This came up in my Discover feed and I initially assumed it was a fake news site. Unfortunately all the things in the article are indeed real (aside from the robo-brains which they note are mock ups). The brain cells learning to play Pong made the news last year. Combine this with the creepy as hell skin grafted onto a robot and you have nightmare fuel for life.
That raises a lot of ethical concerns. It is not possible to prove or disprove that these synthetic homunculi controllers are sentient and intelligent beings.
I think we should still do it, we probably will never understand unless we do it, but we have to accept the possibility that if these synths are indeed sentient then they also deserve the basic rights of intelligent living beings.
Slow down... they may deserve the basic rights of living beings, not living intelligent beings.
Lizards have brains too, but these are not more intelligent than lizards.
You would try not to step on a lizard if you saw it on the ground, but you wouldn't think oh, maybe the lizard owns this land, I hope I don't get sued for trespassing.
I'd wager the main reason we can't prove or disprove that, is because we have no strict definition of intelligence or sentience to begin with.
For that matter, computers have many more transistors and are already capable of mimicking human emotions - how ethical is that, and why does it differ from bio-based controllers?
It is frustrating how relevant philosophy of mind becomes in figuring all of this out. I'm more of an engineer at heart and i'd love to say, let's just build it if we can. But I can see how important that question "what is thinking?" Is becoming.
Good point. There is a theory somewhere that loosely states one cannot understand the nature of one's own intelligence. Iirc it's a philosophical extension of group/set theory, but it's been a long time since I looked into any of that so the details are a bit fuzzy. I should look into that again.
At least with computers we can mathematically prove their limits and state with high confidence that any intelligence they have is mimicry at best. Look into turing completeness and it's implications for more detailed answers. Computational limits are still limits.
I think a simple self-reporting test is the only robust way to do it.
That is: does a type of entity independently self-report personhood?
I say "independently" because anyone can tell a computer to say it's a person.
I say "a type of entity" because otherwise this test would exclude human babies, but we know from experience that babies tend to grow up to be people who self-report personhood. We can assume that any human is a person on that basis.
The point here being that we already use this test on humans, we just don't think about it because there hasn't ever been another class of entity that has been uncontroversially accepted as people. (Yes, some people consider animals to be people, and I'm open to that idea, but it's not generally accepted)
There's no other way to do it that I can see. Of course this will probably become deeply politicised if and when it happens, and there will probably be groups desperate to maintain a status quo and their robotic slaves, and they'll want to maintain a test that keeps humans in control as the gatekeepers of personhood, but I don't see how any such test can be consistent. I think ultimately we have to accept that a conscious intellect would emerge on its own terms and nothing we can say will change that.
That is such a weird "headline feature" to be adaptable to different riders. I've never known someone who would regularly share or swap bikes with someone where this is needed. I need my bike to fit me. I buy adoringly and set it up once. I then never touch saddle height, handlebar position and whatever else is adjustable ever again.
If it brings production costs down for having less variants or sizes, sure. But who needs this as a feature so desperately that it's one of 3 l features even mentioned in this post (except for it being a trike in the first place, I guess).
Not even all that unusual a feature for trikes, but I get the appeal: It's for lending it out and making it more compact for storage or transport. Being adjustable also ensures a good fit.
Reading a few articles about this, it seems a big concern is area. They wanna squeeze them in every free space they have between and around roads. Conveyor belts can probably do a lot sharper curves etc. than railways. If they do special small rails, they’ll also need special trains for that.
From the articles it’s also not clear if it’s from one point to another point or from multiple to multiple. They talk about deliveries, which would rather be multi to multi, but it’s not explicitly mentioned anywhere.
So now it's not just "bad CGI idea", it's "bad CGI idea generated by AI".
Next up: people investing billions in said cool looking bad CGI project only to find out none of it works and after wasting half a decade, they'll come to the conclusion that they'll need to invent a large transportation system with metal wheels that will run on a specialized track where you can add or remove carts as needed.
It's so bad that we don't have any of this yet!
Seriously, fuck Elon Musk for getting these scams popularized
Hmmmm I'm still skeptical mind you, but hear me out ...
What if there's benefits to be had by the traction motors being stationary, the electrical connections being fixed instead of moving contacts (read: not 3rd rail or overhead catenary), and the simplicity of containers not being all connected for easy removal from the conveyor without disrupting the movement of other containers?
I don't think speed is the thing we need to concentrate on anymore. You could have this country spanning convayer belt essentially, and power it all with solar. Thereby reducing pollution by a HUGE amount within Japan.
And hopefully other European countries will follow. Then we'd have to deal with the beast that is North America. Large sprawling land, both in Canada, and America. Especially America would be difficult. Canada probably has an entire unused northern half. Whereas America doesn't really have much unused open space in the eastern half. And it's just sooooooo big.
I have zero faith this will ever come to America. Too much politics. Too much zoning issues. Too much distance.
I won't agree or disagree with the speed comment, you could very well be correct.
As for powering by solar in Japan (and any other currently electrified system), I would guess that's easily done right now by changing how their power is generated; and that doesn't require a change in the system, just the generation. In japan around 66% of their rail is already electrified (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_electrification_in_Japan look at the summary box showing total miles and electrified miles). So I'm still skeptical that a conveyor system is the answer vs adding more electrified rail in that same strip of land and powering it with solar generation. But again, maybe there's something to be gained with such a different engineering solution per my OP.
And while you're spot on for the US (less than 1% from my google search) a conveyor won't solve it sadly unless there's something about that which makes it cheaper to deploy then adding a catenary system to our current railways.
A train sends 100 cargo boxes from town A to B in an hour. It takes 4 hours to put all the boxes in, and 5 hours to pull the boxes off the train and stack them in the yard
Conveyer sends 1 box every 6 minutes for 10 hours.
Same throughput, but one is easier to schedule workers around at both ends. I’ve never worked in a train yard or anything, don’t know how accurate my time frames are or anything, just trying to imagine what’s better about this.
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