Given the current government, I don't find that evidence of anything except that somebody in government doesn't like them. Perhaps evidence will show up at the trial, if they actually follow through.

They aren't bullshit concepts, but they also aren't even nearly practical now. Give it time. The Dyson sphere (practical variation) would need at least several centuries to be practical, and even then I think topopolis is a better approach, but it's not a bullshit concept. The "space AI" probably needs sustained space-based industry to become practical, and that, itself, has a few problems to overcome, but it's reasonable eventually.

It's interesting how these multi-billion-dollar AI companies all have such remarkably terrible UI.

But the company providing the technology also has some agency in the matter. How much it's reasonable to argue about,

It's worse than the halting problem, because different cpus will have different errors and error handling.

You mean just like lawyers and programmers?

*That* depends on the movie. Some movies NEED to be long, others need to be cut. But making each movie the same length is a really bad idea. (E.g. I saw a version of War and Peace that was so long it ran in two days. It didn't need to be cut, but the break was necessary.)

Secretary of War is a more accurate description. I agree that legally it's Secretary of Defense, but that has always been a misnomer.

Generating bad pathogens is quite plausible. Generating narrowly targeted ones that will stay narrowly targeted is currently implausible, and probably will remain so until well after the singularity. It would require designing genomes that were strongly error correcting. Elephants and naked mole rats do a reasonable job of that, but I don't think it's plausible for bacteria.

We can't do that yet, and may never be able to be that specific. Trying to do it, however, could be exceedingly dangerous.

N.B.: All bacteria and viruses have a very high mutation rate.

They may not be, but you can bet that SOMEONE is.

Over evolutionary time, starvation was a major killer. It may be rare today (comparatively), but it used to be a real threat. Even today it's not insignificant. And it directly selects for the ability to eat whatever's available.

I think it's more "environmentally induced epigenetic modifications", which *are* a real thing, and sometimes can be inherited...but I don't think inheritance is needed for this argument, as the environment has kept chaning in the same direction. I.e. more fine muscle movement in the upper body, less massive physical effort.

It depends on how you define the term. I tend to consider any choice an act of reasoning (including a simple if test). I know that most people have a different definition, but I can rarely get them to define what they mean by the term. I tend to suspect it's an "I know it when I see it" kind of thing.

Are they not forgotten now? I never heard of them before this story.