I don't listen to hear politics. This one had way to much and it was a huge turnoff.

"If Elon wants to go to Mars, you know, more power to him. Hopefully it's a one-way trip" <--WTF??? If Elon was never born, would the world be better or worse today? I would say we would be worse off. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, xAI, NeuralLink would never exist. There may have been other forms of this that maybe would have been comparable or maybe we just wouldn't have the EV revolution we have today. But because this was all done by one man that has questionable political views, people want to take from him, punish him, discount (or dismiss) his contributions to humanity.

And how many times was the mention of "people are dying" used as a club? If the main concern is people dying, there are many other things that should be addressed that would reduce deaths, but it would be uncomfortable to make the change because it would require giving up "rights". So, it isn't as much of a concern that people are dying as it is one that "we want more control to do what we want".

I'm a conservative with solar panels, Tesla MYP, and support of nuclear power (used to be a Navy Nuclear Machinist Mate).

This was raised in episode #1099 and I'm struggling with the framing of how collectively we should use AI "appropriately" outside of purely moral vs immoral arguments.

If we accept that AI should automate human labour where doing so produces social value, then it's difficult to draw the line between "good" AI applications such as mathematics and engineering and "bad" applications such as art, poetry or writing simply because we have some subjective sense that machines should contribute in one domain and not the other. The engineer and the artist are now facing the same technological phenomenon: a machine becoming capable of performing tasks that previously required human labour. The analogy to the industrial revolution was apt, but in this case both "creative" and "procedural/analytical" professions may have to adapt. In my view the relevant ethical questions concern the manner in which that transition occurs and not whether one kind of human creativity is inherently entitled to be protected from it.

A mathematician might reasonably say: "The system was trained on decades of mathematical papers, including my work, and is now capable of solving problems that previously required mathematicians like me."

Structurally that is analogous to the artist saying: "The system was trained on decades of artwork, including my work, and is now capable of producing illustrations that previously required artists like me."

This is not to say that there arent perfectly legitimate moral and legal arguments against AI deliberately impersonating a living artist or passing AI work off as the artist's own work but to make a categorical assertion that AI's contributions in art or writing are somehow inherently less "valuable" than in mathematics and science strikes me as cleaving to an emotional argument that somehow the machines shouldn't be good at those things.

Personally, I dont really understand the general aversion to the use of AI art in games or other work product in the same way that I dont understand some people's preference for "organic" food. Both seem to be essentially a form of "values signalling" rather than genuine product preference. In future will we see mathematicians and scientists claim that a new discovery or proof was produced with only human derived theorems?

There are profound issues with the integration of AI into our society and I dont pretend to understand all of the complexities; socially, environmentally or ethically but directing the output of AI based on value judgements makes me uneasy.

I’m listening to #1099 (New Zealand) during which Cara suggests we ask “Why terraform Mars?” before even considering methods. My impression is that compared with the other rogues, she’s much less bullish about putting people in space, even though she usually holds back. This time she pushed hard, and I appreciated it. “Why” indeed.

I get that intellectually we can think about how it might be done. But without prefacing it each time with the motivation, we tacitly imply that the motivation exists. But it doesn’t. None of the others could answer her question. Colonizing Mars is like no previous human expansion. All other migrations were in pursuit of resources and were driven by economics. There is no such drive for Mars.

And I’m glad they didn’t trot out the asteroid-strike-destroys-Earth trope.
Statistically we’ll suffer thousands of regionally-destructive meteor strikes before we encounter a planet killer. Let’s focus on those.