I agree, they should start small, and then steadily expand; pretty much the way Waymo is doing.

I'll believe they've sussed it when the number of Cybercabs on the road simultaneously is greater than the number of people Tesla could plausibly have hired to remotely babysit them; until then, there's always the possibility that they are doing the Mechanical Turk thing and their "full self-driving" cars are really "self-driving (supervised)". (It wouldn't be the first time; they've been caught pulling that trick with Optimus on multiple occasions)

If we assume there is meaningful competition between insurers, then any insurer that started charging "normal" drivers extravagant rates would start losing customers to its competitors who could easily undercut them on price. So the likely outcome would be that self-driving cars would get cheap insurance, and the rest of us would continue paying rates similar to what we pay now. In particular, the arrival of safe self-driving cars would presumably not result in human drivers having more accidents.

OTOH if there is not meaningful competition (e.g. due to a monopoly or oligopoly), then the insurance companies can charge anyone whatever price they like, because the only alternative to paying it would be to not drive a car. But that would be the case for both human-driven and self-driving cars.

You're only slightly exaggerating. In reality, the corporate overlords dream of printing piles of money and becoming vastly richer than they already are; monitoring and controlling the 'average' citizen is mainly a means to that end, rather than an end unto itself. A citizen that depends on your product to conduct his life is a citizen from which money can be regularly extracted!

Say that Chinese-made cars are banned from the USA, as described. What happens then? China licenses its auto technology to a European (or Mexican or etc) company, which then produces the same cars and sells those to the US, and the US manufacturers still have to either step up their game or get competed out of the market. The only way to avoid that reckoning would be to ban all foreign car imports entirely, which is probably where the Trump administration will start heading, sooner or later.

I didn't ever think I'd live to see The Forbin Project become a real possibility, but here we are.

The problem with wearing Water Wings (even really good ones) instead of learning how to swim is that on the day the Water Wings stop working, you still can't swim, and now you're floundering out in the middle of the pool.

Except time and willpower. However, the McDonald's analogy does hold up -- nobody is ever going to get rich flipping burgers at McDonald's, precisely because it requires so little skill to do that job, making McDonald's workers completely fungible. Since anyone can man a grill, no one is going to command a salary much more than what a high schooler will agree to do it for.

The economic problem with having an AI produce music for you is, you never get the opportunity to learn how to produce it for yourself. At the end of the day, you're paying them $200/month for the privilege of remaining unskilled, and you're competing against everyone else who knows how to enter "write a catchy song for me" into a prompt box. You can't make money that way, because the moment you do, the AI companies (who own all of the talent and all of the production machinery) can simply appropriate your income stream for themselves.

It's the difference playing Guitar Hero and taking guitar lessons -- both let you feel like you're a competent musician, but only the latter will ever get you a career as a musician.

Eh? This is incorrect. Perhaps most fictional murders are premeditated, because that makes for a more interesting mystery to solve, but in real life, the vast majority murders are impulsive, spontaneous acts that happen during arguments, fights, or emotional outbursts (often with the help of alcohol and/or readily available weapons).

You're right, they'll run the numbers and take whichever path maximizes their net profit -- but shuttering (or even heavily modifying) a facility that they've just invested $$$$ into is unlikely to be found to be their most profitable option. More likely they'll try to sell memory chips at a profit of +$.25 per chip in large volumes, because when you've got is a giant hammer, hammering lots of nails is what you can do best.

I wonder if anyone will start selling home systems capable of using cast-off data center RAM? It might be worthwhile if there's lots of that sort of RAM floating around for cheap.

Sure, a company could use an increase in productivity to allow their workers to work fewer hours while getting the same amount accomplished... but capitalism doesn't work that way. Instead, the company will use the increase in productivity to get more work done in the same amount of hours as before... or if they don't, their competitor will, and thereby obtain a competitive advantage over them.

This is especially true for salaried employees, where the cost of the employee to the company is the same regardless of how many hours the employee works, and it is therefore in the company's financial interest to maximize the return on its salary "investment" by getting as much output from the employee as possible in any given pay period.

I've got a co-worker like that; every email I get from him is just him copy-and-pasting text from his pet AI, and when I reply, he forwards my email on to his AI to read and generate the next reply for him.

Which raises the question... exactly what value is my co-worker providing there? Sooner or later management will notice that they are paying six figures of annual salary to what is essentially just a very slow meat-based email relay, and they'll lay him off and just have me communicate with the AI directly instead. There's a fine line between "all in" and "all redundant".

It all depends on one thing: Will your speech-driven AI agent reliably accomplish the tasks that you told it to do? If so, great, we've entered the glorious Star Trek future. OTOH if it screws up, even just 5% of the time, it'll be kicked to the curb, because a "timesaver" that you have to stand over and supervise to make sure it doesn't go wrong is no timesaver at all.

If the weather is bad enough, people choose not to go out in it. Unless someone has a gun to your head, you always have a choice.