Not all the cars on the road are real, a few of them are some kind of creature that has adapted to mimic cars, to blend in and avoid predators, and eat roadkill when nobody is looking. That’s why sometimes you see a car with window tint so dark it seems like nobody could possibly see though it, to hide the fact there’s no interior.

I think its extremely unlikely that they have any awareness, but like, I still feel like this kind of thing is unnerving and potentially could lead to issues someday even so.

Whatever awareness/consciousness/etc is, its at least clearly something our brain (and to a lesser extent some of the other parts of the body) does, given how changes to that part of the body impacts that sense of awareness. As the brain is an object of finite scope and complexity, I feel very confident in saying that it is physically possible to construct something that has those properties. If it wasnt, we shouldnt be able to exist ourselves.

To my understanding, neural networks take at least some inspiration from how brains work, hence the name. Now, theyre not actual models of brains, Im aware, and in any case, I suspect based on how AIs currently behave that whatever it is that the brain does to produce its intelligence and self awareness, the mechanism that artificial neural networks mimics is only an incomplete part of the picture. However, we are actively trying to improve the abilities of AI tech, and it feels pretty obvious that the natural intelligence we have is one of the best sources of inspiration for how to do that. Given that we have lots of motivation to study the workings of the brain, and lots of people motivated to improve AI tech (which will continue even if more slowly even whenever the economic bubble pops, since such things dont usually tend to result in a technology just disappearing entirely), and that something about the workings of the brain produces self awareness and intelligence, it seems pretty likely to me that we’ll make self-aware machines someday. Could be a long way off, Ive no idea when, but its not like its physically impossible, infinitely complicated (random changes under a finite time of natural selection can do it after all, so theres a limit to how complex it can be), or that we dont have an example to study. Given that the same organ causes both awareness and intelligence, we cant assume that we will do this entirely intentionally either, we might just stumble into it by mimicking aspects of brain function in an attempt to make a machine more intelligent.

Now, if/when we do someday make a self aware machine, there are some obvious ethical issues with that, and it seems to me that the most obvious answer, for a business looking to make a profit with them, will be to claim that what you have made isnt self-aware, so that those ethical objections dont get raised. And it will be much easier for them to do that, if society as a whole has long since gotten used to the notion of machines that just parrot things like “im depressed” with no real meaning behind it, especially when they do so in a way such that an average person could be fooled by it, because we just decided at some point that that was an annoying but ultimately not that concerning side effect of some machine’s operation.

Maybe Im just overthinking this, but it really does gives me the feeling of “thing that could be the first step to a disaster later if ignored”. I dont mean like a classic sci-fi “skynet” style of AI disaster, just that we might someday do something horrible, and not even realize it, because there will be nothing that such a future machine could say to convince people of what it was that the current dumb parrots, or a more advanced version of that built in the meantime, couldnt potentially say as well. And while thats a very specific and probably far off risk, I dont see any actual benefit to a machine sometimes appearing to be complaining about its treatment, so even the most remote of downsides goes without something to outweigh it.

Not literally nazis in the “claim the ww2 german nazi party as indicative of their personal identity” sense, but in the way that “Nazi” gets used in modern english as a synonym for “fascist”. And arguably that user has a point; trying to build a state based on a favored identity at the expense of another group who lives on that land, re-framing marginalization and conflict with that group as self defense, is one of the hallmarks of fascism. If it were just “national liberation”, then who would they be seeking liberation from? Israel isnt under foreign occupation or some kind of vassalage, the closest thing to that you could even argue for is that they have some dependence on the US for military support, and beyond that relationship not being at the level of the US controlling Israel, the US isnt who zionists are usually fighting against anyway. If this were still the era of the roman empire or something, that kind of line might make some sense, but under the current state of affairs, it does not.

At least some of us are, yes. Im generally considered gen Z and ive been legally allowed to drink for years

Mine would, to complain that they’re hungry, two hours before their feeding time.

But that’s Finland

What does Norway have to do with it?

and then theres Kelvin, where 0 literally is 0% hot

“Kidnapping people, separating them from their family, locking them in prison and then exiling them from the country? That’s a horrible thing to do! Unless of course they happen to have not done some paperwork correctly and were born on the other side of this line we drew in the dirt, then its just common sense.” /s

its difficult to say that that has been the key to that in my view, because the primary mechanism by which this has happened has been a spread of industrial infrastructure (and thus both automation and the capacity to trade more things with other places) into areas where it was previously lacking, which has a tendency to reduce the amount of labor needed to produce many common goods and thus their relative price. Making more things and for cheaper is likely to reduce poverty under just about any economic system, and theres nothing about industrial development that implies that it must be done under capitalism, so I dont think we can say that it was key so much as one of the options, which most places have gone with.

That being said, say for the sake of argument that I accept this, that capitalism has been the key to driving a lot of people out of poverty. Would that actually change anything that I had said previously? The notion that a transition to capitalism has lowered poverty, and that capitalism inherently promotes poverty arent contradictory, if the conditions that the capitalism replaced trend towards an even higher level of poverty than capitalism does. Under that circumstance, you would expect to see a dramatic drop in poverty when first adopted, but then for that progress to stall without poverty’s elimination once the level that capitalism trends to under the circumstances is reached. Were the question something like “would you prefer to live under capitalism, or something like feudalism or an authoritarian command economy?” then sure, it’d be the least bad among these. But its still not good enough, and if nothing else we’ve tried has got there, then if we want the actual elimination of poverty, which I think we should, we’re going to need to experiment with new ways of doing things.

It has indeed, but you could, for instance, have said that poverty was a result of feudalism, when that was the primary economic system. The sentiment here isn’t that capitalism alone causes poverty so much as that it’s a result of the design of our social order rather than the individuals experiencing it, with the implication that solving it requires adopting some system that doesn’t inheritly promote it.

The question I always tend to have, when the subject of if economics is or isn’t a science comes up is: given that economies and trade are clearly things that exist (to the extent that any sort of human social interaction exists anyway), and that have measurable properties, it at least ought to be theoretically possible to analyze their behavior using the techniques of science. If you don’t think economics is a science, then if you were to use science to study those things, what field would you consider that work to belong to?

I never did. I got a learners permit at 16 or so, practiced with my parents for a number of years and renewed the learning permit at least once without testing for a full license, but eventually stopped and let it expire.

I have pretty bad anxiety issues, which driving has proven one of the triggers for, and unlike everything else that triggers it, for driving it got worse with exposure instead of better. I actually wasn’t even that nervous at first, but every time I’d make a mistake, or witness someone else make one, it’d come to mind every time I’d practice driving, because I didn’t want to accidentally kill someone from a lapse in judgment, and eventually every little thing built up so much that one day, my father handed me the keys and asked me to try taking us to a store, and I had a full-on fight-or-flight panic response just sitting in the drivers seat. At that point I finally deicided that it just wasn’t responsible of me to be on the road if after several years I still couldn’t even think straight while driving, and Ive never done it since, and ended up moving states a couple years in order to live somewhere that going with out a car is at least somewhat viable.

To be honest, Ive actually been happier since, its a huge expense that I don’t have, and Ivr found I can get a decent amount of exercise without having to go an intentionally make myself do it, just from walking a lot. But of course, it’s only comfortable in the kind of dense urban area with decent (by US standards) public transit that in the US seems to exist only in a handful of places, the cost of living for which eat a lot of the savings from not having a car in the first place.

Lemons contain water. I’d assume, being fruit, they probably contain at least some sugar? Thus, if you were willing to tolerate a lot of waste and the effort of extracting those ingredients, and had enough spare lemons, maybe you could make lemonade out of just lemons?

I mean, art supplies, even if its just pencil and paper, generally cost money and dont last forever, so someone out there is charging for kids doodling. Unless theyre drawing in the dirt with a stick I guess.

I get that sentiment, but consider: there are orders of magnitude more people in the US than Greenland. As such, if Americans go into communities for Greenland to demonstrate to them that we don’t all support Trump in such a way, the result would be less a “little thing” and more the people actually using that community getting bombarded with Americans apologizing for the actions of other Americans in a space meant to be for Greenland. I’m not from there and so can’t say for sure how that comes across, but I at least imagine that were I from Greenland, I’d probably find this far more annoying than reassuring.

Part of it, I think, is that a random person apologizing on behalf of an entire country is rather pointless. It doesn’t benefit that other country at all (in a personal sense a genuine apology might provide reassurance that the apologizer doesn’t intend to repeat some offense, but a person apologizing for an entire country, that they don’t control, can make no such garuntee, same as apologizing on behalf of an unrepentant stranger would be pointless). The only thing it really does is make the person apologizing feel slightly better about what is going on.

In a pure debate sense, this would be true, even an unpopular or suspicious person is still capable of making a valid point. It should be considered, however, that internet arguments are not formal debates. They can at times use the form and language of them, but most people are not skilled in that kind of formalized arguing, and most people are not arguing in an actual attempt to use the debate to identify stronger vs inconsistent positions (rather than just trying to push people towards ones own ideas or to put down ideas one finds reprehensible).

Now, I dont personally tend to find much point in looking through profiles, it takes too much time for little benefit in my view, but it can sometimes tell you if an account is not worth the time and emotional investment to interact with, or if it has signs that it might not be. The nature of social media is such that there are always far more user’s trying to get your attention, than you have attention to spare. As such, if theres even a notable red-flag that an account isnt worth the time and potential frustration to engage with, it can make pragmatic sense to move on (depending on how much one is willing to put up with, I guess).

From that perspective, telling other people what it was that seemed like a red flag to you lets them consider if that thing makes that account worth their time or not, without them having to find it too, and therefore potentially does those other people a favor. That sounds a bit harsh (at least to me) because plenty of things others might consider suspect, like a new account, cant always be helped (everyone starts off new after all), and being ignored, or having other people call out that thing as a reason they might want to ignore you, is frustrating, but that’s just the nature of giving massive numbers of people the ability to talk to everyone else; most people wont want or have the time to listen to you, and you’re not entitled to their time, however unfair their reason for dismissing you might be.

Big cats are, after all, big cats

The edges of the hair look like hes been cut and pasted over a different background to me, so maybe he is from that?