True, their impact on daily life isn’t necessarily obvious if you’re living in a superpower protected by its nuclear umbrella (someone in Ukraine might feel differently).
Is nuclear deterrence actually still a thing at all? Has any conflict in the past quarter century or so played out any differently than would have if on 1 January 2000 aliens had permanently taken away humanity’s ability to use nuclear weapons?
> Imprisoning someone for one year in the USA costs in the order of 100,000 dollars
There surely must be some way to decrease that by *at least* a factor of 4 or so, possibly by an order of magnitude, if we wanted to? (The poverty line for a 8-person household in the contiguous US in 2025 is $54,150.) Surely that might involve treating prisoners in rather questionable ways, but still way less questionable than f—ing killing them, IMO.
Another objection I have is that [waaay too many things are considered crimes that shouldn’t be](https://archive.org/details/threefeloniesday0000silv) -- what fraction of people in prison are there for reasons comparable to any of your examples?
And then some people felt like they still wanted to do research on what the original ambition of AI had been, and wanted a term that’d distinguish them from all the other people who said they were doing “AI”.
And then at some point all the latter people switched to saying “machine learning” instead.
(not necessarily—glycerol, glycine and many fats are achiral, so the nutritional value of non-mirror food to mirror heterotrophs wouldn’t be quite zero)
And molds are heterotrophic too—mirror molds would starve to death unless they found mirror carbs or mirror proteins to eat, right?
BTW FWIW mirror viruses wouldn’t be all that harmful to humans, as they cannot replicate or do much of anything else except if they infect mirror cells
some kind of magical ritual, like signs against the evil eye or something
What’s wrong with those? FWIW the only reason I didn’t perform my country’s favorite apotropaic gesture upon reading this story is that it didn’t occurr to me
200-person scam center
The content of the article at the other end of that link is the kind of stuff I would dislike in a work of fiction for being too on the nose
Well, it is extremely unlikely to actually help, but it’s not like it will hurt either, and it doesn’t cost anything, so why not? Even if it’s just the literary analog of knocking on wood or whatever, what’s wrong with that? At least, unlike literally knocking on wood, this does have at least a notional action mechanism...
(well, I guess knocking on wood must have had a notional action mechanism at first, but I can’t be bothered to look that up)
In Richard Owen’s place I would have called them “dragons” rather than “dinosaurs”. I mean, we didn’t rename atoms once we found out they didn’t look much like Democritus or Dalton imagined them and the etymological meaning of their name doesn’t actually apply to them...
Yes (though OTOH conversely there are also things that many Europeans struggle to afford but Americans take for granted, e.g. air conditioning)
Note that there are plenty of things that count as “working hours” when white-collar workers do them but not when blue-collar workers do them.
reality has a surprising amount of detail and those details really matter
Yep, the first thing I thought after reading “this isn’t actually possible to achieve in the real world” was “Yes it is! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_hypnosis, or that time I played in a concert while blackout drunk and I can only actually remember playing half of the set list.” The second thing I thought was “But did I actually have no qualia, or do I just not remember them?” The third thing I thought was “Is there any way I could possibly tell, even in principle? If there isn’t, doesn’t that mean that there’s no actual difference between qualia and the formation of memories of qualia?”
Am I the only one who, upon reading the title, wondered “do they mean arguments that conscious AIs would be better than unconscious AIs, or do they mean arguments that existing AIs are conscious?”
Would you apply that to other examples of loss leaders too? When I buy a Ryanair ticket with no priority boarding, a randomly assigned seat and no luggage and don’t buy anything on the plane, should I feel guilty because if everybody paid as little as me the flight wouldn’t be net profitable for Ryanair? If not, what’s the difference?
I would instead choose a relatively light ‘this is not allowed’ where in practice we mostly look the other way
That is very seldom a good idea, for reasons detailed in https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html (if euthanasia is outlawed, only outlaws will euthanize their patients) https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted/ (any circumstance where the actual norms don’t match the ostensible norms can lead to uncertainty and/or disagreements on what exactly the former are, and you don’t want that)
Multiplying all this together gets you to a 1 in 80 million chance of all this stuff happening under the null hypothesis, which is highly significant.
Not until you work out the chance of all this stuff happening under alternate hypotheses, and the prior probabilities of alternate hypotheses, and the prior probability of the null hypothesis.
(I asked random.org for 10 random bytes and I got 02 c8 c2 30 60 b3 2e 93 a6 e9 . The chance of this happening under the null hypothesis is 1 in 1.2×10^24
The LLM analog of in vino veritas