Whatever you think of the various sides of this argument, it's interesting to me to look at how different the sides are.

The US is, on average, far more concerned about pornography and other sexual issues than the UK, but there is not and never will be any significant discussion of government-mandated filters, outside of specific situations like government-run schools. The reason is our belief in the importance of free speech. Although there are plenty of Americans who would like to ban porn, no one at a national level says it out loud. No one seriously talks about it even at local, highly homogeneous levels, because everyone knows it won't fly.

The UK is somewhat less prudish than the US, but is perfectly willing to carve out large exceptions to free speech wherever it's convenient. Therefore, British pols do talk seriously about trying to ban porn, except for adults who opt out.

Europe (as a whole; there are exceptions) is even less concerned about free speech than the UK, but apparently considers porn to be something worth fighting for, to the degree that they're willing to invest at least a little effort in fighting to keep porn available to kids in the UK.

FWIW, I think porn is bad. Conceptually, there's nothing wrong with human sexuality, but porn presents an extremely distorted view of human sexuality. I think regular consumption of hardcore pornography, particularly by adolescents, skews expectations and perceptions in ways that have negative consequences. That said, I have no interest in trying to ban it. I do filter it on my home network, but that's a half measure which mostly serves as an early warning system (I get notified of attempts to get to porn sites) which offers a chance to talk the issues over if I find my kids looking for it.

All of which mostly says that I'm a fairly typical American parent: concerned about porn but unwilling to take the strong anti-freedom steps needed to effectively ban it :-)

No. The pressure on deer is different when the wolves are exterminated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

The deer population saw a higher equilibrium, because the human pressures were different. Wolves did a good job of iproving the deer breeding stock. Sick and weak are selectively targeted, when human hunters will deliberately not choose the sick and weak.

So yes, there are differences, and sometimes they end up larger changes that people assume. Wolves move rivers. The bears and humans and such that filled the niche didn't have the same effect.

But mosquitos have no benefits. Kill them all, and I'll not get bit again. And we'll stop malaria and other diseases.

They aren't nagware. If you give permission to install, and it requires GPS access, it can turn it on and off without "notification" (though, dependent on phone, there will be an icon in the display that will turn on, but I'm not sure if that's required). "Location services" doesn't turn on the GPS icon unless using GPS, and location services rarely use GPS because of the unreliability and power drain.

I'm still not understanding. A Power of Attorney is a form of contract. I can make and break one freely with no penalties at all. It just takes a notary (optional) for it to be valid.

So I could make and break 1000 PoAs in a day, and there'd be no cost. No barrier to doing it. The only inconvenience is if I chose to get them all notarized, and that's not a high barrier.

There is deliberate government interference in forming hurdles to form and dissolve a marriage contract. Eliminating those hurdles without consideration of the results would be folly.

Yeah, wouldn't it make sense to see where the GPS signal dies, and when it comes back, and persume they took transport from one position to the other? No inertia guessing needed. The Yellow to the Red line is the only way to connect those dots without looping or doubling back. So why do you need to have the accelerometer to confirm?

That's certainly fine with respect to crimes that justify criminal punishment (e.g. prison). But if regulators choose a market-style punishment (fines), then they're just acting as a market force, and that's a consideration for shareholders as owners.

Utter nonsense. Yes, in some cases that may be the effect, but it's certainly not the design. Your cynicism has gotten the better of you. By design, boards of directors are intended to serve the same role that elected political representatives do for citizens of a nation; to represent the interests of the voters. It's not feasible for every governmental or corporate decision to be voted upon by the whole body, so they choose representatives. A proper board of directors takes a dim view of executives acting against the interests of the shareholders, and boards that fail their jobs badly enough do get ousted.

That just indicates that regulators are not making the fines large enough. If regulators want to use financial penalties, they have to make them large enough that bad actions are unprofitable.

You're assuming that simulating the structure of an organic brain is necessary to accomplish the same functions. That's like assuming that simulating legs is the only way to construct a self-moving machine, just because that's the way that nature has done it. Evolution produces workable schemes and fine tunes them; but it clearly suffers from the local maximum problem, while the scientific approach to generating knowledge is much less prone to that limitation. You're also ignoring the fact that the basic construction of our computers is orders of magnitude faster and more energy-efficient than the neurochemical processes that drive organic intelligence. That fundamental difference in materials has to make a difference at larger scales, I think. There are likely other questionable assumptions underlying your guess.

Your assumptions may be valid, but we have no way of knowing. I suspect they're not, myself. What is certainly true is that we won't know until we understand how intelligence works.

Yeah, like the UK who told Iceland to bail out the Bank of England or be personally responsible for the Apocalypse. Iceland didn't pay. Nothing happened.

Nope. Bailing out the bank pays out the investors and directors. Letting the bank fail pays out the account holders. The richest of the two groups is the investors, so we bail out with welfare for the rich. Fuck the poor.

Yes, you've tracked the "subprime" explosion. But subprime was unrelated to the crisis. "Subprime" was rich white male banker code for "Nigger". Blame it all on the Black man. Don't look at the rich old white males handing out the "bad loans" and bundling them into trade-able instruments and committing fraud by lying about the risk of the bundled loans.

At the time the "crisis" was named, the default rates for subprime were well below historical norms. It's just that, as statistics say, the first card to fall was from the high-risk group. Blaming the high-risk group for being high-risk is insane. But when you let the people who actually caused the mess name it, "subprime crisis" was the name given.

Yes, I played the race card. I'm a rich white male. I just also happen to have been raised in the American South with open eyes, so I see the racism that's pervasive in the US, to the detriment of the US.

What an odd thing to say. Of course the owners of the bank take the hit when fines are levied. Who else would? And it's up to the owners of the bank to decide how to hold their employees accountable.

No, this is clearly #1. The biggest existential risk, and the most promising opportunity. It all depends on what those 7 billion unusually intelligent apes decide to do.

Very well put. I came here to make this post, but now I don't have to.

One quibble, though:

We also have no reason to believe that we don't have hardware completely capable of running one, and haven't for quite some time. Until we have some idea how intelligence works and how to construct an AI, we really can't have any idea whether or not our hardware is sufficient.

What are the shareholder votes?

A bit harder to transport to a client's office, though.

These machines are obviously aimed at a particular niche that full desktop workstations can't cater for.