Watching that, especially that part starting at 1:23 makes you realize quickly that in about 10 years, 95% of all jobs can be replaced by machines. Scary and interesting at the same time.
I'd suggest 20 years, and 10% of jobs can be replaced by machine is a more accurate assessment. The latest revision of the Atlas is an interesting technology demo - but I think progress in this space will be much, much slower than automated driving (which I expect to see 25% penetration in 10 years - that is, 25% of all driving, based on miles driven, will be hands/foot free).
Even something as simple (and very, very low cost) as making up a room in a hotel, is probably 25-30 years off at least.
Now you make me want to try and design a self cleaning hotel room.
I think the trickier aspects of hotel room cleaning could be mitigated by creative design of the accommodations.
If it was a stark room with a bed a couple tables and a flat screen there would be little to knock off tables or break.
Make the whole bathroom operate like a giant dishwasher and come up with a more robot friendly fitted bedsheet then use some kind of industrial roomba.
It wouldn't be cheap but it can be done.
Depending on how far you are willing to stretch your definition of hotel room I bet we could automate the cleaning of those Japanese pod/tube hotel rooms right now.
The automatically cleanable bathroom already exists. I have used them years ago in cheap hotels. After taking a shower, it locked the door once you exit and it rinses the whole room with some detergent and water for 30 seconds.
Self-cleaning public toilets, that worked exactly like this, went through a bit of a phase in Australia 10-20 years ago. They started decommissioning them after they began trapping children during the cleaning cycle: http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/auto-toilets-a-flush-....
Heinlein in the 60's suggested rooms that would have a daily "wind" cycle to blow off any accumulated dust and anything loose would be forced to one area where it could be picked up to place back in the room, recycled, or disposed of.
This whole current thing with foaming at the mouth over bots taking all our jobs in the next few years reminds me a lot of how VR was being talked about in the early 90s. It's still early in the game, folks.
This stuff is not small. The cost reductions achieved through shrinking transistors are irrelevant here. You can only go so cheap with moving parts that need to be strong and durable.
For widespread adoption, cost is probably the biggest factor. Actually getting close to the same performance of a full time worker who grosses under $20k a year for a lower price is going to take a lot longer than many people seem to think. Throughout human history, we've repeatedly solved labor problems by throwing heaps of desperately poor human slaves at them, and we continue to do so-- competing with that model will be difficult.
Absolutely correct - keeping in mind that most of the (often undocumented) people cleaning your room in places like California are making around $10K/year or less.
Fully automated "Cleaning a hotel room" is actually an insanely complex task across tons of disciplines - solving that problem will also result in you solving a lot of the Artificial Intelligence challenges.
I think what we'll see much earlier, is a hybrid solution, where automated bots that can do 99% of the tasks send an interrupt to a controller when they encounter something they aren't certain of, such as, "Is that a lifelike doll laying on the floor, or a child lying very quietly."
Does that mean we live in a happy utopia where 95% of the tedious/dangerous work has been taken care of and we instead get to spend our time focusing on what we find inspirational/creative, or do we live in a dystopia where 95% of job opportunities have vanished and we can no longer sustain a consumption based economy.
Well when the cars were invented did people start living in a dystopia where the car moguls owned mobility itself or did people just got around much faster and had better lives in general.
It was mixed. People got around faster and stuff was cheaper. On the other hand, we got fat and dependent on cars, which is particularly bad for the poor (since cars are inherently expensive), and for kids' independence. That's why you're seeing many metro areas starting to prioritize walking, biking, and transit.
On balance the development of cars was good, obviously, but let's not kid ourselves, the downsides were significant.
I'm not sure if it is an established fact that people got fat because cars came along (before cars there were carriages). I'd rather bet that diet is the culprit.
If we look at agriculture mechanization, we went from 80% of the population to 5% to feed everyone. While this is good for everyone, I don't think farmers are living some sort of utopia.
Rather most of them are indebted for decades to pay for their complex equipment.
I believe the introduction of robot will follow a similar pattern, some industry will see their number of employee reduced drastically but they won't necessarily increase their margin. The customer will likely win.
The thing is that people who were employed in farms moved to factory. Nowadays I don't know where people who lost their job to robots will move.
To extend your point. The jobs that are easily programmable like farming, and warehousing are easily replaceable. Some tasks may even require using humans and robots together like construction or search and rescue.
Some things are indeed not replaceable by robots and I think "most" professions* may not be able to be replaced by robots. These could be things like professional chefs (not fast food), programmers, and masseuse.
*By professions I mean the raw number of unique jobs not the number of people who work in those positions.
That being said in the U.S. with the "College Driven" economy I doubt it will ever affect 95% of the population at once. Generally professions will disappear one by one, but those people can retrain and if they don't it won't matter as the next generation will obviously not train to fill positions that don't exist (that's not logical). Eventually the new generations train to fill different job positions.
First will come the dystopia, the utopia might be later. In the early years the best positioned companies will reap the huge benefits of this new field. In time, the benefits will trickle down to ordinary people. The same was with cars and computers.
Even when ordinary people will reap benefits from robotization, the big bucks will go to the Google or Apple of the day. We might have our daily needs met by the future economy, but big companies will dominate the finances. We'll get to play with the new toys, though.
There's a TV show (haven't watched it yet) about a future where society is split between something like 15% employed and 85% unemployed. The unemployed live in this desert wasteland or whatever while the employed are living in a big o'l building structure.
I would say it's far fetched and unlikely except that's kind of how the world is today.
I think in 20 years it's still much easier and cheaper to rebuild a human workplace to be suitable for (very dumb) robots, than it is to use humanoid robots for human tasks.
We already replaced humans for many tasks such as assembly etc.
The next step is cognitively challenging but physically easy tasks like driving cars.
A lot of "simple" human tasks such as making sandwiches in a restaurant require fine motor skills, creativity and other very difficult robotic traits. Those jobs will be done by robots long long after we as humans stopped driving cars or building them. Given the budgetary difference between making a sandwich and going into battle, we can be pretty sure sandwiches will come last. If anyone is still around to eat them by then that is.
Purpose-built robots for things like "making sandwiches" will always be cheaper than general purpose robots. There really isn't a culinary task today that can't be fully automated (you can look at the frozen food section of a grocery store for examples of almost every cuisine type). The reason this hasn't happened at your corner diner is that manual labor remains much more inexpensive in the short and long term for low volume production (ie, restaurant vs food factory). Additionally, before it becomes cost efficient to build a customized culinary robot for a restaurant, it is still less expensive to design a custom culinary tool for use by the human staff that will net 99% of the efficiency of the purpose-built robot.
Barring "replicators" (a la Star Trek), or labor costs rocketing through the roof (perhaps from something like a "minimum income") I don't expect the general composition of restaurant staff to change in the next hundred or even two hundred years.
10 years for 95% of all jobs is kind of too much too soon I'd argue. Big dog debuted 10 years ago for instance...even supposing non-linear growth, thinking that something like atlas in 10 years waiting tables, cooking gourmet food, greeting hotel guests, making plants, etc...
This is the first video that has actually given me that feeling. Maybe it's because of how anthropomorphic they've made it's movement compared to other robots, but I can see this guy doing very real work in the very near future.
The part at 1:23 is not that impressive. It is a carefully controlled lab environment, all flat surfaces, no obstacles, with a cubical box that has carefully placed AR tags which tell of the box's exact position and orientation. Not to mention this is a video which is inherently disingenuous. It may have failed 10 times before they got it right. It isn't even using its lidar.
Now what would be more impressive would be for it to get down on it's knees and autonomously change a tire. 4/10 if it does this in a controlled environment, 8/10 if it adapts to tools/bolts being dropped, 10/10 if it does all the above outside on the side of a road.
One thing to keep in mind is that many 'menial' tasks are more complicated than they seem. Because much of the control is done subconsciously they don't seem that hard and they are harder to reverse engineer.
I think you vastly underestimate how expensive that robot would be to manufacture and maintain. Of course, costs could come down over time but it's going to take a lot of work to make it economically viable for the types of jobs you are considering replacing.
it seems that it might be close to doing what a low-skill laborer would do in a factory setting. remember that it should be able to work for longer hours, and not require benefits etc. i suspect that companies would start to purchase such a device at $100k. that price seems achievable, probably within a few years. as quantities increase, i suspect that the price will fall dramatically thereafter.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, it's generally a lot simpler to redesign your workspace to take advantage of a simpler robot design than it is to get a bunch of more general robots like this that still aren't quite there anyway. Amazon's warehouse robots come to mind in every one of these conversations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quWFjS3Ci7A
The hardware is almost there, at least, for general tasks. I'm not sure about software. Is there anything recent showing machines reading human-targeted instructions to accomplish some task (change a tire, set up a desk) and then fulfilling the task, without having been programmed or trained on that task already? That would be impressive.
Given the above assumptions that seems doable to me. 2 years of working nearly 24/7 with virtually no costs(compared to wages/benefits) would more than pay for itself. But I don't think the above assumptions are necessarily correct, that sounds a bit too cheap to me.
It may be doable, I am not trying to be overly negative. It's just that I probably wouldn't target minimum wage workers with this robot.
Also you say "no costs" but do you honestly think these would be maintenance free? There would probably be a fairly significant cost to keep a fleet of these robots running as they are incredibly complex as compared to say an amazon warehouse robot.
Yeah, I know what you mean. We'll have several dozen heading off to Mars, various moons of Jupiter, and perhaps the outer planets. Because humans won't be going, it'll be a fraction of the cost.'
Btw, why do people always worry about the jobs technology will take away? The good old days when everyone was a farmer.
>Btw, why do people always worry about the jobs technology will take away?
Because if technology destroys your industry you lose. Automating textile work lead to greater wealth for the world as a whole, but it didn't make textile workers better off. The fact that a new job was created somewhere doesn't matter to them if they can't do it.
Can't upvote this comment enough. I'm also currently in the process of creating a full featured WebGL game, and nothing is faster than simply using pure JavaScript there. Most people won't accept this, but when you ask them, those never actually tried creating a complex WebGL game.
These are totally fine most of the time. Typescript in particular looks like a good choice for game development.
Sometimes the language is less of a good choice. E.g. i did a small toy project in coffeescript about two years ago, and found to my horror, that if your function ended in a loop, it would return an array. Always. This isn't possible to accidentally do in the host language, so I'd say it is a bad fit (for game development, where you care about such things).
I believe that point is that JS always returns something for every object. Many users of JS just don't realize it. (I know I didn't till I started drinking the coffee flavored kool-aid)
This is probably as a result of CoffeeScript's Ruby-esque syntax and semantics. It does mean you can write some very clear and succinct code at times, but the tradeoff is that it can have unforeseen performance implications.
They don't add much overhead during runtime; most of the time there is zero overhead, or sometimes they can (theoretically, not sure if it's done in practice) produce more optimal code than a "literal translation".
It depends on the language. TypeScript is basically JavaScript with added bits. Unity compiles to JavaScript, but it does so through a crazy chain of C# -> CIL (via Mono) -> C++ (via il2cpp) -> JavaScript (via Emscripten). And then remember that your browser then converts that JavaScript to assembly. Holy convoluted toolchain, batman.
Everytime I read a comment like this (claiming nuclear is clean, ignoring the atomic waste contaminating your land with radiation for the next hundreds of thousands of years, which is starting to become a severe problem for example here in Germany), I notice that the commenter is usually from the US. I wonder why this is?
The waste produced by a nuclear power plant is orders of magnitude less than what a coal power plant produces. Even if we only look at radioactive waste - coal power plants produce more of it, only instead of being stored in a special underground site it is dispersed into the atmosphere giving us cancer.
So yes, nuclear waste is a serious issue, but let's not forget that the alternatives have major environmental costs as well.
Nuclear waste is orders of magnitude less in volume but orders of magnitude more dangerous, to the point we have to plan to keep it out of reach for literally millenia.
1. Nuclear waste, even when not processed, is not that large in volume and it can be stored in a space on the order of a hectare (about 2.5 acres) for the entire US nuclear waste production over several decades. Consider the comparative amount of storage needed for just coal ash, as well as the environmental hazards that presents.
2. The reason the US does have comparatively more waste is because the government forbids any reprocessing of nuclear fuel. For example, merely separating out the more radioactive isotopes, you can greatly reduce the volume. Reprocessed fuel can also be partially reused in a nuclear reactor and the French have great experience with that.
3. Even reprocessed "spent" fuel can be useful in 3rd and 4th generation reactors. Spent fuel today is still a valuable future resource, so it needn't be buried and guarded for millennia afterwards.
4. Natural nuclear fuel usage can be greatly more effective with nuclear breeding, which can turn non-fissile U-238 and Th-232 into the fissile U-235 and U-233 respectively. Right now, what's actually burned is mainly U-235, an extremely rare isotope (the minor constituent of "natural uranium") and that's comparatively as rare and expensive as platinum. Breeding can increase the energy obtained from the same quantity of fuel by 10-100 times.
The other point that we tend to forget about nuclear waste is that it is not only minuscule in term of size, but it can also be confined. When a factory releases gas in the atmosphere, we loose control of this gas.
To me the main problem with nuclear energy is not the waste, which even if we never intend to recycle is such a tiny volume that being afraid of it is like an elephant being afraid of a mosquito. The problem is rather the chernobyl/Fukushima risk.
I am not a specialist but I understand that switching to Thorium could reduce a lot that risk. Most nuclear reactors around the world have been built in the 60s/70s. I would expect that if we decide to replace them, there would be a sufficient critical mass to justify the cost of moving away from uranium.
For Fukushima: ".. no confirmed casualties from radiation exposure.." "no evidence to support the idea.. will lead to an increase in cancer rates or birth defects".
The problem is that these accidents have actually happened even in countries that were deemed to be "serious" (Soviet Union, Japan). The cost of having a whole region devastated and becoming a no man's land for several dozen years is I think unacceptable, particularly if it is avoidable with alternative nuclear fuels.
I would not put the USSR and Japan in the same league as far as concern for environmental or human safety in the operation of nuclear reactors. Fukushima was the result of a confluence of unlikely natural events. Chernobyl was not an accident, it was caused by an intentional experiment deliberately conducted against the better judgment of the plant operations staff.
Especially because we had in Germany several reactors (which also tended to have issues) of the same design as Fukushima-1, for example Krümmel, Brunsbüttel, Philippsburg, Isar-
The toll from fossil fuels is however much easier to deal with. The worst case scenario for a nuclear reactor failure in Germany, is that there is no Germany afterwards.
That's a big claim. Do you have big evidence to back it up?
Take into consideration that 2 nuclear bombs dropped on Japan did not cause Japan to not exist afterwards. In fact, the damage and death toll from those two bombs was less than from the wholly conventional Tokyo firestorm.
Yes, nuclear technology is a big lever, and yes, big levers are dangerous. But it's simply not as earth-shatteringly more dangerous as people believe.
Remember that there have been no deaths so far from the Fukushima meltdown, which was about as bad as you can imagine, with bad siting, bad technology, bad safety precautions, awful handling etc. At the same time, the Tsunami that caused the meltdown did cause over 15000 deaths.
I agree with your position but comparing to bombs is not a good comparison. Nuclear reactors contain far more fissile material than the bombs dropped on Japan. Of the two, Little Boy had by far the most fissile material, with 140lbs of U235. By contrast, a nuclear reactor will contain many tons of fissile material. The possibility for widespread long-term contamination of the landscape is therefore much greater.
Again, I think you've reached the right conclusion, but looking at the lack of long-term damage from the bombs doesn't tell us anything either way about the potential for damage from a reactor.
1) I wrote "take into consideration". That means that this is something to consider, not something that proves my thesis conclusively. So your criticism is misplaced.
2) You also miss the fact that bombs are designed to cause as much damage as possible, whereas reactors are designed to contain damage as much as possible. A candle contains much more energy than a stick of dynamite, yet the former is far more damaging.
It makes no sense to "take into consideration" the long-term radioactive contamination caused by 150lbs of fissile material when considering the potential damage from a reactor accident. I stand by my statement.
Since both of those links only bring up the Hiroshima bomb to show that Chernobyl was orders of magnitude worse in terms of release of radioactive material, I'd say both of those support my point rather well.
Actually, they disprove your point, which you would notice if you'd actually read both the link and what I wrote.
First, they show conclusively that "amount of radioactive material" is not the be-all/end-all measurement that you make it out to be. Nuclear tests put a total of 100-1000 times the nuclear material of Chernobyl into the atmosphere, and yet we are also still here.
> It makes no sense to "take into consideration" [..]
Furthermore, they do exactly what you claim "makes no sense". They "take into consideration" the effects of the bombs, and they compare those effects. They do come to the conclusion that the effects are different, one factor being that Chernobyl had more material, a counter-effect being that the radiation from Chernobyl is much more low-level and thus much less harmful (in fact, there are indications that low-level radiation may be beneficial).
But "into consideration" they certainly take. QED.
That's all fine, but for example Fukushima is still not under control, and may still cause enormous harm.
That kind of stuff is why we need to get rid of nuclear power altogether. All that's holding us back is politicians and their bribes.. and of course, to a lesser extent, people who rationalize not moving away from nuclear power.
Fukushima was an unsafe design. Chernobyl was both an unsafe design and being operated in an obviously risky and neglegent way when it failed. These kinds of disasters won't happen with more modern reactors that already exist. Even if they do, making a few permanent wildlife reserves in the irradiated areas isn't a global catastrophe. The world is full of uninhabited and uninhabitable places.
Fukushima was a standard design. Built by European and US companies in the same style as dozens of plants in Germany.
This is not "Fukushima was unsafe". If you say "Fukushima was unsafe", then half of Germany’s reactors are unsafe.
Shutting them down was the only option.
> making a few permanent wildlife reserves in the irradiated areas isn't a global catastrophe
You are talking about Japan. A country with one of the highest population densities worldwide. Declaring a whole province – and one with lots of history – off-limits is not going to happen. Currently they’ve been digging out the ground in half of the province.
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EDIT: Some more info:
Fukushima was a Boiling Water Generator built by General Electrics. Reactors of the exact same design are Krümmel (Germany), Brunsbüttel (Germany), Philippsburg (Germany), Isar (Germany). Krümmel and Brunsbüttel had constant issues, including the town next to it having the highest cancer rate on the planet.
The same design used by Fukushima is described in Wikipedia as "the second most common type of electricity-generating nuclear reactor".
The design was unsafe. The company knew this. In fact it had been known for 35 years. It was not unfixably unsafe, and in fact 5 of the 10 reactors had been upgraded. These 5 shut down properly during the Tsunami and survived without problems.
The main design flaw was that the vital emergency cooling equipment was sited in an unprotected building outside the protected reactor. This is especially troubling if you site your reactor on a Tsunami-ridden coast. It's less of a problem in the middle of Germany, where there are no Tsunamis. Or to put it another way: if you have a Tsunami reaching the middle of Germany, a meltdown at these powerplants is going to be among the least of your problems.
Well the way for a reactor to "demonstrate an improvement" over Fukushima would be to withstand the same kind of earthquake + tsunami that Fukushima didn't.
It doesn't make sense to say it's hard to demonstrate improvements when it's not even under our control.
But demonizing nuclear power has nothing to do with it.
> Well the way for a reactor to "demonstrate an improvement"
> over Fukushima would be to withstand the same kind of
> earthquake + tsunami that Fukushima didn't.
Gee, what a great idea! In fact, a slightly improved reactor was operating in the other Fukushima plant, and all its reactors were shut down safely after being hit by the same Tsunami.
More modern designs are safer still. For example, there are designs that do not require external power for a shutdown at all.
I'm sure that the people behind Chernobyl and Fukushima were no less convinced that the design was safe and operated perfectly fine, than you are convinced that modern reactors are safely designed and operated correctly.
All that's holding us back is politicians and their bribes..
No, unfortunately, that's not all that's holding us back. There are still some pretty substantial, e.g., storage and transmission problems with the renewables.
Unless you want us to keep burning coal or some other nonsense like that...
There are no storage or transmission problems. Build hydro-pump-storage plants, and you fixed the storage issues.
Build power lines from everywhere to everywhere, and refit transformer stations to be up to the load of users producing more than using, and you fix that, too. (Incidentally, in Germany we’re having a huge debate about a huge powerline currently, NIMBY is one of the worst things that happened)
> Build hydro-pump-storage plants, and you fixed the storage issues.
You do realize that the largest ever energy-generation accident was a dam failure? 171000 people killed in 1975 when a dam in China failed. And overall, hydroelectric facilities claim 94% of the fatalities of energy-production accidents.
That type of storage has no dam that could fail – you take two lakes, one higher than the other, connect them with a tunnel, and place a turbine in the tunnel. Now you can push the water up (store energy) or let it flow down (produce energy).
That's debatable. Coal is known to cause far more deaths than nuclear. Even Fukushima was nothing compared to the 10's of thousands killed by the tsunami.
"Far more" is even an understatement. Coal kills more people every year than nuclear ever has, and that still holds true even if you include the two bombs dropped on Japan in "nuclear."
Yes. Perfectly working coal produces more radiation than perfectly working nuclear.
When coal has a major incident, though, it still produces the same pollutants as if it's working correctly.
When nuclear has incidents, like the plants of Brunsbüttel and Krümmel that frequently had leaks, you end up with the highest leukemia quote worldwide [1].
Krümmel had major issues, with nuclear fuel being found in the area around the reactor, outside, on the ground, with the power plant leaking coolant frequently, and more incidents. [1]
Mismanagement with Nuclear can lead to far more problems than mismanagement with coal.
> When coal has a major incident, though, it still produces the same pollutants as if it's working correctly.
Yeah. No.
"Coal mining accidents resulted in 5,938 immediate deaths in 2005, and 4746 immediate deaths in 2006 in China alone according to the World Wildlife Fund"
So each year more deaths from coal accidents alone than the entire predicted, somewhat speculative and hard to ever prove death toll from Chernobyl over the next 20 or so years.
This was a solved issue with Yucca Mountain in the US, but then fear mongering and political back-peddling caused it to be blocked at the last minute. Nuclear plants had to help pay for its development and then got screwed when it came time for the payoff.
How long does it take non-nuclear waste to decay? For many types of dangerous waste, the answer is "forever." Yet we treat the nuclear stuff as being much worse. Why is that?
From Germany here. The issue is not that nuclear is "clean" in an absolute sense, it's that the alternatives are incredibly more dirty and dangerous so relative to those it is incredibly clean.
Here are 3 articles comparing the death-rates of various means of generating power.
For each death attributable to nuclear, 4000 are attributable to coal. 4000:1. Incredible, but apparently true.
NASA shows the deaths that have already been prevented due to nuclear, currently the rate appears to be 80000 per year. That's 80000 people alive per year who would have been dead without nuclear:
It's fair to say the author's methodology is interesting. Only 50 deaths from Chernobyl count... as it would be "tenuous" to count other people that eventually died from radiation poisoning (even using the figures accepted by bodies responsible for promoting atomic energy). It's apparently not "tenuous" to count ballpark estimates of a million lives shortened due to coal particulate poisoning, however, or indeed to guesstimate 1/6 of all roofing deaths are likely to be from solar. It's something of an understatement to say this is not the most intellectually honest exploration of statistics around an issue.
Compare with the New Scientist's claim - based on a study by the IAE - that the ratio should be around 14:1 for coal, and 1.5:1 for natural gas. Better than coal, certainly, but not spectacularly safe even compared with burning other fossil fuels
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928053-600-fossil-f...
They say the death toll could reach 4000 (from the pool of emergency workers), but so far only 50 have been confirmed.
' [..] the radiation-induced increase of about 3% will be difficult to observe.'
'Poverty, “lifestyle” diseases now rampant in the former Soviet Union and mental health problems pose a far greater threat to local communities than does radiation exposure.'
'Persistent myths and misperceptions about the threat of radiation have resulted in “paralyzing fatalism” among residents of affected areas'
'Notes Vinton, “The most important need is for accurate information on healthy lifestyles, together with better regulations to promote small, rural businesses. Poverty is the real danger. We need to take steps to empower people.”'
If you're going to count a WHO estimate on lives shortened due to coal power in your fatality statistics, which the author does, it's probably not a good idea to dismiss the equivalent estimate of 4000 for Chernobyl, which the author also does. Even organizations existing to promote atomic energy aren't disputing the validity or relevance of that figure
I mean, if you're doing a sincere comparison with "people whose lives may have been shortened by coal dust" and "back of the envelope guesstimate how many people die installing domestic solar", you simply don't pick "people definitely proven to have died from radiation poisoning at Chernobyl" as your comparison point.
Coal would look remarkably safe (which it isn't) if you required similar standards of proof of coal dust rather than lifestyle factors being the cause of premature death.
While both the coal dust and Chernobyl future deaths are somewhat statistical in nature, there is a huge difference that you would acknowledge if you were sincere. The coal deaths are already occurring. They are, as far as I can tell, sufficiently statistically significant that they are not seriously in question.
The future Chernobyl deaths are just that: predictions about what may happen in the future. They think it could happen, but they don't know. And due to the extremely low level of the signal, it will be very hard to tell if they do occur, because as the WHO report states, other effects such as poverty are much more significant.
So, no, the comparison to coal dust is not unfair at all.
But, for the sake of argument, let's completely ignore the coal dust and other respiratory or global warming effects, and concentrate on just the proven accidents. Heck, let's be super unfair and leave in the estimated possible statistical future deaths from Chernobyl, but only consider the documented deaths from coal accidents. That gives us 4000 deaths for Chernobyl and 4000-6000 per year for coal. So even when being totally unfair towards nuclear, it is somewhere between 20-40x safer than coal.
When you level the playing field, you have the 50 deaths from Chernobyl and around 131 others, though that includes lots of accidents not related to power generation. Around 180. Let's double it and call it an even 400. So 10x fewer deaths than coal. Except that's per year vs. since ever. So we're talking around 500-1000x safer.
No matter how you slice and dice the numbers, nuclear power is vastly safer than existing means of power generation, even given the sorry state of the industry today.
Of course, we should still be doing as much solar as we can (just be careful when installing!), and we should improve reactor designs so they are even more safe. For example using the liquid fuel thorium reactors, or concepts such as PIUS, which uses passive mechanisms relying mostly on physical laws to shut down and cool the reactor, rather than active mechanisms that can fail as they did at Fukushima-Daiichi. And hope that one or more of the multitude of nuclear fusion projects makes a breakthrough.
> While both the coal dust and Chernobyl future deaths are somewhat statistical in nature, there is a huge difference that you would acknowledge if you were sincere.
OK then, I sincerely acknowledge that the estimate of 4000 Chernobyl casualties is much more widely accepted (including by the nuclear industry) than the WTO's more speculative guess at how many people are having their lifespan reduced by exposure to coal particle dust. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise, but then I'm also perplexed by your assumption that none of the 3940 total casualties the WHO predicts from increases in rates of cancer and leukaemia among those most closely exposed to Chernobyl radiation have happened yet.
The lack of confirmed Chernobyl deaths is because - as the report you linked to states - cancers are common cause of death among people not exposed to nuclear accidents, not because 50 acute radiation sickness victims and 9 kids with thyroid cancer are the only people living or working near Chernobyl to have died a bit young over the last 30 years. I mean, I'm not sure any individual lung cancer has been directly proven to be a result of working down a coal mine either, but it would be an unusually outspoken proponent of coal that argues that it should be discounted as a risk altogether because of that, or because of difficulties gauging the precise size of the effect when miners tend to be poor and smoke a lot.
I'm going to go out on a limb and consider a published study
suggesting nuclear is around 14 times safer than coal[1] and 1.5 times safer than natural gas a little more valid than your own back-of-the-envelope exercise, or indeed a blogger whose use of statistics is rather creative.
[1]though much as with flying being safer than driving, that's to a large extent because nobody is suicidal enough to run a nuclear plant with safety standards comparable to those of Chinese coal mines.
Except that that is in all likelihood not a nuclear issue at all. If you read that article you quoted, you will see that the only study to actually look at other such clusters found that the main correlation were not geographical factors (such as proximity to nuclear facilities or air bases), but rather demographic factors.
"Im Zuge der Auswertung der Studie zeigte sich, dass nicht Umweltfaktoren, wie die Nähe zu Kernkraftwerken, zu Militärflugplätzen oder anderen häufig als Verursacher in Rede stehender Anlagen mit dem Auftreten der Leukämiefälle korrelieren, sondern dass demografische Faktoren die signifikantesten Merkmale darstellen, in denen die untersuchten Cluster übereinstimmen."
We could also start getting our shit together and build some breeder reactors that burn up >90% of what we now call "waste" and produce end-products with much shorter half-times than current reactors.
Germany started their nuclear power phase-out in 2002, well before Fukushima. In 2010 the Merkel government decided to extend the lifetime of the existing power plants by 8 to 14 years, which was heavily criticized at that time. The only thing the Fukushima 2011 incident resulted in was that the phase out was accelerated but it would have occurred nonetheless.
> if the waste is dealt with properly and stored safely
At least in Germany, nobody figured out yet how to store the waste properly for a long-time. Remember, that the country is densely populated. For example, take a look at the Asse II mine.
Nobody has yet built a storage site for high-level waste. There are three attempts, the two German ones failed. WIPP in New Mexico looks promising but is far from perfect. Even for less-radioactive waste, the current situation doesn't look too good.
The thing is: No matter how often it is repeated, there is currently no safe place to store a sufficient volume of nuclear waste securely anywhere in the world. It's not just a simple question of "paying someone else".
Developing those sites seems possible but the solution to the waste problem isn't there yet.
There's a storage site being build in Finland. Should ne ready to start accepting waste around 2020. The waste will ne stored in bedrock, around 450m below surface.
They used the nuclear reprocessing plant in La Hague but that waste was shipped back to Germany afterwards. Same with the waste that was processed in Sellafield, though nothing has returned yet from there.
Using those sites for commercial waste is not allowed anymore since 2005 though.
The biggest problem with nuclear waste that everyone keeps overlooking is the potent NIMBY issue. In democracies politicians need to do what their constituents want in order to survive. And constituents will forever be scared to the bone about nuclear waste anywhere near them.
The simple political reality in Germany is that you will not be able to build nuclear power plants and that's that. Germany is a democracy and the will of the people will not allow it. All other considerations and discussions and arguments are wasted breath. Germany will have to do without it. I don't think that's so bad, all things considered. It's an interesting experiment and I'm quite optimistic.
Because coal power releases more radiation than nuclear power, and those energy sources are what americans know best. Nuclear is the lesser of two evils, and less ubiquitous. It's somewhat of a false dichotomy.
I'm pro-nuclear because it's one of the lowest risk forms of electricity production in terms of human lives per kilowatt, with the possible exception of utility scale solar.
The occasional wind turbine workers and rooftop solar installers have been killed doing their work; in extremely small numbers but each turbine and rooftop only makes a minuscule quantity of energy.
Hydro is usually very safe, except that the dams can fail and wipe out entire cities. When Banqiao Dam failed, 26 thousand people died. If you want to talk about the "what if" dangers of nuclear, you have to accept that Hydro's "what if" scenarios are far, far, far more deadly.
Deaths per trillion kW hours
170,000 Coal
36,000 Oil
24,000 Biomass
4,000 Gas
1,400 Hydro
440 Solar (rooftop)
150 Wind
90 Nuclear
That link seems to be unrelated, you probably put the wrong one.
I notice that Wind and Solar aren't much worse than Nuclear, though, and they don't produce highly radioactive, toxic waste we must safely store for millenia, don't take decades to set up, don't cost as much, do not require incredibly high levels of competence to be safe...
I'm all on board for wind and solar, we should be deploying as much of it as possible. But if we want to eliminate fossil fuels from the world economy in the next 50 years, we need more than just solar and wind.
Saying that nuclear power produces "highly radioactive, toxic waste" is extremely misleading and demonstrates a core misunderstanding of the nuclear fuel cycle. This stuff is only scary because it has been pitched as the boogie monster by anti-nuclear weapons campaigners who were completely uneducated about the difference between the two.
If you educate yourself about nuclear power, your views might change.
If we were to stop using hydro or wind the number of related deaths would quickly drop.
With a lifetime of 100.000 years, today's nuclear waste has a potential to kill tenths millions.
Your claim of future deaths has no rational basis.
You have fundamentally misunderstood the nuclear fuel cycle, and some very basic facts about radioactive material. The stuff that "kills" has a short half-life. The stuff that lasts for millennia is almost safe enough to store in your underpants.
Rather than parrot ignorant statements of others, please consider learning more about nuclear energy.
And I wonder how you know where they're from, considering there is no city/country listed on their profile. Can you please explain how you arrived at that from OPs simple comment?
Those 'artificial' restrictions are as natural as they can get. Different operating systems have different Shells and APIs, even programming languages. Nothing artificial in there.
I programmed that. I also wrote that CopperLicht library. So feel free to ask about that on the CopperLicht forums as well if you are using it anyway.
It is nothing really complicated: I created a deterministic randomizer class, and generating the worlds 3D geometry based on each squares coordinates as random seed. Terrain is currently based on a simple sin/cos function, buildings are built from blocks like minecraft does it. See the third Copperlicht tutorial in its documentation on how to create own geometry and stuff.
I can recommend BMTMicro: http://www.bmtmicro.com/
Payment processor with the best support I had so far. Supports nearly every payment type and does all the nasty stuff for you (invoices, recharges, customer support etc)
Having written a commercial obfuscator, I can assure you that there actually is no way. Encrypting or obfuscating your client code won't prevent it from being stolen, analyzed or even "reused" by other people. Just live with the fact that if your software gets popular enough, your client code will be copied or modified.
The only way to secure your product is to make the client depend on algorithms running on your server. That's also the reason why most popular computer games are becoming "online only" recently.
Your demo was also choppy for me on 2.2 Core 2, 460m, Chrome 29, Win7.
After your experience with both native and WebGL game development, don't you think it's a little premature to make a hardcore game targeting only WebGL?
While it might be better for you to just make it free, it's obviously worse for the market as a whole. The people you're complaining about on the app stores have the exact same excuses - they tried to sell it, few people bought it, so they just made it free. Now everyone expects it to be free. So their next app and your next app now need to be free, too.
It's actually worse than that - it looks like your primary customers would be game developers (you're selling editors for 3D apps, javascript webgl, audio libraries, etc). This means that you are directly competing in your customers' market with a free product that you are supporting from the money your customers are giving you. You're de-valuing their market while using proceeds from them to de-value it further. Woops!
Well, it's a 2D game (my products are usually for 3D), but you have a point there. I was primarily writing about the app stores, and it is a web game, but you are basically right. Never though about that.
"In short, after 5 years, the game makes more money through ads when it is free, in contrast to selling the game directly."
I suppose that's the secret hope of anybody making an app free, or very low cost. They suppose it's going to be better for everyone in the end, including them.
