I would expect that our backward-ass leaders will instead get all nationalistic and prideful of the "homegrown" Microsoft monopoly

Then we must lead them down a better path.

"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. You can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" -- Blacula

In other words, the "gap" you describe is considered to be good news for the humans who have to do those jobs.

I say this jokingly, but I really did drink the Kool Aide, and I think it's just Kool Aide without any additional harmful ingredients. I'm seriously all for us at least striving to live a completely hedonistic lifestyle, where we never toil because our robots slaves do everything tedious for us.

I want to die in an Orion whorehouse, looking like a character from WALL-E. Only in my final moments do I want to learn the awful truth, when one of the green-skinned ladies' faceplate falls off, revealing a robot.

Ok, maybe it wasn't pure Kool Aide.

The premise is that you would understand how it works. Once we've glossed over the story of finding that holy grail, then you can build minds with different amounts of spite. (e.g. doubly-infinite for a TortureBot, or decreased for most other uses.)

Wait, are you suggesting I can simply hire humans, to design and manufacture these intelligent computers for me?!

Oh, duh, I get it! You're taking Bezos' own point of view, rather than the point of view of his engineers.

But how do the engineers create the intelligent computer? It's not hiring-people all the way down, is it?

What do you think is the right age for Carousel? As someone over 30, I think 30 is too young. ;-) But what age might we all agree isn't too young?

It hasn't produced anything yet, but somehow it's already Too Big to Fail? Sanders and Trump can go fuck themselves.

I think that would be a fair exchange for the resulting LLMs also having no copyright protection.

A bit idealistic, but nevertheless correct.

I agree with every word you just said, except one.

This will help the US economy, not hurt it. American businesses paying for a commodity as mundane as Microsoft Office, year after year, is an unnecessarily taxing parasitic drag. If this can be eliminated, all the better for every American.

(Well, except for the ones who own a piece of that one company, but fuck them.)

Ukraine is affecting their daily lives, by hitting their pocketbooks instead of wasting their attacks on "war crimes," i.e. hitting worthless targets which don't help end the war at all.

Murder a civilian and all you do is slightly sour their family against the war. Blow up an oil storage tank and you just made thousands of people have to suffer through inconvenience.

And worst of all, you heartlessly, viciously left them alive, where they'll remember how much poverty sucks, and they'll complain about it too. Good luck achieving that level of sadistic manipulation through mere murder.

In USA, Aedes Aegypti is invasive and new, and it won't be missed. In most places in America, it's been here less than 30 years. Less than 5 years, where I live. I am confident that the ecology of 2026 is plenty compatible with the ecology of 2021.

If some obscure bird species that just moved in 5 years ago can't settle for eating the slower, bigger, less stealthy classical mosquito strains we'll have left, then it can fly back down to Central America where it recently came from.

At this point all their base, did in fact, belong to them.

At this point CATS was just doing a villain monologue on screen.

I expect they're worried about being replaced by AI themselves. Cost cutting here is probably pre-emptive.

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