Came here just to point this out. No reason the whole audio stream needs to be sent to a remote server to do that.

That's basically what I got out of this and all without needing to mention string theory. Trust The Guardian (and realistically any mainstream news source) to mischaracterize, overhype, and oversimplify any sufficiently advanced article. It's rare to find an outlet that hires science writers with the background and experience to do otherwise.

Damn straight. I hear people going on about this all the time and then crying because "everything sounds the same and nothing's new!" For two major points: money isn't everything ("Oh, clutch my pearls!") and artists do deserve a living wage ("And its the demon, socialism!") because people do deserve to eat and have a roof over their heads. This is why grants and subsidies for artists are a thing in several countries in Europe. Music and art made by committee is the same wallpaper paste pap you get in insurance commercials: corporate music, or as it's otherwise known, elevator music's boring cousin. What survives the sieve of time is music made by individuals or small collectives who have a vision and don't care what a focal group thinks. The part not spoken aloud is this little belief that the only people who should be able to make music are the independently wealthy, who by very nature of their wealth are assumed to be "geniuses". It's not right but that's the logic train you get on when you assume money is everything and artists should go get a "real job". In the industry it'll likely hit a point where only independent artists who compose and play on the side can be drawn in because scarcity eventually breeds higher payouts and more people can make a living in music. Since actually investing in people is taboo, until money starts flowing away from the already wealthy stockholders and CEOs that's not going to happen. In the meantime we have artists self-publishing and only making it by to a certain degree with a small trickle coming into the mainstream by sheer chance. /Now that rant's over, if anyone's looking for something different I'd recommend checking out Guilhem Desq. He's only released three albums but from Visions: Break Your Crank, Cicatrices, and Le Château Magique are all excellent.

As they stand right now, we don't have any kind of generalized AI. We have to train a neural network to do one thing well and nothing else. We're nowhere near generalized AI or this whole argument being relevant. This is only relevant with a system complex enough that not only does it have the potential to be but has become sentient and sophont. Even then parents et al may not be relevant, depending on the form and function that intelligence takes. E.g. what does a gestalt care for one individual?

Yeah, I'm not sure The Verge should be throwing stones. These are the people who demonstrated publicly and unironically they don't know how to assemble a computer correctly.

That is the thing. The latter is impossible so long as we're fleshy meat bags. The former, some kind of treatment or pill that stops or reverses aging might be. I'd have to search for it again but there was a statistical analysis that factored in accidents (plane, train, automobile, falling off a ladder, slipping in the shower, etc.), weather events and natural disasters, and medical incidents. There was a rough upper limit of 2000 years before it was practically guaranteed the odds would catch up to you. Immortality isn't all that long really when you look at it. The thing is that age itself isn't what kills you. It's the susceptibility to physical dangers or medical issues that does. You won't find "old age" on a death certificate. You'll find cancer, renal failure, stroke, trauma from falls, etc.