I haven't actually watched Two and 1/2 Men, so I haven't seen with my own eyes how the switch was justified. I was somehow under the impression that Kuchner was supposed to be the same person, and surgery was involved. Maybe somebody told me about the switch, but I didn't pay enough attention, since I didn't really care? Anyway, if that's not how it happened, my apologies and please ignore this example.

I agree that many shows that pull a switch end up failing, but this is not always the case: M.A.S.H. for example replaced quite a few of the initial roster - Trapper John, Lt Col Blake, Frank Burns - without faltering.

But why go with a look-alike? In your example, they won't be able to use Fassbender's name anyway, and I think the name is what attracts viewers much more than the face. If it becomes impossible (or just too difficult or expensive) to keep using the same actor for some movie series, studios could replace the star with an AI character using a random person's appearance and handwave the change. It's not like actors haven't been replaced in quite a few long-running series; sometimes explicitly, like Colonel Potter replacing Henry Blake in M.A.S.H., sometimes with a fake explanation, like the "surgery" that changed Charlie Sheen's appearance in Two and a Half Men to Ashton Kuchner's, sometimes completely ignoring the issue, like Dick Sargent replacing Dick York in Bewitched.

Moreover, with AI the studios would have access to a much wider range of physiognomies than today. They can pick somebody with a remarkable face without caring if they have no acting talent, a limited range, bad voice, or whether they're handicapped and can't handle the role's physical demands. The studios won't have to worry whether their star is getting too old, too crazy, too addicted, moves to a rival studio or can't perform anymore for any reason. All in all, from the point of view of the studios, AI actors make a lot of sense, and the Actors' Guild victory sounds hollow.

ObSF: Hugo winning novelette The Darfsteller (written in 1955!).

I believe the Chinese Loongson processors are based on MIPS (and recently have started to include some features from RISC-V). China even has a supercomputer based on those chips.

Or, by the same token, it could be very useful in developing targeted diseases.

As a completely random example, say collecting DNA from regions inhabited by Uighur people would lead to finding a specific DNA marker for that population. This may be valuable to Chinese leadership in ways very different from "dollars and cents".

Could we imagine some president of China (again, completely randomly, let's say he was visiting Wuhan at the time) casually remarking something like "Will no one rid me of this turbulent population?"

In all previous cases new technology was only better than humans in relatively small areas. There were lots of other domains where the new technology simply didn't work, so it couldn't compete with humans.

However, humans have hard built-in limits. They're biological creatures, slow to change, prone to all kinds of issues, needing long years of growth and education in order to become productive in the modern economy. Machines don't have those limits; every time some new technology gave machines a foothold in a new domain, they ended up eliminating or strongly reducing the presence of humans in that domain.

For example, humans aren't the main providers of brute physical work anymore, and haven't been for quite some time - a steam train can carry the same amount of merchandise as thousands of porters, a mechanical shovel does the work of hundreds of ditch diggers, and so on. But those primitive machines couldn't do manual work, especially requiring fine coordination. Only humans could do this, and burgeoning industry became the source of jobs for the people displaced. However, with the development of technology, we see how industrial and manual workers have themselves been replaced by machines in agriculture, light industry, auto industry, mining and so on.

AI is now assaulting the last areas where humans were still irreplaceable: intellectual and creative work.Until recently those domains remained the appanage of humans, and were the sources of new jobs, in services, computers, economy and so on. Those "human only" domains are however getting fewer and fewer, and the barrier of entry goes higher all the time - for example, lots of high paying jobs now require decrees. As humans reach their biological limits, machines will get better than humans in the intellectual domain as well. Once this happens, there will be nothing left for humans to do - and I believe it would be smart to start preparing for this situation now.

It's easy to ignore the issue and postulate new jobs will show up - many people do this. I don't see however any of those optimists provide examples of abundant and well paid jobs that can be done by an average human but can't be done more cheaply by a machine.

While, of course, people without a college education are known for not holding incorrect beliefs. In fact, why limit ourselves to college education? If people who didn't go to college are less misguided than college alumni, think how closer to the real truth (the one that isn't taught in school, see) are people who didn't go to high school! Or even better, people who never went to any school at all! Those are the folks whose creativity is completely unspoiled, and whose beliefs are correct in all cases!

Abolish kindergarten now!

I think "Buffy" got it right with their musical episode, who wasn't only fun, but also brought significant advances to the plot.

First, who cares? What OP says (and what I believe customers want) is not to get something "novel". It's to get something good. So your ask is completely besides the point.

Second, how often human "creators" really come up with something novel? Most works (web sites too) are mostly rehashes of other previous works; this is sometimes intentional - when you paint "a homage to Dali", or "in the style of Rembrandt"), but usually automatic - and then the critics will say things like Led Zeppelin have influenced hard rock and heavy metal bands such as Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Rush, Queen, Scorpions, Aerosmith, the Black Crowes, and Megadeth as well as progressive metal bands like Tool and Dream Theater. When a web designer creates a web site, he's not inventing it from scratch. He's using rules he's learned, based on many other web sites created before, adds a header similar to one he's seen somewhere, uses some fonts that he thinks worked really well on another site and so on.

What I'm trying to say is your wholesale rejection of AI web site creation with such a wimpy counterargument is completely unconvincing.

Sagan said it first though (and, I think, more elegantly). From the first episode of his series "Cosmos":

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Buying oil from Russia is supporting them. What do you think Putin does with the oil revenue, buy bouquets of roses for the ladies? I know you're not that naive, so you're just dissembling.

This has nothing in particular to do with capitalism - it just happens to happen in a capitalist society.

Ever since humans existed they have created rules, and ever since rules existed there has been irrational and unnecessary enforcement of rules. If you're lucky, you get a chance to see those rules, but by no means has this always been the case.

"We can't change the AI's decision" is just the latest in a long series of obtuse societal shibboleths - "The emperor says so", "Magister dixit", "God says so", "That's how we've always done it", "It's in the Bible", "It's the will of the people", "It's in the five years plan", "Because I'm your dad and I say so" and so on, and so on.

Makes you despair sometimes.

Most people consider food, lodging, clothing or medical expenses as higher priority than buying a new computer - especially when the one they have still works well enough for their needs. They'll chose to fix the car or get braces for the kid rather than dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars on a new machine because of some vague or highly technical "security threats".

If security can't be ensured unless you run the latest and greatest browser, the failure is with the industry.

Classist bullshit. Lots of people buy EVs because they actually prefer them. As a recent EV owner, I like my new electric car much better than previous ICEs: it drives better, is quieter, much easier to maintain and doesn't stink.

Such a silly argument - we can't do everything, therefore we must do nothing.

Nobody says *all* existing ICE need to be replaced. But if we replace 80% (or, heck, even 50%) of ICEs with EV we're already helping the climate a lot.

The point is that the battery wouldn't be considered "part of the car", any more than a full tank of gas would be considered part of the car and people would not want to replace it with gas that's possibly "years old and may have problems".

The battery would only be a means of delivering energy, similar to exchanging your propane grill tank instead of jealously holding on to "your" tank, and insisting on only refilling it.

I don't understand this point - surely all you have to do in this case is drive to the exchange station again and trade the problematic "copy" in. I also expect exchanged batteries would be tested before charging, and broken or marginal ones would be sent out for repair or recycling. So the batteries used for exchanges would get tested more often than today's EV batteries; on the whole, it looks like the chances of getting a battery with problems from an exchange station should be really low.

If you think about this, the battery exchange scheme is actually very convenient for everybody except people who just bought a new car (and even then, only for the first couple of years). But now car owners don't have to worry anymore about their batteries losing power, getting old or breaking down. People who buy second-hand, people who drive a lot or who operate fleets of vehicles, and actually everybody whose battery goes belly-up can just drive (or get towed) to the nearest exchange station and get a good enough battery without having to pay through their nose for a replacement.

Maybe, but what about beef tartare, or sashimi, or the "blue rare steak" some misguided people insist it's the only way to grill meat?