hax0ron3

I think the current state-of-the-art models are already AGI, by the kind of definitions of AGI that people had a couple decades ago. I could be wrong but I kind of feel like people have started using the term "AGI" to mean "artificial superhuman intelligence".

I don't think it's quite that capitalist.

Picard says at one point "A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of 'things'. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions."

At another point he says "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

To be fair, capitalism is mainly a system of contracts and laws that allow for certain kinds of ownership structures and investments. It does not necessarily have to be done in a way that is obsessed with the accumulation of things or wealth. So those quotes are also not really anti-capitalist. But the quotes are, at least, not friendly to today's common notion of what 'capitalism' means.

In-universe there was a brutal nuclear war that killed a large number of people. And then after the war they developed technology that got rid of a lot of material scarcity and disease.

I find it somewhat plausible that this could actually lead to something like the show depicts. There is precedent for sweeping moral changes in human history. For example, large parts of the world now find practices like torture, slavery, and collective punishment to be repugnant. Those practices still happen to some extent, but they're not viewed as being just normal like they generally were seen back in the day.

Another example is how Europe and Japan after WW2 genuinely became more pacifistic. Not just as a pretense to fool outsiders, but as a genuine change in how the inhabitants see things.

I think Twitter is worth less mainly because Musk removed some kinds of censorship and by doing that, scared advertisers. Not because the layoffs actually caused any significant technical issues. I don't think they did, since from a technical perspective X works just fine right now.

The US system has always been imperfect. In fact, it used to be much more imperfect. It being imperfect doesn't mean that democracy is about to end.

"We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970"

The evidence?

"Imagine that a film was released this year in which the following happened: <... list of things which are vaguely reminiscent of some things that have recently happened, but none of which have actually happened ...>"

It is bad that some US citizens have been wrongly deported, but it does not mean that democracy is dead in general or for some categories of Americans, unless maybe you mean specifically the category of Americans who are US citizens and have been falsely deported. Which is a very small category. I am not claiming that US democracy is perfect. I am claiming that Trump is very unlikely to topple US democracy over.

Has Trump done things that are questionably legal or flat-out illegal? Yes. Has Trump ever managed to come close to overthrowing US democracy? No. None of his partial or full violations of the law have come anywhere close to overthrowing US democracy.

I find that my attention gets drawn to the opposite phenomenon: it is very common for mainstream newspapers to call Trump's election fraud claims false right as they describe those claims. I mean sentences like "Trump falsely claimed that the election...". This always draws my attention because the same newspapers do not usually do this when public figures claim something false, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. I don't think the election was stolen from Trump, but when newspapers do this it makes me feel like they're treating me like an idiot who has to be verbally manipulated into thinking that the election wasn't stolen from Trump. Rather annoying.

>I feel like debating whether he even can run for a third term makes the premise that he got cheated on accepted.

Only if the readers are incapable of understanding hypotheticals. Also, like Jtsummers said, I'm not even debating it.

I don't think anyone here is claiming that he got cheated.

>Well, forced deportation of Jews into camps was "legal" too.

Yes, but Nazi atrocities would not be legal in our system. And Trump does not have enough hard-core supporters to make it legal to send his political opponents to concentration camps.

>If you're not seeing "any sort of danger to democracy", you're either deliberately blind to what's going on, or you're simply supporting the regime, in which case I see no difference.

I see potential dangers to democracy coming from the Trump administration, but no serious ones. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fight against the potential dangers, it just means that the chance that Trump will actually end democracy in the US is very low.

I'm not a Trump supporter, I just don't believe that the system is at any serious risk from Trump.

I don't like many of those things, but many of those things are not illegal. Many were done by previous Presidents as well (that doesn't mean they're good, but it does mean they're not without President). None of them mean that Trump has escaped checks and balances in a way that seriously endangers the system.

For example, as far as I know the war is not technically illegal. And wars of this nature have been done by many previous Presidents.

I don't know why firing the FBI director would constitute getting past the system. Trump's the head of the executive branch after all.

Executive actions have been widely used by previous Presidents. Should they be more limited? I think so, if it was up to me I'd probably reduce the power of the Presidency in general. But Trump wouldn't be able to, for example, use an executive action to allow himself to run for a third term. If he tried, people would just laugh at him.

National Guard deployment in Los Angeles is within the President's normally agreed-on authority and did not lead to any sort of danger to democracy.

Etc.

Reforming English spelling would make it easier for people to learn English, but it could also theoretically have some negative effects as well. For example, it's possible that the bizarreness and irregularity of English spelling have a stimulating effect on the mind that has grasped them and lead to enhanced creativity in a similar way to how the minor variations between musical instruments of the same general type, or between paintbrushes, can lead to interesting creative results. Also, part of the aesthetic effect of written text comes from the exact sequence of characters.

The system has plenty of checks and balances that are outside of his administration.