Co-incidentally (or not) during the last 30 years, Chinese GDP grew by 20x. During the same period, the U.S. GDP increase was only 2x. Obviously, green-house gas emissions are tied to GDP growth.

>>but I think when Canada tries this, most bigger corps are 'so what' and just drop Canada as a market.

The entire Canadian market is 1/2 the size of California. Why would an international business go out of their way for Canadian dollars in that case?

>>home grown social media and other tech.

No one would use it. It would end up being something like the Canadian government would have to make it illegal to use Facebook, and only the shittier domestic alternative would be allowed. Similar to Ladas in the Soviet Union.

Canada's GDP is half that of just California, even though Canada has a slightly larger population. They don't have Silicon fabs. A decade of left-wing government that dis-invested in energy and infrastructure production while increasing regulatory requirements means that something like a data-center is prohibitively expensive to build in Canada.

And the thing about having a replacement for something like Google/Apple/Facebook means billions in capital investment, in a place that can't provide the return on investment.

17 going on 25... There's a reason they card people at liquor stores.

There's no reason a superintelligence couldn't emerge from existing computational resources. Such an intelligence wouldn't even have to be 100% "conscious" to have intelligence or autonomy. It would merely need to have a goal and take realistic steps to achieve it. The goal could be: cause share-holders of Meta to be sell shares, so that the price declines by 20%. It would then "figure-out" what steps to take to achieve that (maybe generate fake online gossip about Meta's poor financials).

The danger from such a machine, of course, would arise if it decides that humans would be an impediment to its goals and takes steps to reduce the human population (a "Skynet" scenario)

It would never need to have a conception of itself as an entity, just merely decided on a goal, take actions, and bypass any safeguards humans have put in place to stop it.

Yeah, exactly. He's so fucking reclusive that his kids can't even go to a proper "private" school, of which I'm sure there are dozens in SF or Hawaii, or DC, or Tahoe, which would take his kids.

Just the irony of a person who made his billions basically selling the private data of millions of people being so private and reclusive himself.

No, it's the fact that EVs are a solution in search of a problem. For most normal people, an ICE car will do, especially when used ones are more economical.

Nobody but political ideologues and tech bros asked for EVs, and their recent success is entirely due to tax subsidies, rather than market competition: if anything EVs are more expensive and less practical than an ICE car: a toy for the affluent who can use them to signal their virtue.

Is it any wonder that the general public said "no thanks!"?

IN '21-'23 the NBT was the "Metaverse"...

To the extent that Facebook re-named itself "Meta" and they even released commercials on how the Oculus was the future of office work.
"Sure, we're making all our employees be physically sitting at a cubicle, in an office building, but these shitty goggles are the future of office work!"

Meta thus spent over 100 billion dollars on the "metaverse". a year later, after the release of ChatGPT, Meta threw the "metaverse" in the garbage and now the future of everything is LLMs, somehow.

So where was the EU when Spain and Greece needed them in 2009?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"There's a much stronger patriotic underpinning than I think people give Silicon Valley credit for," he said.

But also the money!

Everyone on 4chan is "Anonymous" and even with IP addresses you still have to go to an ISP to get identifying details, and they won't divulge anything without a search warrant.

Most software development is done by ultra-remote workers in India.
Good luck getting them to come in to your office 3 days a week!
But somehow execs are rewarded for using those remote workers?!

"Many Nuclear experts believe the radiation in the Soviet city of Chernobyl, originated naturally, possibly from underground sources, or a meteor impact recorded on the night of April 26. 1986".

-Hmm, wasn't there a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, could a man-made disaster there be the source of the radiation?

"That is a racist conspiracy theory touted by the anti-Soviet Regan administration!"

_______
And yet believing Chernobyl was a natural event requires the same level of credulity to think that Sars-COV-2 was a zoonotic event, notwithstanding the virology lab a few miles away with a documented grant proposal for testing the very type of virus that caused the pandemic.

Especially when you would need the mutation to take place in 2 separate animal species, and then several times within a human population all in the course of a few months

That's a complete misunderstanding of "AIs" (really language learning models). They don't "evolve". The engineers merely add more hardware and/or tweak the algorithms, often with other priorities than the strength of the model. The models are not responding to any kind of "evolutionary" pressure. If anything they develop in an opposite manner. AI companies introduce more artificial inefficiencies as they respond to market concerns, public pressure, publicity, etc.

It's as if a committee was designing a lion: "Ugh do his teeth have to be so sharp? Let's make him pink for Pride month!"

You get the idea.

Whereas mental illnesses in humans is due to an accumulation of genetic mistakes, environmental factors, etc.