TheFeshy

Have you thought about posting the specifics of your affiliate relationship with each mattress company, as suggested by one of the people interviewed in that article?

Not OP, but I can answer: Because he can't. If you are here illegally, you can't apply to become legal. Even if you were brought here as a child. This is something the Democrats have tried to change several times; most recently during the last border wall funding dispute (when they offered funding for the wall in exchange for creating a legal path to citizenship for "Dreamers" like OP.)

We let real bad operators process all of this stuff, they don't give a shiny shit about you, or me, or their workers. They don't live anywhere near this shit.

This. The engineering problems for nuclear are pretty solved at this point. The people problems with nuclear are no closer to a solution than any other people problem. Which is unfortunate, but, reality.

G factor

Somehow I had missed that they were calling it this. How has no newspaper run with the headline "Scientists use their Large Hadron Collider to probe universe's G-spot"

But I love PBS Spacetime, and am a few weeks behind - it looks like it's time to catch up!

What exactly do people think is the motivation will be for SI to harm us?

It's not so much motivation to harm us (though that's always a possibility too) as much as it is the ethical differences.

As one option, imagine we create a truly benevolent AI, and it's #1 priority is our happiness. As humans, we rejoice - we picture an end to poverty, solutions to the middle East, etc.

Instead, within milliseconds, every human being on Earth is drugged into a state of bliss.

Now, that's a good start, but obviously more happy humans is more total happiness than fewer happy humans. And we do so want our happy humans So we scoop up all those happy, drugged humans, and inseminate the women artificially, to gestate us some more soon-to-be-happy humans.

Immediately we spot some inefficiencies: Only half our happy humans can make more, and a good Von Neuman happiness machine should be able to double itself. So we simply eliminate one gender and double our production!

This goes well for a while, with the Earth's crust being converted to stacked storage and nutrient/waste plumbing for all our drugged humans, but once the land-mass of the Earth is covered, we start to slow down our happiness doubling. We've got two choices here: Materials from space, or increase efficiency. But we're a super intelligence, so we choose both.

Eliminate the bodies, and simply clone brains, which you keep soaked in serotonin tanks. On the bright side, we do get to go to space, as orbital brain stations in and around every major solar system body. From there, I dare not even speculate.

From benevolence to nightmare fuel, without any motivation to harm us.

Now, maybe our SI doesn't look for "happiness", maybe it takes something more inclusive like "fulfillment" - but I daresay I could think of a similarly horrifying outcome for a lot of different words. We might be bargaining with an evil genie (who isn't really evil; simply different), with our whole race as the stakes.