I think it's worse than the summary indicates. Many customers would prefer lab grown diamonds to mined diamonds even if they were the same price to avoid the stench of violence and exploitation that hovers around the diamond trade.

Due diligence in this case would have been looking into the future to read the text of a bill that had not been written yet. Many of the original legislators that worked on the bill admitted later that it is a very poorly written law.

Unfortunately it is often not the polluters that are stuck with the bill. My dad worked at a university that "bought" an old mining site for $1. I think it was for the geology department. Later on the site was declared a superfund site due to tailings from a mine that had operated there decades ago. The mining company was no longer around so guess who got stuck with the bill to clean up the new superfund site. The university. They had never run any polluting operations on the site, but the superfund law was written such that anyone that ever owned any part of the site can be held fully responsible whether or not they did any of the polluting.

Do the best and brightest rule over us now? Has the genius class been swept into office while I wasn't looking? Sarcasm aside, it might be nice to be able to improve the intelligence of the political and wealthy classes. At least that way they would be a bit smarter about the wholesale corruption. Of course it might be that people above a certain threshold of intelligence are unwilling to be politicians and CEO's due to the high levels of cognitive dissonance required. That would be a good way of limiting political and financial dynasties, unless the sociopath gene is added in there as a protective measure.

We have bad news. Negative news sells. While you're here, check out our other studies that show people that disagree with us are actually malevolent, and not just stupid like we formerly thought.

That last part. It's the last part I don't think is plausible. I can see all the previous steps, but the part where the AI is actually capable of killing everyone is a bit of a stretch. No one seems to want to explain that part either. You know, the part where large numbers of people are dying and the rest of humanity is incapable of stopping a machine from continuing to kill all remaining humans.

People are pretty good at destroying stuff. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where we can't either pull power to the genocidal AI or simply bomb it out of existence. For the robot apocalypse it is similar, when the homicidal robots run out of power, -wait for it- don't charge them up again. Or just destroy them all and bomb the rogue robot factory. There is a big gap between "That one army made a demo bot that can shoot autonomously" to having enough rogue AI controlled robots to end all human life on earth. There just seems to be an awful lot of hand waving going on.

It's easy to go from whoopsie to oh F%$& our AI enabled drone just killed 5 innocent people. I don't think it's easy to get from there to the end of all human life on earth. I have yet to see a plausible scenario where advanced AI leads to an "extinction level threat".

Government says: We need more government!

1. AI gets smarter

2. something, something,

3. All of humanity wiped out

4. Profit!

Forgive me father for I have sinned. Mine factories spew oxides of carbon and nitrogen.

Thou canst be forgiven child. Thou shalt say 45 hail Kerry's, then stop by the shop on thine way out and buy 25 carbon credits.

Delete all copies of a free and open source software.

Good luck with that.

lameness filter is .-.. .- -- .

At least you were able to get one in your title. Not to be a grammar pedant but it should have been "It figure..." -.-- .--

Fails test

Immediately throws IBM under the bus.

The jokes practically write themselves.