My random thoughts

Anything that doesn't quite fit in elsewhere...
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by funkervogt »

I bought a small house, have been renovating it, and just finished removing all the old galvanized steel water pipes and sink faucets. All of it is over 50 years old, and probably closer to 70 years old, and is badly rusted and leaky. At the scrapyard, I only got $7 for 120 lbs of this steel!

Whatever. I'm happy to do my part to make the world just a little tidier and more modern, and to put some scrap metal back into the economy so it can be used to make a new car or something. Whenever machines come to dominate the planet, they'll collect, reuse, and recycle every bit of useful scrap material that humans have left scattered around. Much more efficient.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by funkervogt »

Even something as simple as municipal trash service will be affected by AI and robots. The way things work now is there is a designated trash collection day each week where garbage trucks stop in front of each house, empty the homeowners' trash cans into their vehicle, and drive it to the landfill. This is actually an inefficient way to remove waste. Along a particular collection route, the amount of trash its inhabitants are throwing out fluctuates from week to week. One week, the garbage truck might be perfectly full, the other it might be half empty, and the next, it might be overflowing and forced to do two trips to the landfill. Moreover, households that consistently generate large amounts of trash pay the same, flat fee as households that consistently generate less.

Once AIs are running things and each household has a robot capable of doing manual labor, trash collection will change. They would monitor the volume and weight of trash that their household had accumulated, and once the households located along a specific garbage collection route had built up enough trash to match the garbage truck's capacity, the garbage truck would be sent out to get it. Routes might also constantly change to account for geographic variations in trash accumulation. As a result, there would be no set "trash day," and households would pay different amounts of money for the removal of different amounts of waste.

This model would also apply to recycling. You might have a bin devoted to used aluminum products that doesn't get collected until it fills up, which might take months.
Vakanai
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by Vakanai »

funkervogt wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 7:17 pm Even something as simple as municipal trash service will be affected by AI and robots. The way things work now is there is a designated trash collection day each week where garbage trucks stop in front of each house, empty the homeowners' trash cans into their vehicle, and drive it to the landfill. This is actually an inefficient way to remove waste. Along a particular collection route, the amount of trash its inhabitants are throwing out fluctuates from week to week. One week, the garbage truck might be perfectly full, the other it might be half empty, and the next, it might be overflowing and forced to do two trips to the landfill. Moreover, households that consistently generate large amounts of trash pay the same, flat fee as households that consistently generate less.

Once AIs are running things and each household has a robot capable of doing manual labor, trash collection will change. They would monitor the volume and weight of trash that their household had accumulated, and once the households located along a specific garbage collection route had built up enough trash to match the garbage truck's capacity, the garbage truck would be sent out to get it. Routes might also constantly change to account for geographic variations in trash accumulation. As a result, there would be no set "trash day," and households would pay different amounts of money for the removal of different amounts of waste.

This model would also apply to recycling. You might have a bin devoted to used aluminum products that doesn't get collected until it fills up, which might take months.
I don't like the idea of changing people's bills like that. Sometimes poor people produce more trash than those who have more money to spend. I mean, there's a lot of plastic and cardboard containers when buying cheap food. Plus it hits larger families harder, and they usually have less money to spend because, well, more mouths to feed. Wanting to punish people for waste is understandable, but it's more complex than people just being wasteful.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by funkervogt »

When did making a person pay for their own expenses become "punishment"?
Vakanai
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by Vakanai »

funkervogt wrote: Thu Jun 02, 2022 9:39 pm When did making a person pay for their own expenses become "punishment"?
They already do, that's what bills are for. As for punishment, it might have been a bad word choice on my part. I was just kind of grasping at words to lazily express the idea that you're clearly trying to instigate an idea/impetus to incentivize people to produce less waste, and I was just expressing the view that some people might have trouble with that while being unfairly charged more than they used to be.
Still, raising garbage bills on people for something they don't have much say on seems ill advised (sure, some people are blatantly wasteful, but most are really just trying to get by). I'm also concerned that some would then turn to dumping their garbage somewhere out in nature out of sight, which would be unfortunate.
Plus you'd have to add scales to every garbage truck, which seems like an unnecessary expense. Again, it seems like the point isn't to reach an efficiency in payments, but to incentivize behaviors you might find desirable. Which I'm not again, I wish cigarettes were taxed out of existence, but it is a nuanced problem.
At least, I think it probably is. Maybe I'm overthinking it, I don't know.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by funkervogt »

They already do
Your previous post implied the opposite. By suggesting that switching from a flat fee payment system to a measured by weight/volume payment system would result in some poor people paying more, you implied that they are currently paying less for the waste disposal service than they are using.

That's all I'll say about it. I hate talking politics.
Vakanai
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by Vakanai »

funkervogt wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 5:53 pm
They already do
Your previous post implied the opposite. By suggesting that switching from a flat fee payment system to a measured by weight/volume payment system would result in some poor people paying more, you implied that they are currently paying less for the waste disposal service than they are using.

That's all I'll say about it. I hate talking politics.
Not really - I believe a flat fee payment system is paying for it. But to each their own.
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by funkervogt »

David Cronenberg has released a new body horror movie called Crimes of the Future. Here's an interesting passage from a review of it:
Autonomy and ownership, consumption and modification, sex and pain, what it means to make passionate love in an autopsy machine or have a zipper installed in your guts for easy access
I'm not sure if Posthumans will ever have such a thing, but robots certainly will. They will be able to remove their own parts to fix them or replace them with new ones, and to open up their bodily cavities to access everything.
Having a flexible torso, four hands, and four, highly flexible limbs that could bend in more ways than we can would also let the general-purpose robots comfortably touch any part of their own bodies, enabling them to self-repair, which would be an invaluable feature. The swiveling sensor stalk plus tiny cameras built into other parts of its body like the hands and torso would also let it see every part of its own body (cameras built into the hands or fingers would also let it reach inside small, tight spaces and clearly see what is inside, letting it guide the appendage, unlike humans who must blindly feel around in such situations). Contrast this with us humans, who have a hard time touching and manipulating some parts of our bodies (like the spot between our shoulderblades) and who can’t see every part of our own bodies because we have only one set of eyes that are in a head with limited rotation.

On that note, having small cameras embedded throughout its body would also eliminate blind spots, which would improve safety since the robots wouldn’t be at risk of running into humans or objects because they were unseen. Whereas human vision is confined to a forward-facing cone, the general purpose robots would see in a 360-degree bubble. The tip of the head stalk might have the biggest and best camera, but losing it wouldn’t blind the robot.
https://www.militantfuturist.com/what-w ... look-like/
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funkervogt
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Re: My random thoughts

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After several decades, the U.S. military might be adopting a new assault rifle. As this video analysis shows, the "M5" is a high-quality weapon incorporating more advanced engineering than the current M4 rifle.



This makes me wonder what a rifle designed for robot troops to use would be like. I think it would be simpler than the M5. Since they wouldn't have eardrums to get damaged by the sound of gunblasts, there wouldn't be a suppressor. There would not be ambidextrous controls and buttons since robots will already be ambidextrous (think about it). And since robots would be able to very strongly grasp their weapons, they might not need buttstocks at all. If they did need one, a simple, non-adjustable wire framed butt would be fine. Since robot soldiers would have naturally good vision, the need for accessories meant to assist aiming, like scopes and flashlights, would be reduced, and the guns would be less cluttered with added gadgets.
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Lorem Ipsum
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Re: My random thoughts

Post by Lorem Ipsum »

One answer to the fermi paradox is that FTL travel is not possible + the rarity of spacefaring life (we could be one of the first in at least nearby galaxies).
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