All of which will soon become illegal or be used as proof that you're up to no good. Why would you object to being tracked if you're not doing something bad, right?

And even if refusing or trying to avoid tracking won't be made illegal per se, it will still flag you to the authorities as a suspicious individual. You aren't paranoid enough.

ObSF: Photino Birds.

I don't know why you think this is relevant to the discussion. If we get to a point where the Supreme Court is ignored, do you think the decision of some jury made of regular people would matter a damn? The nullification will be ignored, and the jury members would be lucky if they only get deported.

This is bullshit.

First, do you realize what a ridiculous kind of "standard" DNT is? Advertisers promise to honor it, as long as users promise not to use it. This is a real life Catch 22, and nobody should defend it.

The issue is worse though: the DNT "standard" wasn't ever intended to stop tracking. It was intended to sabotage other proposals submitted to the W3C who would have had an impact on Google's bottom line. From this point of view it succeeded brilliantly.

At the time tracking was considered an important issue and some reasonably effective solutions were submitted for standardization. One of them, for example, boiled down to embedding functionality equivalent to AdBlock directly in browsers. That was a customer-facing design, because it would have left the choice to customers, and stopped browsers from contacting malicious tracing sites completely.

Google realized the danger and invented DNT. DNT is a terrible technical solution, and its problems were well understood at the time. Here are some issues:
  - there is no way to enforce DNT against a non-cooperating site
  - there is no way to find out in advance whether some site honors DNT or not
  - there is no way to even find out whether some particular request resulted in your being tracked
  - the feature is opt-out for tracking - an underhanded ploy to take advantage of less knowledgeable users, thus favoring the ad sellers. A standard intended to protect customers should default to more protection, not less.

Google bulldozed the alleged standard through the W3C with great fanfare, leveraging its membership in the Digital Advertising Alliance and requesting Mozilla to support the proposal (Mozilla was getting good money from Google at the time, so they embraced the DNT scam, principles be damned). Of course, DNT was a failure in the market place, as expected. But it did succeed at its real goal, which was to bury all competing standard proposals which would have benefited customers.

As a proof of the deep duplicity of Google in regards to DNT, consider that Google never honored it, even though it was their own proposal.

Why would they even bother? Competence is the last thing Americans care about when they decide who to vote for. It may be even worse: competence is a problem for some candidates. Many voters will choose "the guy you can have a beer with" over the guy who knows what he's talking about, as we have repeatedly seen.

So basically this guy's solution to poverty is "stop being poor". He's as much in touch with the lives of regular people as a certain queen of France.

The queen in question ended up losing her head though, so maybe this solution doesn't work as well as he thinks.

Yet. Continuous progress in robotics together with the combination of robots with AI can create machines good enough to replace a lot of manual jobs too. This may happen sooner than we think too: see how quickly AI has evolved from a subject for derision, with its drawings of six fingered people, to a real threat to knowledge workers. Fairly soon I expect truckers, taxi or Uber drivers and others to start feeling the pressure from autonomous cars.

In the end, the driving force is the desire of companies to replace expensive and unreliable human workers with machines that can be owned outright. As long as somebody gets paid to do something, they'll be a cost to the company; add in various worker rights - ragged and flimsy as they they have become, especially in America - and companies are strongly motivated to get rid of the pesky humans. Machines don't even need to be better than humans for some tasks; if they're good enough and don't cost too much more, they'll be used.

The replacement juggernaut can be faster in some areas than in others but the direction is the same everywhere. To begin with, job seekers will have to accept lower wages and worse conditions so they can compete with the advancing machines. Still, sooner or later it'll be too expensive to pay a human for virtually any job.

Obviously, given the current social system, this is unsustainable. We as a society need to separate living from employment - because there'll be no employment available for the majority of people.

Just move your kid to a local school - problem solved!

What, you say there are no good schools, because nobody pays taxes? And the only schools are private and too expensive? Geeze, I wonder how this happened!

Well, it's weird that your first thought was porn, but this is really one of the worst examples you could have chosen. First, all you need to make smut about some person is a name and a few photos, or maybe only one - and even the name is optional. Your putative malicious porn maker doesn't need any of the data the lawyer in the article targets. Your argument doesn't have any legs.

Furthermore, are you so naive as to think that AI is the only way to make porn? Do you think there was no "look-alike" porn before AI? Drawings, paintings, smutty books about various living or dead persons, weird fan fiction, more recently porn movies with models made up to look like somebody else are a dime a dozen, and have been so for centuries or more. Nobody needed AI to make them.

Also, you have nightmares about porn? Geeze!

This whole concept of "privacy for the dead" seems iffy to me, and I'm also not sure why the author singles "AI" as the particular scenario that raises concerns. People have been writing histories, newspaper articles, obituaries about dead people since forever. They wrote biographies, painted pictures or carved statue of dead people, they made movies/biopics about them, wrote "tell-all" or other unauthorized biographies without needing the estate's approval and sometimes facing explicit opposition from the estate. Is the author's intention to stop all this, or give the estate an absolute right to veto all and any of those?

Also, what exact data should be included? Should the estates have the right to delete or block access to public info about the deceased, like property records, police files, jail sentences? What about posts to social media, which were intentionally published to all and sundry by the deceased ? If somebody has read the deceased's posts, is he supposed to forget them, or never use them in any way without estate approval? Also, some social media companies explicitly state in their TOS that they reserve the rights to use the content published by the poster in any ways they want. Should the TOS be invalidated retroactively? What about if the respective company is from some other country?

One area where I find AI useful is in automated transcription and summarizing of Teams meetings.

Unfortunately, the trend in my company is to move various discussions from e-mail to Teams threads, or - even worse, IMO - to various meetings over Teams. This is principally driven by younger generation folks, who seem to think e-mail is too old-fashioned, despite Teams having the worst UI and usage model I have ever seen. This particular rant aside, AI integrated with Teams has done a lot to alleviate the pain points. AI gives me a text summary of the meeting that I can scan quickly for main points; I can then ask for clarifications, or ask the AI to give me a shortcut to the time in the meeting when some issue was discussed. AI can also build lists of work items decided in the meeting, lists of areas of disagreement with summaries of the arguments on both sides, and I get all that without having to listen to folks rambling about - more or less coherently - for minutes and wasting everybody's time.

Well, to be fair, EV opponents argue in a very similar way: "this is a problem for me so it will be a problem for you".

Well, I'm not an astronomer, so my opinions aren't in any ways authoritative; however, from what I learned, the lifetime of stars is - interestingly enough - inversely proportional to their size. Very large stars burn through their material in a mere few million years before exploding; the smallest red dwarf are misers and can live for trillions of years.

Given the current estimated age of the universe, there was plenty of time for generations of massive stars to be born, burn brightly for a few million or hundreds of millions years then explode, enriching the interstellar medium with metallic atoms ("metals" is what astronomers call any element heavier than helium, so this includes oxygen, carbon and all the rest).

This is what Sagan famously said:

Our Sun is a second- or third-generation star. All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff.

Well, that's not quite the case. As stars age, a portion of their stellar material gets dispersed in planetary nebulae. If a star becomes a supernova, he huge explosion also disperses a lot of stellar material. Even if a star collapses to a black hole, some stellar material still gets ejected via relativistic jets.

This material, which has already been part of a star, can coalesce again, creating new stars. Supernova explosions create shock waves in the interstellar gas, creating zones of high concentration, who become new star nurseries.

The first stars after the big bang were composed mainly of hydrogen and are called population III stars. During their lifetime, they created heavier elements (in astronomy-speak, "metals"). When population III stars died, they enriched the interstellar medium with those heavier elements, and the second generation of stars (population II stars) started their lives with higher metallicity. When population II stars died, the process repeated, and another generation (population I) came to live, reusing the stellar material of predecessor generations.

The Sun, for example, is a relatively recent population I star, and has comparably high metallicity.

This looks like mysticism - or, to be charitable, maybe like a reference to the quantum consciousness theory. I'm not convinced this theory is true, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to judge, nor arrogant enough to state my opinions as facts.

There are many quantum random number generators that use quantum effects to extract non-deterministic streams of random numbers. Some types are a dime a dozen (like the ones based on electronic quantum noise in reverse polarized diodes, for example). It's trivial to integrate non-deterministic quantum random number generators in an AI, so your argument doesn't hold.