This is evidenced by the scant few people who get into math just so they can rediscover group theory or differential calculus on their own with no spoilers.

Nobody has solved the Riemann Hypothesis, but it has been highly fertile ground for new mathematics. Answering the question is of far less value than the question itself.

With potentially plummeting value for human involvement in these skills, I think that’s precisely what many people are worried about.

There are always individual counterexamples. And yet as a whole the cost of healthcare has exploded.

> at least some of that is affluence meaning we choose to eat out instead of cooking at home

A lot of that is poverty, not affluence. People working two jobs and living in food deserts aren’t cooking a lot of meals at home. It’s expensive being poor.

More and more it’s seeming that the “societal benefits” from the last fifty years of progress have largely been concentrated at the top.

It’s not like this is the first time that Elon has overpromised and underdelivered.

GP has it backwards too. For 1g of acceleration, none of the beam that is produced after a year will ever reach the accelerating spacecraft. You only need to run it for a year.

Sure there will always be some people who want to explore for exploration’s sake. But a generation ship leaving a garden of Eden we’re quite literally built for in order for our children’s grand^(1000)children to terraform a rock half a galaxy away in order to have a different mix of resources?

That’s a hard sell for the first generation, to say nothing of those who come after.

With Apple, you are the customer. With others, you’re the product. It’s an easy differentiator for them, plain and simple.

Yes, Apple has actually put work into designing, building, and shipping secure enclaves. Yes, they have put a gargantuan amount of work into PCC to uphold the claims they make about its privacy. Yes, they employ differential privacy. Yes, they have shipped a feature that enables privacy-conscious users to be the only ones to hold the keys to their iCloud account. And on and on and on. Nothing will ever be enough for you.

You aren’t asking these questions in good faith. If you were, you’d have your answers already.

Always missing from the paranoid lunatic side of this discussion: what devices do you use? I presume you do all your computing on an abacus?

The only standard they will accept is absolute perfection. It doesn’t matter all of the drastic steps they’ve taken to ensure that past mistakes are never made again or that their hands are tied when governments make demands of them in the future. It doesn’t matter that they’re demonstrably orders of magnitude better than everyone else.