When the predicted event is ten years out, that means that it is still pure science fiction.

Everyone acts in their own best interest.

Big Tech messaging about what kids should learn is designed to benefit Big Tech in some way. Any truth-value to their statements would be secondary.

The fact that a message comes from "Big Tech" should never be used to give it credence, but merely to determine who would benefit. Evaluation of benefits to anyone else must be done independently.

May AI will acquire control of the orbital weapons and use them to kill all humans!

We might create a powerful AI that manages to acquire control over weaponized robots, and send them out to do the job.

But humans are so frightened of this that anything we might call "warbot" or "killerOS" or whatever will be dead on arrival. It would require a different marketing strategy.

Someone will sneak it under the radar by making it sound like some sort of positive, joyful AI operating system. Maybe we would call it something like....

Joyful OS.....
HappyOS....

Or maybe...

GLaDOS........

"Staying ahead of everyone else is hard. It costs a lot of money, and we don't have effective monetization in place yet. So, we want everyone else to slow down so it will be easy for us to maintain our position of top dog while we figure out how to become profitable."

That's what I took away from the call for a slowdown, anyway.

I prefer the Martian bear.

Forgetting he exists would be the best punishment.

I think it is funny that the tech community tends to take a very dim view of AI drones and other weaponization of artificial intelligence, and yet, the very instant we get our hands on something that we can train to play doom, we do.

"If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
  Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Do people still buy audio CDs?

Most, if not all, scientific research is weaponizable. This seems like a dangerous precedent to set.

Yes, Don-boy, I called you a fuckup. Tell the FCC to ban the internet.

There has been erosion over many years, but Trump is doing it's best to make it one right now.

Lucky for us he's an utter fuckup.

This attitude is common among religious believers who face accusations that the reason their beliefs require faith is because there is otherwise no good reason to believe them.

The cold hard fact is that ALL knowledge is uncertain. We can't know anything for sure, because all our sources of knowledge are suspect. The experiences we have might all be illusions. Things that seem obviously self-evident might only seem so because our brains are broken (or otherwise lying to us). We have no means, even in theory, to arrive at knowledge that is absolutely, indisputably, and obviously true.

It gives the word "knowledge" a somewhat weaker definition than we would like. But that's what we've got to work with.

The real difference between religious teachings and scientific models is that religious teachings are based on some person-or-group who claims to have had a special experience or be a special kind of person and as such has access to knowledge that nobody else does. And so we should believe just because they said so. Scientific models, on the other hand, are based on repeated observations that have been attested-to by many people under very rigorous testing conditions. Neither has absolute proof, but science has "a whole bunch of us saw this and still see it every time we look" whereas religion has "people long ago wrote this down and there is no way to test it now."

Religious belief tends to be bolder, giving answers to more questions that we would like answered. Science tends to be more conservative, admitting to its limits and only answering the questions that it can answer from the data. So, religious answers are often more marketable. But they still come from more dubious sources.

And that's why religious beliefs require "more faith" than scientific models, even though scientific models can be really hard to understand.

With new technology comes new power, and that is always frightening. Every tool can be weaponized, and AI is no exception.

This never means that we should shirk the technology! Yes, it brings danger, but that's only because it brings utility. We want and need that utility. Our technological ascendancy is the most critical part of our evolution, at this point.

We are going to have to adapt to the problems that the new tech is bringing. That might be hard, but we have this new tech to help us do it. That is the right way forward.

I'm more interested in the game than in the packaging.