So it's interesting that the summary mentions Geoffrey Hinton, with his 10% or 20% estimate of AI ending the world. In the consensus of the ML community 10 years ago, neural nets had less than a 10% probability of becoming as artificially intelligent as they are right now. Making a useful estimation of risk is impossible when probability is near 0 and consequence is near infinity.

Which is why OP used "cure cancer!" as a joke.

However, much progress has been made. I am alive right now because of a breakthrough cancer therapy that was FDA approved in 2011. (Well after Nixon!)

This fall I am going to get a therapy that mass-replicates your own immune cells in a lab for re-injection. It's so expensive (and has uncertain benefit) that it's not generally available in the UK or Canada yet. Automation will be a key to making it cost-effective.

It's such a complex area, I think information retrieval and computational science / simulation, or AI if you prefer, will help.

"Direct to Satellite" tech is coming right along and both the satellites on cell towers and the batteries to power them are going to be obsolete fairly soon.

Latency to LEO is not a dealbreaker for backup usage. 25-50 ms for Starlink.

Granted, your issue about bandwidth still stands and seems hard to fix. They form virtual cells on the ground with beamforming, but I don't know how many satellites are in view of a city at the same time to divy it up.

Making games isn't actually that easy? I've been doing it for 25 years, and making a game that's good that people enjoy requires, in no small part, that you yourself enjoy playing games, and that you understand what fun is.

That's a good insight - we're essentially talking about art. There's no real indication that AI can do the actually creative part. But I wonder if a union can either? Art is about allowing inspiration to hit somebody like lightning and allow it to rise to the top. Unions are about making rules for everything to enforce fairness, and I wonder if that will be the most creative environment. Of course top-down corporations struggle with it too especially as they get bigger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Please take a look at this wikipedia on Limpieza de sangre ("blood purity") from the 1400's and tell me how it fails to qualify as racism.

Wow, the idea that "racism was invented in the 18th century" is the wildest thing I've read in a while. I'm trying to imagine a defense of that statement but I just can't.

I don't think it is much cheaper in the US, after a paying a 70% to 100% import tariff.

I would call this an immigration cap, not a population cap. Let's say internal growth somehow resumed and they got on track to break 10M even after ceasing immigration. If it's a population cap, they'd have to make their own citizens not have kids, which is an ugly prospect. Granted the distinction doesn't matter unless their internal reproduction zooms back up which isn't happening anytime soon.

"Except Apple."

They are immune to the so-called laws of economics.

To the point, they pay for their utilities - water and electricity. For some reason people seem to think industry gets utilities for free and then the residential users have to pay for it? It's silliness. The utilities require upfront fees and contracts before making an investment for a big new consumer.

There isn't a shortage of water in Michigan.

And then we get this: " Last month, Township attorney Douglas Winters told the Board of Trustees that building hosting the data center would make Ypsilanti Township a "high value target." He pointed to the recent bombing of Gulf Coast data centers by Iran as evidence. "

They're grasping.

Forbes has a guess:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/t...

Microsoftâ(TM)s standard severance package previously included 12 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for every year of employment, though this could vary depending on tenure and level. When the company laid off 10,000 employees in 2023, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said his firm would offer benefit-eligible employees six months of health care and stock vesting and 60 days of notice in addition to severance. If a 20-year employee whose salary totaled $180,000, their severance package would offer $180,000, though itâ(TM)s likely this would be larger for higher-level workers.

Two weeks pay for every year of employment, up to a year of pay, seems to be kind of common in buyouts.

He's 65 years old and worth almost $6B. But no, he must keep his nose to the grindstone or he'll be a rat abandoning a sinking ship. Couldn't just be sailing off into the sunset in a megayacht, why would somebody want to do that?

Sometimes the 1000 lb gorilla has the worst odds of leading the next generation because they're still making good money on the old model during the years when they would have to be building a lead in the new model, but doing that would destroy the old (highly profitable, for them) model even faster.