dgran73

I'm curious if you think open source textbook movements, which seem most prevalent in the areas of hard science, will make some real traction. While your business is doing great things to reduce the cost to students in some ways it still operates off of the standard model of publishers selling books. Can you envision the open textbook becoming disruptive to not only traditional publishers but also your business?

Years ago I had a hosting account with textdrive.com and at the time (around 2004 I believe) it was probably the most developer-friendly hosting option around. It always came up in conversation as a good choice. Something weird happened later with Joyent buying them or something and it all seemed to go to pot. I miss those days.

Can you comment on what happened and who snuffed the flame?

I think you're talking about Kiva. The robot picking system.

Yes, that was it. Thank you. I was just sort of curious about what sort of automation the OP has seen or anticipates.

I'm not sure how long you have worked there, but I've read a bit about how Amazon has introduced a lot of automation into their warehouses. Can you speak to how this has changed the nature of your line of work?

What exactly do people think is the motivation will be for SI to harm us?

The scenarios I've read about seem more concerned that our well being would simply become of ancillary concern to a super intelligence. It would have a core program or function that it would improve upon with a kind of ruthless indifference to the outcomes. Our ability to monitor and guide it (heck, we can't even manage our own impulses that well) will react more slowly than the SI's ability to outwit us. Considering the way technology grows at exponential growth it is plausible that in a fairly short amount of time the sophistication of SI can change from novel pet-level intelligence to orders of magnitude smarter than us.