... are way more stupid and/or pointless and more expensive I'd say exploring space should be one of our global scientific priorities. Perhaps even more so than yet another collider for even smaller sub-atoms or yet another Tokamak that goes nowhere. I'd perhaps even make that a new sort of quasi-religion, since the benefits from work on this is likely only to pay out when todays generations are no more.

As for saving this planet and keeping it livable for humans: We can do both and then thousands of other things on top of that at the same time. And we should absolutely do all that while we still have an advanced scientific high culture.

... just as I have never written for Google Search. I've always written for humans. If an AI and/or a crawler wants to read that, I'm totally fine with that. If it doesn't, then that's OK too. By and large I couldn't care less.

... to become a Bladerunner? I sooo what that cool coat, gun and one of those flying police cars. Awesome!

And can I have an Ana de Armas clone in flesh an blood? OMG that would be so awesome. ... She'd have to be engineered to find me irresistible of course, but that should be a problem, or?

Ooooh, I'm so excited!

... with a Linux setup on her brand new good Lenovo laptop with the lates W1ndows pre-installed. Backed up her Thunderbird Mail directory, wipe-installed Mint Linux and set it up in a few minutes. The difference in boot time and responsiveness is night and day.

I started at a new company a year back and hat one of their Win Laptops for a few weeks before my dev MB Air arrived. The system was so finicky to the point of being unusable. I was speechless. I fundamentally don't get why people even use W1ndows for regular stuff these days. If all you need is Mail, Web and some digital project and content management. there is absolutely no need for anything other than a lean modern Linux. The last version of W1n that I used for anything meaningful was Win2k and that was just about 25 years ago.

Totally bizarre.

... big techs obscene cash reserves and not so much third-party or VC investment money, so I'm not too concerned for the market, to be honest. The environment and the looming AI threat is a different issue, but's that's not so much about the market. If the bubble pops I hope for little impact for ordinary folks.

Art distorts reality in order to show us different perspectives and perhaps give a warning.

Could the world of Bladerunner 2049 be a thing? Absolutely. Is it likely to be exactly like that? Probably not. Same with Gattaca.

I love cyberpunk literature. I've been reading it since my teens. It prepared me for everything that's happening these days. And what I really like about that is that some things have been outpaced by reality. In many places we are already in post cyberpunk utopia before we even reached cyberpunk.

As Deni Villeneuve said to the Google engineers:"You guys are making it really difficult for us to write science fiction."

Which pretty much sums up the state of things with fiction vs. reality.

Steam was introduced by making it mandatory to be able to buy and play Half-Life 2. Big red flag right there and then, which is why I decided _not_ to use Steam right then and there at the beginning of it all.

Yes, HL2 was an excellent game and dominates the hall of fame of videogames for good reaons. Which is why Steam took off like a rocket. And yes, Steam offers great value and Gabe and his crew manage the service well. But if he changes his mind or valve gets sold to some greed leech investment gang things can go belly up pretty fast. I buy my pure-bits versions of videogames with GOG and archive the packages myself. If GOG would shut down tomorrow, I couldn't care less. Which is the way things should be. I'm too much of a (seasoned) computer and internet expert to be fooled otherwise.

... up with a method to convert radiation to electricity directly, we'd be ready to back to nuclear power.
Until then it remains a dead end.

Nuclear fuel or power isn't the problem. Nuclear Fission steam power and nuclear waste is.

There, FTFY.

Say what you will about Steve Jobs, but ever since the switch to MacOS X he always had one budget item in each category with sometimes great or even exceptional value for the money and Apple quality along with it. The legendary white 12" iBook G4 was by far the cheapest subnotebook at it's time and the first Mac minis could be bought for 250-300 euros, offered great value for the money, were excellent machines and very small. Any PC equivalent that even could come close would cost hundreds more and came with ultra shitty windows.

So good for Tim Cook finally getting back into offering a neat quality budget item. I might actually buy Apple again, believe it or not.

... than an elaborate auto-complete / stochastic parrot inside an evolved naked ape. So am I. So I'd say you're likely dead wind about your assessment. At the state of tech and the rate it's improving it's short-sighted to assume that by some magical mystery attribute humans can have consciousness and artificial beings can't. That's just silly.

There is quite a bunch of solid evidence that what we call consciousness originates in the different levels of brain and the two hemispheres interacting, communicating with and reflecting each other.

Why shouldn't a non-biological brain setup be able to do the exact same things?

Example: Those countless AI CPUs going into "model rearranging" mode on a regular (daily) basis looks to me pretty much like what sleeping is to us. It even happens in the same intervals (based on our sleep and wake cycle).

The only thing I see a larger gap in is use having (and basically being) bodies with loads of secondary sensory input, hormones and gradual shifts in body and brain metabolism. But I wouldn't be so sure that those are required to build a consciousness.

Bottom line: He definitely knows more about AI than I do, but his statement sounds very simplistic IMHO. Not buying it.

This is smart actually. Tech is moving so fast, classic universities can barely keep up. Yes there are basics you need to know regardless what decade you live in. Graph theory and Boolean algebra doesn't change that often. But all that is better covered in premium video courses and in-house exercises with the seasoned devs. No need for degrees, wasted years and hundreds of thousands in debt. I actually agree with Peter Thiel on this one, believe it or not.

... a Vacubot yet, even though they're getting cheaper and better to the point of actually being useful.

No effing way am I going to let some Internet of Trash device load excessive amounts of very personal and private data to some anonymous computer in the cloud. Obviously.

... this "computer simulation" thing is.

We just ditched abrahamic revelation cult superstition only for it to come back in disguise brought in by pseudo "atheists" and "anti-theists" and their "computer simulation" shtick. Very strange indeed.

If the universe actually is a simulation (which would make no sense at all), the universe that simulation is running in would need to be infinitely more complex and large than the one we're in. That's non-sensical in itself. On top of that, we couldn't tell either way if we're in a simulation, because, well, we'd be simulated. Which alone makes the whole thought exercise pointless in itself.

What "simulation theorists" also seem to generally overlook is the fact that their is a very hard physical limit to how complex a separated computation device can become within a given universe that contains it. Given, those limits are way beyond any human brain in our case, but they _are_ there. A computer the size of the moon in which every atom is a bit would eat up large portions of energy the sun emits and one read/write operation over the entire memory would take a day or multiple days, making a computer of that size totally pointless and any "universe simulation" an impossibility or so slow as to be pointless.

Maybe we should be focusing on actual problems?

... critical in the cloud that you can't get out again within 2 hours.