Anyone who owns a tesla vehicle with "full self driving" is probably chuckling to themselves about Tesla ever making useful general purpose robots any time soon. Disclaimer, I own two tesla's with FSD and it's far from "full" or "self". I am very sceptical of robotaxis unless they have the appropriate sensors & SW (e.g. Waymo) which Elon has not done.
Finally, I know lots of people who own cars, but none who own robots. Many friends will not have Alexa in their homes due to privacy concerns. How many people will trust Elon to have a robot in their homes and assume he's being benign and safe with your personal data?
South Dakota has a population of less than 1 million people and the complexity of a CTO job of a state like South Dakota would be quite low. It is < 0.3% of the US Population and likely has de minimis benefit programs.
I suppose I'm an optimist. I believe it is possible to create a secure online voting system. My life savings might be held at Fidelity, Merrill, or elsewhere, my banking is online, 90% of my shopping is online and it all has "good enough" security. Plus most banks seem to be well behind the state of the art in security. I believe with the technologies we have available today, we could create a secure, immutable, auditable voting system. Do I believe any of the current vendors have done that? NO. But I believe it could be done.
People of limited technical ability can understand the checks and balances of a paper voting system, which legitimizes outcomes. No digital voting system I'm aware of has this characteristic.
Elections in most countries involve tens of thousands of volunteers for running ballot stations and counting votes.
That is a feature, not a problem to be solved. It means that there are tens of thousands of eyes that can spot things going wrong at every level.
Any effort to make voting simpler and more efficient reduces the number of people directly involved in the system. Efficiency is a problem even if the system is perfectly secure in a technological sense.
I find that argument lacking. Each of those people is also a potential weak link or even an adversary from a security standpoint. Would I rather have 10,000 weak links or one software system with rigorous testing and logging?
Money are stolen electronically every day - we do not know how to build secure systems. Considering the stakes for national elections (civil war or government instability) good enough is not good enough.
I agree with you on local elections - electronic voting is good enough for town or even state level elections. The stakes are dramatically lower.
It's of course possible. In fact electronic voting could be safer. The issue is that voting has nothing to do with technical details of safety and everything to do with trust. If your electorate doesn't understand modular arithmetic, then there's no point to electronic voting.
"trust" is a fuzzy concept - people use iMessage and have no concept of how it's architected or how it works. But they trust it. Why? because trust is something that is transferable. If you trust me, and I tell you iMessage is safe then you have a high likelihood of trusting iMessage. If this is reinforced by other people you trust, even better. There would be ways to create a voting system in the open, and have it validated by third parties. If you've ever bought stock it's because underlying the transaction, and auditor has certified their financials...
We have ID.gov and we have blockchain. If we can ensure that the person submitting the vote is indeed that person, would it matter whether it was online, in a booth, or by mail?
I will probably be downvoted for posting something that “doesn’t add value” but I have to say that is a beautiful post about a difficult topic. I could never put into words my feelings as well as you just did. I loved his art. I did not love the man.
I find it really sad that I lost respect for him because of his political views. When someone you admire dies, it happens once. When you lose respect for someone, that person you admired dies over and over again, on every new disappointment.
To me, he died many times in the past few years. Dilbert of the 1990s is dear to me and I really enjoyed the animated series. My sons tell me it prepared them for corporate life. I'm sad he left us this way. I wish I could admire him again.
Yes, placing your political views into the realm of moral views places them beyond contestation. For many people, most of their political views boil down to core moral views, including ideas about taxation and carbon.
That’s why it’s not productive to just point at people and say they’re bad because they have bad ideas.
Or "if you take away my ability to hug women I will become a suicide bomber and I won't apologize for it. I like hugging more than I like killing, but I will kill." especially coupled with "Learning hypnotism has been my Jedi mind trick into sleeping with women".
I knew he was a loonie, but thought that you're exaggerating.
Nope.
Quote [1]:
While I’m being politically incorrect, let me describe to you the mind of a teenage boy. Our frontal lobes aren’t complete. We don’t imagine the future. Our bodies want sex more than we want to stay alive. Literally. Lonely boys tend to be suicidal when the odds of future female companionship are low.
So if you are wondering how men become cold-blooded killers, it isn’t religion that is doing it. If you put me in that situation, I can say with confidence I would sign up for suicide bomb duty. And I’m not even a believer. Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.
There's a lot to unpack here, starting with equating female companionship to sex, and ending with the dichotomy between having sex and murdering people.
I started looking for a source of his hypnosis quote, and stumbled into [2].
Umm. Not going to quote it.
[3] is a higher level overview of Scott Adams' hypnotism. It didn't make me any happier.
Ugh. I used to like Dilbert in the 90s as a kid. Wish I knew about Scott Adams now as much as I knew then.
That's to say, wish he wasn't such a horrible person.
> I could never put into words my feelings as well as you just did. I loved his art. I did not love the man.
There is a lot of this in the modern era, and probably will only get "worse". People need to sooner than later be able to reconcile this whole idea of "not liking the person yet can't help but like their art". Back in the day it was easy to ignore, and probably most of the bad stuff was easily hidden, not so much these days.
Yet he did a lot of good leaving his money to academia and medical research.
I think the Egyptians had it right. Ultimately your heart will be weighted against the feather of Ma'at, and it is up to the goddess to decide. We mere mortals don't know the true intentions and circumstances of other people and their lives to judge, nor to throw the first stone.
This reads like a Speaker for the Dead moment (from Ender’s Game): neither eulogy nor denunciation, but an honest accounting. Acknowledging the real impact without excusing the real harm.
Consumer level security always has to contend with the lowest common denominator. As my 80 year-old mother‘s technical support team I can testify that she will download and install anything she sees on Facebook. The consumer security world has to protect us from people like her. It’s also the reason I will only allow her iOS devices.
Maybe people like her should just, uh, not use technology? Or not do it as much? The fact that the society so heavily pushes everyone — regardless of their technical literacy and willingness to learn — to use internet-connected devices is also a huge part of the problem.
Finally, I know lots of people who own cars, but none who own robots. Many friends will not have Alexa in their homes due to privacy concerns. How many people will trust Elon to have a robot in their homes and assume he's being benign and safe with your personal data?
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