Uh, Houston we have a bluescreen.

Surely they're on the LTSB (or whatever it's called in this quarter's Brand strategy).

Yes.
Getting rear ended by a 30 ton truck while strapped into a car with specifically-designed structural safety measures is, unsurprisingly, several orders of magnitude safer than getting rear ended by a 30 ton truck while standing upright picking your way across multiple lanes of traffic. For a very large number of medical/physics reasons.

Do you want to end up tortured forever like Prometheus? Because this is literally - and I mean LITERALLY - how you end up tortured forever like Prometheus.

Remember, kids! A technology that can keep you alive forever, can be used by debtors, governments, and other similar psychopaths to keep you alive. Forever .

"Mercy! Mercy! Even if you are only one more dream, have mercy. Take me on board. Take me, even if you strike me dead. But in the name of all mercies do not fade away and leave me in this horrible land."
        Lord Rhoop

The chemist's statement is logical, and clinical.

COMPARE WITH:
"We found three tons of nicotine in human brain tissue. That's awful! We know that nicotine is a toxin. [time passes] It turns out our data about the level of nicotine in brain tissue was overstated. But (we know that nicotine is a toxin so) there should be none in the brain."
"We found 3kg of Cesium-137 in human brain tissue. That's awful! We know that radioactive isotopes are highly destructive to animal life. [time passes] It turns out our data about the level of C-137 in brain tissue was overstated. But (we know that C-137 is highly destructive to animal life so) there should be none."

The possibility that levels of plastic in human tissue are lower than previously measured, does not in any way affect any clinical experiments or other statistical analyses showing a clear causative link between plastics in tissue and poorer health outcomes. She is speaking to that. Her statement does not say there should be no plastics in existence, nor does her statement rely on or necessitate the elimination of plastics. We can want to make AEDs with plastic casing so they are lightweight and portable in order to save lives, and simultaneously say "there should be no plastic from the AED floating in my cerebrum after I use it to save someone's life".

To make her statement illogical, you would need to have evidence to invalidate any studies that established a causative link between the presence of plastics in animal tissue and an increase in disease/mortality.

Now that would be an actual use of a mobileOS-level AI agent that is perfect for LLM derivatives.
It's trained on all your personal data, so it can impersonate both you AND your pattern of interactions with your social/business circle. Then when activated it can quickly crank out a completely plausible alternative data history -- your notes, browser history, coherent back and forth message conversations, all with current time stamps and headers. Or it can go through your device data and scrub references to potential legal exposure, replacing sentences and paragraphs with semantically valid but clean equivalents.

Patent this, bring it to market, and become a millionaire. I'll take a royalty percentage for inventing the idea.

(Of course, you're still screwed because thanks to "cloud computing" AT&T and Comcast and Spectrum and Samsung and Google and Microsoft and Apple have all that data and will comply with whatever legal LEO requests they receive.)

Celine's First Law
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity."

I did a LOT of research on the USA data reporting ~20 years ago.
Throughout the 80s/90s/00s, USA drunk driving stats were drastically overreported due to poor standards across jurisdictions, a sloppy verbal technicality, and pre-digitized-OCR searching/indexing. During that era, the technical definition used for creating the national aggregate data, was actually "alcohol-involved" fatalities. Basically, if ANY of the people involved in a traffic incident were found to have alcohol, the incident was classified as "alcohol-involved" regardless of what caused the incident.

Those totals would then be publicized by it-bleeds-it-leads newsmedia and political action groups like MADD simply as "drunk driving fatalities". Which drove popular acceptance of all the legislative/policy changes to 4th/5th amendment concepts - like no-refuse traffic stops, breathalyzer locks, etc. No elected person wanted to end up in a campaign with their opponent able to say "Mr. Willis voted AGAINST holding drunk drivers accountable for deaths and damages!!!" and MADD protestors at the polls holding up signs of their beloved 9 year old daughter killed by a drunk driver.

Examples of things which, during the 80s/90s/00s, were included when people talked about the national "drunk-driving" frequency:
-A sober designated driver carrying 2 drunk friends home from the club at 3a, swerves to miss a deer on the road and crashes.
-A sober driver is driving the speed limit. A heavily intoxicated homeless person stumbles into the street and gets hit.
-A person has one glass of wine with a heavy Italian pasta meal. An hour later they are driving home with a BAC of 0.02 and crash.
-An intoxicated person is driving 2 miles home from their neighborhood bar, at 3a, going 35mph on familiar residential streets. A sober but reckless driver thinks "I can make that light. It's late at night and nobody else is on the road" and blows through a red light, T-boning the intoxicated driver (who had the right of way and was following all traffic laws) in the intersection.

This is the point no one seems to have recognized yet:

Any emergency-mode rapid escape maneuver you force the company to install in their software becomes a potential way for a malicious actor to induce the car to ram into pedestrians, either for kicks or for terrorism.

I can see the 2032 headline: "Incidents Of So-Called 'Waymo Bullfighting' On The Rise Among Teens And Gangs Calling Themselves 'AutoMatadors' or 'Matties' For Short".

An artificial algorithmic "mind" knows what it knows.
A human mind can conceive that there are things it does not know.

So AI can sort through and retrieve an item and that item's entire ranked adjacent items, faster and more reliably than any human brain. But it cannot break its own rules. You can ask AI to generate an image of a cat with nine tails and zebra striped fur, and it can do that because you - the human mind - prompted it to invoke those specific rules (cat, nine, tails, zebra, fur) and combine them in specific ways. But if you - a human mind - paint a photorealistic image of a cat with nine tails and zebra striped fur wearing a ballet tutu, a top hat, and a monocle, swimming past a coral reef, then present that image to an AI program and request it identify the thing in the picture, it might return anything. And, whatever it outputs as its answer, if you follow up to input "Are you sure that's correct? It has a tutu like a ballerina, stripes like a zebra, top hat like a victorian gentleman, (etc.)" it is very likely to output a completely different guess, or (if programmed by human minds to do so) will output that it can't be sure.

Meanwhile, every (non-neurologically damaged) human being over the age of 5 will immediately say "a cat" or something like "a cat with zebra fur and a lot of tails and a tutu and...". If you follow up to ask, "Are you sure that's correct? Maybe it's something else" they will say "It's a weird cat, but yeah it's a cat" - even though there has never existed such a cat in the history of the world, and thus from a taxonomic, scientific, reality sense that image does not contain a cat.

The human mind has capacity for unknowns, so it can instantly expand to create space where that completely-not-a-real-thing still is a cat.

The intriguing "magic" is that you could train a current-gen AI to recognize that image as a cat. IF you first created tens of thousands of images of equally bizarre cats, mixed them with images of equally bizarre dinosaurs, giraffes, cactuses, etc., then had thousands of human minds click CAPTCHA tests on the images, then added that data to the AI. That is, the AI could eventually have a high accuracy rate on bizarrely-visualized cats if subjected to thousands/millions of instances of cats. Meanwhile, a 5 year old human who may have only seen a small handful of cats in their entire life, and never ever one wearing a tutu/hat/monocle/stripes while swimming in the ocean, will instantly and with total certainty know "that's a cat".

That's one reason I scoff at the claims we're right around the corner from (or already across the line to) human-level general intelligence if we just (n+1) faster. Every big LLM out there has "read" more text than a random sample of a billion human beings. Human understanding is NOT just about adding more instances of a thing. There's something else (and a lot of it) going on that makes human conscious cognition what it is.

What's even more provocative to me is watching what happens when your toddler learns what a thing is. They become obsessed with it. For the next several months, every time a cat (physical or an image) comes within view, they point and excitedly say "Cat!!!" "DaDa! Cat!!!" Same thing for every airplane in the sky, every bird at the window. They are hungry for ideas to fill their capacity. The human animal inherently LOVES acquiring concepts. We crave them. They pleasure us.

It's why elementary school kids love corny jokes. A joke takes a concept, then jumps from that to a different, unexpected concept. The brain gets the pleasure of knowing the first concept and is following along, then gets a hit of pleasure from suddenly having a new concept thrust into the concept space and recognizing both the nature of the connection and the jump. The more apparent distance between the two concepts, the more pleasure we derive from it. Almost all kid jokes (and a huge percentage of grownup humor) takes the form:
1) Banal context followed by weird incongruous situation. Knock knock. Who's there? Me. Me who. Meow!
OR
2) Weird context followed by banal situation. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side!

5 year olds absolutely love jokes like #1. The reason is because of that pleasure hit from making a new connection. Until they first hear the joke, the word "me" has only been used to refer to the self. The word "meow" has only been used to refer to the sound of a cat. The concepts of "self" and "sound of a cat" have zero conceptual connection. That is, they have an infinite distance between them, semantically. They only connect through an accident of the particular phonetics of English and a few other languages where both words start with the same syllable. And kids get that. They don't know the word onomatopoeia, but they already understand and know how to work with the concept of onomatopoeia.

You can melt every ounce of ore in the world and refine every drop of oil in order to produce 60 trillion GPUs and then use every centimeter of land to create one massive datacenter, and the absolute best of our current AI models will still not get the joke. They will have less understanding and less concept-manipulation capacity than a 5 year old. It's all still just programmatic I/O and logic gating at this point.

Global mergers/acquisitions heading toward all technology being the proprietary possession of a small coterie of Barons.
You will be technically "free" to live as you wish, the same way the poor schmucks who took the Red Pill exited the Matrix and were free-- to scrabble out their depressing MRE-hardtack existence hiding in the dark crags of subterranean tunnels.

You will, on paper, philosophically speaking, have all your freedoms, but they won't be worth exercising. Because if you want access to the productivity, the food, the space, the medical care, the communication, the platforms, the government services... access to anything at all, everything on the planet is behind some kind of paywall.
16 tons, and what do you get?

1) Convert the planet's entire socioeconomic infrastructure into dependence on ComputeAsAService.
2) Turn compute access into currency.
3) ???
4) Profit!

(Where "???" means "breaking the placenta becomes a shrink-wrap TOC whereby you implicitly agree at birth to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Weyland-Yutani Corp". And "Profit!" means "Sweep the table. It's yours in perpetuity. Only thing left is cloning and mind downloads, then it's Godhood for one ultimate winner of the Game Of Clones".)

Do you want to live to see the world of "Alien : Earth" series? Because this path is how you get the world of the "Alien : Earth" series. Or Altered Carbon. Or a few thousand other SF stories over the years.

Global mergers/acquisitions heading toward all technology being the proprietary possession of a small coterie of Barons.
You will be technically "free" to live as you wish, the same way the poor schmucks who took the Red Pill exited the Matrix and were free to scrabble out their depressing MRE-hardtack existence hiding in the dark crags of subterranean tunnels.

You will have all your freedoms, but they won't be worth anything. Because if you want access to the productivity, the food, the space, the medical care, the communication, the platforms, the government services... access to anything at all, everything on the planet is behind some kind of paywall.
16 tons, and what do you get?

1) Convert the planet's entire socioeconomic infrastructure into dependence on ComputeAsAService.
2) Turn compute access into currency.
3) ???
4) Profit!

(Where "???" means "breaking the placenta becomes a shrink-wrap TOC whereby you implicitly agree at birth to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Weyland-Yutani Corp". And "Profit!" means "Sweep the table. It's yours in perpetuity. Only thing left is cloning and mind downloads, then it's Godhood for one ultimate winner of the Game Of Clones".)

Do you want to live to see the world of "Alien : Earth" series? Because this path is how you get the world of the "Alien : Earth" series. Or Altered Carbon. Or a few thousand other SF stories over the years.

Whoever out there is hoping the above, clearly hasn't paid attention to how products like this are brought to market.

To be accurate, the sentence should read:

It is hoped - by hospital corporations, med tech manufacturers, insurers, and all the corporations who supply/service or invest in the business of medical care - that remote robotic surgery could spare future investors the vast expense and inconvenience of employing enough humans for each city/region to have a set of people and facilities to provide common medical care; now they can source their surgeons through a rotation of countries with the lowest-billable-hour wages, and help deliver better profits to equity investment firms.