mRNA research was not banned in the US, and is still ongoing. Some specific research had its funding pulled due to lack of results so far. That might not be great, but it's not a ban.

The hallucination problem has not been fixed. That means that this tax agent cannot be trusted. The work it produces may be full of inaccuracies that look convincing.

You got me all excited. But TaxCalc is a UK product. It doesn't do American taxes.

How dare there be a world outside of the USA? Everyone else needs to get with the program.

There is a third option: Apple.

A mac mini costs $600 and is more than powerful enough to run Turbo Tax (and they DO support it on mac).

I might also add that H&R Block's tax software is cheaper than TurboTax and also has a desktop version that runs on Mac.

You also have the option of doing your taxes by hand. The instructions are thorough and free. And if you can't manage that, you can hire professionals to do your taxes for you (though they might be using Windows 11, for all you know).

In theory:

It may not have been the entire company that was "in on it." It could have been just a few bad actors, in particular in leadership, who were perpetuating the unethical behavior.

Further, it could be those same bad actors who punished him by firing him for raising the issue.

And, lastly, he might need the money he makes from his job.

So, if he wins the case, it could mean that the specific managers responsible get fired. He gets re-instated under ethical managers who approve of what he did. And his other team members may approve as well, as they might not have been in on it at all, or they might have known about it but been too scared to say anything.

So, that story can have a happy ending, if all these facts line up.

The real world is all messy and complicated of course, and there are surely details we don't know. But behavior like this could make sense, in some cases.

I wonder about liability for hallucination.

Of course, humans can do it too, but there are also options for suing humans who falsely advertise. When salesman straight-up lie about the features of a product, there can be consequences. AI are at even greater risk of this than humans, not because they have a profit motive, but because hallucination is a core part of how they function.

A lot of smart people bought into the AI hype. If Meta didn't try to position themselves as a leader in the field, they would have been pummeled in the stock market. Zuckerberg may be rich, but he is still beholden to the will of the shareholders. If they are caught up in a bubble, then so is he.

The reality is kicking in. We just had an article right here on Slashdot today about how 95% of attempts at using AI in the corporate workplace were failing. I think the bubble is starting to pop. So, Meta is re-positioning for that event, now, since there really isn't much else they can do.

Realizing the dream of AGI is going to require a fundamentally different breakthrough. This supercharged pattern-matching-and-prediction tech we have now is pretty cool, but it just can't get where we want it to be, and no scaling-up of training efforts will fix that. Producing machines that can visualize and reason will require a different approach, and the path to get there is far from clear. Maybe some of the ridiculously-paid AI specialists will come up with something, and maybe they won't. There is still enough belief in this possibility, at the moment, to try, of course. So the big players are still trying. But the goal posts no longer appear nearly as close as they once did.

Windows is for people who are too non-technical to use Linux, and too poor to afford Macs.

Of course, that's most people, so Microsoft still wins. But those of us with money and/or tech smarts have a better way, if we want it.

This is a result of many independent factors, though all of them are common to all countries in the developed world. I am not going to be able to list them all (nor even pretend to know them all) but I can give you some of the major ones.

1. In and earlier world, most people were farmers. Having children was a necessity: you needed to put those kids to work! This fueled and was fueled by a very pro-child culture and legal framework. All the dots connected. But now, children are a huge financial liability. Instead of helping produce income, they cost money (a whole lot of it for a very long time). So, the incentives are all wrong. People are just responding to those incentives.

2. There is no time to raise children. This is especially true since most families cannot afford to have a stay-at-home-parent to raise the kids. Both parents must work full time, and spend the money they earn on daycare, so someone else can raise their kids for them. Not only is this a barrier in-and-of-itself, but it reduces the expected emotional rewards of being part of a family.

3. High likelihood of divorce, terrible consequences to divorce. Back "in the day," divorces were extremely rare. People had very reasonable assurances that the partner they married would stick around and shoulder their share of the load until the kids were gone, and even stick around to face life's challenges together after that. These days, it's basically a coin flip, with no secret sauce that guarantees a lasting marriage. And when the split happens, the family's finances can be devastated and formerly-wealthy people are reduced to a poverty level existence, possibly for the rest of their lives. Regardless of the reasons why the laws are like this, the end result is clear: this legal environment is hostile to family.

4. Desirable alternatives. Working people have all kinds of ways to entertain themselves and self-actualize that weren't available to prior generations. The wealthier a country is, the more such opportunities there are. So, people have an easy choice: a difficult life of hardship and poverty with high risk of things ending badly (to have a kid), or, a life of luxury and self-actualization as a reword for a good job done. What are most people going to pick?

5. A romance-hostile culture. Especially this has been fueled by things like dating sites. People get wildly unrealistic expectations about what kind of a mate they merit, and refuse to settle, and much drama ensues. It produces a lot of single moms but not a lot of families. I will also add that our culturally-constructed ideal of marriage is one where two people fall in love, choose to marry each other, and live happily ever after. Once upon a time, in most places, marriages were arranged by the parents. That sounds ghastly to us now. "But what if I don't love the person I get stuck with????" Well, as unpopular a fact as this is, most people don't love the person they get stuck with because love is a temporary emotion most of the time. Even when it does endure through the years, its nature changes significantly. The difference is, you are stuck with a partner that you picked while young, stupid, and drunk on hormones. Whereas in the old day, your partner was chosen for you by people who were mature, wise, objective, and had your best interest at heart.

We can't turn back the clock. The entire interconnected set of cultural, legal, and religious values that produced a highly fertile world is simply gone. And much of it is gone for very good reasons that have nothing to do with fertility. But these consequences are here nonetheless. I personally think it is possible to forge a new path forward that applies the new cultural values in an intelligent and equal way, but, it will require that a lot of people overcome some very strong biases and pettiness, so I don't have my hopes up.

Are you serious? These answers should be obvious.

Humans are put through a vetting process when hired, sometimes including criminal background check and usually including some level of proof-of-competence during the interview. Then when they are put on the job they are assigned a team, a supervisor, etc., so they aren't operating in isolation. And on top of that there are performance reviews, auditable processes when security is paramount, and so on.

It's an imperfect system but it is "good enough" to weed out the bad apples most of the time.

In the case of AI, they all hallucinate. No interview, vetting, or review process will protect you from AI hallucinations. They all do it, they do it a lot, and they do it when it matters. Furthermore, unlike people, AIs don't actually understand their circumstance. So they don't prioritize properly, don't develop competence with experience, and don't exercise good judgment. They underperform humans in all these domains that are mission critical for business roles.

The narrow range of things that current AIs are good at is simply not enough to make them effective replacements for human employees in most domains, even given the fact that some humans are incompetent or deceptive.

This might also have something to do with the fact that AIs still hallucinate a lot and are fundamentally unreliable.

Individuals using AIs casually can easily check their facts. But when actual responsibility is accorded to an AI, as in a corporate setting, it is going to fail.

COBOL is so easy to understand that no business will have to hire software developers ever again.

Open a firefox tab and type "about:config" in the address bar.

Then find these two settings and set them to false:

browser.tabs.groups.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled

(I haven't tried this yet, just found these instructions online).

Have you considered the possibility that "this reality" might be the only reality? And that the only way to significantly overcome suffering might require technological ascendancy as well as continued evolution?

The only way to make that happen is to keep breeding.

But you aren't required to participate, and the current state of law-and-culture is hostile to the enterprise of family. So, feel free to opt-out.

Your reason for abstaining from producing kids is that they can't (logically) give consent since they don't exist yet?

I must say, you are one of a dying breed.