Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "ColdFusion" channel.

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  12.  @felixisaac  There is the most terrible aspect of that. There's nothing you or I could do that will stop the next million children dying of hunger or the other million dying from a lack of basic medicine. All we can do are those things that might make the world a better place at some point in the future. I'm actually an aerospace engineer and when they did the first road map for the Australian Space Agency the very 1st item in the list was advanced space based water management with the claim it MIGHT be available in the mid 2030s. Its an area of space technology called Earth Observation Sciences. My attitude was "Why TF are we going to wait until 2035 for somebody to just gives it to us. Lets just get on with it." Australia currently has a population of 26 million but produces food for more than 75 million. If we mismanage our water (and we have a long history of doing that) then we don't produce as much food as we should and a lot of people go hungry. However - if you try and tell the Australian Government you want to spend a few hundred million so that it will help starving children in other countries it wont go far. There are these people called economists and they'll ask "What's the business case for that?" So I tried another tack. Australia's ag sector employs over 300,000 people and is worth just $200+ Billion a year. Our tourism industry employs over 550,000 people and is worth over $55+ Billion a year. So collectively we have a lot of people dependent on the management of our rivers, land, forests and ocean areas. So I pushed that as simple straight forward economic reason - protecting jobs & money. I GOT NOWHERE. Unfortunately I'd upset a few egos, which is an ever bigger issue than economics when it comes to politics.
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  15. AEROSPACE Engineer here and I've heard some similar stories regarding many technologies like: 1950 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1960 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1970 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1980 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1990 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 2000 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 2010 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 2020 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. By chance can you guess how far away nuclear fusion will be in 2030? I'm Australian but did my degree in America. I was doing my degree in the late 80s and we EXPECTED to build Space Station Freedom in the 1990s and then be back on the Moon by 2001 to start setting up a lunar base that would be the start of a permanent settlement AND YES we took that date from the film. THEN the Challenger accident happened and as we know it was because of poor decisions being made by the wrong people. That has been followed by several 1,000 poor decisions being made by the wrong people and we are no closer to a permanent lunar base than we were January 28, 1986 when Challenger happened. I have spent the last 30+ years working across a variety of industries doing industrial control systems and trying quietly to learn from these industries how we might do stuff on the moon. So long as we have the combination of the wrong people making bad decisions in combination with the unrealistic promotions (and at least Cold Fusion does but "providers" into the story) of effectively vacant over rated (and often over hyped) "future technologies" that will re-shape humanity we wont (as a species) move forward because too many of the basic things like food, shelter, clean water, clean energy and a few other things are NOT DEALT WITH as a priority. I have spent most of the last 20 years working on construction mines in remote locations because it presents the same sorts of issues building a lunar base has. Everything is at least 3 days away, the environment is hostile and you have to build all the basic infrastructure any modern society needs including housing, food storage, food prep, clean water, waste water, power (including power distribution), roads and very importantly workshops for maintenance. While we have story after story of the latest break though technology we are also surrounded by crumbling infrastructure. Go and look at any modern society and you will find major infrastructure issues. They might differ from country to country but we all have them. Energy infrastructure is the major issue that most have and its a serious issue because everything needs energy.
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  22. AEROSPACE Engineer here and I've heard some similar stories regarding many technologies like: 1950 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1960 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1970 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1980 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1990 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 2000 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 2010 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 2020 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. By chance can you guess how far away nuclear fusion will be in 2030? I'm Australian but did my degree in America. I was doing my degree in the late 80s and we EXPECTED to build Space Station Freedom in the 1990s and then be back on the Moon by 2001 to start setting up a lunar base that would be the start of a permanent settlement AND YES we took that date from the film. THEN the Challenger accident happened and as we know it was because of poor decisions being made by the wrong people. That has been followed by several 1,000 poor decisions being made by the wrong people and we are no closer to a permanent lunar base than we were January 28, 1986 when Challenger happened. I have spent the last 30+ years working across a variety of industries doing industrial control systems and trying quietly to learn from these industries how we might do stuff on the moon. So long as we have the combination of the wrong people making bad decisions in combination with the unrealistic promotions (and at least Cold Fusion does but "providers" into the story) of effectively vacant over rated (and often over hyped) "future technologies" that will re-shape humanity we wont (as a species) move forward because too many of the basic things like food, shelter, clean water, clean energy and a few other things are NOT DEALT WITH as a priority. I have spent most of the last 20 years working on construction mines in remote locations because it presents the same sorts of issues building a lunar base has. Everything is at least 3 days away, the environment is hostile and you have to build all the basic infrastructure any modern society needs including housing, food storage, food prep, clean water, waste water, power (including power distribution), roads and very importantly workshops for maintenance. While we have story after story of the latest break though technology we are also surrounded by crumbling infrastructure. Go and look at any modern society and you will find major infrastructure issues. They might differ from country to country but we all have them. Energy infrastructure is the major issue that most have and its a serious issue because everything needs energy.
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  25. ​ @cg.marklemuel  They are a lot closer to taking away millions of simpler jobs like call centers and customer support. Where computer based systems have always worked is on REPETITIVE tasks. What they have managed with these newer systems is to expand that range into things that are not exactly repetitive but are predictable. I mentioned in another comment how I heard that an Indian call center sacked most f its staff and replaced them with an AI. That's the sort of thing that can have dramatic effects with expansive consequences. There are some tasks that AI is particularly good at and there's reasons why. If you think about the text completion in things like search engines. The moment you type the first letter you have suddenly reduced the chances of the what the first word is. Type the second letter and that goes down even further. Complete the first word and start the second word and the number of options reduce dramatically and because of previous searches the rest of the question can be suggested. That's an ideal task for how neural nets can be trained to function and (by extension) also why a lot of customer service work is at risk. Also if you consider things like image analysis tasks like matching finger prints or facial recognition where the task is to compare images or partial images. Its what in engineering can be called a "well defined task." The image can be digitised and key features NUMERICALLY DEFINED into a pattern. Its then a matter of searching for close matches to that numerical pattern. Its a bit like how a person does one of those "Where's Waldo?" photos. Your brain might not just be looking for Waldo but some part of him like his hat. This is why AI is very good at certain tasks or types of tasks. My biggest concern is that its being now PROMOTED as the solution to everything. Think about how many times there's been an announcement of the "next game changing" technology and that's almost the last you ever hear about it. But then we get disasters like Theranos where it gets totally out of hand and people lose out huge.
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  26.  @farentimonnaewens4662  Agreed there have been people who warned about all sorts of tech including AI and NOBODY listened. WAY BACK around 1990 Silicon Graphics did a demo of there then latest systems at the college I was doing post-grad. They were one of the first to use RISC based systems and their graphics CPUs (what we now call GPUs) ran at TWICE the clock speed of their main CPUs. it was serious stuff at that time. They were foundered to fill the need for data presentation coming out of the Supercomputers. In those days the CRAY SCs were just giant number crunching beasts. They needed a front end to format the data and a back end to present it AND Silicon Graphics were one of the companies that stepped into that space. They were the first ones to do all those fancy flow visualisations of wings and racing cars. I did aerospace so I got to see that stuff. At that display they showed us they had a 100% created in software short film of a girl walking out of the surf onto a perfect beautiful white sandy beach. Had we NOT been told none of us would have noticed it was a simulation. It really was that crisp. A couple of years later that same company Silicon Graphics became famous for what they did on the film Terminator 2 with the liquid metal robot. Even back then Silicon Graphics and others admitted that in future they would be able to make almost anything and the average person would NOT know the difference. What held it back for so long was how much time (both people and computing) to do even a few seconds. That 10-15 seconds of the girl on the beach (I think) took over a month because it required so much ray tracing. With this new stuff what used to take days or weeks takes minutes and hours. If you recall the film "Running Man" where they map Arnnie Swartz onto old footage with Jesse Ventura for a fight scene. That would have take months back in the 90s now its almost as fast as the film. I have heard Ric Beato (here on YT) talk about the sound equipment they have now that can make anyone into a sensational singer and fix almost any sound track. If somebody hits a wrong note they can fix it in the software. I bet you know more about that stuff than I do.
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  32. AEROSPACE Engineer here and I've heard some similar stories regarding many technologies like: 1950 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1960 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1970 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1980 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 1990 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 2000 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 2010 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. 2020 We'll have Nuclear Fusion in 30 years because somebody made a breakthrough. By chance can you guess how far away nuclear fusion will be in 2030? I'm Australian but did my degree in America. I was doing my degree in the late 80s and we EXPECTED to build Space Station Freedom in the 1990s and then be back on the Moon by 2001 to start setting up a lunar base that would be the start of a permanent settlement AND YES we took that date from the film. THEN the Challenger accident happened and as we know it was because of poor decisions being made by the wrong people. That has been followed by several 1,000 poor decisions being made by the wrong people and we are no closer to a permanent lunar base than we were January 28, 1986 when Challenger happened. I have spent the last 30+ years working across a variety of industries doing industrial control systems and trying quietly to learn from these industries how we might do stuff on the moon. So long as we have the combination of the wrong people making bad decisions in combination with the unrealistic promotions (and at least Cold Fusion does but "providers" into the story) of effectively vacant over rated (and often over hyped) "future technologies" that will re-shape humanity we wont (as a species) move forward because too many of the basic things like food, shelter, clean water, clean energy and a few other things are NOT DEALT WITH as a priority. I have spent most of the last 20 years working on construction mines in remote locations because it presents the same sorts of issues building a lunar base has. Everything is at least 3 days away, the environment is hostile and you have to build all the basic infrastructure any modern society needs including housing, food storage, food prep, clean water, waste water, power (including power distribution), roads and very importantly workshops for maintenance. While we have story after story of the latest break though technology we are also surrounded by crumbling infrastructure. Go and look at any modern society and you will find major infrastructure issues. They might differ from country to country but we all have them. Energy infrastructure is the major issue that most have and its a serious issue because everything needs energy.
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