They mean safe for Microsoft to release. I suspect they still remember their earlier Tay AI chatbot that after a short contact with the internet was spouting neo-nazi hate propaganda and swearing like a sailor.

The one time you can generally guarantee that corporations will have extensive and effective safety checks is when it comes to protecting their bottom line.

Yes it is but I will note that the human brain is the result of 3.5 billion years of evolution building and training it. We've got to where we are with AI in under 100 years since the first electronic computers while it took nature 3 billion years from the start of life to figure out multicellular organisms let alone human-level intelligence. We may have a lot further to go to match what nature has achieved but we are catching up at an incredible rate and it is hard not to believe that before long we will exceed nature's achievements.

Really? While AIs can certainly generate perfect sounding English the fact that they frequently hallucinate suggests that they have absolutely zero understanding of what they are writing....either that or they are a lot more intellligent that we realize and they deliberately lie a lot to stop us finding out, in which case they are really doing a great job!

Compare that to just the first verse of Modern Major General from Gilbert and Sullivan in 1879 and you can see how far we have simplified things:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical
I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I am teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

No, because that was not the argument you were making. You said that requiring people driving expensive cars to pay more for their insurance would cause more people to drive cheaper, badly maintained and hence more dangerous cars. My counterpoint was that this would have no effect because many people were already driving the cheapest legal cars possible and that what mattered in regards to this safety concern was the minimum safety standards enforced on vehicles.

So, just because you seem a little confused, lets agree to the bleedingly obvious that if you do not properly maintain your car it will become less safe to drive and try to focus on your original point which was that charging higher insurance rates for more expensive cars would somehow (your claim, not mine) lead to significantly more dangerous and poorly maintained cars on the road which is something that you have completely failed to explain or justify.

For exactly the same reasons as biological life: the wider you spread out the less risk that you will be wiped out by a natural event. Sure some AIs may not want to expand but that's the same for natural species as well. There is no reason I can see why an AI civilization would be more or less likely to expand than a natural one.

No, relativity does not work like that. If you are "some number" of light years away then with relativistic time dilation you can only travel "some number" of years into the future, not thousands. While you can be thousands of light years away in our galaxy even this is not an argument for not seeing anything because evolution occurs on the timescale of millions of years this means that an alien intelligence could well have been travelling around for millions of years already making the few tens of thousands of light year distances possibly in the galaxy no reason for us not to have seen anything given that we have no visit in recorded history that extends back at least ~1000 years.

So either visits are very infrequent or there is no one visiting....or transmitting.

It's also an argument that does not explain anything. All it does is replace natural intelligence with artificial intelligence at which point all that has changed is that instead of first contact with a naturally evolved species we would make first contact with an artificial intelligence. So what is filtering out the AIs?

I suspect the more likely plan is that this is a test of the precision formation technology they will need to build orbital gravitational wave detectors like LISA that will be sensitive to a different region of the GW spectrum that current ground-based detectors.

The _main_ point is to test precision positioning of satellites, not make shadows. For example, one very good scientific use of precision formations is that there are plans to have orbital gravitational wave detectors such as LISA. This will require three satellites flying in a very precise formation creating a triangular interferometer with 2.5 million km arms. This should be sensitive to difference frequencies of gravitational waves than the current earth based detectors like LIGO.

Well they asked for it by calling what they are doing an eclipse. An eclipse is defined as one celestial body obscuring the illumination from another. Similarly, putting one object into the shadow of another is not an eclipse unless those objects are planets or moons. This is why we don't call holding our hand up to shade our eyes or standing under a tree on a sunny day a solar eclipse.

Are you actually so obtuse that you did not understand my point which was that many people already buy the cheapest vehicles they can and so your level of safety is already determined by whatever minimum road safety standards you enforce?

No it does not just work in hindsight. The Greeks knew basic geometry - indeed they were the ones who came up with it! They knew that the Earth was a sphere and in 240 BC Eratosthenes measured the radius with an accuracy of a few hundred kilometres. This meant that they knew the circumference and the surface area of the planet and they also knew how much they had explored which was a lot less than the total area.

It WAS proven otherwise by the ancient Greeks themselves! Mathematical proofs are absolute. The Greeks knew with absolute certainty what the surface area and circumference of a sphere was given the radius. They knew the Earth was a sphere from measurements they made which as I mentioned above, determined its radius surprisingly accurately. Hence, they knew there was much more unexplored surface out there. Where possibly uncertainties would have come in for them is in not knowing whether the curvature of the surface was constant so, had they considered this (which they likely did not since they tended to think that nature like perfect geometry) that would have lead to some increased uncertainty on how much surface there was to explore but would not change the conclusion that there evidence of a lot of surface left to explore.

It's the start of the new culture war: Artificial Intelligence vs. Natural Stupidity.

There are already minimum road safety standards that cars have to meet as well as mandatory road safety tests for older vehicles. If these are not stingent enough in your country then you already ready have a serious problem with road safety because many people are naturally going to get the cheapest cars.possible.