No I said Reagan and I meant it. There was an 84-year-old judge who just struck down one of Trump's crazier power grabs and he was a Reagan appointee.

They're all younger judges that were appointed by Reagan. And the guys appointed by Trump are often in their 30s because they were appointed for loyalty not competency and the Democrats don't have the balls to hold up judicial appointments.

although for the most part except for the actual supreme Court the lower courts have been surprisingly sane in regards to Trump's power grabs.

It's cute that you think rules apply to multibillion dollar corporations. Oh you sweet summer child....

Are temporary construction jobs? Also wake me when the factories are actually cranking out semiconductors. We've seen this before where they suck down a bunch of tax incentives and get a bunch of free land and they get to keep all the land and the incentives without ever delivering any jobs.

What do you think of the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was perhaps engineered in the USA as a DARPA-funded self-spreading vaccine intended for bats to prevent zoonotic outbreaks in China but then accidentally leaked out when being tested by a partner in Wuhan who had a colony of the bats the vaccine was intended for? More details on the possible "who what when how and why" of all that:
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/...

If true, it provides an example of how dangerous this sort of gain-of-function bio-engineering of viruses can be (even if perhaps well-intended by the people involved). Also on that theme from 2014:
"Threatened pandemics and laboratory escapes: Self-fulfilling prophecies"
https://thebulletin.org/2014/0...
"Looking at the problem pragmatically, the question is not if such escapes will result in a major civilian outbreak, but rather what the pathogen will be and how such an escape may be contained, if indeed it can be contained at all."

My worry with SARS-CoV-2 from the start (working in the biotech industry at the time, including by chance helping track the evolution of SARS-CoV-2) was that so much effort would go into researching the virus and understanding why it was so transmissible and dangerous (mainly to older people) that such knowledge could be misused by humans to make worse viruses. Sadly, AI now accelerates that risk (as in the video I linked to).

Here is Eric Schmidt recently saying essentially the same thing as far as the risk of AI being used to create pathogens for nefarious purposes and how he and others are very worried about it:
"Dr. Eric Schmidt: Special Competitive Studies Project"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It'll get shot down at the supreme Court and everyone involved knows that. There is a high probability it'll make it all the way up that far even if it goes through a few Reagan or Trump appointees. The evidence is pretty much incontrovertible that oil industry executives knew that their product was going to cause deadly heat waves. It was their own research back in the 30s 40s and 50s that got the ball rolling on our understanding of anthropogenic climate change.

But the current supreme Court is hopelessly corrupt so it'll die there. It might make a headline or two which is probably the main point. The oil industry can't settle on something like this because once they start there's no end to it. The damage climate change is causing is in the tens of trillions. The only way the industry can survive is by continuing to externalize their costs onto all of us.

I don't know if "enthusiastic about the tech" completely describes my feelings about a short-term employment threat and a longer-term existential threat, but, yeah, neat stuff. Kind of maybe like respecting the cleverness and potential dangerous of a nuclear bomb or a black widow spider?

A related story I submitted: "The Workers Who Lost Their Jobs To AI "
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

Sure maybe there is some braggadocio in Hinton somewhere which we all have. But he just does not come across much that way to me. He seems genuinely somewhat penitent in how he talks. Hinton at age 77 sounds to me more like someone who had an enjoyable career building neat things no one thought he could working in academia who just wants to retire from the limelight (as he says in the video) but feels compelled to spread a message of concern. I could be wrong about his motivation perhaps.

On whether AI exists, I've seen about four decades of things that were once "AI" no longer being considered AI once computers can do the thing (as others before me have commented on first). That has been everything from answering text questions about moon rocks, to playing chess, to composing music, to reading printed characters in books, to recognizing the shape of 3D objects, to driving a car, to now generating videos now, and more.

Example of the last of a video which soon will probably no longer being thought of as involving "AI":
""it's over, we're cooked!" -- says girl that literally does not exist..."
https://www.reddit.com/r/singu...

On robots vs chimps, robots have come a long way since, say, I saw one of the first hopping robots in Marc Raibert's Lab at CMU in 1986 (and then later saw it visiting the MIT Museum with my kid). Example for what Marc Raibert and associates (now Boston Dynamics) has since achieved after forty years of development:
"Boston Dynamics New Atlas Robot Feels TOO Real and It's Terrifying!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Some examples from this search:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=robo...

"I Witnessed the MOST ADVANCED Robotic Hand at CES 2025"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Newest Robotic Hand is Sensitive as Fingertips"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"ORCA: An Open-Source, Reliable, Cost-Effective, Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand - IROS 2025 Paper Video"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

What's going on in China:
"China's First Robot With Human Brain SHOCKED The World at FAIR Plus Exhibition"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Lots more stuff out there. So if by "long time" on achieving fine motor control you mean by last year, well maybe. :-) I agree with you though that the self-replicating part is still quite a ways off. Inspired by James P. Hogan's "Two faces of Tomorrow" (1978) and NASA's Advanced Automation for Space Missions (1980) I tried (grandiosely) to help with that self-replicating part -- to little success so far:
https://pdfernhout.net/princet...
https://pdfernhout.net/sunrise...
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/osc...

On who will buy stuff, it is perhaps a capitalist version of "tragedy of the commons". Every company thinks they will get the first mover advantage by firing most of their workers and replacing them with AI and robots. They don't think past the next quarter or at best year. Who will pay for products or who will pay unemployed workers to survive for decades is someone else's problem.

See the 1950s sci-fi story "The Midas Plague" for some related humor on dealing with the resulting economic imbalance. :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""The Midas Plague" (originally published in Galaxy in 1954). In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by humankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption, trying to keep up with the robots' extravagant production, while the upper-class "rich" can live lives of simplicity. Property crime is nonexistent, and the government Ration Board enforces the use of ration stamps to ensure that everyone consumes their quotas. ..."

Related on how in the past the Commons were surprisingly well-managed anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In Governing the Commons, Ostrom summarized eight design principles that were present in the sustainable common pool resource institutions she studied ... Ostrom and her many co-researchers have developed a comprehensive "Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework", within which much of the still-evolving theory of common-pool resources and collective self-governance is now located."

Marc Andreessen might disagree with some of those principles and have his own?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" is a 2023 self-published essay by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The essay argues that many significant problems of humanity have been solved with the development of technology, particularly technology without any constraints, and that we should do everything possible to accelerate technology development and advancement. Technology, according to Andreessen, is what drives wealth and happiness.[1] The essay is considered a manifesto for effective accelerationism."

I actually like most of what Marc has to say -- except he probably fundamentally misses "The Case Against Competition" and why AI produced through capitalist competition will likely doom us all:
https://www.alfiekohn.org/arti...
"Children succeed in spite of competition, not because of it. Most of us were raised to believe that we do our best work when weâ(TM)re in a race -- that without competition we would all become fat, lazy, and mediocre. Itâ(TM)s a belief that our society takes on faith. Itâ(TM)s also false."

I agree AI can be overhyped. But then I read somewhere so were the early industrial power looms -- that were used more as a threat to keep wages down and working conditions poor using the threat that otherwise the factory owners would bring in the (expensive-to-install) looms.

Good luck and have fun with your project! Pessimistically, it perhaps it may have already "succeeded" if just knowing about it has made company workers nervous enough that they are afraid to ask for raises or more benefits? Optimistically though, it may instead mean the company will be more successful and can afford to pay more to retain skilled workers who work well with AI? I hope for you it is more of the later than the former.

Something I posted a while back though on how AI and robotics and provide an illusion of increasing employment by helping one company grow while its competitors shrink: https://slashdot.org/comments....

Or from 2021:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
"According to a new academic research study, automation technology has been the primary driver in U.S. income inequality over the past 40 years. The report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, claims that 50% to 70% of changes in U.S. wages, since 1980, can be attributed to wage declines among blue-collar workers who were replaced or degraded by automation."

But in an (unregulated, mostly-non-unionized) capitalist system, what choice do most owners or employees (e.g. you) really have but to embrace AI and robotics -- to the extent it is not hype -- and race ahead?

Well, ignoring owners and employees could also expand their participation in subsistence, gift, and planned transactions as fallbacks -- but that is a big conceptual leap and still does not change the exchange economy imperative. A video and an essay I made on that:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...

Anyway, I'm probably just starting to repeat myself here.

That's not why they are called extrernalities. They are called externalities because they are the external consequences of actions. They are very much in our control, and if you are going to price any commodity fairly, to make it reflect true market and societal costs, then you have to price those in. Otherwise what you're really doing is subsidizing an industry.

In fact we had that here fairly recently, some older people who lost their home and had nowhere to go squatted in it and burned it down with a candle, with themselves inside of it.

Wars they didn't start, except with terrorism?

So why doesn't Powell know about this? Why stick to an ivory-tower fairy-tale story about interest rates and shelter costs, when it isn't the real world?

What if I'm such a statistical outlier that your statistics about people that don't drive as carefully as me don't apply?

What if I drive slow enough through intersections that I can look both ways first?

The phrase going around right now is, I hope you have the day you voted for.

Not that it matters but they polled a bunch of hardcore self-identifying maga types and even a quarter of those nut jobs were opposed to what Trump was doing.

Hilariously they still approve of his job because they can't connect in their minds the Trump screwing them over to the Trump they keep seeing on TV.

Trump's own commerce Secretary already admitted that any factories did come back will be automated.

And we're going to use unpaid prisoners, AKA slaves, to pick the lettuce.

So I'm afraid you're going to have to find a different career.

According to random slashdot posters we should all be HVAC welding plumbers. As I understand it from the posters around here that's how Peter thiel makes all his money. I don't know I didn't make it to the bottom of their comments...

"Fake it till you unicorn? Builder.aiâ(TM)s Natasha was never AI â" just 700 Indian coders behind the curtain"
https://techfundingnews.com/fa...