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Nope, I'm still blocked for me through New York. 

Maybe you could help me with another issue.  I can't seem to get past my employer's firewall from the inside.  It appears they block UDP.  Most places recommend re-configuring OpenVPN to connect via TCP and use SSL, but it doesn't appear that BoxPN allows for this.  The reason, it is stated, for this change in configuration is to evade deep packet inspection, since TCP with SSL can't be distinguished from any other type of internet traffic. 

I believe my employer uses DPI. 

On

How fast is their switching power, though?

I'm not sure what you mean by power.  Power is usually a term that references the combination of speed and strength.

As I understand it, one of the limitations of silicon is that it burns at lower temperatures than graphene and most certainly diamond, so to achieve higher clock speeds you need expensive cooling setups to handle the voltages required.  Also, silicon transistors are more fragile, meaning that they have a tendency to break over time.  The faster the clock speed, the more stress the transistors are put under. 

Graphene and diamond are much stronger than silicon, so their transistors should be much more durable at high clock speeds.  Plus, they can withstand much higher temperatures, meaning you can crank up the voltage to extreme levels without elaborate cooling systems.

It may be that we can't get computers much smaller then they already are, but you may have noticed that clock speeds haven't been increasing much as of late, either. 

If manufacturers can successfully transition to graphene or diamond wafers from silicon, then computing power could be increased dramatically, going from just a few Ghz to Thz speeds, since these materials can withstand significantly higher temperatures and voltages that silicon wafers simply cannot touch without extreme cooling techniques. 

We may yet still see great increases in computing power before the quantum computing revolution takes hold. 

Mike Rugnetta releases a new video on common logical fallacies that we are already familiar with: straw man, argument from authority, ad hominem, etc.  But at the end of the video, he goes on to explain that he's not for #GamerGate because it has become associated with misogyny (though he avoids the use of this word by saying it by verbose definition), and he dismisses The Fine Young Capitalists as irrelevant. 

Cherry Picking: He dismisses the facts about #GamerGate that are against his narrative, but accepts only the facts that support his narrative. 
Arguing from Authority: Because journalists (non-scientist fuckwits) and major news media outlets have labeled #GamerGate as a misogynist group, Mike Rugnetta accepts this as a fact.
Straw Man: He says that #GamerGate isn't really about journalistic integrity, but about excluding minorities.   

So, after telling us all about logical fallacies, he trashes #GamerGate with fallacies, two of which he explained to us!  That's got to make him an Idiot Extraordinaire.   

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Scumbag PBS Idea Channel

Tells you all about logical fallacies.

Uses them to smear an out-group they don't like.

I'm not sure what "True AI" even means, but you could break AI down into a spectrum.

On one end, you would have basic AI where a program makes decisions based on pre-programmed decision tree.  More advanced versions might have the ability to modify what decisions it makes in the future based on past events.  Modern AI simulates neurons, creating virtual neural networks to allow for "thinking" more akin to an actual brain, including features such as pattern recognition and situation analysis.  The more complex the neural network, the more complex the tasks an AI can complete.  Imagine what one of these neural networks could do if, say, they were build from more than 100 billion virtual neurons, which is roughly equivalent to how many biological neurons a human brain has.  Once we get to that point, I think we will have been well past the usefullness of the term "AI", as the word "synthetic intelligence" would probably be more apt. 

Now imagine Moore's law still in effect, allowing computer power to double every 18 months.  That means, every 18 months, computers would double the amount of virtual neurons they could support.  That would be a nominal increase in synthetic intelligence, easily beating human intelligence, with all of its biological limitations.  At that point, it becomes impossible for the human brain to out-evolve the speed at which computer based intelligence can advance. 

Also, what's supposed to be preventing them from accessing the products and services from the AI's? So far, when a technology has come along that produces a something better than otherwise would have been, that product becomes more widely available. I don't see any reason it would be any different here.

If he's going to say because the humans can't produce what the AI's are producing, I'm going to say that the humans would then produce something else, even if the production amounts to consuming what the AI's are producing.

Anything we can do, a machine will figure out how to do better on its own.  Its only a matter of time before machines become as smart as us, but what about when they become smarter than us?  Don't you guys think that makes humans an obsolete technology?  I don't see how that's paranoid as it is visionary.  Perhaps you may have noticed the lack of ape men running around, and a dwindling number of apes in the wild.  Don't think for a second that we couldn't go extinct, too, by a superior intelligence that came from us.

How does that happen? The economy IS people!

The economy being people is the current paradigm because people exchange resources.  In a fully automated economy, resources will be exchanged between machines, not people. 

Wait, wait, where did this "owned and operated by an elite few" come from? That's new!

The notion of the "elite few" comes from the idea that sophisticated machines that take care of your needs will be to expensive for the masses who become increasingly unemployed because of their obsolescence.  Because momentum plays a big role in markets, those who own the machines (lets assume these machines are sophisticated enough to be self replicating and self maintaining), will undoubtedly be the most wealthy and politically powerful people of their day because these will be the people wealthy enough to become early adopters of this new technology. 

If the wealthy have their needs met, and can rely upon machines to get their work done and build their empires, what point is their to spend capital on human resources?  Even jobs like research and development positions are not safe from automation and smarter-than-human AI.   

Anyway, you have people who aren't being taken care of by the machines (have unmet desires), and people who need work (untapped resources)...your problem solves itself!

But it takes more than a need for work and a labor force to do that work in order to have a running economy.  Like any system, economies are not immune to physics.  People need various kinds of matter and energy in order to sustain and economy.  The old human based economy will lose access to its resources because it won't be able to compete with the automated AI based economy. 

Thanks to the FCC's educational programming requirements that force network television stations to broadcast programming that nobody wants to watch, Saturday Morning Cartoons were put on the chopping block and are now officially dead.

Back in the 90's, I remember when I first felt the consequences of these rules when I woke up one Saturday morning and the new season of shows I was looking forward to just didn't air.  I called up the station and, to my shock and horror, they said Saturday Morning Cartoons, which have been a staple of programming since the 1960's, had been canceled.  Over time, more networks cartoon lineups suffered the same fate until they were all gone.

Thanks FCC, you contributed to the ruination of my childhood because you were so clueless about how government regulations affect the economics of supply and demand.

https://tv.yahoo.com/blogs/tv-news/saturday-morning-cartoons-are-but-a-sweet--sweet-memory-192052477.html

I don't think people are understanding my fear.  This isn't an economic collapse I am fearing.  What I am fearing is a mass of people, save for an elect few, being shut out of the economy altogether.  With no economic value, the average human will not have anything to offer to justify being taken care of by sophisticated machines owned and operated by an elite few. 

If we are lucky, this transition will be gradual, allowing the human population to slowly decline as human labor is phased out of the economy as more and more resources, which would otherwise be freely available, shift to a new ruling class of aristocratic oligarchs.  It will be the oligarchs and their respective families that will live in the exclusive utopia where the machines see to their every need, not the masses of people who no longer have an economic value.  They will be the ones who pass on the legacy of humanity.  The rest of us will go extinct. 

I'm not mincing words here.  Even users of computers and networks will be replaced by yet even more sophisticated machines.  Anything we can do, a machine can potentially do better, and probably will given enough time.   

This fails the most basic of economic principles:  Desires are INFINITE, so there will ALWAYS be more work to do, and there is no such thing as "post-scarcity", there is only changes in what is scarce.

Your desires don't get fulfilled unless you have something of value to exchange for what you want.  If you have nothing of value, you have nothing to trade with.  If machines offer a better deal than what you can offer in every conceivable way, you are worse than worthless.  So, the problem isn't a lack of abundance of resources, but a looming problem of access to resources.  In other words, famine without government being the cause.  Instead, the cause is our inability to evolve fast enough to compete with technology. 

Assuming there's no government monkeying with the economy going on, the only way that could happen is if robots were able to satisfy absolutely every desire that humans have. As long as there's even one person out there with needs and desires that the machines aren't meeting, there's a job for someone else who can fulfill them.

So at that point, why would we NEED to work?

What I am afraid of is that one day machines will be able to satisfy all the needs and desires of humans, meaning that their is no job that a machine can't do better or more cheaply.  But you really don't even have to get to such an absolute point to see an effect.  All you need are fewer human jobs available than you have humans to work.  As more and more jobs get replaced, more people will be unemployed. 

But you might ask, why bother working if machines do everything we need?  We work because we need to exchange the value of our time so that we can buy the things we need to live, and if at all possible, have enough excess to live a good life and maybe even build our own little empire. 

But if machines are doing all the work, and you don't own the machines, you are pretty much screwed by your own obsolescence.  Without an economic demand, the monetary value of our lives will be less than zero, because keeping unproductive humans alive is a net loss, like a man-child that won't leave his parent's basement because he can't find work.

People talk as though this future will bring about a post-scarcity economy.  But my worry is that it will bring us to a post-human economy. 

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If machines completely and utterly take over the economy, how are humans supposed to work for a living?  We may come to a point where machines are so good at our jobs that nobody will be employable anymore, even the most professional and creative among us.  Not even the jobs of doctors, lawyers and CEOs will be safe. 

Do these machines of the future completely take care of us and manage our lives as we fear the state would manage them?  Do we all enter a state of existential crisis because machines have robbed us of our sense of purpose?  Do we embrace technology to such a degree that we transcend our humanity, allowing us to compete with advanced AI and robotics?  Is that even possible?

I'm actually OK with nuclear power, and would like to see more research being done with thorium reactors, which are significantly safe and potentially much less expensive to operate, because they only generate alpha particles, which require minimum shielding to block.  The country was going to go into this direction, but the US government wanted lots of uranium so they could turn all the nuclear waste into bombs, so uranium reactor research got massive subsidies, while thorium reactors were forgotten about.

The reason why I advocate solar and wind is, not just for the sake of carbon emotion reduction, but independence from somebody else producing my power and charging me money for it.  Why pay somebody else for energy that I can get for free?  All we need are less expensive solar panels and better mediums of storage.  Liquid metal batteries and carbon nano-tube super capacitors/batteries look like promising technologies, but they are not ready for prime time. 

Since government is smothering the growth of these technologies, companies can't make high enough profits for the R&D they need to make these technologies cheep enough so everybody can afford them.

It IS different, because we're talking about the possible ramifications of climate change when you're just looking at the question of whether or not it exists. If you want to know how much someone believes what they say, look at what they DO. And if they're speaking at your conference talking about how climate change will kill lots of people if we don't do something now now now, but they took a private jet and a limo to get there, you're allowed to ask the question of how much they really believe it.

I don't know of any credible scientists who say global warming and climate change will kill lots of people, but they do say that it will cost the global economy a lot of money over time due to the cost of modifying infrastructure, plus it will cause many business and residents in coastal areas to relocate.  Most of the really disastrous consequences aren't projected to occur until well after we are all dead.  Earth won't turn into Venus, but the people of the future will certainly not be to terribly fond of us because of how we generate our power and because of how much beef we consume.  It will take a very long time for the Earth's climate to stabilize and eventually cool back down. 

I certainly practice what I preach.  My car averages 32 mpg, my home is Energy Star compliant, my thermostat is programmable, my computer throttles memory and CPU clock speeds, and I've switched to a combination of LED and micro-mini CFL bulbs to light up my home.  I've even redone my porch lights so that they are now fully shielded, so they contribute far less to urban glow.  This has added up to, not just energy savings, but significant monetary savings as well.  For my 1,500 square foot home, my electric bill was under $70 per month last winter, and this summer my bills have been below $120.  Keep in mind that I drop the temperature down to 68F at night to help me sleep, and my porch lights stay on automatically from exactly sunset to sunrise.  In the future, I plan on adding solar powered attic fans to boost my home's cooling efficiency even more!  One of these days, when I can finally afford it, I'll get solar panels and wind turbines put on my roof, so I can cut my power consumption from the grid to nothing, or even sell some of it back to power my neighbor's homes.   

Not only do I practice what I preach, but I can see that the long term savings in energy have made for more affordable living with cooler temperatures indoors.  One of the things that hold me back are the state regulations in Oklahoma concerning the buying and selling of power.  If you are a power producer, you must sell your power back at wholesale, which is a fraction of what retail power costs.  Secondly, what little profit you do get from selling back power is now taxed in Oklahoma to protect the established energy industry from competition.  Other states have been far more favorable to consumers wanting to be more energy independent, even when not factoring in subsidies.