Anecdotally, a notorious real estate developer named Blackstone where I lived got into a lot of heat, and afterwards rebranded to a local-language version of "DearCity". Now everyone seems to have forgotten their ruthless practices. To be fair, they went from a hilarious villain-like name to an almost cartoonishly cute one. But jokes on the public, because it works. They're largely off the hook in the publics eye now
I am a part of a small but passionate group in Denmark, who advocates for giving everyone an account in the national bank at birth.
This account would be able to attach a featureless debit card (using our national standard payment system "DanKort"), and have the same interest rate as the national Bank (so for now, slightly negative).
Employees of the national bank is already able to get accounts like this. So there is precedence.
This is obviously not a particular attractive not sophisticated "product", but it is awfully hard to hurt yourself with, and will have all the functionality that allows you to function in a modern society.
Make banking a choice, and force the banks to make sufficiently attractive products to convince me to participate willingly.
How does “giving everyone an account in the national bank at birth” correspond to making a choice? How about, instead, you give people the option to open an account with the national bank? That sounds more like a choice.
A less synical conclusion would be that the longterm viability of a AI-centric company like Google benefits a lot of reasonable development in the early stages. If Google can avoid ethical hiccups it might provoke less regulation and provoke it later.
All else equal, being a reasonable and ethical company IS good business. Problems arise with ethics and business collide.
This kind of liability mitigation use case is at odds with academic freedom. Your view would imply making AI part of your InfoSec / CyberOps team, not an academic research group.
This is pretty important.
The way the guys does this is very close to how you could also fool a human by hanging up real stop signs in the wrong places, and "stupidity" people would start to respect them.
The only difference here is that a mere 500 ms flash elicites a response, where a human wouldn't notice.
on balance, a 500 ms response time does seem like a feature more than a bug compared to a human.
Are self-driving computers superior to humans and make less mistakes, or is it OK for a computer to be tricked by something some humans would also not detect?
Btw. I think I can tell if there is a real stop-sign or something on a billboard after some 'huh'-moment and without slamming on the brakes. And humans still go circles around AI regarding plausibility-checking very out-of-the-ordinary events.
It isn’t either/or. One system can be overall superior another and that system can have different vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Cars are generally considered better than horses for transport, but cars also cannot use grass for fuel.
I suspect flashing a stop sign sized image of a stop sign for 500ms on a tv mounted where the stop sign goes, at an intersection that should probably have a stop sign, would get most people to stop.
I thought the same thing and most certainly slow way the heck down while trying to figure out what the heck I just saw. I'd probably presume it was some sort of programmable temporary signage on the fritz and treat it like a traffic light with the lights out.
Where I live, if the introduction of a UBI was followed by a drastic reduction (or complete elimination) of the means-tested system we know today, hunger would potentially become a problem for people blowing their money early in the month (or getting robbed?).
This tells me the utopian ideas of replacing the entire complex system with a simple UBI isn't feasible. You'll end up in dreadful ethical choices and moral hazard. This is indeed already happening, but the bureaucracy of it makes abuse less attractive.
> if the introduction of a UBI was followed by a drastic reduction (or complete elimination) of the means-tested system we know today,
As I understand it, that elimination is part of the point of UBI. The MTBs are no longer needed.
Why do you think hunger would be caused by UBI? At worst, I would expects those who already depend on MTBs would be in the same position they are in today.
I suspect I know what my society will do to people who repeatable demonstrate the inability to take care of themselves and manage basic living aspects of food and rent. They loose the right to do it themselves and get appointed a guardian.
Where I live, if the introduction of a UBI was followed by a drastic reduction (or complete elimination) of the means-tested system we know today, hunger would potentially become a problem for people blowing their money early in the month (or getting robbed?).
If that happened regularly the charities would be started up again, except next time far more people would have a little extra money to give so they could be much better funded.
>hunger would potentially become a problem for people blowing their money early in the month (or getting robbed?)
How is the likelihood of this connected to the source of their money? Is hunger not a problem for people who work for a living and blow their money early in the month (or get robbed?)
Maybe off-topic, but the article says they used a modified machine learning algorithm to nap bat calls to activities and from that developed a translator.
With the improvements to machine translation without parallelism data and voices-to-voice translation, how stupid is the idea that we might someday be able to take enough bat calls and human speech, and create a true translation system? obviously assumes the bats got something vaguely resembling a language we can translate from.
I don't think we need to declare "One truth", in order to remove the worst layer of misinformation. It's a false dichotomy.
What is the effectivness of (homemade) masks? Disbuted, so here information should be free
Should you inject disinfectives into you bloodstream to cure Covid-19? No. This is misinformation, is easily identified.
If there is doubt, it should be allowed. There will obviously always be a grey area, but for the time being, a lot of good can be done, without any harm.
In Denmark we've had a public payment card for a couple of decades now (Dankort). It's a no thrills, dump, payment card, but it is universally accepted, has no fees and virtually impossible to get into financial trouble with.
I have to admit, I welcome apple pay with a lot of sceptisism. In my perspective, a lot of innovation in payment over the recent years has been towards better ways of extracting value from basic transactions, or selling confusing products to financially illiterate consumer. With the exception of contactless and mobile payments, which our public solution has picked up as quickly as the commercial vendors.
Interesting, because in some places like the UK, road infrastructure is intentionally made "difficult" as it has been proven to make drivers pay more attention and reduce accidents around those places.
These are different types of changes like lane narrowing or lane marker omitting that don't aim to make driving less intuitive, but to decrease the perceived safe speed of travel. They're trying to make driving feel more difficult without actually increasing the danger level, which in theory decreases the danger for everyone else on the road without actually endangering drivers.
This happens in Norway too. For instance lots of zebra crossings were scraped away where I live a few years back, because they argued (from accident statistics) it gave pedestrians a false sense of security.
That may be, but it also made 95% of drivers (those obeying traffic regulations) actually stop for you to cross. Obviously they don't if there's no crossing, and you have to wait ten times as long to cross safely.
Do you have a reference for that, out of interest?
That might genuinely be the intention but I'd worry that -- depending on the kind of 'challenge' added to roads -- it might not always work out for the best.
I know this approach is used in residential areas in the Netherlands. A lot of these streets are designated as "woonerf" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street), which means that everything has right of way on cars (i.e. pedestrians, bikes, playing kids, whatever).
The design is often (intentionally) tricky to navigate. Brick/cobble roads to make driving fast uncomfortable. Planter's narrowing/blocking half the road, resulting in the road frequently being limited to a single lane (often alternating sides) so cars can't simultaneously pass. Frequent 90 degree turns, that sorta thing. It make it impossible to drive fast on these roads.
Note that this is only applied in some "zones", generally this applies to streets with houses, which will then connect up to a 30 km/h max road that is less obstructed and functions as a connecting artery to main roads in the city/town and eventually provincial roads (80 km/h) or highways.
Each classification has different goals, so highways and provincial roads are "vehicles only", cyclists and pedestrians will be on completely separate unconnected paths (usually with several meters of separation from the main road).
Main roads will have both cars and cyclists, but usually separate/designated bike lanes (and sometimes even separated bike paths). Only the 30km/h and woonerf streets really have bikes and cars mixed on the same lane (and will have measures that restrict car speed like I mentioned above).
The keyword to look up is ”traffic calming”. Making lanes narrower, adding curb extensions (bulbouts), gentle curves to otherwise straight roadways, and so on.
That's certainly not unique, though the amount of effort put into it will vary. In Germany a typical response to an accident hotspot might be putting up extra signage (e.g. no passing, lower speed limit, Difficult Curves Ahead), adding or moving/changing a traffic light, speedbumps, speed checks etc.
Major, expensive stuff like changing the routing or curvature is pretty rare and most likely to happen if the road is reworked anyway.
