almost an ego sort of thing - the main characters have to be human, which comes with all the drama of first-alien-contact, life support, etc.

With robots, all that risk is mitigated since there's no risk of loss of life. At the worst we have our bots self-destruct or something.

It's funny that with all this talk recently about the rise of AI and robots, we continue to just assume that space exploration and colonization has to be done with human beings.. As if we've already exhausted the most robots could do with rovers and satellites.

From a economic and safety perspective, it would seem far more practical to establish a foothold in non-Earth environments with robots that do the initial habitat construction for humans. I fear we are hand-waving much of the risk the first batch of humans we send to Mars have to shoulder - think the Roanoke Colony of the 16th century

People also hurt other people with cars. What was it again? You are more likely to die from a car accident than in an airliner?

Low interest rates also inflate stocks. When you can't earn much with cash sitting in the bank you switch to something with more return.

And last I checked the average Joe doesn't have enough savings to put into stocks.

For the past couple months the media has pointed out China's successes in tech in Shenzhen, how they have a much better stance on climate change than Trump, and how they have the most prudent position (that doesn't involve all-out war) on North Korea. That's pretty positive if you ask me.

Yes, but in places where say news organizations are tightly controlled by the state, it is much easier to push a nationalistic, "my-country-can-do-no-wrong" agenda than in places where multiple parties push for agendas that help point out flaws that need to be mended in a country.

And the worst part about having to move out of country to find out things that were censored/hidden? You'll be inclined to believe foreign nations have a negative bias towards China.

At least, that's China's (and Russia's) narrative.

There's inevitably going to be people trying to justify the tragedy here by suggesting America is no better, pointing to instances such as the Kent State Shootings (Vietnam War protest).

For those people I'd like to point out that unlike China, America doesn't actively try to hide the negative sides of its history to the extent China does. I can read about the Kent State shootings all I want, along with the My Lai Massacre, the Trail of Tears, American involvement in Central America or the Middle East, etc..

It is in fact sad that China depends on the West to expose the darker sides of its past, and then claims Western negative bias whenever we do.

Can confirm this. In a lot of design schools (I went into architecture school) students are taught to iterate, iterate, iterate to improve and refine on their design. It's very rare to see great designs 100% complete on the first try, and often you see early models and prototypes tossed to the side after the final product is due.

From the short-term, economic perspective, watching someone hammer away at something when "tried-and-true" solutions exist (with some 'creative' twists ofc) can even seem irrational and wasteful. One famous Modernist architect, Phillip Johnson, even quipped that,"Architecture is the art of how to waste space."

People who can't handle the waste in design probably would never shell out for proper R&D or scientific developments either. Hardly anyone gets it right on their first try, even in research.

It's funny because when creative endeavors finally pay off, they can pay off big and then they themselves become the "tried-and-true" trend that people follow.