Many cameras include microphones that the user has no intention of enabling. These are like that, since they're in a state where no-consent audio recording is illegal.
No audio recordings are made or handed over to anyone. Handing video over to a service provider to do things like weapons detection is not uncommon and not inherently a privacy problem. It's done in hospitals today.
A friend of mine was involved with AVLIS and Pu-AVLIS. There were/are significant counterproliferation concerns with them. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with the lack of major commercialization, but I wouldn't find it shocking if it were true. As I understand it, it's one of those technologies that the US doesn't strictly need, but we really don't want the Iranians (or similar weapons-pursuing state) to have it.
It's a U.S. national security policy to prevent countries which don't already have capabilities to enrich uranium or reprocess spend nuclear fuel from aquiring such capabilities.
Technologies which have low energy consumption and need only small space and therefor are easier to hide, such Laser isotope separation, US wants to restrict to any country, even allies.
> actual understanding of the pros and cons of union membership
Many of us have worked in $MEGACORPS with substantial union representation among the employees, have seen what it does and how it works in practice, and as a result want nothing to do with it. I wasn't represented due to my job classification, but now due to my firsthand exposure to unions I absolutely never will be by choice.
I know plenty of line level engineers (mostly non-software) who's main interaction with unions is things like waiting for a week to move their desk to the other wall of their cubical because that's a union job and they're not allowed to touch the Ethernet cables.
Notice the story has cubicals, how nice! Most these stories are pretty old. I suspect because there are less jobs in some big F500 campus with colocated engineering, accounting, etc and a unionized manufacturing plant all in the same place.
> open competitive programs based on project quality
This will never, ever happen. There will always be bonus points available, even if they're awarded to "conservative"-leaning feel-good attributes like veteran-owned sponsor businesses.
These investments are likely to always fail at their declared purpose. Better to put the money towards free childcare and maybe trying to convince parents to read to their kids.
> There will always be bonus points available, even if they're awarded to "conservative"-leaning feel-good attributes like veteran-owned sponsor businesses.
Your consent is given when you choose to pay for a ticket and attend an event there.
For publicly-funded venues, you may have a point. But if Bimbo's or the Warfield in San Francisco wants to ban someone and it's not for a reason prohibited by law, more power to them. Casinos have been doing this for many years, and generally speaking businesses have the right to refuse business to anyone. Make them post signs if that makes you feel better, but they should be able to ban, say, a person who attacked a patron or staff at the venue (and then was swiftly let out of jail by an activist judge).
Funny you mention San Francisco since 1015 Folsom and other places now use facial recognition to bar entry to (what I suspect are) bad actors. I suppose it was inevitable that as we allow more bad behavior through diminished societal enforcement that this would move into the private sphere. It's interesting to observe that places like San Francisco have moved into this kind of multiple-parallel-government structure.
There was a fight one time in the place? Do you mean bataclan bad actors?
The claim of a few bad apples is a ridiculous claim to require facial recognition. Prior to facial recognition, situations were dealt with. It's not a new problem, nor did a hard ban policy solve the problem. After, facial recognition this seems to be a fear mongering technique that just allows for customer profiling even more than it did before.
> AI in its current form has limited usefulness for most people.
That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.
Yes, she knows it hallucinates and you have to double check everything, but so far she finds a ton of use for it even with those caveats.
Now, I agree that a personal servant robot would get a ton of business. Even at new-car prices, it's still cheaper than a human caretaker/maid/butler/etc. And the maid usually doesn't also mow the lawn on a hot day, while a robot would potentially do all kinds of different things without complaint.
> That's not what I'm seeing. My mom always wanted Google to just answer questions, and now ChatGPT can. She uses it enough in her daily life that she bought a subscription.
Google summaries from websites mainly did this before “AI” came around. Now I just don’t know the source unless I dig myself. Would rather it went back to before, or at least they implemented the veracity checks better.
I thought it was interested that the movie looper had argidrones, but what inspired that wasn’t part of the training set or discussion online. I get remarkably bad answers and search results which seem misleading at best.
What's a problem though is that while it includes a reference, its distillation from the source, or worse, from the combination of sources, is often plain wrong. I check them regularly, and it made me very distrustful of Claude's capacity to faithfully summarise or explain from a source.
When asked to give specific links, it's usually even worse.
I don’t disagree. Many times when I’ve checked the source links a language model provides, I get concerned. It’s definitely important to stay vigilant and exercise critical thinking, but the model’s ability to synthesize information and converse with it in natural language still blows my mind sometimes
So does ChatGPT. The hallucination problem is not completely solved, but much better than a few years ago, especially if you use reasoning mode, where it’s more likely to spontaneously do a web search
We already have robot grass trimmers and they work pretty well. Why would you want a crude, inefficient, facsimile of a human push or power an inefficient form of mowing the lawn?
Cameras worked pretty well, but most people take photos with their phones nowadays. Pro photographers still mostly use cameras though.
I can envision a future where people have a humanoid trimming a small backyard but at the same time the maintenance of e.g. a golf course would be done by dedicated robots.
EDIT: my point is that just like smartphones replaced a number of specialised devices for most people, a humanoid robot could do the same, by virtue of being a general purpose machine
That's laughably false propaganda. Maybe one person one time stole something for jail health care, but the hundreds of thousands of other shoplifters do it for other reasons, ranging from being unable or unwilling to control their childish I-want-that impulses to being part of organized crime rings.
To pretend shoplifting at its core stems from not having socialized health care is the height of chicanery.
I mean, yours is just as false by putting everything in a different container.
The issue is all this stuff is complex and multiple causative.
For example metal thefts are by far going to be executed by two groups. 1. Criminal gangs stealing large amounts at once. 2. Methheads looking for anything they can sell for their next fix.
Group 2 can certainly be helped with clinics and healthcare.
I find it bizarre you imagine a world where immoral or amoral persons are somehow not at fault for their own behavior. When some turd goes into a Walgreen's on Market St. in SF and fills a bag with goods to resell, they aren't doing it because society made them do it. They aren't stealing to feed themselves or their kids. They're doing it simply because they can and they don't find anything wrong with it.
The drug users stealing copper can only be helped if they truly want the help. A great many are not ready for that help yet. As San Francisco has amply shown, no amount of money poured into the existing homeless industrial complex will change that fact.
See, I imagine you live in a black and white world where people are good and bad. Bad people do things like steal from walgreens and should be punished with death. Good people simply make mistakes, like steal hundreds of thousands via wage theft from their employees, and when they are caught they should be forced to pay 1% of that as a fine.
No audio recordings are made or handed over to anyone. Handing video over to a service provider to do things like weapons detection is not uncommon and not inherently a privacy problem. It's done in hospitals today.
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