Surely you can steel man this yourself. Iran wants nukes. Iran has stated it would like to destroy the US and Israel. Israel is an outpost of Western democracy and our ally. Iran has missiles that can reach Europe. Iran is an ally of Russia and China. Iran wants to control the passageway for a big chunk of the world's oil. Cooperation between Israel and its neighbors would be a great asset to the world economy.
This is not comprehensive and maybe you can quibble with some of it, but it is not mysterious why we might care.
>Israel is an outpost of Western democracy and our ally.
The former is a meaningless characteristic when said democracy commits a genocide and runs an apartheid state (hard to deny with the recent capital punishment law exclusively for Palestinian prisoners). Hardly model behavior for anyone else in the region to emulate. The latter is meaningless since this ally only ever drags us into problems, almost all of which are of its own making.
> Cooperation between Israel and its neighbors would be a great asset to the world economy.
It's easier to cooperate with your neighbors when you stop squatting on their territory, or stop massacring them.
>but it is not mysterious why we might care.
I think "people who care" should volunteer to serve in the IDF, and leave the rest of America out of it. Kinda like the various low-friction pipelines for people to go fight/die for Ukraine without committing US Service Members to such a wasteful endeavor.
Long shot, but I'll ask. For a while Thunderbird spam filter will work fine. Then, spontaneously, it stops working and starts showing me many which are obvious, identical junk. And after flagging them as junk, it doesn't seem to learn anything.
For when this happens, it would be nice to have an explicit (and easy) way to blacklist items. Creating new filters for each of them is too involved.
I hope you have spam filtering happening somewhere upstream of your local computer. Spammers are constantly adjusting to find ways around filters, and there is no way a third class open source legacy email client I going to be able to give their filter the continuous attention it needs to stay effective.
There is only one reason for us to give a damn about Israel other than religious fervor, and it's their technology and intelligence apparatus. They only care about us because we give them a lot of money and weapons, and apparently will follow them into their Leeroy Jenkins war and do the heavy lifting.
They're committing a genocide and now are ethnically cleansing Lebanon of Muslims under the cover of the Iran War. Their government is not worthy of support.
It is not obvious at all unless you don't understand Iran's objectives and its attacks on Israel (a country over 1,000 miles away) for the past several decades.
Let's also imagine an alternative reality where some reasonable percentage of the $2.5T in current year AI spending was instead invested in the "general intelligence" researchers we already have for the same purpose. I think it's a pretty reasonable expectation that 1) they'd probably make more progress and 2) that money would help a lot more people in the process (through jobs and economic activity).
Obviously there's no "evidence". Why would you even think we need AGI? But I'm happy to hear your reasoning if you were one of the few/only? people who imagined that software that could predict the next word could do what it now is doing.
I think his broader point is that life preservation doesn't seem like such a big win if overall quality of life is dropping to the point where people decide to not subject their potential children with the burden of living.
I've already seen at least one person who was pretty sure that the preprint paper they co-authored with AI (read: AI wrote for them) was going to cure cancer and make them billions of dollars.
There was only one problem. The paper jumped straight from "this paper will show how our new treatment could cures cancer forever" to "as you can see, these results clearly show that our treatment cures cancer" - with neither any actual results nor any specifics on the treatment. And I don't just mean that the paper didn't go into details; writing the paper was the full extent of their "research".
AI was used fundamentally for COVID vaccine development. AI is used for research in all modern drugs. It’s a certainty if cancer gets cured AI will have played a fundamental role since it’s already fundamental to precursors.
This is not comprehensive and maybe you can quibble with some of it, but it is not mysterious why we might care.
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