The US military's massive $1.5 trillion budget request for the next fiscal year includes [...] $53.6 billion [...] spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies [...] would surpass most countries' defense budgets and rank among the top 10 in the world for military spending.

56.3 Billion is 3.75% of the 1,500 Billion military budget. 4% of our proposed military budget is MORE THAN MOST COUNTRIES ENTIRE DEFENSE BUDGET, and would be among the top 10 military budgets in the world on its own.

WTF is wrong with our priorities?

Anybody can fork an open source repository. But not just anybody can keep it going. LibreOffice survives not because it got its code from Open Office, but because of the community that keeps it alive.

I think we programmers often obsess too much about who can see or get copies of our code, as if that were the magic sauce. It's not. It's the people behind the code, that is the magic sauce.

Which is a really odd thing to do. SpaceX is successful. Why load up a success with a bunch of failures? Usually, you transfer all of the failures into a sacrificial entity that can declare bankruptcy while leaving the successes running.

Ooop. You are clearly correct.

Much has happened since that initial court filing I referenced... including actual, formal censure of Anthropic by DoD/USG

There are two components: Agency for direct liability, and Negligence for indirect liability.

People have agency. Guns do not have agency. Software does not have agency.

Negligence is broader. A gun owner can be negligent if their gun is improperly protected from unauthorized use. A gun seller can be negligent if they sell a gun to some they should not. A software provider can be negligent if their software contributes in a way they should have foreseen and prevented.

That becomes the question: Should the AI provider have foreseen these events, and could they have reasonably taken action to prevent them.

-If they had no reason to foresee these potential events, then they are not liable at all.

-If they did foresee these potential events and took no action, then they are liable.

-If they did foresee these potential events and took action which was ineffective, then they may be partially liable. How liable will depend on a jury. They may be financially liable. They may be required to take specific actions to further attempt to prevent future recurrences.

The usual result is a settlement where they agree to take specific preventative actions in the future, and making a "donation" to a victim fund, while not admitting to liability.

Even Allbirds, the failed shoe company, is now an AI company. https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

Just as not "anyone" can use power tools to build a house, not just "anyone" can use AI to build software.

I'm not sure why you're making all these points. We don't really disagree.

Schools are mismanaged, not underfunded. We spend plenty, we just don't spend it well.

A lot of people are doing so via Welfare, or Unemployment, or Social Security, or Disability payments... a lot more people would be happy to do so if they had the choice.

I guess we could do both....

My response was not intended to be comprehensive, but more of an illustration. There are a million places wheeled vehicles can't easily go, that are easier for a bipedal robot to go.

If you're right, and there's no reason for these robots, people won't buy them, and the market will speak for itself.

Your understanding is wrong.

According to actual filing by the DOD lawyers -Secretary Hegseth expressed his intention in a social media post, but no such action ever formally occurred. The lawyers claimed that although he appeared to be speaking for the government in his official capacity, he was actually just exercising his first amendment right to state his personal opinion and frustrations.

Indeed, there are whole categories of human inventions that focus on imitation of human or animal capabilities, from hearing to seeing to speaking to flying to swimming to thinking.

You've got a point about knees!

Who knows what the uses could be! There are a billion places cars or airplanes can't go, that a humanoid robot can. How about, up a flight of stairs, for example. A humanoid robot would need far fewer special accommodations than other types of locomotion, especially indoors. If the only thing the robot can do is carry a thing from one place to another, in some contexts that's already amazing.

We've only just begun the development of humanoid robots. Of course there are many problems to solve. There is plenty of time to solve them.

This is an accomplishment worthy of celebration even if the only application, is the knowledge that was gained in the process of making the robot successful.