Everyone I know who makes my equivalent AGI, except for my household, has 1+ dogs, work crazy hours, and have been told that their dogs are lonely and depressed.

Not one or two people.

EVERYONE. Dozens upon dozens of my clients, colleagues, peers, friends from grade school, etc, have a dog or two, and then they have to have someone come spend time with said dog when they're putting 10+ hours away from them.

Wag/Rover/etc is part of their crazy consumer spending. I always am shocked to hear they're spending $1000 a month on their pets.

Americans are insane about their pets. Instead of buying a dog, I invest in corporate veterinary hospitals, because it's crazy profitable.

Oh yes, some governments love the idea of censorship-by-proxy: instead of issuing unpopular laws against free speech or free commerce, they come up with rules to make companies responsible for countering money laundering, human trafficking, or what have you. Rules with vague criteria but very stiff penalties, in order to scare companies into erring on the side of caution.

But in this case, it is quite that simple. Banks and payment processors should be declared to be a Common Carrier, especially since their services should be considered essential, these days. Which means they cannot deny service to anyone, unless there is a clear indication that they are running afoul of the law.

> I think it's too miserable and unpleasant a thing for anyone around here to be willing to think about. The idea that Civilization does not progress on a line and does not always improve.

I am perfectly fine thinking about it, and I do think that after studying the topic for a long time, civilization is in a decline in the sense that life isn't really getting better for more people. I mean, it's not really a logical consequence that just because some technology has made life better, that continued innovation will always improve things. After all, the power of a tool is proportional to its potential for misuse, and the probability of misuse is proportional to the complexity of the society. So I think it's actually quite likely to experience severe decline with the invention of AI.

Personally, I think Ted Kaczynski was quite right.

That's a bit like being on a cruise where the breakfast buffet offers only eggs prepared a 1000 different ways, and you're telling someone who is allergic to eggs "if you can't find something good, maybe lower your standards". For the record: I do like eggs.

A tiny handful? The problem is that they pretty much dominated the Blockbuster niche for the past decade or two. The kind of movie many of us turn to for a few hours of dumb escapism: usually with a simple but solid plot, some explosions and eye candy, uncomplicated characters, but big ticket actors and good production values. For those of us who enjoy that sort of thing, but dislike the premise of superheroes, it has been woefully slim pickings the past years.

At least the damn thing apologized. That's pretty impressive. Though not quite what we want from AI.

It's not like it's the first time either. Here they caught a lady taking a wee behind a parked car. They did blur her face though...

It's doable, if he gets a couple of Chinese engineers to help. Designing and building factories is an art in itself, one we've largely lost in the West. But in China, they know how to set up an automated factory, producing goods to the right tolerances, and applying automated QA. They do that pretty much every day.

MacOS runs on non-Apple bare metal as well: Hackintosh. And it runs very well. I built a top end "Mac" for a fraction of what Apple would have charged for similar performance. The only issue is that keeping the OS and software up to date can be a major PITA.

...is it a good thing? Can we even handle this rapid rate of new software, a lot of which will be used for highly commercial purposes? The question is not whether AI makes programmers more efficient, but whether it's actually a good thing.

No kidding. But "si vis pacem para bellum". Many nations aspire to lasting peace, but as it turns out there's always some ambitious a-hole who thinks their neighbour's land is there for the taking.

The way to do it is to drum up hype for some fantastic product or service, but disclose enough uncertainties to make it a long shot. With enough hype, enough buzzwords and slick videos, and a few big ticket celebs to endorse your launch, investors will still come. They figure it as a high risk/high reward deal, they have several on the go and hope that one or two of them will pay off to make up for all the others that fail. When your business inevitably fails, you'll have extracted enough money for yourself from it (there's several ways), and your investors will chalk it up as just another loss on something they didn;t do sufficient due diligence on.

Outright lying about your product though... that's bad enough and opens you up to prosecution. But lying about the numbers? That is a big no-no... They will come after you for that, with a vengeance.

There is no right to privacy.

There is no right to your image.

Government can TRY to make those rights, but the freedom of expression is superior to the idea that you can stop me from hand drawing your image when you're at the beach.

Those have already been deployed. They are flown to the front by the operator, who will in most cases also designate the target, after which the drone will engage it autonomously. Jamming is most effective at close range, so that's when you want the AI to take over.

This is statism, writ large.

You get paid for work you PERFORM, but not work you RECORD. Copyright is anti-individual rights and liberties.

I'll be glad when Ai truly replaces all of these artists.