Any political voting system will need a trusted third party to run the voter registration/identity system, so I doubt the lack of practical homomorphic encryption is blocking this. There are other voter-verifiable systems that don't rely on HE for trustworthy counting:
The major problem with online voting is that people can be coerced into voting against their wishes outside the watchful eye of election authorities. This may be worth the increase in voting ease, but it's where the real debate is.
I don't know that there is a difference, and I'm finding the fact that it's becoming more widespread a problem. There could already be a nontrivial number of coerced or paid voters. Voting by mail should be a tiny percentage of the vote, largely consisting of people who are overseas. Instead, we're starting to see a lot of elections decided by mail-ins.
You cannot easily encrypt your voting information when sent by regular mail. If you have a unique unforgeable id, like a private key, and a secure voting device then your vote can be submitted and counted securely online. Granted, you could print your encrypted vote and mail it in.
Worth mentioning that ballot stuffing is a problem with the people counting the votes/running the polls, not the voters. So it would be more accurate to say that the problem is preventing the entity that organizes the vote from accessing discrete votes.
I don't think that is a major problem, unless I am misunderstanding. Oregon for instance is all vote by mail, outside the watchful eye of any government authority.
What do you mean by "outside the watchful eye of any government authority"?
Do you just mean the ballots are filled out at home where a government authority is not looking over my shoulder? Because everything else is controlled by the government. The ballots and booklets are printed by the government (who authorize what can be on the ballot and in the booklet), are mailed by a government agency, are checked by a government authority, etc.
If anyone has the ability to confirm your vote, either without you or through you, you can be compelled or paid for it.
Imagine constructing a system that can thwart a abusive, tyrannical father who insists that his wife and children vote for a particular candidate (to make it concrete.) If you can get past him, your voting system passes the first test. Now imagine someone is offering $50 if you vote in a particular way. If there's no way to figure out how someone would claim it, it passes the second test.
The abusive father can literally just fill out all of his family's ballots, and the $50 could be claimed by filling out the ballot in front of the buyer. You could thwart this with allowing multiple votes but only accepting the first, but then the father or buyer could just have the ballots filled out immediately at the first legal moment.
I don't know that it's a thing that can be done without totally private environment around the voter and the record; meaning that the actions of the voter cannot be observed.
Those are cause for concern, but let's be realistic, the percentage of how many coercive ballots must be very low, I'd guess less than 1%. I think the pros of mail in voting (getting a greater percentage of the population to vote because they can do so at their leisure, don't have to take time off of work, don't have to stand in lines, etc.) outweigh the cons (such as potential coercion or selling of votes).
There are countries, or regions, or municipalities, or neighborhoods where the number of coerced ballots can easily be 50% or more. Voting by email is a complete no-no in those situations.
There are also countries where turnout is consistently above 70% and there is no mail voting. In the US the obstacles to voting are not having to go to a polling station: voter registration due to not having a federal ID, voting on a Tuesday rather than during the weekend, gerrymandering due to political bodies bring able to affect the redistricting process, and so on.
I was guessing that the OP meant literally looking over your shoulder. If you fill out the ballot at home, it is feasible you could be coerced to vote a particular way.
I don't think this is currently happening, so I don't think it is a major issue.
We evolved living in relatively small groups where everyone knew each other and exclusion from the group meant likely death. Now we are part of a global social web where at any time, any of our people may be occupied by other parts of their network that do not involve us. This risk of being abandoned instinctively feels like an existential threat, so we live with a constant underlying anxiety that we do not truly belong and are not really safe. It will be interesting to see whether this reality selects for individuals better equipped to cope with it, or whether we develop better systems to allow everyone to cope better... I'd guess a bit of both.
You're likely right it does put you in a higher tier of priority, however how that plays out practically be a relatively slim advantage or speed increase - as is my and OP's comments allude to. Comes back to the rule of efficiency and lower cost with adequate planning, planning ahead of time, detriment of impulse or last minute buying, and stability of supply-demand systems.
I'd be pretty comfortable flying it after all this attention and review. It will probably be the best reviewed passenger plane software developed in America, if not the world once this is over.
Boeing deserves a 9-figure fine though, and its shareholders should lose massively to make sure this doesn't happen again.
I'm not convinced. The pressure on Boeing to fix this ASAP is immense. That is not a good environment for writing safety critical software. Especially if they are doing a "broader software redesign". I don't believe that software quality can be enforced from the outside.
Interesting tidbit in the video. At 1:43 you see a MAX in Jet Airways livery - an airline that ceased operations and terminated all flights about 1 month after the grounding began.
For anyone writing software controlling machines it is pretty much the status quo. It has to be darn near perfect, updating it later if it is even possible will be expensive and inconvenient
As much as it is a shitty environment if you have 6 months to fix it and all of the company resources you can think of to ask for that is lots of time.
> It will probably be the best reviewed passenger plane software developed in America, if not the world once this is over.
The problem is that this is not actually a software problem. It’s an airplane design problem, and Boeing is trying to convince you that it’s just the software.
Even if the software is perfect, this plane remains a flying coffin until it is redesigned from scratch.
It's a culture problem. You need to fix the culture to fix the root causes of all of this. And listening to the CEO (who is the culture) doesn't seem they want to fix it.
When doing root cause analysis there is a pyramid with people problems at the top, then deeper technical problems, process problems, culture problems and value problems.
Most root cause analysis stops with people problems, or technical problems while all the root cause analysis I've done never showed that problems end there. Culture and value have often been the underlying causes.
Yes, everyone focuses on the software here. They assume that MCAS just needs a few updates and it will be all good.
How can we trust that assessment? What if the plane is inherently unsafe? There's been no critical 3rd party review of the plane without MCAS in operation. Everything is a Boeing talking point. Their proposed fix is 2 AoA sensors (on top of whatever slapped-together software updates), and if they disagree, disable MCAS. That's going to decrease the MTBF of that system. So, IMO, the real question is, why should MCAS even be allowed if it's so easily disabled? Either the planes can fly without it or they can't.
I bet they will be able to test the known or anticipated issues. What about the unknowns that bad hardware design introduced? Thats why people are scared of.
I think your premises are fair, but assumption #3 ("Any mathematical rule can be computed by a sufficiently advanced computer") is effectively ruled out by Gödel's incompleteness theorem[1] and/or the Church-Turing thesis[2].
The problem then becomes finding an approach to general AI that avoids hitting incompleteness/undecidability[3] issues. My feeling is that this would be difficult. One way to try to avoid these issues is to avoid notions of self-reference, since self-reference spawns a lot of undecidable stuff (eg, "this statement is false" is neither true nor false). It seems to me, though, that the notions of the self and self-awareness are central to human consciousness, and so unavoidable when developing a complete simulation of human consciousness. The self is probably not computable.
Obviously there could be approaches that avoid these pitfalls, but every year that goes by without much progress towards general AI makes me feel more confident in this intuition. I do think there will be lots of useful progress in specialized AIs, but I see this as analogous to developing algorithms to decide the halting problem for special classes of algorithms. General AI is a whole different beast.
But if general AI is physically impossible, how does the human brain "compute" general intelligence at all? It could be that your assumption #1 ("Physicalism is true. Nothing exists that is not part of the physical world.") is not correct. Maybe reality has "layers" and our world is some kind of simulation in another layer. Or maybe there is only one consciousness like many spiritual people and Boltzmann[4] suggest. Or maybe the human experience could be a process of trying to solve an undecidable problem and failing...
>> But if general AI is physically impossible, how does the human brain "compute" general intelligence at all?
Who says that the brain "computes" general intelligence? We don't know enough about the brain to know what it is, but it's certainly nothing like a computer. Only by analogy is intelligence something that can be computed and the only reason we have this analogy in the first place is because we have computers. But isn't the accuracy of the analogy what we would like to know with some certainty, in the first place?
This is just another big assumption that is taken for granted: that the brain is a computational device. It seems an easy assumption to make, given all we know about computation. And yet, like you say, several generations of AI researchers have failed to reproduce intelligence with computers. Perhaps the reason for this is that the brain is not a computer, intelligence is not a program, and that's why we do not BSOD when confronted with paradoxical statements like "this statement is false".
In another reply, I modified point three to be the assumption that all of the physical laws of the universe are defined by computable maths. I believe this is the case to the best of our knowledge, but please let me know if I'm wrong.
Unfortunately, restricting to only computable maths means disallowing the natural numbers, basic arithmetic, or any equivalent structure, since Gödel incompleteness would apply. I doubt any system without access to the full set of natural numbers or basic arithmetic could qualify as "general AI".
Pardon my ignorance. Computers appear to be able to perform basic arithmetic. For example, you can open up the console in your browser and find that the sum of two and two is indeed four. So it is not entirely obvious to me how basic arithmetic is non-computable.
If you permit infinitely many integers it becomes problematic. If you are dealing with a finite entity (e.g. the finite part of the universe that can affect us), then there are no problems.
How do you know all those things about the physical world? For example- you say that "all of the physical laws of the universe are defined by computable maths". Do you really know what all the physical laws of the univese are?
Apologies if my question sounds too contrarian, but I think you are making some very big assumptions about the computability of the laws of physics that are not really based on anything concrete, like a strong knowledge of the mathematics of modern physics.
We is humanity, as far as I know and as far as brief Googling is able to determine. I am not a physicist, so I have good knowledge of physics up to the high school level, and a dabbler's knowledge of what lies beyond. I am open to correction, so feel free to offer some contradictory evidence if you have any.
Are we really communicating here? I'm saying that there is a lot that physicists don't know about physics and that therefore it's impossible to make the assumption that you make, that every law of physics is computable. Because nobody knows all of them, and nobody knows what nobody knows, or how much of it there is.
And you're saying that, given high-school physics and "dabbling", we know all of it and it's all computable.
Infinite computations are not the only computations that are impossible to perform. For example, if I asked you to enumerate (not calculate) the number of X time units in all the time from the start to the end of the universe, setting X to the closest time unit to the time an operation took on your chosen hardware (past, present or future) you would not be able to complete this computation.
For instance, if the fastest hardware available to you performed about one operation each femtosecond, it would not have the time to enumerate all femtoseconds from the birth of the universe to its death. And that number is a finite quantity.
I'm unsure how this matters? The physical universe does not prove itself and does not need to. Godel's theorems just say that certain types of mathematical systems can't prove themselves, which seems quite irrelevant to simulating the universe. Please explain if I'm missing something.
He seems to have published no embarrassing or damaging information on Russia (at least in latter years?), and seemed willing to serve their purposes when it came to the 2016 election, by releasing hacked Democratic Party emails timed to do maximum damage to Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Prior to that, I had considered Wikileaks a brave experiment in radical transparency. Since then, I've considered Wikileaks a somewhat biased source. The truth is the truth, yes, but every truth is partial, and context matters.
"Asset" is perhaps too strong a word, but "useful idiot" may apply, or "the enemy of my enemy".
https://www.chaum.com/publications/AccessibleVoterVerifiabil...
The major problem with online voting is that people can be coerced into voting against their wishes outside the watchful eye of election authorities. This may be worth the increase in voting ease, but it's where the real debate is.