There isn't something. Pretty much anything we can think up to differentiate people from AI will always have one of two limits 1) The effort will be prohibitively high for a person to pass and/or 2) the moment it becomes remotely used AI will be trained to react in a way that is hard to distringuish using that test. At best captch style tests add a nominal cost to automated systems like bots which may be enough to stop it being financially worthwhile for low value transactions. In the case of something like bug bounties where the incentive is thousands of dollars the cost won't be sufficient to put people off using AI/bots.

The obvious options that do work are identification so that abuse can be stopped by blocking the individual in a way that isn't as simple to circumvent as setting up a new email etc or requiring a deposit of some kind that can be witheld in cases of abuse; however they have their own downsides as well.

Said by everyone whose never seen a factory or a machine shop in their entire lives. Even automated industry requires a non-negligible amount of touch labor. Your fucking smartphone is still assembled *by hand* in China. If it were done here maybe some of it would be automated to offset the cost but a lot of it wouldn't be.

Using smartphones as an example, I think the labour involved per iPhone is something like 10-15 hours. You're absolutely right that it couldn't all be automated, but I am confident (as someone who literally works on this sort of project in manufacturing organisations) that at least half, and potentially 70%+, could be engineered out. What would happen if we started manufacturing iPhones in the West is:
1. A couple of the most time intensive and difficult to automate steps would likely still be outsourced. The company would pay tariffs on those components but they would be valued as fraction of the phone's price. For example the process of sand-blasting iPhones certainly used to be horrendous and manual. I'm not even sure you could do it in the West unless it could be automated.
2. Because your labour cost would increase by 5x+ (likely more like 8-10x in the US or similar) this becomes a far bigger factor at the product design stage. You might be willing to compromise on thickness if the saving was 2 hours labour that would cost $80 (after all employment costs) instead of $15.
3. There will be options to automate that are already available but not utilised because the current labour cost doesn't justfy it. That already happens even in the West. I've worked with plenty of firms that still have manual packing and/or warehousing for example even though there are other firms that have automated this because it isn't cost effective enough for them.

I would be extremely surprised if more than 10-30% of the labour used would transition if production moved to a western nation. I'm not making a claim about whether that is good or bad inherently, just that that considerable automation is likely and possible.

I agree with almost everything you say although I see it as having some benefit and a direct downside and I really struggle to decide on balance which is more important.

Downside: Aside from cheap shit these sorts of retailers also stock a huge variety of niche bits that help avoid throwing things away. I've bought things from AliExpress a couple of times because I had something I could fix but the parts I need couldn't be sourced from the manufacturer anymore and weren't available in normal retail. If that $2 part is now $15 due to postage, duty, tariffs, fees etc this becomes less viable.

Upside: If cheap costs more then the price differential vs better made items shrinks. I accept your point that more expensive doesn't mean better but better options do usually exist. However at the moment the price difference is huge vs disposable poorly made crap and the price of the crap going up may make trading back to better made items more attractive. Additionally part of the reason why well made stuff is so expensive is that they don't sell well when competing against all the cheap crap. I'm pretty sure better made stuff would become more affordable, after time for manufacturing to catch up, if the demand for it increased considerably.

Assuming that the $200 machine doesn't offer any improvement in terms of capability or quality... I'd also suggest that it's a dubious assumption that because one coffee machine lasted 15 years that is the likely lifetime of a replacment that you should be comparing against.

I'm not sure of the relevance of your post given that no one is claiming they are better at avoiding crashes in circumstances other than those they have been operating in it just seems like you are pointing out the obvious and redundant.

Even if Waymo can only operate reliably in a very limited area the scope to reduce injuries is still very considerable. Picking a big US city at random I think Houston has something like 1,100 pedestrians injured and 100 killed per annum. Reducing accidents to Waymo's level would mean 800 less injuries a year and likely 80+ fewer deaths just in single city like Houston. The bigger and potentially more important point is that it is a useful counterpoint to the anecdotal news where any self-driving vehicle accident is far more prominent in news coverage.

There's no evidence to support the assertion that tight election results leads to better governance and anecdotals are inconsistent at best; not least because when elections are tight people running for elections have a strong incentive to do things that sub-groups of the population care passionately about if the wider population won't change it's voting intentions based on it. They are also far less likely to do things that are in the broad interest of the state and its people UNLESS that will lead to them retaining voters they already have or will attract voters they don't already have.

It's really interesting that you chose Mass for your example of the downsides of a party being dominant. I don't live there but it's consistently held up as an example of a US state with great education, healthcare, general wellbeing, and making decisions in the long term interests of its population.

It does make me laugh that a lottery, which literally exists to get players to put more money in than they get out on average is somehow fine but someone buying lots of tickets is somehow a crime.

This is what is depressing about the current situation. AI target acquisition could help avoid innocents being killed but that would be dependent on the people employing it caring it about that and it's clear at the moment that they don't.

For brevity's sake I'll be direct. Putting aside arguments about inevitable developments, if a person can accurately assess if a potential target is legitimate or not and has time to do so safely then there is no need for an AI, thus the core advantage of AI will be in determining things that people can't determine accurately or doing so faster than people can. If what you end up with is an AI looking at data and saying shoot to a human operator who can't determine accurately for themselves OR doesn't have time to determine who then pulls the trigger then there is no meaningful difference between this and a computer pulling the trigger directly.

Spoken like someone who gets caught up in theoretical semantic arguments instead of comprehending reality. The point of unlimited plans is that consumers like knowing how much something will cost, even if in theory the cost will likely be higher than PAYG and that companies really like subscription based income. For 99.9% of people unlimited services are effectively unlimited because they can use it as much as they want without issue; the fact that someone can't buy an unlimited gym membership and then move in 24/7 while true is entirely irrelevant and aside from a few pedants no one wants 'unlimited' to be replaced with 'not limited within a broad acceptable use range' in common discourse.

This is the same person who in the same statement said he'd refuse to tip if they gave someone else at the table the check; you really think they aren't thin skinned enough to be upset by someone else acknowledging their wife. I'd say it was telling that they didn't say they felt the same way if the waitstaff flirted with them in-front of their wife, but I'm pretty sure that's because it's inconceivable it'd ever happen.

You need to get back on your meds. Nothing about this article is concerning to anyone with a passing understanding of what is happening. AIs can already choose to communicate in different ways, they already know about concepts like encryption. It would be blindingly obvious to most people that an AI that wasn't smart enough to work this out without being programmed isn't going to be smart enough to plan and execute the extinction of mankind.

If you have to link to the Daily Mail to back up your position then it's a pretty safe bet your opinion is wrong.

You may want a world where everyone is fingerprinted, DNA registered etc automatically and that all phone activity is logged and available to law enforcement automatically; plenty of other people see this as a massive risk to civil liberty because you can't control how that information will be used or misused once it is collected. You want to bet someone like Trump or Nixon wouldn't be happy to find whistleblowers highlighting abuses like Watergate using this information, or are you naive enough to think the checks and balances are sufficient to stop abuse...

Don't disagree with your general point but your wrong on when Twitter started requiring logins. Twitter was bought by Musk in late 2022 and started restricting viewing without an account in mid-2023.

Did Mark Twain have that plan at a point where copies of his works could be made by anyone and distriuted as physical and digital copies within hours of release if it wasn't for copyright protections? If not, it seems a little redundant to claim it provides insight in a completely different context.

How definitive your claim about Facebook is says a lot about lack of consideratiion you've given the issue before commenting. Facebook are investing billions in this area and are paying very generously for some of the data they use. If they hadn't torrented the works and their options were spend some money or not have the material they would happily have spent a large amount of money for it.

I'm a long way from happy with copyright law as it stands but arguments against entirely against it need to be a lot more persuasive than those.