If you’re talking about a true offworld backup to our species, that is a very very long ways away. Even if we were to really take that effort seriously, it would take us millennia before we truly established and independent presence in space.

The key is that it’s not possible to have a non-industrial civilization on a place like Mars. Our cultural model for such things is always the Age of Sale and similar exploratory waves by European imperialists. But this cultural analog is flawed. People could sail from England to the Americas and live off the land once they got there. They could build houses, find food and water, and really form a farmstead with the tools and knowledge they already possessed. They could even cut down local trees and repair the ships they used to get there.

But Mars? There’s nothing there. You want water? You need to build a water purification plant. You want air? You’ll need a huge air cleaning and reclamation system. And all of this will require massive amounts of power. And all of this infrastructure requires vast supply chains to keep, both to build the things and to build the things that build the things.

What this ultimately comes down to is that until you have hundreds of millions of people living on Mars, you can forget any idea of them truly being able to survive without Earth. You could have a million people on Mars. But if Earth collapses, unless Mars is already self-sufficient at that time, the Martians are on borrowed time. Sure, once you start a colony, there will be strong incentives to make Mars as self-sufficient as possible. The transport costs alone will ensure that. But it will be a very, very long time before Mars is self-sufficient in something like, computer chips for example. Every colony would be built from the start with its own water and air systems, but inevitably most of the components for that equipment would be shipped in from Earth. It will be a very long time before such a colony is capable of producing all the tools and equipment it needs to keep operating. And remember, on Mars, going organic farm and returning to the land is never an option. It’s full industrial civilization or death. The planet is not capable of sustain life (or at least life like ours) without extensive technological supplementation.

Or alternatively, have your friends worry about you. Say you unavailable as you were drunk/high/intoxicated out of your mind. As times goes on, cite inebriation by ever-more exotic and illegal substances.

Earth, 2150:

As the last embers of organized human civilization crumbled in the hothouse Earth catastrophe, a handful of astronomers remain in cloistered study, pouring over the data from the last of the great space telescopes, built at the height of 22nd century science. What have they learned? We are not the outlier. In the light of other Suns we find them. Dead world after dead world. Once bastions of life reduced to wastelands of ruin by technological civilization. The majority of Earth-like worlds around Sun-like stars are tombs, rendered unto sterile husks by the actions of their own offspring.

To firmly tease such a conclusion out of such ephemeral evidence as a stellar spectrum was truly a feat of the astronomical art. It required techniques undreamt of and inconceivable by 21st century scholars. But, the last of this civilization’s great astronomer’s found a way. And the conclusion was damning.

Intelligent tool-using life is a terminal disease for life on a world. Once a biosphere has dreamed up a species like ours, that world’s days are numbered. There are many forms that extinction can take, some more exotic than others. But most are through mundane causes like self-induced ecological collapse. For every one case of a civilization destroying itself in a science experiment gone wrong, there are a thousand cases of simple ecological catastrophe.

We are dying. We are alone. We are surrounded by the dead.

Ok! :D :D

I’m sure with all the latent mental illness he’ll be great in bed!

Well that’s literally what these laws are requiring. You can speculate on future laws, but you can imagine innumerable horrible futures. It’s important to stay grounded and not get lost in the dooming. And I see nothing wrong with an optional feature that lets you set an age on a child’s account. As long as it’s something I control, then that’s actually giving me more control over my hardware, not less.

Yes, there will be people pushing for more invasive methods. But those are the laws you should oppose. Not these. People tend to think in binaries. And they tend to lump everything called “digital id” into one bucket devoid of nuance or discernment.

If anything, lumping all digital id into one bucket without any nuance only helps the opponents of privacy. Simply giving the parents the option to enter an age is a perfectly reasonable policy. If you oppose that because you cannot recognize nuance and consider all id laws equivalent, then you’re hurting your side. People see you appealing to privacy when opposing something that reasonable people will not see as a violation of privacy. Again, we’re taking OS-level controls that actually give you more control over the machine.

You risk a “boy who cried wolf” scenario. You turn everyone against you fighting something that really isn’t an invasion of privacy. Then when someone does actually try to pass a law mandating facial recognition be built into apps, people will ignore you as they already consider you an irrational radical.

But that’s literally what these systems are. There is more than one form of age verification. The type we’re discussing here literally is just “enter your name in a box.” It’s important not to muddy the waters. If you don’t know what you’re opposing and choosing your battles carefully, you can’t effectively fight infringement on privacy. And I really don’t see anything wrong with a law that just says, “every OS needs to have a feature that lets parents self-report age on a child’s account.”

Yes, there are other forms of digital id laws. But we’re talking specifically about OS-level ones. This literally just be a more effective parental control, giving people more control over their own PCs, not less.

Again, try to focus on what specifically we are talking about, not similar-sounding but unrelated technologies.

I don’t really get this. Why is it such a big deal if your OS has setting where you enter your age, and the OS then sends that to websites? Face scanning or demanding uploads of photo IDs is an immense privacy violation. But simply having your OS have a setting you can use where you provide a number, a number that you’re completely free to alter or report whatever value you want? I really don’t see the issue with this.

This seems like a pretty easy way to give parents some control over their kid’s online activities while also not infringing on privacy. The parents can set up the OS and give an account to their kids that lists their ages as under 18. If they want their kids to access the web without restrictions, they simply don’t have to create an under 18 account on the computer. And even if your OS has to report an age to access a website, if it’s all based on self-reporting, you can just self-report a false age.

We tend to think in binaries, as this is convenient. We tend to view all digital age verification as horrible and equally horrible. But this? Just giving parents a way to give their kids a minors-only account, and have websites respect that OS-level flag? This is nothing like bills that require uploading face scans or photo IDs.

Sure you can speculate a slippery slope. But that is a fallacy for a reason. It tends to wash out all nuance and make you conclude everything is absolute evil forever.

There’s a reason we abandoned monarchy. Zuck is effectively the king of meta. Literally. The founding corporate structure is designed so he literally can never be fired. And if you give anyone absolute unaccountable power, it’s only a matter of time until they drive things right off a cliff.

I would also be curious to know.

That’s just a consequence of shitty bathroom design. In civilized places, bathroom stalls have actual walls and doors that go to the floor and ceiling.

Don’t even wait for the drainage district to do it. What’s Tesla going to do, sue you for blocking their illegal dumping?

I honestly deeply despise articles like this. Articles like this are how we get trapped in forever wars. Fuck the Iran War. I didn’t want it to start, and I don’t want it to continue. But the main reason we get caught in forever wars is that the media lampoons any president that actually does the wise thing and ends the doomed conflict. They portray them as a coward or demonize them for letting troops’ deaths go to waste.

It’s like anything. I can cook my own food. That doesn’t mean I don’t go out to restaurants sometimes. I could use an LLM myself to write a novel. But it wouldn’t be the same novel. And there is some skill in prompt writing. Even then, just the sheer time to generate a novel-length coherent work from small snippets of chat windows is still a large investment of time.

Of course, we know how this will actually go down. AI generated works are going to be much cheaper to produce. Therefore they’ll be me more profitable if they can sell at the same price. Barnes and Noble thus has a strong incentive to not carefully label AI works as AI-generated.

Ideally they would all be in their own section. AI-generated works are only allowed in the part of the store that is labeled as such. That’s the proper way to do this.

But that’s not how it will actually be done. Buried somewhere in the fine print inside the back cover of the book will be a long paragraph, one sentence of which mentions the work is AI generated. Or the inside back cover will have a QR code labeled “notes on this work,” and there will be a hundred page long legal disclaimer that briefly mentions the book is AI generated.

This isn’t really true. The courts have held that there needs to be some human involvement, but that involvement can be pretty minimal.

Irrelevant.

We’re not talking about hypothetical socialist utopias. This entire conversation is about labor law in our existing economy and system. Derailing the conversation isn’t productive.

Exactly. We are beings of atoms and matter. If you want to believe in some immaterial soul, fine. But if you’re a materialist, then everything we are is atoms. We know atoms in one configuration can produce true intelligence. And there are likely many possible arrangements of atoms that can reproduce this effect. And since artificial minds are not subject to most of the constraints of biological minds, an artificial superhuman intelligence should be possible. Hell, even if biology was the only way to make it possible, you could always build an artificial biological brain and just make it a lot bigger than a human one. Even if human neurology really is the limit of what this universe allows for in terms of intelligence, we could best it by just making a bigger one.

Driving employers out is fine. We have enough minerals, oil, and farm land that they aren’t needed.

You have no idea how the civilization your rely on to keep breathing actually functions.

I don’t think you have any understanding of how labor law works. Even adopting very pro-worker legislation requires coordinating with companies. Otherwise you end up with a system that does nothing for workers at best or just drives every employer out of business at worst. There’s certainly more room to shift compensation from owners and executives to the actual workers. But companies aren’t magic infinite money trees. If you write even well-intentioned workers rights laws, but you completely ignore the actual workings of companies, you end up with a disaster.

Consider the example of pregnancy employment protection. You want to help working mothers out, and you want to pass a law requiring employers to offer so many months of paid maternity leave, and similarly paid paternity leave.

If you look into the legal language of these laws, they always have limits on which employers they apply to. And one of those limitations is company size. Imagine you operate a small shop or business. You’re a sole proprietor for years. Eventually things grow enough that you can take on an employee. You’re probably not going to be in a position to be able to afford to pay maternity or paternity leave. Your operation is just too small. You just don’t have the resources to pay people to not work. That one person going on leave represents you losing half of your capacity. If they pass a law requiring you to anyway, all that will mean is that you have to close up shop. No one actually benefits. The new parent you would have hired doesn’t get a job at all. The community loses a small locally owned business. Everyone is worse off. More business shifts to the megacorps.

Now if you’re operating a hundred-person company? You can afford to offer parental leave. You have enough resources. That one person going on leave means you lose just 1% of your capacity. That’s perfectly manageable.

Different jurisdictions and laws set the threshold at different numbers of employees. But they all set it somewhere. And to calibrate that number requires coordinating with employers. When writing such legislation, you have to strike a fine balance between helping as many workers as you can without driving the very businesses they rely on out of business.

And this is just one example. There is no such thing as a policy that only concerns workers, not employers. Even if you don’t care at all about the employers, at a minimum you need to make sure businesses stay viable. All labor labor law, even extremely pro-worker law, needs to have employers at the table as a kind of sanity check.

Moving more and more towards streamers, podcasters, and independent journalists. For actual investigative reporting, the future is outfits like 404 Media. For editorial and dissemination, the future are podcasters, streamers, etc.