Nah, I'm sure the rainbow condoms will be a hit.

Paul Ehrlich is a famous doomspeaker known for his predictions of imminent doom and gloom.

He's not famous for being right though.

He may not believe in the easter bunny but he certainly believes in The Great Demise despite its consistent failure to materialize in any shape or form.

It's just Malthus 200 year old meme and alarmist policy as usual.
Claim doom and gloom is right around the corner if we don't stop this right now, if called out just claim "this time it's different! it's not like in the past because reasons!"

Sure, stars are hand-waving and no substance too because no one have built one yet.

The focus on consciousness as a guiding beacon and the insistence that consciousness is a indivisible unity is something philosophers made up because they needed something to debate endlessly with no chance of every getting anywhere.

If we define any umbrella term to be indivisible we can have the same pointless masturbation over its unattainable special snowflakeyness.

We acknowledge that a Nation or Computer or Corporation is something consisting of components that can be identified and described with some degree of precision but when it comes to consciousness there's suddenly a refusal to accept that it could be broken down to components only, there have to be some core that's pure consciousness to it despite the fact that we can enumerate components that if removed from a human would reduce him to something that pretty much everyone would agree on is something not conscious. Or do you think a person with no sense of touch, smell, vision, hearing, emotions, no language or object recognition, no motor control, no memory, no planning and executive capability would still be a magical conscious being?
If you do, please tell me what precisely he still have left that is consciousness, and oh, if you name a component that I forgot to remove that's of course not an argument for magical consciousness, it's an argument for my list of subcomponents being incomplete.

And with that out of the way, how come that artificially implementing a component of what we refer to as consciousness isn't actually a step towards artificial consciousness?

We already have superhuman AI. Limited superhumanity. Watson beat the shit out of the jeopardy champions because superhuman reflexes and superhuman searchtime.
Image classification and search algorithm are superhuman in they work rapdily and around the clock even if the result may be so-so.

This trend will become more and more apparent as more fields get in the reach of specialist AI, essentially we're building autistic savant superhumanity. And like autistic savants these will not be much of an malicious existential threat.

By the time we can actually build a universally superhuman AI that could form willful malicious intent we'll be so immersed in AI and so used to build, deal with and monitor AI that it will be a mostly forgotten nonissue.

Parkinsons and alzheimers are neurodegenerative diseases, it takes time for the degeneration to happen.

It's like replacing a rust eaten component with a new shiny steel one. Yes it will also rust eventually but it will keep things working until then.

The article reads like a environmentalist pamphlet.

Is there any real studies to support this or is it an artificial problem?

And who can resist "4700 hours in Dota2"?

Hydro have an astronomical death toll compared to nuclear.
You can count the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki as deaths due to nuclear power and hydro still have a lead.

Sure. Just take the worlds largest solar farm: Topaz Solar and multiply it by 16. Then some more and build battery backup for even more to supply during the night and bad weather

Ideology will power nothing.

It's not a well kept secret. Do a google image search for: ipcc models wrong ; and enjoy the countless graphs that shows the model gap in a idiot proof manner.

People take great offense though because they'd rather (ironically) call you a denier than accept what's in front of their eyes.

The satellite record is even more entertaining. Drop a note saying "18 years of pause" in a pro-agw conference and there will be total upheaval as half of them denies that there is any pause at all as they haven't got the latest PM and the other half blames hidden heat(?) and natural variability.

Our hypotethical kid just want to gamedev after watching a youtube video, he's not there to start a fucking business and he's not going to pay when he can dev for free.

$120 a year and it's a needless cost for anyone trying to get into gamedev. The pay-when-you-make-it approach of UE4 and Unity is much easier to stomach when you're new.

There's some 3rd party assets that probably are worth paying for on the associated asset stores, but with both UE4 and U5 free there's really no reason to pay for engines.

The only reason is if you're already competent with a paid engine and don't want to learn it all again.