If the AI were consistently accurate (meaning it summarized well the reliable web pages), it wouldn't be too bad. But it isn't even remotely accurate much of the time.

You do realize that there are lots of Biblical (New Testament) texts between those years, right? Mostly fragmentary, but not differing substantially from later complete texts.

The same apostles who ran away and hid when Jesus was arrested? The same apostles who (as far as we know) paid with their lives for their beliefs?

The elders in the Temple did not seem to think so.

Indeed! To have been critiqued by Plato might well have been an honor, sort of like having one's math critiqued by Euler.

"Berated" is your interpretation. Did you go and read the transcribed scrolls in their original Greek? Plato's critique may well have been the same sort of thing your high school music teacher would have done for your playing of a musical instrument.

I could see an interesting SciFi story coming out of your Mars colony scenario. Leave out the whip, since that's not a necessary part of slavery. But what recourse would a Martian colonist have if they didn't want to work for the system? And how does this differ from slavery? Entered into voluntarily in the first generation, I suppose, but with no option of exit, and no choice for succeeding generations until the population grows much bigger.

You're assuming that critiquing someone's performance is being a "prick." I guess you've never had a school teacher mark up your papers?

Nonsense. The economic output of prisoners in no way exceeds or even equals the cost of their imprisonment. So imprisoning an additional person is economically negative, not positive.

Plato was in Greece, which was not at the time part of the Roman empire. Do you know what conditions were like for slaves in Greece? (I do not, so this is an honest question.)

You need to get rid of LLMs as the be-all end-all of AI. Or at least supplement them with something that doesn't hallucinate so much.

As someone who used the web before Google (even before Alta Vista--do you remember Gopher?), search engineS are absolutely necessary; I see nothing of "MBA stupidity" in this.

Notice the 'S', I'm all for multiple search engines--if that's your only point, then I am misunderstanding you. But obviously Microsoft's search engine is *not* the only one around (Microsoft is not a monopolist in this domain). Indeed, while I use DuckDuckGo (which IIUC runs off of several engines, including Microsoft's Bing), there are times--particularly when my search is highly technical (such as linguistics) when I have to resort to Google for better results. But I'm glad Google is not the only game in town.

In sum, I don't see anything in the stuff quoted from the Microsoft person that implies *Microsoft's* search engine is anything other than a replaceable *search engine*. What I do see is a realization on his (her?) part that the results we get out of chat bots, no matter whose chat bot we're talking about, need to be referenced--at least the current generation of AI tools is far to prone to hallucination, and the only way to stop that at present is to reference the results back to a "real" web page. I only wish other AI promoters had this same humility.

Dr. Richard Kimble.

"Mars is full with underground water ice. If you melt all of it you have several oceans." No. Most Martian ice is at the polar caps (although the visible caps are mostly CO2 ice), some at mid-latitudes. And definitely not enough to create one ocean, much less several.

Whether it ever had "an atmosphere similar to earth" is debatable. If it did, it was almost certainly a CO2 atmosphere, like the early Earth, without any appreciable free oxygen.

Top temp: not all that different from Earth. Which means that surface water/ ice is gone.

"Brands have to make risky predictions many months in advance about which items will sell..." Which presumably depends on which fashions come (and which go). If we could just get rid of the silly notion of "this year's fashions", that would cease to be an issue. Are this year's fashions any better than last year's?

And as a boomer, I like that idea, as all my high school clothes can come out of the closet (which tbh they already have done).

Back to the future!