I rather suspect that it means "valid under the WIPO" treaty.

To be fair, there are lots of negatives about the Chinese approach. And we're so used to the negatives of the US approach that we almost don't see them...but other people do.

As "dominant world power"s go, the US has been quite lenient. This is known as damning with faint praise. OTOH, China shows every sign of being going to be worse...but probably not worse than Britain was.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.

Yeah, this. If I have to sign up to some site that I don't care at all if it gets hacked, I use a throwaway password. Oh noez, someone might compromise my WidgetGenerator.foo.bar account and generate some widgets in my name, heavens to betsy!

I think your model is only one of several alternatives. I don't foresee a unitary intelligence as likely, but an executive function delegating different tasks to different experts depending on context. And it can't be limited to language, it needs to interact more directly with the physical world. But we're already taking steps in that direction.

Yes, it's difficult. Perhaps it will take awhile. But there's absolutely no reason to expect human intelligence to remain the top measure. (Even now there are lots of contexts where it isn't. Try to out-calculate a spreadsheet. What the spreadsheet can't do is design itself.)

"nuclear startup" are two words that scare the hell out of me when they're put together

Good points, but not necessarily eternal truths. I suspect you could use magnetic fields to strengthen the cable. Of course, that would collapse if the power failed. But perhaps there are other alternatives that nobody has thought of.

Still, my favorite skyhook is the PinWheel, though it needs a hefty mass in a fairly low orbit (as well as long arms that reach into the stratosphere). But you need to lower as much mass as you raise (on the average) or the orbit decays.

Looks like you're implementing LISP.

What I wonder is whether it's any good. Admittedly, I don't wonder hard enough to listen to it, but then I generally (almost always) avoid podcasts.

There will be tools. But there will also be the more general intelligence. One can argue about the time-line, and that's quite reasonable, but denying it requires accepting spiritualism or some such.

For that matter, people are often used as tools. It's not an "either/or" choice.

The only way you could reasonably predict what jobs will be available would be to predict exactly how much more advanced AIs are going to get and how quicly. And any prediction is a "Wild Ass Guess".

FWIW, there's a company in China building humanoid robots for assembly line work. So far it's only sold less than a thousand, so it's probably still in the experimental stage, but if it's "nearly ready" then it will soon be ready.

Now most assembly line work is basically rote repetition, with only a limited number of special-case scenarios, to this is far from a general purpose robot...but it's enough to eliminate LOTS of jobs...if it's cheap enough. And if it is, one can expect incremental expansion into other roles.

It's not going to be an LLM. The LLM is just what it's going to use to talk to you. But "world models" are being built, and that is going to be the basis of real intelligence.

The thing is, it wouldn't help things for one player to quit.

OTOH, as someone else pointed out, the government isn't exactly trustworthy either. (I consider accepting funds from lobbyist groups to be accepting bribes, just like accepting funds from individuals.)

On the third hand, open source approaches can't limit the use to which something is put.

Perhaps the "corporate powers" are the least bad choice...but that sure isn't encouraging.