you have to suspend your disbelief a bit. None of it makes sense from a physics point of view, any more than most of Star Trek

Agreed. Make it so, Number One.

It's not a bad idea to put some pressure on kids, even if they crack. In engineering, it's important to test materials until breaking point. In human occupations where stress is an important day to day component (eg medical ER or brain surgery) it's best to see the kids fail *before* they enter university, spend 7 years studying, and find that they can't cope with the pressure after they become interns.

People need to know themselves before they can pick a path, and society needs to know they can handle the path before it invests in someone's education.

Then the user is pretty dumb, aren't they?

What if the user is 7 years old?

A "harmful response" is when you ask "how can I protect myself against COVID" and the response is "drink bleach". Then you do it.

It's common knowledge. Maybe not for you though? I'd suggest taking a class in ancient history to close those educational gaps.

There are at least three classes of supporting evidence: literature (eg Juvenal, Cicero) ancient ruins (eg Pompei, Rome) and modern historical research. Here's a popular science book for you.

Nice repartee!

In that case, the employees who were let go are the lucky ones. They get a head start looking for a profitable company.

It totally has! I saw it in a documentary called Spaceballs. It's ludicrously speedy!

"Aus nichts läßt sich nichts folgern." ist aber nicht Nichts. Was kann man daraus folgern?

It's not wrong, but it isn't right either. AI has gone through several boom bust cycles since the first neural network was invented in the late 1950s, and no doubt will go through several more in the next 80 years. Currently we call everything AI because it allows money to flow into projects by linking them with the stratospheric stock valuations of AI tech companies. Success loves company and all that. Conversely, when the next bust cycle hits, AI will become a dirty word and projects will go out of their way to de-emphasize any connection with "AI". This is exactly what happened in the last two or three bust cycles since 1950 in this field. Might be worse because a lot more people will get burned this time.

As an aside, the vague idea of letting a data-driven program explore inputs is bullshit. There is a likelihood function which controls the desired exploration. This is always specified (or more likely not explicitly, by practitioners, who just use an inappropriate default). The program's task is merely to solve the implied equations by successive approximation. The program designer's task is to write the equations down first.

This is intuitively similar to what physicists have been doing for 250 years when they write down a Lagrangian and solve for critical points where the energy of the system is minimized. This connection is literally what the 2024 Nobel prize in Physics was all about.

Electronic drives from 40 years ago have already degraded to the point of being unreadable today, except with highly specialized equipment. There is no chance any trace of our digital world will be readable electronically in the far future.

At best you might get a mysterious single damaged disk drive, not unlike the Antikythera mechanism. But unlike Antikythera, deciphering the physical mechanism is not enough, archaeologists will have to figure out the magnetic encoding, perform error correction on the degraded plates, and in the unlikely event something can be retrieved fully they then must have a copy of MS-DOS to run or view the files etc.

(TL;DR. Don't worry, AI will figure it out, little one, now go to sleep)

Elevators had been invented and were already used by the Romans in various places.

However, it would be unlikely that these warnings would have existed in their apartment buildings (insulae). The risk of fire was extremely high compared to today (open flames used everywhere), and the well off residents certainly wouldn't have lived in penthouses encumbered by stairs. The most desirable apartments were actually located at ground floor, which was easier to run out of. The top floors were generally occupied by the poor who didn't matter.

I got my copy! This will be a collector's edition in 25 years.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

So yeah, they do live by the super-sea and frolic in the autumn mist. I draw the line at super-honalee though. That's batshit crazy!

I'm high up in an apartment building. If there's a fire and the exit is blocked, I'm turning on Netflix and waiting to die.