What kind of university would not have a physics department?

The kind that has "Stamp-Collecting" as a major :-)

Then you're welcome to convince China, Iran, etc., to use AI systems built in US... and vice versa. Like it or not, national boundaries are often a pretty good reason to "do things differently", if for no other reason than "national security". And this is good... if AI designed vaccine kills off the population, then there's a pretty good chance that the species will survive anyway because other countries "did it differently".

Small nations often fall in line with whatever the regional superpower does...

...how is that a solution? Do you think Russia, China, Iran, or you name a hundred other countries, are going to follow your suggested limits

Each country can and must do whatever they want... the segmentation of systems can happen at country borders. As far as extinction is concerned, a world where US, Russia, China, Iran, India, etc., each have THEIR OWN (home-built-from-scratch) system is better than one-system-for-everyone.

Each country should develop their own vaccines, medicines, AI systems, etc. To ensure species survival in case the improbable happens.

print culture ... associated with ... hostility to superstition...

Oh, really??? Many burned/hung/drowned "witches" would disagree.

even a 1% chance of catastrophic events like extinction or the destruction of democracies is unacceptable

...it is impossible that the improbable won't happen.

The only solution is to limit individual systems... define a sort of kelly criterion for AI, where a single big failure does not mean extinction. e.g. for military robots, mandate any model/manufacturer/dataset/etc., be limited to say 5% of the entire robot fleet... don't let them share code, or collaborate. We *want* them to have different bugs. That way if there's a glitch/feature/emergence someplace, it's limited.

Same for medicine/treatments synthesized with the help of AI... only let 5% o the population to benefit from any individual "solution". That way if there's an extinction gene-editing virus, only 5% of the population is impacted, etc.

social media and the scrolling feature---tech savvy teens slowly winning the darwin award

...wait until people start spending a few years dead... for tax purposes.

...and a constant flow of new users buying into crypto with Fiat currencies

Makes it perfect for 401k plans... every week, new users will pump a fraction of their paycheck into this thing... which will increase the price... which will make even more gullible fools to pump in more and more of their retirement money into it... which will cause it to increase in value even more....no way to go but up!

How often it blackmails the observers, and how often it succeeds!

What's worrying is the explicit urgency... They know something is brewing. Will AI-agents hit some sort of critical mass---e.g. become 99% of internet traffic, rendering their ad-business useless, etc.? What are they scared of?

A killer app for AI would be to filter out all advertising...

...that code is uncopyrightable

he was clever to say "authorship is still going to be human"... even-though we expect AI to write all of it...

If AI can really write "nearly all" of Microsoft's code... wouldn't that capability put Microsoft out of business? (e.g. hey, AI, write me an operating system, business software, etc., from scratch!, and make it backwards compatible to everything I have.... on second thought, rewrite all of my legacy stuff too!... on third thought, forget me using software at all, you go and generate revenue for me, I don't care how...).

With AI "future" they're pushing, what would be Microsoft's competitive advantage over say anyone else?

Now you get to go online to play a single player game!!!

...there are suckers who think they won't be the ones holding the bag when it all crashes down.

Yes... the idea is to make government that sucker.

If there are paying customers for all those books that may (or may not be) generated and/or edited by AI... then great! But... I suspect the value of the written-word has fallen dramatically in the last few years---what's the average return on an average book on amazon? Probably too low to bother for most people, unless you can turn out a dozen books a day... which may be the whole point, until even that market dries up.

So. Why don't they?

...lf con- is the opposite of pro-, then the opposite of progress is...