Yeah, this report reeks of the people promoting Lunar exploration in order to mine Helium 3: a solution in search of a problem. They already have the thing in mind that they want to happen (in this case, settle Mars) and are searching backwards for a means to justify it.

In no way, if the actual goal is "studying life", will $100B buy you more results by sending humans than by sending robots, and nor will it shorten the schedule.When you put humans into the mix, suddenly all of the resources for your project end up going to delivering, sustaining, and retrieving that "smart hammer" you're sending, rather than the actual scientific equipment.

I'm not saying that there can't be good justifications for settling other planets - their can be. Musk's is the most defensible, IMHO (that it's a long, slow, expensive project, but is needed to learn how to make this rare thing (consciousness) redundant against natural and manmade disasters (the latter risk of which grows every year), and we never know how much time we'll have left to do the very-long project needed to do so. Though Musk IMHO grossly downplays the timescales and costs for true resource-independence (or rather, independence to the degree that *if necessary*, it could develop full resource independence on its own, even if shipments of key supplies from Earth are more efficient), and his "quick terraforming" notions are fantasy.

He's listed like a dozen things that he wants to pay for with the tariff money, each of which would individually consume anywhere from "a large minority of it" to "more than all of it".

Not to say that spending money to do "cool things" is inherently wrong, but just as a reminder: the Trump administration cut $8B from USAID's annual budget and it's projected to lead to 14 million extra deaths by 2030, 4,5m of them children.

[William Stanley Jevons has entered the chat]

It's this observation that makes me skeptical about the whole humanoid hype fest.

You have a strange definition of humanoid.

The second thing is that people are damn cheap.

Depends entirely where you are. Labour in our greenhouses here (Iceland) is insanely expensive and makes it difficult to compete on the global market against imports (even imports of perishable things that are expensive to ship). Replacing workers with machines on a given task might not be economical, in, say, Uganda, while it might be a complete no-brainer here.

That said, there are also things that we could do to bring labour costs down, but don't. For example, at the same time we struggle with high labour costs and shortages in fields like agriculture, we also have problems with too many asylum seekers, most of whose cases get rejected and kicked out (economic migrants), but not for many months of limbo, living at taxpayer expense, when what they really want to do is work here. The obvious solution is to make an agricultural worker visa, where while you're guaranteed the same labour/safety standards but you're not guaranteed Icelandic minimum wages and benefits - but still far better than these people would get in their homeland. The vast majority of them would be thrilled to sign up for such a thing if it would guarantee them residence. But migration-politics is such a hotbutton political issue right now globally, it's hard to do any commonsense stuff like that.

. At the moment, making such a robot that can even perform that task well, let alone be cheap and, importantly, reliable, is a very difficult problem.

I'd also add that while picking is the glamorous AI task, it's only part of the work. In greenhouses at least (I don't have field-tomato cultivation experience) we do an awful lot to manage the plants**. You have to remove the suckers at every internode on the plant (except those at the base to get the proper number of vines per plant), you have to remove the lower leaves at regular intervals, you have to wind the plants around the string that they grow up, when the plants get tall you have to slide the tops over so that they grow at a diagonal, and on and on. And that's just the management for the mature plants - you also replace your plants at regular intervals, so you have to start new plants grow them, repot them, grow them, then plant them out (not just the planting, but also replacing the growing medium) - plus all of the side stuff like cleaning, managing irrigation, and on and on. Harvesting the fruit is just one task among many.

** To anyone reading this who is surprised about all of the plant manipulation, think of it this way: you have a finite amount of surface area for light to hit, and a finite amount of root volume for each plant. So once your plants get to a size where they're basically using all the light and basically have rooted through the whole growing medium, the only way you can keep their growth in balance as they continue to grow is to keep removing old leaves. And you need to stop any branching immediately because again all that branches would do is just grow into your other plants. And once your plants are so long that they've hit the top of your wires, the only thing you can do is slide the wires over so that the plants are growing (ever-increasingly) diagonally. Nothing you can do about the fact that the stems just keep getting longer and longer as the top continues to grow except replace the plants at regular intervals - you need to let the plant continue to grow because that's how you get new blossoms for fruiting. Removing the lower leaves also has the nice side effect that the tomatoes that are maturing lower down are left fully exposed, making them easy to harvest. You harvest as they hit maturity. Once your plants have hit their max size, you top them and go hard on top/branch removal until the majority of your tomatoes left on the plant are harvest-ready, then take them all. A good trick BTW to boost flavour right before harvest is to significantly up the EC in the irrigation solution (to levels that would normally be wasteful or even detrimental to the plant), as it results in effectively "salting" the tomatoes.

Leave it to Slashdotters to complain about tomato-picking going from "repetitive mindless activity at maximum velocity" to "only the cases that you have to use your brain to think about because a robot isn't smart enough".

I guess we should have people manually screwing the caps onto toothpaste tubes also.

Every economy will always have some unemployed and underemployed people, as every economy is constantly shifting, as does people's status as to what kind of work they can carry out. That doesn't mean it's efficient or sustainable to say, "Oh, you lost your job yesterday? You're a farmer now!". Japan has an unemployment rate of ~2,5%, which is actually quite low. Japan is famous for making "busywork" jobs for people. "Oh, you have a traumatic brain injury and have trouble walking quickly? Just stand over there and hold this sign."

Will do! :)

The big difference is the profit motive in the absence of a truly free market.

The big difference is the requirement to test them to make sure they work. It's expensive, and most candidates fail.

This is potentially the biggest strenth of a vaccine approach. According to the Internet the flu vaccine costs my government an average of $5.43 cents. Individuals can get it for under $100 in most parts of the world where you have to pay the full cost. The reason it's not stupid expensive, being a new drug with novel components most years, is because the procedure for making flu vaccines is well known and has a special type of approval that lets new variations be used without extensive trials.

It's not particularly difficult to determine the protein that a bit of DNA codes for. It's more difficult to figure out which of those are going to be reasonable antigens to target, but you don't really have to. Cancer cells aren't unknown pathogens, they're regular old human cells with mutations.

You don't need to do that either though. Cancer mutations aren't infinitely diverse. "Personalized medicine" sounds like a treatment just for you and you alone, and maybe in a Star Trek future it will be, but in the meantime it means a targeted treatment. You'd identify something that occurs in 10% or 1% or 0.01% of a particular type of cancers, make a treatment, and sell that along with a test for that mutation. We've already got several of those based on more traditional immunotherapy. RNA vaccines just make it a lot easier so we'll have lot more options, including ones that target the 1% and 0.01% instead of just the 10%.

It's worse than that. They insist on not selling any bitcoin. So their ability to repay the loan, issue dividends, whatever, depends entirely on their ability to get more people to give them money.

Infinity: I do not think it means what you think it means.

ACs say the darndest things.

Gyre is a more official name for the Pacific Garbage patch, as there are presumably few kids in it

Not really IMO, moderation is broken by design at best