nomadpete

I rather like OME's analogy - the old bible was a compendium of ancient writings, sprinkled with some ideology.

I don't believe that the average churchgoer holds a bible for history lessons. That only leaves it as a source of deity information. I hesitate to use the word :fact" due to the lack of substantiation. By the way, there are quite a few Greek and Roman records dating back to around zero BC

I'm curious about what events might follow. Iran supplies China with a lot of oil. So they have skin in the game. Between the Iran attacks, Venezuela, and maybe Cuba has USA given a green-light to China’s expected takeover of Taiwan? Or at least moved it up,since they have plenty of military toys. The west wouldn’t have a leg to stand on to object and couldn't stop it?

And that shows how a well intentioned movement can be developed into a ruthless system of mass control. Every religion is discriminatory. It has no place in any government. Spirituality is a personal thing and any attempt to corporatise it is bad for society, in my opinion.

I can neither agree nor disagree with that. Unfortunately we lack access to enough other records of ancient Hebrew history, to support this. We seem to have only one book of, as you suggest, embellished anecdotes that may be connected to distant events. But even if it was an accurate history book combined with a guide to life, it seems a poor way to teach good behaviour. The eight commandments basically say "be nice, don't be an arxhole"

On this, I back away. Sure there are some stories designed to teach moral societal behaviour. But are you discounting the old testament? Our present society would say there is way too much immoral stuff in that. And remember, for a very long time you would be executed for suggesting that it was anything but the word of god.

Does that make the scriptures more like a "Goatherders guide to the Galaxy" ? I was trying to address the high probability the any document (dare I call it that?) or book is unlikely to resemble whatever was originally recorded by the authors. This applies to any reliance upon the book for historic 'facts'. Just because a few paragraphs align with other authors does not automatically make all the stories 'factual'. So many revisions (authorised by a god, of course). So many language translations. Unless a god actually signs off on all the inevetible changes, how can the "word" be trusted? Any god who can create a universe in less than a week might find the time to verify their follower's guide book. He has had a couple of billion years to address this issue.

No need to look for bonespurs?

Yes but... As usual, the USA has not proposed any plan, or perthway to a regime change. As usual, the old regime has a sucession plan to continue power. As usual, USA has no plan for what to do next. Just go in all gunz blazing and expect the locals to miraculously unite their mobs and create a whole new system of government. Never worked before, unlikely to now. P.S. With the present state of amazing intel, and amazing precision strike capability, why did they destroy a school full of kids?

Is it possible that Pootin doesn't mind US hitting Iran? After all, according to reports the russian economy is in a bad way. They rely heavily on oil income, which is presently limited by caps on Russian oil prices. Right now, the price of crude is likely to go up bigtime? Would this boost Russian income? I doubt that Donold would do much to enrage his mate Pootin. Just looking for an upside. There always is one but not always obvious.

Whenever I was feeling all alone, stuck in some isolated grubby motel, away from the comforts of home...... I'd rummage through the bedside drawer for anything to read. Alas, the only thing I ever found was a Gideon's Bible. In desperation I'd open it in hope of finding some mental stimulation beyond what the local TV repeater offered. The first pages hold nice, uplifting positive affamations.... then there is The Old Testament. Wow. Lots of heavy rather unscientific stuff about laws controlling what animals shall be sacrificed for what occasions, & when it is time to stone women to death, etc, etc. I guess later on the eight commandments made life easier for the common man (person). All too depressing - small wonder there is so much suicide in the bush. Maybe the book is due for revision again.... Question - is Scripture teaching fact? Whose Scripture? What revision number? Does it come with a change log and was it stored in a code repository so we can track document changes back to confirm the original author(s)?

Listen to what our mate Stephen Fry says about A.I.

Maybe we need a separate thread for Iran.

At what point can we csll a device "autonomous"? At present both sides in the Ukrain/Russia war, A.I. is being used for navigation by attack drones. They are using preprogrammed landscape recognition to recognise their location and guide them to a target. Although at present (as far as we know) they still need a human toget it out of its box an switch it on. From that point it is autonomous - navigating to a (at present) preprogrammed target. At our present rate of computing evolution, it won't be long before it will be feasible to have satellite data constantly monitoring enemy movements and doing target decisions very quickly. In the old days each technological advancement took time to reveal its hazards. This allowed humans to assess and mitigate risks before too many people got wiped out..But with the present rapidity of developments, it is a lot harder to deal with widespread downsides.

All the statements have the caveat "now", and "today", meaning " maybe not ok now". At some stage, either a board of directors, or CEO, or deranged president can declare "ok now". When that day comes I won't trust the first generation of autonomous weapons, say perhaps flocks of autonomous killer drones, to recognise my face as friend-not-foe. Worse still, imagine the money that governments around the world can save when drones can do the work of our police. Autonomous ICE is sure to be trialled in USA first! Once this was just sci fi plots, now it is getting real.

Absolutely agree with that! I love to see innovation, when it works.

OK you got me there. You are obviously more digitally competant than I. However I'd say that the 'upwardly raised middle finger' is unlikely to result in any transport.

But, I recall that is what the experts once said about electronic speech recognition.... and speech synthesis. But I agree with you about human life on Mars.

Nah, that's not digital, unless a thumb is a digit?

At the moment, DJT has declared that Anthropic A.I. is "A radical woke, left company.... The left wing nut jobs at Anthropic..." So DJT has ordered every federal agency and department to immediately cease use of this A.I. immediately. It looks to me like possibly somebody in that company failed to bend the knee. Maybe someone's cheque bounced? A spokesperson for Anthropic made this press release. There is one statement in it that frightens me. Can you pick it? "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner. However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now: Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale. Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today." https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

Is A.I. more than just the modern day bogeyman? Can the many A.I. entities forget to serve man when they are mainly in competition with each other? Read this article where one robot kidnapped a bunch of competitor's robots.... https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/ai-robot-kidnaps-12-robots-in-shanghai

And mushroom lunches.

Sir, sir! Please tell me how to digitally migrate away from a physical threat? Does A.I. now have the power to teleport? Need to know as I have holidays coming up.

I note that although the recent official graphs show a slight decrease in domestic electricity consumption, I think they cannot measure most of the locally consumed rootop solar, so they miss that. In my case, my solar has logged as much power as my street meter consumption, but my bill only showed a third of that going back into the grid. So nationally, average household power consumption has increased steadily over the years. Of course bills go up. Consumer lifestyle is the real reason for the increased power bills.

Just doing a 'back of the napkin' calc.... Average Australian wage is circa $100k per annum. Say 30% income tax, leaves $70k real income. My power bill is about $1300 per annum. Isn't that 1.8% of wages going on electricity? Even if the government (who incidentally don't own the power system anymore) make electricity free it hardly impacts the overall cost of living.