Think about the incentives involved in the new AI race.

We've inventing a new type of machine. The machines are big and huge and complicated and consume enormous resources, so they're necessarily centralized. These machines are wondrous marvels. You can ask them a question and 9 times out of 10 they give you a relevant and useful answer.

People are naturally trustworthy of machines because we view computers as infallible. If I store contact information in my contacts list and go back and retrieve it later, the information is still there 100% intact. It augments our brains with perfect memory and recall. After all, that's what computers do.

So almost everyone trusts these new machines intrinsically. Few people question the answers that are given, and even if you were a little skeptical, it's much less work to convince yourself that it's probably right than to track down the supporting material.

The organizations that control these new machines have a perverse incentive. They can make far more money by manipulating the answers that the machine produces in subtle ways for their benefit, or for the benefit of their paying clients. "What is the best dishwasher?" "Are there any pharmacies in my area open until midnight?" "Summarize the political platform of candidates X, Y, and Z." "What medication can treat such-and-such disease?" These are all prompts that can be monetized by the AI provider.

We know they will because companies have been inserting paid advertising and results into our search queries and emails for years.

Imagine the power that you wield if you own a machine that everybody trusts implicitly with their most important questions and most sensitive information.

That's clearly what we're building. We can't say we didn't know and weren't warned.

I'm pretty sure zipline would have a lot of incentive to patent it. But you can license patent rights.

I salute the naming committee from that group. Well done.

I'm sure women would have something to say about abortion rights, like they should have them including all rights that men are afforded.

To be pedantic, men don't have the right to an abortion. I assume that's not what you meant though, LOL.

Tinkering with a word guessing machine to see if you can make it smart is like breeding horses to be faster and faster expecting one to give birth to a locomotive. Word guessing machines are cool but they're never going to actually "understand" what they're talking about.

In one sense, taking on any engineering challenge you haven't done before always causes you to learn something new, so there's always progress. In the case of this particular program (Artemis) there's a lot of reason to be skeptical of what we're getting for the money. The original Apollo was done in a hurry with an all-hands-on-deck attitude, and amazing progress was made. When that program ended and the space shuttle program was created, there was less urgency, and politics dug its heels in. The only reason the shuttle program was allowed to happen was because different parts of the shuttle were manufactured across almost all 50 states. That made it inefficient, but also politically possible. The program itself wasn't as successful as originally hoped, and for reference if the cost of 1 kg to orbit on a (partially reusable) Falcon 9 today is $2700, then the space shuttle's cost of 1 kg to orbit was almost $55,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. When the shuttle program was scrapped, funding to NASA for Artemis was only approved on the condition that NASA use all the same contractors and parts that the shuttle did. That's why you have two solid rocket boosters and shuttle engines powering the main stage, and a big orange foam insulated tank. And those 4 shuttle engines are thrown away with each launch. It's the least efficient way to do this, but it's politically possible because it keeps a bunch of money flowing out to almost all of the states. SpaceX is developing a new launch platform called Starship that's supposed to be fully re-usable, and the long term cost of 1 kg to orbit is going to be in the range of $150 (some estimates have it under $100). So the whole Artemis program is at risk of being obsolete as soon as Starship is proven to work. I would argue that it's already obsolete and a spending boondoggle, and I'm a space nerd who loves space exploration.

No it didn't. Nobody in "upper middle class" back in the 50's was "going on a vacation every year to a foreign country." Give me a break. And the general standard of living was much worse, particularly health care. Back in that "golden era" the life expectancy was significantly shorter, everyone smoked, and health care was basically anti-biotics, or nothing. They were still doing lobotomies. And houses were a lot smaller, poorly insulated, almost every kid shared a bedroom with a sibling, you had to wash your own dishes (gasp) because there were no dishwashers. Microwaves weren't a thing. Cribs came covered in lead paint. You were lucky if you had one television, and it was in black and white and got 2 channels. The one thing that an upper middle class family could do in the 50's was buy a new car every couple years, and that's because cars were a lot cheaper as a percentage of income, but they didn't have seat belts, airbags, power steering, and they needed constant maintenance and didn't last very long. Someone making minimum wage today lives better than royalty did hundreds of years ago. Get some common sense and learn about history.

What are you smoking? The median household income in the US is roughly $84,000 a year. That would make $133k very clearly upper middle class. You know that there's more to the US than New York and Los Angeles, right?

This makes you no different than any other creature in this world, and I see nothing wrong with that. You need to do your best to exist in the world as it is, and be realistic about what levers and knobs you can actually adjust.

I assure you that the voters are far more short-sighted than the politicians.

Yes. So?

I already vote green party. I look for practical ways to reduce my carbon footprint.

I'm not going to stop living my life, providing for my family, and making sure my kids have as good of a future as I can manage. And if I'm weighing how much effect I can have on their future by a) putting money towards their education, or b) trying to single-handedly save the planet by spending exorbitant amounts of money on ground source heat pumps, super-expensive electric vehicles, etc., then it's quite obvious that I can do far more good by focusing on helping my immediate family, friends, and community.

How much are we really doing by installing a heat pump water heater vs. everyone else who's pushing crypto-currency mining or AI datacenters, both of which consume enormous amounts of energy for frivolous and/or corrupt purposes?

Honestly, it's completely ironic and sad but the combination of COVID shutdowns plus the high gas prices due to the wars in Ukraine and Iran have at least temporarily cut fossil fuel emissions by more than any other environmental program anywhere or any time.

So piss off already.

This is exactly correct. Do you really want an 11 year old who's confused about their body to be getting answers from strangers in a Discord server or via Tiktok shorts? Because that's what's happening right now. There are some legitimate support groups that operate through these channels, but it's completely unregulated and for every legitimate channel or server there's a dozen distributing made-up or even harmful medical advice. In some cases it's even predators because it's the perfect place to find minors you can start to pry away from their family and friend groups. The social media companies knew this was going on and I can only imagine their legal departments were either screaming about this problem, or being paid to shut up about it.

The CEOs of these companies are trying to justify inflated stock prices that were high based on the expectation of future growth. You don't convince investors that you're still growing by laying people off, so you have to give them some kind of explanation, and AI is convenient. By the time it becomes obvious that AI isn't actually producing the productivity boost that they're claiming, then they'll be on to the next thing. The reality is that the cheap capital that funded the dot com companies through to about 2018 is gone permanently (due to demographic and globalization changes). The valuations will eventually crash. It's just a game of everyone playing chicken to see who sells first.

I agree it would only be a surprise first strike. But if any container ship was potentially hiding a few of these, think of the chaos it would cause in supply chains.

And how is that any different than a nuclear arsenal? It's an attack weapon that's most highly useful in first strike situations. But your enemy probably has a bunch too and they're hard to find and wipe out in a first strike. So the only way to win is not to play.