What kind of university would not have a physics department?

The kind that has "Stamp-Collecting" as a major :-)

For electronics specifically, you have lots of online options beyond NewEgg/Walmart including B&H Photo/Video, Adorama, Microcenter, and maybe Best Buy. Since electronics are generally expensive, it's a high impact way to steer money away from Amazon.

Then you're welcome to convince China, Iran, etc., to use AI systems built in US... and vice versa. Like it or not, national boundaries are often a pretty good reason to "do things differently", if for no other reason than "national security". And this is good... if AI designed vaccine kills off the population, then there's a pretty good chance that the species will survive anyway because other countries "did it differently".

Small nations often fall in line with whatever the regional superpower does...

...how is that a solution? Do you think Russia, China, Iran, or you name a hundred other countries, are going to follow your suggested limits

Each country can and must do whatever they want... the segmentation of systems can happen at country borders. As far as extinction is concerned, a world where US, Russia, China, Iran, India, etc., each have THEIR OWN (home-built-from-scratch) system is better than one-system-for-everyone.

Each country should develop their own vaccines, medicines, AI systems, etc. To ensure species survival in case the improbable happens.

print culture ... associated with ... hostility to superstition...

Oh, really??? Many burned/hung/drowned "witches" would disagree.

even a 1% chance of catastrophic events like extinction or the destruction of democracies is unacceptable

...it is impossible that the improbable won't happen.

The only solution is to limit individual systems... define a sort of kelly criterion for AI, where a single big failure does not mean extinction. e.g. for military robots, mandate any model/manufacturer/dataset/etc., be limited to say 5% of the entire robot fleet... don't let them share code, or collaborate. We *want* them to have different bugs. That way if there's a glitch/feature/emergence someplace, it's limited.

Same for medicine/treatments synthesized with the help of AI... only let 5% o the population to benefit from any individual "solution". That way if there's an extinction gene-editing virus, only 5% of the population is impacted, etc.

By signaling that everyday/mundane content might hurt you, you teach people (teens and young adults in particular) that they are inherently fragile.

The problem is that life is tough. Even in rich Western social democracies, you will encounter horrible days and incredible challenges. Instead of coddling people and encouraging them to runaway from discomfort, we should be challenging them to engage with progressively more difficult ideas and realities.

Trigger warnings generally do more harm than good:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencefocus.com%2Ft...

Keep in mind that non-human generated code may not have copyright. Not open source, which does have a copyright. But no copyright at all.

There's an argument that if it is modified by a human, it can be copyrighted. But that could be line by line.

How did you cram so much stupid into one post? Impressive!

Small indulgences can have a huge impact on how customers feel about a product. That counts for a lot in the competitive high-end auto market.

It's definitely that we wrestle with the pending consequences of AI (both personally and societally) now rather than burying our heads in the sand. However, nothing about the march of AI has a set itinerary... historically the field has cycled thru stagnation and sudden jumps forward. ChatGPT and Dall-E got people's attention and spurred a bunch of investment, but there's no way to know if the next jump forward is happening tomorrow or if we're in for twenty years of mild incremental improvements.

"who started it?" - kind of a bogus question given that one side can always point to some earlier incident committed by the other side (see cypress, Palestine, and Ireland for examples).

"Who wins it?" - I tend to agree with you about the right's geographic advantage, but there are many ways the conflict can unfold, and it doesn't necessarily take the form of a classical military engagement.

"Who wins it really?" - Russia and China. For the vast majority of Americans who just want to go about their lives this will have extremely negative impacts.

If you haven't done anything wrong, what have you got to hide? Me thinks this attempt to avoid sunlight will mainly be used to stifle stories of waste, incompetence, and the occasional atrocity. For a free people to effectively check their government, reporters must be able to do their job and publish the things the government doesn't want you to see.

Bingo... these are marketing and product design issues. There are no genuine moral or philosophical concerns for American capitalist, save those that can be productized (preferably with a monthly subscription fee).