"Who's to say it wasn't XYZ?" is classic random-conjecture/fantasy language.

The phrase is inherently vacuous. It doesn't even contain any meaningfully useful logic, because XYZ could be literally an infinite number of things without adding or subtracting any from the potential resolution of the question.
Who's to say they weren't harvested by Shiva?
Who's to say they weren't Raptured by Jesus?
Who's to say it wasn't Shiva pretending to be Jesus?
Who's to say it wasn't Loki pretending to be Shiva pretending to be Jesus?
Who's to say it wasn't Loki pretending to be Shiva pretending to be double-reverse Loki while pretending to be Jesus operating through Mossad?
etc. ad infinitum

Hundreds of thousands of Juries - the Constitutionally-appointed deciders of culpability - have agreed that business owners, tool makers, property owners, and individuals behaving certain ways in public places, are in fact criminally and/or civilly responsible for the damages suffered by victims of their negligent choices. The quote from the AG will be very persuasive to many criminal and civil jurors: "My prosecutors have looked at this and they've told me, if it was a person on the other end of that screen [doing exactly what the chatbot did], we would be charging them with murder."

If you dig a pool in your front yard, put up no fence, invite anyone who wants to come play in your yard, and your neighbor's toddler falls into your pool and drowns, you'll find your culpability in front of a jury won't be summarily dismissed by saying, "A pool is just a place to have fun, it's an inanimate object, not a malevolent intentional conscious murderer. It is not my fault that someone abused the pool's intended function and it accidentally became an instrument of death".

Osama bin Laden was not on any of the planes that flew into buildings. All he did was sit there and help plan and train the people who did it.

Or, you go to a construction demolitions expert and ask him what's the best way to place explosives around the football stadium to make sure the exits collapse first so no one can escape. He looks at floor plans and pics, tells you what supplies you need, where to plant the charges, and how to rig the IEDs to blow simultaneously.
But all he gave you was information, so he has no legal or moral culpability for the death and destruction you cause?

Not for anywhere near the same Comp&Ben scale.
Look around. See the increasing pace of convergence and conglomeration? Less awful companies can't compete. A mission statement of "Don't be evil" only carries you so far.

The real kicker of the absurd "Coal miners can learn to code!" mantra is that we now see it fails both ways -- it's just as absurd to expect a Senior $IT_Job_Title to get laid off and learn to be a plumber crawling through people's attics to connect their new water heater system at age 54.

That's both an incorrect statement and an invalid comparison.

First, people did not lose their horse-related jobs "when automobiles were invented". The transition from horse/oxen power to machine power took 150 years. Jobs and economies gradually adapted over generations as steam locomotion spread, and then again over decades as automobiles spread. Trains and cars didn't take over the world 3-5 years after their major breakthroughs. There were millions of square miles of Earth's land surface where no railroad tracks or roads went, well into the mid-20th century. Even in the wealthy USA, it wasn't until after World War II that one car per household became the default. In the 1940s in the USA South there were still plenty of rural sharecroppers without a personal automobile. Same goes for working class folks in dense metropolitan areas with streetcar systems and city planning that did not yet prioritize cars and parking over all other needs.

Second, the automobile did not eliminate the need for powered motion. It's payload wasn't to eliminate movement. Its payload was to upgrade the method humans used for moving things to a more powerful method of moving things. The same humans were still moving the same things for generations/decades, because those things still needed to be moved. The AI/algo/agents being proffered this year are not saying "We'll take the same humans and give them a more powerful method of producing the same things they have been producing". They're not replacing human-driven horses that cart veggies to market, with human-driven trucks that cart veggies to market. They are making it so the veggies hop off the vines and drive themselves to the market.

I can understand the temptation to say, "Look at history-- there have been several big scares about The End Of Labor, but we always discovered some new market for goods and services several billion people could labor to produce". But this seems akin to saying that since the temperature change from 10C degrees to 25C isn't that bad and was composed of 3 changes of 5C each, that therefore we can confidently assume this pattern will remain true and the change from 25C to 40C will be just as comfortable.

That assumption fails for the same reason the "buggy whip manufacturer" comparison fails -- it presumes that the nature of human beings plays no role in determining whether a result succeeds or fails. It overgeneralizes the wrong rule: "Human metabolism can easily adapt to changes of 15C" instead of "Human metabolism can fairly easily adapt to most temperatures between 10C and 25C without major intervention". In the same manner, your argument overgeneralizes "The average human cognition which could easily adapt from manual labor in the fields to manual labor in the factories, can just as easily adapt to manipulating nuanced verbal abstractions of statistical inference within logic frameworks which update every 3-6 months".

Thus, it is not sufficient to merely hand-wave and say "Past changes have been adapted, so future changes will always be adapted". You must actually enter the fray and argue why the consequences of this particular change is a member of the set containing the consequences of all those previous changes. Otherwise what you have is not an argument, but a belief. Induction is not a proof of reality. Induction is a description of what we have observed, and that if the previous conditions hold, then we have reason to expect our observed event to repeat. But the "if" is doing a ton of heavy lifting.

1) Food
2) Shelter
3) Medicine

Online streams of music, video, influencer crap, etc. can be the new Usenet multipart/MIME attachment delivery method. 300 years ago you tied your real message to the leg of one pigeon and a variety of fake messages to a dozen other pigeons to confuse/delay anyone who might successfully intercept them. Now, with automation, you can have an on-the-fly Distributed StegaSwarm spread out across thousands of posts on hundreds of different platforms, among millions of other red herrings. You seed the twin sender and receiver AIs with a unique, immediately-erased prompt key that then undergoes spooky-coevolution-at-a-distance which is time-sensitive, such that finding the parts and reassembling the message can only be done by that exact starting-state AI using that exact starting prompt at a specific time interval determined by the combination of the previous two items, so you have built-in MFA. If someone else could capture and replicate your AI, they would still need the exact prompt. If someone was able to kidnap and torture the prompt out of your prompt engineer, they'd still need the exact AI. If someone captured both your seedkey input prompt and a starting disk/state-image of your AI, they'd still need to wait for the recursion evolution to hit its target trigger before unlocking the payload. They can't speed it up, because the tempo is built into the recursion as a governor, checked against outside references, so speeding it up destroys the fidelity of key reproduction, and creating an entire simulated Internet to lie to the algo is resource-prohibitive and runs into paradoxes involving self-containing infinite sets.

Man I shoulda stopped at a double espresso today.

It's a reference to "The Walrus And The Carpenter". An LLM could produce it from a human prompt, but the lateral-thinking inspiration to use that poem for this circumstance is still distinctly human.

As I understand it, your essential argument goes like this:
We must maintain our skills and capacity to produce future machinery/materials of war, to the point of practicing those constituent skills and investing/reserving in facilities/resources for the potential of scaled-up war capacity -- even if those skills and capacity do not otherwise provide economic value greater than other things we could do with those resources, or the things produced by those processes have insufficient market demand.

Is that correct?

By your rationale, the US should annually spend billions of dollars to build drone factories and data centers, and spend billions of dollars to pay people to work in those factories/warehouses churning out otherwise excess inventory that just sits in warehouses. Because adaptive algorithms will control semi-autonomous drone swarms when the next true world war breaks out.

I think the guy is morally and intellectually repulsive. But he's not a dictator.
He won the election, and all the bonkers crap he is doing is either mostly a direct repeat of or slight extension of executive power expansion that has been gradually increasing for decades. In 2 years 9 months, possibly sooner, he will leave office.

No single person should ever have as much power as has been vested in the Executive, and the federal agencies he commands, over the past several decades. The solution to Trump isn't "vote blue no matter who", which is indistinguishable from Fallout Vault-Tec lemmings conditioned to say "When things look glum, vote Vault 31". The solution to Trump is to drastically limit the power of the Executive, return those powers to their appropriate legislative domain, and IMO eliminate the hopelessly archaic and obsolete size limit on the House - the latter of which is a huge reason your representatives no longer seem to actually represent you.

(You don't know them and they don't know you. The population has long ago outgrown the 435 cap, and that cap is what makes gerrymandering possible. Eliminate it and the math makes gerrymandering virtually impossible.)

If there are ants in your kitchen, before you spray poison all over your countertops, clean all the surfaces and plug the holes in your structure.
The Trump administration is the inevitable result of letting the country be ruled by the Biden administration, the Obama, the Bush, the Clinton, etc...
When you imbue so much power into one role, you WILL attract these two kinds of people:
A) the kind of narcissist who craves power and attention. (current president)
B) a prop, an empty shell that smiles nicely for the camera while their handlers maneuver everything behind the scenes. (the previous president)

The more power the executive accumulates, the more crazy A will get and the more fragile B will get. Period.

Uh, Houston we have a bluescreen.

Surely they're on the LTSB (or whatever it's called in this quarter's Brand strategy).

Yes.
Getting rear ended by a 30 ton truck while strapped into a car with specifically-designed structural safety measures is, unsurprisingly, several orders of magnitude safer than getting rear ended by a 30 ton truck while standing upright picking your way across multiple lanes of traffic. For a very large number of medical/physics reasons.

Do you want to end up tortured forever like Prometheus? Because this is literally - and I mean LITERALLY - how you end up tortured forever like Prometheus.

Remember, kids! A technology that can keep you alive forever, can be used by debtors, governments, and other similar psychopaths to keep you alive. Forever .

"Mercy! Mercy! Even if you are only one more dream, have mercy. Take me on board. Take me, even if you strike me dead. But in the name of all mercies do not fade away and leave me in this horrible land."
        Lord Rhoop

The chemist's statement is logical, and clinical.

COMPARE WITH:
"We found three tons of nicotine in human brain tissue. That's awful! We know that nicotine is a toxin. [time passes] It turns out our data about the level of nicotine in brain tissue was overstated. But (we know that nicotine is a toxin so) there should be none in the brain."
"We found 3kg of Cesium-137 in human brain tissue. That's awful! We know that radioactive isotopes are highly destructive to animal life. [time passes] It turns out our data about the level of C-137 in brain tissue was overstated. But (we know that C-137 is highly destructive to animal life so) there should be none."

The possibility that levels of plastic in human tissue are lower than previously measured, does not in any way affect any clinical experiments or other statistical analyses showing a clear causative link between plastics in tissue and poorer health outcomes. She is speaking to that. Her statement does not say there should be no plastics in existence, nor does her statement rely on or necessitate the elimination of plastics. We can want to make AEDs with plastic casing so they are lightweight and portable in order to save lives, and simultaneously say "there should be no plastic from the AED floating in my cerebrum after I use it to save someone's life".

To make her statement illogical, you would need to have evidence to invalidate any studies that established a causative link between the presence of plastics in animal tissue and an increase in disease/mortality.