A very strange comparison. It seems to imply that we "need fewer humans" because of AI. It also assumes AI is primarily used to replace useful human work, something I very much doubt.

If I think of the last thirty years of policy in most of Europe and the US I'm thinking of a strong trend of deregulation and giving more powers to markets, removing international trade barriers and so on.

That seems to be a dynamic opposite to the one the quoted article is suggesting.

It sounds to me like that's not an inference that can easily be drawn. Copilot was trained on predicting code, it doesn't understand the code it produces syntactically. Security issues can be highly context dependent. For example, in most cases it's fine to log a variable, but when it happens to contain a password, it's a security issue. This is a flawed example as the algorithm may be able to learn that variables with names or contexts suggesting that they're secrets should not be logged, but I can imagine much more subtle issues can crop up.

Sounds quite plausible to me that having a good memory at old age leads to a more active and engaged lifestyle leading to happy people that appear less neurotic and more extrovert.

It's interesting that you talk about replicating pieces. This is a "peculiarly Western" way of treating musicianship (and even in the Western world it applies primarily to classical musicians). In most of the world, musicianship is first and foremost judged by ability to improvise and to perform an orally transmitted repertoire of music. Music tends to be made in an improvisatory manner, but within the rules and constraints of a particular style.

It really depends on what kind of musician you want to be. Do you want to play Western classical music, or professionally in recording studios then reading is probably essential. If you just want to make music, it might still be handy and practical but by no means required.

Can you elaborate on the connection between this announcement and the platform's value as a platform that fosters discussion you perceive? Do you mean content moderation has turned the site into an echo chamber?

Chicken or egg. You can make this argument either way. The fact is that slavery has been around for a lot longer than the governments that "enforced" it and it eventually took governments to abolish it completely.

> As we saw with toilet paper (and hand sanitizer), the average person will hoard anything they are afraid will not be available tomorrow. Companies have shown more restraint in this crisis and others.

Luckily in a well functioning democracy it would not be the toilet paper hoarders that'd be charged with coming up with ethical legislation.

It's not either or. Legislation doesn't solve everything, but neither does a completely free market (which doesn't and couldn't exist anyway).

I admire your optimism, but I don't share it. Many are right now (and have been for decennia) foreseeing catastrophic effects of climate change (floodings, mass migration, disruption of ecosystems) and yet we fail to act. Health experts have apparently warned for years that we're not prepared for a pandemic (I believe they recently discussed this in NYT Daily https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/podcasts/the-daily/corona...). An additional problem is, like the other commenter points out, that many people see many crises coming all the time and there's no objective way to tell who's right and who isn't.

I found this remark by Margaret Livingstone, quoted in the article, very surprising. What if anything does innate functional specialization have to do with whether "humans are special"? How does the presence of such specialization distinguish us from "lower animals"?

Perhaps the reasoning goes that what might make humans special is the presence of human-specific innate specialized brain mechanisms. But while not everyone might agree, I tend to think the difference may be more related to subtle neuro-anatomical differences (such as number of neurons) rather than the presence of specialized "brain modules". We know brains are highly context sensitive and plastic, and judging by Livingstone's earlier quote, she agrees. So why is the charged question of human exceptionalism (which she already seems to accept given the reference "lower animals") suddenly linked so strongly to the presence of innate specialization?

There needs to be a discussion about economic incentives. It's not people wanting things that is the problem. It's that it's easier and more profitable to produce short-lived crappy things that can be sold for cheap, because the environmental impact of the waste it generates (both CO2 and the actual crappy product itself) is not sufficiently factored into the price.

I would not be surprised if, in our current economic system, simply having more green energy available (or products produced without emitting CO2) is not going to solve anything. With almost 8 billion people on earth, we'll find ways to increase consumption and burn it.

IMHO, a free book is an insulting and scientists shouldn't accept to do this work for commercial publishers for free to begin with.

I know many people feel it's their responsibility to provide "services to the community" which is great, but it's ridiculous that commercial publishers get to profit from this when they proceed to claim ownership of academic work and hide it from the public behind a paywall.

If they want to make money off research, fine. But reviewing costs time and money. Academic publishing may well turn out to be not so profitable anymore if reviewers have to be paid. Maybe then we can finally move to university-hosted open-access publishing.

For an essay, in my opinion, it stays in rather neutral territory, making some uncontroversial observations that climate change is bad, that big oil plays a major role it, and expressing some enthusiasm for standing up against partnerships with big oil, but not otherwise making strong claims about what should be done.

In fact, here are two recent studies that suggest life-time exposure plays a significant role in the perception of consonance. If that's true your own judgement of consonance of two sounds is not a good evaluation of a theory of consonance, because that judgement may be shaped by your cultural exposure.

Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature18635 pdf: http://mcdermottlab.mit.edu/papers/McDermott_etal_2016_conso...

Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09609... (paywalled but sci-hub is your friend)