Israel had time to get its jets into the air so I wouldn't be too surprised if evacuated hangars were not a high priority for the missile defense system.

I disagree with you, because a modern human could offer the people of the distant past (with their far less advanced technology) solutions to their problems which would seem miraculous to them. Things that they thought were impossible would be easy for the modern human. The computer may do the same for us, with a solution to climate change that would be, as you put it, magically ecological.

With that said, the computer wouldn't be giving humans suggestions. It would be the one in charge. Imagine a group of chimpanzees that somehow create a modern human. (Not a naked guy with nothing, but rather someone with all the knowledge we have now.) That human isn't going to limit himself to answering questions for very long. This isn't a perfect analogy because chimpanzees don't comprehend language, but if a human with a brain just 3.5 times the size of a chimpanzee's can do so much more than a chimpanzee, a computer with calculational capability orders of magnitude greater than a human's could be a god compared to us. (The critical thing is to make it a loving god; humans haven't been good to chimpanzees.)

I don't think you're imagining the same thing they are when you hear the word "AI". They're not imagining a computer that prints out a new idea that is about as good as the ideas that humans have come up with. Even that would be amazing (it would mean that a computer could do science and engineering about as well as a human) but they're imagining a computer that's better than any human. Better at everything. It would be the end of the world as we know it, and perhaps the start of something much better. In any case, climate change wouldn't be our problem anymore.

The article compares coal and natural gas based on thermal energy and does not take into account the greater efficiency of natural-gas power plants. According to Yale the efficiency of a coal power plant is 32% and that of a natural gas power plant is 44%. This means that to generate the same amount of electricity, you need 38% more thermal energy from coal than you would from natural gas. I'm surprised that the author neglects this given his focus on performing a full lifecycle assessment.

Natural gas becomes approximately equal to coal after efficiency is corrected for, using the author's GWP20 approach. GWP20 means that the effect of global warming is calculated for a 20 year timescale. The author argues that this is the appropriate timescale to use, but he also presents data for the more conventional GWP100 approach, and when this data is adjusted for efficiency, coal is about 25% worse than natural gas.

I'm not an expert so I can't speak authoritatively about GWP20 vs GWP100 but I suspect GWP100 is more appropriate in this case. Carbon dioxide is a stable gas but methane degrades fairly quickly. Its lifetime in the atmosphere is approximately 10 years. This means that while a molecule of carbon dioxide can keep trapping heat forever, a molecule of methane will trap only a finite amount of heat. This effect is underestimated using GWP20.

Edit: Also the Guardian shouldn't be calling this a "major study". It's one guy doing some fairly basic math and publishing in a journal that isn't particularly prestigious.

You could. This type of gun is not intended primarily for use against people (although this particular gun might be modified to serve the role of a sniper rifle). It's for shooting aircraft and lightly armored vehicles. By that I don't mean cars; I mean armored personnel carriers. The bullets would go right through a building's walls.

I can't quickly find a photo of this gun's 12.7 mm bullet doing its thing, but here's what the very similar American 50 cal bullet does to six-inch-thick concrete:

What worked on my friend (in other words, what pissed my friend off) was saying "Why don't you..." and then proposing something other than what he was doing, with bonus points for proposing an idea that came to mind there and then without thinking about it much.

My guess is that they didn't answer your question because they had strict instructions not to stray from the script on this topic. Saying the wrong thing could lead to a big PR problem, so I don't expect that people working in this field would be willing to have a candid public discussion even about topics to which they have given a lot of thought. I do expect that they have given the ability of AI to obey orders accurately a lot of thought at least due to practical (if not ethical) concerns.

I mean, I am currently willing to say "the AIs will almost definitely kill civilians but we should build them anyway" because I don't work in defense. However, even I'm a little nervous saying that because one day I might want to. My friends who do work in defense have told me that the people who gave them clearance did investigate their online presence. (My background is in computational biochemistry but I look at what's going on in AI and I feel like nothing else is important in comparison.)

As for cold comfort: I think autonomous weapons are inevitable in the same way that the atom bomb was inevitable. Even if no one wants to see it used, everyone wants to have it because enemies will. However, I don't see a present need for strategic (as opposed to tactical) automation. A computer would have an advantage in battlefield control but strategy takes hours or days or years and so a human's more reliable ability to reason would be more important in that domain.

Once a computer can reason better than a human can, that's the end of the world as we know it. It's also inevitable like the atom bomb.

The federal government uses the term "terminate" rather than "revoke" to describe the decision not to extend TPS, but even the article the OP posted (which is very critical of Trump's plan) interprets what he said as "not extend".

Now Trump plans to forcibly uproot this group of roughly 18,000 people who pay taxes, own homes, have jobs, and support their families. But that’s only the beginning: Up to 2.7 million people could lose protection from deportation if Trump allows immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status, DACA, and humanitarian parole to lapse during a second term, according to Forbes.

The interviewer was the one who used the word "revoke" but Trump does seem like the kind of person who could attempt to end the TPS designation early rather than waiting for it to simply expire a year into his term. Such an attempt would have very little chance of success. Decisions to terminate (as opposed to revoke early) TPS status during Trump's past presidency are still going through the courts (see Ramos, et al. v. Nielsen, et al.) and not in effect.

Trump and the interviewer are talking about Temporary Protected Status, which is temporary.

A TPS designation can be made for 6, 12, or 18 months at a time. At least 60 days prior to the expiration of TPS, the Secretary [of Homeland Security] must decide whether to extend or terminate a designation based on the conditions in the foreign country.

Source.

TPS eligibility for people from Haiti will last until February 3, 2026 unless it is extended. If during a Trump presidency, the federal government does not extend TPS for Haiti, it would be acting well within its established authority.

The essence of the message itself is simple: Warning, dangerous materials are buried below.

The warnings will be heeded about as much as the curses in ancient Egyptian tombs were.

Still others advised against erecting any warning monuments at all, worrying that the markers themselves⁠— if not properly interpreted⁠— may rouse the curiosity of their discoverers enough that they might explore further, to disastrous ends.

The best idea, IMO.

I'm not saying they aren't intended to be used in combat. Of course they (or more sophisticated future robots for which they are the prototypes) are. I'm saying that they're not being used in combat right now.

a full-scale total war in the middle east, possibly even beyond that

Who else would enter the war on Iran's side? It doesn't have any powerful allies among the other Middle Eastern countries, which rightly perceive it as an ideological rival and a would-be regional hegemon, and its proxies appear to be doing as much as they can already.

I think Iran is vulnerable because it overplayed its hand. Thus a war now may be better than dealing with Iran as a nuclear power later.

Despite media speculation, Israel is not currently planning to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to four Israeli officials, even though Israel sees Iran’s efforts to create a nuclear weapons program as an existential threat. Targeting nuclear sites, many of which are deep underground, would be hard without U.S. support. President Biden said Wednesday that he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites.

I wonder what the strategy here is, given that the USA also wants to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons. Is the implication here that the USA will not enable an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities as long as Iran doesn't actually try to build a bomb? How confident are Israel and the USA that Iran can't build a bomb in secret? Is there a way Iran could retaliate against an attack on its nuclear facilities but not against an attack on other major targets?

That and the following make me suspect that this is a faked publicity stunt rather than a real prototype.

“The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it,” Nguyen and Ardafiyo write in a document explaining the project. Instead, the students say their goal is to raise awareness that all this isn’t some dystopian future — it’s all possible now with existing technology.

PimEyes doesn't search Facebook. You can try it for yourself. It will show you matching faces for free, but you have to pay to find out where it found them.

a Ghost Robotics Vision 60 Quadrupedal-Unmanned Ground Vehicle, or Q-UGV, armed with what appears to be an AR-15/M16-pattern rifle on rotating turret undergoing "rehearsals" at the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center in Saudi Arabia

They're not being used in combat.

With that aside, I appear to be the only one here who thinks this is a great idea. AI can make mistakes, but the goal isn't perfection. It's just to make fewer mistakes than a human soldier does. (Or at least fewer mistakes than a bomb does, which is really easy.)

Plus, automation can address the problem Western countries have with unconventional warfare, which is that Western armies are much less willing to have soldiers die than their opponents are. Sufficiently determined guerrillas who can tolerate high losses can inflict slow but steady losses on Western armies until the Western will to fight is exhausted. If robots can take the place of human infantry, the advantage shifts back from guerrillas to countries with high-tech manufacturing capability.

I have not come across facial recognition software that contains Facebook pictures in its database. I don't mean to be creepy, but I'm curious about which software you're referring to.

Wow, I think that's a modified DShK, which entered service in 1938. It's not a museum piece - these guns are still in widespread use.

You can plug the body back on for the next time.

What do you mean? Are you reconnecting two halves of a cut tube of toothpaste somehow?