I'm just glad they decided to use this data gathering against rich people. The government might wipe their ass with the Constitution, but stopping the rich from cheating on their taxes is one step too far. I can only hope that when this is ruled un-American, it will be a wide ruling that covers you & me and not just "the IRS may not use this data".

Buddy these AIs are meant to free you... from having a job.

You can't go after people who claim to live in one of their extra homes for tax purposes but in reality are cheating the people of your state! That's so unfair, they might have to sell one of their vacation homes or even their yacht!

Sure, and you can also insist that employees must do jumping jacks while singing praises to the CEO. But stupid rules cost extra, and for self-respecting people quite a bit extra. But if you want stupid rules and to only pay a little extra, you have to start tapping the pool of people who love asskissing and have no self-respect, but you better hope their boss isn't an idiot who asks for convenience at the cost of security.

With a death sentence by stoning, or of being tortured for eternity? "But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. "

Thankfully, these people can't scan your brain yet.

Sure thing boss, I'm sure every economist will agree with you that increased supply and competition causes increased prices.

Lol if there's a skip button you're doing it very very wrong.

It turns out Earth life is made of piles of food -- proteins, carbohydrates, oils. If Mars microbes can eat that, but we or our tastiest plants can't defend against them, we're in trouble. Of course, maybe Mars microbes won't like that our atmosphere is 20% bleach, even some of the Earth microbes living like this for several billion years still require an anaerobic environment.

Turns out there's lots of whitespace

People already time their electric use to benefit the grid, either because they're on variable rate plans or because the electric company pays them to. Traditionally with electric heaters, where instead of using random cycle times the grid tells them to turn on before reaching min temp or off partway to max temp. Idiots learn about this and say "Oh no I don't want to do the thing I'm not doing and don't have to do! My cycle times must be random!"

Sure, but if it takes them 1000x longer to industrialize than it took us, that would be about 0.0002 billion years, barely a blink of an eye in geologic time. And we use roughly 0% of our fossil fuels for spaceflight, and hydrogen/oxygen is one of the best fuels (specific impulse) that there is.

The only reason we're burning through millions of years of fossil fuels is that it is already there cheaply available and because the natural process to make them is stupidly inefficient. All we really need is a sufficiently stable society. And though our countries only tend to last about 0.000001 billion years, even during big events like the Bronze Age Collapse and the Dark Ages we didn't really lose much in the way of progress, so it's quite plausible even our fairly unstable species could figure it out.

Oh and hydro, wind, and solar power are all pre-industrial, in case you were wondering. And steam would work fine with our earliest solar power plants (forests) or the alleged Archimedes solar death ray. It would all just be slower, not impossible. And unless it is about 1,000,000,000% slower without fossil fuels there's plenty of time for a post-human dolphin society to re-evolve land dwelling and escape to space before our planet dies.

That's silly, fossil fuels can't be necessary for civilization because zero planets start with fossil fuels. Sure, it is thanks to a stockpile of fossil fuels that we industrialized in a mere 0.0000002 billion years, but they weren't a necessary part of anything. Plus we can make our own equivalents of fossil fuels, in fact that's how we first made steel (with synthetic coal aka charcoal), we can make synthetic oil too. An untapped fossil fuel stockpile is not an absolute requirement but to do without we'd need to have a very stable society, and our most stable countries have only lasted for 0.000001 billion years.

Looks like they discovered the early stage evolution of an organelle, and also a new type of organelle, and also something that could revolutionize agriculture.

What do you mean, threaten? If Google is robbing them, they should be thrilled that it's ending.

Having advertisers pay for the news may be part of why the news is so crappy these days: eyeballs equal money, so simply looking at the article is success. The proposed legislation would change this so they get money even if you don't click the link, so the big moneymaker will be SEO with clickbait a secondary objective.