But if we do that today, what do we do tomorrow? When someone someone else takes that vacant CEO position and starts receiving that ludicrous salary, what then?

If you killed every billionaire every month, they probably wouldn’t have time to seriously affect society, but then I suspect we’d have other problems. I have a feeling that would produce some negative outcomes for the economy and general quality of life.

I was 12 when my dad gave me the talk (the talk about how police will kill you if you aren’t exceptionally polite to them). How having skin our color is very dangerous because police are afraid of us. So no quick movements.

More than that, they’re just stupid.

Here’s just one example of dumb Jedi stuff. I just rewatched the prequels and it occurred to me, that Anakin didn’t really suddenly turn to the dark side because his mom died. He turned to the dark side because he didn’t have any friends to check him when he’s being a douche bag… The dude literally has nobody to talk to except for Padma, and he’s forbidden from pursuing a romantic relationship with her, which is super frustrating. This is a scenario destined for failure. What he really needs are some friends he can talk to and vent at about his shitty situation.

Here’s the weird thing though, remember that scene where Yoda is training a whole class of little padawans? Those padawans at least have a cohort, they have a group they can bond with and lean on as they grow up and continue their training. So if that’s the way they run things, where is Anakin’s cohort? Why is he isolated? Anakin has a single person as his mentor, boss, teacher, therapist, dad and only friend, that’s not really healthy. And when that one person is gone for an extended period, that leaves Anakin with absolutely no support structure and a lot of temptation to make bad choices, this is setting him up for failure. Cause let’s be honest, he’s a teen, making bad choices is what they do.

Wow… Well I maintain that is about the dumbest thing he could do, but I apologize for doubting you.

There’s no way he’s asking for that. If you can find a source for that claim I’d love to see it. But it’s about the dumbest thing musk could do.

The British call them crumpets. Yes that’s what a crumpet is, it’s an English muffin.

That word “attractive” is a bit loaded though. I think your right that society values attractiveness, but what individuals actually find attractive varies widely. Being intelligent or creative or bold can be attractive. To some being violent or unpredictable or vulnerable can be attractive. For many it all comes down to appearance, but even here there’s not one definition of beauty.

It certainly does contain all the right words. I mean, it won’t happen…

It would be great if it works, but it won’t.

AI developers are like the modern version of alchemists. If they can just turn this lead into gold, this one simple task, they’ll be rich and powerful for the rest of their lives!

Transmutation isn’t really possible, not the way they were trying to do it. Perhaps AI isn’t possible the way we’re trying to do it now, but I doubt that will stop many people from trying. And I do expect that it will be possible somehow, we’ll likely get there someday, just not soon.

I completely agree with your post except for the last part.

Either way, crypto is just more costly to use than traditional systems when you properly factor those risks.

This all depends on the risks involved in the traditional systems you’re comparing the cryptocurrency to. Traditional systems are exposed to some kind of risk that cryptos aren’t. For example, with cryptocurrency your account can’t be seized or frozen by authorities, be them governments or banks. With some cryptocurrencies you are also at much lower risk of hyperinflation (or inflation in general).

In many cases the risk involved in using cryptocurrencies will outweigh the risk posed by traditional finance, but that’s not true in all cases. In some parts of the world, the risks involved in traditional finance are significant…

I can answer that. We won’t.

We’ll keep iterating and redesigning until we have actual working general intelligence AI. Once we’ve created a general intelligence it will be a matter of months or years before it’s a super intelligence that far outshines human capabilities. Then you have a whole new set of dilemmas. We’ll struggle with those ethical and social dilemmas for some amount of time until the situation flips and the real ethical dilemmas will be shouldered by the AIs: how long do we keep these humans around? Do we let them continue to go to war with each other? do they own this planet? Etc.

No matter what this product is, it cannot affect the physical world.

I’m going to go ahead and refute this claim.

Blockchains can be used to affect the physical world because blockchains can be used to transmit information. One example would be if the result of a blockchain transaction is sharing important information with a user, say a password, account number, or access token.

But there’s also the more obvious case, you can use financial blockchains to send money. If a system is designed to work with that currency, then it will presumably work with that currency. You could for instance design a vending machine to take Bitcoin, if it receives a certain amount of currency to a certain address, it dispenses a snack. Yes, there is an authority that manages this vending machine, but that’s unavoidable in any case. No matter what the scenario is, someone needs to own the machine and manage maintenance and supply for it.

But is this actually a problem. Does people go around now and need proof that they bought some property?

Yeah, all the time, obviously. That’s literally what a receipt is. If people did not need to prove that they owned things, then receipts, titles and deeds wouldn’t exist.

A long time ago now I spent over 10,000 hours on world of warcraft. I wouldn’t really recommend getting into it now though, I think the magic is gone.

Can we please stop pretending that future space colonists will live their whole lives in microgravity? Nobody seriously suggests that as an option, that’s stupid. Countless studies have shown that for proper biological development, humans (and in fact nearly all organisms) need gravity. But for large space stations, spin gravity is actually not that freaking hard. If you can create a large enough station to support a sizable colony, it does not take much more engineering to make it spin.

No?

Yeah, I’ve been meaning to read a City on Mars, it’s near the top of my list. I have read some excerpts from it though, and from what I’ve seen, it is trying to tackle these questions from a realistic perspective, but it does also seem overly pessimistic at times.

Btw, your username is awesome.

Maggy for short, I’m sure of it.

Space mining can absolutely cause asteroids strikes. It only hasn’t done it yet because we haven’t done any asteroid mining yet. A big part of asteroid mining operations will likely be asteroid herding, bringing all the asteroids you want to the same place where they can be processed. But moving asteroids around is a potentially dangerous activity.

That said, space is really really really big… It’s really hard for two things to hit each other on accident. If you’re collecting asteroids at a high earth orbit, the chance of them accidentally hitting earth instead is extremely low. You have to miss your target by over 100,000 miles. Which would be… a monumental failure.

I think it would be a good idea to start colonizing space before “we have our shit figured out on earth”, since you know, that will never actually happen. We will have wars on earth for all eternity, we should colonize and explore space anyway.

Honestly, I strongly believe that striving to make space habitats work is one of the things that will finally teach us what we need to know to live sustainably on earth. The thing is, an affordable space colony is one that recycles almost everything, one that works mostly as a closed loop, a sustainable bubble. So in other words, if you know how to survive in a space colony, you know how to live without destroying the earth. And extreme sustainability is really the natural goal with any large space colony. Unfortunately nobody is really trying to do that here on earth, the funding, the engineering, it just isn’t happening. But if we start seriously attempting habitats in space, then people will be attempting that somewhere… And once we figure out how to do it, it can be reapplied to life on earth.