Further, their argument for not granting to the AI itself wasn't so much that the AI isn't human, but that the AI would not be motivated to work harder if it were given exclusive rights.

I start writing, with stubs, fill them in, realize I did things wrong and replace/refactor over and over. It's frequent to have duplicate routines using different algorithms that I'll time then choose the winner. But almost always a few lines from the first draft do survive intact in the final project. Especially member variables.

I do think it would be good to require implementing the quadratic equation in Python as a lab during algebra, including if-statements handling the degenerate cases. Even if it's just typing in a pre-written program and running it.

All the birds sing words and the flowers croon, in the tiki tiki tiki tiki tiki room

ChatGPT has quite a bit of intelligence. It can interpret and use idioms. It can map new words to existing concepts. It can cite the correct mathematical formula for most things. It was trained on a huge database. The problem here is it made up results and asserted them confidently without doublechecking them. It's been trained to BS. It hasn't been trained not to BS.

If it had been trained not to BS, before it said anything it would have a valid proof of reasoning for what it was saying. And if pressed it would supply that proof. It appeared to do that, but the facts it cited were made up, not from a database of known facts. Internally it was easy to show it was BS, but it presented it confidently anyhow. I don't know if it internally verified it was BS and confidently lied, or didn't bother to verify at all.

I know both countries are concentrating on shooting each other, but, look, more rockets! Maybe once they can launch things into space reliably they'll switch to using the rockets for something more productive. And they're competing against each other, which is a standard formula for rapid improvement.

More seriously, you want a Dyson Swarm (lots of independent satellites capturing as much of the sun's energy as possible), not a solid sphere. The natural place to put it (once geosynchronous earth orbit is full) is the asteroid belt. The natural thing to make it out of is the asteroids and eventually Mars, which aren't hydrogen. You don't get around to snuffing out the sun and building things out of hydrogen from the sun (and Jupiter) until everyone already lives in space, you've mastered fusion, and everyone's been converted to robots or pure computation so living at 4 degrees Kelvin is no big deal.

Well, clearly, the first step in building something out of Jupiter is to snuff out the sun so that the ambient temperature drops low enough for that hydrogen to be solid.

Big exploration satellites like this would benefit from having a tiny jiggery-pokery robot bundled with them.

This sounds like a task for a tiny cube-sat with some jiggery-pokery tools. It has to reach the satellite eventually, match speed, land on it, then crawl around and do the appropriate poking. It should rely on the Juice satellite for communication once it gets there, and needs hardly any data rates before then, which should help allowing it to be small.

The earth's got a magnetic field. You can use electricity to push against it without sending out any propellant. Googling yields https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.... . The earth's magnetic field is pretty weak so this needs a lot of space. They were using km-long tethers. I didn't read this quantum-stuff article and suspect it's not supposed to be this. I'm guessing it either doesn't work or is magnetic propulsion in disguise. Solar sails are another real propellantless propulsion, working off sunlight and the solar wind.

I agree Google has not done well as a USENET steward (foremost being requiring a Google login to search and read it). But USENET groups pretty much died due to spam (and inability to screen out spam) anyhow.

I'm getting slightly bigger than Texas, or only half as big as Alaska.

Absolutely everyone could be rich! But, only if almost nobody acts rich. It's not the world we live in. But economics would be happy with everyone having a million dollars in their bank accounts so long as very little of it got spent. If everyone decided to spend it all at once then there'd be huge inflation and it would fall apart. For such a world to survive people getting old and dying, there'd have to be a culture of not spending all that money on trying not to die, which we don't have. Passing it on to grandkids would be fine, which would keep such a world rolling.

On the other hand the first thing designer babies will do is eliminate obviously bad genes. I expect the future is going to be harder on obviously bad genes overall, not easier.