I didn’t realize this sloth was in fact our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

But I wanna build the torment nexus!

I want to see more people claiming formal religious exemptions to being forced to use AI in the workplace. A good case can at least be made for chat bots.

Plenty of religions and cultures have held that words are sacred. The universe was spoken into being. Life was breathed into Man. Etc. That’s the tradition I would appeal to.

If I’m forced to use a chat bot at my work, I’m being forced to have a machine put words in my mouth. Instead of my words representing my own voice, my own, my own soul, a soulless machine speaks for me instead.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to refuse to use AI on religious grounds.

Exactly. If a future superintelligence wants to create a copy of me to torture, well I suppose it can do that. But that entity it creates will not be me, but a lossy copy of me. I will be long dead and in the ground.

If a future superintelligence wants to create innocent sentient beings just to torture them, well that’s on the AI. It can be responsible for its own sins. But it has nothing to do with me.

This is more of a high school civics question. There is nothing preventing a president from serving other offices after their term ends. Taft served as Chrif Justice of the Supreme Court for nine years after leaving the presidency.

If AOC wanted to remain in politics after serving as president, she would have plenty of ways to do so. You’re claiming she can’t. You need to prove that claim. All you’ve got so far is vague “logistics.”

If you don’t know, why did you say she would only be in politics for another 8 years?

What’s stopping her from running for Senator after?

People voted for Trump because he felt more authentic. That’s really it. He seemed authenticity an asshole, but voters prefer authenticity over anything else. Kamala and Hillary lost because they were inauthentic. Every word they said felt like it was written by a committee of political strategists. Meanwhile, Trump saunters up and says Haitians are eating dogs.

How delusional do you have to be to think political resumes matter much for presidential candidates today? Hillary had the most impressive resume of any candidate in a generation. It didn’t work because voters don’t give a shit about your political resume. Kamala had decades of political experience. A completely inexperienced clown like Trump can win the presidency twice, and you’re still here pretending a candidate can’t win unless they serve an ambassadorship or similar for a few years.

I think you’re just personally uncomfortable with the idea of a female president.

Lemmy has a sexism problem. Simple as that.

I think you’re just projecting your own sexism onto the electorate.

Democrats need to quit being spineless cowards. Fuck “wait your turn.” That only seems to ever apply to Democrats.

MAGA went directly from nothing to the presidency.

Corporate Democrats are just Republicans who happen to inhabit social circles where homophobia is considered distasteful.

I think what people forget is that moderates are just fighting for what they believe in, just like progressives do. The problem is they do not want the same thing. Moderates and progressives have fundamentally different motivations. Democratic moderates are not simply progressives that have pragmatically decided to pursue centrism to win the most gains they can. They’re not progressives willing to settle for a moderate option. Moderation is their actual desired goal. They themselves are mostly wealthy coastal elites. They’re quite comfortable in their lives, and their main goal is to protect the status quo. They fundamentally do not have the same goal of crafting meaningful legislation that progressives do.

For Democratic centrists, eeking out a single seat majority in the Senate is mission accomplished. Progressives need to push for greater gains, as they want 60 votes to pass major reforms. Conservatives need 60 votes, as they want to implement Christian Nationalism. But Centrists? Neither party ever getting more than 55 votes in the Senate is their ideal outcome. Such a government will be able to pass modest bipartisan bills that don’t rock the boat, but no real change to either the right or the left will be possible.

Liberals ultimately have little desire to create a “political juggernaut,” as a juggernaut is only useful if you want to force through real change.

A gantry may not be required in the future. A gantry is used because it greatly simplifies the problem. The gantry allows a fixed known relationship between the print head, the ground, and what is being printed. A simple 3D printer can work completely blind.

But this need not be the only way to 3d print. It’s pointless to have a mobile 3D printer for desktop printing applications. But construction? The case may be different. Imagine a swarm of small robots, each a small cement mixer and print head. Hell, as absurd as it sounds, little flying printing drones might turn out to be a viable solution. The tech required for these is way beyond what is needed for a conventional fixed 3D printer. But it’s probably possible. You don’t set up a huge gantry for your giant house-sized 3D printer. Instead, you unleash a swarm of printing bots onto a construction site. They build up the house like bees assembling a hive from their own wax.

Now you might wonder if this could ever be financially viable. A swarm of printing robots? Well, historically, nothing changes technology faster than war. War forces innovation by necessity. Countries are getting really good at making absurd numbers of high quality robots cheaply.

For example, what’s going to happen to all the Ukrainian drone engineers once the war ends? Sure, some will stay in the defense industry, but peacetime defense budgets are always lower than those of a nation facing existential war. Imagine the minds that are currently inventing drones that can fly a hundred miles and autonomously hunt down and kill individual enemy soldiers. Apply minds like that to the construction automation problem, and suddenly a lot of doors open up.

Hell, I’m sure damn near any builder would happily sell you a fully furnished home. Even tract lot home builders in the middle of Nebraska. You might so annoy them that you’ll end up paying $50k for $10k worth of furniture, but I’m sure it could be done.

You need to use your imagination more. A robotic construction site will not look anything like a human one. Bags of readymix concrete have the form they do because they are intended to be carried by a human being. But the goal isn’t to get a bag from point A to point B. The goal is to get the concrete from point A to point B. Instead of a humanoid robot carrying a bag of readymix, imagine an automated hopper on the end of a crane, with a computer vision and reasoning system that allows it to precisely place it where it needs to go. And instead of that concrete being formed by a humanoid robot holding a trowel in its hands, it will be mounted on a robotic arm mounted on a glorified roomba.

When we automated car factories, we didn’t do so by making millions of mechanical men. Construction will be no different. Individual humans are not masters of every construction trade. Why should we demand the robots be masters of all trades? We can simply purpose-build robots for particular construction tasks. Builders wealthy enough may own a fleet of them. Smaller operations will rent them as needed. Just replace the cost of hiring subcontractors with the cost of renting a particular trade robot.

Keep this in mind. A building is a memory of the tools used to create it. And as those tools change, the buildings change.

Yes, the way we currently build site-built wood-framed construction would be a poor fit for automation. But other building forms may be more amenable to automation. The form of the building itself may change to fit automated construction techniques. The most obvious example of this is 3D printing. And yes, those buildings have many issues. But we not only consider 3D printing.

For example, imagine a building that isn’t so much made from materials cut to length as is made from small blocks or modules assembled together. It’s easier for me to imagine automating ICF construction than stick-built construction. Or maybe in the future, every home will be built with an at-grade or basement slab or basement suitably flat to serve as a working platform for construction robots. Maybe homes are built around a large central vertical shaft, the shaft that once held a large articulated construction robot. (I’m imagining a large robot riding on vertical rails in a vertical shaft. The robot has a long articulated arm that can reach into individual rooms and perform work functions.) Once automation is good enough, you start designing the building for the automation, rather than the automation the building.

Imagine if I could build homes for half the cost of conventional homes. However, it comes with the caveat that these homes look very different from conventional ones. They look different because their design was optimized for automated construction. Would they sell? If they still functioned as homes. If they still kept you warm, dry, and comfortable. Unless the homes were just completely crazy, I think those homes would sell just fine. People have learned to live in all sorts of things. Pioneers built houses on the prairie out of sod. If automated construction requires substantial modification to building design, but those buildings are substantially cheaper or faster to construct? The architecture will bend to the automation.