It's too late for that.

We can't afford to quit now. None of the world's militaries or three letter security agencies will give up a weapon that might give them and advantage, ever. If we stop, we've lost any future conflict that might arise.

Imagine a future in which the world is controlled by Iran or North Korea. Competitive AI is the only way to prevent this.

This is the real world of realpolitik and real military power. Idealistic pearl clutching at this point is just noise. A ban won't happen, can't happen now.

The tax, aside from lost revenue, are inevitable security breaches and uncontrollable outages. If a state actor decides to take down AWS or Azure, literally thousands of businesses would be down for an indefinite period.

This incident was nothing, a glitch. That doesn't mean the next one will be.

Which is what happens when you let MBAs make decisions instead of engineers.

MBAs hear the magic words "CAPEX vs OPEX" and their tiny myopic brains turn off as do the compliance officers with wet dreams of shifting liability elsewhere.

lt all works (with ever rising costs), until it doesn't.

It's just that the government is in denial and those geniuses with journalism degrees haven't caught onto the fact yet.

Just sell it the same way you sell human created software that has no benefits (e.g. every phone game ever made).

Because Fox "news" just wasn't enough for them.

Golly, who could say no to that?

Well, you could, but seriously, there's no good alternative to Linux.

> There's nothing to indicate it can or will produce anything remotely approaching an interesting new take on anything.

You may be correct. I doubt it will matter much. As Mencken in 1938 said, ""No one in this world, so far as I know... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."

Yes and no. When thousands of amateurs are cranking out films for free and posting them publicly, some of them will be more popular than others.

Not to mention the porn industry.

It's not just the actors, it's the whole entertainment industry that's doomed.

Look, it's all about money and synthetic actors will always be cheaper. Eventually they'll be better. Even more eventually, your humble home computer will be able to cobble up a personalized drama, comedy, rom com or whatever you want, on command and there will be no more Hollywood, Bollywood or anything like a centralized entertainment industry.

Like the T800 in terminator, this can't be stopped. It can't even be slowed.

Microplastics are this generations lead in gasoline. Crappy processed food would be the second culprit, followed by vaping and whatever crap goes into that.

So, can you pay me all that research money now?

There'll be quite a market for people who can fix this crap.

Because drugs!.

There's a whole contingent of the USA population who put all drugs in one mental bucket and scream "drugs are baaaaad."

If the USA government was serious about drug harm reduction, then THCs and hallucinogenics would be legal and cheap so law enforcement resources could focus on cracking down on actually harmful drugs like meth, fentanyl, PCP and it's analogs and so on.

Eventually, less harmful drugs would crowd out more harmful drugs and drug associated health problems become relatively minor.

While the article does discuss a valid point which is that much of physics research is nonsense. The reason is that the whole system of grant funding is dysfunctional. It's not a conspiracy run by a secret cabal. It's just the usual case of institutional human stupidity.

All orchestrated by Google. Hope you products out there weren't expecting privacy or anonymity.