Erdogan's Türkiye doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming an EU member. Although I loved the idea behind Mustapha Kemal's Türkiye, even there I would be very opposed to their entry due to the enormous size of the country and its population. It is simply too big (and poor) too be assimilated. Special status, sure! Beter a friendly Türkiye than a hostile one. NATO member? No prob. It's a defensive alliance after all. So is Türkiye 'western' country? Nope and certainly not under a Islamist dictator as Erdogan....

"The US is going to ban TikTok because it's a foreign company from a country that is not a US ally"
A huge tell here is that TikTok is STRICKTLY FORBIDDEN in China itself as being to damaging for their young!! (As of course are Google, Meta, Wikipedia et al.) And they still have the gall to complain about the west's censorship of their (but not really their as forbidden over there) so-called social media....

It always comes down to the following: "How do YOU define intelligence?"

Well, whatever the result in the end, I will remain grateful to Stability AI that they offered a free product that could be installed LOCALLY (I hate the cloud concept with a passion...) I'm happily running Stable Diffusion on my RTX3070 with acceptable speeds using Comfyui, playing around with the different checkpoints, lora's and all the other fun stuff I find on Civitai. Pinokio really lowers the bar for playin with AI things (thanks Peanut!)

When I was younger, my take was that it would take 15-20 years to 'train' an 'artificial brain', just like it takes time to get a baby up to general intelligence. I still like this idea. Now we throw the whole internet, music libraries, picture collections at a monster computer to have it digest it all at once. We end up with LLMs that are seemingly magnificent at the written word, but have actually no clue as to the meaning/context of what they write. We have seen wonderfull things like Sora that seem to have only a rudimentary understanding of physics (water simulation seems pretty ok, but consistency seems whacky what with people/cars/things disappearing/appearing, the human skeleton not being consistent (swapping legs, finger horrorshows) etc I like to think that the AI has to LEARN these things, not just regurgitate what it's been fed. So treat it like a baby. Give an advanced machine one or two manipulators and a vision system (it'll learn how to use them) and give it children's toys (maybe simulated). Biggest problem will probably be how to give it 'curiosity' (What will an AGI do when it has no tasks to do?) Keep adding more toys and add complexity to the toys, just as for a baby. Let the manipulators interact with water, mud, foam, soft things, hard things, unbreakable things, breakable things. Have it LEARN how things work, action & effect. Keep building up the compute capacity while doing this. Those things will go slowly, other things like learning arithmetic, mathematics, text etc will probably go faster. At the end you would end up with a machine that understands the world, has knowledge and reasoning skills. (hopefully...) Anyway, maybe this is more for a science-fiction scenario but that is how I envisioned the AGI evolution. I'm sure we'll see wonderfull things in the coming one-two years but if no REAL breakthrough is achieved we might again go in the trough of disillusionment and enter the next AI winter....

The Chinese ought to retaliate and outlaw Facebook!! That will show those freedom-hating Americans!!

Didn't Rabbit R1 already promise something like that? By the time it gets to R3 it ought to be something quite usable. I would prefer that to something from Microsoft/OpenAI taking over my PC...

Hi, I have a pretty standard medium PC (Ryzen something, RTX3070, 16GB) While not having deep understanding of GenAI, I like to play with LLMs (GPT4All) and Text-to-image (Stable Diffusion) locally on my PC. (hate cloud concept) While a lot of discussion here is about adding NPU cores to the CPU die, would that not go in the direction of iIntel's integrated graphics? ie more or less does the job but sucks compared to AMD and Nvidia dedicated GPU offerings? Would it not make more sense to release consumer level (ie inference oriented) cards with 'something' that accelerates GenAI beyond what GPU does? Some sort of TPU or inference-only H100 /mi300 variants? I'll keep my PC for the next couple of years but if something would come out like I described, I would certainly be interested... or am I completely missing the mark here?

Fredric Brown was obviously an A.I. You asked for a SciFi story of less than 10 words end it gave you one with 17 words!! What's scifi about Anthony Burgess' story? It's a f*cking 8 word sentence...

OK. So there is no such thing as a "wooden leg" either by your definition. After all it is just a piece of wood. It is no leg. Maybe a vat grown 'leg' grown from your own stem cell would meet your definition of an artificial leg, but a wooden leg would certainly not be an artificial leg. I'm sure others have explained to you the difference between ARTIFICIAL intelligence and artificial INTELLIGENCE. Gen AI (and all other form of current day AI) are the former, not the latter.

Look at the way numbers are tallied. Belgium not only counts the dead in the hospitals, but also in retirement homes, nursing facilities for the old. In fact, due to the dearth of tests, even POTENTIAL Covid-19 cases are included in the total. Besides that, the population density here is CRAZY (compared to the US) and there are an awful lot of old folks (health care here being cheap and good). Thirdly, a popular holiday destination is/was the North of Italy for skiing. Bad choice....There is also a very large carnival culture here with the biggest ones happening just as awareness of Covid-19 started. All these factors caused the Covid-19 to explode. In short, donâ(TM)t compare tiny Belgium with vast Sweden. Maybe compare Stockholm with Brussels? Just saying....

Don't we already have these situations?? (kinda, sorta)

A car with ABS/ESP starts slipping (ie on an oil slick) , departs its normal trajectory and the driver hits the brakes but thanks to ABS/ESP does not slam into a parked car. It does however change it direction by a coupe of feet, killing me while cycling on the same road. (hypothetically speaking. I don't know enough of ABS/ESP)

A car without ABS/ESP starts slipping (ie on an oil slick) , departs its normal trajectory and the driver slams the brakes. causing the car to slide and crash into a parked car. I keep on cycling.

In the first case, can my wife sue the car maker because the ABS/ESP was responsible for killing me? I would think not!

Now replace ABS/ESP with AI. Remember, it's ARTIFICIAL intelligence, not real intelligence but dumb as a rock. It certainly will not have a internal philosophical discussion on what to do and which is the best course to take, taking the value of life into account. In the aforementioned situation, it will most likely try to correct the trajectory as best as it can, maybe killing me in the process.

I just would like to state that these are all what-if border cases. Sure, they will happen, but in the vast majority of cases, AI car control systems will save us a lot of grief and a lot of lives without being perfect. It'll be better/safer than what we have now.

Bored....

Slippery slope here!!!
Sure, you can make the argument that we've known for decades that smoking is hazardous to your health so any smoking related ailments should not be paid for by the general population thru their insurance premiums - socially imposed or otherwise.
But then you can make the same argument about heavy drinkers (Liver cirrhosis? Traffic accident while DUI? Fuck you! Pay it yourself, don't make the community pay for your vices)
What about obesity? Heart problems? Diabetes? Well of course, you stuff yourself full of hamburgers, fried chicken, carbonated sugar water and so on. Now you're obese, your arteries are clogged up, you have diabetis, gout and a whole raft of other ailments? Screw you, fatty! Don't let my insurance pay for your lifestyle errors!! That way my insurance premiums can remain low!
Only healthy people should be covered for things like infectious diseases (if they were fully vaccinated that is), cancers of an undetermined origin and accidents (although of course, if you got your accident doing dangerous stuff like skateboarding, doing bike stunts, skydiving, hey, don't come crying to MY insurance company! Take out a special, 'dangerous sports' insurance or so)
As you can see, you can take this to extremes and keep on excluding 'special cases' until noone is left..
The situation is not black and white but is a large, grey zone going from pitch black to light grey. Who gets to decide where to draw the line?
If the economy tanks completely however, some cost/benefit analysis in health care should be made ("for just 5 million we can keep this 95-year old living 2 years longer!!" is not a good use of scarce resources... but then, who am I to decide that?)

Disclaimer: I'm not a citizen of the USA, I don't follow everything that happens there, I'm not qualified in any of these subjects...
Here across the pond, we have often heard that the opioid epidemic started because Big Pharma (embodied by Purdue and the Sacklers) pushed a highly addictive product (OxyContin) all the while marketing it as a harmless painkiller. People got hooked and when their prescriptions ran out had to turn to alternative source. Hello web-ordered fentanyl! The people responsible for this should rot in jail for the rest of their lives. Apparently companies are now legally persons as well, so a death sentence should be pronounced and EVERYTHING (buildings, patents,...) should be confiscated, placed in trust until a more reputable entity would take over. So I agree that the $500+M seems like a slap on the wrist, an acceptable cost of doing business. As others mentioned however, this is the fine in a single state. If all states jump on this bandwagon, Big Pharma stands to lose billions. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of people. OF course this will never happen and the billionair class will weasel out of it like they always do.