There are lots of non-pretty people who dislike that more-pretty people can make an easy living by marrying wealthy partners.

There are lots of non-athletic people who dislike that more-athletic people can make an easy and wealthy living playing sports. Should we then ban the use of photos of athlete's faces?

There are lots of people who can't act and/or aren't good-looking that dislike that actors can make an easy and wealthy living playing roles. Should we then ban the use of photos of actor's faces? Should I go on? Models? Politicians? Firemen? Cats ?

Who will protect our feline friends from the outrageous exploitation of the fact that they are cuter than almost any human who ever lived?

I mean, honey, you may be cute, but cats have you beaten like a grievously dusty rug in that department.

The entire trend of "oh no, can't see / say / look at / admire / leverage" [a photo of a face] is absurd, and would actually be funny if it wasn't so outrageously wrongheaded.

Imagine a big lab where male researchers put playboy pictures on the wall.

That's not even a remotely reasonable take or example for what's happening here. This is a woman's face . It's a "Playboy picture" only in the sense that yes, it appeared in Playboy. It's not a nude. Pictures of, just for instance, Peter Sellers and Steve Martin have also appeared in Playboy. Should we now ban crops of these gentlemen's faces from those photos from appearing in an image processing example? I mean, seriously. It's puerile. Stupid. Regressive. Ridiculous.

Do you think that is professional ?

If a person's face, even, OMG, a handsome man or beautiful woman or other, should be used for an image processing example? Yes. Absolutely. 100%. Is it professional? Yes. Absolutely. 100%. I'm not in the least offended by the idea, nor should I be. It's a picture of a face. As for beauty, again, not offended regardless: male, female, trans, androgynous.

Do you think female researchers would feel comfortable working there ?

With pictures of people's faces on the wall? Even, OMG, women's faces? Well, if they don't, they need some therapy. What they don't need is for the walls to be sanitized so they can pretend that good-looking people don't exist, aren't interesting to others, and are somehow offensive in and of themselves.

What about people who fear cats? Should we then ban all pictures of cat's faces from lab walls and studies? How far do you want to take this? What about agoraphobics? Would you have us ban pictures of the outdoors from lab walls and studies? What about amathophobics? Should all labs have privacy walls so no one sees powders on the bench? What about, OMG, a picture of a pile of powder on the wall? JFC, call the Powder Police immediately.

Look, if you — or whomever — don't want to appear in Playboy or some other publication, I'm 100% behind you. Don't. Don't sign a contract that gives them rights to any photos. As for what other consenting adults have chosen to do, just fuck off, please. The only one in need of your take is you. As soon as you start telling me what I can do with a picture of someone's face, presuming copyright issues are squared away, I'm going tell you to fuck right off.

And what is triggering you ? Are you afraid they're going to come for your porn ?

Quite aside from the neurotic absurdity of the anti-adult-porn movement, no, this is something else entirely. This is moving normal things into the realm of moral panics. It's a bad thing. Entirely. On its own.

Trump and his american taliban allies are the ones you should be afraid of.

I am about as anti-regressive and anti-Trump as you can get. Lefter-than-left in almost all social and economic aspects, conservative only where it seems to me to be logical to conserve already-achieved progress. An outlook that includes conserving the achievements of separating personal liberties from absurd moralizations insofar as we have managed that thus far.

The problem here, what makes it worthy of comment, is that this particular moral panic in-a-teacup is straight-up regressive.

The thing is there is a moral panic

A perfect storm of toxic feminism and neurosis.

The copyright holder is okay with it, and they own the rights to the image. The researchers using it are okay with it. The only "offensive" thing [cough] about this image is that she is beautiful, and that is what is actually triggering these people.

There's no problem with control if you don't give it too much power.

The not-very-subtle issue is that regardless of the limits put on hardware, the people using the hardware may not be subject to effective limits. Which is how we got Putin, Hitler, Trump, Pol Pot, McCarthy, McConnell, Stalin, Mao, etc.

People have a disturbing habit of taking up crazy and harmful ideas regardless of the source. All an AI really has to do is source the ideas. There will be people who will be delighted to take it from there.

Major Pain would like a word.

The point is, that there is no sound scientific basis for claiming "it is all just known Physics" at this time

Since everything, literally everything, we think we understand today has fallen squarely into "100% just known physics", yes, we can have pretty high confidence that the things we learn tomorrow will do the same. I do agree it is (vaguely, hand-wavingly, extremely low-order probability) possible we might need some new physics, but given the physical constraints of our fleshy machinery, (a) it seems really, really unlikely and (b) without discovering a mechanism that requires same, there's little point in claiming that is the case.

At various points in time we didn't understand X, but later on, we did understand X, and every time that threshold is crossed, the answer has been "100% known physics." To say that because we don't understand Y yet means "might not be known physics" seems to slyly imply that it might not be physics at all, which our experience with reality does not support. Just in case you were leaning that way.

While it would be magnificently interesting to find something that does not fall into that classification, no one has done that yet, and there's no particular reason to expect anyone to, either. Because it has never happened.

We don't know how the brain works or what consciousness even is. Until we figure those out there will not be any real progress towards strong AI

It's worth noting that some developments come from somewhat randomly throwing things at the wall to see if they stick. Often, those doing the throwing are just as surprised as the rest of us when something does stick.

Consider: To have a machine (a robot, more or less) formed as human arm throw a baseball well, the usual approach takes some really heavy math. We, on the other hand, do it without understanding that math at all. There are a lot of folks working on various approaches to what we can loosely call "computational intelligence", and it is possible (not saying likely, just possible) that this will result in an intelligence.

After all, that's how nature did it. Multiple times. In multiple ways. Without knowing how intelligence worked.

This:

I thought the shopping bot was at best a slight upgrade on searching Amazon

Talk about setting a low bar... Amazon's search is one of the worst, quite possibly the worst, searches out there. Not only does it not find what you fucking clearly asked to find and is missing even the most basic search amenities such as wildcarding and quoted exact phrasing, it spams the search output with complete product irrelevancies, artificially up-floated overpriced results, and actual advertising for... well, whatever, but most likely nothing to do with your search.

When doing search engines for my clients, I use Amazon and Pinterest as examples of exactly how poorly searching can be implemented.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Meat is defined as the flesh of animals

Yes, and cultured meat is unquestionably the flesh of animals. It's grown directly from real animal cells, real animal DNA, etc. Therefore, obviously, it's meat. Trying to say it isn't is either a demonstration of a complete ignorance of the science, or disingenuous nonsense unworthy of the claimant or those the claims are being made to.

The USDA's definition doesn't say "has to be from a slaughtered animal carcass."

Fully hyphenated would be better, "Lab-Grown-Meat" or perhaps "Cultured-Meat".

Sure, seems fine. Might want to call the other stuff "Slaughtered-Meat", too. Just so everyone's clear.

Related, I 100% object to calling plant-based products "meat." They aren't meat by any reasonable definition. Calling them meat is outright deceptive. Being a curmudgeonly crank, whenever it comes up in conversation, I say, "Oh... you mean salad. :)

So banning the use of the word "meat" with respect to lab grown would be a fine move to avoid possible consumer confusion. Call the lab grown somethings else.

That makes no sense at all. You're saying "let's not call meat, meat."

Just call it "Lab-Grown Meat" or perhaps "Cultured Meat" as these accurately describe what it is and provide a clear distinction for those who are concerned with it, and go on with progress.

Buy an EV and keep meat on the menu.

The objective — far from met as yet — is to keep meat on the menu; the idea is to get animals off the menu.

And yes, by all means, EVs are the obvious way forward. But moving to an EV represents a major change in consumer habits, at least in the USA, and it's going to take a while both to achieve consumer buy-in and to see the charging infrastructure become ubiquitous. Plus, replacement cycle times have extended because vehicles are lasting somewhat longer and replacement costs have risen for similar vehicle types.

...maybe Slashdot could get their help prevent preventing duplicate articles just hours apart?

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Visually? Zero. That's not how my mind works.