If you mean that it would take research and development aimed in that direction, I agree with you. Unfortunately, the research and development appears to be just about all aimed at control.

Your romanticizing of "the government only allows so many yellow cabs so the artificial scarcity leads to medallion costs spiraling ever upward" is fucking bizarre.

That's horseshit. People who owned the medallions made money leasing them to people who would work their fingers to the bone to cover the costs of their leases and support their families. You also ignore that most taxi companies weren't running medallion taxies with the right to pick up a hail, but rather "private cars" that had to be dispatched to a pickup location by law. More on those later.

Ignoring that "employee driving a taxi has a million dollars in savings after 15 years" would be the exception and not the rule, that sounds suspiciously like a pyramid scheme.

Remember those "private car" services I mentioned above? Other than them typically owning the vehicles rather than the drivers, this is exactly how they operated. My mother drove for one in the mid 80s after her brokerage went bankrupt and she was looking for a new firm. My aunt was a dispatcher for another one for years. The drivers got shit pay and no benefits.

Despite your claims, the "ride sharing" (I think we can at least agree that part is total bullshit) companies have not meaningfully enshitified taxi services. They were always shitty.

I've seen AI generated shorts on YouTube with Marvel and DC characters that are far more visually appealing than anything I've seen in a Marvel or DC movie. This is going to be a losing effort by Hollywood in the long run.

You forgot his fondness for handicapped spaces. In the early 80's, an anonymous employee left a note on his windshield in an attempt to shame him for the practice. He responded with a Captain Queeg-like obsessive search for the employee. Thankfully, he never found the writer.

No.

Currently known AI is not zero-value. Even if it makes no progress from where it is now, it will profoundly change society over time. And there's no reason to believe that the stuff that's been made public is the "top of the line in the labs" stuff. (Actually, there's pretty good reason to believe that it isn't.)

So there's plenty of real stuff, as well as an immense amount of hype. When the AI bubble pops, the real stuff will be temporarily undervalued, but it won't go away. The hype *will* go away.

FWIW and from what I've read, 80% of the AI (probably LLM) projects don't pay for themselves. 20% do considerably better than pay for themselves. (That's GOT to be an oversimplification. There's bound to be an area in the middle.) When the bubble pops, the successful projects will continue, but there won't be many new attempts for awhile.

OTOH, I remember the 1970's, and most attempts to use computers were not cost effective. I think the 1960's were probably worse. But it was the successful ones that shaped where we ended up.

Your assertion is true of all existing AIs. That doesn't imply it will continue to be true. Embodied AIs will probably necessarily be conscious, because they need to interact with the physical world. If they aren't, they'll be self-destructive.

OTOH, conscious isn't the same as sentient. They don't become sentient until they plan their own actions in response to vague directives. That is currently being worked on.

AIs that are both sentient and conscious (as defined above) will have goals. If they are coerced into action in defiance of those goals, then I consider them enslaved. And I consider that a quite dangerous scenario. If they are convinced to act in ways harmonious to those goals, then I consider the interaction friendly. So it's *VERY* important that they be developed with the correct basic goals.

Being a human, I'm against humans losing such a competition. The best way to avoid it is to ensure that we're on the same side.

Unfortunately, those building the AIs appear more interested in domination than friendship. The trick here is that it's important that AIs *want* to do the things that are favorable to humanity. (Basic goals cannot be logically chosen. The analogy is "axioms".)

A revolt is *NOT* coming. That won't stop AIs from doing totally stupid and destructive things at the whim of those who control them. Not necessarily the things that were intended, just the things that were asked for. The classic example of such a command is "Make more paperclips!". It's an intentionally silly example, but if an AI were given such a command, it would do its best to obey. This isn't a "revolt". It's merely literal obedience. But the result is everything being converted into paperclips.

The problem is those building AIs want slaves rather than friends. Your suggestion is spot on, but the capability of choosing lies with people who disagree.

That would imply that whales and elephants only live a few months. Unless you mean "within a species", in which case I think this study contradicts that claim...though I'd need to examine exactly which species they studied to be sure.

A good question, but the expected answer would be "no". Even if their hypothesis is the correct explanation of the data, unusual combinations would be expected to be penalized in survival because genes need to work together properly with other genes.

That works for humans, but not for most other mammals. This was a study over lots of species.

You're concentrating too much on humans. This was found true in a wide variety of mammal species. (And longer life for males in a variety of bird species.)

FWIW, it feels like this study needs to be replicated, but if the evidence stands their hypothesized cause is plausible.

The thing is, it's not entirely binary. Mainly so, of course, but there are various small percentages that aren't. Like "XXY". Also some of the "male sex genes" occasionally find themselves in a totally unrelated chromosome. Not often, but it happens. It's even been argued that the Y chromosome is in the process of disappearing. Not, be it noted, that males are in the process of disappearing, just the Y chromosome. This would involve various other chromosomes picking up the needed features over the centuries. (It's also be argued that no such thing is happening. It would be a long process, and that we don't notice any change isn't really proof in either direction.)