is that at the moment, it has human junior engineer-level skill. This means it's also liable to do stupid mistakes out of inexperience, that turn into giant screw-ups if you put it in charge of critical stuff.

I did my share of root rm -rf's when I was a young programmer but my boss didn't let me do it on the primary database machine. The wost that ever happened was that I deleted my own copy and had to reinstall my machine.

If you're dumb enough to make AI work on important stuff, you're a bad "manager" of your AI junior engineer.

sawing the branch you're sitting on.

You think that's bad? In the year 2035 they banned teeth in jolly ol' England. Too many drive-by bitings, you see. You will have a government loiscensed tooth-bearer masticate your food for you, and give you the old baby bird treatment. And you will be happy.

Couldn't they pass all the bikes through a box that delivers a high-energy eletromagnetic pulse, or microwaves for a split second or something to destroy any electronics inside while leaving the mechanical things intact?

Or course stuff like electronic derailleurs or cycle computers would have to be taken off first.

Holy ripoff Batman...

Then again... Apple. They know their customers have too much disposable.

might end up in a Salvadorian concentration camp in less time than it takes to say "Oh, what are these armed, masked men surrounding me for?"

Is that guy a cat who needs to nap every 2 hours?

FWIW, I once participated in a coding contest at my university in the early 90's that lasted 72 hours (the first prize was a full scholarship, which I didn't get :)) I ran on coffee and speed for the full 72 hours, then collapsed on a couch and slept until someone woke me up to come get my third prize (a Solaris license).

10 hours non-stop coding sounds like a normal day at the office trying to wrap up a project.

This marketing technique is seriously long in the tooth...

If you ever make a chatbot call me, you're SOOO out of my addressbook forever. Telemarketers are annoying enough to get deal with without having to deal with Google AI robocalls on top of it.

and make it worse, until it's enshittified to uselessness.

Sorry I think I meant to click reply on some ridiculous post by rsilvergun and you got caught in the crossfire. At any rate, I'm not sure this is a problem with or a feature of capitalism, which as an economic theory embraces competition as a means to provide the best goods and services at the best price. I see the situation an inverse of co--a fascistic (for lack of a better term) syndicate/oligopoly due to the corporate/government dynamic we enjoy.

This guy jumps from one buzzword tech du jour to the next with nothing to show for the previous massive investment. If I was a shareholder, I'd sell-sell-sell.

You could make the same argument: "that's why Nike uses child labor and in third world countries" because they can't find an American willing to work for unsustainable, veritable slave labor wages in a miserable sweatshop. Well, no shit, Sherlock.

No. The real problem is your framing of the situation is at odds with reality. The reality is that American citizens could be employed to do all of these things (as they have been in the past) and and in reasonable working conditions at living wages, but that idea is at odds with the idea of multi-billionaire individuals, and trillion dollar companies who collect disproportionately to their risks and efforts.

If you have a problem with the Bezoses and the Musks of the world, I agree with you: that class of wealth should be basically unobtainable; it's only through exploitation that it's possible in the first place.

A recent visit to my local county head office is enough to tell me the government is drastically over staffed, with rare exception. In researching some real estate issues, after doing everything I could via the internet and being bounced around on the phone with zero success, I had to take a trip down to the county office--a modest size county, far from the biggest in my state. I witnessed dozens of workers idling away doing nothing productive, even visibly playing on their phones while directing visitors from one office to the next, and even from one building to the next, giving conflicting instructions and taking no accountability to the obvious dysfunction.

Given stories I've heard from friends and family who worked in the government, I can extrapolate the average federal government department is vastly less accountable and infinitely more wasteful. Undoubtedly many thousands of times over, just due to being that much less visible.