You might want to read more about corporate personhood. It doesn’t mean that the corporation is considered by the law to be a person, or that whoever or whatever performs the duties of the CEO is by definition a person. It means that a corporation, despite not being a person, has certain rights usually associated with people. For example, a person can own property or be sued. A cat cannot own property or be sued. A corporation is like a person rather than a cat in that it can also own property or be sued. There’s debate about exactly which rights should be granted to corporations, but the idea that a corporation has at least some minimal set of rights is centuries old and an essential part of the very definition of what a corporation is.

You’re mixing up corporate personhood and the CEO’s own personhood. He isn’t the corporation. Ultimately, he’s just an employee. There’s no good reason for the board of directors to pay him if a machine can do a better job while costing less. I’m not sure why you might think that wouldn’t happen.

I saw a guy once with no gap between his beard and his chest hair.

Why would you want to read a comment by someone you’ve blocked, and why would you want to upvote, downvote, or report a comment that you haven’t read?

You get to control your own experience, not their experience.

Not if they can help it.

I suppose I still want life-extension technology to be developed for the sake of the large number of humans who aren’t Putin or Xi. But for them,

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay.
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare.
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Progress in AI. The sooner we build a machine god to judge us, the better. But seriously, it’s exciting to see something so new and different being built at a time when so much human effort is dedicated to destruction.

We’re not the first organisms to alter the atmosphere and cause a mass extinction. The first ones were cyanobacteria and the gas they released was oxygen. They caused

a decrease in the size of the biosphere of >80%

We’re descended from the survivors that adapted to a high-oxygen environment but to this day there are many microorganisms that die if exposed to even small amounts of oxygen.

Plenty of other people’s interests don’t align with mine either - these days, it seems like most people’s interests don’t. What makes a corporation less reliable than my fellow Americans?

Ah 2013, the year I got my first real job after grad school. That was fun. I miss being 27 - I didn’t have the “Oh shit, time is running out and soon I’ll be old!” feeling quite as much, although back then I did worry about turning 30.

And speaking of the past, does anyone else feel like it’s sort-of still 2020? 2019 was long ago but everything after the start of the pandemic seems like it has happened so quickly.

Corporations are predictable - they try to make money. If their profit motive aligns with my own interests, then what they do will be good for me. Amazon, for example, sells me all sorts of things for low prices and with great customer support. My interests and corporate interests won’t necessarily align and that’s why exit rights are so important, but at least I will still be dealing with an entity acting more-or-less rationally.

I’m going to go against the trend here and say that libertarian corporate city-states actually sound pretty cool. They’re generally not portrayed positively in fiction but I think they might work well in practice. I’m a lot less optimistic about cooperating with all my fellow Americans in order to govern the whole country democratically than I used to be. Choosing to move to an independent city-state with a government that I agree with (albeit one I don’t elect) might work better.

The rules of my building are an interesting toy model of this. Technically I’m supposed to have carpets everywhere (I don’t and no one else whose unit I’ve been in does) and even painting a room a different color requires board approval and a bunch of fees. In practice, many rules are not enforced against people who don’t make trouble. A neighbor of mine even has a dog - not exactly a subtle violation. I suspect that all those rules are a response to the fact that it is legally really hard to evict someone. You can’t just say “He’s an asshole and all his neighbors hate him.” But if fact if he’s breaking a whole lot of rules (just like everyone else) then you can decide to make an issue of it in his case.

We’re seeing this happen on a national scale with people like Lisa Cook now. She refuses to leave her job so Trump is threatening to have her criminally charged with mortgage fraud. Pretty much no one is ever criminally charged with mortgage fraud, but if the feds look closely at anyone’s life then they will certainly find an error on a mortgage application or one of other countless possible crimes.

I’m not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave something sweet then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of some other desserts (baked sweets are often the worst offenders) is relatively high. That means that a lot can be gained simply by replacing one dessert with a different, equally tasty dessert. Hence my ice cream advocacy.

Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.

I don’t see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.

With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don’t eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.

Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.

I definitely am interested in it, although I’m worried about buying a car from a new company’s first production run. I haven’t driven an electric car before but maybe it’ll be fun.

I don’t mind hair everywhere (although I wouldn’t get a dog with long fur because they overheat so easily) but I don’t understand how people who don’t live on a ranch take care of herding breeds. Australian cattle dogs are really popular in New York City but I would never dare to get one in an apartment. It was hard enough to have a dog with a strong prey drive - he could not be off-leash anywhere without a tall fence and double-layer gates, and he would forget that he was on a leash and take off at full speed whenever he saw a squirrel. I admit I envied the people with guarding breeds a little - my sister’s pit bull mix looked like a crossbreed between a crocodile and a pig but that dog just followed my sister everywhere, even indoors, leash or no leash.