>OTA updates cost automakers $66.50 per vehicle for each gigabyte of data, Harman Automotive estimates.

What nonsense. When Tesla sends an update. it comes in over the internet, to my house and onto the car via wifi. I'm guessing Tesla isn't paying $66 per gigabyte for their ISP service and neither am I.

Not really. It really *IS* a danger. IIUC, however, currently most of the things it predicts don't really work. (This is also true for professional organic chemists!) So it's going to be something expensive to implement...and require a bit of research (i.e. actually building stuff and testing it).

OTOH, bacteria have been doing this research as long as they've been around. So don't immediately freak out. (Most of our fancy medicines are just tweaks on the bacterial research projects.)

My wife used personal pronouns when talking of the car. (OTOH, she also used to say, when driving, "the cars knows the way to" any favorite location.)

Don't read too much into the use of particular pronouns.

Pigs are relatively large animals. Small islands don't support enough genetic diversity. (Well, that's my guess. Perhaps there's another answer...like small islands don't have multiple water sources or something.)

Whatever the reason, the fact remains. Possibly small islands are inhabited by people wherever it's possible to live. Small narrow islands don't have much interior.

You need to study pacific island ecology. There are reasons why many were cannibals...the only proteins available were fish...and most of those are low fats. Topical plants produce lots of carbs...and not much else. (Yeah, they imported pigs onto many of the larger islands, but most of them are too small for that.)

In a song from the early 1950's ("The Roving Kind") a man being a politician is used to justify the claim that he's a "good and righteous man". (But that may be a hang-over as it's a rewrite of a song from much earlier that I don't know.)

Health coverage is a good idea. Insurance is the wrong model. It should be more like clean water or garbage collection, a "public good".

Well, this is a bit old, and may not apply anymore, but you used to be able to backup entire disk partitions from Linux on the Apple. (But that might have been from a live CD, I don't remember.)

To the extent that I've been able to check their predictions, they have checked out, or been surpassed, so far. Admittedly this is a short time to check. Exponential curves are hard to envision, and the question is always when they will level off...but I see no obvious reason to expect the curves to have already leveled off.

It would, indeed, be *highly* preferable to pause, or at least slow, AI development in order to design and implement safeguards. But there are multiple groups striving to capture the first-mover advantage. Anyone who slows development will be bypassed. And they aren't all under the same legal system, so that approach won't work either.

Consider https://ai-2027.com/ , That's a scenario that currently seems a bit conservative, if you check the postulated timeline against what's been (publicly) happening, though I expect engineering problems to slow things down at some point. Read both suggested endings (and the caveats). In that scenario cluster, the US dominates if AGI occurs before 2030, and China dominates if AGI occurs much later.

It would clearly be better for the US, China, and the corporations to agree to a set of safety rules. My imagination, however, isn't flexible enough to imagine them actually doing so (as opposed to promising to do so, which they might well do).

FWIW, it's not a democracy. It's *called* a "representational democracy", but the name is not the thing. I've never had a Representative or Senator who represented my opinions. I think it *is* a republic...at least under a wide definition of that term.

For that matter, I don't believe that a democracy can actually exist among more that about twice Dunbar's number of people. Also, democracies are a bad idea. Constitutional guards are necessary...but how can they be enforced? Britain is called a monarchy, but I think it may be closer to a democracy than the US is.

If I can't buy a book, I won't rent it. I hate DRM.

Sometimes that makes sense, but meiosis and selection is generally a better approach. OTOH, it's not clear that this approach involves meiosis. But (IIUC) all current genetic surgery approaches have a high error rate, so selection would still be needed.

What they need to do to make this reasonable is grow an egg cell from some stem cell. It *should* be possible, but if anyone's working on it, I haven't heard about it.

Agreed, but I don't think any of the existing studies have actually done this. And it would be extremely difficult.

(OTOH, yes, there is no evidence to support the conjecture that they are causally related to the increase in cancer. Though I suspect that there might be a strong causal correlation with cellphones being used after a cancer diagnosis.)