Cocodapuf

AI developers are like the modern version of alchemists. If they can just turn this lead into gold, this one simple task, they'll be rich and powerful for the rest of their lives!

Transmutation isn't really possible, not the way they were trying to do it. Perhaps AI isn't possible the way we're trying to do it now, but I doubt that will stop many people from trying. And I do expect that it will be possible somehow, we'll likely get there someday, just not soon.

I completely agree with your post except for the last part.

Either way, crypto is just more costly to use than traditional systems when you properly factor those risks.

This all depends on the risks involved in the traditional systems you're comparing the cryptocurrency to. Traditional systems are exposed to some kind of risk that cryptos aren't. For example, with cryptocurrency your account can't be seized or frozen by authorities, be them governments or banks. With some cryptocurrencies you are also at much lower risk of hyperinflation (or inflation in general).

In many cases the risk involved in using cryptocurrencies will outweigh the risk posed by traditional finance, but that's not true in all cases. In some parts of the world, the risks involved in traditional finance are significant...

I can answer that. We won't.

We'll keep iterating and redesigning until we have actual working general intelligence AI. Once we've created a general intelligence it will be a matter of months or years before it's a super intelligence that far outshines human capabilities. Then you have a whole new set of dilemmas. We'll struggle with those ethical and social dilemmas for some amount of time until the situation flips and the real ethical dilemmas will be shouldered by the AIs: how long do we keep these humans around? Do we let them continue to go to war with each other? do they own this planet? Etc.

No matter what this product is, it cannot affect the physical world.

I'm going to go ahead and refute this claim.

Blockchains can be used to affect the physical world because blockchains can be used to transmit information. One example would be if the result of a blockchain transaction is sharing important information with a user, say a password, account number, or access token.

But there's also the more obvious case, you can use financial blockchains to send money. If a system is designed to work with that currency, then it will presumably work with that currency. You could for instance design a vending machine to take Bitcoin, if it receives a certain amount of currency to a certain address, it dispenses a snack. Yes, there is an authority that manages this vending machine, but that's unavoidable in any case. No matter what the scenario is, someone needs to own the machine and manage maintenance and supply for it.

But is this actually a problem. Does people go around now and need proof that they bought some property?

Yeah, all the time, obviously. That's literally what a receipt is. If people did not need to prove that they owned things, then receipts, titles and deeds wouldn't exist.

You may be preaching to the choir here on Lemmy.

Probably 90% of us have left Reddit to use this instead.

(Not that I disagree with you, I feel your frustration)

Would you get off that?

A long time ago now I spent over 10,000 hours on world of warcraft. I wouldn't really recommend getting into it now though, I think the magic is gone.

Can we please stop pretending that future space colonists will live their whole lives in microgravity? Nobody seriously suggests that as an option, that's stupid. Countless studies have shown that for proper biological development, humans (and in fact nearly all organisms) need gravity. But for large space stations, spin gravity is actually not that freaking hard. If you can create a large enough station to support a sizable colony, it does not take much more engineering to make it spin.

No?

That's giving everyone involved a lot of credit. To be honest, I sort of doubt these decisions were quite that rational.

Yeah, I've been meaning to read a City on Mars, it's near the top of my list. I have read some excerpts from it though, and from what I've seen, it is trying to tackle these questions from a realistic perspective, but it does also seem overly pessimistic at times.

Btw, your username is awesome.