They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Well, it would be interesting to hear why you disagree with anarchy so profoundly.

My basic principal is that "illegitimate hierarchies are bad." In particular, having a hierarchy without consent is bad (ie, no taxation without representation sort of thing).

I would like to say I have a full system for how a very good anarchy system should look, but I fully admit it's not an easy problem. So instead I focus on general principals, and trying to find incremental changes that will improve things with high probability.

Realistically, modern democracies are already a massive improvement on the situation in most countries 300 year ago, with a much weaker hierarchy. Since a full revolution carries significant risk, it's better to make incremental improvements one at a time (unless the problems in the current system are severe). But simplistic "left-right" thinking and political parties are both a net negative, as they are both a method employed by bullies to to increase their power over others. So I feel confident getting rid of them would be an improvement (although I do admit there are some benefits to parties, like recruiting candidates to smaller, less important offices or recruiting election observers. So we need to be aware of the positive and the negative).

No one expects you to explain basic economics. You're too ignorant for that. Even looking at the Wikipedia page, you would have found several conflicting definitions, none of which is adequate (for example, capitalism originated with capitalists making loans to sponsor voyages. But they didn't own the ship, or the sailors, which are the means of production. So the definition at the top of the page falls flat at the original encounter in history). Without empathy we aren't evil, we are blind. It's not the same. Maybe you meant sympathy.

If you weren't an idiot, you could have just given a definition of capitalism (although different people have different definitions, so that doesn't work). Instead you decided to rant about America. Is America in the room with you?

It's kind of funny that Trump was bragging about how great the vaccine was and his role in it.

ok grandpa lol

That website is cool but it's not really convincing, since the presentation gives a much higher precision and confidence than their data actually allows.

Other estimates say more oil is flowing through the strait now than before the war. Of course, that isn't the same as the strait being open, but for most of us, it's what we care about. Ships filled with iPhone shipments to Kuwait don't affect us much.

"Real Capitalism" isn't a real thing. It's a strawman used as a rhetorical device to make communism look good.

IF you want to talk about capitalism from a scientific/academic standpoint, you should use well-defined terms, like "Free markets" or "private investment."

I now am dependent in part for my livelihood on paypal. Going to check my contact info there now.

https://informationr.us/

I am usually able to find a place faster on agoda.com than on airbnb fwiw.

It makes sense, hotels are almost always a better experience than an AirBnB, unless you have a special location like this one or an area without enough hotels.

Why stay at a sketchy house that makes you clean, when you can stay at a hotel that cleans for you?

This.

They aren't going to use the beam on illegal immigrants, they are talking about making a plan to potentially use it. Enough to get headlines, not enough to do anything.

Here is some footage of the device in action. It was originally thought to be lethal because of the water, but that was mistaken understanding.

It's not always harmless.

The thing that worries me isn't "new" weapons, those are a perpetual problem of humanity.

The thing that worries me is that now people/countries have an understandable incentive to intentionally induce Kessler syndrome.

Point taken, but it only takes one good ICBM to ruin your day. Russia doesn't like Golden Dome, but China is the one on the warpath towards America (in both the Philippines and Taiwan).