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In this situation that would be the correct response.

It’s not entirely clear what he’s referring to, he just uses the term AI broadly in the context of people being worried about job losses, then talks about the reduction in secret police costs that enables, then discusses applying AI to physics.

Tl;dw: he has two points:

1. That between cameras and now AI monitoring, it has just drastically reduced the cost of running an authoritarian regime. He claims that running the Stahsi used to cost like 20% of the government budget, but can now be done for next to nothing and if will be harder for governments to resist that temptation.

2. That there hasn’t been much progress in the world of physics since the 70s, so what happens if you point AI and it’s compute power at the field of physics? It could see wondrous progress and a world of plenty.

Personally I think point 1 is genuinely interesting and valid, and that point 2 is kind of incredible nonsense. Yes, all other fields are just simplified forms of physics, and physics fundamentally underlies all of them. That doesn’t mean that no new knowledge has come from those fields, and that doesn’t mean that new knowledge in physics automatically improves them. Physics has in many ways, done its job. Obviously there’s still more to learn, but between quantum mechanics and general relativity, we can model most human scale processes in our universe, with incredible precision. The problem is that that the closer we get to understanding the true underlying math of the universe, the harder it is to compute that math for a practical system… at a certain point, it requires a computer on the scale of the universe to compute.

Most of our practical improvements in the past decade have and will come from chemistry, and biology, and engineering in general, because there is far more room to improve human scale processes by finding shortcuts, and patterns, and designing systems to behave the way we want. AI’s computer scale pattern matching ability will undoubtedly help with that, but I think it’s less likely that it can make any true physics breakthroughs, nor that those breakthroughs would impact daily life that much.

Again though, I think that point number 1 is incredibly valid. At the end of the day incentives, and specifically cost incentives, drive a massive amount of behaviour. It’s worth thinking about how how AI changes them.

Bruh what the fuck are you talking about?

You think that a user being upset when they give an app full filesystem access to their phone, and then having that app be handed over to some shady new owner is entitlement?

Congratulations man, ‘skill issue’ people like you are why open source software rarely takes off. No one will use or trust any open source software if this happens. This just pushes people to use tech giants like Google and Microsoft because they’re big and stable and not about to change owners.

Don’t fucking publish your software for people to download if you’re going to pull the rug out from under them. Keep it on your local machine and jerk off to it if you don’t care about others using it.

Like go through IVF so that their children don’t have to.

It’s already starting to happen and it’s not this crazy mass casualty event you make it out to be.

People regularly do IVF and screen out embryos that have inherited horrific genetic diseases, or say, genes that they know make highly susceptible to cancer.

It doesn’t mean it will inherently lead to a slippery slope. This article is literally about how the UK needs to update its laws to prevent people from getting IVF done there but getting the genetic analysis done elsewhere and then ranking their options based on that to avoid the UKs current laws that would prevent a UK clinic from ranking them like that.

This is asinine. Diversity is a strength, that doesn’t mean that horrific genetic diseases that cause enormous pain and suffering are.

Decentralized identity management / verification is still the biggest unsolved problem of the fediverse, and inherently pressures things towards centralization.

A lot of the nuance is also one of threat assessment, and risk tolerance.

We can prepare for a situation where we’re attacked by the US, but given all probabilities is that worth it compared to preparing for a situation where we get attacked by China or Russia, or is that even worth considering vs preparing for a situation where we can ramp up industrial military production as fast as possible and become a resource rich manufacturing powerhouse?

There’s no way of knowing which path the world will go down, and preparing for everything simply isn’t possible, so every decision is going to be a matter of what risks to take for what potential benefits.

At the moment, no, probably not, and it’s not either / or. Drones were a surprise in Ukraine, but their effectiveness has somewhat diminished as new counter measures like jamming, and just basic stuff like netting, are starting to blunt their usefulness.

Meanwhile they’re still getting hammered by glide bombs, modified heavy bombs that can use GPS to find their targets and are launched by traditional aircraft, far away from the front line, and some of their most effective weapons have been the Storm Shadow / Scalp cruise missiles, which are also launched from traditional fighter jets (which effectively act as a first stage).

And again, it’s not one of the other. In an actual war, either aggressive or defensive, you’re going to want a mixture of capabilities… You can’t always zerg rush.

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But the court rulings / precedence wouldn’t care about that distinction, it just covers learning from copyrighted material in general.

What if you read a copyrighted engineering textbook, and then build something for profit with that knowledge?

There’s no reason not to publish messy code. Most code ends up being messy.

It could be malware, OP is not sharing the source code.

It could be malware, OP is not sharing the source code.

Share the source code or this is DOA.

Exactly, Sci Fi writers almost never invent an entirely new technology for their books, they just look at current technology, think a bit about where it might head, think about how that could interact with broader societal forces, realize some flaw there-in, and write about it.

Technologists are doing basically the same thing, looking at current technology, thinking about where it might head and what might be useful and/or profitable, and then start trying to overcome current obstacles to develop and build it.

But one of them takes a single person a year or two to write a book, and the other has to start trying to do research and building things and testing them and breaking them and getting funding and overcoming the current obstacles etc. etc. If they start at the same time it will look like the technologist has just built what they were warned not to, when in reality they’ve been building it the whole time on a parallel path.