There will come a time, and it's almost certainly within a generation from now, when AI and automation will be better than let's say 90% of humans at the things that those humans do in the economy. 90% figure pulled out of orifice. Could be 80%, could be 99%. Doesn't qualitatively matter from a socioeconomic problem and policy perspective.

And the AI and automation will also be better than 90% of humans at whatever new "replacement" jobs people or AIs come up with as a spin-off of the new automated economy.

This is qualitatively different than many previous technological revolutions, in that NO faculty/capability of the average human will be more effective for work than the new automation.

Previously, when strong men wielding shovels and scythes were replaced by combine harvesters, those men could go on to another job, like construction, or plumbing, or computer programming, in a new urban economy. Horsemen and stablehands could become truck or taxi drivers and mechanics or oil workers or gas jockeys.

When hand weavers were replaced by looms, they could go on to become administrative functionaries or apparatchiks in some business or bureaucracy.

Soon, almost all of the replacement jobs or new functions needed in a re-jigged automated economy will themselves be more cost-effectively done by more AI and more automation. That is the difference.

If you get that (how it really is different this time), then you may be agile of mind enough to be one of the last to be replaced. If you can't grasp it, well good luck to you my fine fellow human.

If you're afraid of spreadsheets in the financial industry, you should probably just keep your eyes closed. The entire industry is built on them to a very large degree. I've been in IT for almost 30 years, and over most of that, I've seen Excel spreadsheets used throughout the various accounting departments of companies ranging from small operations of a couple of dozen people up to multinationals with tens of thousands of employees, with some banks in there. Some of those spreadsheets are enormous and are doing complex calculations across sometimes a couple dozen worksheets, where changing one number can take several seconds to recalculate everything even on a reasonably modern computer.

Accurate statement: "Humans invented a way to harness CRISPR/Cas9 to create transgenic organisms"

Inaccurate statement: "Humans invented CRISPR/Cas9"

This isn't complicated.

If there were animals adeptly using fire long before humans existed, we would not call humans the first to "master fire" just because humans understood what they were doing.

Here is a list of all the animals besides humans who have mastered the use of CRISPR technology:

FYI, humans didn't invent CRISPR/Cas9 - bacteria and archaea did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR

It's an antiviral immune system. They bait bacteriophages into inserting their genes into noncoding regions of their genome, and then use CRISPR/Cas9 to match up anything from these noncoding regions that are in their coding regions, and to cut it out.

We humans stole that tech from them :) They mastered it long before we ever existed.

To pay a fitting tribute to the man, I'd drop the coin into a dish of acid, but then instead of saving it while there was plenty of time left, I'd leave it to be slowly eaten away while occasionally dropping in healing herbs and drops of organic fruit juices, and then only try to rescue it once it was far too late

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

I'll just leave this here.

You don't think policies like VAT on private school fees and pushing up business taxes instead of personal ones play well with the typical Labour voter?

They're cratering in the polls anyway for a host of other reasons, and I suspect Starmer is already toast anyway for a host of other reasons (though it's significantly harder in practice for Labour to replace a leader they're not happy with than it is for the Tories), but I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that some of these policies are being chosen because of their political alignment.

Unlock all interactions? No. Unlocking a specific interaction? Maybe.

For common uses (like the public web), the most likely approach to decrypting a specific interaction is to break the RSA (cert-based) on the outside and then the Diffie-Hellman (ephemeral per-transaction) on the inside, then recover the symmetric encryption key to decrypt the rest of the conversation. But this is not trivial, and it requires more work than to just toss the transaction into the quantum computer.

The ephemeral layer is where things get harder. Even if you can derive the RSA key on a regular connection, you've got the first layer, but the DH layer is redone for each new connection. (Some sites don't use DH, or are vulnerable to downgrade attacks where DH isn't used, but DH is pretty widespread.) Every ephemeral negotiation has to be individually cracked. Tor uses DH or x25519 on all connections, so each has to be individually cracked. It is expected that breaking an individual 2048-bit RSA or DH encryption would take several hours if one had a quantum computer of sufficient power. Cracking 3072- or 4096-bit RSA/DH will take even longer, if it's even possible on the same systems. However, we appear to be a long way from such capabilities, and the NSA isn't likely to use it to break arbitrary Tor connection encryption, saving it instead for much more practical items. As soon as the NSA has practical quantum computing, it's going to have decades of backlog to go through just for the international signals, and getting anything moved up in line is going to need a damned good reason.

They appear to be playing heavily on the politics of envy. Look at some of their education policies, for example, or the way they treat small businesses and the people who run them. They don't seem to want to pull up the less fortunate if they can be busy pulling down the more fortunate. It's not a good look if you actually want a successful economy, but it plays well to their base.

I agree with you that they seem to be all over the place in policy generally, and after trying to give them a fair chance in the early months, I now have a fairly low opinion of them (with the odd exception in Cabinet who does actually appear to be at least recognising the real problems and trying to do something about them, which I can respect even while thinking little of their party politicians and government as a whole).

You're right about the investment culture as well, but presumably if we're talking about entrepreneurs who have already been successful and are looking to move elsewhere, that's of limited relevance unless they're planning to start at least one more business after they arrive, so in this particular debate, I doubt that is such a major issue.

While we're hardly Russia, our democratic and stabilisation credentials are looking more shaky than ever as well. Our electoral system produces results very far from proportional. One of our two traditional main political parties is now essentially irrelevant. The other, which currently holds power, is breaking all the wrong records and is widely expected to suffer severe losses at the next election already, barely a year into their term. Waiting in the wings (and currently leading by a very wide margin in the polls) is the nascent far right populist party that has become the default protest vote. It looks scarily like that party might actually be pulling so far ahead (whether thanks to their own merits or, like the present incumbents before the last election, because the government of the day is so unpopular) that even with the usual reversion towards traditional voting patterns when a real election happens, they might still win. And the prospects of what happens next in that timeline are truly terrifying, particularly for anyone who isn't a white British citizen from birth.

As a Brit, I was surprised to see the UK as a destination of choice.

The current Labour government here often seems to be criticised for being ideological and not pragmatic. In particular, they seem to prefer policies that tax "the rich" and businesses in one way or another, yet not large, relatively wealthy groups like pensioners or the homeowners who have lucked out and now live in a million-plus property that most younger people will never be able to afford.

There's also quite a lot of red tape for businesses here, maybe not compared to some of our neighbours in Europe, but certainly compared to places like the US and probably parts of Asia too.

Obviously some of this is politics and maybe the policies are not so surprising coming from a party that in theory represents the working class. However, it is surprising that entrepreneurs would be attracted to a culture like this at a time when we expect to have this government for another four years still.