I had a close associate who perished as a passenger on the first plane to hit the WTC. As much as I mourned his loss what eats at me to this day was the stark terror he must have felt watching as the plane descended to the level of the buildings in Manhattan. Even if his death was nearly instantaneous no one should have to endure that level of fear. Same for these Max passengers. Oh and like my buddy they felt it, however briefly

Why is this any different than what Facebook's ai algorithms do. Their leadership directs developers to ensure that the ai puts more controversial, anger-inducing posts in front of people because emotion drives engagement which pays the bills. All of this stuff can be misused in this regard. We can only hope there's a level of social conscience in the designers of this tech AND most importantly that consumers maintain their critical thinking skills to not just blindly accept what they're served up. To be fair, it's the utter lack of critical thinking skills that makes feeds like Fox News so successful so perhaps we should accept that we're doomed

This is obviously true. In every generation of technological advancement most but not all jobs disappeared. The most difficult or obscure roles are preserved but the roles for the masses go away. AI is replacing roles in (para)legal, will replace roles in medicine, many roles in tech and many/most other industries. But not all. OTOH if you're not at the top of the food pyramid in each of these areas you'll have no role.

I remember when RPA (Robotic Process Automation) rolled out it was clear that many jobs would (and were) replaced by machines, long before more recent AI advancements

And it's folly to think that the plan of the OpenAI people was to get cheap coding labor. That's a byproduct, not the plan

This statement: 'Many AI researchers believe that solving the language translation problem is the closest thing to producing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)' is complete BS. And look at the org that posted this

We are nowhere near any reasonable definition of singularity. That said, there are many reasons to believe that various forms of AI will rapidly transform our society. Not necessarily for the better

If Covid hasn't done it

If Climate change hasn't done it

Nope

I believe that the people managing his estate sold off the aircraft and the program

Yep it's the famous 'law of the excluded middle'. The B747 is almost as capable and infinitely cheaper because they're ubiquitous. SpaceX has the ability to lift payloads that are financially interesting. This thing was in between the two and was knowable from the start.

I think Paul Allen was a great man but this was not his greatest moment

A flying answer in search of a question

Drug development and patient treatment protocols

Separately, a long time back I attended a biz luncheon and the guest speaker was Malcolm Gladwell (he was wonderful btw). Back then he warned that 'any job or task that can be documented (e.g. a written specification like a software spec) can be outsourced to a low-cost region. I'd say that the same will soon true but can be outsourced to an AI

Watching movies at theatres will be virtually gone by 2030. Streaming will be dominant, new devices that make watching them will abound, another Covid-like outbreak will stop casual gatherings and the cost structure for supporting theatres will be untenable

This. Exactly

I might add quantum computing to the list

It'll be like Dall-E and others. Soon and for the foreseeable future the science of computer science will morph in to writing the prompts