I found Chuck's product placement ads for Subway amazing actually. Rather than invisible, they were intentionally over-the-top to the point of being a clear parody. This on a show where significant time is spent in "Buy More" which is very clearly Best Buy.

The scenario explicitly included an ID check.

There's a bunch of what you say that I agree with*, but then you start going to crazy-town with your talk of "crypto-communists". Especially right after you proclaim "welfare for life" as a solution for the displaced people, which is the very essence of "to each according to their needs".

* In particular, I see "fewer jobs" as an intrinsically good thing. Yes, we all understand that leads to a wealth distribution problem. There are multiple possible outcomes.

He's clearly talking about evolutionary algorithms. There is a human involved, yes. But that's moving goalposts. Scribing for copying text was replaced in part by the printing press, then further impacted by photocopiers and later printers. Yes, a human still fed texts into scanners, or nowadays types "10" in the # of copies field of their word processing document, but you can hardly call that human a scribe.

I did, and here is the definition they came up with:

http://www.merriam-webster.com...
http://www.merriam-webster.com...

Didn't see your (inaccurate) definition there, so maybe they already fixed it.

I'm going to need evidence for this one. The USA can "easily" accommodate 320 trillion people with "existing technology"? More than the number of ants on Earth???

Put another way, 1 million times as many people means the entire population of Canada in a single square kilometer. Or 33 people per square metre. I get that you want to build vertically, but we categorically do not have this technology to do this.

It is just a matter of engineering*. It's not like we need fundamental new science. Literally everything you said is an engineering problem.

It's just a whole fuckload of engineering.

Here's one way it might go down.

1. Self-sustaining Martian robot "colony". Note we don't have one on Earth, but to be fair we don't need one on Earth nearly so much. This is conceivably something that could be useful even on Earth in extreme environments, or in Earth orbit, so we can get some practice, then adapt for Mars. Again, this glosses over a lot.
2. The robots can now attempt to create a liveable ecosphere. We could even send ahead some plants and animals that nobody would miss to prove the concept.
3. Then the humans come.

Does that sound conservative to you? Because that's how the real space program happened, the one that is often lauded as going so fast compared to now. First we sent machines which had a useful life in space much longer than any human has ever lived in space (thus, self-sustaining). Then came the dog, the monkeys, and finally humans. We skipped the dogs and monkeys on the moon at great risk, but we had already proven:

1. Launch from a gravity well
2. Continuous space habitation on similar timescales to the moon mission

So we had good reason to think we could skip that step. We should work ourselves up to longer-term habitation similarly. The ISS is a good step for long-term habitation with resupply, but we need something with no resupply.

The class of problems that could be solved by humans using only local materials, but would leave us totally fucked with only machines, is pretty small. I can see the argument about useful science, but we're talking fatal emergencies.

* Mayyyyyybe psychology or economics or some soft sciences like that.

We have all sorts of spinoffs from the unmanned space program too.

Audio ads kill that.

In fact, why do we have to talk about intelligence? What about the Kardashians? What would they do if they showed up here? What would we do if we met the Kardashians? Would we try to eradicate them?

This article isn't about existential risks in general, it's specifically about AI.

There is one good reason to assume that: we are their creators, not a series of random processes smoothed out by natural selection. That has several consequences:

1. We can (attempt to) create strong AI in such a way that it doesn't want to kill us, or is unable. The want thing could have bugs, but we can work through bugs. The ability thing seems stronger at first brush -- consider a strong AI whose entire existence is inside a virtualized environment and which has no direct external sensors -- essentially an AI in the matrix, a matrix which may or may not even be recognizable to humans. It is not going to be able to conceive of a way of killing its extradimensional overlords.

The other problem is if some crazy person subverts this because they want apocalypse. Suicide bombing the species, so to speak.

2. We are their creators and they know it. You can twist that around and also say that's a reason they'll destroy us, but it is nonetheless unique to AI compared to every other example you have cited.

3. There is no reason that strong AI needs to have a survival instinct built in. It's fundamental to us because if it wasn't, we wouldn't live to produce as many children as we do (and even then suicide rate is alarming in humans, and documented in other mammals). I can think of no reason it's logically necessary to a strong AI to have a survival instinct. I know that's Asimov's third law of robotics.

In fact there's no reason to presume just about anything about the motivations of an AI. We'll probably try to give it some, which align with our motivations, so it's probably not entirely distinct from a human motivation, but that doesn't mean its actions overall would be human-like.

I will give one big exception: if strong AI is first developed by full-brain simulation of a human, that would imply human-like motivations.

Errr...did they change the rules that day? Or are you treating sunk costs oddly?

There are lots of studies that use equivalent consequences that show this to be the case. You can see citations just reading the summary paragraph of the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

They are referencing this well-known result, not using their work as evidence for it.

Canada (at least some provinces) gets by with a separate, lower minimum wage for high-schoolers. Pretty much annihilates the "but the YOUTHS" argument.

Your scenario is broken because you believe that doubling some people's earnings causes all prices to double, which is absurd.

The total money circulating in the marketplace did not come even close to doubling, so there's no reason to expect 100% inflation. Prices will probably rise marginally on low-end goods.

In fact, if you passed a law that said that literally everybody on earth got their wages exactly doubled instantly, you *still* wouldn't see a precise doubling of prices, because you haven't increased their existing asset base.

If you double literally all incomes on Earth, *and* the value of all financial instruments, overnight, then and only then do I expect everything's price to also double overnight (provided there's no legal impediment to doing so eg. rent control). Nobody is doing that.

It's like Lenz's Law. Yes, running a current causes electromagnetic interference and, ultimately, a countercurrent. No, that doesn't mean that electric current is impossible.