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.

Sure, but for computers, I'm not sure the separation between the two can remain as strict as it is for humans. With access to networking, the AI may run the specialized chess program as a sub-agent and access its skills - in fact, the AI can access a whole variety of expert systems, and integrate with those. In a way the sub-agents become part of the AI itself, while the top level ChatGPT or whatever component becomes the "conscious self" of the wider distributed intelligence.

I'm not a psychologist, but IIRC there are well-developed mind theories that suggest that something similar is happening in humans. For instance, Daniel Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model, or Minsky's society of minds theory propose that the human mind is built of simpler components (named agents by Minsky), who are themselves mindless.

Ook!

It shouldn't take 4 billion years; on the contrary, I believe this will be very fast. This is a problem, because I don't think society will have enough time to adapt, leading to turmoil and potentially big trouble.

The reason why I think the change will be very fast is the fundamental difference between biological evolution and technological evolution. Biological evolution uses a Darwinian model, whereas technological evolution uses a Lamarckian one. In Lamarckian evolution, the offspring inherits the physical characteristics the parent acquires during its lifetime. For example, say some giraffe ancestor starts eating leaves higher up on trees; the effort will strengthen its neck and maybe get it a little longer. Lamarck's assertion is that the offspring will be born with a slightly longer neck than the parent's.

Biological evolution happens via Mendelian genetics - acquired characteristics don't get inherited (barring some minor effects of epigenesis). This makes it SLOW. However, improvements acquired by a generation of some technology do get passed on to the next generation. The speed of technological evolution is explosive, compared to biological evolution. We have seen it already, as a single human generation saw technology evolve from horses and carts to landing on the Moon.

We see the same break-neck speed of change in AI. Just a couple of years ago we were all laughing about clumsy six-fingered figures; now, we're talking about making full-length feature movies with AI. I also think that the technology still has a long way to plateau, and I don't know what will happen along the way.

As Sir Terry Pratchett said, the world could especially do with a few more orangutans.

I think I read a document about that - they use emergency teams of children to stop leaks by sticking their fingers in the dam's cracks.

That's ridiculous. Do you somehow live under the impression that Tesla is the only electric car maker in the world? Tesla sales are declining sharply in Europe and China, while European companies like Volkswagen and BMW or Chinese brands like BYD are taking over. Tesla role as a driver of innovation has also pretty much disappeared, and they have trouble coming up with new models as they get sidetracked by technological debacles (like the Cybertruck) or by Musk's political idiocies. If Tesla closed doors tomorrow, electric cars would continue to thrive and grow - maybe even better than they do today, since the corrupt Republican administration (I know, oxymoron) wouldn't have more incentive to cripple the competition in order to favor Musk's "Tesler".

Also, blaming the left's hatred of Musk for the putative failure of electric vehicles is doubly ridiculous. Do you somehow feel conservatives are putting in sterling efforts to encourage electric cars, but are hindered by the hater lefties? Are you even listening to yourself?

It's true there are some who won't drive an EV for ideological reasons - they probably believe God loves exhaust fumes, or something. However, I think a much larger percentage are more concerned about the price and the perceived inconvenience of driving a BEV - mainly range and access to chargers.

I think both of those issues are being addressed. BEVs have started as luxury models, but cheaper models are showing up, and manufacturers - especially Chinese - have built enough capacity to start seeing economies of scale. Also, as more and more people drive electric cars, it becomes profitable for businesses to start supporting them, so the infrastructure improves. At the same time the infrastructure for ICEs will start dwindling; as this happens, I expect a lot of the non-hard core ICE users to switch, since it will become more convenient to own an electric car.

I don't believe this would be the case, at least not for long - the new USB chips will become cheaper as time goes by.

But even if this happens, it's a good thing. As a customer, I much prefer to buy merchandise where what I see is what I get. I don't want to have to dig through fine print on some vendor's confusing site to find out what the real capabilities are. I can compare a laptop that has 2 full USB-C ports against one that has 3 full USB-ports. I can't really compare it against a laptop that has 1 full port, two that only support power charging, and another one that supports display but no data, or whatever weird combo cost-cutters come up with.

I'd like to recommend the very thought-provoking short story Learning To Be Me, written by Australian writer Greg Egan (if you don't want spoilers, the Wikipedia article contains a plot summary). It's quite topical to this discussion, and also quite unsettling.

As the man says, Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. It's the Republican way: when we do it it's good. When somebody else does it, it's the greatest crime ever.

What we're seeing now is just a continuation of the profound hypocrisy that characterizes the Republican party. Not that Democrats are saints, but Republicans have been and still are completely shameless in their double standards. For example, as the Dubya admin was pushing the American deficit to unprecedented heights, Cheney famously said "Deficits don't matter" - and the Republican party applauded. As soon as Democrats came into power, Republicans instantly turned into deficit hawks, attacking Obama for the deficit they themselves had created. There are even worse examples out there, but I don't want to make this rant too long. And sadly, it's not only Republican politicians who are guilty of that; regular Republican voters are by now quite versed in double-think.
 

You needn't worry; I'm sure our respected leaders will provide proper venues for us peons to redeem ourselves through work. After all, don't they tell us that work will set you free? (though it sounds better in the original German).