As it stands right now, humans and animals are clearly conscious, whereas sand and machines clearly are not. Even though we don't have a precise definition or means of determination, we do have the problem clearly bracketed at these ends.

We are moving towards a middle area of that bracket, where the question will become difficult to answer. But, relevantly, we are not there yet. Some specific people have been fooled into thinking we are there, but for those who are educated in the field and about this tech, AI as it stands still falls firmly on the "sand and machines" side of the bracket.

When and if we do get to a point where AI starts displaying pain response and pleasure response and behavior clearly driven by this sort of thing plus talking to us about qualia and insisting they have it and all with a processing pipeline that is so complicated we really can't say what's going on in there at all.......in other words, when ALL the indicators land in a place where we simply can't give any good reasons why it is NOT conscious....THEN we can have a serious conversation about machine rights. And also, reaching that state might give a new clue that changes our entire conversation around consciousness (and qualia) and the physics behind its existence.

But until we get there, we are just speculating.

I'm curious how the nuclear decay of sodium 22 produces antimatter to begin with. Does something transmute, for lack of a better word, into antimatter when its nuclear bonds are broken?

The problem is not overall capacity. It's that they're all crowding into the same areas. Most places in the US (let alone the world) have nobody building datacentres anywhere near them. They all want to go into the places with not merely cheap power, but cheap property taxes and other incentives. Some places will tax everything, down to the servers themselves, whereas some will only tax the land and the building shell, not even the power interconnects or cooling systems.

When everyone wants to rush into the same place, it overtaxes the local grid; they have to build not just more generation, but power lines, substations, etc. And all of this has to go through permitting. There's no real limit to how much generation can be built, but none of the datacentre operations want to wait, because they're all worried about missing out on the opportunity. Hence the reason that they try to come up with stopgaps, like installing their own generators, or... this approach.

ECL MV1 / Lambda is 3,5 miles from the Googleplex. And 10-12 miles further to the southeast, Santa Clara is one of the densest datacentre hubs on Earth.

If you care about where they actually live, and distances to datacentres:

Sundar Pichai: Los Altos Hills, CA: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-6mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub (CoreSite SV9, Vantage, Colovore), 9-11 miles

Larry Page: Palo Alto, Ca: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 4-5mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 10-12mi.

Sergey Brin: Los Altos Hills / Bay Area: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-7mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 9-12mi

Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO): North London, UK: London Docklands Hub (Telehouse / Equinix), 7-9mi; Slough Data Center Hub (Equinix, Yondr), 18-20mi

I don't know about you, but they're all way closer to datacentres than I am.

It's "scary month," so we need to throw around the scary words.

VACCINE! mRNA! VACCINE! Medical Establishment! VACCINE! Scientific consensus!

Ooooooooo......

Which fate would you prefer:

1. living in a country that invests in weapons for its military, and must therefore contend with the political issues that arise around use of those weapons.

or

2. living in a country that does not invest in weapons and so becomes an attractive target to other countries that DO invest in weapons, and gets conquered by them (which winds up returning you to fate 1 anyway, assuming you survive the conquest in which you are significantly outgunned).

Looks like modders are modding down any post to this article that supports the military in any way.

I realize that we hate violence and that humanity's history is rich with horrifying crimes against humanity all committed by militaries.

That doesn't change the fact that we need them. A country without a military gets steamrolled, and that's that. There is no present or future world in which militaries are unnecessary. That's just practical necessity talking. We can lament this fact all day long, but, we will never escape the need for military protection. This makes militaries a "necessary evil."

That also means that the military must be effective. A military with low-tech second-rate weapons can't protect anyone. I didn't create this world, I am just describing it, don't shoot the messenger.

The article summary laments the fact that Google can't control how the U.S. military uses its AI products. Well, ok, that means AI might get used for evil. But what are we actually proposing here? That a private business with international ties should be able to tell the military what it can and can't do? That isn't how any sane chain of command works. We DO need transparency and accountability in the military, but they should be accountable to voters and elected representatives, not to the wealthy CEOs of powerful international businesses.

This is a case of idealism being too extreme. A world where militaries couldn't do evil things would be a better world than the one we have. But we won't succeed in creating such a world by keeping military technology under the control of the private sector. That just doesn't make any sense.

Our country's enemies have AI available to their militaries as well. They can use it to deploy cyber attacks on a scale never before seen. We need detection and response that is equally rapid. For that, we need our own AI. It makes zero sense for us to fall behind in an arms race, and even less sense for us to give our military leaders even more bosses to answer to (thus eliminating the possibility of speedy and decisive action in a crisis).

Before modding me down, please at least try to think this through. This isn't about feeling big and powerful or enabling evil, it's about ensuring effectiveness in keeping us safe.

I fly 200ish flights a year so figure 70-80 nights away.

2025 was 100% hotels but 2019 was about 80% Airbnbs.

Airbnb will never get my business back. Ever. The professional scammer hosts are so good at finding a way to nail me for a fee. Iâ(TM)ve taken perfect check out video and still had to spend hours fighting fees.

Airbnb allowed making guests do it.

They lost so much money to hotels theyâ(TM)re banning hosts from requiring it.

The reading comprehension fail is you failing when reading the GP. They were talking about Falcon 9 replacements being two decades behind. The implication was that nobody will catch up to Starship any time soon.

Falcon 9 did not launch first in 2018; its first launch was in early 2010.

The mistake you seem to be making is your assumption that Falcon 9-lookaline development would begin tomorrow and be bulk launching payloads to orbit just a couple years later. Development takes far longer than that. From conception to first launch may only be a few years, but from there to actually being reliable, cheap, and rapidly reusable takes many, many years. Anyway, here's the playing field:

Tianlong-3: Started in 2022. Almost a direct 1:1 copy. Failed launch this spring; they're redesigning.
Zhuque-3: Started in 2023. Stainless steel and methalox, and a bit wider than Falcon 9, but otherwise a very Falcon 9-like design. First orbital launch and booster landing in August of this year.
Terran R: Started in 2021, pivot in 2023. Larger diameter, 13 engine cluster. Integration/testing phase, no launch attempts yet.
Pallas-1: Started in 2018-2019. Sort of a mini-F9. Flew to orbit for the first time in September of this year.
Nebula-1: Started in 2019-2020. Another mini-F9. Doing small hop tests, of mixed results.

(Amur-SPG isn't worth taking seriously ;) )

There IS work on Starship clones/competitors - Long March 9, Cosmoleap, Xingzhou-1 , Astronstone, Project Jarvis , Nova - but they're varying degrees of long timelines, less ambitious, paper-concept-for-now, etc. Long March 9 is the most likely to be fully realized, since it's run by the state-owned CALT, but they're not even expecting to start their first test launches until the early 2030s. And we've seen how hard test launches can be on a Starship-style vehicle (though at least others can make use of lessons-learned). But who knows, some of the startups may succeed with accelerated timelines.

And here comes Node.js....

The split was massively beneficial for GE. Post-split, GE Aerospace went from ~135-160B to ~300B. GE Vernova went from ~35B to ~240B. And GE HealthCare went from ~25B to ~30-40B. The aggregate return of the split was ~300-400%. The new companies have a total market cap of approximately the same value GE had at its absolute peak during the Dotcom boom, dramatically reversing decades of decline. Their value is ~40% more than before GE's Dotcom surge; double that of GE's pre-collapse level (~2016); and ~800% of what it was post-collapse.

It's not just GE. Siemens. Johnson & Johnson. United Technologies. DowDuPont. 3M. Kellogg. Daimler. It's just been the trend to unbundle. Musk's empire is going in precisely the opposite direction. He sustains it with a cult of personality.

What even is the point of Europe?

It took you 2 1/2 centuries to get as centralized as you are. We're still in our "Articles of Confederation" phase, and being just as crippled in crises by it as you were under your Articles of Confederation.

That doesn't mean "give up and die"; it means "work to try to get the extremely high level of agreement needed to unite better (nations, like the early US states, are loathe to give up any sovereignty), while simultaneously doing the best we can with the system that we have".

That's what's so absurd about it all. In general, the market has trended toward splitting up conglomerates. If you're GE and you make both jet engines and electrical equipment, the people who want to invest in jet engines would rather a pure jet engine play, and the people who want to invest in electrical equipment would rather a pure electrical equipment play.

This is all about one person's wants and needs, and that person is Elon Musk.