Has anyone noticed that this is the exact paradigm of the "discontinuity" that was incorporated in the Terminator movies. Someone invents a smarter computer. Someone else combines many these computers to make one that is smarter than any human. The computers then continue to improve themselves. In a short time referred to as the "Discontinuity" the new computers take over because no human can comprehend what the computers are doing. People have been predicting that it would happen very soon. Now it has. It is obviously too late to stop it.

GE had a notorious management management technique that involved announcing that some arbitrary of number of were redundant and making them re apply for their jobs, in competition with new recruits who would work for less money. To make it legal it had to be mathematically possible to keep your job, just very unlikely. Now days you ( if you are tech bro moving fast and stealing things ) you can just say itâ(TM)s âoebecause IAâ, and then carefully timing some futures sales to make it appear that the market âoeapprovesâ, so the story gets lost because , the Donald said something distracting. It depends on short memories, which because of supportive media are not in short supply.

Why go to the surface at all? You can float a lighter than Venusian atmospheric pressure vessel at the top of the atmosphere and have better radio contact with Earth as well. It is quite temperate and cool and up there and the denser atmosphere reduces the size of the pressure vessel needed to get buoyancy. Drag a folding parachute into the atmosphere to slow down from trans orbit speed and then use it as an aerial.

Strange that none of the answers mentions energy supply. Since the 18th century the fundamental factor that drives economic growth has been cheap energy. When Germany shut down the worldâ(TM)s best and safest nuclear power industry Germany went into recession, and Europe followed.

You are asymptotically approaching a key issue in science and incidentally on Slashdot. The reason for the existence of Slashdot is that most media are designed for the masses and have a low signal to noise ratio, in other words , although the subject matter is real and serious, the treatment is for entertainment, and the underlying subject is trivialised, because its real purpose is to sell advertising. A publisher cant make money pitching to a tiny minority. If you are reading this you are either lost, or you are on the right hand side of the bell curve. Science is not a popular sport. It is inherently elitist. The media farrago of pseudo science around the COVID crisis, is no different to what happened to Galileo, or Darwin. Science has advanced, but society is still essentially unchanged, and without a massive genetic redesign it probably canâ(TM)t change, which is probably a good thing. A lot of space in Slashdot is wasted on pointing out that the commenters are not very bright. The silence of the others is significant.

The question is naive because the purpose of the internet, search engines, LLM, âoeAI,â etc is to make money for the provider, by trading a trivial service that cost nothing at scale, in exchange for massive amounts of personal data, which is the most valuable commodity in the world, which people have been trained to believe is âoefree.â The more of this data you give away, the richer they get, and the poorer you get. This discussion is between highly skilled people who are working as beta testers, for free, using software that no one would pay for. When it starts to actually work, you will have to pay for it. At this point adults are bribing children with candy.

People whose phones were stolen have been begging for this function for decades, but we were told it was not possible. Now it turns out it is available for Apple but not for the customers. Are we really surprised? In Lebanon the phones would have exploded.

The only reason we are reading this is because the infrastructure is provided for "free". Free means that the owners of the infrastructure get the data for free.

Nuclear weapons are banned. Chemical weapons are banned. Biological weapons are banned. Now robot weapons will be banned. Can you see a pattern here?

There is no real comparison between fibre and satellite connections. Fibre is the real deal because it has no upper limit on the bandwidth, but it is not available short term and the world has been waiting decades for it to be available outside major urban centres. Satellite is available at much smaller bandwidth as fast as a courier can deliver the equipment. You plug it in and in 10 minutes you are connected. There is almost no overlap between the two systems, so they dont compete except in some edge cases. The Inflation Reduction Act was designed to expand fibre outside urban centres to improve national productivity. It was never going to be an overnight success. The problem was that Musk was ruining his own reputation with Democrats. People who need a satellite connection are a small minority whose interests were trampled on because of the fake politicisation of an engineering program that was never going to help them anyway. Musk doesn’t actually have anything to do with that. People who think that cars, or rockets, or network connections, are political, are suffering from hysteria.

There is one thing and that is spending taxpayers dollars to stop someone spending their own money to dig up the dump. This is just reflexive authoritarianism. They should have just asked him to clean up after himself and pay a deposit.

Before the lynch mob comes for Cory Doctorow they should read John Brunner and Philip K Dick who were predicting these events in the 1960s. Sic semper tyrannis!

The comment compared a landmine, which is a very simple computing device that is already in use on a massive scale, and which is programmed to kill indiscriminately, with an AI device which can be programmed to kill in a selective way. It clearly implies that the AI device would be a morally superior alternative. The article completely failed to show that the current debate that proposes that all AI weapons are evil and should be banned, would be worse than the current situation. This is about comprehension of logical statements and fails completely as journalism. Read it again. As it stands it is propaganda and has no place on Slashdot.

He aught to know! Everyone in the world is less safe because of Edward Snowden.

This is at least 50% true, but look at the spin. If you rewrite the article and substitute the word Euro, or any other currency, for Tether, it is still equally true. People use any currency to good things and bad things. Like wise spinners complain about the energy use of coin mining, without mentioning that the official credit system uses huge amounts of energy, that is somehow not worth consideration. Every day the USD is used to pay bribes, buy drugs, guns, and CSA. The government should ban it obviously.