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.

Yes but only around two things: public performance and copying/distrubution and arguably public performance is a form of distribution.

The problem with the current situation is that it gives YouTube all the power with none of the responsibility.

They do not need to pay. Copyright, as the name says, is the right to copy and distributute something. So long as you purchase a legal copy you are allowed to use it as you wish provided you do not distribute copies.

If I buy a book the copyright holder cannot tell me that I'm only allowed to read 5 pages a day, or that I can't use it to balance a table, prop open a door or even burn it. Similarly, they can't tell me that I'm not allowed to use it to train a machine learning algorithm provided that the algorithm does not reproduce copies of parts of the book - if it does that then it is breaking copyright.

I get that some authors think they should be compensated more simply because companies are using their books etc. to train AI algorithms that make them money but if they want that they need to get the law changed.

It was not coding but if an AI cannot understand a simple request to extract one piece of information from a text document then I can guarantee it is going to have problems understanding the far more complex instructions that will be necessary to construct the code needed to do the analysis to extract that information in the first place.

It may be that those limits have expanded in the past few months although that example is only a month old. However, I'd be surprised if my original point does still not hold i.e. that the problem with AI coding is still going to be putting together instructions that are precise enough and that it can understand in order to get it to produce the code that you need. This will be especially true with code that may be doing something less common - like scientific analysis - for which it has either little or extremely poor quality (looking at my own and fellow physicists' code!) training data.

It should be given the choice. Either it gets regulated like a telecom provider in which case it cannot discriminate against content unless it is illegal and, in return, cannot be prosecuted for material on its servers OR it gets regulated like regular media in which case it has editorial control over the content it serves but is then legally liable for that content.

If we just assume that the AI can't write the code we need then the whole premise of the discussion, that we can program code in natural language using AI, is moot.

After speaking to several of my american colleagues a few weeks ago it is very clear that American Science is fighting for its life at the moment and there is definitely no surplus.

It depends on what you are doing and how specific you need your code to be. The more precise the harder, and harder it is to get the AI to do what you are asking in many cases. For example, when I asked ChatGPT what the statistical signfiicance of a specific scientific result in it said "very significant", when I told it to be more precise in its response it responded that it was a "high statistical significance". I then asked it to specify the number of sigma significance, it responded "more than 5 sigma" so I asked it to get the exact number of sigma to one decimal place (since the paper gave it as 5.9 sigma), the AI's response? "More than 5.0 sigma". I never got it to tell me the correct answer of 5.9 sigma.

If I have to fight with a coder-AI like that to get it to do what I want forget it - it will be vastly less frustrating just to write the code myself and traditional coding is fun even if it may be slower overall. Who wants to fight an AI with excellent training but the personality of a pedantic 2-year-old to get the job done?

Paying for the compute time and licensing of the code are not going to be the problems that stop this it will be programming the AI and then debugging the output. Generating the correct prompt for an AI is going to be much, much harder than people think. Sure, it is easy to generate a picture in your head of what you want an app to do but, at least in my experience, often the most consuming part of programming is deciding _exactly_ what you want your code to do i.e. converting the vague floppy idea in your head into a concrete set of instructions where all ambiguity is removed and everything is decided.

Having an AI involved might mean that a developer may not need to know the programming details (although I suspect it will be needed since AI code is far from bugfree) but they will still need to describe the program with complete precision e.g. what input parameters are needed, what the controls for each should look like, where they should be placed etc. because if you do not then not only will the AI make a complete mess of an interface but, everytime you tweak the prompt to fix an issue, the interface will likely completely change unless clearly specified.

Now multiply that by all the small decisions that developers make when coding an app and, while AI may help reduce the burden I doubt it is going to massively reduce it plus you have to contend with the issue that unlike a traditional programming language, one slight change to the prompt can radically shift how the AI codes things meaning that a minor change in one area could radically change another area unless the prompt has everything tied down precisely. So I think that developers are absolutely going to be needed but, if this works well, it may make them more productive as well as change their skillset somewhat.