Or it could be used as a robot guide for "what not to do." Basically, your robot would be sure to tell you that are not a faggot and should neither kill yourself nor catch AIDS and then die in a fire.

And it's insane when you compare fusion research funding to military spending in general, or what we spent on the Iraq war specifically. If we'd spent a fraction of those amounts on energy research...my God. It's not for sure that throwing money at energy research will solve all our problems, but come on, our society runs on energy, and the cheap energy we got from long-chain hydrocarbons is never coming back.

When I think about threats to the future of stable society, lack of cheap energy is #1. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would have all kinds of interesting ideas as to why the government isn't pumping more money into solving this problem.

What's wrong with using the term "microcode?" America does lead the world in microcode. Intel and AMD are American companies.

Why do you hate job creators?

But then you're arguing for inefficiency to make-work.

Everybody who said it died.

About half the cost of building a house is labor. They say in the article that aside from the guy running the printer, there are no labor costs here. I don't believe that's necessarily true, because there's still got to be somebody wiring the electrical and installing windows, but regardless, it could dramatically decrease the cost of building a home. It could also be a lot faster. Imagine that, just rolling up two trucks to a construction site: one carrying the printer, another with all the crushed rock, setting it up and letting it go. A week later, a finished home ready for a family to move into at half the cost. That brings the dream of home ownership within the reach of a lot of people who wouldn't have been able to afford it before. We live in exciting times.

That's what Elon Musk is doing with SolarCity. Combine his cheap solar panels with his cheap batteries from the gigafactory they're building and you've got your fantasy.

I would still like to see a fully automated farm, that requires no labor except robot maintenance. Robots to till the soil, plant the sides, harvest the crops, process them, load them on to automated trucks and ship them off to market. That would be amazing. I think a stable society in the future is going to depend on "free" food. There simply is not enough work for everyone to do, so we have massive unemployment and underemployment. We're eventually going to have to let go of the idea that you have to have a job in order to have food and shelter, but people are so scared of "socialism." "It's not fair that some people sit around and eat for free but somebody else is working in the fields!" But if you can show that food can be produced with zero human labor...wow. That's a game changer.

Paraphrasing Tom Morello, "Freedom is the freedom to starve."

I will be impressed when you can show me a robot write an original, funny joke. But can you run an economy on jokes and poems and songs? Maybe.

Then again, how original is most anything? There was a story on slashdot a year or two ago about a guy who wrote a book describing the exact formula that 90% of Hollywood movies follow. Like, page for page. I wonder if one could train a neural network with scripts to every sitcom, every movie, identifying humor, tension, the range of emotions each scene is designed to inspire and then let it go. Could a computer write an entertaining movie? A sitcom? I wonder.

I heard that the human body produces more bio-electricity than a 120V battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Perhaps we could use that to power the machines. We might get bored, though, sitting around letting our bio-electricity and body heat be absorbed, so maybe we could hook in to some kind of simulated environment to keep us occupied.

For once that meme is actually on topic!

I think something like basic income is inevitable. We have it now, it's called Section 8 and food stamps. And as joblessness increases those programs will steadily expand until, well fuck it, just give everybody enough money to buy basic food and housing and be done with it. There's no reason for anybody to go homeless or hungry in America. We pay farmers not to grow food and we have more empty foreclosed-on houses than we have homeless people. There's got to be a way to match that up.

"But teh socialisms!!11!one!1!!" Well, the alternative is teh riotz!!!1!!

The transition is going to be ugly but it's bound to happen. In the meantime, we computer programmer types will be fine until the singularity, and it'll still be quite awhile before robots can fix a busted water pipe so the trades can still provide a living. But transportation? Gone. Manufacturing? Gone. Knowledge work? Gone.

The future will be awesome or terrible.

I think the definition of trolling has also changed. I don't think those things really count as trolling. That's shitposting, but trolling is a art.

Fuel-air bomb maybe? Kill it with fire?