What's really unfortunate here is that due to OpenAI's drastic exaggeration of what happened here it distracts from the real capabilities here. Being able to efficiently find sources in the literature is an incredibly useful tool. And even aside from that there are now multiple examples where professional mathematicians have used GPT-5 in the thinking mode to make progress on math problems. Nothing as major as any Erdos problem, but still clear use. Terry Tao for example used GPT-5 in thinking mode to help locate a counterexample to a conjecture here https://mathoverflow.net/questions/501066/is-the-least-common-multiple-sequence-textlcm1-2-dots-n-a-subset-of-t. Now, he could have almost certainly done this on his own, but it clearly saved time. Similarly, computer scientist Scott Aaronson used it to get a specific useful suggestion for a function with specific properties he needed that he was then able to use to do a specific thing https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9183. In neither of these cases was anything deeply groundbreaking done by the LLM. But the LLM clearly helped and likely saved many hours of work otherwise. And these systems continue to improve.

Star Trek is definitely not community. It is post-scarcity. The idea of some sort of "post-scarcity" society is itself pretty unlikely, but the broader ideas of a prosperous free society where advanced technology is used to help people, better ourselves and explore the universe is very different than one where drones and self-driving cars are being used by cops for unclear purposes.

This seems like this is going too far in the other direction. The news is often very negative but that's because we don't have headlines like "Last month, more solar power was installed than any other week in history, again for the 40th month in a row." Similarly, many diseases that were death sentences a few years ago have with the advance of modern drugs been turned into manageable illnesses. Cystic fibrosis for example used to kill early almost everyone who has it. Now we have drugs which make people with it likely to have lifespans close to normal. Similarly, HIV invariably lead to AIDS and a functional death sentence within a few years. Modern HIV treatments give people with HIV life expectancies better than a typical person in the 1950s. Lots of positive things are happening even as lots of negative thing are happening also.

I would much rather live in Star Trek than whatever cyberpunk dystopia we seem to be living in. Can the writers please change the genre a bit?

No one said "Doctors know everything." Biology and life are weird and complicated. But anecdote are by nature not as reliable as actual studies. They lack anything like a control, and they involve small groups of people. I'm also not sure why you feel a need to reply with so much vitriol. The primary point I was making is that the literature is mixed in regards to what impact it has. How that turns into claiming that one must be "right" about somethin is beyond me. If we are going to make this personal as you seem to prefer, maybe the problem is that people who aren't very bright have trouble reading actual studies so they like to dismiss them rather than actually grapple with the evidence?

There may be an AI bubble. I'm not sure though why you think this deal is evidence that that bubble is bursting. Do you want to expand on your reasoning?

Whether marijuana helps prevent Alzheimer's or makes it worse is unclear. There are plausible mechanisms where it could do either and the empricial data is itself mixed. See https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/marijuana-addiction/marijuana-and-dementia/ and https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7259587/ for a start. The situation is also complicated for other forms of dementia with small amounts of marijuana use having some evidence of a slight protective effect but heavy usage showing more dementia and early cognitive decline. See https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstract/2832249 https://www.eurekaselect.com/article/138726. The effects here though are small, and given pot's very high increase in heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems, any positive benefit from dementia protection is swamped by those large negatives.

1) We're going to soon have better genetic engineering anyways. 2) The vast majority of people have no problems having kids. 3) Many people who cannot have children who want them cannot have children due to reasons that have nothing to do with genetics. For example, people can have serious injuries to their genitalia. Take for example people who have been injured by landmines or in car crashes. And as emergency care has gotten better, more o those people are surviving. 4) Aside from all the practical issues, maybe let people make their own personal decisions about how to use technology instead of imposing your authoritarian aims about imagined worry which will appear centuries in the future if ever?

Most human generated code is riddled with security holes and it takes a lot of careful work to even clear out the most basic ones. AI generated code is not different. (That said, I would not be at all surprised if this code crashed frequently or had other serious problems. If it can actually turn out a genuinely useful program this way, this would be a major step forward.)

I have a different related concern: As AI becomes used more and more for coding, since those AIs are trained on the massive amount of code on the internet, it will make it much harder for new languages to get attention, since they will not start off with any strong AI assistance. This may lead to effective indefinite lock-in of current major languages.

A two hour smartphone limit would in the US likely be Constitutional since it is content neutral https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/content-based/. A two hour max for specific purposes, such as at most 2 hours of funny cat videos, would not be.

There are at least three different reasons this is bad.

First, this is one more sign (of about 15 court cases at this point) that this court is willing to give Trump massive powers simply because he is pushing for them and they agree with him politically. And there's no reason to remotely think he's going to stop.

Second, it means that the Presidency (already an already too powerful office in the modern form for any one person) is going to be even more powerful under for the first time under a far more authoritarian person without any safeguards in place.

Third, is more subtle: even if we get through this with Trump with only some damage, the long-term damage and threat to stability is massive. In general, parliamentary systems or presidential systems with somewhat weak presidencies are more stable than those with powerful presidencies. One sees this in for example the high instability in many presidential republics in Central America and South America. The standard explanation for this is that when there's functionally a winner-take-all system, the stakes becoming higher and the degree to which any side has an incentive to moderate becomes small. One question then is why this hasn't happened in the US? One explanation is that the US had the illusion of a not deeply strong President, in part because everyone (including the Presidents) agreed tacitly not to push the limits of their authority that much. The precedent breaking nature here undermines that illusion, and makes it more likely that we'll have years (possibly decades) where the Democrats and Republicans will even more than usual treat everything as a zero sum game with no respects for democratic norms.

The bottom line is that everything about this is bad.

My wife works in a library. Some of these people become not just defensive, but outright hostile. Part of the problem is socioeconomic and education based. A lot (not all but a lot) of people using libraries on a daily basis don't have much formal education and have little experience with computers. Much of my wife's work is just helping people do very basic tasks, like showing someone how to open a Word document, or how to download or upload a file for a job application. So for probably some of these patrons, ChatGPT must seem like magic. The interface is simply typing what they want, and even highly misspelled or garbled requests will generate something like a coherent response from it, so they don't even need to know what any icon means. And if one is dealing with people who often literally don't understand the difference between a file stored on a computer and a file on the cloud (to use one common example) then even explaining the idea of an AI hallucination is going to be an uphill battle.

As is the case for almost all international treaties, enforcement mechanisms are limited. Egregious violators will get pressure from other countries. Many countries will depend on citizens to enforce it. For example, in some countries regular citicizens can file lawsuits when their country is not fulfilling treaty obligations. But generally, when countries sign on to international treaties, most involved countries also pass internal legislation to comply with treaty aspects. This is the way for almost all international treaties, and it largely works. People have an idea that international law doesn't work but the vast majority works fine, and we often just notice the serious failures and breakdowns, not all the stuff that is quietly working on a day-to-day basis.

Much of what you wrote is wrong or misleading or more of a rant than anything with content. You didn't respond at all to the point that the environmental damage here is tiny. But I do want to address two specific bits which are the most contentful parts:

This is confused at multiple levels, but does almost touch on a valid point. It is true that a lot of people were awful maskers, and lifted up their masks all the time, or had terrible seals, making their masks not function. And then you had people doing things like wearing masks in indoor restaurants and then taking them off when they sat down to eat as if their dining table was somehow protected. And if you go back to Slashdot, you'll see me explicitly saying that all of this was awful behavior. People failing to mask properly isn't a problem with masks though any more than people dying in car accidents due to not wearing their seatbelts is a sign that seatbelts don't work. And the point about car windows out non-airtight cars misses something we figured out pretty early in the pandemic, namely that outdoor environments in general were pretty safe.

People didn't need a hundred vaccines, but we're still getting new covid variants, and vaccines are still helping prevent people from getting seriously sick. Vaccines worked, and they drastically saved lives. Here is a really good essay about that https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-2-key-facts-about-us-covid-policy which shows how prior to the vaccines, death rates in the US among Democrats and Republicans looked nearly identical and only after vaccines showed up they started diverging. There's one easy explanation for that. And it is worth noting that the author there Nate Silver, generally takes the position (and argues explicitly in that piece) that mask mandates were not substantially effective, even as vaccines worked really well. It may be worth realizing that while you somehow see vaccines and masks as interconnected issues, they aren't, and not everyone falls into the vaccines-bad-masks-bad and vaccines-good-masks-good categories. To use two fun anecdotes: One of the most strict maskers I know was a couple who were highly anti-vax and was also taking HCQ as a preventative. One of the most vocally pro-vax people I know is a Rabbi who despised not getting to see his congregant's faces and was pushing for the vaccines so people would feel comfortable unmasking. Maybe don't treat all matters as some giant soccer game with two large sizes?