Figuring it out on your own is science, but I have a feeling OP didn’t actually personally search the world for one-horned horses or pointy eared-people with long lifespans. I bet they didn’t even work out how biology changes with scale and how evolution works to show that there can’t be tiny winged people.

And how do you get people to collaborate? People have tried making governments based on the idea of everyone working together for the common good. It never ends well.

Ownership in general isn’t some fundamental inalienable right. It’s just that if you let people own things, you give them more incentive to make things. I think intellectual property rights are far too extensive, but if we didn’t have them at all, how would we pay for R&D? How would we pay for big budget games and movies? Maybe you’re happy contributing to openly licensed projects, but a lot of people have to pay for rent and raise a family, and can’t take the time to contribute to things like that even if they want to unless they have the money to support themselves.

Sure it does. All they have to do is fire the CEO and they’ll have so much more money.

Is it ethical to give tools to a country you don’t trust to use them responsibly?

I used to, but now that we have sexbots why bother?

It is a more likely place for people from Twitter to migrate to.

From what I can find, Threads has 10 million active users, and Mastodon only has 1.7 million. Threads may have been a “massive flop” in that they’re not doing as well as hoped and the userbase is declining, but it’s still far more popular than Mastodon, which also has a declining userbase outside of some recent spikes.

Threads?

He also ran the Boring Company.

If you just want the caffeine you could just take a pill.

Counterpoint: If you’re an IT guy, you’re probably making enough money that you can donate mosquito nets and save tons of lives, and it’s not worth risking all that to save one more.

I come here occasionally, but for the most part I use Reddit because it has the biggest user base, so you can find far more specific and active subreddits than Lemmy communities.

Or, and I admit I’m just spitballing here, maybe they consider fetuses to be people just like they say, and all the women who are pro-choice don’t just feel like they need to be oppressed?

You have to remember that pro-life people consider fetuses to be people. How many of your constituents would need to favor murdering babies for you to vote in favor if it?

I’m asking whether AIs are able and allowed to modify THEIR OWN code.

Yes. They can write code. Right now the don’t have a big enough context window to write anything very useful, but scale everything up enough and they could.

Scientists are continuously baffled by the universe - very physical thing - and things they discover there. The point is that the knowledge that a thing follows certain specific laws does not give us the understanding of it and the mastery over it.

And my point is that neural networks don’t require understanding of whatever they’re trained on. The reason I brought up that human brains are turing complete is just to show that an algorithm for human-level intelligence exists. Given that, a sufficiently powerful neural network would be able to find one.

Here’s a source that it does require paying for links (scroll to the bottom).

Are AIs we have at our disposal able and allowed to self-improve on their own?

Yes. That’s what training is. There’s systems for having them write their own training data. And ultimately, an AI that’s good enough at copying a human can write any text that human can. Humans can improve AI by writing code. So can an AI. Humans can improve AI by designing new microchips. So can an AI.

These are of course tongue-in-cheek examples of what a human brain can, but - from the persepctive of neuroscience, psychology and a few adjacent fields of study - it is absolutely incorrect to say that AIs can do what a human brain can, because we’re still not sure how our brains work, and what they are capable of.

We know they follow the laws of physics, which are turing complete. And we have pretty good reason to believe that their calculations aren’t reliant on quantum physics.

Individual neurons are complicated, but there’s no reason to believe they exact way they’re complicated matters. They’re complicated because they have to be self-replicating and self-repairing.

“We’re going to keep standing our ground. After all, if the government can’t stand up for Canadians against tech giants, who will?”

Yes. How can those terrible tech giants advertise for news companies without paying them? What kind of monster doesn’t pay people for the privilege of advertising?

I agree with the basic idea, but there’s not some fundamental distinction between what we have now and true AI. Maybe we’ll find breakthroughs that help, but the systems we’re using now would work given enough computing power and training. There’s nothing the human brain can do that they can’t, so with enough resources they can imitate the human brain.

Making one smarter than a human wouldn’t be completely trivial, but I doubt it would be all that difficult given that the AI is powerful enough to imitate something smarter than a human.