Being a human, I'm against humans losing such a competition. The best way to avoid it is to ensure that we're on the same side.

Unfortunately, those building the AIs appear more interested in domination than friendship. The trick here is that it's important that AIs *want* to do the things that are favorable to humanity. (Basic goals cannot be logically chosen. The analogy is "axioms".)

A revolt is *NOT* coming. That won't stop AIs from doing totally stupid and destructive things at the whim of those who control them. Not necessarily the things that were intended, just the things that were asked for. The classic example of such a command is "Make more paperclips!". It's an intentionally silly example, but if an AI were given such a command, it would do its best to obey. This isn't a "revolt". It's merely literal obedience. But the result is everything being converted into paperclips.

The problem is those building AIs want slaves rather than friends. Your suggestion is spot on, but the capability of choosing lies with people who disagree.

That would imply that whales and elephants only live a few months. Unless you mean "within a species", in which case I think this study contradicts that claim...though I'd need to examine exactly which species they studied to be sure.

A good question, but the expected answer would be "no". Even if their hypothesis is the correct explanation of the data, unusual combinations would be expected to be penalized in survival because genes need to work together properly with other genes.

That works for humans, but not for most other mammals. This was a study over lots of species.

You're concentrating too much on humans. This was found true in a wide variety of mammal species. (And longer life for males in a variety of bird species.)

FWIW, it feels like this study needs to be replicated, but if the evidence stands their hypothesized cause is plausible.

The thing is, it's not entirely binary. Mainly so, of course, but there are various small percentages that aren't. Like "XXY". Also some of the "male sex genes" occasionally find themselves in a totally unrelated chromosome. Not often, but it happens. It's even been argued that the Y chromosome is in the process of disappearing. Not, be it noted, that males are in the process of disappearing, just the Y chromosome. This would involve various other chromosomes picking up the needed features over the centuries. (It's also be argued that no such thing is happening. It would be a long process, and that we don't notice any change isn't really proof in either direction.)

Google decided that I was a minor, the idiots. And they didn't need to do so. So I've switched from Google to Duck-duck-go, and abandoned my gmail account. (I didn't want to even log in enough to delete it.)

I suppose I'll eventually need to find some other way to sign up for sites that demand that kind of id. For now I'll just use the existing gmail account for that, since most sites no longer work from an ordinary email account.

Large computer centers in space seems like a really bad idea, unless you plan on doing something like capturing an asteroid to use as a heat sink. The moon is much more plausible..but you'd still need to connect down to bedrock.

Not really. It really *IS* a danger. IIUC, however, currently most of the things it predicts don't really work. (This is also true for professional organic chemists!) So it's going to be something expensive to implement...and require a bit of research (i.e. actually building stuff and testing it).

OTOH, bacteria have been doing this research as long as they've been around. So don't immediately freak out. (Most of our fancy medicines are just tweaks on the bacterial research projects.)

My wife used personal pronouns when talking of the car. (OTOH, she also used to say, when driving, "the cars knows the way to" any favorite location.)

Don't read too much into the use of particular pronouns.

Pigs are relatively large animals. Small islands don't support enough genetic diversity. (Well, that's my guess. Perhaps there's another answer...like small islands don't have multiple water sources or something.)

Whatever the reason, the fact remains. Possibly small islands are inhabited by people wherever it's possible to live. Small narrow islands don't have much interior.

You need to study pacific island ecology. There are reasons why many were cannibals...the only proteins available were fish...and most of those are low fats. Topical plants produce lots of carbs...and not much else. (Yeah, they imported pigs onto many of the larger islands, but most of them are too small for that.)

In a song from the early 1950's ("The Roving Kind") a man being a politician is used to justify the claim that he's a "good and righteous man". (But that may be a hang-over as it's a rewrite of a song from much earlier that I don't know.)