The US is behind the world in a number of areas, high-speed internet being the first that comes to mind. That said, the US has multiple large solar power plants, including, but not limited to, Avenal, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada Solar One, Ivanpah, Solana, and multiple SEGS. There are multiple ones under construction, and many more planned. Most are thermal, not PV, and they are not as large as the proposed one, but solar plants make a great deal of sense in the right location (say, Arizona or Nevada or CA desert). It's also hard to get approval for exceptionally large projects in the US, it turns out to be easier (environmentally, financially, etc.) to make large projects. You can see a list of concentrating thermal plants here.

so, your argument that the US would be doing it if it was of any possible real benefit doesn't work.

It's all about making it commercially viable, cheaper, and easier. People have been doing 3D scans for a while now, but the infrastructure, technology, compute power, etc. have finally reached the tipping point making it available for the average hobbyist.

Autodesk 123D Catch works pretty well, for some objects, and it is currently free. I have had it fail miserably in some cases, work very well in others. The important thing for me is that I can then read it into Blender, do the cleanup, and I have a 3D model of something much, much more quickly than if I did it from scratch.

Also, the technology will continue to get better. Consider the following SIGGRAPH video: 3-Sweep If you combine this technology with 123D and data from several photos, then you are 99% of the way there. The original article of course is largely about trying to make the technology work for the non-specialist, and 3-Sweep is not there yet, but give it a couple of years.

Aye, there's the rub. How gradual? How will the transition be handled? If it's too sudden, there will be mayhem. If it happens over 100 years, then the societal expectations about what someone is supposed to do with their lives will change sufficiently slowly that I think it will be fine.

If it happens over 10 years because of the singularity, then I think that the upheaval will be too great. Too many people thinking that they are supposed to be 'doing' something with their lives, climbing the ladder of success or something.

To a degree, I agree. I think that there are lots of things for me to do to keep me occupied, if I did not have to work. As I get older, I discover I really like going on vacation and visiting other parts of the world. But, if it was that way all the time, it's not clear that I would enjoy it. What would it mean to visit other parts of the world? Nobody would be doing anything there. In addition, lots of people become depressed when they retire; it's not clear whether it's because they have stopped doing somehting that they had to do for decades, or a societal expectation that has become part of them, or if it is something more basic and that people fundamentally need to 'work' (at something) to be happy.

That supposes that both they and you are happy. That's not a given.

This is not necessarily genocide. Given control of their own reproduction, it turns out humans often don't breed sufficiently to maintain population (Europe, parts of Asia, Russia [well, other reasons too], etc). The aging population causes problems, but if you have robot AI, then the problems are largely solved.

In my mind, it's largely timing. Can the development of AI happen in concert with aging across the planet, such that we get workers to take care of the elderly as the number of young decreases, while at the same time we are able to encourage demographic transition in other areas? So, it turns out that the decrease in the number of workers happens as the number of robots goes up, and there is a match so that things are stable?

Amusing that it is posted on the Guardian.

Nope, I use the Catalan sequence, Bell numbers, Fibonacci numbers, and various Mersenne primes. When I have to use letters, I use the letters below the numbers.

Brilliant idea! Get some currency with numbers that the FBI / CIA are really interested in, and send them to the scammers. The FBI / CIA does your work for you!

I agree: Go with whitelisting. You can whitelist entire blocks of numbers (local businesses, for example), and it's unlikely that the autodialers of the scammers would fall into them.

Because he was a useful bat with which to beat the Iranians. And he would have continued to be a useful bat except he invaded Kuwait. Until that time, it was a case of "Yes, but he's our bastard" -- Roosevelt.