The word "conscious" (and the family of related words) is sloppily defined. This is not a defect. In fact, it is a powerful feature of our language (and our mental abilities that allow us to process language) that we can operate really well with sloppily-defined concepts. It allows for very speedy information exchange on very practical matters (especially useful when in combat or other emergency situations).

But this same feature makes in-depth analysis difficult, especially when it presents logical traps (fallacies) that we can innocently fall into.

Our commonsense understanding of consciousness is rooted in our very practical need to quickly divide up the world of our experience into the categories of "conscious" and "not-conscious." Rocks, clouds, the wind, shadows....all not conscious. People, wild animals, divine beings (to the extent that one believes in them) all conscious. The point here is that the sloppiness of the definition is rooted in a stark practical reality for us: we interact differently with conscious beings than with inert matter, so we need to be able to make very quick snap-judgments about which is which.

For most of the history of our existence, this was enough. We just tossed plants over in the "not conscious" group and ran with it. Computers, too, went right into the "not conscious" group, and that was good enough.

This commonsense idea of consciousness is not very helpful when we dive deeply into the edge cases, especially the ones that are new in the history of our species. As AI becomes more sophisticated, we wind up with something that has elements common to both categories (its a metalic/plastic construct, so generally not conscious, but it can engage with us in lucid dialog and solve engineering problems and so on, so generally conscious).

We aren't going to be able to resolve this dilemma with what we have on-hand. Our basic intuition about what consciousness is does not give us a clear answer (and it will just become more fuzzy as the tech improves), and further scientific research is hard to do properly since such research must begin with clear and unambiguous definitions (which we don't have, for the reasons given above).

So, for now, it is still easier to toss these things in the "not conscious" bucket and move on, but if the hopes and dreams of interested parties come true, it will become a lot more difficult to do so in the near future.

All the same applies to the word "life" incidentally. And though we can clearly have things that are alive but not conscious (such as a human in a coma), AI raises the interesting question of whether we can ever have something that is conscious but not alive. At this point though, such a discussion is entirely semantics without substance. However, in the future, if the tech actually does make the leaps we hope fore, that discussion will become more poigniant.

It is common that people who devotedly study science don't also study philosophy. As such, there is a lot of misunderstanding among scientists (academic and/or professional) as to what philosophy is and, relevantly, what kind of material has already been thoroughly covered.

This sounds like a group of scientists are simply wandering into philosophical territory, and could benefit from an education on that front with emphasis on such questions of life and consciousness.

I watched documentaries on police response to school shootings. A very common theme is: the shooters shoot themselves as soon as they see an armed response.

Former police response strategies that involved surrounding the building in an attempt to catch the perpetrator and going in cautiously with in groups wound up just costing innocent lives. The response that involved police just charging in as soon as they got there resulted in halted shootings as soon as the shooters saw them.

And, it should be obvious that there is a reason why shooters pick schools instead of police departments to target.

So, these and similar facts point directly to the tactical viability of keeping armed staff in schools. It is a significant deterrent to the shooters and it gives staff the ability to stop shooters quickly if the (for some reason) do turn up there.

Facts like this don't work well, however, on people who simply have a deep emotional bias against firearms.

It sounds crazy to people who live in dense cities where they are constantly swimming through an ocean of strangers.

Out in rural areas (of which Texas has a significant number) people live much further from their neighbors, police protection is spread thin, and families have to fend off dangerous wild animals in their back yards as well as protect themselves from criminals.

In that environment, it is just a given that everyone is going to have firearms. It would be insane not to.

So it really doesn't matter if these policies, which make sense given how much of Texas lives, sound crazy to other parts of the world where things are different. What makes sense in one place doesn't make sense in the other.

School shootings are terrible, but in the USA, kids are still over 100 times more likely to die in a car accident than in a school shooting.

And there are many other causes of death that are higher than school shootings as well. School shootings are relatively low on the list.

Of course, they are still terrible, but if we are going to prioritize child safety, the numbers make it clear that children in the USA face many much greater threats than school shootings, and so we would do well to focus on those.

Are there steps we could take to make vehicular travel safer in the USA? Absolutely. Would they save children's lives? Absolutely. So, it seems clear what our priority here should be.

Hey there AC, you seem to be confused about the difference between the words "fact" and "belief."

You believe that WFH is inefficient for most positions, but the available evidence show otherwise. Therefore, your belief is not a fact.

They have the numbers to prove that, for their company, WFH isn't as profitable as in-office.

No, they don't.

The C-Suite that you rail against is entirely profit motivated.

No they aren't. They are human beings, and as such, they have many motivations including emotional and outright irrational motivations, including their own sense of pride and power. Furthermore, they suffer from ignorance and cognitive distortion just like all other humans, so they are driven by many false beliefs about what will maximize profit. The end result is often called "human error" and results in policies that don't maximize profit and even harm it a little bit, but remain good enough (and strongly-enough believed-in) that they keep at it.

The superiority of working from home, both for the employee and the business, varies greatly depending on the nature of the job. But the common and widespread belief among managers (and above) is that employees can't be trusted and slack off when they work from home. This is true for some people, false for others, but it motivates blanket policies that punish people who would be better off working from home (and would serve the company better that way).

The regulators weren't going to block the deal because they wanted iRobot to die, nor because they wanted it to remain in Collin Angle's hands. They were going to block the deal because they didn't want Amazon to have it. The concern was that Amazon's position of being both a producer AND owner of a global marketplace would put them in a position of too much economic power.

Further, the FTC did not eliminate a choice for consumers. iRobot was already losing to the competition. This bid to be bought was a last-chance effort at putting the product in the hands of a better owner who might be able to make it competitive again.

The FTC didn't drive the business to bankruptcy. Collin Angle did.

So the only consumer benefit here is that Amazon is still just a marketplace administrator, and not also a producer, of at least one consumer product.

Starting the Butlerian Jihad just a bit early, aren't you?

I forgot to add: Nintendo hates the fact that we can legally sell a game cartridge to someone else once we have played a game. They want everyone to have to buy their own copy from Nintendo, without there ever being any kind of used game market. Obviously, they make more money that way!

So if their abusive access-denial policies have the side-effect of scaring people away from the used game market, that is a total win!

We need better consumer protection laws to shut down abuse like this. But getting them is an extreme uphill struggle, given how much political power these super-rich international businesses wind up having.

Apple is pretty bad about this, as per the recently-reported story of Apple revoking a user's access to literally all of his apple hardware and email account because he bought a gift card that someone else had compromised. That's quite a lot worse since people depend on their apple devices much more than on a simple game console.

Google is bad about this too. They will disable your email accounts based on their automated policy violation detection and even though they, in theory, give you a way to get human review, reported cases show that they are notorious for showing no mercy even when you did was innocent and legal (but just has the appearance of risk). They feel justified in this since their services are free to you, but people get very dependent on their emails and a ban can be very life-wrecking.

In the case of apple and Nintendo, they very deliberately protect themselves from criminal harm by deflecting victimization on to their own users instead. Like in the apple case: if you are the victim of fraud (buying a compromised gift card), Apple shuts YOU down, rather than eating the financial loss themselves. And with Nintendo, if you innocently bought a legit used game, but it turns out the previous owner illegally duplicated it, Nintendo shuts YOU down, rather than eating the cost of copyright infringement.

In the very specific case of hardware mods, I can see a justification of denying online use in order to protect players from OTHER players who cheat. Especially in PVP games, people obviously hate cheaters because they ruin the game for everyone, so they are happy to accept control measures that can detect cheaters and shut them down. HOWEVER, even in this case, a permanent account ban is WAY too heavy handed. The obvious reasonable balance is that you are banned so long as your device remains detectably compromised. Once you clean the device up, you should be allowed to play again. MAYBE a perma-ban from online games would be justified for repeat offenders, but only after they have received and acknowledged several warnings to this effect.

Shutting a player down the instant a copied key is detected is outright egregious, as it punishes the victim without proof of guilt (not to mention bypasses any pretension of legal due process). Nintendo doesn't care, of course, because their products are desirable enough (and there is too little competition in the industry realistically), that they can just get away with this. People will put up with this abuse to play Nintendo exclusives. Same for Apple.

The wealthy abuse us because we tolerate it and keep giving them our money. And also because there are too few big-tech companies, creating an effective cartel, leaving us with no-where else to turn (realistically, even if there are theoretical alternatives that come with unwanted sacrifice, cost, or risk, above-and-beyond).

Watch for the AI bubble crash in 2026.

This quote from the summary about two engineers with an AI assistant being more productive than ten engineers without one just doesn't add up. I have done vibe coding both on hobby projects and at work, and it doesn't make me anywhere near that productive. I spend so much time asking it to re-do what it did wrong or manually fixing its bugs myself that I wind up only a little ahead in productivity. Not even double my usual pace.
Maybe if I am starting from scratch working on a relatively simple tool, it doubles my productivity. But it nowhere near quintuples it, and most of my work isn't nearly as AI-friendly as that kind of project.

My current employer has been pushing the team to be more productive, with everyone encouraged to use AI as much as possible, and the result has been rushed-out buggy code with security holes and questionable design decisions. Despite the fact that the team's productivity has obviously not made a 5x jump, they still refuse to hire more people. At least in our case, this has nothing to do with AI making us so much more productive, and everything to do with leadership being cheap and not wanting to shell out for the talent that they obviously need in order to produce at the pace they want.

I realize that my individual lived experience is not data. Ok, fine, so I can't prove my claims. But I still stand by them, because I have used the best AI tools available and they don't come even close to what people are claiming. I still think that the recent economic mudpit caused by the high interest rates (made in response to high inflation) has much more to do with the lack of jobs than these AI tools.

There is also the fact that we very recently experienced global hyperinflation, followed by extremely high interest rates to tame it. The natural (and intended) effect was mass downsizing and layoffs, which we did, in fact see. So we are sitting in the valley of that effect right now.

It's popular to put "AI into every headline, but there there are other things simultaneously going on in the world that are significant contributors to the current low demand for workers in various industries, including tech. This is just part of the normal cycle and hiring will go up again when conditions change.

Of course, that is cold comfort to current debt-ridden and jobless graduates right now. But the world does not run on compassion.

The third option is.....labor automation!

Walk with me on this....

Humans have been exploiting and oppressing each other since before recorded history. And this has been true in very capitalist economies as well as very communist ones. It's basically a universal truth. Furthermore, it was way, way worse in the past.

What changed? Has humanity become more moral in the past few thousand years. I find that very, very unlikely and not well supported by evidence. But tech level has changed tremendously in the past few thousand years, creating more luxury for more people than ever before in history.

So, I contend that there is no sweet spot of an economic or legal model that will resolve the problems faced by capitalist and socialist societies. Humans will just keep on humaning. But more breakthroughs in labor automation have the potential to be significant game changers. Once people can have the things they need in abundance without having force others to labor to produce it, the incentives, targets, and dynamics all change.

Of course, all the human evils will still be there, but just as we have seen a huge reduction in slavery during the rise of labor-saving technology, it is at least possible that we will continue to see a reduction in "slavery" (or wage-slavery or lesser forms of oppression) as we automate more and more of our labor.

I would roll AI into the labor-automation category as well. It's all driven by corporate greed of course but that doesn't mean that absolutely no good will come of it.