If we don't preprogram them in advance, then how will kids learn "Math class is tough!"?

Selecting office software is not a political statement

That's right, it's not a statement. It's just a position. You either hold the position that it's ok to be dependent on a third party and it's ok to fail if that third party turns against you, or you hold the position that it's not ok and you would prefer to stay up no matter what adversaries want.

It only becomes a statement once you tell someone that security and reliability are among your values. ;-)

Scale isn't the main problem, interoperability is. If you've solved interoperability (i.e. you've got SPF, DKIM, etc working so gmail.com and outlook.com will receive emails sent from your system) then you're in good shape.

Not that running large systems is necessarily easy, but it doesn't have enemies the way interoperability has enemies. Scale is a merely conventional problem that Google and Microsoft aren't making worse for Linux users. Nobody's pushing back, trying to make you fail; your only foe is savage reality.

And man-vs-savage-reality is a pretty nice conflict to be involved in, compared to man-vs-man.

I was waiting for this one to come up, but yes, some things are absolutely worth eradicating. Nobody is petitioning to bring back polio or smallpox. Mosquito larvae compete for resources with other insect larvae, so fewer mosquitoes will mean more of whatever they're competing with for resources, which could replace them in the food chain.

How do they measure this? Did all the pirates magically agree to put Google Analytics on their web pages and share reporting with Muso? Or, in accordance with The Pirate Code (?!) do all pirate pages request the browser load http://muso.com/arr-trackme-1x... and (again, in accordance with The Pirate Code, I guess) the visitors configure their browsers to whitelist and load it? I am skeptical of any third parties who claim they "track" pirate site visits.

Surely whoever bills for Trump's services knows exactly what has been sent so far. Trump doesn't "work" for free.

Paper strips don't depend on anything to persist.

Get that desk fan out of here!!

The history of AI is all about modeling human intelligence, just like the models we have in natural sciences. If the model happens to be a very good match with reality, we may sometimes mistake one for the other. OTOH, they may be the same thing for all practical purposes.

I'm not sure if I have any deeper intelligence than a fancy language model. When we say that LLMs don't really understand things, then what exactly do we mean by understanding? In my personal definition, the meaning of something is simply the graph of its associated things. I consider something very meaningful if the graph has a lot of nodes and edges, and this also explains why simple things gain more meaning as we age.

I think you just described humans. WE are the danger to this world, and provide no value to it :)

No one eats viruses but quite a lot of species depend on mosquitoes to survive, or eat the mosquito-eaters to survive.
You don't have to kill any mosquitoes, just replace them with a genetically modified version that is resistant to parasites?

Quite a lot of animals feed on insects, and then some carnivores might feed on them.
If you overfish sardines, anything bigger than a sardine may also suffer a population decline, as it is a staple food for lots of yummy fish and also marine mammals..

You could replace "mosquitoes" in that headline with polio, smallpox, measles, AIDS, malaria, or any one of a thousand different pathogens. No one is agonizing over eradicating them.

Except RFK Jr.

So Who'll .. do the tough jobs

I think that for most use-UBI-to-deal-with-AI advocates, the premise is that robots will do that, and presumably would already be doing it by the time UBI is enacted.

If this is a problem (i.e. robots can't do it yet, or they can't do it as economically as humans), then you're not in a post-work situation yet, so you can't have a post-work utopia yet.

Keep improving those robots! You're not done until unemployment is over 90%, and ideally not until 100% though that may be asymptotic.

What does *he* envision a hypothetical scenario where AI has taken over an extremely large amount of the labor?

Your question wouldn't make any sense to him or any other Trump supporter. Let me rephrase it so that it can be answered by MAGA.

What does he envision, in a scenario where the people Trump currently steals from, no longer have anything to steal? How does a thief find new victims once the old ones are used up?

I think the best MAGA answer to that, is that someone will own the AIs, and reap the "wages" that the AIs earn. Steal from them, because they'll have something to steal. AI will be no different than anything else which changes the distribution of prey: you just gotta keep up with who and where the prey are.

If people boycotted the expensive software options for one year and slammed the IRS with paper forms, this would be reversed post haste.

If we did that, do you know how much it would inconvenience every House member and Senator?

None at all. Their lives will be as damaged as a bulldozer that just ran over Arthur Dent.