I knew a woman from a wealthy Indian family. She talked about her house, her servants, and all those things and did not see a problem with the stark contrast between her family and most others. She grew up with it and accepted it without thought.

Which to me is really difficult to understand, because she's otherwise an incredibly compassionate person.

There's a huge difference between making half the population disappear and deciding that a population decline that is already happening isn't a bad thing.

Non violence is preferable, but it is also a way for those willing to resort to it to dominate you.

When the slaver declares he's coming for you, you can take care of business or accept your collar.

Fewer people means a reduction in our gross impact on a finite biosphere even if our per capital impact remains stable.

This is Fact with a capital F. To deny it is to deny reality.

You had no choice being born. Living requires effort to sustain it, and you didn't get any input into that bit of reality either.

But now that you're here, why wouldn't you try to maximize your enjoyment of the experience? Rather than toil away so someone else can take a cut of your output and live like a god... Why not drag that asshole out in the street and beat him to death, then go home and enjoy some family time knowing you just improved the world your children will grown up and inherit?

You have to do your part to be productive enough to support your society so long as it is doing its part to make your life better than if you were living in the paleolithic era. Everything after that should be about enjoying life without impairing anyone else's ability to do the same.

Try this - we are starting to experience severe negative consequences from the resource use required to support our desired standard of living.

If we halve the population, we immediately halve that issue. All those tourist sites getting locked down? Open again. CO2 emissions? Cut in half overnight. Water use? Enough for everyone!

Imagine if we dropped to 1/10th how much better we'd have it. We could increase our personal resource usage while still having much less net pollution, more personal space, etc.

So yes, we're over populated.

Given the AI would have been trained on human diagnosis, the answers it spits out should be a sort of vague merging of all the inputs. So if you had all those doctors doing all those diagnoses together, on average they'd collectively do as well as the AI.

To me, this suggests that AI isn't the answer; what you want is an expert system assembled step-by-step by humans with clear chains of reasoning that are easy to update as new medical knowledge becomes available.

If you want to put an AI chatbot front end on that, fill your boots.

I find a lot of scifi authors have no concept of scale. They throw out big numbers to impress but don't seem to understand (or at least care) what those numbers would really mean.

What usually happens is they set up something vast but then almost immediately start treating it as if it's something similar to our everyday experience. The galactic empire where every planet is about as varied as a small neighborhood in a mid-sized city, the ancient relics that look like something granddad could have built in his workshop, etc.

This is inevitable because stories are supposed to communicate an idea to their audience, and you're not going to absorb 10,000 years of realistic history of a galaxy-spanning empire so you can watch a few hours of a movie about what comes next. To me it just means the author screwed up making things bigger than they needed to be.

>If you live close to people you have to somewhat do what they want you to do.

Yep. I'm in my 4th home since I stopped living with my parents many decades ago. Every place has been a bit further from the city with a bit more space between me and the neighbours than than the one before it.

The closer your neighbours, the more potential for friction. Life's too short to be dealing with everyone else's crap interfering with your personal time in your personal space.

Not the US, obviously.

If you followed politics at all, there's only one country that matches what I've posted. If you don't know what it is, it's not like it will inform you further.

You apparently think Musk and/or Trump can be trusted, so that right there tells me you're not worth conversing with further.

...and put your nation's communications in Musk and Trump's control. Yeah, very secure.

Last time Trump was in office, he declared my country a national security threat as leverage in trade negotiations. We really don't need him controlling our communications infrastructure; that's a national security risk for us.

A lot of my job is demand-based, and that demand is usually at the front half of my day. Afternoons are variable. Not quite enough work to go around, but a bit too much to just work mornings only and too much to switch to projects due to likely interruptions.

Me? I'm crazy. I'd let half the staff take short Fridays, and split the afternoons for the other four work days so half the people are pure project Mon/Tue and the other half are pure project Wed/Thu.

And I'd definitely have far more WfH. In my opinion, WfH should be the rule, not the exception, wherever you don't have a legitimate need to be physically present, and anyone who can't handle being productive from home can start looking for work elsewhere. This would vastly reduce infrastructure costs for the company.

Except, WfH should not be available to the management team. If anybody needs to be available in a specific physical place for the ability to concentrate or meet with peers... it's management. There's nothing quite so morale-building as a RtO order that doesn't apply to them, and when you try to reach them they're always magically unavailable.

But I'm not the employer, and I have neither the money nor the inclination to try and start up a competing business... so I sit in my seat and try to justify my pay during the average afternoon. If I occasionally goof off because of the lack of opportunity to be productive, that's the company's fault and it's above my paygrade to fix it.

I want to see a rocket that can achieve a high orbit and then make like a sea squirt and dump its innards leaving a usable hab space behind. We send a lot of mass up, and it bothers me knowing a lot of it is just orbiting the Sun if it hasn't come back down to Earth.

Where's my rotating ring station like we were promised back in the 1970s?

I can't imagine the final interviews wouldn't make a great black comedy; It'll have to be MAGA/Libertarian people smart enough to be useful but stupid or indoctrinated enough not to realize just how badly they're going to be used and abused.

>Periodic near total extinction events may have helped with this.

Almost certainly. Biodiversity seems to increase until every available niche has a stable resident species, at which point nothing else can get past local maxima to evolve into something more complex that might lead to something 'better' (at least as judged by humans).