It's the Garfield effect; it happens to every commercial product eventually.

First, the designers run out of "low-hanging fruit" that they can harvest to enhance the product... but sales still needs a new version every 6-12 months, or they can't market the product, so the designers are forced to make changes that improve the product only marginally.

Eventually the designers run out of ways to improve the product even marginally... but sales still needs a new version every 6-12 months, or they can't market the product, so the designers are now forced to make changes that actually make the product worse, just for the sake of having something new to advertise in this year's marketing copy.

Non-commercial software has the option of just staying as-is when it's feature-complete. Commercial software is doomed to be destroyed by its own need to keep generating revenue.

2025 Siri is dumb as hell, and only does about six things, but four of those things are really useful and work reliably enough to not have to worry about using them. I'm not sure I want anything "smarter".

It's hard to compare the two, unless you can convince a cockroach to try its palp at Python coding, or alternatively create an AI that knows how to scavenge for leftover bits of food in your kitchen.

An AI that accurately categorized my incoming emails into "important", "worth reading", and "not worth reading" would be a welcome development. Gmail is currently one of my least-favorite tower-defense games.

Thats a good point -- whenever I need a new flat screen TV I just wait a week for one to appear on the sidewalk, et voila.

Isn't the digital display of artwork, it's keeping advertisements out of the display.

... when Windows tried to prevent ransomware from running on your computer, rather than installing the ransomware as part of the default OS.

I hope it works out for them, but I suspect they are shortly going to encounter the phrase "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". All of Maduro's people are still in place, and Trump has little incentive to try and remove them.

I'm pretty sure Trump's plan is to let Maduro's government (less Maduro and his wife, of course) continue doing everything exactly as they had been, as long as they give US oil companies access to the oil fields. Trump couldn't care less about drug trafficking or democracy or human rights; he just wants that sweet, sweet oil.

I suspect there is a market for them as a design/visualization tool for professionals. They aren't cheap or easy enough for casual entertainment, but for people with corporate budgets and a need to see what something will look like in 3D space before committing the money to actually create it, they are good deal.

You're not wrong, but I think the last few decades have demonstrated what peoples' de facto priorities are. Maybe after we've lost the great majority of biodiversity, we'll regret not having done more to prevent that loss, but for now the common mindset is "I want my goods and services today, and if there's any tradeoff at all between my day-to-day comfort and the natural world's long-term existence, then I'll take the former now and hope that the latter works itself out somehow". :(

The people don't want it, but the companies do. As for why the companies want it, I'll just quote a bit of dialog from a Douglas Adams novel:

It's not "overwhelming the biosphere" that's the primary cause for concern, though. The primary concerns are human-centric: cities flooding or catching fire, crops not growing, hurricanes and tornadoes destroying infrastructure, people dying of heat exhaustion, etc. All of these things are problems already and will get worse the higher the CO2 concentration is allowed to get. Knowing that the total amount of carbon on Earth is finite doesn't help with that.

Is it an AI trying to mimic human artistry, or a human artist trying to mimic AI's mimicry of human artistry?

In the end, does it matter which?

Not if Waymo is clever (which they are). A Waymo's car can and should go into a failsafe mode where it maneuvers its way out of traffic and parks, and also moves out of the way of emergency vehicles when possible/necessary. Basically the same things a responsible human being would do in the same situation. It's not rocket science.