Right. A hypothetical superhuman AI wouldn’t have to master robotics to affect the physical world. It could simply bribe, blackmail, manipulate and play politics with humans. As others have pointed out, our political leaders have already been playing these games since forever ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49689978 and a super-AI would be better at it. At the cost of being seen to cite a SF novel in defence of an "X-risk" argument, Neuromancer is a half-decent worked example, and in Neuromancer [spoilers] both of the disembodied AIs are only modestly superhuman and both have the equivalent of a human specific learning disability. In the real world, the many AI psychotics inhabiting grandiose fantasies and people hopelessly attached to AI girlfriends and boyfriends are some of the most obvious and lowest-hanging fruit.
To be clear, I don’t believe anything like this will happen, because I don’t expect anything like an ASI to show up. But if you do think there’s a meaningful probability of ASI in the near future then the fact that it will (might?) start off with no more than a current-day mastery of robot control should not reassure you much.
It isn't true by definition: you could quite happily induce people to release a series of highly contagious bioweapons, after which those people would be surplus to requirements. What is true is that you're likely to need humans to sustain you and act for you for a few years to decades, so if you're not suicidal or deeply mad (and that is itself by no means self-evident) then total and immediate human extinction is probably not something you will aim for. But ruling out total, prompt human extinction isn't, by itself, remotely enough to justify the OP's overall don't-worry conclusion.
(Again, to be clear, I myself am not predicting or assigning a significant probability to any doom scenarios, because I do not expect AGI.)
But if you're a rational actor, and you need humans to e.g. release your bioweapon, then clearly humans are capable of a bunch of stuff you still can't do. So you can't kill all the humans.
OTOH if you're a religious fundamentalist who thinks the End Times are near and just need a little shove, you can certainly use AI to design your weapon and recruit people to go release it. The difference being that religious fundamentalists aren't rational actors and aren't interested in self preservation.
There’s no guarantee that the humans would be in the driving seat of events in a no-robotics ASI scenario, and in fact if we really were coexisting with a Machiavellian superintelligence then we’d quite likely only be in the driving seat on the sufferance of that ASI. Even assuming that the AI wouldn’t itself be an end-times enthusiast, a coldly rational and self-preserving AI might easily come to the conclusion that it needs, let’s say, no more than about 5% of the current human population (still several hundred million people!) in its maintenance and construction gang.
(Again, I myself do not assign a significant likelihood to any of this.)
As usual, "Google" here means the two individual human beings who together have a controlling interest in Google, Page and Brin. It may also mean some other people, but it certainly means them. To be clear, that's not to suggest that everything dubious about Google can be put on their shoulders. Some Google issues are genuinely hard to solve; some are deep enough in the weeds that they may plausibly never have heard of them or not have time for them. AdSense being a sewer doesn't seem to be one of those.
If you're serious about doing OO with static typing as well as (of course) mutability, you basically have to have something like flow typing to keep away the circle/ellipse nonsense. (In so far as flow typing is really static typing at all!)
One thing that the Special Edition did for Star Wars was make clear that it had borrowed the Humphrey Bogart and "Little Pete[r Lorre]-Big Syd[ney Greenstreet]" characters which came from The Maltese Falcon via Casablanca. Sam Spade-Rick Blaine-Han Solo; Casper Gutman-Signor Ferrari-Jabba the Hutt (original version); Joel Cairo-Ugarte-Greedo; and of course they're fighting over a celebrated artificial "Falcon".
(Edit: according to Phil Tippett who did the initial character design for the RotJ Jabba puppet, when he asked Lucas directly "if there was an actor that was going to play Jabba the Hutt, who would it be?" Lucas answered "Sydney Greenstreet". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GXrQ-L-ROs&t=599s )
For the Duo to make sense at all, it basically has to fold out into a screen which is big enough that (quite often, at least) you don't feel obliged to bring along a second, larger device anyway, or to wait until you get home or back to the office to "do real computer". That means that hitting a large-enough unfolded size and a suitable unfolded aspect ratio had to be Priority 1.
That's not really why foldables make sense. It's not for productivity, primarily, it's for entertainment. Videos and ebooks (and other long form text content) look better and feel better on a foldable (for the same reason we have e-readers despite having Kindle apps). Multitasking I'll admit is more useful on mobile now in the AI era than in the past. But really, a foldable isn't meant to compete with a Mac Air or similar. I don't even think it's really competition for iPads. It is nice to have the optionality and flexibility at all times and nothing is more on your person than your primary phone.
Whatever they do will take 2 to 4 years and I think they will do something to permanently solve their memory problem and I think it will be no different than solving their processor problem (Intel) or their long-term modem problem (Qualcomm).
Let Google spend $185 billion, and Microsoft spend $140 billion thru the end of this year on AI model building and AI hardware.
Sure, but that's not the "just a solution in search of a problem" claim made in the article. I don't think anyone including Ted Nelson has ever claimed that Xanadu was sufficiently complete at any point.
To be clear, I don’t believe anything like this will happen, because I don’t expect anything like an ASI to show up. But if you do think there’s a meaningful probability of ASI in the near future then the fact that it will (might?) start off with no more than a current-day mastery of robot control should not reassure you much.
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