I think the killer app is having an enormous, portable, handsfree display wherever you go:

1. Replace your phone
2. Replace your monitor
3. Replace your home theatre

Nonsense. This is an attempt to once again diffuse responsibility and exculpate these scoundrels. No one is denying that fossil fuels are necessary, but what is also undeniable is that measures to wean ourselves off fossil fuel dependence would have worked has action been taken when this whole fiasco was discovered more than 50 years ago. The fossil fuel industry borrowed the same playbook from the Tobacco industry and sowed fear, uncertainty and doubt, stalling climate action to maximize profits. They are directly liable for it.

I think there's a key point missing here. The amount of information a human can process is naturally constrained, whereas a machine is not. So while superficially, what these machines are doing is roughly the same as a human brain, that doesn't mean that our laws ever envisioned use of this nature and scale.

We are just dealing with something unprecedented here, and everyone is learning how to deal with it. I wouldn't dismiss these concerns off hand.

That doesn't sound improbable when you look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... It looks like basically the same features have been added to Microsoft Teams, with the main difference being that "Multi" uses Zoom infrastructure and probably has a greater head start. I guess we'll have to wait and see whether there's something more innovative afoot.

Not sure it matters so much where it gets its energy from. Even coal burned at a single large power plant produces less emissions and wastage (well-to-wheels), than ICE engines over the lifetime of a car: https://www.reuters.com/busine... And that's without counting
a) that the grid can be made cleaner over time, whereas ICE remains ICE.
b) The distributed nature of the pollution that ICE vehicles produce, and therefore, the inability to remedy it in any way

I appreciate the finer point you are trying to make, but I don't think it alters for the core point I'm trying to make. The issue here is that jobs are not going to materialize themselves out of thin air when the fundamental value proposition that a human has to offer (their skills/labour) are no longer valuable. Were we to take things to the extreme and extrapolate a future where AI is able to match the average human intellect, almost all jobs will be eliminated, because most jobs will no longer require (messy) humans.

Jevon's paradox states that a fall in prices will create an increase in demand. However, a fundamental assumption here is that individuals actually have income with which to create that additional demand. Where is their income going to come from when they don't have jobs?

I keep bringing up the example of horses being out of a job since the advent of the automobile. In all previous historical instances, many new jobs and avenues were created as a result of advanced automation. What is happening this time appears to be fundamentally different. Can you explain what new jobs will be created when almost everything that can be automated, will be?

This is why the solution won't come through individual action, but through systemic controls. What we really have to do is to stop giving climate vandalism a free pass guised as a "negative externality", and to account for the actual cost of carbon. Even without any of that, just look at how quickly traditional automakers are being wiped off the map when compelling alternatives arise. The world and people will adjust pretty fast given the right incentives. Most people want to do the right thing, they are just too involved in their day-to-day problems as you say.

I had been hoping for the possibility of using a laser to zap mosquitos, and am glad to see someone has done this. It may be hard to operate this safely with humans around but it could potentially be installed at ingress points like doors and windows so mosquitos never have a chance to make it in. Unlike sprays and other deterrents against which they exhibit remarkable resilience, this may take a while to evolve around, if ever.

Fundamentally, their case for being ahead of the pack rests on 5 pillars.

1. Lidar and high precision mapping doesn't really help towards a generalized solution to the problem. I think they are probably correct here.
2. They have a special purpose accelerator specifically designed for this problem, with redundancy built-in at every level, and the necessary performance for the task. This is a tossup for me, and mostly only matters from a power consumption perspective.
3. They are not trying to explicitly program rules, as this is an intractable problem. Instead, they want to interrogate the fleet to provide high-quality data so that the neural network can train itself. This again, seems like a sound principle to work on.
4. They have the infrastructure (i.e. the fleet + software) to gather high quality data to feed the network. Large volumes of similar data alone is not enough, as you run into the overfitting/sparse data problem. They've built out the software infrastructure to gather a diversity of high-quality examples so that the neural net can learn in a very generalised way.
5. Don't under-estimate exponentials.

The fourth and fifth are still the biggest stumbling blocks IMO. The number of bizarre cases are so many, it's not clear to what extent even that kind of infrastructure can gather sufficient data to solve the problem. However, one thing that is clear is that, at least, they do have no. 4, whereas the competition is not even close, which gives them a significant leg up. As for Elon's predictions on the timeline, he seems to be relying heavily on no. 5, but it's also not clear whether skynet is actually learning at a geometric rate, and to what extent no. 4 will scale to allow it. Considering the rate at which auto-pilot is reported to be improving, they are probably expecting a good outcome.

Essential should market their phone as a vaccine-dispelling device with a yoni healing aura, and it will surely sell like hot cakes.

We really shouldn't. Elon Musk has bought into Nick Bostrom's ideas on super-intelligence. What do they both have in common? Neither of them are experts in AI.

If in fact, you do look at what experts in AI are saying (Geoff Hinton, Andrew Ng, Yann Le Cunn), they generally agree that this is mostly a useless distraction - we are nowhere near general intelligence, never mind super-intelligence. There will be a time to have this conversation, but this level of scare mongering, at this early stage, is not warranted.

There's also no need to anthropomorphize AI. Just because they are many violent humans with genocidal impulses, it does not mean that AIs will magically acquire such tendencies, unless we explicitly tune them to do so.

Let's take this to the extreme. Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect. All of a sudden, most jobs would be eliminated (including robot repair, because robots would repair themselves), because most jobs no longer require humans. This is similar to how most horses are still out of a job since the advent of the automobile. So the idea that when one job is eliminated, a new one will always arise is simply false.

That is therefore, not an argument to say that we should not welcome an AI revolution - I think such a revolution would bring more positives than negatives for the future of humanity. But to assume that jobs will continue to "invent" themselves is magical thinking - we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.

In general, one wouldn't go into StackOverflow to learn a language, you go there to find solutions to common tasks and issues. Ergo, the more answers which are sought on Stack Overflow, the greater the number of common tasks being implemented in said language.

Can you elaborate more on how the concentration of wealth in a few and free markets can be kept separate? I assume that this will be through enforcing a process of diminishing returns on concentrating wealth? Also, why did Marx think it was unavoidable a byproduct of free markets?