

In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots - 7402
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/science/mit-scholars-1949-essay-on-machine-age-is-found.html

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ChuckMcM
I would have loved to talk to this person. I was particularly struck by this
comment: _Finally the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we
ought to ask them to do. In the discussion of the relation between man and
powerful agencies controlled by man, the gnomic wisdom of the folk tales has a
value far beyond the books of our sociologists._

So often in debugging I see that machine doing exactly what I _programmed_ it
to do and not what I _meant_ it to do. As we build things with greater
influence in the world such bugs go from being "oopsies" to ones that do a lot
of harm either economic, human, or both.

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gizmo686
Hopefully, we will have layers of safeguards so you would need bugs in many
programs to conspire allow a problem happen. For example, even on my personal
laptop, I can play around with fan/CPU_speed without worrying about making a
potential mistake, even if I am playing around with them in kernel space. The
reason for this is I know that even if I make a mistake that would melt my
CPU, the BIOS is also monitoring the temperature and, if nessasary, will scale
back the CPU to minimum, kick the fan up to maximum, and possibly power off
the machine.

Granted, I could disable these protections, however then we go from me having
a "oopsie", to me having disabled critical safety features.

Note, I'm not sure how much the BIOS actually overrides the kernel. I was able
to override the BIOS safties just by passing in some parameters to the Linux
kernel. However, you could imagine a system where such would not be an option.

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simcop2387
From what I understand that's all the System Management Mode stuff that's been
around for a while, no idea what it's usually like though. I haven't gone that
far down the rabbit hole.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode>

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noonespecial
_If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human
beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an
industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty._

It took 50 years but we are finally starting to be forced to take this problem
seriously.

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quackerhacker
Idea to fruition = half a century.

So Popular Mechanics amazed me as a kid. They often speculated what the future
held, but if I was to look back at their predictions and the current year, I'd
probably be disappointed.

I realize tech (specifically mobile) is the fastest evolving industry right
now, but am I the only who feels that we're still behind on ideas coming to
reality? It's what compelled me to get into coding.

I didn't want to be one of the people that expresses an idea and say "they
should make an app, that blah blah blah." I'm not waiting, I'll learn to code,
and smash a keyboard...but I'll do it my self!

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kruhft
He also formalized Brownian motion:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiener_process>.

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ordinary
Similar: The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster, predicting the
Internet, written in 1909. The full story is now in the public domain, and can
be found here: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops>

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wladimir
I immediately had to think of Kurt Vonneguts "Player Piano" published in 1952,
with similar a theme of automation of all production (by "taping" actions) and
the impact of that on society. It also briefly mentions a "third industrial
revolution" in which even human thought will be performed more efficiently by
machines.

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gpcz
I'll assume that he knew of the ENIAC since it was publicized in 1946, which
means he probably didn't "predict" mechanical/electrical computation.
Regardless, he successfully predicted digital feedback control systems,
lights-out manufacturing, mechatronics, artificial intelligence (to a limited
extent), and the social ramifications of a post-scarcity society. Are these
technologies obvious progressions that come from knowing about automatic
computation, or was he truly that much of a visionary?

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dylanhassinger
I'm glad we're not still called tapers

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HumbleWiener
"We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can
be arrogant and die." - Norbert Wiener

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gizmo686
In fairness, we are going to die either way.

