If you’re talking about a true offworld backup to our species, that is a very very long ways away. Even if we were to really take that effort seriously, it would take us millennia before we truly established and independent presence in space.

The key is that it’s not possible to have a non-industrial civilization on a place like Mars. Our cultural model for such things is always the Age of Sale and similar exploratory waves by European imperialists. But this cultural analog is flawed. People could sail from England to the Americas and live off the land once they got there. They could build houses, find food and water, and really form a farmstead with the tools and knowledge they already possessed. They could even cut down local trees and repair the ships they used to get there.

But Mars? There’s nothing there. You want water? You need to build a water purification plant. You want air? You’ll need a huge air cleaning and reclamation system. And all of this will require massive amounts of power. And all of this infrastructure requires vast supply chains to keep, both to build the things and to build the things that build the things.

What this ultimately comes down to is that until you have hundreds of millions of people living on Mars, you can forget any idea of them truly being able to survive without Earth. You could have a million people on Mars. But if Earth collapses, unless Mars is already self-sufficient at that time, the Martians are on borrowed time. Sure, once you start a colony, there will be strong incentives to make Mars as self-sufficient as possible. The transport costs alone will ensure that. But it will be a very, very long time before Mars is self-sufficient in something like, computer chips for example. Every colony would be built from the start with its own water and air systems, but inevitably most of the components for that equipment would be shipped in from Earth. It will be a very long time before such a colony is capable of producing all the tools and equipment it needs to keep operating. And remember, on Mars, going organic farm and returning to the land is never an option. It’s full industrial civilization or death. The planet is not capable of sustain life (or at least life like ours) without extensive technological supplementation.

Or alternatively, have your friends worry about you. Say you unavailable as you were drunk/high/intoxicated out of your mind. As times goes on, cite inebriation by ever-more exotic and illegal substances.

Earth, 2150:

As the last embers of organized human civilization crumbled in the hothouse Earth catastrophe, a handful of astronomers remain in cloistered study, pouring over the data from the last of the great space telescopes, built at the height of 22nd century science. What have they learned? We are not the outlier. In the light of other Suns we find them. Dead world after dead world. Once bastions of life reduced to wastelands of ruin by technological civilization. The majority of Earth-like worlds around Sun-like stars are tombs, rendered unto sterile husks by the actions of their own offspring.

To firmly tease such a conclusion out of such ephemeral evidence as a stellar spectrum was truly a feat of the astronomical art. It required techniques undreamt of and inconceivable by 21st century scholars. But, the last of this civilization’s great astronomer’s found a way. And the conclusion was damning.

Intelligent tool-using life is a terminal disease for life on a world. Once a biosphere has dreamed up a species like ours, that world’s days are numbered. There are many forms that extinction can take, some more exotic than others. But most are through mundane causes like self-induced ecological collapse. For every one case of a civilization destroying itself in a science experiment gone wrong, there are a thousand cases of simple ecological catastrophe.

We are dying. We are alone. We are surrounded by the dead.

Well that’s literally what these laws are requiring. You can speculate on future laws, but you can imagine innumerable horrible futures. It’s important to stay grounded and not get lost in the dooming. And I see nothing wrong with an optional feature that lets you set an age on a child’s account. As long as it’s something I control, then that’s actually giving me more control over my hardware, not less.

Yes, there will be people pushing for more invasive methods. But those are the laws you should oppose. Not these. People tend to think in binaries. And they tend to lump everything called “digital id” into one bucket devoid of nuance or discernment.

If anything, lumping all digital id into one bucket without any nuance only helps the opponents of privacy. Simply giving the parents the option to enter an age is a perfectly reasonable policy. If you oppose that because you cannot recognize nuance and consider all id laws equivalent, then you’re hurting your side. People see you appealing to privacy when opposing something that reasonable people will not see as a violation of privacy. Again, we’re taking OS-level controls that actually give you more control over the machine.

You risk a “boy who cried wolf” scenario. You turn everyone against you fighting something that really isn’t an invasion of privacy. Then when someone does actually try to pass a law mandating facial recognition be built into apps, people will ignore you as they already consider you an irrational radical.

But that’s literally what these systems are. There is more than one form of age verification. The type we’re discussing here literally is just “enter your name in a box.” It’s important not to muddy the waters. If you don’t know what you’re opposing and choosing your battles carefully, you can’t effectively fight infringement on privacy. And I really don’t see anything wrong with a law that just says, “every OS needs to have a feature that lets parents self-report age on a child’s account.”

Yes, there are other forms of digital id laws. But we’re talking specifically about OS-level ones. This literally just be a more effective parental control, giving people more control over their own PCs, not less.

Again, try to focus on what specifically we are talking about, not similar-sounding but unrelated technologies.

I don’t really get this. Why is it such a big deal if your OS has setting where you enter your age, and the OS then sends that to websites? Face scanning or demanding uploads of photo IDs is an immense privacy violation. But simply having your OS have a setting you can use where you provide a number, a number that you’re completely free to alter or report whatever value you want? I really don’t see the issue with this.

This seems like a pretty easy way to give parents some control over their kid’s online activities while also not infringing on privacy. The parents can set up the OS and give an account to their kids that lists their ages as under 18. If they want their kids to access the web without restrictions, they simply don’t have to create an under 18 account on the computer. And even if your OS has to report an age to access a website, if it’s all based on self-reporting, you can just self-report a false age.

We tend to think in binaries, as this is convenient. We tend to view all digital age verification as horrible and equally horrible. But this? Just giving parents a way to give their kids a minors-only account, and have websites respect that OS-level flag? This is nothing like bills that require uploading face scans or photo IDs.

Sure you can speculate a slippery slope. But that is a fallacy for a reason. It tends to wash out all nuance and make you conclude everything is absolute evil forever.

There’s a reason we abandoned monarchy. Zuck is effectively the king of meta. Literally. The founding corporate structure is designed so he literally can never be fired. And if you give anyone absolute unaccountable power, it’s only a matter of time until they drive things right off a cliff.

Don’t even wait for the drainage district to do it. What’s Tesla going to do, sue you for blocking their illegal dumping?

It’s like anything. I can cook my own food. That doesn’t mean I don’t go out to restaurants sometimes. I could use an LLM myself to write a novel. But it wouldn’t be the same novel. And there is some skill in prompt writing. Even then, just the sheer time to generate a novel-length coherent work from small snippets of chat windows is still a large investment of time.

Of course, we know how this will actually go down. AI generated works are going to be much cheaper to produce. Therefore they’ll be me more profitable if they can sell at the same price. Barnes and Noble thus has a strong incentive to not carefully label AI works as AI-generated.

Ideally they would all be in their own section. AI-generated works are only allowed in the part of the store that is labeled as such. That’s the proper way to do this.

But that’s not how it will actually be done. Buried somewhere in the fine print inside the back cover of the book will be a long paragraph, one sentence of which mentions the work is AI generated. Or the inside back cover will have a QR code labeled “notes on this work,” and there will be a hundred page long legal disclaimer that briefly mentions the book is AI generated.

This isn’t really true. The courts have held that there needs to be some human involvement, but that involvement can be pretty minimal.

Exactly. We are beings of atoms and matter. If you want to believe in some immaterial soul, fine. But if you’re a materialist, then everything we are is atoms. We know atoms in one configuration can produce true intelligence. And there are likely many possible arrangements of atoms that can reproduce this effect. And since artificial minds are not subject to most of the constraints of biological minds, an artificial superhuman intelligence should be possible. Hell, even if biology was the only way to make it possible, you could always build an artificial biological brain and just make it a lot bigger than a human one. Even if human neurology really is the limit of what this universe allows for in terms of intelligence, we could best it by just making a bigger one.

The only thing that worries me is that we don’t actually know how the human brain works. There’s an entire school of psychological theory and practice - really its oldest truly scientific branch, that holds that human intelligence actually does work a lot like an LLM. The hard core behaviorists believed that literally all human behavior was just a really complex version of Pavlov’s dogs. It sounds absurd, but they had good arguments. In principle even very complex behaviors can be the result of reinforcement and conditioning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism

The 25% more figure includes all of these things. How else do you think they would make the comparison?

IDK. I get really uneasy about claims that a computer or AI can never be intelligent or self-aware. Sure, it’s “just” circuits, but your brain is “just” cells passing information between each other. An individual cell is no more intelligent or self-aware than an individual transistor is. It’s deeply unscientific to believe there is some magic voodoo involved in biology that can’t be reproduced in a machine.

Eh. It’s par for the course. 20 years ago, at the height of the frenzy of outsourcing things to China, I remember saying that this will just result in US companies creating their own competition. Anyone with a brain could see that Chinese companies weren’t going to be willing to serve as second-fiddle to their US masters. The idea that you could keep design and management, while sending production overseas, and that you can keep that arrangement stable long-term? Pure fantasy. Of course a country isn’t going to be content just doing the grunt work. They want the highly paying design and management jobs, not just the menial labor ones.

Is a deliberate misspelling of googol any better for a company name?

Please. You don’t use exercise to lose weight. That’s what bootleg weight loss drugs are for.

UK standard of living has been declining for years.

There’s ultimately really no reason for them to completely dismantle democracy. Republicans know they can lose big in 2026 and 2028 and still regain power in just a few years. It’s already guaranteed that whatever Democrats get elected won’t really do anything to change the circumstances that resulted in Republicans winning. And they will not prosecute Trump and his co-conspirators for their crimes. And Democrats don’t offer the working class anything, so the Republican message of “we’ll make other people’s lives worse to make your life better” resonates with people. They’re the only party actually offering to help people.

There’s just no reason for Republicans to abandon democracy all together. They’ll happily tilt the scales heavily in their favor, but completely abandoning democracy would mean civil war. And they’re already doing quite well in our existing flawed democracy. Why risk it all when you’re already winning?

Ultimately living standards are declining because of increased wealth inequality. And Democrats aren’t going to do anything to fight that. So Republicans at most will be out of power for another cycle.

Republicans don’t need to destroy democracy. They’re already in complete control in our current system. And Democrats, if elected in 2026 and 2028, are already promising to do everything in their power to make sure MAGA returns to power in 2032.