I suspect there is a market for them as a design/visualization tool for professionals. They aren't cheap or easy enough for casual entertainment, but for people with corporate budgets and a need to see what something will look like in 3D space before committing the money to actually create it, they are good deal.
Those of us who feel it are right to be ashamed of this act of biocide. It may not be permanent for the earth, but it is as good as permanent for humanity.
You're not wrong, but I think the last few decades have demonstrated what peoples' de facto priorities are. Maybe after we've lost the great majority of biodiversity, we'll regret not having done more to prevent that loss, but for now the common mindset is "I want my goods and services today, and if there's any tradeoff at all between my day-to-day comfort and the natural world's long-term existence, then I'll take the former now and hope that the latter works itself out somehow".
The companies clamoring to use this shit in their products are acting absolutely stupid. People don't want it. They know it's 21st century snake oil.
The people don't want it, but the companies do. As for why the companies want it, I'll just quote a bit of dialog from a Douglas Adams novel:
"It's funny how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see there have already been several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly ordering and analyzing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally toward the right decision. The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analyzed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want."
"Yeeeess
"Well, Gordon's great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program's task, which it was able to accomplish with consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion."
"And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. [...] The entire project was bought up, lock, stock and barrel, by the Pentagon."
It's not "overwhelming the biosphere" that's the primary cause for concern, though. The primary concerns are human-centric: cities flooding or catching fire, crops not growing, hurricanes and tornadoes destroying infrastructure, people dying of heat exhaustion, etc. All of these things are problems already and will get worse the higher the CO2 concentration is allowed to get. Knowing that the total amount of carbon on Earth is finite doesn't help with that.
Is it an AI trying to mimic human artistry, or a human artist trying to mimic AI's mimicry of human artistry?
In the end, does it matter which?
Waymo goes into a failsafe mode and becomes a roadblock,
Not if Waymo is clever (which they are). A Waymo's car can and should go into a failsafe mode where it maneuvers its way out of traffic and parks, and also moves out of the way of emergency vehicles when possible/necessary. Basically the same things a responsible human being would do in the same situation. It's not rocket science.
Human drivers can let a firetruck through until the road is hopeless. The robots just block them.
Robots can also let a firetruck through until the road is hopeless -- they just need to be programmed to do so. Assuming Waymo isn't completely insensate, that will be the case going forward.
What power generation system other than "none" doesn't require maintenance and what industrial manufacturing process doesn't generate hazardous waste that needs to be properly disposed of?
Let's ask that the other way -- what other power generation systems have depopulated entire cities as a result of not being adequately maintained? I think hydroelectric dams might be one answer.
They of course pick Abu Dhabi. Just in case they run over someone, it will likely be a dirt poor peasant that won't be missed...
That's likely a factor. Not a whole lot of liability lawsuits to worry about there, I imagine.
Other factors include:
1. A government that is happy to throw money at anything that helps them look modern and cool
2. Wide, empty, logically-laid-out streets that are easy to drive on (if self-driving were a video game, Abu Dhabi would be the tutorial level)
3. Minimal weather/visibility concerns
They will be trashed, vandalized, and generally abused in ways that a driver would prevent. Druggies and homeless will occupy them.
But surely this is obvious. I wonder how Waymo plans to deal with the problems
Probably they'll deal with that sort of misbehavior the same way hotels do... by always having someone's credit card on file before allowing access to the shared resource, and charging service/cleanup fees to that card as necessary to recover costs and discourage bad behavior.
They should counter misinformation with actual information, not censorship. By censoring something, you defacto breath life into it as opposed to just denouncing it.
That's been the go-to strategy for decades now; the problem is that it doesn't work.
The speed at which news (gossip, really) spreads on social media is proportional to how effective it is at getting social media users to re-post it, rather than proportional to how accurate it is.
The problem with that is that the truth is sometimes compelling but often not particularly interesting, while a well-crafted lie is (by definition) always compelling.
Therefore we constantly see the scenario where "a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes". Usually by the time the ethical people have posted their followup corrections, it's too late, the damage has been done and half of the Internet thinks the lie is true and the corrections are "just a cover-up".
I don't have a solution for this problem, I can only unhelpfully note that simply "drowning out the lies with the truth" isn't a solution that works anymore, if it ever did.
Some talented film-maker needs to take these rules and create a movie that is required to break every single one of them. Dunno what that would look like, but it might be fun.
So once again we get to play the game of "malice or incompetence?"
I'm going with "malicious compliance" -- when you task 1000+ FBI agents to grovel over a mountain of data with the express instruction to cover up anything that makes the boss look like the pedophile he is, at least a few of them are going to take exception to that and "forget" how to properly redact things.
The fact Democrats support it is enough for Trump to remove it, especially if Biden or Obama had supported it.
I'm reminded of ancient Egypt, where each new Pharoah's first order of business was to destroy the monuments created by (and for) his predecessor, and then to start building new ones by (and for) himself. Have we reached that level of narcissism?
You can call them extremists, when the bomb some data-center, or gun down a group of intellectual property attorneys at the firms anal barbecue.
The word you're thinking of is "terrorists" (i.e. people who employ terror as a political tactic).
"Extremists" simply means people whose views lie at the extreme end of a range of views on an issue.
Sometimes terrorists are also extremists, and sometimes extremists are also terrorists, but they are nevertheless two different words with different meanings.
Do these scraper guys qualify as extremists? I don't know -- their position on copyright law seems to be that it can and should be ignored. Is that the most extreme position one can have on that issue?
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz
