Yes I know, the robot apocalypse people seem desperate to be afraid of is always just around the corner. Geoff Hinton, while a definite pioneer in AI, didn’t kick anything off, he was one of a large number of people working on it, and one of a small number predicting armageddon.

If you’re vegan you don’t decide to eat chicken just because chickens don’t eat meat. They’re still chickens.

The trick is to judge things on their own merit and not on the hype around them.

Jam! How has nobody mentioned jam? Jelly, marmalade, take your pick, it’s all good.

Exactly, and as automation gradually makes profits obsolete, the wealth tax and UBI should evolve from money into a basic right to receive goods produced by the automation. Money is really just a middleman. If we eliminate scarcity we won’t need it.

Yes, we’re going to have these surveillance capabilities. Anti-AI memes and boycotts won’t stop it. The rational choice is to develop authority structures the public can trust. Instead of treating the whole concept of authority as the enemy by default, we have to figure out a way to make it trustworthy. The question is how, and I don’t have that answer but I know that’s the question. I see it as kind of analogous to how providing basic income, healthcare, etc. for everybody would cut down on crimes of survival. When people aren’t desperate they don’t do desperate things. If making laws didn’t attract money and prestige, greedy people wouldn’t be part of it but public-spirited people would.

Considering how new anonymity is for the human race, it amazes me how people treat it like a crucial element of life. Civilization mostly lacked it for thousands of years because almost everybody lived in villages or small towns - about half the people in the world still do.

It just lets one person know the other person is thinking about them, but without the arduous burden of sending a text. “I love you but typing. is. haaard. So I’ll just touch this lamp lol.”

I think this is called friendship lamps or touch lamps. They’re connected online and when one person touches their lamp the other person’s lamp lights up or changes in some way. There are a few Arduino/ESP projects for making these, or you can buy them. They’re promoted as a way to keep a long distance relationship going.

The AI haters will hate this, but I think AI is gonna provide the push that forces the fundamental changes we want. You can only replace so many people with AI and robots. The theoretical point of zero employees also means zero customers, because nobody has any money to buy anything, so making employees obsolete makes business and profits obsolete. In the real world the system will change long before that point, because it will have to. It might be from food riots and social breakdown, or political movements finally taking hold, I don’t know, but AI will make the profit system eat itself. I’m just not looking forward to the extremely difficult transition period.

That’s the problem with relying on slang instead of real conversation. The desire to process our social media feeds as fast and with as little typing as possible means we encapsulate complex issues into ridiculously overgeneralized shorhand. We take in minimal information about each item, apply minimal quality control (mostly our own prejudices), use minimal thought to arrive at value judgements that make us feel morally impeccable, and spit out condensed replies. It’s superficial hillbilly-grade communication with a delusion of being informed, involved and enlightened.

• Brillo-Padding
• Tire-Kicking
• Backyarding
• Barney-Rubbling

A few assholes bought as much TP as they could, also hand sanitizer and other items, to hoard and sell at exorbitant prices to make a profit off the pandemic. They made their homes and apartments into little warehouses.

Some appear to be holding their shit in until the next pandemic. Or to use it as a projectile weapon in the Mad Max apocalypse.

Putting “cringe” in the headline is the only cringey thing I see here.

Not quite that simple. Speed is only a rough guideline. When you shift depends largely on how hard you’re accelerating. In a typical car if you’re trying to get up speed to get on the freeway, 25 is way too soon to shift into 3rd. I wouldn’t until at least 30. Same if you’re going up a hill, at 25 the car won’t have enough torque for 3rd gear.

No more difficult than using a phone while walking, except looking around while driving is even more important. I’ve taught several people how to drive a manual transmission in an afternoon. Different afternoons of course.

It also involves the fantasy that you and your freedom buddies will survive a serious encounter with US armed forces because you have camos and tactical boots.

Woah, did Jesus actually say that (AFAWK)? Because I knew a Christian Scientist who said the whole religion’s view of Jesus was that he wasn’t a god, he was “a perfect man”. That quote sounds like he was literally disclaiming this.