JanJoar
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My intuitive feeling is that this makes too many unscientific assumptions that it does concretely support. The main issue I have is the dismissal of the techniques to kill off humanity. While it is true that it is by definition impossible to try to reason as a superhuman entity it is still the case that a rogue AI would only have a limited set of tools to try and cause a mass extinction. Wouldn't the first step be to cite a counterexample strategy that an AI could use?
... (read more)The authors think these are not existential only because "we have concluded that a single nuclear winter is unlikely to be an extinction risk". Hardly
That is absolutely true, but it remains to be seen if those attempts will hold up in the long run. There is a big difference between American power being in decline (but still dominant) and the world being multipolar. I would say that currently the derivative is <0 but American power is still vastly greater than any other country.
Of course the Chinese nuclear arsenal is enough in absolute terms to destroy a large segment of the US population (and an even greater share of GDP) but I would not say the same in practice. Contrary to the US and Russia, China has a "no first use" nuclear weapons doctrine. This piece of... (read more)
You are correct in that there is quite a lot of contention when it comes to the current structure of the international system. While the PRC undoubtedly has a lot of economic heft, the degree to which this actually impacts the "polarity" of the system is unclear. The USSR was not a great power merely because it had a lot of tanks; it was at least seen as a political hegemon that controlled critical territory that allowed it potential world domination. It also had a a foreign policy objective diametrically opposed to the US - leading non-US aligned states to side with it - and parity with the US in the nuclear... (read more)
The problem here is caused by the initial split of the "free software" term and community. A is entierly correct in that X is open source, but since it does not follow the four freedoms (to run for any purpose, to change the program, to redistribute copies, and to redistribute your modified copies) it is not free (as in freedom) software. Notice that none of the above explicity require access to the source code, but it is in practice a requirement to fulfill the freedom to make changes.
This is already one of the reasons that RMS himself opposes the open source term: