Grandmas stupid baby photo collection create more positive utility for humans than a petabyte of stupid slop images of crayfish aranged into a jesus face ever will.

Im more wondering if we're gonna start seeing clankers ordering "Victorias secret vacuum cleaners" catalogues getting orders in the mail leading to claude-bots in raincoats atendending seedy industrial machinery video screenings at 2am in the bad part of town.

"grease me daddy."

Well, I can think of some uses if it were actually up to the job. I'd often like to have it read something to me, but it would need to be able to understand the emotional background.
E.g.:
Strange thing are done neath the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold,
The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold,
(etc.)

Or possibly have it read me The Lord of the Rings. And I have some fond memories of the radio program "X minus one".

But I *really* doubt that current AIs are up to that.

That would be funny... but also foolish. Iran is thrilled to have Trump right where he is, doing all the dumb things he's doing.

Nah. Only those who count.

Sorry, you're not in Kansas anymore. Most slashdotters won't get the reference.

Honestly, IBM would do well to just stick to their course. This AI thing is due for a pretty severe market adjustment to bring some rationality back into the tech decision makingl, We're already seeing a lot of companies shitting the bed over token costs and realiseing they laying off the entire tech staff would just cost them more. And this flows on.

Or this is wishful thinking on the part of myself, a 50yo whos been feeling a lot less secure about my future job prospects lately if I dont stop rejecting any and every offer to go into management..

Valid! (Including the gray and the beard, though my hair is still mostly black. Mostly.)

The point, though is that there are lots of grandmas with varying levels of computer knowledge, many of whom can and should be moved to a Linux system that is harder to screw up. Or, honestly even better, a good Chromebook.

On that topic, I did that for my father-in-law around 2010. I got tired of cleaning up the mess he made on his Windows laptop, so (with his permission) I upgraded him to Debian. It was hugely lower-maintenance for me.

The really funny thing about that particular case is that my father-in-law was a retired Full Professor of Computer Science! His problem wasn't that he didn't have the background or ability to manage a system himself, it was that he didn't want to. At his life-stage, the computer was a tool that he used, mostly as a web browser to buy parts for the farming and antique furniture refinishing that were his passions. Also, he had very thick fingers and constantly fat-fingered stuff, literally. What he really needed was a Chromebook with a full-sized laptop keyboard (a bigger-than-normal keyboard would have been even better), but Chromebooks didn't exist yet.

I'm a grandpa and I'm using a computer. My wife is a grandma and she's using a computer, too.

You don't have to like the forecast to track it against the news reports. (Of course, the news reports are often just PR, and you need to weigh that in.)

The brainstem is probably rather invariant between people. That's an area where differences are likely to be fatal.

Actually, we're pretty sure it CAN happen by random chance. The argument is about how small that chance is...and what environmental conditions give the highest probability. And in what order things happened. (Currently I, not really knowledgeable in the field, think metabolism probably came before centralized information storage.)

YES!!
And *part* of the reason it's tricky is that we've got no real idea of what current AIs are going to develop into. Projections are all over the map.

FWIW, I tend to consider the AI2027 projections as identifying the most probably sequence, but there are lots of others, and none of them have any chance of being more than approximately correct. (The AI2027 people say it isn't moving quite as fast as they projected, but when I compare what they said against the news I'm not sure I believe them.)

Nope, Intel has made ARM chips before, remember StrongARM? It just couldn't sell them.

Right now Intel is making its variant of an AMD CPU design after trying for several years to make variants of an HP design while reluctantly selling a 32 bit chip based on an 8 bit chip (the 8008) it built for a terminal manufacturer in the 1970s, in much greater quantities. I think you severely overestimate how enthusiastic Intel is about the CPUs it sells. Intel has repeatedly tried to come up with better designs than its popular products and the market has consistently rejected them, from the iAPX 432 in the 1980s to Itanium.

It's more than happy to rent fab space to Apple if Apple ponies up. Especially right now when RAM prices are killing the market for new PCs.

"These days"

They've all been engineered since Heaven's Gate bombed, and certain franchises have always been engineered. There was even a book on how to write generic blockbuster, called Save The Cat!, that became an industry bible in the early 2000s, with scripts being rejected if they didn't follow the formula, which gave a page by page description of what needed to be there.

But... complaining they're engineered is like complaining that rollercoasters are engineered. Nobody goes into a MCU or Bond or even a John Wick movie expecting some amazing piece of meaningful artistry. Hell, if they did, the number of people interested in them would reduce dramatically, because the last thing most of us want to do after writing Java for 5 days and trying to relax on a Friday evening is to think. People want fun escapism sometimes, because life right now sucks more than it's done in 30 years for most people.

"Are they worth saving?" So you're telling me that you feel that giving a group of billionaires more control over what you watch and what information you get because you don't see any cultural or entertainment value in The Beekeeper? That's your argument?

Really?