Elon Musk steals designs from everyone, buddy. Join the damn “Elon Stole My Shit” club. RT: All of Tesla’s designs for the last ten years have been ripped off the of the Chinese. I know it’s popular among white nationalists to claim “Asians are intelligent, but not inventive.” Well, if you believe that, then tell... Read More

That the government of San Francisco, America’s most liberal city, on November 29, 2022 by a vote of 8 to 3, authorized robots to have life or death authority over citizens indicates the extent to which Americans have been dehumanized. Perhaps this dehumanization is the consequence of many decades of Washington slaughtering people from Vietnam... Read More

I have been lonely in my concern with the dire economic implications of robotics, but now Clarity Press has provided me with some company by publishing The Artificial Intelligence Contagion by David Barnhizer and Daniel Barnhizer. It is telling as to the irrelevance of the economics profession that the coauthors are lawyers. The concerns about... Read More

My earlier post, Mapping the Road to American Disunion, discussed the apparent high likelihood of increased social and political unrest in America in the coming years – a process which, with the ongoing partisan stand-off in Washington, might well be under way. This was based on the work of Peter Turchin and his field cliodynamics.... Read More

Half Sigma has an excellent post up which talks about a topic that is an under-appreciated concern: the obsolesce of human labor, thanks to automation. Virtually all of the increase in worker productivity over the past few decades is due to increased automation. I've quoted this post and some of the comments here: There’s an... Read More

Steven Spielberg's new movie A.I. is the latest in a long line of fictions about artificial human beings, reaching back into the golem legends of medeval European Jewry and the "homunculus" which the 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus claimed he had made. In one of the earliest literary appearances of this idea, a certain Rabbi Löw of... Read More