What resources are we short on?

Argumentum ad homimen. If you can't actually point out what's wrong with the arguments, you haven't refuted them.

Or if, you know, we developed ways to generate and use that don't produce carbon dioxide emissions, and ways to capture CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it, then we wouldn't have to slaughter billions and return to a subsistence lifestyle.

Can we maybe try a carbon tax for a couple of decades first? We can always do the murdering later. Given the birthrate trends, if we wait a century the population will crash without doing anything.

Until the AIs have actually taken control there's still room to try to figure out how to align them with humanity. I suspect we are running out of room, though. Fast.

Well, that does tend to produce about one baby per month on average.

The point is that the best way to eliminate abortion is to make contraception easy, effective and cheap.

That quote was in the article, but the article title was about a four-day work week. Kamelia Aryafar, the author, clearly thought (correctly) that AI would allow engineers to get a week's worth of work done in less than a week and then thought (incorrectly) that this would mean developers would respond by ending their week as soon as they had done that.

What actually happens, of course, is that if you can get done in one day what used to take five, you now do five weeks' worth of work every week.

Fundamentally, productivity isn't the constraint on working hours. If that were true, Keynes' expectation that we'd be working 15-hour weeks would be true. What constrains working hours is the limits of human ability to remain attentive and focused and the demands of human life, and those constraints turn out to be roughly 40 hours per week. A little more or less than that depending on the person and on the nature of the work.

Increasing productivity has never really changed working hours, it just increases productivity, which makes us all wealthier. Yes, all of us, including the workers -- if you believe all of the gains accrue only to the bosses or owners of capital you really need to learn more about what life was like in past decades and centuries.

The things AleRunner mentioned are plausible outcomes of misaligned artificial superintelligence, and the research in question is trying to prevent those outcomes. If you have good arguments as to why those outcomes are implausible, a lot of people would like to hear them -- including the AI companies and their safety researchers.

You misunderstand the purpose of this research, and the reason for publishing it. The research is not about "flexing", it's about safety, trying to understand the risks that we may be facing as the agent capabilities increase. AGI or not AGI is actually irrelevant here. What the researchers are trying to understand is what the agents will do when they face apparent opposition.

The cooperative results are great, because we think that's what we'd like highly-capable agents to do, to look for reasoned, peaceful resolutions. What we don't want them to do is to become aggressive, or to fail to step back and look at the larger situation.

And the reason for publishing it is to enable other researchers to see it and build on it, quickly, because everyone working on this stuff understands that it could pose an existential risk to humans. Find and talk to some people who work on AI research; they all worry about this. Many of them actually believe that we'd be better off if everyone stopped the research, or at least slowed it down significantly, but everyone knows that's never going to happen. So, their best option is to create the most capable and best-aligned AI, as quickly as possible. It needs to be well-aligned so it doesn't pose a threat to human existence. It needs to be capable so it can protect us from badly-aligned AI.

The IPOs won't stop the research, nor the publication. If you're not interested in it, just don't read it.

False. It is still indefensible, because it is a problem of Apple's own creation. If Apple wants to charge for it, that's fine, but only if they also allow their devices to download apps from somewhere other than Apple.

For in-app purchases of content, it already works that way, of course, but I'm assuming this isn't what is being discussed here, because it would be particularly heinous of Apple to want to charge up to a 15% tax on content that it had no involvement either in payment for or distribution of.

If students are being subjected to 4 GPa of pressure (40,000 bar), that's a real problem. I mean, that would crush their bodies beyond the limits of molecular cohesion, rupturing all cell membranes and turning all of their bodies' water into high-density ice. If the university is regularly murdering students this way, they should be stopped.

I'm not sure how pass/fail grades help, though.

Sounds like they're going for the Amazon model — sell at a loss for years until the competition withers, then stop selling at a loss.

Ground effect requires being at lower altitude than the wingspan. Unless that plane is a quarter mile wide, ground effect doesn't play into it. And if it is a quarter mile wide, you'd better hope it doesn't fly into any populated areas. :-)

As others have pointed out, gaining altitude requires some extra energy, but over the duration of the flight, you use less fuel because the air is thinner, resulting in less drag. (This assumes that your propulsion doesn't lose efficiency to match, of course, but I think you can compensate for some of that by changing the blade angle. This is way outside my area of expertise, though, so I'm not entirely certain about any of this.)

One reason not to go to higher altitudes is that it has a range of only 125 miles. The hybrid drivetrain (500-mile range) doesn't exist yet, I don't think. With such a short range, you'd use up half your battery power on the ascent, so the benefit from more efficient travel at altitude would be lost, and you'd likely end up with even lower total mileage.

But 2,000 feet still seems awfully low to me by a factor of four or five. Dunno.

Just wait until it starts training on porn that people managed to upload to Twitch in violation of the terms and conditions. Then your use of the word "rape" in that comment will take on a whole new meaning.

Real-world flight times are likely to be miserable for most purposes. Currently, this plane has a maximum altitude of 2,000 feet. Not sure why. But the plane has a maximum airspeed of 140 knots. For context, a 737 has a cruising speed of 450 knots.

In practice, this means that this plane is only suitable for very-short-distance flights where a jet would not achieve normal cruising altitudes or speeds.

A nonstop flight from SJC to DFW takes about 3 hours and 35 minutes, give or take, for 1440 miles. At cruising speed, it would take 2 hours and 46 minutes. So an additional 50 minutes or so is spent on taxi time and landing at a much slower speed (maybe 140 to 150 knots). Of that, landing takes 20 to 30 minutes and drops the speed to a third, so I'm going to ballpark that as about 15 minutes of added time, leaving 35 minutes for taxi time. So the total flight time is probably about 30 hours at 450 knots.

Assuming that landing speed for the X1 is proportional to the difference in cruising speed (which may not be accurate, but won't make a huge difference), this means that same flight would take 35 minutes plus about 3.2x the flight time, or about 10 hours and 11 minutes.

On the flip side, the low landing speed means that it can fly into much smaller airports, and because it carries a much smaller number of passengers affordably, it could make much more direct flights economically feasible. Combine that with autonomous piloting, and if it actually had enough range to do medium-range flights, such a design would have potential.

When I fly from SJC to my mom's house in West TN, it takes me about 14 hours to fly commercially, thanks to 3.5 hours of driving, an hour of TSA time, and an hour or more of layover, and an extra takeoff and an extra landing. If I could get rid of all of that extra time and fly general aviation rules, then an automated flight with a single passenger to the nearest tiny little air strip would involve only half an hour of driving (3 hours savings), no TSA time (1 hour savings), no layover (1 hour savings), and no extra takeoff and landing (30 minutes savings), reducing the trip to about 13 hours and 15 minutes (12.5 hours in flight, 30 minutes of driving, and maybe 15 extra minutes for landing).

But that all assumes adequate range. With a hybrid range of only 500 miles and an all-electric range of only 125 miles, the X1 would have to make a minimum of four stops to reach Tennessee from California. So this plane, while a great demonstration of the potential for electric flight, still has very little practical use other than ultra-short-range flights. I suppose with this, I could fly into Nashville or Little Rock or Memphis and take a tiny plane to that airstrip if such a flight existed and were cheap, and that might be worth doing if it existed and were cheap, but I'm not holding my breath unless it is entirely automated.