That is not true. You could certainly present credentials that give you a government-signed token that only has claims as to your age. While initial validation of your identity is a must (but in most places you already have a way of doing that to some gov agency or another), storing a copy of that information is not needed for this to work. We have sufficient cryptography tools to solve this for real, if we really wanted to.

While at it, I would also append county of citizenship to that token, to see if a comment is coming from Russia/China or is from an actual citizen of my country. Would do wonders for dissinformation.

Your point being that once-dominant IBM forgot how to create value, and has only tried to extract it, creating a long death spiral that at every cycle makes it more and more a shadow of what it was? Yes, I can see the similarities. I assume the people within IBM might care, but those on the outside don't give a ... Oh, wait ...

Priorities indeed. Cristiano Ronaldo alone makes £173 million in the same time (a year), after which nothing of any value is left (not like a soccer match becomes a classic over time even).

I could not imagine a better idea that the entire leadership of a company going into short-term / burned-out / micromanagement / panic "Mode".
The evidence of those measures doing wonders for innovation, morale, talent retention and productivity can hardly be overstated.

In fact, give it 3 weeks and the first "eureka" moment will be the realization that, you know, "if we can do this, so can and should all of our employees, it is for the greater good. Feels great to lead by example."


[sarcarsm trigger warning for the sarcasm-impaired]

As commendable as a devotion to mother nature goes, you would be greatly underestimating human adaptability and ingenuity.
Yes, in unprepared countries like Haiti, 2010, a magnitude 7 earthquake can kill hundreds of thousands (out of around 3 million affected).
But countries know for having periodic Earthquakes adapt. On the same year, I was in Chile, and I had all services running the next day morning. Only a handful of buildings affected. Only 500 deaths, from over 15 million affected. And surprise, that was an 8.8 quake, so almost 2 orders of magnitude stronger (the scale being logarithmic). And this is Japanese engineering we are discussing here, my guess is that the 6000 figure is probably an "up to" pessimistic estimate. Tsunamis are a different story, as the article states, they can be much more devastating.

Actually, I can see all kinds of benefits from having a technical solution to this problem. Age verification is one part but not-a-bot verification is much more useful.

I could probably spend more time thinking about the corner cases, but in principle it seems to me that a government could provide a service that allows websites to validate not your identity, but only the fact that you are a person (and adult or not). I wonder if some cryptography in the browser could make this so that the government also does not find out what websites you are actually visiting, only the fact that you are using the internet, but perhaps it would be impossible due to man-in-the-middle attacks.

It would surely be nice to get rid of bots and capchas though... oh, and protect children (not that it is ever been about that really).

I tend to agree. Additional human population is both a blessing and a curse. It kind of depends on the capacity of society to produce net-positive individuals, those than through their work can produce more value than they consume.

The core issue though, as you glimpse, is not # of people, but rather long-term sustainability. With the caveat that we are not even close to be able to have a true circular economy, the aim is to get as close as possible to this equilibrium:

things_spent = things_produced

Which in turn can be broadly decomposed into

population * individual_consumption = resources * productivity

* So, one thing that helps is to reduce population. In that regard, what is happening in developed countries is desirable. We are reducing population without killing anyone of forcing anyone. Yes, it will be hard to adapt our economies to (we cannot rely on old people dying quickly or young people to come in droves after them). At some point, we need to produce the incentives to get population stable, neither increasing nor decreasing.
* Another is to reduce consumption, which is hard in most of the world since they aspire for more rather than less, but can certainly be done in some developed countries where food and goods are over-produced and mostly end in the garbage.
* Another is to increase productivity, which is as always a mix of investment in infrastructure, technology and education. This we should definitely do and be bold at, but we should not just take if for granted. I'm very skeptical of the idea that since technology has grown so fast and saved us in the past that it will *certainly* do so forever, just-in-time.

And this is a very simplified picture, without accounting even for immigration, war, redistribution, fairness, politics, etc. But in essence, many things need to happen if we want to prevent unnecessary suffering.

Only support wireless charging? That would place an IPhone in my "never buy" bucket for sure... Oh, wait, it ALREADY is in that bucked due to the 3.5mm port you mention...

No AI researcher myself but do have a graduate degree in AI. Assuming your question is honest, I'll try to give an answer. But you'll have to be a little less dismissive to engage with the topic...

1) Indeed, this is not a representative paper. Most papers expose new algorithms, their underlying math and experimental data, as you might expect.
2) Even so, occasionally even the sciences need to have a debate about moral debacles in their fields, and you would nor reasonably expect such a debate to display the elements you mention to the same degree. Check for instance the Declaration of Helsinki debate about the human experimentation moral debate in science.
3) Even outside of the moral domain, non-empirical postulates like Drake's Equation are still valid publications IMHO.
4) AI Experts are indeed dealing with a moral question with real human impact. Algorithms already dominate the world in ways we do not fully understand nor control, in a broad set of domains from our markets to our social interactions. AI is exploding out at an unprecedented rate.
5) The risk is real. While AIs are not as smart and able to deal with the real world with the same generality as we humans do, the rate of improvement is exponential. Human IQ on the other side is increasing only linearly and slowly. Here is an explanation in layman's terms.
6) There is very little chance to gather empirical data. First, we have not achieved superhuman general AI yet. Second, if we ever do, we achieve second place in the intelligent-being rating, and we'll be out-competed and controlled instantly in probably the same way we can outcompete and control the current second place: Orangutans. You can only try this ONCE, and any moral questions should be discussed BEFORE you event attempt an experiment with what amounts to a doomsday machine.

That said, the paper is really far from their claims of being either the first or the deepest to think of the problem. This is hubris. People say at MIRI or Stanford's HAI, and probably many others have been at it for years. Nevertheless, this is exactly the kind of publication that is reasonable to see at this stage.

And here I though that the whole idea of taxing alcohol was to reduce consumption / pay for healthcare and other indirect costs of alcohol. Why not just to clam mission accomplished? There should be a term for this kind of "reverse idiocy". Reminds me of people wanted to add mandatory noise to electric cars...

Actually, I don't know what a "home" is? A single house/physical location? The people that lives in it? A family group? There is already a premium on "using more than X devices", which is reasonable and proportional to usage. Much better to stay with that.

I believe your premise is correct and can be readily acknowledged. I do not believe it to be such a revelation as you seem to think. I cannot come up with a single example in the entire history of mankind where that premise has not been true. The state has always had the right to tax you, fine you, imprison you, force you to risk your life and very often take your life altogether.

In fact, a society is nothing more that this complex game that we all decide to play together and submit to, with the objective of being able to collaborate instead of being at each others throats. So we set (and keep updating) the rules of the game, and as long as the majority benefits from playing it we keep doing so.

Yes, the game/agreement can be construed in multiple ways and will have different outcomes. Some of these outcomes might make the game less stable over time (corruption or inequality for example), make more people stop playing by the rules (crime) and even break the game (your own example of the french revolution). But it then becomes a new game where your premise is still valid: the powerful being able to take anything from you. Even in the total degenerate case, where the rule is that there are no rules, then might makes right and ANYONE can do so. Whatever sense of security and fairness we feel is a testament to our current game being a good one.

So 1) your premise is sort of a no-brainer and 2) the fact that these projects frame the question as "what rules would be accepted by the most people?" makes perfect sense.

There is plenty of precedent that Russia would do just that. They have a decades-long track record of getting incarceration-on-demand.

Congrats guys, a refreshing level of open discussion where being careful in framing things demonstrates that there was not much disagreement to begin with and some level of consensus is reached. This is true intelligent debate. Kudos.

Oh, don't be like that, it is not like they shared an MP3 or something...