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All the talk in the news lately about artificial superintelligence and the urgent need to regulate it reminds me of a virus that's already escaped the laboratory. I get the feeling that the genie will be well and truly out of the bottle before the world's lawmakers can do anything about it.

Even if he did pay out (and he won't), most people would have lost over $5k already in price rises, loss of benefits, loss of services etc caused by the idiot's actions to date, and would lose more if they kept the Republicans in power.

Anything to do with Trump is foul.

I always wondered how many folks actually read my posts. Now I know. Thanks!

The Poor will pay the Price of the bribe. It just adds to the existing debt, and is inflationary. Another Con by the Don. Nev

Bloody yanks complaining that the MCG, designed for cricket and AFL, had too much space around their postage stamp pitch so front row spectators required binoculars to see the game. I watched part of the game, a stoppage every 20 seconds, making a 15 minute quarter take more than half an hour.

Nowadays reality can be created while you wait. And history has become an evolving story, when it was once a record of the past.

Here is an analysis of Trump's $5K cheque announcement by, would you believe it?, an Australian professor of Economics living in the USA. He asks five questions whose answers shoq that this announcement is hot air. Totally impractical, and even illegal under world moentary rules. The answer to his first question is obvious - would Trump deliver? No need for me to supply the answer to you.

According to Trump, if it walks like a duck; if it quacks like a duck, it's a water fowl.

Nope.. It is c. 245m adults x $5k = c. $1.33tn. On the assumption he would follow through (apparently, previously promised money including DOGE cheques for those who effectively took voluntary redundancy haven't been paid - but I have not researched it so it could just be a rumour), and assume it would take around 3 months to permeate through the economy, it would represent a c. 3.7% of GDP stimulus to the economy, with a lot of people who will spend it. What happens when you add to the M3 money supply? Inflation. And putting that much more in - in a short period - would bring back visions of people in Germany in the 30s.. Well, maybe not as bad, but inflation will hit hard, interest rates will rise to try and stem it and that $5K is not quite worth what they think it is. The US debt is at historical highs and yields are rising now (still YoY slightly down). The world economy is starting to feel the onset of a nasty flu. If Chumpo is true to his word and the Republicans win, you do not want to have or hold anyone else's debt.

Developing and implementing all risk systems for our whole European business.

One example of job losses will be in the modelling industry. There will still be a need for physical catwalk models but almost all of the print and media advertising will go to AI generated models. That's a spin off from the graphics getting to the point where AI models can just about pass off as the real thing. A lot of photographers and modelling agencies will have to find something else to do. It's happening already; most of the online clothing retailers are using AI generated models now. It's not something that's going to happen one day; it's happening now and things will really accelerate, like a snowball effect. I can see the point of it though. If you were running a retail business or you were an advertising agency doing advertising work for companies, why would you employ a modelling agency when you can do it all with a few mouse clicks. No photographers, no studios, no booking venues and sets for model shoots. Unfortunately also no jobs for those people.

I can remember watching the Canadian football grand final on the telly when I was in Alberta in 1985. There was a bit over four minutes left on the clock and the game finished about 35 or 40 minutes later. A lot of stops and big pow-wows. One thing I noticed during the MCG match was the coaches with a speaker/microphone headset covering their mouths with the playbook when they were calling a new play through to whoever it goes to. I'd never thought about it before, but maybe the teams employ lip readers to get a heads-up on what the opposite team is about to do.

Yeah, but a very clever one, notwithstanding the illegality of it. Everyone will see $5K in their eyes... many will see $10K (or more) to the household. It is not an amount to be sneezed out. Many people aren't taught basic economics (otherwise Chump would not have got in in the first place), so all they see is money money money - the stuff the very fabric of USA culture is made from. Even if the purchasing power of the USD halved overnight, 2.5K or 5K or more in today's money may well be quite an enticement to those on the bread line.. and the future is looking very bleak anyway, so looking bleaker is neither here nor there to them. That is why governments like keeping the masses poor.

I can see you have tried to answer my question. Thanks for that. But you seem to be struggling to name any definite benefit to the people. What is the prospectus? Will my Council rates/car rego/groceries/rent, etc, go down? Will the hospitals definitely deliver faster/more accurate/cheaper health care? Seems the promises are all couched in terms like 'might' or 'should' do lots of the above. In the past, multibillion dollar projects were only approved when there were specific itemised measurable deliverable values that warrant the investment. So far I only see wishy-washy vague half promises. And little sign of addressing any of the risks. Is it just 'build it and the world will beat a path to your door, bearing gifts of gold' ?

What staggers me is the way you can take a creased old black and white photo taken 70 odd years ago and carried around in someone's wallet, and in a few seconds change it into a full colour image that looks like it was just taken, and even animate it. https://www.facebook.com/share/r/19Zj3pXhXH/

Simply complying with Parkinson's Laws: Parkinson's Law is the title of a satirical essay by the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson which was published in The Economist in 1955, following the report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service. He proposed the following Laws: 1. "The Law of Multiplication of Work" (Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion). 2. "The Law of Multiplication of Subordinates" (The number of workers within administration tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done). After observing that the promotion of employees necessitated the hiring of subordinates, and that the time used to answer minutes requires more work, Parkinson stated: "In any public administrative department not actually at war the staff increase may be expected to follow this formula" : where: x – number of new employees to be hired annually k – number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees m – number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics) P – difference: age at hiring − age at retirement n – number of administrative files actually completed. Here's a video on this:

That does not depend on AI.. that depends on those who govern us. And history shows that pollies wait until the problems are well entrenched before they deal with them. But also, even if the governments finally swallowed the need to tax the corporates to fund more and more people with nothing to do.. what is the impact on those people effectively on the scrap heap. Yep, some enterprising souls will thrive, but we are mainly conditioned to go to school, get a job, work and then retire. So, the way we educate future generations will have to change, too. A friend of mine in a more senior position at another bank is telling me they have gone all in on AI for software development and it is giving them between 15 and 20 x the productivity. So he will end up implementing a decent swathe of cuts but hold enough to significantly improve rate of output. I have been saying for a couple of years that in the next now 8 - 13 years, there won't be many software programming languages left. People will type in their prompts and the run time will be generated directly from it. Yes, some of the lower level languages will still be around, but there will come a time where they are no longer needed as well. Certainly in software development - ironically the industry that gave birth to AI - there isn't much for the common software developer - they will need to be English (or other human language) graduates

Not mine. But OME's might qualify