Yes you are right, that strongly leftist governments tend to become dictatorships. Interestingly, strongly leftist and strongly rightwing governments are indistinguishable. E.g. the Soviet Union was strongly leftist, and yet is was, in reality, one of the most fascist regimes to ever exist.

Hi.

Socialism is not necessarily totalitarian. It can be democratic. The state owns the means of production, but people can elect the state representatives.

I am not a fan of socialism - as I explained. I am just saying that AI will inevitably take all jobs, and so there will have to be some strategy for preventing everyone except the owners of the robot factories from becoming impoverished.

Funny how predictable the responses are here: "That's socialism!" - as if that shuts down the argument.

I personally am horrified by the idea of socialism, and also capitalism. They are both deeply flawed for different reasons.

But unfortunately socialism is inevitable. AI is going to eliminate ALL jobs - ALL of them. So a government handout in some manner is inevitable. And that's socialism. We can't avoid it, sign.

Bernie Sanders is an idiot. But what he proposes (which is not his idea) is probably the best outcome. But given that he - a leftist extremist - proposed it, it now has zero chance of being discussed seriously. He has tainted it.

yeah, that's all we need people having these. Maybe everybody should have their own atomic bomb too. See how long the world lasts.

It is provably impossible to "test" that software is (1) secure and (2) reliable. To demonstrate those properties, there must be an "assurance argument" - a logical explanation of how the security and/or reliability aspects of the design generate those properties. Thus, an AI could author such narratives, but without human-readable source code, there would be no way to verify that the code actually adheres to the claimed explanations.

Hi - thanks for this thoughtful response.

I do like the flexibility of Javascript-like languages - e.g. that one can just add an attribute to any object. But one pays for that:

I am working on a pure Javascript front end with a Java back end at the moment, and whenever I have to make changes to an object that needs to pass between the two, it is a real headache on the Javascript side - there is no compiler to find all the places where I used the object based on its old definition...

So pros and cons.

Yes, C is a brilliant language.

"AI performs better with strongly typed languages. Strongly typed languages give AI much clearer constraints..."

As Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python once wrote,

"I've learned a painful lesson, that for small programs dynamic typing is great. For large programs, you have to have a more disciplined approach. And it helps if the language actually gives you that discipline, rather than telling you, 'Well, you can do whatever you want.'"

The TVs now monitor what you watch, and sell that data. But (by law) you can disable the monitoring. It's hard to find the settings, but the TVs have setting to turn off monitoring.

No premium seats for cross-country or international flights? Then I won't be flying anymore. No thanks to the MISERY of being stuck sitting upright in a seat, often late at night, unable to recline or sleep, for 5+ hours at a time. And no thanks to the MISERABLE gate waiting area, which also has no place to recline. Economy flying is an AWFUL experience. NO THANKS.

"Sorry, but the opinion of a nobody on slashdot isn't a measure whether someone "understands" what science is or not"

I am a scientist, with masters degrees from an Ivy League school in both nuclear science and operations research. Your comment that science is just a hobby is dismissive, arrogant, and ignorant. If not for science, we would not have cellphones, cars, or any other modern conveniences. Science is based on a combination of theory and experimental proof.

Science is performed by humans, who are flawed, so science is as imperfect as humans are, but it is the best process that we have for ascertaining truth about the natural world. Perhaps don't be so dismissive of others and their profession and education. BTW I work with scientists, some of whom have saved literally millions of lives in Africa through vaccines that they developed there - scientists who could have become rich from their work but chose instead to help others.

Sorry, but you clearly do not understand what science is. And the claim that "every life is sentient" is circular because you are saying that all life is sentient and sentience is life. Finally, there is no evidence that primitive life, such as a bacterium, is sentient - any such claim is an absurd conjecture.

"Every living thing know what I'm talking about, the chatbot has no idea."

You are referring to sentient. That is not how scientists try to define life. Not all life is sentient - e.g. a bacterium is not sentient.

Hi - did you read my article?

What is "happiness"?

Be careful - the criteria might be met by a AI bot...

One can define "complex adaptive system", but "life" - no. And "sentient" is something else, but a lot of life is not sentient. Here is an article I wrote about this: https://medium.com/@cliffberg/...