Maybe they were; at this point they seem to be reduced to trying to invent a more compelling form of interactive pornography that they can sell subscriptions to. Color me underwhelmed.

Perhaps it was referring to golems? That idea dates back to 400-500 BC, although really they behave more like traditional computer programs than anything we'd currently consider intelligent.

I don't need an AI to write my code, since I can write code myself. That said, it could be nice to have an AI inspect my code and point out anything it suspects might be a bug... there are already lots of static analysis tools that do this sort of thing and they are great, but I think AI might be able to find different classes of bug that are beyond the capabilities of static analysis.

Going a bit further, what would be even more useful is an AI that can run my program and exercise its GUI (or fuzz its inputs) and monitor the resulting behavior the way a human would, to look for faults during execution. Human-driven SQA is always a lot of tedious work, and a production bottleneck.

The Rastafarians have the distinct disadvantage of being recent, being well studied historically, and having been denounced by the person they consider their figurehead.

America was founded mostly by religious fanatics escaping countries that were either less fanatical or that pushed different fanatical beliefs. The result was a higher per capita fanaticism than Europe during that time period. From a higher starting point it takes longer to get to any particular lower point.

There are probably other reasons, perhaps in the US there's less punishment for believing silly things.

The Gospels are deliberately constructed fairy tales formulated to fit into cultural religious beliefs popular then.

There is no evidence for resurrection, all that exists now are writings (which are not evidence) and proven frauds like the Shroud of Turin.

Richard Carrier has published what is currently the best summary and evaluation of Christian claims. In short, the odds of Biblical Jesus ever existing are at best 1 in 3.4; the chance of resurrection being true is 0. (approximations based on my watching Carrier's youtube videos)

You might find Answer by Fredric Brown entertaining. It's only a page long; well worth the time.

How has porn corrupted open heart surgery?

Ignoring the religious aspect, America has twice the per GDP generosity of the 2nd most generous country, New Zealand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Another reference puts the US at number 6, behind a very peculiar list of countries.
https://worldpopulationreview....

It's a lot easier to be charitable when you're rich, and the US is rich.

If you want to know when the AI bubble has burst, watch for Facebook to announce that it's changing its name to "AGI LLM" or something. That's the official signal.

... then literally constructing a false God for Christians to worship is as good an approach as any.

If I'm a perfect teacher, teaching 17th century French literature to one human and 9 golden retrievers, they should all get A grades?

Alas, some of the elites go into politics and are rewarded for their corruption and dishonesty, like a certain now deceased Massachusetts Senator.

In a fission nuclear plant, nuclear fuel is used to generate heat to boil water to run a steam turbine.

That's all well and good, but there's no reason the heat has to come from nuclear fission; any similarly reliable heat-source would do just as well. Perhaps there are cheaper and safer ways to obtain the required heat? You can do a whole lot of drilling with $80,000,000,000 dollars, especially since without any radioactive material to worry about, you don't have to spend all that money on security, failsafe backup systems, and long-term waste disposal anymore.