To be able to trust random Internet users was never a good dream because cheap identity is the Internet's default. (Not necessarily a bad one.) More surprising than reviews regressing to the mean is that it took them so long. Why?
They will be as effective as anti-piracy law would be if pirates were paid to seed. At best they will prevent respectable publications from directly using distributed archives as a source.
>kind (especially when others around us are unreasonable just because they can)
Think about why you want to be kind to such people. It is one thing if you expect your kindness to disarm them and be reciprocated and another if you don't. If you don't, you would only be rewarding and reinforcing bad behavior. Surrendering to avoid conflict is not a viable long-term strategy in any career but that of a monk. It is far better to learn to stand up to those who mistreat you without undue kindness.
If obvious inefficiencies are not being fixed, nobody's incentives are aligned with fixing them. A sustainable solution must address the wrong or weak incentives, not try to fix the inefficiencies one at a time. Business owners are uniquely empowered and incentivized to address inefficiencies in their businesses and to compete for the customer. They lose money if they provide a product that isn't good enough. Making cities businesses would allow you to leverage that.
The problem with voluntary human extinction is that suicidal ethical systems are inherently self-limiting. A serious negative utilitarian who wished for human extinction would have to sterilize or kill others to succeed.
If those who augment their brains outcompete those who don't by an ever-widening margin (seems more likely than not), this discussion topic is preemptively obsolete. Their ethics will be dominant sooner or later.
On the other hand, if a lot of countries had apocalyptic weapons (a phase that naturally precedes such weapons becoming available to individuals), it could all but eliminate war. Countries behave surprisingly like rational agents in international relations. This period would be the window of opportunity for one lucky winner to bootstrap an AGI.
You can have it both ways: use CloudFlare and offer direct access through a hidden service (since DDoS attacks over Tor are impossible, expect for application layer attacks).
I think you do my argument a disservice by equating it to the general trend of people denying X can be automated until X is automated. It is more specific: I say that some jobs (roughly, those requiring an agent to rapidly gain an understanding of existing unstandardized systems) need AGI to automate to human satisfaction in a way that doesn't require constant human supervision. It predicts, for instance, wide replacement of cashiers (which is already happening) and construction workers (which isn't yet).
>Maybe plumber, give it 20.
Perhaps we have different standards for "automated." Do you expect remote operators standing by ready to take over for a plumberbot or giving it hints at least once per service operation on average in 2036? If so, I find that technically plausible. I also expect new buildings to be built for automated service.
If we are talking fully automated human-quality repair and improvement of legacy plumbing, do you to expect a long time to get from there to AGI?
I'll answer your specific questions first. Driver, no. Maid, no. (But keep in mind that robot maids/janitors are considerably farther away than self-driving cars. Cleaning environments not specifically designed for it is really complicated and I expect humans to outperform robots at it for longer than at most other kinds of physical labor.) For a fancier meal than burgers, yes, I'd pay a premium to have a human chef cook it. Doctor, definitely not in most cases.
As for it being "awkward and contemptful," I suspect you are imagining humans perform a task exactly as a robot would. That will be the minority of cases, because the economics are strongly against it in most. Instead, you'll pay humans for their ability to customize their work or the products they produce in a way that isn't economical to automate. (Burger flipping is doomed for this reason -- not much to differentiate humans form robots there.) Hence, chefs, plumbers, tailors, auto mechanics, specialist doctors, interior decorators, etc. will be assisted by "weak" AI but won't be replaced by it.
More seriously, as robots do more and more, people will start to place a premium on having a human do the work where they notice the difference (so, not Amazon warehouses but probably the local Starbucks). With this factored in, 95% unemployment is unlikely until artificial general intelligence.
Not ceding classic liberalism with the word is the point. (Because ceding too much of it puts you at danger of a populist takeover, i.e., "literally Hitler".)