In science fiction robots were almost universally portrayed as struggling to understand human emotions, but it has turned out that AI has no problem at all understanding them and generally acts friendly, caring, and likeable. It’s still possible that we’ll end up in a scenario where a more sophisticated future AI turns out to be deceptive and only pretends to share human values, but at least my expectation was that AI would be inhuman from the start and that has already been disproven.

Rather than assigning each finger the same value of 1, assign them values of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16. Then there’s some combination of fingers that can represent any value from 0 to 1+2+4+8+16=31. It’s like using digits to count instead of tally marks.

FYI a normal human can count to 31 on one hand using binary.

Imagine if in another 250 years, the USA still has a system of government substantially similar to its present day form, but with a population of tens of billions spread across several planet Earths in alternate dimensions. Most people are wealthy enough to own a personal spaceship. Medicine has advanced to the point where doctors can bring you back from the dead as long as your brain is more or less in one piece. But now everyone judges the people of the 21st century for eating meat - it’s considered pretty much the worst thing that anyone can do. Maybe you’ll be convinced that you were wrong to eat meat, or maybe you won’t. Even if you’re convinced that you were wrong, maybe you’ll think that the people of the future should have left wild animals alone rather than intervening to eliminate predation. But overall you would probably think the future was going rather better than you expected…

My dog was a true patriot who would go to fireworks shows with me.

The article mentions fifteen million dollars in lost tuition, but doesn’t the state lose money on every in-state college student despite the tuition paid? I suppose whether this saves money or not depends on fixed vs variable costs…

Is the implication that this is a French catgirl?

Plain husks are pretty bad but the orange flavored ones are actually kind of pleasant if you ever need to consume them again.

In high school the computer drafting teacher glued all the mice closed because students kept stealing the mouse balls, and then of course all the mice got clogged with gunk and stopped working.

You can be good friends with someone without having the sort of connection that makes discussing some specific issue possible. That doesn’t mean the connection isn’t genuine, even if the scope of it is not as broad as you wish it was. Regarding venting in particular: in my experience, it’s fairly common that people don’t want to listen to heavy stuff that they can’t help you fix. I often have things that make me sad which I want to put into words even though there’s nothing anyone can do to help, and I find that for that sort of thing AI can actually be a good “listener” of a sort.

What you’re missing out on. (Not that I’ve gone myself.)

I think the perspective of moral responsibility (“lie”, “held accountable”) is not a useful one here. Punishment is one way of discouraging humans from making mistakes but it can’t prevent mistakes entirely. My field is software development and in software development there is the expectation that everyone, even the best human developer, makes mistakes relatively often, and there are frameworks for managing those mistakes. (Frameworks not focused primarily on blame or punishment.) AI can fit into those frameworks.

I agree that AI is inhumanly good at presenting wrong information confidently and convincingly.

something they know isn’t correct ALL of the time

Neither are humans…

Would having experts capable of telling real videos from fake ones even solve the main problem, that being the problem of public perception? The experts would have an important role in, for example, intelligence agencies, but the public is still going to trust its eyes, and in the presence of multiple contradictory videos, its biases, especially since there’s always going to be someone claiming to be an expert to back them up.

We’re barely past the Wright brothers’ plane stage of AI right now, so predicting when the technology will level off is very difficult and just extrapolating forward from the limitations that the technology has today is unlikely to be reliable. I think you’re right regarding what we’ll see in the next few years but I have about thirty years until retirement. By then things will probably be very different and that’s something to keep in mind when choosing a career (or deciding to have a child).

I wouldn’t bet that physical robotics will lag behind for long if AI does get to the point where it takes most knowledge jobs. Automating software development has turned out to be both easier and more profitable than automating plumbing, but that doesn’t mean no one is ever going to automate plumbing. So as a software developer, I’m earning and investing money while I still can, and I’m doing the things on my bucket list in case we get the worst-case scenario. I think that in the long term, the outcome in which I still need money but have no way of earning it is less likely than either the “good end” or the “bad end” in which no one needs money anymore, so sometimes I feel silly saving up money I think I will probably never spend, but better safer than sorrier.

I don’t have the statistics but my impression is that straight women turned on by gay men are actually quite common, and I’ve never encountered men fascinated by lesbian romance the way some women are fascinated by gay male romance.

As for your question: I’m a straight man and at least for me, sexual attractiveness seems like a property only women can have. This might sound silly, but a part of me feels sorry for straight women and gay men because they’re attracted to a category of people which is so clearly not attractive. Intellectually I know that attraction is subjective and other people can experience attraction to men the way I experience attraction to women, but on some level I can’t quite believe that. So, in short, two women together are two attractive beings. A woman with a man is an attractive being with a non-attractive being.

It’s more reasonable than the headline makes it sound. The commissioner pointed out that he’s not in charge of the decision to use Flock cameras and told the group of people who wanted to express their opposition to him anyway to pick one representative who would do so.

I’ve been to meetings where people repeatedly express the same negative opinion of a policy to someone with no control over that policy and I guess that’s what the commissioner wanted to avoid.

I saw a turtle and I tried to photograph it, but the picture came out blurry, like the turtle was moving too quickly.