This does *not* imply the inevitability of AGI. It does not imply AGI is necessarily bad.

It does mean that "the capabilities of AI will eventually plateau" offers no meaningful predictive power or relevance to the overall AI discussion.

The impact of this is far more than just DoD procurement, which is already enormous.

This is not the government saying they're going with a different vendor, it's the government saying everyone has to choose to either have federal contracts or Claude, they can't have both.

The government could similarly argue that if a company provides communication as a service, they should be able to provide access to the government given they have a warrant.

If you explicitly create a service to circumvent this then you're trying to profit from and aid those with criminal intent. Silkroad/drug sales and child sexual content are more common, but terrorism would also be on the list.

I disagree with this logic, but those are the well-known, often cited concerns.

There is a trade-off in personal privacy versus police ability to investigate and enforce laws.

The point is that one could similarly be dismissive of human brains, saying they're prediction machines built on basic blocks of neuro chemistry and such a view would be asinine.

I'm not advocating against health nor preventive care, however they don't decrease costs nearly as much as you'd expect.

Per the predictive processing theory of mind, human brains are similarly predictive machines. "Psychology" is an emergent property.

I think it's overly dismissive to point to the fundamentals being simple, i.e. that it's a token prediction algorithm, when it's clear to everyone that it's the unexpected emergent properties of LLMs that everyone is interested in.

Also, you're right that it's often used in a way that wouldn't make sense grammatically if it were written out, but that's true for most acronyms I think; e.g. JPEG or GIF.

"Look at this funny Graphics Interchange Format I just sent you!"

That's just wrong. Pacemakers are a form of transhumanism, improving the human condition through technology. When you comment on the difference between faith and reason, say transhumanism is based in faith, you're implying it's not reasonable.

Even if you're talking specifically of those that support cryonics like Alcor, or hope for mind uploading your statement is still flawed. Most don't have an absolute belief these technologies will come about, but hope they do and work towards bringing about that future.

Maybe the word you're looking for is hope. Transhumanists hope for a better future in the same way Christians hope they'll go to heaven.

Process matters and laws matter. The federal budget is set by congress. If the executive branch is allowed to unilaterally withhold or redirect money then what is the point of congressional budgetary authority? If they had won a super majority then they would have also been able to pass whatever laws/budgets/etc. through congress (assuming they're constitutional).

People are not just objecting to what they're doing, but how they're doing it.

Acupuncture has a CPT code and can be billed; do you think a patients file is required to deny it?

Removing a skin tag is considered cosmetic unless it's causing significant issues or is suspected to be cancerous.

A denied prior auth results in no unexpected costs but perhaps a change or delay in care.

A denied claim to an in network hospital may result in the provider losing revenue but nothing for the claimant.

There's a long list of conspiracy theories about the vaccines. There are chips in there to track people, they're actually sterilizing people for population control, it's the mark of the beast, it's made with aborted fetuses, etc. This impacted vaccination rates. I can't think of any that would have actually increased rates, maybe something about the rich hoarding the vaccines, but that's a stretch.

Also, they measured conspiracy mindset with the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, which has general questions like "I think there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions".

They found that lonely teens, that then got lonelier overtime, had a higher rate of a conspiracy mentality in their 40s. It's hardly surprising but they also controlled for depression and anxiety, and found that loneliness still had a positive correlation with the mentality. I found that part interesting.

2. The first death from the virus was in January and it was less than 2 weeks later the first confirmed case was in the US. I think we forget how fast this thing went from novel pneumonia in Wuhan to potential world-wide pandemic. Maybe a head start on shutting down the borders would have delayed things a bit, but there would have been zero appetite to shut down everything in January 2020.

3. There absolutely were conspiracy theories that undermined efforts to contain Covid. E.G. the vaccine heralded end times and was the mark of the beast, or people would start dropping dead from the vaccine and it was part of the Great Reset etc. Or that the bans on gatherings were intended to stop religion, Covid didn't even really exist and it was part of a plan to institute a new world order, etc.

The knight on that outpost was a monster and it ended up winning the game for him.