In addition, the part of that money spent on computer centers will be useful even if AI doesn't pan out. It's not like investing in tulip bulbs. If AI doesn't pan out, it will just take a few years longer to pay for itself.

That said, AI will pan out. Even if there's no further development (HAH!) the current AIs will find an immense number of uses. It may well be "growing too fast", but that's not the same as worthless. (But expect well over half of the AI projects that are adopted in the next few years to fail. People don't yet understand the strengths and weaknesses. Unless, of course, AGI is actually developed. Then all bets are off because we REALLY don't understand what that woud result in.)

It's going to take more than one more efficient algorithm. OTOH, there've already been improvements in more than one algorithm. Nobody knows how far that could go, but the best evidence is that it could get a LOT more efficient. (Consider the power usage of a human brain...it uses a lot of power for an organ, but not really all that much.)

I'm guessing this is a summary:
Banks are legally allowed to loan more money than they have in deposits...to a degree. They've occasionally been found to go well beyond that limit. And they aren't carefully audited often enough.

Whether that's an accurate summary or not, it's true, if a bit shy on details. (I don't know the details this decade. But there probably haven't been any basic changes in the last few decades.)

Are they vagrant if they aren't moving around?

That's a real problem, but it ignores that the labor statistics are manipulated for political ends, so you can't trust them.

It's not at all clear to me that we currently have low unemployment among those who would be seeking jobs if they thought they had a chance. (Once you've been unemployed for a while I believe they stop counting you. Admittedly, it's been over a decade since I looked into that.)

"Oath of Fealty" wasn't a dystopia, it was an attempt at utopia, that wasn't working out all that poorly. Nobody who didn't want to take part was forced to do so. Some people liked it and other people didn't. A few people hated it. The viewpoint character's assessment was (paraphrase)"not all cultures need to be the same".

Sorry, but a sawtooth wave is full of singularities, not that we can generate a true sawtooth wave, but singularity doesn't tell us we don't know what's going on. You need a larger context to know if and what it means. IIUC Hawking believed that the black hole singularity would never actually be reached, even on an internal frame of reference...that uncertainty would prevent that from happening. A singularity just means that the projection you're making stops working. If we're talking about the space-time of a black hole, I think this means we can't predict what happens, but I wouldn't bet against Hawking.

IIUC, it doesn't actually have a singularity, it will just eventually have one after an infinite amount of time (as measured from outside). And when the singularity happens the laws of physics break down...so nobody know what it looks like from the inside. But the precursors to the appearance of the singularity are such that there won't be any observers, even in the Quantum Mechanics sense of observer.

Dark energy isn't a theory, it's just a name. A name for "something with these particular properties". My quibble is that those properties don't seem reasonable. We can't measure the expansion of the universe with one number if it's not expanding the same rate everywhere, and it shouldn't be. Also the measured rate of expansion is ... well, it has pretty large error bars, because our ways of judging distance aren't that precise. And don't always agree. And our ways of measuring expansion depend on sparse measurements...which is fine for a uniform surface, but that doesn't describe the universe. Remember that the rate at which time flows should vary with the density of the matter in the area.

If it did, I'd guess Aristarchus didn't account for Jupiter's effects.

FWIW, epicycles can match Newton's math for accurate predictions, it just gets a lot more complicated. And isn't as theoretically elegant. (I'm not sure it couldn't be made to handle the deviation of Mercury's orbit. It's quite good at ad hoc adjustments.)

Yeah, but what is the certainty? I'd ask for error bars, but that doesn't directly apply to a theory.

There is, indeed, evidence that the universe used to be expanding quite rapdily, but "inflaton" particles feel quite ad hoc, and thus not to be trusted. And while the expansion theory is consistent will all the evidence, I'm not sure what the error bars are on a lot of those measurements. Perhaps it tends to expand sinusoidally, or even at random times and places...how would you test? Different groups using different measures have come up with different answers as to the rate/consistency of the expansion. This makes me feel that any strong belief in any explanation is probably at best premature.

In fact, I believe that any universal rate of expansion is incompatible with general relativity. Not only would it need to vary with the density of the matter locally, but it seems to require a universal frame of reference.

In addition to the other objection, "low level heat" is a useful commodity. Why not use it rather than throwing it away.

Waste from a molten salt reactor should be fairly stable. Put it in the center of a glass brick and use it as a low level heat source. (Actually, that's what I think they ought to do with most reactor waste except the stuff that's too hot for glass to hold. And you might need a couple of barriers within the glass. Glass would stop alpha and beta cold, but some gamma might need a lead foil screen.)

Yes, there's a paper saying that given enough centuries the waste will slowly leach out. But the level of the radiation emitted would be less than the rock it was concentrated from. The only problem is the rate of release, and if you dilute it enough the problem disappears. (Either that, or nobody should live much above sea level.)

Scale *will* have its own challenges. So will maintenance. This is an "always true". They may well but soluble, but that sure isn't guaranteed.

IIUC, they're talking about turbines, so probably not fuel cells. (And fuel cells have their own problems, which is why they aren't more popular.)