Yes it does matter. If you watch a film and an actor in it says they are a medical doctor does that mean the actor deserves a lengthy prison sentence for claiming they are a doctor when they are not? Your approach would pretty much make the acting profession illegal. The difference between an actor and a scam artist is purely context: in a film or play we know that not everything we see is true so there is no intent to defraud, only to entertain.

Labelling AI chatbots in a way that makes it clear that their output is not always going to be true is all that is needed. It is then up to the user to decide whether that means they are still useful or not.

You can't prevent it: current "AI" technology does not understand what it is saying so not only can it lie/hallucinate it has no idea that it even has lied. The correct response is to correctly label it i.e. make sure that all users know that AI output cannot be trusted as being correct. This would not only solve this therapist issue but would also solve all the other problems related to people trusting AI output, like lawyers submitting AI written court documents with fabricated references.

Essentially treat AI output like a work of fiction. It may sound plausible and it may even contain real facts but, just like some "fact" you read in a fiction book you should not rely on anything it says to be true.

I do not see anything in any of those ammendments about not purchasing data. There was no search or seizure, the airlines voluntarily sold their data and as for the 5th ammendment the only part that seems to apply here is "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." and since the data were sold clearly there was "just compensation" and arguably the property was not "taken" but offered for sale.

Unless you can show that the airlines were somehow compelled to hand over the data I don't see how anything in those ammendments applies. Your government bought the data from companies who were more interested in making extra money than in protecting their customer's privacy. It's shitty behaviour and in most places with data protection laws it would be illegal for the company to sell private data like that but it's the company at fault here, not the government...although I'll grant you that it raises definite questions about what your government is planning to do with all that data.

If you are wanting to steal a car then clearly you are commiting theft and the question of data is secondary. Suppose instead your government is wanting to track your car to see where it has been. It is (I hope) illegal for them to force everyone to have a GPS tracker installed on their vehicle for this purpose. However, it is not illegal for a car manufacturer to choose put one on your vehicle - after all you need if for navigation - but then have it record your location data to a file that they can read when they service your car, or even transmit it over a mibile data connection.

Now, in Europe or Canada, data protection laws would probably make it illegal for the car manufacturer to sell that personal data to anyone. However, if they did sell it to say a government then the person breaking the law would be the car manufacturer, not the government, because the data is under the control of the company and they have a duty under the law to protect it which includes not selling it to anyone, government or otherwise.

Hence my question anout what laws the _government_ broke because, from where I'm standing, it looks like the airlines who are at fault here because they owned the data and so it is they who have the duty to protect it although, given the weaker data protection laws in the US, it may be that they are allowed to sell everyone's personal data.

Fee? Why not have an auction like they do for upgrades? That way you can get passengers bidding to keep their data private against governments and other companies wanting to know all about you and the airline can make even more money!

What laws did your government break? The airlines were not compelled to release the data, they chose to sell the data to the government. If anyone broke the law it was the airlines who sold the private data they held...which is probably why they required the government not to tell anyone how they got it.

I doubt it will take HP long to figure out how to require an ink cartridge in order for the system to work and then they can sell the system for much less.

It depends very much on the reason for the change. It may be that the new proposed definition is for some good scientific reason that has little to do with the political/social need to classify a group of chemicals that build up over the long term in the environment and cause damage. Indeed, it would seem to me that you would be better off completely separating the two definitions since it seems likely that there are more "forever chemicals" than just pfas.

Well I guess if your philsophy is "move fast and break things" planes are pretty fast moving. It's the second part that worries me though.

Yes, but you do realize that if the environment was so finely balanced that the extinction of a handful of the thousands of mosquito species were enough to cause an ecosystem collapse on such a massive scale that it eradicated humans then such an event would already have happened and we would not be here discussing it as a possibility?

Really? It is _much_ easier to repopulate them than to eradicate them - mosquitoes breed fast under ideal conditions which is something very easy to provide so that makes it a very viable back-up plan in the very unlikely event that we need it. I'm all for a cautious approach but surrendering to irrational fears of an insanely unlikely - and arguably basically impossible - consequence is, well irrational. If you are that concerned about miniscule probabilities, don't worry it is much more likely that we'll all be wiped out by an extinction-level meteoroid impact before anything like this happens.

...which is the best kind of possible. Saturn is thought to have a solid core although I doubt we have the technology to build anything capable of surviving the conditions there.

Open the pod bay doors Gemini!

I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Definitely much more dramitc flair than the lengthy explanation I was expecting about how it does not have any pod bay doors to open!

We should absolutely do ecological studies to determine the likely effects of eradicating the dangerous species of mosquitoes. However, given the benefit to human health we should absolutely not just assume that "bad things" will happen and abandon a plan that could save millions of lives. Indeed, it may be that the largest ecological impact will be human population surges in areas hit currently by mosquitoe-borne diseases like malaria and if that is the case I do not see how it is at all ethical to tell all those people that millions of them have to die to preserve the ecological balance.

Thosands, if not millions, of species have gone extinct since humans evolved and not all of those extinctions are due to humans.I would agree that ecological studies need to be done before we try this but if we keep some mosquitoes in captivity we can always re-populate the species should the ecological rebalancing cause problems. However, I see no real possibility that such a rebalancing would be an existential threat to us. Indeed, we've already eradicated multiple species including passenger pigeons, dodos and wooly mammoths all of which were food sources and so far more likely to impact human existence than mosquitoes.

It's also not at all clear why we would know so much better in a few centuries - science can't deliver certainty and you cannot calculate the odds of something you do not know anything about occurring...but given that none of the species we have inadvertently eradicated - plus the few we have deliberately killed like the small pox virus - have had serious consequences for us it seems highly unlikely that eradicating the dangerous species of mosquitoes would harm us but, even if it did, we could still re-populate from those we have repserved in captivity.

That's too specific. The more general question we need to know the answer to is what would the ecological impact be of removing mosquitoes from the environment. It might be that some predator populations would decline but it may also be that some other species surges in numbers to fill the ecological gap left by eradicating mosquitoes. It would not be a great improvement if mosquitoes were replaced by some other, potentially worse biting insect or, if the population of predators relying on mosquitoes declined would that allow some other insect population to surge as a result?

We'd obviously need answers to this broader question before eradicating them but, provided we kept some mosuitoes alive in captivity, it is much easier to undo an eradication that it is to undo the introduction of a new species and given the potential benefits, provided we have this safeguard and the studies suggest no significant, negative ecological impact it would seem reasonable to try it.