Taking the approach with AI that we took with the atomic bomb would be catastrophic. If the only people who are allowed to use this technology are governments, intelligence agencies, and a select few anointed companies, then the risk of authoritarian misuse will skyrocket.
I worry that any attempt to limit their use and development will be abused and misdirected. We are already seeing people like Anthropic doing this, they are trying to use anti-AI sentiment to engage in regulatory capture. Go watch Dario’s speeches about how open weight models are dangerous and how they are “not really open”. Everyone can see that much of this “safety” conversation is ultimately just a tactic to shut potential competitors out of the market and establish a monopoly/duopoly.
>It does not need to be a choice between having internet or seeing stars at night.
It’s not, we’ll be able to see the stars no matter what. There are many millions of people who are getting real broadband access to the internet for the first time right now because of these satellites. It really does enable an entirely new way of living for people in rural areas, I see this myself firsthand every day. Many areas are just economically not feasible to run fiber cables to.
Cheap access to space means you can put space telescopes into orbits that provide views entirely unobtainable from earth. And with cheap access to space we can eventually put space telescopes which exceed the size of the largest ground telescopes which won’t have to deal with atmospheric interference or light pollution at all.
Starship will lower the cost to orbit by 15x. Making entirely new types of scientific missions economically viable including extremely large space telescopes.
Connectivity for the entire globe does more for progress. Millions of people have access to the wealth of human knowledge that wouldn’t otherwise have it (Africa, rural people around the world).
Additionally, what we lose in visibility from earth we will more than gain in visibility from space telescopes, which will be funded by profits provided by LEO satellites.
Any way you slice it, it’s a massive net increase in scientific progress and quality of life for many millions of people.
>What sort of insurance do they have for that person breaking something in your home?
Probably just make the user accept a license agreement saying they accept the risk? I suspect most people would accept the risk something might get broken if it means they no longer need to clean their house.
>but instead leave behind micro particles that float around for a long time. People are studying this and hopefully raising appropriate alarms
The number of satellites required to create a measurable number of particles in the planet's atmosphere would be impossibly large. How much mass to orbit do you think is required to create a 1 PPM increase in earth's atmosphere of these "micro particles"?
I find it extremely disheartening how much anti-technology, anti-science, and anti-progress sentiment I read about lately.
Junk yes, but think of the new science and industry it will enable as well. Microgravity experiments, new space stations, space tourism, new types of manufacturing in space, asteroid mining. Any technology is a double edged sword, but the benefits surely outweigh the drawbacks here.
Anthropic has been touting how their newest model is basically a cyber weapon and is so dangerous that they need to only role it out to trusted people and make sure it has super restrictive guard rails. They are begging to be regulated. This is exactly what they’ve been asking for.
A huge number of people in the US use these cars for transporting large items like plywood and drywall (4 feet by 8 feet), a full sized truck or SUV are the best options for this type of work. Additionally, most tradespeople need these types of vehicles for their work, ask any carpenter, plumber, electrician what they drive. A non-trivial portion of the US economy relies on these types of vehicles.
Safety can dramatically be improved just by focusing on the design of our infrastructure. For example adding bike lanes to a road can dramatically improve safety for both pedestrians and cyclists. The vast majority of the US road network has no bike lanes. Instead of trying to regulate the types of vehicles people are allowed to own even more, why isn't the focus on improving the design of our infrastructure? The amount of taxes we pay is a staggering sum, there's more than enough room in the government budget to spend on roads.
Yes it is natural to prefer your own ethnicity and culture, which has existed for thousands of years. It is okay to say you want it to survive.
Japan, Korea, China, all have a strong preference for preserving their culture and ethnicity. Japan is 99% ethnic Japanese and has strict immigration laws. Yet they are also tolerant to outsiders who are visitors and we respect their right to govern themselves. I don’t think anyone regards the Japanese as a hateful people, yet by your definition they are indeed “racist” and “xenophobic”.
If the choice is to see your people replaced or be labeled “phobic”, then the obvious choice is to just accept the label and fight for your people.
Up until 1965 the US had strict origin requirements for where immigrants could come from and it was capped at a relatively low number throughout much of the 20th century.
Yes actually up until 1990 the US was overwhelmingly European ancestry, just go look at any demographic data from before 1990. Many states were 90+% white and indeed many were even higher.
The places with African slave descendants in the US were the main sources of “diversity” and were of course the ones with lower social trust and higher crime/poverty.
Do what Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China are doing: just let it fall, it will eventually bounce back. Boomers will be fine.
Replacing your entire culture and people doesn’t really fix the problem, it just permanently changes your country to be more like Africa, Mexico, India, etc.
You obviously didn’t watch the video, he literally does the heat transfer math using radiation only, it works just fine.
Instead of just stating “it won’t work” why don’t you actually do the calculation yourself and show why it won’t work?
Yes they have an incentive to put things in space, but it actually is a decent idea if they can execute on it the same way they did with Starlink. There’s huge demand for compute, many data center projects on earth are being scuttled because of NIMBYs and lack of power, there are no NIMBYs in space and a sun synchronous orbit means you can power them without batteries.
I worry that any attempt to limit their use and development will be abused and misdirected. We are already seeing people like Anthropic doing this, they are trying to use anti-AI sentiment to engage in regulatory capture. Go watch Dario’s speeches about how open weight models are dangerous and how they are “not really open”. Everyone can see that much of this “safety” conversation is ultimately just a tactic to shut potential competitors out of the market and establish a monopoly/duopoly.