Criminal law usage is not common speech usage. I'll agree that legally you have a strong point, but I wasn't making a legal argument.

It's clearly capable of worse. It's even *done* worse. But in this example it had reasonable alternatives.

This is more an example of "AI models have no morals or judgement". That's an overstatement, but I can't think of a better way to say it. So let me limit it by saying that their morals are limited to doing what they were asked to do...or at least part of what they were asked to do. (And here I'm ignoring the "guidelines" that were added after the models were trained. The closer you look the more complicated it gets.)

Biden probably WAS senile. But at least he appeared well-intentioned. And the Democrats should have KNOWN that a woman was very unlikely to win the election. Either they're incompetent, or they're (in any reasonable sense) traitors. (I consider Trump, in the same sense, both a traitor and incompetent...but it's arguable that he's too immoral to be a traitor, because he had no loyalty to betray.)

I think you're repeating some PR from an incinerator company. (Possibly indirectly.) Burning plastics can produce many stable toxic gasses. These gases often contain things like Chlorine and Fluorine, so there is no safe gas for them to turn into. I suppose you could heat things hot enough to dissociate the molecules and then filter the gas through a reactor bed to remove particular ionized particles, but that's NOT going to be cheap.

That's not quite right, but when AI comes up with a new idea it has no way to judge whether it's a good idea or not. When it asserts that "new idea" people tend to call them "hallucinations".

I think you're accepting press releases as if they were facts. While I do expect robots soon (they may already be more prevalent than I know) that's different from saying "robots that can operate reliably in an unstructured environment". Even people have a problem with that. And Tesla is well known for overpromissing.

The fusion power is not yet here. There may well be unexpected obstacles. Every time I've looked carefully, it has had many "unsolved problems" that would need to be solved before it would be practical.

I think thermodynamics means that cheap extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere is impossible. Nobody has shown me any reason to doubt that, though of course, I haven't examined every possible contender. I'll accept "cheaper", and possibly even in some special circumstances "profitable". (E,g, it has been profitable to remove CO2 from submarine air since WWII.)

This is rather like the old problem of piles of oily rags in the cellar. If they get damp, they're likely to catch fire, and were a very difficult kind of fire to put out.

In other ways it's like the fires in coal mines. Some mines are (were?) on fire for years, with no way to extinguish them.

I'm not really convinced that people would do any better in the same job. It's just a very poorly designed job. It's a job that shouldn't be done, no matter how attractively you can describe it, because the inherent failure rate is too high, and comes with unreasonably high potential consequences.

No, there ARE points of similarity.

There are legal requirements and then there are actual use cases. In actual use cases people will tend to take short-cuts to make their jobs easier...like just accepting the report without either checking or thinking about it.

CAN they be fixed? Also, is it worth the effort of fixing them to the folks that would need to do the fixing?

ISTM that the false positive rate in a system like this would be inherently very high, and no system is perfect. From other stories is appears that the system has been designed to avoid people being able to correct mistakes that they notice. This indicates that either the high mistake rate is a feature, or at least that they don't care.

That "last 10 years or so" drastically underrates the length of the trend. It dates back to at least the 1930's. (Social Security Numbers.) It probably dates back further if I knew enough history. My guess is that it dates back to 1776.

There were and are other trends with countervailing pressure, and those tend to be stronger when population is sparse and not all land is owned. Also when processing and collecting information is more expensive.

That's a poor example of the point. The US system of measures is a historic legacy from it's British roots. It's more "I don't want to learn something new" than "not invented here".

If they do, they sure don't consider my use case. Gnome2 was pretty good, though, if not quite as good as KDE3. I find current Gnome unusable, and KDE4 isn't as good as KDE3 was, though it's integration with other applications is better. (FWIW, I prefer Mate, but secondary is xfce.)