While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

When I had Comcast in the Bay Area, it randomly dropped one day because they installed the line to the house at a height that a semi driving through the neighborhood likely clipped the line. I was attempting to diagnose the issue from within the house, until I discovered the severed cable laying in the middle of the street.

You don't know how to argue, or debate, or even answer comments, do you? Mindless passion is still mindless.

Try rebutting what I said. Can you do that for me? I'd appreciate it.

Corals have been regenerating themselves for several hundred million years. They don't need human help.

Corals have been around for several hundred million years. They survived the comet which killed off the dinosaurs. They survived ice ages and glaciations, the most recent being a 400-500 foot sea level rise just 10-15,000 years ago. They routinely bleach themselves while shifting populations of the critters which give them color.

We puny humans are no threat to corals.

Sociopaths fool a lot of people because most people don't work that way. However, they often wind up in litigation and they think they'll con the judge. However, judges have seen a lot of sociopaths because they tend to wind up in court a lot more than most people. That's usually where they finally get stopped.

Let me be perfectly clear about this: I am insulting you. I am calling you out as either being such a plonk that you keep old copies of People magazine around just in case ... or you are such a plonk that you google and select the answer you want.

Either way, you are a plonk. Your memory is reliable and truthful, mine is full of lies.

Yah, right, like I keep sources of everything I remember from 30 years ago. Uh huh. You of course, being perfect, do keep such sources, instead of just googling and reporting the results which confirm your own bias.

Lots of inventions were unasked-for until they were invented.

No we have not. That's another cherry picked date comparison. Corals have been bleaching and repopulating themselves for several hundred million years.

That's not how it was reported at the time, and I have no reason to trust People magazine.

If you were an anti-alarmist, you'd be crowing this shows sea levels dropping.

For another indication of how sloppy sea level rise claims are, the alarmists published a list of sea level changes along the US Atlantic coast, and funny thing, they differed considerably, as if the ocean were rising more in some places than others. The alternative explanation of sinking land levels was pooh poohed as climate denialism. But another funny thing: California's central valley was once reported as having sunk 22 feet since the gold rush days 150 years earlier, due to pumping out so much underground water. Gosh, could the same thing be happening along the Atlantic coast?

They made those loans because the government promised to bail them out if the loans soured, and the government said there would be consequences for not making enough subprime loans.

Oh yes it did, starting back in the Clinton era. I forget what they called it, other than subprime lending. Banks were specifically told the government (taxpayers) would back their risky loans, and if they did not cooperate, there would be consequences.