On the other hand, the US is close to bankruptcy. And that's not all the current admin's fault.
And their cuts are trying to avoid that, although they have thrown out many babies with the bath water. It's hard to blame them for trying to avoid default, which would be far worse than anything.
The program apparently cost $900 million which is not a trivial cost.
Addictive tech in your hand is an evolutionary trap.
Much like cars are to squirrels, squirrels have evolved to run into a straight line to the nearest tree at the hint of any danger. And for all threats other than cars that is the correct thing.
But many squirrels are "trapped" by evolution to cross the path of a car when there is no need to do so.
Humanity's curiosity, sociability and OCDness have all been trapped by algorithms and smart phones.
And it is shortening lives and even more so reducing reproduction.
A faint hope is, that with all such evolutionary pressure, we can evolve our way out of them.... eventually.
I find it interesting ever more risky way to sequester carbon are invented.
Instead of making adding biochar to farm land an agricultural subsidy. A simple, extremely low risk policy, that is a local subsidy and does create international trade conflicts like other subsidies can.
And it does not affect any wilderness.
And in hot humid climates is proven to increase fertility.
Or a bit risky we could fertilize the open ocean, very significantly increase ocean life. And it has been proven that a significant percentage of fish poop sequesters carbon in the deep ocean.
Instead efforts seem to be focused on shading the sun. And new ideas using nukes....
If copyright forces a diversity of AIs. That would be good.
Every AI company using its own created training, resulting in AIs that are similar but not identical, is in my opinion much better than one or very few AIs.
Japan used to be known as the one nation in the world where old people were fans of bran new tech.
However, today it would seem that's because that generation lived through the great changes Japan experienced. Extremely quickly going from a pre-industrial civilization, to a post-industrial one.
And so despite Japan's great traditionally intense conservatism, they were fans of technological innovation.
With that generation fading away, it seems Japan is returning to being hyper conservative in every way. And falling behind technologically.
The story of Shuji Nakamura, inventor of the blue LED, is interesting. The company founder supported his experimentation, but the next generation, the son of the founder, wanted to Shuji Nakamura to stop.
Copilot to me is a multiplier, just like compilers and GUI editors and languages above machine language.
And possibly the biggest multiplier. But anything times zero is zero. Someone who does not understand the code Copilot writes is too dangerous to do anything.
But I worry what Copilot will do to future developers.
And knowing what universally available spell checking has done to me, destroyed my ability to spell correctly without it, I even worry how Copilot might deskill me over the coming years.
I'd love to see facial reconstruction of people of whom we have pictures and video. Since what I've heard of facial reconstruction is that there is a lot "art" in it.