I wonder if that was just an outgrowth of NASA's "plan for failure" ethos.

But, I also wonder if that ethos was apart of early NASA before they had failures to learn from... Hmm...

Post-AI, the debate feels academic at this point.

Sure?

How would you feel about flying in a plane done with AI without the involvement of any engineers?

today, bad. tomorrow, better than if a human built it

And when is this tomorrow?

It's physical matter all the way down.

With that said, I've been thinking that consciousness is just mystery.

There's so much about the brain we don't know. Within that mystery, humans can read in all sorts of things. So we are conscious.

Machines are not a mystery. We made them, it's just numbers. They are not conscious.

If an AI can pull a confidence trick, I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is. "Chinese Room" problem, I guess? If the physical results are all we are able to compare, how do we define artificial vs real consciousness?

Atoms aren't a mystery. We know all the relevant laws of physics. No known law of physics could possibly lead to consciousness. Consciousness might as well be magic from the point of view of modern science.

Numbers versus atoms, what's the difference? Machines could certainly be conscious, by some weird, "magical" process. Maybe it is a crude, unrecognizable kind of consciousness, that turns on and off with the electricity.

But, given how we understand essentially nothing of where consciousness comes from, how can we possibly claim that it can never arise from just numbers?

Citation needed on jail time for WoW private servers.

Source: I made it up, apparently, my memory failed me and they never went to prison. They just owed Blizzard $88594539.

For me!

Conventional wisdom is Google did all the groundwork with LLMs...

The creepiest part of Voight-Kampff in Blade Runner was the idea that I'd fail it (not imagining myself as a replicant, but still as a human).

Do you have problems with your iris-contraction muscles and other involuntary muscle reactions? Because that's what Voight-Kampff actually tested. Supposedly, autistics and sociopaths would still pass it (as long as they were otherwise 'normal' humans).

I'd assumed that the VK test in the movie relied on knowing about the specific implanted memories that replicants had.

I'd assumed that Dick just pulled it out of his Bag of Narrative Props. Tolkein he was not.

Replicants could have been implanted with any memories. And if someone was manufacturing illegal replicants why would they be using specific memories that were known ?

It was about judging emotional response and relationship to subtle physical cues.

My layman expectation would have been much higher. It's got no atmosphere refracting anything and it's closer to the source of energy.

The distance from earth to the sun is 150 million kilometers and your orbit is probably only a few hundred kilometers up (and realistically it’s sun-synchronous and perpendicular to the earth-sun axis), so the distance change doesn’t really matter.

LEO isn't much closer to the sun, and the atmosphere probably doesn't absorb a huge amount at the wavelengths they work.

I could also see some key decision-makers just being nerds that like space.

Someone should spend money on a marketing campaign teaching people how to be tech literate (while skirting the law, and making implications).

Someone like Nathan Fielder would have the balls for this.