I talk to high school teachers all the time, and they tend to be ideologically captured by whatever the next big thing is. There's so much groupthink going on, it's ridiculous. When we complain that students are reaching the workforce without useful skills, teachers love to say, "you see, we're not teaching students the skills that the workforce needs right now... we're teaching them the skills the workforce will need decades from now." This is just a mantra they repeat. So sure, they think AI must be the next big thing and everyone needs to learn it, instead of the fundamental skills that explain how it's all working at the base level.

They're also obsessed with equality to an absolutely absurd degree. One younger teacher we spoke with said, "I don't give homework because it's only the students who are already going well who do the homework, so it doesn't benefit everyone." An older more experienced teacher nearby said, "you understand that we're still going to need doctors in the future, right?" The first teacher looked confused.

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

American big tech knew that they would eventually run out of power for their clouds, social media, video, etc. AI just hastened the problem. They should have been planning for this years ago. Nuclear power was always the solution. Tech companies should have been funding their own nuke plants and lobbying politicians to loosen America’s regulations on building new plants. But they fucked around, didn't plan ahead, and it bit them on the ass. Meanwhile the tech leaders in China saw this coming and worked with their government to crank out nuclear plants to run their datacenters. China has been adding a new plant every 8 months for years, and they're only getting faster at it. America's tech companies are going to lose the AI battle with China, even if China can't get the fastest chips, because Chinese business leaders were thinking ahead instead of thinking about their yacht collections and pleasure compounds.

Obviously, sooner or later we will want to do things that require our physical presence. And be it because the ping time to Mars really, really sucks.

Robots are way easier to engineer for space than humans, even though space is so unforgiving that that's not trivial, either. The same is true for other planets. Building a robot that works well in 0.2g or 5g is an engineering challenge but doable even with today's tech. Humans... not so much.

But let's be honest here: We want to go out there. The same way humans have found their way to the most remote places and most isolated islands on planet Earth, expansion is deeply within our nature.

So, robots for exploration to prepare for more detailed human exploration to prepare for human expansion.

And maybe, along the way we can solve the problem that any spaceship fast and big enough to achieve acceptable interplanetary travel times (let's not even talk about interstellar) with useful payloads is also a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that makes nukes seem like firecrackers.

Has What If? already done a segment on "what happens is SpaceX's Starship slams into Earth at 0.1c" ?

So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

It does not matter how broken the DRM is, circumventing it is still illegal according to copyright laws.

That’s the plan. The AI industry and its dependents will never make enough money to cover their current CapEx and then replace everything in five years when the chips are obsolete and components are breaking down. But if they tank every company that's using AI software will be fucked and the NASDAQ will tank. So the Fed will print a trillion dollars to bail them all out and everyone else will end up with higher grocery prices.

Itâ(TM)s easy to bribe one president to keep the federal government from reigning in a bad corporate actor. Itâ(TM)s hard to bribe fifty state AGs who all aspire to higher office and need big wins to show off on the campaign trail.

Four simple apps that do four different things. Or one bloated app that tries to cram four apps’ worth of functions into one messy UI. Nintendo made the right decision.

You guys get that 4.3% is low unemployment, right? Something like 90% of the last 30 years have had higher unemployment rate than that. It's the participation rate that's dropping, and that's almost entirely a demographic issue... there are more people retiring every year than graduating. The labor pool, as a percentage of the total population, is falling. This was all known well in advance and has been talked about to death. Those lower 4.3% of the population... the vast majority of them are really difficult to employ. A small percentage of people show up work late, or get drunk before they come to work, or whatever, and it's that group that finds it hard to stay employed.

The third solution is a revolution. It’s going to get really crazy when people in the USA realize that there’s not enough food, a couple big Wall Street companies own all the housing, and there are 400 millions guns in private hands.

If you're referring to the chargers, I agree. They have a bad reputation currently. But I think a lot of the effort and resources has to go into more generation and distribution infrastructure, which tends to be robust, but expensive and it takes a while. I do think the AI boom is going to leave us with a lot of unused electrical capacity, and I think that's a good think for EVs.

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

I work in the automotive industry. Two years ago the attitude across the automotive industry was that whole industry was switching to EVs and it was all expected to happen at a completely unrealistic pace. There was still a ton of charging infrastructure to build out, but the industry was expecting high double-digit growth and a rapid phasing out of gas vehicles within a few years. It was absurd at the time. Then a couple years later and the whole industry has flipped (yes, this has a lot to do with government subsidies and Trump winning the election) and now everyone thinks EVs are "dead". This is, of course, just as silly as the continual proclamations that the PC market is dead. In reality, the EV market will continue to exist and mature, and with a number of really promising battery technologies in the pipeline, not to mention a massive build-out of electrical generation capacity to support an AI future that's primed to burst for a few years, there's actually a bright future for EVs. Just not on the ridiculous timeline that everyone was thinking two years ago.