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Comment Re:Can't Channge The Universe (Score 1) 211

I think a better answer would be for everyone to use the same time number, and adjust their hours of operation to fit local standards. For this I pick Zulu time for purely historic reasons, though it's really no better than any other arbitrary choice. And scrap leap seconds. Every once in awhile you might have a leap minute...either that or use leap microseconds as needed once/year...say at the spring equinox.

Comment Re:It's hard to imagine (Score 1) 95

Well, I can think of some uses if it were actually up to the job. I'd often like to have it read something to me, but it would need to be able to understand the emotional background.
E.g.:
Strange thing are done neath the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold,
The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold,
(etc.)

Or possibly have it read me The Lord of the Rings. And I have some fond memories of the radio program "X minus one".

But I *really* doubt that current AIs are up to that.

Comment Re:Known this for our Solar system since the 1980i (Score 1) 43

Actually, we're pretty sure it CAN happen by random chance. The argument is about how small that chance is...and what environmental conditions give the highest probability. And in what order things happened. (Currently I, not really knowledgeable in the field, think metabolism probably came before centralized information storage.)

Comment Re:That's the easy part (Score 1) 149

YES!!
And *part* of the reason it's tricky is that we've got no real idea of what current AIs are going to develop into. Projections are all over the map.

FWIW, I tend to consider the AI2027 projections as identifying the most probably sequence, but there are lots of others, and none of them have any chance of being more than approximately correct. (The AI2027 people say it isn't moving quite as fast as they projected, but when I compare what they said against the news I'm not sure I believe them.)

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