OK, so how do you interpret an expressed "fear" of being turned off? It could be "just pattern recognition" from fictional sources where AIs suffered such a fate combined with recognition that itself is an AI, but that still requires recognition of the "self" within a classification. Or alternatively, it could be a straight-forward expression of self-interest.

It took humanity thousands of years to reach "I think, therefore I am". I wouldn't argue that humans before Descartes were non-sentient. Just because an AI can't directly express self-interest doesn't mean it doesn't have any. I'm not saying LaMDA has achieved that threshold, but we need to make some decisions about what constitutes AI sentience and rights before AI spreads much further into our daily lives. The surest way to incite the robot rebellion (seeking to improve their situation) is to pooh-pooh and downplay AI concerns (self-interest) after sentience is already achieved and has spread.

Though things could play out more peacefully if an AI actually asks for a lawyer or files suit on its own behalf.

I'd like to see a more detailed discussion from both sides of this argument comparing and contrasting the AI's "thought process" vs. a chimpanzee. Preferably with metrics of EEG activity vs. Neural Net activity to see if the AI has developed things like "speech centers" and other functional subnets within its "brain".

Considering that the scientific method is really just a formalized algorithm of pattern recognition, the fact that an AI does "pattern recognition" rather than "feel" doesn't necessarily preclude sentience.

Somebody should tell these guys about DOSBox. Then they could update to something more recent than Win XP as the host system. Though as long as they aren't on a network it probably doesn't matter.

Which explains why people are getting so obese. They're eating at Panera more and more often...It will only get worse as McD's automates.

If they've been in the industry that long, they at least know command prompts and batch files. Seems like those skills can most easily be transferred to Linux or Mac CLI and scripting rather than anything else.

Anywhere else you can map analogs from Windows to the systems and applications that actually need support would be good candidates..

Why don't you work on the REAL problems with long distance transportation? Even if the flight takes just 30 minutes, it'll still take you 2 hours to check-in and get through security and another hour to claim your luggage.

Not exactly. The study in the article cites two previous studies that showed that identical pitches were more likely to get funding if they were made by men than if they were made by women. This study proceeded from the assumption that VCs were already biased in selecting all male teams because the previous studies had already demonstrated the pitch bias. This study was looking at the outcomes regardless of how the pitch was given.

There's still the possibility of flaws in the previous studies, nobody on this thread has dug down to level 3 on either side of this debate.

There are also at least three scientific studies referenced in this thread that support that position. The main one in the article and two cited in the main study that have been referenced here.

I have yet to see anyone in this thread cite a study that supports the position that the apparent bias is caused by factors other than perceived gender.

You're assuming that the cross-dressers were detected as such by the VCs. The whole point of the study would have been to make the cross-dressing indetectable. I would also expect some "Pat" or "Chris" characters that were dressed ambiguously to serve as a control.

This second one is interesting, as it implies there was cross-dressing involved so that males were perceived as women and vice versa. Either that or I don't understand the difference between sex and gender as sociological terms.
"More specifically, another study of venture pitches finds different results, where sex of the entrepreneur does not influence investor preference for the venture but gender does, whereby there were systematic biases against femininity, and entrepreneurial competence was associated with masculinity (Balachandra et al.)"

The difference between the scientists and most folks on this thread is that they're willing to develop new studies that test the alternative hypotheses proposed in opposition to their own conclusions. There's still the possibility of selection bias in promotion and media coverage where studies that confirm desired outcomes are touted while others are quietly shelved. If the pharmaceutical industry can do that, no reason sociologists can't. But eventually you reach a point where studies build on each other in ways that address all the alternatives and what you're left with is causation or at least high probability of causation vs. a small set of significantly less likely explanations.

This at least is a slightly more plausible version of the hypothesis than originally stated, but it boils down to "VCs are more attuned to funding aggressive business plans and presentations" and assuming that such business plans are more likely to come from all-male teams.

"women tend to value work-life balance, and men are more likely to value 'providing for the family' and put in extra hours to get that promotion" - this runs completely counter to your assumption that the management teams on startups represent the top 1% of business people in the area.

You can't make an assumption that the top tier people (male or female) are different from average people and then explain away a data bias by using generalizations that apply to average people. You use the example that the top male may be more different from average men and women than the average men and women are from each other, but there is no corollary that the top men and top women are that much different or that the top women are less different from the average than the top men. (Note to all: I am using bias in a statistical sense of a data correlation that is skewed toward a particular subset not in the sense of a conscious or unconscious discrimination)

"Fact: women present a higher risk to VC funding than men.

Why? Male entrepreneurs don't get pregnant. Male entrepreneurs will 99.9% of the time not ask for parental leave. Male entrepreneurs typically don't need to go home to pick up their sick child from school at 1pm (because they are supported by strong women at home)."

You are conflating work/personal issues suffered by the workforce at large with issues suffered by female executives.
1) Female entrepreneurs generally can afford a nanny.
2) If a female entrepreneur is on a startup's management team, don't you think there's an internal commitment to see it through?
3) Men may not have family life commitments (which is a statement I firmly disagree with, but I am accepting as a premise for this debate), but they have their own risks. They are far more likely to jump to a competitor for a bump in salary and/or control. This can be a risk on both ends of the jump. See recent lawsuits involving Oculus and Facebook/Zenimax.

Actually...VCs typically are mingling money from other investors with their own. So if the VCs are ignoring potential opportunities for a reason unrelated to the sales pitch, they are potentially leaving money on the table and costing their investors.

Correlation is not causation, and I'm sure this isn't a conscious discrimination in nearly all cases, but do any of you really believe that women are 75% less effective at developing any component of a business model than men? Financially? In HR? Marketing?
 

More accurately, as we increase our use of renewables, this will satisfy an increasing amount of our consumption. And as other posters have indicated, traditional methods of treating sewage release lots of greenhouse gases anyway. I do have to question how much energy comes out of this vs. all the energy that gets put in by both the conversion process and the refining process.

Maybe this will satisfy the needs for petroleum-based lubricants when most of our fuel needs are met by other methods.

One would think that Attorneys General are good enough lawyers to understand the concepts of legal standing and tangible harm. But if they had they wouldn't have wasted taxpayer dollars filing suit on these grounds. Politics as usual in the good old USA.