You forgot the fee. Yes, a human expert and team need to look at the suggestion, but they should be paid for their time and effort. Paid enough to counterbalance the false positive rate from the AI. The AI's owners should pay the fee. Repeat for each of the AI's "sorry I was wrong about that, this is the right answer".

You're not consistent. If you don't believe that our species makes it off this planet anytime this century, then you don't need to argue that the tiny headstart in years that Elon's company has is worth anything.

Keep things you're comparing on the same scale. Say you give 100 years to getting off this planet. Then China has both the resources and 100 years to get us there. And unlike Elon's company, they will be around in 100 years to see it through.Elon has 10 years headstart, that's a blip over 100 years.

The MAJOR obstacle to profitability that you missed is: the AI companies GENERATE NO PROFITS THEMSELVES (*)

(*) under standard accounting rules the rest of us operate under.

Especially if they use the magic constant 0x5F3759DF in all the right places!

Not to mention that Elon is playing games with Ukrainian civilian lives

Sounds like a job for a sumo master!

Both Cringely but also Jerry Pournelle (Chaos Manor) were inspirations for those of us who used to spend Saturday mornings reading tech magazines and dreaming of what the future would bring. Infectious writing that made you want to tinker with PCs all day, then read science fiction all night.

Maybe they are spies, .... or maybe they are super heroes charged with planting safeguards against the AI apocalypse that Amodei keeps threatening to unleash against Humanity.

If you want to protest the use of a delivery robot? Cool. Do it at the *business* using the robot, not in the middle of the street blocking one robot from delivering someone's dinner or whatever.

Which whatever?

Suppose you had knowledge that the robot was helping commit a crime? Let's say the robot was delivering a gun to a thief, who later kills a 7/11 employee and flees. Should you really be travelling all the way to the HQ of Amazon or whatever the delivery company is to "protest"? Shouldn't you be doing your citizen's duty instead and blocking the delivery robot, while calling the police to remove the gun?

Let me check Trump...

Sorry, Trump says no.

Victim blame much? How about the police do their fucking job and arrest the perpetrators? Maybe trace the buyers of the data? Maybe issue Interpol warrants? Maybe sanction some individuals?

Americans are such weird people. They absolve criminals like they're inevitable and bash the innocents like they should know better. Oh look, it's so hard to fight Internet crime I just want my life to be easy let's pretend we've found the bad guys, problem solved.

In life, worthwhile things are often hard to do. That's not a reason to not do them.

You've also not seen rot13 ruled as an invalid protection measure.

The courts in the English speaking Common Law hemisphere wait until some enterprising lawyer comes up with an argument before ruling on that particular argument.

As to "compilation" not containing copy protection, that is incorrect. There are many compilers out there, and some of them are very good at generating obfuscated machine code designed to trip up decompilation.

Why would they do that? They didn't mention this is my first year uni class!

They do that because people have been interested in decompiling and modifying binaries for at least 40 years now.

People have also been interested in taking HTML source and modifying it for about 30 years. And guess what? Deliberate JavaScript obfuscation is a thing too.

AC evidently does not, and neither do you if you claim he's right. Here's a hint for you: obfuscating compilers have been a thing since the 1980s.

Even Google is desperately developing fingerprinting tech to try and label AI slop from non-AI content before training. Why would they do that? Because they know model collapse is a real issue for them.

Indeed. The two big frontier models companies have made very bad financial decisions that are tying their future profits up into debt servicing for 10 years. Literally after all the costs and the contracts for GPU servers that they can't get out of now for years are serviced, they won't have any profits left and probably still be underwater for that long.

Nobody in their right mind wants to wait for maybe profits in ten years time while the present drawdown is gigantic, and inflation means that whatever meager profits might be expected eventually won't be worth as much as it seems now.