Which is why software engineers make more than truck drivers.

Because corporate America requires employees to be physically present in the office, they have to pay the mortgages of employees in prime real estate locations.

Because corporate America uses the salary system - which often requires unpaid overtime - they must pay higher salaries, regardless of whether the employees actually work the hours commensurate with their salary.

Because corporate America frequently lays off employees en masse, every employee needs six to twelve months of salary in savings - again, which increase the amount the company must pay for labor.

In other countries, where employees are guaranteed weeks of vacation time, where employment is on a contract, rather than at-will basis, where companies actually do long-term planning, software engineer salaries are typically half to a third of what they are in the US. American companies are literally paying two to three times what they would otherwise pay in salaries simply because of their own inflexibility and inability to do long term (i.e. beyond the next quarter) planning.

Well, considering the technology is 80 years old... Germany created coal->gasoline plants during world war 2, I'd say that it's just a matter of political will.

As for scale, if you build a plant which produces it, you can start small and start by blending it with traditional fossil fuel sources until you've built out enough capacity to completely replace petroleum. That is, the conversion process can start right now, even if it takes a decade or so to completely replace all the petroleum sourced fuels.

Think about it this way: I can remember when gasoline was $1.10 per gallon. If we'd started this project back then, gasoline would probably still be ~ $3 per gallon, but it would all be carbon neutral, and we'd have about a third of the CO2 emissions problem solved.

And only one party is trying to remove a candidate from the ballot, because even though he's a convicted felon, etc... there is a very real fear that even though they beat him last time, they won't be able to do it again.

Let's look at the facts.

1. Trump is the most popular Republican candidate at the moment which means that if he runs, he will likely get the Republican nomination.
2. In the last 50 years, no incumbent has won reelection during an economic downturn. Carter couldn't do it, Bush lost to Clinton, etc... Biden is at serious risk of losing the election if he runs against anyone reasonable.
3. Donald Trump is the only Presidential candidate who has lost an election to Joe Biden.

Therefore, if Trump is allowed to run, he'll get the nomination and stands a good chance of losing (again) to Biden. But if Trump can't run, any of the other Republican candidates (who at least appear as if they're not insane) will get the nomination, and stand a very good chance of beating Biden come November.

Which makes me think the Democrats hate Trump so much they're willing to cede the White House to any Republican candidate other than Trump. Otherwise, they'd let Trump run, and ruin, any Republican hopes of winning the White House.

Perhaps the authors never imagined that such a tool could be used by drone to identify and autonomously eliminate anyone carrying a gun... the military application of such an AI is just to tempting to ignore.

Imagine if the police could be followed around by a drone which would automatically shoot anyone carrying a gun, before they could get it pointed in the officer's direction? Imagine what this would do for "crowd control". Imagine that errors in judgement would be directed against a faceless corporation with deep pockets and highly paid lawyers.

An AI which can identify weapons of any sort sounds like an authoritarian's wet dream come true. Maybe this isn't the world the authors envisioned, but it's the one they've helped create.

Apparently some guy whose name rhymed with "steen" had an extortion racket where he threatened to expose people's sexual habits...

Whatever happened to that guy?

Suppose you buy one of these things, and you're just fine with it listening to you. No problem, right? You agreed to the EULA.

But then suppose that while you're out of the house, your underage daughter calls her boyfriend and talks dirty for a while. Regardless of the fact that you may have consented to recording, your daughter did not, and certainly not her boyfriend.

At this point, wiretapping laws certainly apply - the device, at the behest of Big Ad Company(tm), has just done two illegal things: 1.) recorded a phone call without the consent of either party, and 2.) placed itself in the possession of obscene materials involving a minor.

While a good lawyer may be able to get the company off the hook for the first offense (it could be argued that it wasn't intentional), the second would absolutely incur liability on the company and perhaps even its officers. The obscenity offense is a strictly liability offense. Even if the company did not intend to possess obscene material, the fact that they do is enough for a conviction.

It only takes one red state prosecutor with an axe to grind to make this happen. The likelihood that none of these "always on" devices have captured intimate conversations at one time or another is between slim and none.

Yes, I find it a bit creepy that these things spy on people. But were I an investor, I'd be wondering how long before the company was sued and/or the executives were jailed. These devices could be very easily portrayed not just as an invasion of privacy, but as obscenity harvesting machines.

Maybe I'm underestimating the laziness of researchers, but I would think that it would be relatively easy to dump a wireshark capture of packets at the router level to see if a device was listening to ambient conversations. That these devices are spying (for Great and Glorious Cause of Capitalism!) does not surprise me; it surprises me that no one has researched this.

After having networking issues with the only Windows10 computer in my house, I discovered that Edge was slurping down about a megabit of bandwidth as it ran in the background doing "nothing". While I can't say whether or not it was spying on me, I can only wonder why someone at Microsoft thought this level of resource wastage was appropriate. I can only wonder how much network traffic is consumed not by actual streaming or user applications, but by spyware intended to sell ads.

While to the average person this regulator sounds like he's bullish on national security, to those who know either computer science, engineering, or even tool and die work, he sounds rather naive. In the first place, a ban on selling Nvidia chips to China won't prevent China from acquiring them, and in the second place, selling them chips won't help China make them.

The process of lithography for producing chips is by this time well understood. When I built my lathe from scratch, the most amazing part of the process was that through geometry, through relatively simple and crude tools, I could create a machine capable of greater precision than the tools which made it. A similar principle exists with the lithographic process; it is not as if China doesn't have scientists which understand physics, or is somehow incapable of building their own chip making machines. It is simply not a priority for the communist party. The Chinese are content to forego building their own fabs as long as they can buy the chips from the US. If we stop supplying chips, they will build fabs; if we don't sell them the machines, they will build their own.

And the quip about AI sounds ridiculous to anyone with a computer science degree. AI is not some magic weapon, and it's usefulness is primarily a function of the algorithms employed, not the hardware on which it runs. While Nvidia has done a good job with its graphics cards, the fact remains that any computer engineering grad could produce a faster AI chip with a modern FPGA. Generally speaking, purpose-built chips will always outperform general computing platforms every time. Any use of AI in a weapons platform ( with national security implications) would be built around a purpose built platform, rather than a gaming one. It just so happens that the same processes useful for game rendering are also useful in the AI algorithms du jour, but additional research could nullify that. There are AI algorithms more efficient than massive matrix operations, but the latter are more easily trained, whereas the former are more useful in time sensitive applications (such as weapons systems). Giving China gaming chips won't improve their weapons capability, but getting Chinese teenagers addicted to video games will prevent them from developing the muscle mass and visual acuity required of a soldier.

In the end, this regulator is making the textbook case for libertarianism: his regulations sound good on the surface, but when one investigates the consequences of his actions, it becomes apparent that the regulation serves neither the greater public interest, nor the interest of the parties regulated. However, it well serves the interests of a social climbing bureaucrat with political ambitions who seeks to exert power over others.

The pay for digital artists working for others is already abysmal. Truck drivers literally make more than unionized illustrators.

And to make matters worse, the sort of image manipulations AI is designed to replace are the soul-crushing mindless illustrations that most artists do only because it's steady work. Anything edgy, thought provoking, or opinionated/editorial will still require a human being.

So, from the perspective of an actual, working artist, this only takes away the jobs we wouldn't want to do otherwise.

There have always been machine threats to an artist's living. Even etchings (invented about 4 centuries ago) and lithography enabled the mass-production of images, and generally speaking, collectors have ignored most forms of machine-generated imagery. The sort of people who will spend more than a few dollars for a poster-print of an image, generally speaking, want art that was created by a human being, which the artist actually had a hand in creating. Which is why prints almost invariably sell for less than originals, and only sell well in the home-decor market.

I did not become an artist because I wanted to compete with ink-jet printers or computer generated imagery. I became an artist because I have something to say that no computer could even understand. Computers can't understand emotion, only mimic what has already been created. And if you know anything about the art market, no one wants to buy something mechanically generated.

They are not the first, there have been others in the past.

Secondly, what happens to the sequestered oxygen? If this is ever adopted at the planetary scale, wouldn't removing oxygen (via CO2) deplete the oxygen in the earth's atmosphere?

The fact that they a.) copied the artists work without permission, and b.) it negatively affects the artists' ability to profit from their work.

What everyone seems to miss is that there are already artists whose works have been so convincingly copied by AI that they're being accused of using AI for their own work! They have been banned for submitting "AI" generated works because the AI generator output matches their originals so well.

The difference between AI and traditional artists is that traditional artists, generally speaking, cannot create an (comparatively) unlimited number of works in another artist's style, and that most artists strive to be different from other artists to the extent that saying, "Your work reminds me of [another artist]" is usually taken as a backhanded compliment. Artists in general have ethics, and AI doesn't.

To someone trained in the visual arts, AI feels like trying to finger paint with mittens on.

The issue is that it's far more work to get the AI to produce specifically what the artist had in mind than to just paint it himself. For most artists, reproducing a particular style is the easy part; the difficult part is the inspiration, i.e. figuring out what we should paint.

The social cost of Windows past inability to open tar files is that millions of Fox viewers don't believe in global climate change, even though the temperature data is freely available, because it is provided as tar archives.

Prior to the 2000's, Republicans routinely courted the environmental movement. I remember when GH Bush said he wanted to be the environmental President. But with the widespread adoption of Windows on PCs, the majority of upper-middle class people were no longer logging into UNIX terminals, but instead using their personal devices which could no longer open the most widely used file archive format of scientists, engineers, and intellectuals. And the Republican party shifted from a party focused on long-term, sustainable, solutions to one focused on gut-feeling anti-intellectualism (i.e. distrust of experts) and greed. A trend which was reinforced by the Windows paradigm of deliberately hiding the complexity of computers and encouraging them not to think.

Now the reasons for the shifting of political winds are certainly complex. But I can't help but believe that a part of this shift is due in part to Microsoft deliberately dumbing down computers to the extent they hindered effective communication between experts and the general public. The experts were sequestered behind UNIX workstations, and the rest of the population was dumbed down by Windows PCs.

I remember when opening tar files on Windows involved installing cygwin first.

I suppose it's better late than never, but it's been nearly three decades after Windows 95 came out, and most of us have already moved on to Linux or some other POSIX compliant OS.

When I wanted to know if global climate change was real, the data came in tarfiles.

When I wanted to know if masks really worked, I had to extract the data from a tarfile.

I could go to the primary sources of information, and become better informed, precisely because I was using a POSIX compliant OS that could open tar files.

Now, I'm not saying that this is going to undo the 2016 election, or stop the MAGA chants, or even wake up Joe Biden, but at least those Windows users who want to leave their ideological bubble and join the worldwide community of intellectuals and scientists will now be able to do so.