Ah, here's a comment that says it better than I did: https://slashdot.org/comments....

to notice that the entirety of Alien: Earth is an exact analogue to the race among billionaires for AGI. With all the same egos and all the same downstream consequences for the 99.9999% of the planet.

This feels a good bit like saying rain runs on ocean and clouds but water is a side issue.
What is enabling the current level of production and consumption to happen?

It will be this, because that's how human intelligence works.
There is no such thing as unitary consciousness.
It's the emergent aggregate internetwork and general-purpose vector sum produced by a set of local electrochemical networks and special-purpose processes all signal-patterning among each other.
Your Self is the result (and feedback loop) of traffic shaping.

My favorite aspect of your very-well written summary is how it is indistinguishable from the action at a poker table. Which further highlights what everyone already knows - the choices driving the economy of this global technological civilization are being made in the context of gambling. The cards themselves do have some nonzero tangible value as physical assets, but the hands have no inherent value. The value of your pocket 94 is whatever your chip stack can handle and whatever you can convince (ie can afford to convince) others your potential hand is worth, based on their own chip stack and what they can call or raise (ie can afford to call or raise) you on.

The entire planet is Emperor's New Clothes and Greater Fools all the way down.

Is this where CBS journalism standards are in 2025?

Granted, I am on the downhill slide of life so perhaps this has changed, but in the USA sitting presidents are labeled with their title of office. I do not ever recall CBS political newscasters and commentators saying, "Mr. Clinton spoke to Congress today" or "Mr. Bush held a press conference".
You can drop the title for brevity and just say "Obama"; but if you use a title when referring to someone acting in their official capacity, it isn't "Mr. Obama".

Did style guidelines change recently, or does CBS now stand for Columbia Bias System?

In summary, you now stipulate:
1) You understood perfectly well what he said. Just like all the rest of us understood perfectly well what he said.
2) Nevertheless, you made a choice to parse the statement in the most extreme ragebait way possible and then argue with him for your parsing.
3) To that end, instead of directly quoting him in a meaningful, you began posting that he said the words you chose to parse -- "we'll actually like it that the kid was killed" -- rather than what he actually said even though you admit that you in fact understood.
4) When asked who said "we'll actually like it that the kid was killed", you at first continue to insist on your chosen re-wording and argue with people who understood what was said.
5) Now you pivot to say you also understood it, but the combination of certain trigger words was.the real problem.
6) Then you finish with both owning and disowning your original statement, by explaining that the wording would be problematic to some hypothetical roomful of other people, and that everyone here on slashdot who understood perfectly well what he was saying, should go "Argue with them".

So you have an argument to make, and you make it across several posts, but when anyone challenges your willful mis-parsing of the original comment, you switch to saying it's not your argument and we should go find and argue with the people who might make that argument. Okay, then why make the argument here on slashdot at all? This isn't the Senate floor or a shareholder earnings press release. We're just people talking to other people. What's the benefit of having people language-police their everyday statements for every hypothetical edge case?

Let's simply end the thread and award you the good citizenship ribbon for defending:
theoretically-triggerable feelings of
hypothetical people
who aren't here to react to
a statement that nobody here made.

Man, I feel like that pretty much sums up 95% of social criticism on the Internet these days.

Correct.

I read the entire thread. I didn't see the post he refers to that said we'll actually like it that a kid was killed.

Link to that post, please. I don't see it, and I browse at -1 Full.

So did Senator Cotton constructively propose some kind of amendment that would set the change to occur in February 2026, giving everyone plenty of warning?
Or did he just block this to destroy any forward movement on the subject?

Yes, the current script for AI implementation is completely backward from the reality.

Humans are like the frogs in the fable who cry out to the gods for a king to rule over them (i.e. be at the top of the "pyramid of trust and control"), then are dismayed and feel wronged when the gods send a stork who is verrrry happy to rule the soft tasty frogs.

We have vestigial C-suites and Senators and Houses Of Commonses because we take comfort being ruled over by gods who look sort-of like us. We are all desperately, deeply terrified of freedom and spend our lives coming up with narratives and systems to help us escape from freedom. We like to gripe about our vainglorious presidents and our senile Senators and our Vampire Lestat-styled corporate CEOs, but each revolution just becomes the new tyranny because subconsciously in order to function we need to believe that the world is ordered and someone is in charge, so the instant we successfully overthrow The Man we start making a series of choices that create the new "The Man". We will never choose freedom. We are not capable of it.

The LLM is the answer - not to eliminating the understanders - but to eliminating the bullet-point summarizers.
You still need the understanders to feed their reports and data to the LLM. An LLM without actual human understanding of its training set is a nothingness.
Thus, LLMs can more readily replace the C-suite and the Congresscritters. We all "vote" with our reports and data, and the LLM processes and summarizes the aggregate electorate (reporterate?), then responds with a project-management framework for implementing our desires and needs.

I've been quite negative in my esteem of this wave of "AI", but among the entities more untrustworthy than AI are corporate execs and United States Senators.

Makes sense. Executive work consists almost entirely of:
-reading reports.
-looking at charts.
-processing reports and charts and then making a choice based on clearly-stated criteria.
-going to meetings with other executives where you all discuss the choices you make (based on your direct-reports' reports).
-announcing the choices you made to employees and external PR outlets.

That's basically a list of LLM strengths in a nutshell.

C-suite folks are the reason AI hype will continue to build. It's because C-suite folks are already and always have been human LLMs. C-suite folks have always interacted with other people the way LLMs do. Think about it, their entire job consists of processing information just enough to issue a choice/announcement. They don't need to (and typically do not bother to) understand the issues on a deep, personal experience level -- that's a job for the underlings. Underlings are the human beings who have actual years of experiential true understanding. The underlings use their experience to write up their reports and collate the data to generate the charts that represent their understanding, then mouth-feed it to the little chirruping execs like a mama bird. Execs take all the pre-digested understanding, pick one or two token points that seem most important to their overall goals, and render a conclusion. Sound familiar?

That's why C-suite folks love AI and see it as the undeniable coolest best biggest yugest future. It feels warm and familiar to them. It does work and talks to them the exact same way they do work and the exact same way all their C-suite cadre talks. They will even be highly puzzled that the rest of their employees don't love AI, because the C-suite folks don't actually understand what their direct reports DO. And that's by organizational division-of-labor design. But that division makes everyone blind to experiences outside their own.

An LLM is merely a PHB that's been programmed to be nice to people. (at least so far)

Since you're resolute in your commitment to defining "speech" as "any and all behaviors and situations that are attached to the act of someone communicating", can you identify who are these "free speech absolutists" you are arguing against?

Like most older computer nerds, I have been discussing/arguing/debating various points of politics, religion, science, economics, sociology, etc. since the pre-GUI newsgroup and BBS days. I've heard (and at times in my life, proposed) passionate arguments for the most extreme sides to every issue. I have never in my entire life seen anyone seriously say Free Speech means you have the right to go to a playground and tell a 6yo child that their mommy is hurt and in the hospital and they need to get in your van so you can take them to see her. I have never in my entire life met anyone who argues that they have a 1st Amendment right to kidnapping.

That seems like, not quite beating a strawman, but perhaps beating a ghostman. It's easy to argue against a position no one holds. It makes me think I must be missing something to your position that would help me understand why this was important to bring up in a discussion thread where it didn't exist.