That makes perfect sense. :-)

Language is just a consensus. If enough people agree about how it works, then that’s how it works.

Absolutely. It isn’t true. It just should be.

This may be the most brilliant get-out-the-vote tactic I’ve ever seen.

I’m in favor of using whatever you already have on hand.

Agreed. I figure that after a trip in the trebuchet almost anyone is going to be “trustworthy”. At least, in the sense that they can no longer betray your trust.

Thank you! Sometimes thinking sideways produces interesting results.

Just bear in mind that nothing involved in “refurbishing” a drive removes the wear it has already experienced. That may or may not matter to you. The mean time between failures for a particular model is a meaningful statistic, but it doesn’t tell you too much about any individual drive. You may get lucky or unlucky with the lifespan.

If you check and monitor your drives, as various people have recommended here, you are less likely to be surprised by a failure. If you keep them backed up you won’t be out anything more than the replacement cost of the drive when it does happen.

Exactly. The rich will be able to buy privacy, while the rest become ever easier to exploit.

I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.

What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.

Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.

I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.

Depending on the source, Wall Street is somewhere between 3 and 25 feet above sea level. It wouldn’t take much to dampen the market’s spirit. :-)

It isn’t glamorous and it doesn’t grab headlines, but that is how these problems get fixed.

Making to tomorrow is sometimes not a small undertaking.

Not to far. Thanks for letting me know about it.

I certainly won’t disagree with that.

I do understand. I am constantly fighting that myself. For me it’s an aspirational statement, not necessarily one I always manage to live.

Paper tape would probably work, as long as you could find a reliable reader for it. I’m actually old enough to have used it and the readers often had problems. Getting rid of the mechanical aspects of the reader and replacing them with light sensors would go a long way toward fixing that.

Magnetic tape only lasts for a decade or two.

This could be considered a trojan.

I love the idea!

The biggest problem with corporate governance is that precedent in US law is absolutely clear that the only financial responsibility is to the shareholders. If we expanded that to include employees and customers our world would look very different after a while.