I shouldn't need to point out the obvious, but this IS slashdot after all....

On private property, everyone is a guest of the owners. They have very broad authority to ask you to leave. So, "making my other guests feel uncomfortable" is a plenty good enough reason. But even that depends on details. The owner of a public store can't ask a black person to leave just because he is black. That is straight up illegal. But what if the other white customers are white racists who all complain that the black person is "making them feel uncomfortable?" Even if he is doing absolutely nothing wrong, and his blackness is the only thing that is making those racists feel uncomfortable. Does their discomfort justify asking him to leave? Absolutely not.

Oversimplification can lead to injustice, and discomfort in-and-of-itself is not actionable.

Incidentally, coughing and sneezing in someone's direction is illegal, depending on the specifics. It qualifies as assault and possibly battery.

It is also relevant that freedom matters. People are and should be free to do things even if others don't always like what they do. There is no legal protection against "being made uncomfortable." People can feel uncomfortable for all kinds of crazy reasons that don't give them any leverage over whoever is causing it. A muscular man simply walking down the sidewalk, on the other side of the street, might make a person feel uncomfortable. That doesn't mean that the muscular man is doing anything wrong, nor that he should be made to stop.

Sorry to belabor, but this is the critical point: "his actions made me uncomfortable" is NO MEASURE of the appropriateness of a person's actions. Not by itself, anyway. Precisely because any idiot can say that about any action, and any crazy person can feel uncomfortable for any normal and reasonable action on someone else's part. In order for actions to warrant a reaction, there needs to be more.

I've just gotten used to the "âoe" and "â" characters that crop up instead of quotes.

I just see those as quotes now. Kinda like reading matrix code.

This whole article is full of shallow and misguided thinking.

The reason employers are so keen on AI is because we are still in the midst of the hype bubble. We have already seen the appearance, and subsequent disappearance, of a whole lot of "prompt engineer" job openings. It is simply too early to predict the impact, and the statements made presently are fueled almost entirely by hype.

On the other hand, college degrees are losing relevance for some fields of knowledge work because the colleges have been watering-down the curriculum so grab up more of that student loan money. I have seen the trend specifically in Computer Science, where recent grads couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I have heard that this applies to some other such fields as well. So there IS an issue here that may be motivating employers to care less, at least in some industries, that has nothing to do with AI.

I also have a hard time seeing a world in which practicing lawyers, doctors, certified accountants, etc., don't have formal educations (regardless of the state of AI).

Lastly, "AI Skills" are easy to obtain. Super-easy. Hell, AI can outright teach them to you. Anyone with a degree can easily learn AI skills. If these shake out to be mandatory (for practical reasons and not just hype) for future jobs, then everyone who already has degrees can easily skill up. There won't be some sort of generational gap full of old degree holders who can't learn anymore and can't get AI skills vs young people with no education past high school who have some sort of genius-level grasp of AI such that they can outperform all this educated, experienced, and accomplished talent that is already in the industry. That's just silly.

There is also the fact that we have had high interest rates for a long time now (in order to fight inflation), and that has motivated significant budget cuts, especially for exploratory development, which in turn has motivate significant reduction in headcount and a unwillingness to hire new talent.

Human creative abilities are highly valued, even among those who do not have them. The possibility of machines doing similar work feels like a devaluation of these human abilities. And so people are having a strong emotional reaction against the threat of that devaluation.

It also happens that most people still consider AI-generated art to be lower in quality than human-generated art. Many believe that it will always be this way, and dislike seeing our media drowned in low-quality art that buries the good art and leaves us all culturally impoverished.

So, your endorsement of this will garner you a troll mod. But of course you knew that, which is why you posted as AC.

It's a catch-22. If the government takes action to halt the spread of misinformation, they are accused of censorship. But if they do nothing, they are accused of negligence. Either way, they cannot win.

In my opinion, censorship is the greater evil. Therefore, the government should allow the spread of misinformation but should counter it with educational campaigns that spread good information. It is true that some people will buy into the information, which is unfortunate, but the government cannot (and should not) control their minds. Attempting to block the misinformation won't change the minds of people who already believe it.

Everyone has a personal responsibility to seek out good information. Everyone should cultivate critical thinking skills in themselves, listen to information that challenges their beliefs, question information that seems a little too comforting to be true, and so on. It's a moral responsibility, because the decisions that everyone makes have an impact on everyone else, and misinformation leads to harmful decisions. Not everyone will do this, of course, because some people are just lazy. Or rotten. But even so, censorship is not the right way to influence the lazy and the rotten. The only ethical option is to encourage a proper education and make the good information as available as possible.

For a minute there I thought you were talking about Millennials, since all of these very things were said about them when they were just entering the work force.

As I recall, the very same things were said about Gen-X too.

I don't know if it goes much further back than this, though there is an interesting quote from a famous old guy named "Socrates" that goes like: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

Kids these days....

War is awful, but, that doesn't remove the necessity of having weapons. And a military.

The threats are real, whether we approve of them or not. If we did not develop weapons, we would be wiped out by those who did. It's an unhappy truth, but a truth nonetheless.

There is precisely zero obligation on your part to participate in the development of weapons. That's what freedom is all about. But even so, ensuring the ongoing survival of ones' people is hardly a waste of time.

Supernovae can produce gamma ray bursts, and gamma ray bursts can wipe out humanity (and most other surface life on Earth).

So, I guess, fingers crossed?

You are trolling but I will answer this anyway because there are people who honestly think like you do.

If someone discovers an exploit in a major service provider, and immediately goes public with it, then that means every criminal in the world learns about it. And that, in turn, motivates them to focus on figuring out how to exploit themselves. That, in turn, puts every single user of the service at risk of being victimized. Such victimization can lead to severe losses of money and livelihoods.

Thus, by reporting the exploit publicly, you direct armies of criminals to victimize huge numbers of innocent people. And, quite frankly, that's on you. It's on the criminals too, but you lit the way, so you share in the guilt.

Responsible disclosure protects potentially millions of people from victimization by giving the company time to fix the exploit before any (more) criminals learn about it.

Fun fact, Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure is primarily based on Linux. Also, you can spin up Linux virtual machines as part of cloud services. Even the microservices ("Azure Apps") can run Linux.

Windows is the curse of the non-technical class.

We can have shorter work weeks right now. Technological advances have enabled that long ago. The reason we don't have shortened workweeks has absolutely nothing to do with how productive tech has made workers, and everything to do with employers wanting long workweeks.

To most employers, the phrase "short workweek" means "I pay the same but get less out of my people, meanwhile my competitors pay the same but get more from their people." It is simply not rational for them to go for that.

If we want shorter workweeks in America, the means to obtain it is not new tech, but new legislation.

Corporations: We can afford to pay you much more, but we don't want to. We want to keep that money for ourselves. So, we will pay you only what you could get somewhere else, thus keeping your incentive to leave nice and low while saving money.

On the other hand, our rate of population growth has been dropping so quickly that many people are alarmed. So, the "there aren't enough jobs" problem and the "there aren't enough people" problem seem primed to cancel each other out.

I am sure it won't play out as neatly as that makes it sound. It never does. But after a generation of suffering it looks like it will balance itself out.

Though the "nobody wants to breed anymore" problem is likely to continue and get worse, since none of the root causes are being addressed (nor even admitted-to). So it may eventually overpower the "too many jobs are being automated-away" problem and leave us in dire straits. Hopefully by then the singularity will have happened and our enlightened future borg selves can solve the problem easily.