Every time, the kind of employment has been different. Different groups of people were left out. New types of make-work were invented to employ the otherwise unemployable. Why would we imagine that this time will not be different when we can see that it is different? Why would we imagine that the difference will not be at a new scale when we can see that it is at a new scale?

Some things should be denied because only malware uses them, where for other things you should ask the user what they want to do. Sandbox the applications, make a fake registry and make changes there, do something clever... don't just throw up your hands and say "I can't fix this mess I've made". Microsoft has become the company of "I just can't".

The system that as you say shouldn't depend on cameras alone has driven straight into many things because they looked like something else. I'd say hallucinating a situation because of inadequate sensors and then driving straight into an obstacle because Elon is trying to save a few bucks is worse than driving inattentively.

Also, I've seen computer systems stutter enough times to think that it might just check out at an inopportune moment due to some kind of failure and inadequate redundancy, which I take to become more likely as complexity increases.

Hate is a strong word, though I do often wish he would STFU, and ideally also go away.

That doesn't mean that I think nothing he's done has been positive, or that he doesn't know anything.

My concern/objection has to do with the definitions of "us" and "we". In Elon's imagined future, would I be part of either? I very much doubt it.

The way most ethanol feedstock corn is grown depletes soil, and becomes hydroponics in a dirt medium with the nitrogen coming from synthetic fertilizers. It's not renewable, it's destructive.

At least crushing old concrete is a process you could perform intermittently, when energy is cheap.

Without enough memory, there's lots of interesting stuff you just can't do. Therefore, it's all of those things.

If you want to sell it to the masses it has to be cheap, if you want to sell it for a lot it has to be plush. The masses don't care about your stylus. The people with expectations want Wacom. The masses don't care whether your display is great. The people with expectations want high resolution.

I have the same reservations. I need it to be all mainline and OSS before I'm going to spend this kind of money on it. If it doesn't have a future where I can maintain it, I'm only willing to pay budget prices, if that. Having said that, I want not only mainline Linux support but also a repairable device that's not horribly difficult to open, and one preferably based around a common battery.

Why doesn't Microsoft just write a new VBscript interpreter which cares about security? Don't they have like a jillion programmers working for them? Doesn't their system have fine-grained access control on everything? Why is it yet so spectacularly insecure?

I used VBscript because I was doing database reporting, and the only options for Crystal Reports were VBscript or their screwed over version of VBscript which was just different enough to be even worse. I like to imagine that they've improved this since (but won't go look for fear they haven't) but at the time you couldn't even calculate a median without sorting the set yourself — they didn't offer an array sort function, so I also learned how to write a sort for that.

Taking away VBscript instead of somehow improving security so that you don't have to fear scripts is frankly quite pathetic. Windows has all kinds of fine-grained access control mechanisms throughout the system (even registry keys have ACLs) and yet they can't allow you to run a script safely? Windows proponents like to claim that Microsoft has superior backwards compatibility, which they did once, but they've compromised feature after feature in a desperate attempt to plug the holes in their leaky platform.

The USA has approximately 500-700,000 sq. mi. of desert, and it's estimated that it would take 30,000,000 acres (or 46,875 sq. mi.) to replace our transportation fuel needs with biofuel from algae. So on the one hand it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to replace it all, and on the other it would be feasible to make a major contribution and use this as one of a number of solutions which collectively achieve net zero. I don't actually believe that combustion is the best answer for most situations, only for those where long range is necessary and recharging a battery is infeasible. Even in the best case you're still making some NOx and soot when you're burning hydrocarbons with air.

You are correct. That was wrong. I hope we learned that lesson, but doubt it.

History doesn't begin in the US, and the history of US law doesn't either. It didn't just spring out of nowhere.

Unless the people involved were nonwhite or women, of course.

You don't have to ban those passengers, but you do have to isolate and quarantine them. It's flatly wrong to ban them, but you could charge them for costs. I think that's pretty wrong too, but it's consistent with capitalist accounting.

It's a science fiction trope for a reason, and the idea is about as hopeful as it is feared. Lots of people want AI. For some reason they imagine that it will be rational. But it's not clear that it's rational for it to share our goals, so it's also not clear that's even desirable. Maybe it decides to optimize us out of the picture.

Still, lots of people fantasize about and desire AGI to solve some problem they think we can't solve some other way, or just to leave a legacy that will last longer than humanity. That's a kind of weird goal to my mind, but it's not all that unusual.