Agreed. If there's a legal issue, it seems like the safer route to fix the law. It's a lot of money and risked health just to carry a baby.

Apparently the future is going to skip over sci-fi and go straight to horror? We're going to have robots that can disassemble themselves and swarm you.

That's the consumer point of view.

From the vendor, cloud requirements ensure control and access to data they can mine or sell for additional profit.

That ought to be illegal, but consumer protection laws haven't really caught on with such things yet. Techies have been screaming about it for decades, but it seems that we've gone from being seen as whackjobs to simply being ignored.

Personally, I have a robot vacuum and I block it from Internet access - which means it doesn't do floor mapping and the vendor locked down their API so you can't take it over locally. It still cleans the floor.

Try District 9 (2009). It uses aliens instead of people as an allegory for South African apartheid.

For something American but a bit older, you can look at Alien Nation (1988) or the television series that followed.

> Stevens notes that micro-level substitution does not imply aggregate job loss, as demand for workers who build and maintain AI systems could grow faster than displacement.

AI costs 3% of humans for the jobs being replaced... but we shouldn't worry because the other 97% will be made up by people hired to maintain thevAI?

That is so obviously wrong I hesitate to even call it math. The logic is so flawed I suspect Stevens is deliberately lying, a moron, or both. If you pay a human to maintain an AI system, that cost is built into the AI system. If the AI system costs 3% of a human worker, either the workers have agreed to a massive pay cut or there are a lot fewer jobs.

But then I mainly use it as a natural-language front end to search engines, and to provide small snippets of code so I don't have to rewrite them or find my local copy.

There's no doubt it's made me more productive. Teaching the new guys how to use AI tools effectively in the same way though is weirdly difficult. They're not stupid, but I don't think they had enough time doing it the hard way to know what questions to ask or how to phrase them to get a useful answer... or how to give the responses a critical eye for errors.

I've worked with a lot of white collar workers who basically fill out forms, shuffle forms, collate form data into reports, etc.. As a db guy, I made a lot of their work easier by interconnecting databases and providing live reports.

Only bureaucratic inertia prevented me from going further - there was no 'fuzzy thinking' required. You have rules for collecting the data, rules for extracting what you want from it. Rules, rules, rules. No AI required.

In practice, last time I checked there were price issues and texture issues. It made for an expensive sub-par ground meat product.

If that's changed, let me know. Even if it's just on par with 'real' ground meats. Same price (or better) and equivalent quality. Get there and I'll switch.

Only tactile feedback has any hope of keeping your eyes on the road while using the dash.

It's not as convenient for a dynamic interface... but as a driver your job is to keep the car, its occupants, and the world around it safe, not to choose the next song you want to hear.

Push-button activated voice command is a nice alternative.

Both writing and acting are mix of brilliant and cringe-inducing. The world is complex yet it has these major components that are ridiculously simplistic. The CGI was good enough at the time, but it's unwatchable by today's standards, and somehow aged CGI is far, far more difficult to tolerate than primitive model work.

I enjoyed it on its original run, I tried to re-watch it once and couldn't, so I'm just going to keep the memories.

There's a balance point, we haven't reached it yet. Following my idea, we've reached the point where the oceans have absorbed enough heat that the dynamics change and now the air's heating up faster.

We have a pretty good handle on atmospheric CO2 and insolation, so I'm betting the third major factor when we're not sure precisely what's going on (because we have certainty on the general process) is the ocean heat sink.

Haven't looked haven't done the math, but I believe the ocean's been taking up a lot of heat. It probably slows down as it gets closer to the new balance point.

...but stupidity has infinite potential.

The video tape rental business solved this type of issue by billing customers if they returned a tape without rewinding it.

Add an extra charge to a fare if they don't properly close the door. If the door won't close, they can report a fault to avoid the charge. It'll cut down drastically on the need to hire third parties and completely avoid the need to add automatic door closure systems.

If your profits depend on activities that are not politically acceptable, you can relocate to a less insanely self-destructively stupid country.

Sure, it'll hurt financially to move, but not as much as trying to continue operating in a political environment that wants you out of business.