The main problem with ice, is that it moves all the time. The glaciers on Iceland move up to 46m per day. Also, any tunnel created in fast moving ice could easily be crushed by the pressure of the ice.
Indeed. But most instincts involve elements of learning. Meaning the instincts may be stored using a much smaller number of bits than if they were stored as traditional IF-THEN-ELSE computer program.
For instance, the pattern the brain seeks to optimize to learn to work may be much smaller than the full algorithm for walking.
And if the brain learns quickly enough (and if a newborn animal started learning elements such as balance, moving legs, etc, before even being born), learning to walk may be learned in minutes instead of months.
Student unions tend to focus on all sorts of other issues, I wouldn't trust them to handle cases like this.
The only way to reliably prevent the use of AI tools without punishing innocent students is to monitor the students while they work.
Schools can either do that by having essays be written on premise, either by hand or by using computers managed by the school.
But students that are worried that they will be targeted can also do this themselves, by setting up their phone to film them while working.
And if they do this, and the teacher tries to punish someone who can prove they wrote the essay themselves, either the teacher or the school should hopefully learn that such tools can't be trusted.
Certainly, and I don't think anyone really doubts this.
Still, people are sometimes surprised by how DNA may affect more parts of behavior than they previously thought.
Not necessarily by directly coding for the behavior. In many cases, the DNA will just modulate how we learn from the environment. And if the environment is fairly constant, observed behavior can correlate more strongly with DNA that one might have expected.
I don't think human DNA generally codes for the behavior derectly. Rather, DNA can code for how the brain learns from incoming data streams.
If the brain naturally tunes into some sources or patterns of input rather than others, it may learn very quickly from the preferred sources. And as long as those sources carry signals that are fairly invariant over time, it may seem like those signals are instinctual.
For instance, it may appear that humans learn to build relationships with kin (both parents and children) and friends, to build revenue streams (or gather food in more primitive societies) and reproduce.
Instead, the brain may come preloaded to generate brain chemicals when detecting certain stimuli. Like oxytocin near caregivers (as children) or small fluffy things (as adults). When exposed to parents/babies, this triggers. But it can also trigger around toys, pets, adopted children, etc.
Friendship-seeking can be, in part, related to seretonin-production in certain social situations. But may be hijacked by social media.
Revenue-seeking behavior can come from dopamin-stimulus from certain goal-optimzing situations. But may also be triggered by video games.
And the best known part: Reproductive behavior may primarily come from sexual arousal, and hijacked by porn or birth control.
Each of the above may be coded by a limited number of bytes of DNA, and it's really the learning algorithm combined with the data stream of natural environments that causes specific behaviors.
As technology changes over history, governments tend to emerge that reflect the part of the population that can maintain a monopoly of violence.
In the Classical Period, it was the citizen soldiers of Rome and Greece, at least in the west. These produced the ancient republics and proto-democracies.
Later replaced by professional standing armies under people like Alexander and the Ceasars. This allowed kings and emperors.
In the Early to Mid Medieaval time, they were replaced by knights, elites who allowed a few men to defeat commoners many times their number. This caused feudalism.
Near the end of the period, pikes and crossbows and improved logistic systems shifted power back to central governments, primarily kings/emperors.
Then, with rifles, this swung the pendulum all the way back to citizen soldiers between the 18th and early 20th century, which brought back democracies and republics.
Now the pendulum is going in the opposite direction. Technology and capital distribution has already effectively moved a lot of power back to an oligarchic elite.
And if full AGI combined with robots more physically capable than humans, it can swing all the way. In principle a single monarch could gain monopoly of violence over an entire country.
Do not take for granted that our current undertanding of what the government is, is going to stay the same.
Some kind of merger between capital and power seems likely, where democratic elections quickly become completely obsolete.
Once the police and military have been mostly automated, I don't think our current system is going to last very long.
Exactly. Had this put this exact video into some dystopian sci fi, it might be a suitable way to portray some villain or cynical mega-corporation as nihilistic.
But when a company uses this in an ad, THEY are the ones that come off as nihilists, and not in a good way.
If they wanted to express that the ipad CONTAINED all of those older things within it, they could have created this as something like Dr Strange would have done. Like make those items fly into a portal shaped like a giant ipad, and then shrink the ipad with all those items still inside.
Or at the very least, they could have presented the items to be destroyed like they were worn out and broken (and no longer in use), and then presented their destruction as giving them new life through recycling as an Ipad.
This ad will definitely pop into my head the next time I consider buying an Apple device, and not in a good way.
> More diversity in outcomes in the US, but also better in the median.
To be fair, the median household in the US doesn't have that much more disposable income if taking healthcare and child care costs into account, especially if they're simultaneously expected to save up a 1-2 year buffer and maybe more if they want a comfortable retirement.
But for the top 20%, which includes many tech workers, the difference is larger.
In a way, it's natural selection that drives evolution, by removing the unfit genes from the gene pool. This is arguably more important than mutation, and mutations would accumulate to be catastrophic over time without natural selection.
Startups that survive tend to be more innovative than other companies because other, less innovative startups were less secure than comparable departments within larger corporations that were also low on innovation.
The death of all replicators is unchecked random entropy.
Fair enough, though it is possible to get the effects of a union without a union, if worker-employee relationship resembles a feudal lord-serf relationship, where the serf is bound to the lord for life, but the lord is also responsible for covering the basic needs of the serf.
Obviously, Japan, China and Korea come from quite different circumstances to Europe and the US in a multitude of ways.
Don't forget that European media love to focus on the worst aspects of the US. Not every school in the US requires armed guards and infrastructure is pretty good in many places.
And in particular, if you have a senior position at a FAANG company, you make enough money to put away significant savings for a rainy day, you get access to healthcare that is typically more modern than what is available in Europe, and you don't need to expose yourself to those inner cities unless you want to.
And talking about no-go-zones. They're starting to pop up in Europe now, too, there are plenty of them in Sweden. I wouldn't put all the blame for them on capitalism. Rather, such phenomena seem to be more associated with cases of ethnic or social minorities that feel alienated by society.
> externalizing their negative effects onto society
Those US products are in common use in Europe, too, with the same effects. It's not illegal to create the kind of products Google and Facebook sell from Europe.
The main difference is not the relationships between companies and consumers, but rather the relationship between the companies, workers and the government.
> gig workers
I remember reading a book about this when in high school (in the 80s, though the book was quite a bit older), written by and from the perspective of the unions, where they argued that the during phases of growth, unions DID hold salaries back, but (according to themselves) this was more than made up for during recessions.
In the 19th century, the factory workers had a "gig economy" too, where they would often have to work on a day-by-day basis, and would show up at the gates of the factory every morning hoping to have work that day. If there were not enough workers, they could ask for very good salaries, but if there was a surplus it led to collapsing wages AND a high risk of no income at all, ie even worse than the Uber model.
This is precisely why many companies are trying to make regular dev roles as interchangeable as possible. By minimizing the dependency on individuals, they make their own bargaining position much stronger.
And when you stop being an employee that is valued for your individual contributions, and become an easily replicable "resource", it may very well be in your best interest to unionize.
However, there are externalities connected to unions, as they DO tend to stifle innovation, lowering all boats.
If worker well-being is a high priority, but a country ALSO wants a dynamic economy, one may want to look to Denmark, where most of the "safety net" responsibilities are moved from the employers to the government.
That requires a taxation level a bit higher than in Germany, but may be part of the reason why wages are significantly higher, and only exceeded by special cases like the US, Switzerland and Norway.