... is a movie trope where everyone in the world has perished, except for the protagonist, who is now free to roam the world unmolested, help himself to any of the remaining resources available, do whatever he/she wants, etc.

The fantasy part is the idea that the catastrophe will get rid of all the people you don't care about, freeing up their resources for your own use, while sparing you and the people and resources that you do care about.

The people in this article can be blasé about AI killing humanity because at some level they think that they and what's important to them will be spared. Most likely, they think their wealth will save them. If and when they find out that they will suffer and die as well, their acceptance of the idea will evaporate quickly.

What's the end-game there, once there are no activities left that cannot be performed better by a machine? No more jobs for humans, and then everyone retires (in the optimistic scenario) or starves/riots (in the pessimistic scenario)?

Air-delivery can be faster for small items, but land-delivery is much more energy-efficient, since you don't have to support the weight of the robot and the payload for the duration of the trip.

That means that the wheeled bot can have a larger range, carry larger payloads, and needs to be recharged less often. OTOH it has to wait for stoplights, can only go 5-10 miles per hour, etc.

Take the $billions you were going to spend on Solar Powered Space Data Centers, and instead build equivalent Solar Powered data centers here on Earth at 1% of the cost. Make up for the lack of 24/7 sunlight by adding additional solar panels, energy storage, and transmission lines as necessary.

Then take the other 90% of the money that you just saved, and spend it on cocaine and hookers.

Your ping times will be much better also.

Ah yes, it's the "I gave it thought for 2 seconds, and now I have a better solution than the people who've been thinking about it for decades even though it's not my job, area of expertise, I don't understand the problem anyway, and I am free of a litany of other considerations that apply" guy. Good work.

I prefer to think it's Leonard Cohen's doing.

Drive-by-wire? From the description, it almost sounds like all they need is a trailer to be pulled behind the primary vehicle. Maybe with a fancy hitching mechanism to give it more separation, but still, self-driving seems like overkill for this application.

Then you'll be happy to find out that 99.9999% of the Internet was unaffected.

I love that you couldn't explain that without saying that they represent a financial opportunity rather than just, you know, solve a problem better than existing solutions.

They could also fire you for living out of a car. Fun choices!

Depends on whether they want to avoid consequences the next time it happens; eg causing an accident and getting on the news.

Now, now.

You can't really say that you wren't warned about going hunting with Dick Cheney . . . :)

hawk

>If you have a hankering for murdering parking cops you don't need an app.

I think the motivation is more *avoiding* them than harming them!

If you wanted to harm them, you'd just tell their mothers that they weren't really hookers . . .

!

hawk

>In my state, the cops are legally required (and so) post public
>notices about where DUI checkpoints will be.

Speaking as an attorney who was still handling DUIs when checkpoints were in common use . . . announcing and pbulsihign ahead of time will make at most a marginal difference in the number of drunks heading through them.

You'll get a slight decrease in sober drivers who don't want the hassle, but drunk drivers just don't plan that well.

I recall my Criminal Procedure professor in law school commenting that he *really* wanted to get stopped in one and just sit there not speaking, staring straight ahead. Just to see what happened, as they couldn't possibly develop probable cause under the circumstances.

[*checks beard in mirror*]

oh, crap!

anyway, I both leaned unix on a pdp-11 at work and bought my first Mac in 1984.

Various Macs until I switched to a combination of unix and *nix as a graduate student, largel over LyX (largely a graphical front end to LaTeX at the time, as I was editing plenty of matrices full of integrals and such, so keyboard navigation was critical.

Then in 2008, back to a Mac laptop when it mugged me on clearance in Frys. I figured I could put FreeBSD (or maybe linux) on it, but it was a good enough *nix box, and it's battery management beat the daylights out of what I could get from FreeBSD or linux on a laptop.

And it's been Macs, largely used as *nix boxes, ever since, whether legal writing or developing software.

The bit on lower maintenance, less frequent replacement, and lower support costs goes back thirty years and more. And with some notable exceptions, the general quality of Apple hardware has been top tier, dating to when it was somewhat (but not hugely) better than #2 IBM.