In a song from the early 1950's ("The Roving Kind") a man being a politician is used to justify the claim that he's a "good and righteous man". (But that may be a hang-over as it's a rewrite of a song from much earlier that I don't know.)

Health coverage is a good idea. Insurance is the wrong model. It should be more like clean water or garbage collection, a "public good".

Well, this is a bit old, and may not apply anymore, but you used to be able to backup entire disk partitions from Linux on the Apple. (But that might have been from a live CD, I don't remember.)

To the extent that I've been able to check their predictions, they have checked out, or been surpassed, so far. Admittedly this is a short time to check. Exponential curves are hard to envision, and the question is always when they will level off...but I see no obvious reason to expect the curves to have already leveled off.

What does Brexit have to do with their debt levels? Debt-to-GDP has been climbing across the EU as well, with the average debt over 88% of GDP now. Germany is the lowball figure among the major powers in the union at 68%, with with the other big boys... France, Spain, Italy... all at well over 100%. High debt is endemic throughout nearly every first world power, especially in the West. Why Britain is being singled out here is strange. The EU members with relatively low levels of debt are, ironically, the ex-Communist states (see the same link above). It's all of Western Europe that's been living it up on credit.

It would, indeed, be *highly* preferable to pause, or at least slow, AI development in order to design and implement safeguards. But there are multiple groups striving to capture the first-mover advantage. Anyone who slows development will be bypassed. And they aren't all under the same legal system, so that approach won't work either.

Consider https://ai-2027.com/ , That's a scenario that currently seems a bit conservative, if you check the postulated timeline against what's been (publicly) happening, though I expect engineering problems to slow things down at some point. Read both suggested endings (and the caveats). In that scenario cluster, the US dominates if AGI occurs before 2030, and China dominates if AGI occurs much later.

It would clearly be better for the US, China, and the corporations to agree to a set of safety rules. My imagination, however, isn't flexible enough to imagine them actually doing so (as opposed to promising to do so, which they might well do).

FWIW, it's not a democracy. It's *called* a "representational democracy", but the name is not the thing. I've never had a Representative or Senator who represented my opinions. I think it *is* a republic...at least under a wide definition of that term.

For that matter, I don't believe that a democracy can actually exist among more that about twice Dunbar's number of people. Also, democracies are a bad idea. Constitutional guards are necessary...but how can they be enforced? Britain is called a monarchy, but I think it may be closer to a democracy than the US is.

If I can't buy a book, I won't rent it. I hate DRM.

Notions of "noon" is a relic of a preindustrial lifestyle.

Accenture Makes Room for AI With Thousands of Layoffs

Salesforce CEO confirms 4,000 job cuts ‘because I need less heads' with AI

Glassdoor and Indeed announce layoffs, reportedly due to AI

AI-driven job cuts may be underreported

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says company will cut jobs amid AI boom. It's already happening at Microsoft.

A cursory Google search in the News column will give you an endless line of links.

You can say "Tis but a flesh wound!" if you like, but I see limbs being hacked off.

I've made three purchases online this week, one of them large, and in every instance, an AI chatbot with "Powered by AI" was the purchase support. If you hated Clippy, you're really going to hate first level support going forward.

Yep.

Businesses: "We're laying off a bunch of people to replace them with AI"

Yale: "AI has no effect on jobs"

Reference yesterday's post about distrust of elite universities. The whole thing got bogged down into a stupid slapfest about politics, but perhaps the biggest driver of that loss of trust is right here: the perception that academics live with their heads in the clouds, out in Theory World, while reality is much different.

Sometimes that makes sense, but meiosis and selection is generally a better approach. OTOH, it's not clear that this approach involves meiosis. But (IIUC) all current genetic surgery approaches have a high error rate, so selection would still be needed.

What they need to do to make this reasonable is grow an egg cell from some stem cell. It *should* be possible, but if anyone's working on it, I haven't heard about it.