A world run by software

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Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

redscare posted:

What a clever futuristic way of loving over the poor.

Huh?

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 08:26

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:28

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

shovelbum posted:

Who are these middle class Americans with personal servants?

I know of only one couple and they are both doctors. So yeah, definitely not middle class.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 19:16

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

FilthyImp posted:

For instance, the poor already have a service here in Los Angeles that functions something like Uber. It's called public transit, and it's entirely on-demand for most of the day.

This must be some kind of joke. Do you know what Uber is? Have you used it before?

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 20:02

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

FilthyImp posted:

It's crowdsourced transportation for people that don't like calling Taxis and wouldn't ever consider jumping on a municipal bus.

Are you talking about the public transport system that's on strike all the time?

# ¿ Nov 30, 2013 22:15

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

LP97S posted:

Yes I recall the eternal strike that is currently inundating every city in the world right now.

You're embarrassing yourself. Try to follow the discussion please.

Here's a list of locations Uber is available in. Please tell us which one of the American cities listed has good enough public transportation such that it can actually perform as well as an on-demand taxi service.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 01:26

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

Cicero posted:

D&D is fairly skeptical of new technology, because a) often new technology destroys existing jobs, b) technology is usually adopted by the rich first, and c) it's a way of bettering society that doesn't involve putting capitalists up against the wall.

Gotcha. I have no issue with any of those. I actually work for a company that develops business automation software, and we're proud of the fact that we make businesses more efficient and productive by drastically reducing the need for manual work. poo poo gets done a lot faster, problems and errors are minimized and there's a lot more oversight over processes since the software can generate reports on-demand.

Essentially it comes down to this: no one is "entitled" to a job. If the only value they are adding can be automated away by software, they need to figure out other ways of adding value.

Liberals have an issue with this because not everyone is capable (financially or intellectually) of re-educating themselves to stay relevant in an economy that is ever faster-paced. Once those people lose their jobs due to automation, they descend into poverty. I think that's a very fair concern. In my opinion, the only solution in the long run is unconditional basic income. With that, we can at least minimize the pain of economic obsolescence.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 02:21

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

LP97S posted:

You're embarrasing yourself with by talking about how a cheap rear end app that calls people who have taxi services is the be all, end all to transportation.

I want you to show me where I said anything that even remotely resembles this.

Go on. I'll wait.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 03:03

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

LP97S posted:

By responding to criticism of Uber with that response, you're trying to tie together the overpriced taxi hire as a replacement for not only public transportation but also for the existing taxi system in place. If you didn't mean that, then I apologize

No, I didn't mean that at all.

quote:

and will go back to my main point, Uber is a lovely taxi hire service with a slick app for people with smart phones too dumb or lazy to use public transportation. I looked at the Uber page and they offer transit from Philadelphia international to Center City (doesn't say where) for $45 while Septa offers a train from Philadelphia international to several stations and larger hubs for about $8.

You certainly have strong feelings against Uber.

You have yet to explain how public transportation coverage, frequency and comfort can match that of an on-demand service like Uber. Yes, you're paying for the privilege, but so loving what? Why does that make you so angry?

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 03:45

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

McDowell posted:

I already did.

Public Autonomous Vehicle Fleets. In urban areas you can basically eliminate congestion and massively improve traffic safety by phasing out personal cars in favor of autonomous trucks and buses.

Smaller, On-demand vehicles can be used for trips outside the scope of urban mass transit.

But the personal car is central to our individualist consumer society, so yeah.

The system you describe does not exist right now. Uber does.

FilthyImp suggested that Uber users are just too lazy to take public transport. I responded by asking him how the hell public transport can match Uber's convenience. No response so far, because the answer is obvious: it can't. That's why Uber is successful and growing.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 04:12

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

icantfindaname posted:

You realize you can call a taxi company with a phone and order a taxi, right? That's if there aren't taxis driving around searching for fares. It's a solution without a problem. What exactly does it offer to justify the cost premium? This is a good microcosm of all this future-ist tech bullshit.

Yes, it does. It's called a taxi. Why would I pay fees to a company to act as middleman when I can call a loving taxi without their special app? Clearly there is a market for a shiny taxi middleman app for the iPhone, because the company is growing, but that does not indicate much besides rich people liking shiny things.

edit: I just ran the numbers, a generic taxi from O'Hare to downtown in Chicago is about $35, an Uber taxi is $45-$50. It's an overpriced taxi service by the looks of it.

First of all, Uber has a cheaper version called UberX. I've used it about ten times in three different cities and in all cases it came out to be either on par with or cheaper than regular taxi and still more convenient. I also got to meet all sorts of interesting people - artists, students, bartenders, and even a newly minted lawyer who had become an UberX driver to help pay his law school debt.

As for Uber itself, I've used that several times as well. Yes, it is 15-30% more expensive, but it's also far, far more convenient and comfortable than regular cab:

Uber vehicles always arrive within 3-5 minutes of asking for pickup through the app. In contrast I've waited 20+ minutes for cabs to arrive, and on a few occasions had to call the cab company a second time after 30+ minutes to remind them.
Payments are automatic and seamless. No need to deal with cash/change/credit card at the end of the ride. In the case of a card, it's also a lot more secure since payment is handled by the app. The driver never touches your card. Receipts are automatically emailed to you, which is nice when you need to get the ride reimbursed by your company.
The vehicles are always in pristine condition. I've sat in cabs with vomit stains on the floor and... no thanks.
The drivers are always courteous as hell. They are always clean and well-shaven, they smell good (can't say that about some cab drivers!), they ask what you would like to listen to on the radio, some offer snacks, and most importantly(for me), they never talk on the phone.
This never happened to me, but on the off-chance that the driver accidentally takes a longer route, you can report it through the app and they refund the difference.

This one time I was stuck with a date in a part of Seattle where it's notoriously difficult to hail a cab. I texted Uber and within 4 minutes a black towncar pulled over and picked us up. While he deftly navigated through traffic (none of the floor-gas-pedal-then-slam-on-brakes nonsense cabbies are known for) we were able to relax and doze off in the back seat - something I've never done and will never do in a cab.

You can bitch and moan about Uber all you want. The fact is that it very clearly fulfills a large demand: that for convenience, comfort, safety and a stellar customer service experience. You pay extra for it, but I suppose that's a problem only for the unwashed masses of D&D goons!

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 06:13

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

Soviet Space Dog posted:

It's nice that Uber has nice cars and pleasant drivers and yet I fail to see how it can greatly reduce traffic.

I don't know who is saying what anymore, but I certainly did not say Uber reduces traffic.

quote:

I also fail to see how not having vomit in the cab is part of a softwarecracy.

Because most of the convenience and safety (of payment) is powered by the app. Take the app away and it doesn't have much that is different from a luxury cab service. The app is what makes the experience seamless.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 06:28

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

FilthyImp posted:

After another exchange, you reply with a pithy one line throwaway about the tendency for a citywide service to suffer an outage due to labor disputes -- to which you receive a similarly pithy reduction of the utility of the service, while conveniently dodging the question of access to poor patrons. Putting aside the issue of you disparaging labor strikes (which you do, make no mistake about that), in what universe is your reply an invitation to discuss the convenience of Uber and it's merits as a transit service?

I have no problem with labor disputes. However, the fact that they cause huge headaches for people - especially poor people in this case, because they use public transport more than middle/upper class - is quite relevant when we're discussing the convenience and *cough* accessibility of the transportation method.

quote:

And again, we can ask ourselves how this service will benefit groups that are poor or disadvantaged. We can't dodge the question just because it's a tech darling.

Not every technology has to immediately (or even ultimately) benefit the poor or disadvantaged. Some things will always be much more accessible to rich people. That's just the reality in this society we have built for ourselves.

I've commented before that D&D seems largely incapable of discussing ideas on their own merit, and always has to inject some sort of social justice gently caress-those-CEO-bastards or but-what-about-poor-people trajectory into the threads. I mean, don't get me wrong, I do care about poor people. But not to the extent that I want to discuss them in every loving context.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 07:13

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

WorldsStrongestNerd posted:

And this attitude, in a nutshell, is the reason most people are so terrified of libertarians, yuppies, and techno-fetishists. The inability to recognize/care that most of society is not going to be able to pay for those privileges, yet you still want those "privileges" to become the norm. Obviously I speak of the society you envision in general and not just taxis.

Let's not switch contexts here. I'm speaking purely of taxis. That's the topic.

Obviously when it comes to essential things like healthcare, it's a huge problem that some people can afford it and others can't.

But I see no problem that some people won't be able to afford a luxury taxi service.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 07:24

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

FilthyImp posted:

You typify a public service as flawed because of this. If you have no problems with the sturm und drang of labor v capital, then stop using it as a one-line counterpoint. While I agree that labor strikes disrupt the flow of this particular system (and overwhelmingly affect the poor), the problem behind them is the same problem your data-driven-future seems to want to fix. It's the same problem that drives most of our modern strife. Inequality.

I used it as a one-line counter-point when you gave a dismissive one-line explanation of what Uber is, which was:

"It's crowdsourced transportation for people that don't like calling Taxis and wouldn't ever consider jumping on a municipal bus."

:rolleyes:

But of course, I was being facetious. Strikes are a very tiny part of the problems with public transportation. Others include things like infrequent bus/train schedules, poor coverage, safety and health problems and overall unreliability. I didn't mention these because I didn't want to derail the thread too much (we were still on page 2).

quote:

Right. So the answer is 'sorry poors, you'll get yours when we can get around to it because society'? The same society this new model will usher into utopia?

"Answer" implies a question. There are no questions here. There is only reality. Technology will be developed whether you want it or not. More companies like Uber will pop up as it is the natural progress of technology, which is accelerating everyday.

quote:

The simple fact isn't that I'm injecting a 'b-b-but THE POORS' thread into this topic. I made the sin of explaining how the disadvantaged rely on a system already in place, and that this new model has no utility for them because they're priced out. In doing so, I've apparently exposed a glaring hole in the cloud future and its evangelists.[quote]

It's not a glaring hole from my point of view. Just a bug in the system that will be worked out eventually.

[quote]
Seriously. Just think about how you're asserting that this shift will be a boon to all life on earth

Err.. I never said this.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2013 08:22

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

So I think the massive disconnect in this thread is that Eripsa wants to talk about what is possible and why it is possible, whereas Obdicut wants to talk about what is not possible and why it is not possible.

I personally do like Eripsa's "attention economy" model. It has some problems, but they are not major problems. Like he said earlier, our cognitive minds operate in that manner for the most part anyway. It's not a giant leap to suggest we apply that to economic functions. Yes, it will require some novel technological approaches, but none of them are insurmountable challenges. They are all within the realm of possibility using today's technology (or at least most of them).

Slow News Day fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Dec 3, 2013

# ¿ Dec 3, 2013 02:51

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

SedanChair posted:

Eripsa just stop with the pity party. You're quite insane enough without obsessing about how persecuted you are. By your standards you don't appear to have a single sympathetic reader in this thread (though I would argue that continuing to listen and engage with your "ideas," however insultingly, is an almost superhuman act of toleration and sympathy), so why keep bitching to us about how we're treating you? We're just "jackals" after all, why would we stop because you're complaining?

You mentioned your academic work in the field of philosophy, and how it's worlds apart from the gargle you keep vomiting into your own thread. Well let's see it! It sounds so good that a jackal's teeth would slide right off of it. I suspect, however, that you are garbling your way through the academic world no more capably than anywhere else for the simple reason that it's more awkward to call a person crazy to their face than it is to do so over the internet.

I like him and I enjoy his posts. He's absolutely right to feel persecuted, as everyone has been piling on him and openly insulting him. Did you ever consider the possibility that the reason his posts are less than coherent at times is because he's trying to engage too many people in debate?

You sound like a complete jerk, by the way.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2013 08:43

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

Obdicut posted:

Are you sure you're in academia? "Hostility", or criticism, should be something you want, for your ideas.

Academia has criticism, sure, but it doesn't come in the form of publicly insulting the person.

Just sayin'.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2013 03:16

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

evilweasel posted:

What kind of bizzaro academia have you been exposed to?

While academia has a lot of drama and behind-closed-doors backstabbing, I've never seen public insults and band-wagoning like I've seen in this thread. Professors especially tend to be quite civil.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2013 03:59

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

Considering all the behind-the-back insults I witnessed as a grad student, "civil" is not the word I'd use to describe professors.

Notice I said "public." My point stands.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2013 04:02

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

Incidentally, this was on Ars Technica today.

quote:

Microsoft designs smart bra to combat emotional eating
Wearable sensors measure both electrodermal activity and EKG data.

--

Microsoft researchers have developed a bra-mounted sensor system that measures boob sweat and heart activity in order to detect emotional triggers for overeating.

The research is based on the idea that people eat not just when they are hungry but also for a host of emotional and habitual reasons. The goal was to provide a system that could intervene before the person turns to food for emotional support.

Microsoft researchers teamed up with colleagues from the University of Rochester and the University of Southampton to develop a range of interventions that go a step further than activity trackers such as FitBit and Nike's Fuelband. In their paper, the researchers mention other systems that have been developed that include heart rate monitors, earpieces to track chewing and swallowing, and augmented reality glasses to capture the food consumed.

But the team wanted to have a system of wearable sensors that measure electrodermal activity (EDA), which is essentially the amount of sweat on a person's skin; and electrocardiogram (EKG) data. Both are useful for gauging emotions. The sort of scenario the system needed to be able to deal with was as follows:

"Sally has been home from work for a few hours, and she ﬁnds herself rather bored. An application on Sally's mobile phone has also detected that she is bored by reading her physiological state through wearable sensors. Since this mobile application has previously learned that Sally is most susceptible to emotional eating when she is bored, the application provides an intervention to distract Sally and hopefully prevent her from eating at that moment."

This means that the application needed to be aware of Sally's emotional eating patterns, it needed to be able to detect different emotions through machine learning and it also needed to determine how to intervene while making sure it didn't become an annoyance to the user.

These three elements were explored through three separate studies. The first involved building an application called EmoTree to gather data about emotional eating patterns. A mobile app allowed users�all of whom self-identified as emotional eaters�to log their mood and food intake. There were reminded via text to log emotion every hour, at least ten times per day. This allowed researchers to build up an image of the participants' emotional states throughout the day. The study found that there were lots of different emotional triggers for eating, but generally there were fewer "eating events" when users felt calm or serene. As a consequence, the researchers proposed intervening when people felt stressed with some breathing exercises.

The second area of study sought to assess how useful the proposed breathing exercises were at combating stress and emotional eating through surveys. 87.5 percent of participants said that they were becoming more aware of their emotional triggers, but only 37.5 percent reported that their eating behaviours changed as a result. The volunteers were invited to suggest alternative interventions, with ideas such as distracting funny content, meditation, brain teasers, and calling a friend emerging.

The third part dealt involved the development of a bra-mounted wearable sensor system that gathered EKG and EDA data in order to monitor the emotional state of the wearer. The EKG sensor pads were designed to fit snugly against the ribs, while the EDA sensor was designed to sit inside the bra cap to essentially measure boob sweat.

Four women tested the bra system while also using EmoTree app so that researchers could cross-reference the data. They wore the sensing system and reported their emotions for between four and six hours each day. "It was very tedious for participants to wear our prototyped sensing system as the boards had to be recharged every three to four hours, which resulted in participants having to finagle with their wardrobe throughout the day," explain the authors.

The system was successful in measuring arousal (how alert or bored person is) and valence (how positive or negative emotions are) in between 73 and 75 percent of the time.

"Based on these results, we conclude that building a wearable, physiological system is feasible," say the authors. "However, we will continue to explore how to build a robust, real-world system that stands up to every day challenges with regards to battery life, comfort, and being suitable for both men and women."

The next stage of research will involve taking real-time sensor data instead of log files and trying to predict emotions and show an appropriately timed, personalized intervention.

Since conducting this research, the team has moved to testing the use of Affectiva Q3 bracelets, which detect mood, so that both men and women can participate. The pilots, say the authors, have been "quite promising" for both sexes.

This is interesting because it is along the lines of what Eripsa has been saying with regards to the attention economy. The bra in question measures the person's mood, and at appropriate times it provides "distractions" to ensure the person doesn't resort to eating as a result of their boredom or stress. If you think about it, it is a form of attention management: the device is designed with a specific goal (to reduce emotional eating) and then uses attention mechanics to achieve that goal.

If further developed into a "social" device, the network effects could open new doors. You're working at your desk one morning and you get a notification on your smartphone that your friend Lisa is feeling bored (based on her device's readings). The network knows that Lisa tends to snack when she's bored, so the app suggests that you send her a text message to ask what she's up to. A conversation starts and Lisa is distracted from emotional eating. It could become a peer support network.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2013 08:44

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

SedanChair posted:

e: and I certainly reject any society that wants to plug me into a live feed of my friends' emotional state, thank you! If I want to know their emotional state I will go ahead and ask them about it.

Would you say that there is no value in being notified when one of your friends is feeling suicidal?

# ¿ Dec 8, 2013 09:12

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

Main Paineframe posted:

The technical issues that still cripple the project are telling. The devices were tedious and annoying to use, and were wrong more than a quarter of the time despite having been primed with hourly emotion data from the previous stage. Who's going to use an anti-suicide machine that will falsely mark a non-suicidal person as suicidal 25% of the time?

They demonstrated it as a proof of concept. You know what that is, right?

# ¿ Dec 9, 2013 00:41

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 12:28

Slow News Day: Jul 4, 2007

Obdicut posted:

Yeah, it's an exercise that you do in order to identify critical flaws in your idea and test it for feasibility.

Given that, how do you think the test went as a proof of concept? What would have to change in order to improve the results?

Increased battery life for the sensors as well as improved accuracy in detecting emotions.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2013 06:26

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