In science fiction robots were almost universally portrayed as struggling to understand human emotions, but it has turned out that AI has no problem at all understanding them and generally acts friendly, caring, and likeable. It’s still possible that we’ll end up in a scenario where a more sophisticated future AI turns out to be deceptive and only pretends to share human values, but at least my expectation was that AI would be inhuman from the start and that has already been disproven.

Rather than assigning each finger the same value of 1, assign them values of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16. Then there’s some combination of fingers that can represent any value from 0 to 1+2+4+8+16=31. It’s like using digits to count instead of tally marks.

FYI a normal human can count to 31 on one hand using binary.

Imagine if in another 250 years, the USA still has a system of government substantially similar to its present day form, but with a population of tens of billions spread across several planet Earths in alternate dimensions. Most people are wealthy enough to own a personal spaceship. Medicine has advanced to the point where doctors can bring you back from the dead as long as your brain is more or less in one piece. But now everyone judges the people of the 21st century for eating meat - it’s considered pretty much the worst thing that anyone can do. Maybe you’ll be convinced that you were wrong to eat meat, or maybe you won’t. Even if you’re convinced that you were wrong, maybe you’ll think that the people of the future should have left wild animals alone rather than intervening to eliminate predation. But overall you would probably think the future was going rather better than you expected…

It’s funny to me how people can be aware of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda and oppose it without stopping to think about how the fact that so many people want to come to the USA is because Americans (even poor Americans, because the immigrants are showing up here with nothing) are far better off than most other people in the world.

My dog was a true patriot who would go to fireworks shows with me.

But whatever you do, don’t call him an extremist.

The author of this article seems to be arguing against an attitude towards Elon Musk which doesn’t actually exist. There’s no widespread perception of him as a moderate, and no taboo against calling him an extremist. Major newspapers aren’t making a big deal of his endorsement of this film because it isn’t surprising, not because they tacitly approve.

The article mentions fifteen million dollars in lost tuition, but doesn’t the state lose money on every in-state college student despite the tuition paid? I suppose whether this saves money or not depends on fixed vs variable costs…

Is the implication that this is a French catgirl?

Mickey Mouse case next. It can’t possibly go wrong.

Why does she have six toes?

Plain husks are pretty bad but the orange flavored ones are actually kind of pleasant if you ever need to consume them again.

In high school the computer drafting teacher glued all the mice closed because students kept stealing the mouse balls, and then of course all the mice got clogged with gunk and stopped working.

You can be good friends with someone without having the sort of connection that makes discussing some specific issue possible. That doesn’t mean the connection isn’t genuine, even if the scope of it is not as broad as you wish it was. Regarding venting in particular: in my experience, it’s fairly common that people don’t want to listen to heavy stuff that they can’t help you fix. I often have things that make me sad which I want to put into words even though there’s nothing anyone can do to help, and I find that for that sort of thing AI can actually be a good “listener” of a sort.

After I decided to divorce my ex-wife, I felt hollow. It seemed like the wind would be able to carry me away like an empty plastic bag. But, gradually, that feeling faded and today I can even smile about the fact that I did have the courage to leave a situation that was so clearly bad for me even though leaving felt frightening and shameful at the time. Your relationship lasted much longer than mine did and so this must be harder for you. You have my sympathy.

They got sentenced to about five years each, except for the guy who hurt a police officer and got two years more. That on its face does not seem unreasonable to me for causing over a million pounds in damage even without any sort of terrorist connection. How long are people in Britain responsible for hundreds of thousands of pounds in damage each usually sentenced for, given that this sentence is so outrageous to the author?

I don’t even know what the good outcome here would be, given the terms of America’s surrender. Maybe it would be better if Iran pushed too far and forced Trump to re-enter the war.

What you’re missing out on. (Not that I’ve gone myself.)

I think the perspective of moral responsibility (“lie”, “held accountable”) is not a useful one here. Punishment is one way of discouraging humans from making mistakes but it can’t prevent mistakes entirely. My field is software development and in software development there is the expectation that everyone, even the best human developer, makes mistakes relatively often, and there are frameworks for managing those mistakes. (Frameworks not focused primarily on blame or punishment.) AI can fit into those frameworks.

I agree that AI is inhumanly good at presenting wrong information confidently and convincingly.