The "scientists" will just use someone else's AI. No matter what a particular corporation bans, China will have different banned things. If something can be found by AI, it will be.

The most unscrupulous dictators will develop their AI anyway, using all their country's resources, if they think it gives them an advantage. Just making laws in the USA or Europe will not restrict others. We must find ways to survive even if AI gets out.

I recently tried to do calculations, asking Chatgpt to get data and recommendations. Where I live (Hungary) it is about 20 years to get even. The stuff may quit working before that. It was recommended to only partially cover my power demands with solar, but then the bills are not reduced enough. I have no capital and financing with interest above 10%, it is no-go.

You are welcome to scrutinize the machine instructions of browser binaries and development environments for all architectures :-)
I do not mean the instructions but the data. Some GC languages may readjust their memory allocation strategies, some apps their image caching, etc. Switching languages for efficiency. Discarding what now stays in RAM because previously it was not worth the time to bother. Pointing to the same structure instead of replicating a million times. Etc.

I am curious how software developers will optimize for efficient RAM usage. (They will, right???) I only use Linux and in recent years, I have seen how memory usage is going up, my older, still working machines are now constrained by RAM. OK, mostly it is the web browser. Now that AI helps so much with development, reducing RAM usage would be the right thing to do.

They are humans with instincts to have partnerships. Society does not let them have partnerships. Chatbots are the closest thing so their instincts do their job. It is sad that creatures with feelings go to waste.

I guess while they save 7000 liters of diesel per year, the extra cost is more than 70 000 liters worth of money. And if the tractor and trailer are not owned by the same company, some political tricks are needed, like tax cuts.

Of course. The goal is to train dumb subjects who can be led by simple slogans. 1. Overload the kids, burn them out. 2. Chase away the good teachers. 2. Make it fashionable to be dumb and create distrust towards intelligent people. At first the elite sent their kids to elite schools, but now I suspect they are content with having access to somewhat better info than the rest, no need to take an effort.

I live in Europe. Had a look at automatics and thought "what a cool contraption, I want one". But every time I was buying a car, the automatic was the inferior option. Higher purchase price, higher maintenance cost, higher fuel cost, less reliability. After these, some difference in comfort or speed is irrelevant. Cars are already insanely overpriced, I am not paying extra for such bloat.

I have heard doomsday news about both growing and shrinking human population, depending on what the agenda is. But I have no problem believing these results. Even a smaller number of humans can make bigger harm to the environment if they "increase efficiency" enough.

Customers who seek simple, affordable cars are not served by any manufacturer. Mostly because the regulators do not allow it. "My luxury car is better than what those plebs are using, so let's ban those!" If a brand could sell a normal family car with current collision safety, a reasonable trunk and without those "assistants" at a reasonable price, it would utterly eat all others. So the manufacturers need price fixing and paid bureaucrats and are still in trouble. If people do not have more disposable income, they will not spend more on cars, no matter what.

Those who thrive in a community are not vilified. Those who force others into the office, costing time and money, reducing efficiency, ergonomy and work-life balance at the same time, are rightfully vilified.
You seem to be a pleasant person, so your colleagues surely are eager to be with you in the office.

I am 57 and have about 10 years to retirement age. But by the time I get there, it will be raised further.

Me too. I brought home maybe 4 boxes of 5.25 floppies with Softlanding Linux 0.9x and installed on my 386.
At first mainly command line, because X was a memory hog, with my 4 MB RAM it was paging heavily. It needed manual tweaking of the raster timing config. But DOS was command line too.
I felt immediately at home and still use Linux as my daily driver.

We should have no illusions that this is only done for the public good. And dictators may spend much of their country's resources to have better AI for themselves.