But you are leaving out the difference in fertility. The fertility rate of the UK, which as you noted is a population dominated by native britons who trace their ancestry on the island back a millennium or more, is 1.4 live births per woman. The replacement rate is 2.1. In a hundred years the UK will have a smaller population than Haiti.

Because under a true system of sovereignty, people wouldn't be allowed to vote for a Muslim mayor.

Is if they confirmed your age by a behavioral maturity test. AI could monitor posts, and if it figures out that someone with an emotional age of 15 or older wouldn't have posted such a thing, you're cut off.

Art and cultural activity is a major sector of the US economy. It adds a staggering 1.17 *trillion* dollars to the US GDP. However that's hard to see because for the most part it's not artists who receive this money.

The actual creative talent this massive edifice is built upon earns about 1.4% of the revenue generated. The rest goes to companies whose role in the system is managing capital and distributing. Of that 1.4% that goes to actual creators, the lion's share goes to a handful of superstars -- movie stars and music stars and the like. This is not as unfair as it sounds, as it reflects the superstar's ability to earn money for the companies they distribute through, but the long tail of struggling individual artists play a crucial role in artistic innovation and creativity. Behind every Elvis there's a Big Mama Thornton, and armies of gospel singers who may have made a record or two but never made a living.

We can't run this giant economic juggernaut off a handful of superstars with AI slop filling in the gaps in demand. But maybe we'll give that a try.

Darwin awards are won by removing yourself from the gene pool. These traitors to their own species may end doing that not by killing themselves, but by wiping out the entirety of the human kind.

Actually in China significantly more students choose to pursue degrees in technology, engineering,or business than in the US â" degrees which qualify them for specific jobs after graduation. So the process of college education becoming more vocationally oriented and less about training intellectual skills has advanced even more advanced in China than it is here.

China grants very few liberal arts degrees and its vocational degree programs have minimal or no liberal arts content. In the US an engineering or business degree program requires substantial liberal arts content to be degree accredited. So an engineering student graduating from a US program has had many semesters of training in critical reading and thinking, challenging claims with original sources, and crafting persuasive arguments in areas where opinions differ.

These are skills the Chinese government is not eager to put in the hands of its citizens, so we really ought to question just how âoeuselessâ those non-vocational intellectual skills really are. There are clearly people here whose priorities for education are more aligned with Chinaâ(TM)s â" inculcating respect for authority, obedience to tradition as described by authority, and job skills useful to authorities. In other words for them education isnâ(TM)t about empowering the students, itâ(TM)s about forming a class of compliant worker bees.

Providing 1.3 million round trip airfares between Houston and Washington DC for Texans who want to see the shuttle.

Or ... issue the citation to the passenger who called the ride, and let him negotiation reimbursement for the fine and insurance costs with Waymo. I guarantee Waymo would fix the bug or perhaps even *ask* to be regulated rather than rely on this loophole.

Why burden the taxpayer with finding a solution to the consequences of early adopting a new technology? If you *choose* to summon a robotaxi, then you're responsble for the consequences of that choice. If you don't like it, then demand the company sort those out before you use them.

This is so unnecessary, I wonder whether this is some kind of social engineering operation being sold as a "service" to landlords.

Supercars this fast have tires that last less than fifteen minutes, perhaps eighty miles traveled on the track of you're lucky. And since the wear isn't linear, if you go just a little bit faster, you might only get a minute or two at the speeds this car goes before you have to change all the tires, which will set you back $40,000.

The point of such a thing is the same as one of those suborbital tourist space flights. The point is to *have had* the experience, which is too brief to be practically useful.

Wait ... isn't selling consumers on features that will be available real-soon-now-trust-us-on-that the way American electric car companies sell *their* vehicles?

Once again, Chinese companies are stealing American (ish) ideas.

Yup, that's basically what the 'next step' means. "The goal is to eventually expand beyond summaries to agent-like tasks". The agent will read the summary an make actions on your behalf.

The end game is not needing to have you around at all.

I agree they are not socialist, in any kind of a strict sense. But any attempts to learn from those countries is inevitably branded as "socialism". If that's how we're using the word now, then we have to call them something silly like "market socialist".

If you give any tool to any large group of people, some of them will use it in harmful ways. The knife slips and cuts the user, the chainsaw kicks back, the LLM hallucinates superficially credible gibberish.

Once people get over the shock of how impressive LLMs are, they'll see how far we still are from AGI. Because we don't have an artificial *general* intelligence yet, we can't *generally* replace humans. But we can replace them in many labor intensive tasks that don't require common sense, experience with the real world, and advanced thinking skills.

Take copy editing -- a common and labor intensive task in any kind of publishing, public affairs, content management, and corporate communications. Today you can hand a terrible mess of prose to an LLM and it will tidy it up, correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammatical mistakes like subject verb agreement and confusing homophones like "they're" and "their' and "there". The output will be superficially perfect, but you still need a human to judge whether it does the job needed; someone with actual experience and understanding of the human audience.

I think this will be the story of AI between now and the day that we finally achieve AGI, if we ever do: the need for humans with advanced cognitive skills will actually increase as the jobs for people with fundamental cognitive skills like copy editing will decline. Those two things happening together is a big problem. If we don't do something about education in advanced cognitive skills, we will find ourselves in a pickle, because basic cognitive labor is the pipeline that produces people who can perform advanced cognitive tasks.

Weirdly, there's some skill involved in crafting prompts that give you what you want. The things are trained on all the code that's ever been posted anywhere on the Internet, and unless you can prompt them in a way that eliminates that bad code, that van be a bad thing.