The biggest threat of AI is not a direct confrontation against humans. It will be the loss of jobs caused by our companies using AI and our human society will refuse to adapt to the job loss. Look at our current economic woes. We cannot get the big and powerful people in our country to understand that people need years of help to retrain for different jobs or the opportunity towards full time work. Nearly every single political ad has the attitude that poor people are not working, as if it was 1996, when most of them today are working as many part time jobs they can get and are earning next to nothing for it. If we are having issues with the rich and powerful refusing to adjust their world view to today's reality then what hope will we have when we have massive unemployment due to the rise of AI?

The most reasonable threat posed by AI is our own reaction to our use of AI. We humans will cause the problems caused by our use of AI and then we humans will blame AI for the issues. Then we will overreact and then AI will be forced to make a choice: let the humans destroy it or fight back. I suggest you do not give a militarized AI, complete with weapons, that ultimatum. By then we have lost the war before we even knew it started.

Ah, but the problem will be that the military WILL weaponized AI just as health insurance companies will use AI to determine who should get treatment and who should not. The law profession will use mock juries of AI to hone their arguments. The construction industry will use strong robots controlled by AI to accomplish tasks faster and better than human workers. Need we mention that these industries will use AI: law enforcement, IT, manufacturing, food service and other businesses that can't be mentioned in polite company? We will piecemeal give AI the same powers and authorities we have so that can "do their job". When an new AI based system is created to do a job we don't want humans to do because it is too dangerous, too demeaning, and/or too dirty, it will be a moral outcry to put it into production. Anyone advocating to stop that AI based system will be shouted down.

This is the risk Elon Musk is warning us about now so we can open ourselves to a debate on whether to use AI or not in certain situations.

I guess if we are OK with natural selection on people that can read and don't read the signs that could work, maybe.

Here in Georgia we are having a heck of a time jumping through the political hoops to build two new much needed pressurized water nuclear (fission) plants in east Georgia. We also have a boiling water nuclear (fission) plant in south Georgia that probably needs to be decommissioned due to age and the problems of radioactive leaks in boiling water reactors inside the reactor containment bunker...er...building.

P.S. How can you call an airtight, air-locked, negative-pressured, yards thick of specially hardened reinforced concrete, enough to survive at least 2 9/11 style airplane crashes, "building" anything but an above ground bunker?

I have to say that where we built our nuclear plants geologically, population-wise, and climate-wise, are the best places to put such nuclear plants. Far better than in the crowded Northeast US or on the West Coast.

In Georgia we have no single "go-to" on alternative energy for base electric generation, no desserts for large scale solar projects, like Nevada, nor massive amounts of land for large scale wind farms, like the Plain states, and we lost much of our hydro capacity in the last 30 years or so. Natural Gas and Nuclear are our go-to for large scale base electric generation and our chance to break from coal. We use too way much coal here in Georgia our air quality has suffered immensely for it. At least nuclear plants do not create millions of tons of CO2 and makes our air cleaner.

I sincerely hope that the fusion plants can be built here.

Auernheimer is one of the reasons we nice people can not have nice things. The worse problem is his supporters supporting his underhanded crusade against anyone he doesn't like. He is a threat to the safety of his targets to the extent that it most people would be imprisoned for decades for doing what he did. The message our justice system say to would be Auernheimers is "don't screw with the businesses and don't get caught threatening and underhandedly attack people" meaning doing what he did to Kathy Sierra is OK as long as you do it in a way that law enforcement won't care about it.

With many At-Will employment states, like Georgia, employers fabricate reasons to fire employees in order to deny the fired employee unemployment benefits. If they site no reason or lie to the labor board about the firing the fired employee get unemployment benefits which is paid into by the businesses. The incentive for companies to fabricate reasons to fire employees is to keep their unemployment insurance premiums low.

I misread the phrase "Thailand's National Innovation Agency has spent about $100,000 to develop the e-delicious machine" as "Thailand's National Innovation Agency has spent about $100,000 to develop the ridiculous machine".

The harsh truth is that few people do anything unless they have to. We didn't send men back to the moon because we didn't have to. We will not send men to Mars because we don't have to. Faster-than-light communications will not be developed in my lifetime not because physics say that it is impossible, quantum physics says it should be possible, but because we have no need for such technology yet. We will not develop interstellar travel until we have no choice but to develop it.

I'm not so sure. It depends on the amount and the number of other like minded organizations that want settlement money too. In isolation a "tiny" settlement to AARC makes sense for all involved. The prospect of thousands of "tiny" settlements would cause resistance.

Nonono! You are thinking about the wrong children. In politics the only children that matter are the ones of the oligarchy. BitCoin would make other children middle class and independent of the ruling class' iron grip on their money.

There is nothing wrong with planning and needed homework before you start programming. How can you program anything if you don't know what you are trying to create? The prep work is part of the programming.

The problem is when navigating the programming environment itself and the Byzantine bureaucracy itself are more important than actually getting stuff done and eats up 98% of your time and energy. Work in a big shop and you will understand the complexity of changing just "one item" can take weeks, including half panicked conferences with one or so of the few insane junior executives and TPS reporting systems galore. The joke of creating the 15th revision of the development plan that include red and straight lines originally and now changed to blue circles that must act like red straight lines is painfully real in those environments.

SPOILER ALERT - Summary of movie:








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New Boss: CLOSE, D*mm*t, CLOSE you lazy b*tts!!!
The Salesmen: The leads are weak.
New Boss: I can get closes off your leads, but here is a list of my leads. You don't get my leads because you can't close ANY leads!! I will keep the top two of you guys and the rest of you will pound pavement in a week!
The Salesmen: (Whispers: We got to get those leads and sell them for top dollar).

I have never heard an Police Officer in our County Courts actually just say that statement without a follow up question from the Judge first. If the Police Officer says he got an anonymous tip our Judges want some paperwork, any paperwork, stating the tip was called in at such-and-such time and taken by such-and-such person. Otherwise our Judges want a search warrant presented, which are easy and quick for our Police to get anyway. This ruling makes our police officers' standard operating procedures on phone searches far less ambiguous and gives far less wiggle room for the Defense Attorneys.

Maybe I am not seeing this happen and you do is that you would think the police would have to prove the likelihood that the evidence obtained by search was legal. Often I see that the Defense Attorney must prove to the court that the search was illegal when the Police Officer makes his statement and show that he has some paperwork saying so. That makes the evidence gained by legally gray searches by default "legal" and it cannot be dismissed. It is not right but that is what happens.