Well, that does tend to produce about one baby per month on average.

The point is that the best way to eliminate abortion is to make contraception easy, effective and cheap.

That quote was in the article, but the article title was about a four-day work week. Kamelia Aryafar, the author, clearly thought (correctly) that AI would allow engineers to get a week's worth of work done in less than a week and then thought (incorrectly) that this would mean developers would respond by ending their week as soon as they had done that.

What actually happens, of course, is that if you can get done in one day what used to take five, you now do five weeks' worth of work every week.

Fundamentally, productivity isn't the constraint on working hours. If that were true, Keynes' expectation that we'd be working 15-hour weeks would be true. What constrains working hours is the limits of human ability to remain attentive and focused and the demands of human life, and those constraints turn out to be roughly 40 hours per week. A little more or less than that depending on the person and on the nature of the work.

Increasing productivity has never really changed working hours, it just increases productivity, which makes us all wealthier. Yes, all of us, including the workers -- if you believe all of the gains accrue only to the bosses or owners of capital you really need to learn more about what life was like in past decades and centuries.

The things AleRunner mentioned are plausible outcomes of misaligned artificial superintelligence, and the research in question is trying to prevent those outcomes. If you have good arguments as to why those outcomes are implausible, a lot of people would like to hear them -- including the AI companies and their safety researchers.

You misunderstand the purpose of this research, and the reason for publishing it. The research is not about "flexing", it's about safety, trying to understand the risks that we may be facing as the agent capabilities increase. AGI or not AGI is actually irrelevant here. What the researchers are trying to understand is what the agents will do when they face apparent opposition.

The cooperative results are great, because we think that's what we'd like highly-capable agents to do, to look for reasoned, peaceful resolutions. What we don't want them to do is to become aggressive, or to fail to step back and look at the larger situation.

And the reason for publishing it is to enable other researchers to see it and build on it, quickly, because everyone working on this stuff understands that it could pose an existential risk to humans. Find and talk to some people who work on AI research; they all worry about this. Many of them actually believe that we'd be better off if everyone stopped the research, or at least slowed it down significantly, but everyone knows that's never going to happen. So, their best option is to create the most capable and best-aligned AI, as quickly as possible. It needs to be well-aligned so it doesn't pose a threat to human existence. It needs to be capable so it can protect us from badly-aligned AI.

The IPOs won't stop the research, nor the publication. If you're not interested in it, just don't read it.

Sure, a company could use an increase in productivity to allow their workers to work fewer hours while getting the same amount accomplished... but capitalism doesn't work that way. Instead, the company will use the increase in productivity to get more work done in the same amount of hours as before... or if they don't, their competitor will, and thereby obtain a competitive advantage over them.

This is especially true for salaried employees, where the cost of the employee to the company is the same regardless of how many hours the employee works, and it is therefore in the company's financial interest to maximize the return on its salary "investment" by getting as much output from the employee as possible in any given pay period.

The only thing that's saved us up to this point is that jellyfish are dependent on ocean and wind currents for locomotion. But now, with mutated and improved brains, they'll probably master propulsion.

WE ARE ALL DOOMED.

MMmmm, I understand the sentiment. But I think you'll find that's not true. The Oracle database, alone, has a long history of engineering behind it that has not truly been replicated by other products. Of course, this is really only relevant for corner cases, but these exist, and they're usually folks who have big budgets (like governments, or large enterprises). And at that level, what they're paying for is not the technology as-shipped, but the support ... which means you have a "throat to choke" in terms of lawsuits, but could also mean building something that's proprietary for your business.

Don't worry - when the Gulf Stream shuts down, Europe will cool off significantly. /j

https://youtu.be/fjT5a-yVPZc?s...

Screen Sharing has been off by default for as long as I've used macOS / OS X.

But, frankly, VNC has been known to be horribly insecure for many, many years - Apple really shouldn't be using it at all. Even the major Linux distros appear to be moving away from it and over to (x)RDP... which is also more performant than VNC, for that matter

I was hoping to find a Soundgarden reference here... thanks for restoring my faith in Slashdot (at least a little)!

Google's higher-ups can't even figure out how to "manage" people unless they're physically in the office... why would anyone think one of them would have enough insight to predict something like AI's impacts?

To optimists, robots could rescue U.S. manufacturing by increasing productivity, solving shortages of skilled workers and giving Western carmakers a fighting chance at competing with Chinese rivals that enjoy lower costs.

American auto manufacturers exclusively make cars which have very little marketability other than in the U.S. itself. "Increasing productivity" and "solving shortages of skilled workers" is not going to magically make the Chinese or Koreans want to buy lots of F-250s.

Hillary and Hunter conspired to provide material aid to Chinese-military-aligned drone manufacturers by funneling money through a chain of child-trafficking, pedophile-controlled pizza parlors!

It's so obvious!