Mechanization of various kinds, including AI, has been eating the American job market for decades. It's only just coming to a head in the form of wages being reduced for people wealthy enough to be listened to. Now we're facing the crisis more head-on.

Even productivity-reducing measures like the reaction to the pandemic can't stop the inevitable march of progress. And I don't even know what the Trump cadre think they're doing by reducing cheap goods for the whole economy, but only long enough for it to raise prices and hurt the standard of living even more, while transferring trillions MORE to the top. It's like the whole American economy was supposed to crash and didn't and now they're trying to help it along. And people on both sides are cheering on one or the other side of the destruction because it's their team doing the destroying. But I digress.

Mechanization will continue, and it's not physical work that's being cut into anymore but intellectual work all the way from how to know what boxes go where or how to navigate a busy road all the way up to composing appropriate messages for each of ten vendors to negotiate lower prices, and what to bargain for, and how. And that's okay. Work is a necessary evil. We need to drop the idea that a man's worth is measured by how much money he's making or whether he's working at all. We need to reduce involuntary employment -- a measure of how many people are working because if they don't, they'll suffer -- to zero. We can accomplish this by encouraging mechanization, by clawing back the wealth transfer from the top and reducing income inequality (How about the six hour work day?) by UBI, by hanging the next person in power who says "trickle down" works, by creating the first-ever "unemployed and that's okay" class as opposed to the current "unemployed, barely surviving and looked down on constantly" groups, and by encouraging companies to be more efficient instead of pushing for "jobs". Oh, and I want a pony.

It's about the fines, and also about pushing just that much more toward a totalitarian state. They (the notorious They) don't realize they're pushing society toward a phase change, or that it's not in Their best interests to gain power in this manner.

The point at which some environmentalism reveals itself as misanthropy is where "don't feed the animals" is commanded because it's "unnatural." This stance overlooks that humans are a part of nature, not separate from it. Barring legitimate safety concerns, like habituating bears to human sites, there is nothing inherently wrong with developing relationships, even co-dependencies and forms of partial domestication, with wild animals. Such interactions can represent a form of interspecies mutualism, a concept well-documented in biology, where different species form beneficial partnerships. History, too, offers examples of co-evolution, such as the relationship between humans and the ancestors of domestic dogs. The argument that animals "don't understand what humans are like" is paternalistic. They understand what they like and, as the orca study suggests, are capable of initiating interaction based on their own complex social logics. To deny them this agency is to deny their intelligence and autonomy. They can choose to interact or not, to the limits of their abilities; let them make that choice. This aligns with philosophical arguments for animal autonomy, which posit that sentient beings with preferences should have those preferences respected. The appeal to "naturalness" is a flawed premise in the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by human alteration of all ecosystems. There is no longer a "pure" nature to which we can defer. The insistence on a hands-off policy often stems from a puritanical, almost religious, reverence for a "Sacred" nature that must remain untouched by humanity. This view secretly frames humans as a blight, a contamination from which the world must be cordoned off. It is a philosophy of alienation, not of responsible cohabitation. The fear that a friendly whale, offering fish as a gesture of friendship, might suddenly attack boats is not just unfounded; it actively dismisses the animal's observed intent. It is a projection of human fears onto a situation that the animals themselves are defining as peaceful. This is not to ignore all risks, but to challenge a risk-averse dogma that precludes the possibility of positive, unprecedented relationships. The real debate should be about fostering a more nuanced ethic of interaction, one that respects animal agency and acknowledges our shared and entangled future on this planet, rather than one that capitulates to a deep-seated misanthropy that ultimately desires a world with fewer people in it.

You just replied to a Poe's Law of yourself with the same Poe's Law. This is either meta and philosophical or, more likely, an indication of the depth of your ideology-driven idiocy.

I hope they have an option 2 and 3, because killing anything that mates with x is a guaranteed way to create sexual selection.

I get the strong impression this whole summary and article were designed to push a buzzword into my vocabulary. So: Define "fintech" and tell me why I should use it instead of more precise descriptions of various companies, procedures or trends?

>What am I missing?

Musk's hype and overambitious promises, people who hate his politics and are therefore looking for any reason to call anything he does a failure, the fact that most of the early Super Heavies so far went boom (this is not a surprise, but some people don't remember how many Falcons went boom before they developed into one of the most reliable rockets available) and possibly a few launch and moon landing failures.

AI is absolutely useless for writing a decent story. But it's brilliant at smashing through writers block (suggesting places my story could go next), and research features are great at synthesizing the collective of writing advice from across the internet.

>I see a future where we end up like the humans in WALL-E... just fat blobs who can't walk

You say that like it's a bad thing. The entire history of human innovation has been a relentless drive to eliminate toil.We replaced farmhands with tractors and are now replacing tedious coding with AI. This is the endgame we've been building toward. The WALL-E scenario shouldn't be seen as a warning about technology. It's a critique of what humans might choose to do with an existence free from mandatory work. The problem isn't the chair, it's the person sitting in it. A future where survival is automated could just as easily unlock a renaissance of human creativity, philosophy, and exploration as it could lead to mass lethargy.

>Artists will always

The argument that artists will "always" retain an edge by fixing artifacts or choosing lighting mistakes a temporary bug for a permanent feature. The "human touch" tasks like fixing artifacts or choosing lighting are a temporary patch on an improving technology. You assume human qualities like taste, and originality are insurmountable moats but AI is already not just an apprentice executing an order. AIs are collaborators in discovery. Their "misunderstandings" and unexpected outputs can introduce novel pathways that a human, constrained by habit and bias, might never have found. The artist's intent may evolve from dictating a final image to curating the surprising results of a creative dialogue with the machine.

The more interesting question is not whether AI can learn our taste, but whether it can develop its own. By training on the entirety of art history, AI could identify and generate entirely new aesthetic systems, alien to our own, which we may come to appreciate. Originality, then, is not about a divine spark but about the capacity for novel synthesis. A parrot can say "I love you" without feeling love, but the words still evoke emotion in the person who hears them. Similarly, AI can generate an image of profound sadness or joy without feeling anything. If the work evokes a genuine emotional and intellectual response in the viewer, the "emptiness" of its origin may not matter. The meaning is co-created in the mind of the human observer. The future of art, therefore, is not about humans retaining a monopoly on craft. That battle is already lost. It is about a shift in the artist's role: from a maker of objects to an explorer of concepts. Enduring human value will lie in the framing of the idea, the curation of the AI's output, and the construction of the narrative that gives the final piece its meaning. And of course the "purely human" piece will always be valued for that alone regardless of technical skill.

"you'll just have to work harder" doesn't work. Companies have always been coming up with excuses to demand longer hours from their employees, and those unwilling to work those longer hours quit. Whether the excuse is AI or something else.

Yeah, my congress-critter is totally going to take my letter as more important than the percentage of greenbacks a lobbyist has paid him to ignore me.

The illegality of downloading for personal use hinges on me making a copy on my personal device. The original intent of these laws was to forbid reproduction, as reproduction for the purposes of selling was the expected outcome of that. Making a copy for my personal device does not violate the spirit of those laws, and saying it's copyright violation is a weasely abuse of the intent of copyright law. Which in itself is just an outright theft from public domain and a violation of the intents of the constitution.

I have no doubt that this is going to be a fruitful conversation. All will approach with an open mind, all will set their biases aside at the door, all will be willing to debate in good faith and drill down to provable facts. This is gonna be gud.

Water doesn't disappear. Generally it's treated and put back into the ecosystem.