How to address superintelligence, if that is actually something we realistically face:

1. Make creating an unlicensed AI with over a certain threshold to be a capital offense.

2. Regulate the field of artificial intelligence as heavily as we do nuclear science and nuclear weapons development.

3. Have strict international treaties on model size and capability limitations.

4. Have inspection regimes in place to allow international monitoring of any electricity usage over a certain threshold.

5. Use satellites to track anomalous large power use across the globe (monitored via waste heat) and thoroughly investigate any large unexplained energy use.

6. Target the fabs. High powered chips should be licensed and tracked like nuclear materials.

7. Make clear that a nuclear first strike is a perfectly acceptable response to a nation state trying to create AGI.

Anyone who says this technology simply cannot be regulated is a fool. We’re talking models that require hundreds of megawatts or more to run and giant data centers full of millions of dollars worth of chips. There’s only a handful of companies on the planet producing the hardware for these systems. The idea that we can’t regulate such a thing is ridiculous.

I’m sorry, but I put the survival of the human race above your silly science project. If I have to put every person on this planet with a degree in computer science into a hole in the ground to save the human race, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. Hell, I’ll go full Dune and outlaw computers all together, go back to pen and paper for everything, before I condone AGI.

We can’t control this technology? Balderdash. It’s created by human beings. And human beings can be killed.

So, how do we deal with ASI? You put anyone trying to create it deep in the ground. This is self defense at a species level. Sacrificing a few thousand madmen who think they’re going to summon a benevolent god to serve them is simple self-defense. It’s OK to kill cultists who are trying to summon a demon.

What if instead you hid an encrypted signal within an otherwise perfectly legible audio signal? Imagine a song being played. To the ear the song seems perfectly normal. For example, data could be embedded within a song by ever-so-slightly raising or lowering the pitch of a song multiple times per second. Then if you had a copy of the original file, software could compare the original file to the song transmitted over the radio. The locations where the pitch rose or fell could be noted, and the data could be retrieved. You could send encrypted data without anyone realizing you’re sending encrypted data. To anyone else listening, it would simply sound like a song or other audio track being played.

The law isn’t code.

Past a certain level of wealth, it might make sense to invest in some really expensive jewelry just as an emergency and liquid wealth store.

Consider the US right now with its volatile political situation. Or any other country with volatile and uncertain politics. Or just uncertainty from major national disasters. People sometimes need to flee from disasters on short notice.

For a normal person, carrying around $100k worth of jewelry on your person would be foolish. For most middle class people, that would a substantial portion of your wealth that they’re walking around risking. But imagine your net worth is $50 million. Now that $100k worth of jewelry you wear every day is only 0.5% of your net worth. But if you need to bug out of your city or flee the country for some reason, you now carry around with you the means to do so. International money transfers can take time, and bank accounts can be frozen. But if you have $100k in jewelry just on your person, you have a liquid form of emergency bugout money. You can get on a plane with nothing but the clothes on your back, fly to a far off country, and immediately have access to enough resources to get yourself set up. Even if your accounts or frozen or your nation’s banking system has collapsed, you can pawn some of that jewelry off to obtain essentials like food, shelter, etc.

I think a fair number of rich people like having this amount of jewelry for the same reason that they often like having multiple passports. The odds of having to ever flee the country are low. And for most people, maintaining the means to flee the country at a moment’s notice is simply too much. But when the cost is a tiny portion of your net worth, putting what is the equivalent of pocket change into the ability to quickly flee a country isn’t so unreasonable anymore.

Seriously. Past a certain level of wealth, you don’t even need to buy brand-named items for most everyday things. You don’t buy a suit from an expensive brand. You hire a world-class master tailor to custom make you a suit from scratch. It’s fit exactly to your body, made to your exact tastes and specifications. The same thing should be possible with watches. You don’t buy an expensive brand, you hire a watch maker to make you an entirely custom piece.

Who says I’m worked up? You wrote a whole paragraph, I wrote a quip.

We freeload off of Mexico. They give us about $160 billion more dollars in goods and services than we give them. They give us about $467 billion worth of stuff, and in return we give them about $309 billion in stuff. In exchange we mostly give them IOUs and other pieces of paper.

Oh, and that’s before we talk about the billions of dollars we steal from the Mexican government. Think of all the talented workers that move from Mexico to the US. That’s millions of people raised and educated on the backs of Mexican taxpayers, who come to the US and never contribute a penny to the Mexican economy.

The US is a giant leech sucking the Mexican economy dry.

The government can fuck right off with their Newspeak.

It defines every human as belonging to neither of the 2 sexes. There is pretty much no other way to read it.

Read it carefully, and then read it like a Republican.

“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

This does NOT mean “a female is a person who can produce the large reproductive cell.”

The BELONG is the key word here. They’ll argue that anyone with XX chromosomes belongs to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. An embryo may not produce large or small reproductive cells, but they still belong to the sex that produces the large or small reproductive cell. Even if an adult is infertile, they still belong to the sex that produces the large or small reproductive cell. It’s not like per-pubescent children or post-menopausal women don’t have a sex marker on their passports.

That is how this is meant to be read, and that is how it will be interpreted by conservative courts.

In truth the definition is a bit circular, as it defines “sex” as:

“Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”

And then in turn it defines male and female in terms of “belonging to the sex that produces…”

But I don’t think the courts will really quibble with that. It’s clear what the intent of the order is. And that is how it will be interpreted.

You do not have to actually be capable of producing the large reproductive cell to be a member of the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. Is this definition all-encompassing and without issues? No. But legal definitions rarely are perfect, and courts have to find ways to still apply laws that reflect the intent of their drafters. And while the wording of the order is clumsy, the intent is quite clear.

Not as many as you might think.

I do quite a lot of that as well. In fact, woodworking was what made me first consider wood science as a field of study.

My username is literal. I’m literally a wood scientist. Or more specifically, I’m a current PhD student in civil engineering and wood science. Identifying Wood by Hoadley was actually a textbook in one of the courses I took.

What is your proposal to stop creeping fascism? Because all you seem to want to do is nothing.

You’re mistaking “it took a long time to end Apartheid” with “we shouldn’t even try to end Apartheid.”

They very much did actually. Biden shamelessly just cribbed much of Elizabeth Warren’s economic policies. Hillary’s loss in 2016 forced him to run on a much more progressive platform in 2020 than he ever would have otherwise.

Voters weren’t expecting Biden to issue a complete trade embargo with Israel. What they were expecting was for Biden to FOLLOW US LAW and stop shipping arms to Israel, a country flagrantly violating law. There is a universe of possibilities between “stop sending Israel bombs on our dime” and “turn Israel into Cuba.”

Are Republicans going to stop being Fascist at any time in the foreseeable future? They ran a fascist in 2016, 2020, and 2024. And they have a long line of potential future candidates.

“Don’t hold them accountable while running against a fascist” == “never hold them accountable.”

And there’s no point in going after officers other than the president on this issue. It’s not like governors have much control over foreign policy.

They said the same thing about Apartheid South Africa. You think it was easy to cut ties with them? They were also tied into our military industrial complex.

And I find the argument “but it’s going to be haaard” despicable.

That part comes after, once democracy is assured.

When, precisely, did you expect that day to come?

Refusing to hold Democrats accountable is also voting for Fascism. If your vote is 100% reliable to the Dems, they don’t have to do anything to win your vote. And thus, they can completely ignore you and everything you care about. The Dems have moved so far to the right that modern Republican Fascism doesn’t seem completely unreasonable to many people by comparison. After all, Democrats firmly embraced what was far-right immigration policy just a few years ago. Democrats have made a hard turn to the right. This has forced Republicans to move even further right into Fascism. And if things continue down this path, with Democrats never being held accountable, eventually both Democrats and Republicans will be overtly Fascist.

That is what happens if a party is never held accountable.