I don't know, I think the definition of AI and the reason some things "have rights" are actually difficult enough concepts that it isn't self-evident that AI have rights.

Hehehe, you haven't heard of the famout MIT Media Lab yet? AC, meet famous MIT Media Lab, home of the Next Big Idea, whatever it is!

I agree with your question, but even if she researched robotics, it wouldn't mean anything. I can't tell you how many grandiose papers exactly like this I have read from early-career social roboticists (many of whom couldn't qualify as roboticists without qualifying the term, granted) seeking tenure. And then someone writes an article suggesting it somehow has policy implications? Next, please.

Any researcher with a narrative could write such a paper, and social roboticist peer reviewers eat it up, so why does the summary make it sound as if there are policy implications?

Yes, or they could use one many widely-available population density maps. This is going to make lots of cool things easier, and I really doubt its going to make terrorist plotting much easier than it already is.

You make a good point if you look at that question on the surface, but I'd argue that the question can't really be answered unless we first ask, "What does it mean to eradicate poverty?" Studies have shown that people feel poor if they are poorer than the people around them. That's why a lot of people feel poor in our society even if they are living in luxury compared to someone on the other side of the globe, or even just on the other side of town. It seems to me like we are trying to increase standards of living consumeristically, and I think that's doomed to failure, plus it often makes me question "What's the point?" Because once we eradicate poverty at one level, there'll be another level to eradicate it on, even if everyone's actually living in comparative luxury. Now, I'm not arguing that poor people are living in luxury, only that I don't see the current methods being successful because even if they were, they would still feel comparatively poor and thus be subjected to the negative health outcomes associated with being under stress due to lack of control, uncertainty, etc.

What if we tried a different tack and, in addition to forms of support like rent assistance, had more widespread programs that would help people, say, develop community gardens and thus be producers (albeit only for themselves and perhaps their communities, unless they got really industrious), thereby raising their quality of living by 1) increasing their access to quality food and 2) helping them to develop a feeling of pride in what they had produced for themselves and their communities? And if people in a community produced different things, they could have engage in bartering and raise their standards of living still higher. Well, we can't do this because it wouldn't be "efficient" --- and of course because it would threaten the businesses at the top.

"More women with more buying power means more demand and more work to fill that demand. Adding more workers should make everyone wealthier. If it doesn't that means there is something terribly wrong with the economy."

Ding ding ding --- we have a winner! I continually hear people claiming that if everyone made a living wage --- so not even if we raised minimum wage by government, but if every worker got together and said, 'hey, let's all refuse to work for wages we can't live on so they have to pay us enough to live on' --- that the economy would break down completely. Whether or not that's true, if a significant proportion of economic participants believe that the economy would literally break down if everyone received a fair exchange for the valuable work they do, whether that's programming software or emptying garbage cans or cleaning hotel rooms, that says to me that there is something terribly wrong with the economy. And the number of people who vote Republican suggests to me that this is not just anecdotal among the people I know, but that a significant proportion of regular joes have been tricked into believing this.

But just in case you happen to be a Ron Paul supporter, I should needle you by mentioning that, according to his website, Ron Paul will be proud to be the president who finally turns out the lights on the irs for good. (and I don't think he means that he will have roboticized the entire facility so lights are no longer needed for business as usual).

Okay, I concede that it could be a mistake to run on the "get rid of the irs platform." But I submit that the reason for it is that simplifying taxes --- not necessarily lowering them, but simplifying them to at least the point of non-absurdity so we can actually talk reasonably about how much we are paying --- would render the irs only necessary in greatly reduced form, if at all. And then we can talk reasonably about how much we are/should be paying.

But jobs are continually being dumbed down to that level. In my town, driving a bus is a student-level job. I don't want some student who only got his license two years ago and is thinking about his chem exam driving a BUS. I want a freaking career driver.

And plenty of places will happily schedule you to juuuuust under the limit of hours where they'd have to start paying benefits, too. So you get no overtime and no benefits, yet you end up working more than a full-time job.

I think you have to actually read his tax reform plan for that to make sense.

(And to be clear, I'm not arguing that there is no cause-and-effect between overeating and obesity, but my anec-data tells me that at least some people that are clinically obese don't eat or worse than more than usual, they just have a completely different body type. So I'm just arguing against applying your assertion to *all* obese people. And your methodology.)

So that's two anecdotes from a pair of the closest relatives you can get...Ima need a few before I find your study to be statistically significant.

Okay, point taken. You're right about the autonomous navigation one, I forgot about DART. And yeah, true, it's a matter of perspective, but I'll concede that one as robot error. Basically, they get to a certain age, and you have to let take responsibility for their own actions... And okay, yeah, Clementine, while not a failure, probably would have observed Geographos had there been a human aboard. So I'll concede that my statement was a bit of a sweeping generalization and scale it back.

*But* a lot of the failures in unmanned flights were simple mechanical failures. And a number of them were definitely human error, like a failure to convert units or a part incorrectly installed.

But, okay, I'll concede your point about AI --- so let's put that budget into AI! :D