....why nobody talks about the fact Mars gravity is something along the lines of 0.37ish that of Earth's? Doesn’t such low gravity have disastrous health effects on any living organism from Earth? Moreover, this is something we will not be able to change about Mars.

Or how the soil is contaminated with perchlorates, which is toxic to us. All of it....

Or how the lack of magnetic field will make it impossible to actually keep an atmosphere even if somehow we manage to terraform Mars in the first place.

The cold, IMHO, is the easiest problem to deal with. In fact we have technology to deal with cold weather since the dawn of human civilization. The reason nobody lives in Antarctica is because it makes absolutely 0 financial sense to do so, rather than any kind of technological barriers. It's permanently covered by kilometre(s) thick ice sheet, making access to local resources extremely expensive & impractical. In addition, no colony can survive for long with a negative balance sheet (meaning if the costs of keeping a human alive > the wealth he can extract from said colony over the course of a human lifetime, it dies out). Unless the mother nation is willing to keep the colony artificially afloat while it slowly bankrupts itself.

People forget that the current way of working on a PC evolved over 150ish years....

It is still the most efficient way to work over long hours (assuming correct posture) with the least amount of effort required (imagine your arms after having to navigate for 7 hoursusing touch with 2 32" 4K displays).

Also businesses have invested BILLIONS in software that currently only run on x86-AMD64 architecture (and in fact due to their GUI and information density not really usable on touch navigation) that they are in no hurry to replace.

It's possible that one day we will replace all desktops with smartphones powerfull enough to run x86-AMD64 emulators to run legacy apps, however mouse/keyboard/screen setup is not going away any time soon.

You are correct that there is no point in predicting the future, but it does not mean we should not give it any though and possibly prepare for some of the outcomes.

For example take death; we all know we will die at some point in the future. But we do not know when. We just know it will happen at some point. Does that mean we should live life and pretend it is never going to happen? Or is it wiser to prepare one's will, pick out a burial plot and have all the preparations made ahead of time?

Automation is real, and it does happen. When will it happen? Nobody knows....but we just know it will happen barring some kind of unforeseen disaster (massive solar flair sends us back to stone age, nuclear war wiped us out, etc).

If there is something better than AI, if our brains can conceive it so can AI.

We are still defining I, IMHO.

As for a smooth transition, it is IMHO again, the best we can hope for. Unless something unexpected happens that completely derails us, it's only a question of when, not if.

As opposed to stable humans?

Our "software" seems just as buggy and vulnerable to security threats (illness, propaganda, etc.) as machine code is.

AI does not need to be perfect or infallible. It just needs to perform better than human.

What does it matter? If we create machines that can perfectly emulate the functions of a human brain, it can do it too.

I've noticed a lot of people do not seem to understand the dangers of AI.

People seem to think that their job is somehow special, that they can never be replaced by a machine.

Also there is another group of people who seem to think that it's not a big deal, that just like the industrial revolution, new jobs will pop up for people to migrate to.

Both are wrong.

As of yet, there is nothing inherently special about a human being that cannot be reproduced by machines. When you can mechanize a human in it's entirety, new jobs created will be filled by machines.

Think creativity is some kind of magical power exempt from being reproduced by AI? Think again. There are AI right now that can paint, create new music, write news articles etc. And their works are indistinguishable from those produced by their human counterparts.

AI can code, robots can build and support and repair robots.

Even jobs who people consider "safe" (doctors, lawyers, etc) will eventually disappear. Imagine an AI doctor, who can in a fraction of a second, know your ENTIRE medical history as well as all drugs you where ever prescribed in your life time and know all possible interactions between those drugs and is up to date on research on your particular ailment that was published 1 hour ago. No human doctor could compete. And these AI doctors will work 24/7,365 days a year. No sick days, no training, no family drama to worry about while at work.....

Do you think it's coincidence that the first widely available commercial application AI happens to be autonomous road vehicles? The transportation industry is the #1 industry in North America in terms of total number of people employed (truck drivers, taxi drivers, pizza delivery, etc.).

Why do you think some governments have started experimenting with or looking into basic universal income?

Enterprise hard disks meant to be used in SANs have significantly better rating than that.

The Toshiba's used in my SAN are rated 10^17. When you plug that figure in the formula, there is 0 chance of a rebuild failing due to URE.

You can also use RAID6 (2 hard disks can fail) with disks that have lower URE raitings to protect yourself

Every human activity has a cost. Nothing is free in this world.

Who will pay to publish and host these papers? Advertisement? How well did that turn out for the Internet?

This does not exist in nature.

Survival of the fittest and all.

Say an animal mutates a gene that gives it 2x the strength that is normally present in it's species. Thus it wins all combats against rivals for mating rights and spreads it's genes (and eventually it's strength becomes the baseline in the species). Nature does not turn around and say "hey wait no fair, you cheated...." and bans it from reproducing.

How about this example: Say a stone age humanoid stumbles across 2 devices; 1 is some sort of super accurate energy weapon and the other is a force field device both with an infinite energy supply. The person who discovers it and learns to use it goes on to become the leader of a powerful empire who eventually conquers all neighboring tribes. Revered as a deity, he goes on to reproduce with so many females that his genes become part of the baseline for that species. Does nature say "hey no wait, that was not fair to the others, you are disqualified from competing!" ?

That is not how the real world works. I think our brains are hardwired to use any perceived advantage to win in any competitive situation. So much so it overrides logic and discipline even to the detriment of the group as a whole.So to me these results are not that much of a surprise. Winnners, alpha's or whatever you want to call them tend to do whatever it takes to win, morals and ethics be damned. Might explain why so many rich and powerful people display sociopathic/psychopathic tendencies. This is also part of the reason I believe our species is doomed in the long run. Our inability to override our hardwired tendencies to want to rise to the top/alpha position.

It means your company rents the network or wifi from a 3rd party.

There are different variations (some where you own the hardware, to them owning the hardware) and they manage it for you with their expertise.

Thing is is the network was large enough to require a full time person on it, this requirement will not change. So you will be stuck paying full time worker + overhead of 3rd party who needs to profit. Also at the end of the day you will pay the hardware costs many times over because again the 3rd party is there to make a profit, not be your friendly business partner.

However, if these mega service corps properly lobbied their local gov for some special tax exemptions, this might actually be cheaper in the long run than paying a person directly. But it comes at the expense of service (you have an SLA, if you have to wait, you wait, they will not prioritize you business over others, unless of course you are willing to pay much more).

Just to clarify:

It's not that IT jobs will not exist. They will. It's just that the majority of the labor will be off shored, and what cannot be well they will have hundreds upon hundreds of graduates competing again H1B's (or your nation's equivalent) for the little remaining jobs.

Kinda how like farming works in USA and Canada. You know where they fly in temporary workers from Mexico and then ship them back when the season is done.

This is not a bubble bursting.

It's an entire industry transforming itself. A paradigms shift.

We are living in a post PC world, and it's never going to come back.

With everything centralized, the hardware commoditized...there will not be any decent jobs left in this field (for somebody that lives in a Western nation).

CS departments are pumping out graduates like a mill.

Corporations are pushing hard for H1B visas....

Outsourcing still going strong....

Massive consolidation into data centers.

Tech field is a total disaster. Anybody studying in it right now should switch ASAP to another field.

There is some money left to be made however it's going to be the extremely rare exception rather than the rule.

It is not clandestine if the people meeting in a public location are known to all, if people can hear what they discuss, with whom, what they are planning.....

They reason why they can meet clandestinely in a public space is due to anonymity. Nobody knows who they are and don't care...

However if for example, il all outspoken critics of the catholic church are grouping up in a public park, the catholic church knows something is up and could move to suppress said movement.