You mean every rich one who needs an organ transplant getting an organ transplant. That's why the playing field is so uneven: it would be a direct transfer of health to the wealthy.

Oh --- just in case you're reading this, dad, I know that's not all you do! It's just the part I like describing the most!

My dad was laid of after many years as a developer/technical writer/manager at the same company when he was in his early 60s. After roughly a 6-month job search, he found a great position as an "automation engineer" (he basically wanders around looking at people's processes and then automates the boring parts for them). So hang in there, it can be done. If you just start from the assumption that you have to prove to them you've gotten wiser and smarter with age rather than getting "set in your ways", that could probably help.

Sure, this isn't 'the end of it, but these kinds of events are symbolic of the direction the country is moving. A few states trying it out here and there, pretty soon Iowa will be doing it and then it will be all over.

I don't see why it matters if I get up at 6 or at 7. I know a lot of people who hate it so much they constantly talk about "real time" vs. "government time", but I see it as all "government time". They're just labels so we can manage to meet up with people. The thing I really care about is, why can't we switch to a decimal time system? That would be a lot more functional.

The estate's claim that the use of the name infringes on their rights (which is a patently ridiculous claim, in my view) is apparently quite consistent with R. Buckminster Fuller's views --- supposedly he would claim credit to his student's work but saw himself as simply protecting his own intellectual property by so doing.

I'm confused --- how did you know which party was represented by the loon and which by the fruitcake?

It's more a comment on society in 1951, since that's when the story on which it was based was published...

Well, seeing as how Idiocracy is fiction, I really don't see that as good evidence of anything. And even if IQ tests are really being dumbed down now --- which I doubt --- I doubt it was occurring already in 1951, when the short story on which Idiocracy was based was written.

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.