I suspect that a more fundamental problem is what you would need to preserve.

Embryos are clearly the easier case, being small and impressively good at using some sort of contextual cue system to elaborate an entire body plan from a little cell glob(including more or less graceful handling of cases like identical twins, where physical separation of the cell blob changes requirements dramatically and abruptly); but they are also the case that faces looser constraints. If an embryo manages to grow a brain that falls within expectations for humans it's mission successful. People may have preferences; but a fairly wide range of outcomes counts as normal. If you discard or damage too much the embryo simply won't work anymore; or you'll get ghastly malformations; but there are uncounted billions of hypothetical babies that would count as 'correct' results if you perturb the embryo just slightly.

If you are freezing an adult; you presumably want more. You want the rebuilt result to fall within the realm of being them. That appears to not require an exact copy(people have at least limited ability to handle cell death and replacement or knock a few synapses around without radical personality change most of the time; and a certain amount of forgetting is considered normal); but it is going to require some amount of fidelity that quite possibly wont' be available(depending on what killed them and how, and how quickly and successfully you froze them); and which cannot, in principle, be reconstructed if lost.

Essentially the (much harder because it's all fiddly biotech) equivalent of getting someone to go out and paint a landscape for you vs. getting someone to paint the picture that was damaged when your house burned down. The first task isn't trivial; but it's without theoretical issues and getting someone who can do it to do it is easy enough. The second isn't possible, full stop, in principle, even if you are building the thing atom by atom the information regarding what you want has been partially lost; though it is, potentially, something you could more or less convincingly/inoffensively fake; the way people do photoshop 'restoration' of damaged photos where the result is a lie; but a plausible one that looks better than the damage does.

The fraught ethics of neurally engineering someone until your client says that their personality, memories, and behavior 'seem right' is, of course, left as an exercise to the reader; along with the requisite neuropsychology.

Is this the same Klarna that has already been through one cycle of being super bullish about AI and then having to re-hire some actual customer support?

That's only very partially true. The uptick in unpaid mortgages gave the house of cards a little tap; but it was the giant pile of increasingly exotic leverage constructed on top of the relatively boring retail debt that actually gave the situation enough punch to be systemically dangerous; along with the elaborate securitizing, slicing, and trading making it comparatively cumbersome for people to just renegotiate a mortgage headed toward delinquency and take a relatively controlled writedown; rather than just triggering a repossession that left them with a bunch of real estate they weren't well equipped to sell.

It's certainly possible that some people do, sincerely, 'fear' that the onrushing machine god will speak chinese and that it would be just the worst if all humans were rendered obsolete by the wrong side's robot when that's supposed to be our job; but, especially with how tepid the results are for the money poured in, it seems much more the case that we are seeing a lot of nakedly cynical playing of the 'give us what we want, lest the chinese win' by people who are otherwise on deeply shaky ground in terms of things like massive copyright infringement, voracious data mining, and an endless hunger for capital without any signs of returns.

It's like a vastly hypertrophied case of the 'race to 5G' stuff; where, if we didn't give Verizon whatever they asked for, China would have a faster rollout of 5G and we would lose the 4th industrial revolution or something? It was never entirely clearly what losing the race was going to involve.

The existential tone of the claims seem especially curious given how meagre the leads people are pouring billions into seem to be; and how readily 'AI' models can be poked at via distillation attacks or good, old-fashioned, electronic intrusion. If The Singularity kicks off that presumably changes everything beyond the powers of meaningful prediction(though that holds for whoever develops it as well as everyone else; given the odds that it will slip the leash); but as long as you are in the realm of incrementally more or less flakey chatbots it seems a bit weird to even talk like there is some sort of victory condition that will trigger and cause one side to lose.

What if a somewhat lanky fugitive broke into my car and glued the accelerator to the floor as a side quest on his mission to get the band back together and save the old Catholic school?

It seems exceptionally weird that people have started writing as though "AI"'s needs are just axiomatic; and that the size of other things, like revenue or suckers with available capital, must be the problem.

The fact that you want something that costs more than you have isn't normally described as a 'funding gap'; it's just you having expensive tastes that you can't afford. Why are talking about there being X trillion in 'demand' when, in fact, there's only X trillion in unfunded hype because nobody has slapped a shock collar on Altman yet?

McKinsey is already involved. It's not really a classic Saudi project if it doesn't combine the dodgiest western white collar people and services money can buy with a healthy dollop of slave labor.

It looks weirdly like some sort of baby transport accessory. Maybe perfect for iphone air users hoping that a warm, soothing, environment conducive to frequent suckling will help their purchase recover developmentally normal weight?

Even when you try to keep the implementation fairly practical just deciding that there should be a city somewhere without any historical logic for the presence of a city is a strategy with a pretty dubious success rate. Doesn't fail every time; but unless you get lucky and manage to find an attractive chunk of real estate that was missing nothing but critical mass; or you have a very specific purpose in mind like 'new administrative center without restive urban population' that allows you to just tell the civil service to live there unless they like 8 hour commutes and declare victory your odds aren't good.

In this case the Saudis started with that downer; picked a particularly grim environment, likely to get at least a couple of degrees grimmer in the comparatively near future, and treated aggressive deviations from practicality as a virtue. There's probably something they could have done to doom the plan harder; but I'm not sure offhand what it would have been.

Barring pretty exciting advances in biotech(along with either the psychology or...less wholesome methods...of keeping people on-task when they learn that their 4-century lifespan will be dedicated to a period of drifting through nothing and a life sentence studying the surfaces of Kuiper belt objects inside a tiny habitube or something) you are going to hit a line where (human) exploration is not going to be readily separable from human colonization; just because shipping times become prohibitive: Anywhere on earth you can just pack some extra canned goods and a few spare parts and be there and back in under a decade even with age of sail era tech; even faster now unless the obstacle is political objections by people who already live there, in which case it's 'espionage' more than 'exploration'. Hasn't really been a notable case of 'exploration inextricably linked to colonization' since humans crossed the Bering straight into the Americas, with some weaker alternatives from the colonial period where it almost certainly wouldn't have been as cost-effective; but would have been theoretically feasible.

Near-earth objects are mostly in the same board. Shipping cost are higher, so presumably lunar mining overseers will receive less frequent breaks than offshore drill rig workers; but the moon is only 3-ish days away. As you move further away the numbers get less favorable; though they still remain within the realm of "there were people circumnavigating the earth in that time, even before we knew how scurvy worked" or at least "modest chunk of your expected working life"; and it may well be relevant that a lot of the more distant objects are either gas giants that you would only ever observe rather than land on, or very small solid bodies that you could potentially just have a robot slap an ion drive on and bring back for your perusal.

Ultimately, it seems like it boils down to an irrational emotional position. Some people, don't know why, just look at a situation and are all "the most fulfilling outcome possible would be making this the next generation's problem!" Leads to enough bad calls earthside; I assume there will be some particularly grim outcomes in more hostile environments.

It's not going to get any easier to find definitely bot slop free software as time goes on; but we can be fairly sure about this stuff. Like hunting for low background steel.

I can't say that I'm entirely surprised, given what else they've been getting up to; but it seems downright crazy to just unleash a slop engine without even giving your volunteers a heads up; then patronizingly ask if you can perhaps arrange a meeting to understand their concerns.

If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?

Has it been determined whether the IT situation was related to the theft that occurred?

Obviously it sounds like basically no bad option was left unchosen when it came to their IT config; but I'm curious whether this was a situation where the perps were actually sophisticated enough (or unsophisticated at traditional smash-and-grab/balaclava-when-on-camera techniques) to incorporate the bad IT into the heist; or whether the entry was more or less pure physical access control failure that happens to put the general state of the system in stark relief?

Obviously if it were a heist movie there'd be a hoodie kid using the power of fast typing to haxx0r the cameras and guide the operatives while using a precociously cobbled-together AI to selectively delete them from the surveillance footage; but if the overall physical security posture was bad, and the building is largely accessible to the public, it seems entirely plausible that someone just cased the joint and walked in much as they would have 50 years ago; though a different interested party is probably hosting a C2 server or some exploitation payloads on their DVR.

This is the part in the bad summer blockbuster where it turns out that there was some sort of alien organism involved in the collision; and now people are quietly scrambling to ensure it doesn't make it back to earth, right?

I'd be curious what the breakdown is between 'addicts', in the compulsively-does-thing-despite-knowing-it-is-contrary-to-their-interests sense, and sad but locally reasonable behavior from people with tepid options.

'Addict' is a comparatively easy call to make when people are getting fired because they no-showed to play WoW; or spending all their time scrolling tiktok despite having a school or college worth of peers to socialize with; but if you are retired, less physically able to get out and about than you used to be, and at the age where your friends and peers are starting to die off, it seems like a much more open question whether having an engaging if ultimately rather hollow hobby is an 'addiction' or just a kind of depressing local maximum.

It's obviously not some ideal of perfected human flourishing; but if you are doing it because you don't really have things to do, rather than at the expense of things you have to do, that's not really classic addict behavior; just a mediocre hobby.