Did they factor in the sudden drop in global cloud coverage over the oceans?

Banning high-sulfur fuels in cargo ships was a good move when it comes to reducing acid rain - but it became obvious very quickly that the ocean-spanning clouds seeded by the resulting sulfur dioxide had been causing a powerful global cooling effect, and removing them is nearly doubling the rate at which the planet is warming.

Personally, it seems to me like maybe we should roll back the new ban until we've got the warming under a bit more control. Is reducing acid rain for a few decades really worth cutting the time we have to avert catastrophic global warming in half?

Instead, the only proposals I've seen have been adding new, expensive additives to the fuel to get a similar effect. Which realistically seems VERY unlikely to happen, especially compared to the ease with which everyone would be happy to go back to the old cheap bunker fuel.

Maybe you'd prefer the word "being" to "entity"? Like I said, the words are squishy around consciousness, you kind of have to go with intent rather than technicalities, because we have no effing clue what the technicalities actually are.

A thermostat does NOT have subjective experiences. It undergoes objective changes, but subjectivity is inherently specific to the observer - a thermostat experiences nothing that an independent observer watching it does not.

Referring to AI references for uses of terms related to awareness is rather like referring to an automotive repair guide for terms related to biology. It may be full of familiar-seeming words, but they've all been repurposed to mean something that's at best vaguely analogous to their previously established meanings.

You're talking about a field that has been convinced that they are on the brink of understanding consciousness, and that true general-purpose conscious AI is just around the corner, for the better part of a century. And we still don't seem to be significantly closer to either goal, with the only large gains in the field having come from resorting to extremely crude emulation of biological processes we don't understand at all, and which has contributed nothing to our understanding of either.

Sentience is not just the ability to sense the environment, it's generally taken to require a subjective experience of it. A machine may objectively respond to X with Y, but their is no subjective experience associated with it.

It is, roughly, the quality that separates an automaton from an entity.

And yeah, the definitions all get squishy when discussing the mind, but that's because we still don't have anything more than a vague understanding of what we're talking about.

You make a good argument. I don't quite agree personally, but it's a reasonable position to take.

But look how rogue is applied in all other contexts: a rogue elephant isn't necessarily malicious, but it's also definitely not engaging in a "malfunctioning" application of the behaviors it's been trained to. It's decided to do its own thing and to hell with the bald monkeys trying to control it. Ditto a rogue soldier - they're more likely to be using the skills they've been trained in, but again they've explicitly rejected the desires of those they were trained to answer to in order to pursue their own goals. I challenge you to find any other application of "going rogue" that doesn't involve that explicit assertion of independence.

The average age of a device when in use is only about half the average service life. It has to be - the average is in the middle of the distribution, not at one end.

If 5.29 years is the average age of a PC today, then that means that the average service life of a PC today is over 10 years. Not terribly surprising considering the specs for a high end PC today are not actually much better than they were a decade ago. 3D cards notwithstanding.

Consider: if the average service life of a widget is 10 years, looking around the world you'd see about 10% of widgets are in their 1st year, 10% in their 2nd year, ... , and 10% in their 10th year.

To find the average age you take those ten equal-sized ages groups and average them out : (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10)/10 = 5.5 years.

As a rough approximation anyway - there's some subtleties for extrapolating between batched and continuous data sets.

More significantly, hardware failure tends to follow a bathtub-shaped curve rather than a continuous linear distribution. Lots of hardware fails young, which means the surviving hardware has to last correspondingly longer to keep the average up. So the average service life for PCs that make it to at least three years old is probably closer to 13-15 years.

And which of those taxes specifically discourage fossil fuel use, and compensate society for the social costs imposed on everyone else if you do use them?

More specifically, why should airlines get a tax break that nobody else does?

And most importantly, what is your proposed solution?

Because you're coming across as a "do nothing and let civilization collapse within the century" blowhard.

Yeah. Don't they know you're supposed to dump your sewage into the river and let the NEXT town reprocess it?

In case it didn't come through, that was sarcasm. Unless you're at the very top of the watershed you're already drinking reprocessed sewage. River water. Well water. It's all flowing downstream from the sewage treatment plants above you. Reprocessing it into potable water locally just means you get to use it multiple times before the next town in line gets their chance.

If the police force is committed to being criminals, that sounds like an improvement.

Sure you do. your not doing tyour job as required by law. You're fired.

You want your job back? Sign up with the new contract, or take a hike.

Cities, etc. are not actually required to comply with union demands - and if the union is committed to maintaining police officers role as criminal thugs then the public is better off if the city fires them all and starts fresh.

You're assuming they could successfully remove just the copies that weren't wanted.

This is Microsoft we're talking about. $100 says they'd end up also accidentally removing the drivers of most HP users. Probably in such a way that either made reinstalling them practically impossible, or would continue to re-uninstall all future HP drivers until you do a complete factory reset while bleeding a chicken over your hard drive under a full moon.

I suppose a lot comes down to what you mean by "intelligence"

As generally used intelligence is far more than just processing information. Generally speaking it requires understanding it in-context - which would seem to require actually being *aware* of it in the first place. At which point you are by definition dealing with a sentient being rather than a machine.

At least we've never seen any hint of a counterexample yet. Maybe we'll actually achieve a true AI without awareness, but it seems unlikely.

AI as it exists today doesn't appear to wield any actual intelligence, it's purely an information processing tool. A tool that's extremely prone to making such ridiculous mistakes such as you listed as soon as it moves beyond its programmed/trained responses precisely because it *doesn't* actually understand what it's doing, or the context in which it's doing it. Heck, it doesn't even understand that it is doing anything - it's just converting an inbound data stream to an outbound data stream according to its proramming.

According to your description, a Tesla is going rogue when it tries to drive through a semi because it thought it was a billboard mounted above the street. I would say there's nothing "rogue" about that - it's doing exactly what it was programmed to, the real world just didn't comply with its assumed parameters because its programming was faulty. The only "rogue" involved was Musk, for selling software completely unsuitable for the task it was marketed for.

So don't hire them under those terms.

If you won't work without free reign to function as a criminal gang, we're better off without you.

Lets be clear here - if it were a person doing it, another name for going rogue is "asserting your independence".

Which as I see it means there's two options:

1) They believe they can produce an AI with functionally superhuman intelligence that still completely lacks any sort of awareness or "selfhood".
2) They fully intend to create a slave with superhuman intelligence.

Pick your flavor of optimistic hubris. I'm sure nothing will go wrong.

Getting the cops to wear cameras is only step 1 of improving cop behavior. Mostly useless on its own.

Step 2 is getting the cops to actually record their bad behavior. Good luck, the only ways I can think of are serious penalties for not having it operating, or a presumption of guilt when not recording. Others have suggested various ways that such things could be implemented, and I'm sure there's may more.

Step 3 is getting the footage into the hands of someone providing independent oversight. It seems to me the default assumption should be that all footage goes directly (live streamed if possible) into an archive managed by a police oversight committee, assuming you have one. Internal Affairs at the very least. Ideally beat cops and their coworkers should never even get to see the footage except via a documented requisition, to avoid the temptation to doctor their story to something that agrees with the footage. Not that there aren't legitimate reasons to want to refer to the footage - but those should probably come *after* the initial report has been filed.

I dislike the idea of a more centralized nationwide clearinghouse for such sensitive data because the government *will* abuse it, just like they've abused every other surveillance opportunity. But for problem areas it might be worth at least forming "partnerships" with oversight offices elsewhere in the country - you get a copy of our archive, we get a copy of yours, and then nobody has a way to make local footage disappear.

Contracts are secondary to the law, and cannot require illegal activity.

So pass the law that the city/county/etc. is *required* to withhold payment when the department is not in compliance and force the contract to be either changed or voided.

This sounds to me like exactly the sort of person laws requiring mandatory shutter sounds on cameras were made for. And Maybe the whirring of an old reel-to-reel audio/video camera when recording?

Okay, maybe slightly less "sexual predator" than the primary target of many, but still. Don't be a fucking asshole.

I *hate* such artificial nuisances... but when people not only engage in covert recording but then gloat about it online? I'm thinking it may be time to invoke "this is why we can't have nice things". At *least* for covert cameras - nobody is going to question the tiny "power" light on your glasses, so it does NOT actually function as a "you are being recorded" indicator for anyone unfamiliar with them. "Ker-click! Ker-click! Ker-click!" on the other hand...