I mostly agree. On the other hand, the US was settled by religious extremists who were not welcome in Great Britain because their religion differed from the state religion.

They wisely saw that if the state established a religion, then a religion like theirs could be labelled as heretic. The result of that is that there is (or at least used to be) a separation of church and state in the US.

Maybe it does.

Just because it doesn’t think doesn’t mean it isn’t capable of significant damage in pursuing ill defined goals

Like releasing a parking brake on a car sitting at the top of a hill.

You are part of the problem.

K

Yeah. We’re too used to that being the normal thing to do. It vaguely makes sense in some scenarios, like to see if there has been a firmware update. If there’s a security issue you either want the device to update automatically or you want to be able to notify the user. But, even then, there are other ways of doing it that don’t involve the device sending traffic to the Internet. IoT should really be made from devices that are unable to exchange traffic with anything outside the local network.

Even if you come up with a plausible scenario where maybe you’d want a device to be accessible outside your home (i.e. you want to start your coffee maker before you get home) that could be done without the device having access to the outside world. It would be easy to set up a device which can accept outside messages (“make coffee”) and forward them on to devices inside the network. There are ways of making that much more secure. And, if that’s the case, needing the latest security update for an IoT device is less urgent.

How would you determine if they were?

It would be nice if we could come up with some kind of Turing test that proved beyond a doubt whether something was conscious and sentient or not. But, that’s not possible.

However, if you understand how something works, you can say that certain things can’t be conscious because of how they work. No matter how insightful the answers seem, we know that a magic 8-ball can’t be conscious because the mechanism for consciousness can’t exist in something that’s merely a tetrahedron floating in fluid. A LLM can’t be conscious because it’s merely a system for generating the next word in a probabilistic way.

With a brain, we don’t understand enough about how it works to say for sure whether or not it’s sentient. We can’t say no, but we don’t understand sentience enough to say yes for certain. But, we can operate on the assumption that sentience and consciousness exists in humans and maybe in some other animals, while also knowing for certain that the word-generating program is only mimicking consciousness.

Perhaps if you define better what it means to be careful?

For instance, don’t show up at a party drunk and nude, and then take drugs while you’re there. I’m not saying that you’re never going to be raped as long as you do that. But, that’s a commonsense way to avoid a certain kind of rape.

I honestly think that some smart devices could be really useful. But, there are 2 major changes needed before they’re worth buying:

1. Meaningful privacy laws. By default any device should be locked down otherwise the companies are in deep trouble for privacy violations. Any agreements you make to allow them to do something should be ones you can easily revoke at any time.

2. Right to repair / modify anything you own without any issues. If you buy a Samsung washer with “smarts”, the same store that sells you the washer should be able to offer you alternative firmware from a number of different vendors. If the washer breaks, you should be able to fix it yourself, or hire someone to fix it, whether it’s a mechanical fix or a software fix. If you want to go in there and modify it yourself, or go online to some standard site to download a new feature, you should be able to do that. It your hardware, you should have full control over it. Same with printers, which would end the expensive ink fiasco. Same with Apple’s app store monopoly.

And at least casinos make you as comfortable, well-fed and drunk as possible as you lose your money.

I’m sure it feels like a lot, but ADHD is almost certainly not 1000x as much as a normal person experiences.

1000 times more thoughts seems less like ADHD and more like a seizure.

I still don’t understand why countries that are being bullied by the US, and having their trade deals unilaterally ripped up, still insist on respecting US copyrights and listening to takedown demands from US companies.

Just start treating it like the US treats pot in most places, decriminalize it, stop enforcing the law.

When the US was a new country, one of the first things it did was stop respecting copyrights on British books.

For a full century between 1790 and 1891 the only copyrights that applied in the US were ones by authors who were residents or citizens of the USA.

I think it makes perfect sense to protest the USA by refusing to honour US copyrights.

But we personify stuff all the time.

Which is a problem, it’s how we invented gods that control the weather and stuff. That doesn’t make them real, nor does it make robots sentient. Hacking is normally an action performed by a sentient being. LLMs and robots aren’t sentient.

No, it’s not. Just because it’s now capable of fooling you doesn’t mean the technology has changed.

But, “robot that hacks software” still gives the impression of a robot that is capable of thought. LLMs are not capable of thought. They’re capable of mimicking thought, like how a Venus Fly Trap is capable of mimicking a flower.

Except toddlers think. They may not think well yet, but they are still vaguely capable of understanding something. LLMs just generate likely combinations of words.

The car is not autonomous and doesn’t make decisions for itself

Neither does the LLM. That’s the whole point.

Humans are hairless apes. You can acknowledge that the rapist at a frat party made a mistake, while also acknowledging that the naked woman made a bad mistake of entering the hairless ape enclosure in that state.

It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where every hairless ape had perfect self-control, was raised with absolutely enlightened beliefs, and never let alcohol or drugs impair their judgment. It makes perfect sense to punish any hairless ape that breaks a law.

OTOH, if you’re the parents of a young woman, you should teach her to be very careful when choosing to enter the hairless ape enclosure because humanity hasn’t yet reached a stage where that’s always safe.

No, I’m suggesting that the claim that “remote controlled robotics” can do the job that a human worker in one of those jobs could do is BS. Maybe at some point in the future, but the technology is not there yet.

Well, it’s a carriage, that’s what car means

No, it isn’t.

It’s also self moving which also makes it an automobile which is also colloquially a car.

No, there are subtle differences between “automobile” and “car”.