Why aren’t we using them everywhere?

Because it’s going to take time to get regulatory approval.

Government is a slow process. Years will be spent gathering data, addressing public concerns, carefully evaluating regulations, etc.

Only after the process is complete and regulations are in place will fully autonomous vehicles be allowed outside their current test cities.

China is already ahead of the US with this regulatory framework.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/08/08/tech/baidu-robotaxi-permits-china/index.html

We have driverless taxis in active use in a small number of cities around the world.

My feeling is that most of the current hurdles are regulatory. Government regulation takes years to develop and implement.

People are willing to accept 10s of thousands of human caused vehicle deaths per year. Just in the US.

They demand perfection from autonomous vehicles.

Yes, there is a line that can be crossed, and I would expect AI to be held to the exact same line as a human.

If the art is substantially different, it should not matter what training data was used,

As for appreciation: that is up to the beholder. It’s not something that should be legislated.

People like to think they are good.

Even in a dystopia, the wealthy would want to be able to claim they took care of the poor, unfortunate, dispossessed.

The genocide option is more likely if climate change disrupts global food supplies before technology takes vertical farming to scale.

They want attribution, which would lead to royalties, on all art used as training material.

Which is not how it works with human artists. We, as humans, learn from others and use that knowledge to develop our own way of doing things. A human artist does not assign attribute to every other artist he learned from or was inspired by.

I think we’ll have an economic collapse caused by automation destroying jobs.

Society will stratify into a very small number of insanely wealthy, a small working class, and a very large number of unemployed poor.

Post scarcity will be the very small number of insanely wealthy as the new social structure solidifies into a feudal society and the unemployed poor are discouraged from reproducing.

Most of the tech we have today was sci-fi when I was a kid.

Hell, today’s smartphones and tablets are way better than the equivalent tech on Star Trek.

Our minds are not magic black boxes that operate outside of science, we will figure out how they work down to the smallest detail.

Lets take a look at a few scenarios, to help you see.

1. There is no non-destructive upload. The transferred consciousness is the only surviving consciousness.
2. Cryogenic preservation of the original body until a future point in time where the various consciousnesses can be merged into a healthy biological body. Should they so choose.
3. Individual replacement of synapses - e.g. Ship of Theseus

All you are doing is describing very complex hardware.

Hardware that we are already mapping and interfacing with.

The new tax makes owning an older vehicle less cost efficient than buying a newer vehicle.

The real answer is not the fee itself.

It’s the strong encouragement the fee incites to switch to electric vehicles.

They should invest the money into energy companies.

I hear they are paying great dividends.

Side benefit: seats on the boards of the energy companies.

Old water pumped out, new water pumped in.

Used to live on a Navy base where this was being done.

This is akin to pointing at one black drug dealer and saying all blacks are criminals.

Neither it true, and you should not judge an entire category of people by the actions of a handful of individuals.

Most federal employees would be horrified at the prospect of taking a bribe.

Democracy allows for the freedom to vote whoever you want into power.

If the people of the state agree with the current leadership, then Democracy is working as intended.

It would.

A comet is basically just a large chunk of water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia.

By definition, there is no prediction of what is on the other side of a singularity.

You could just as easily see the extinction of the human race.

Natural human communication is horribly imprecise when designing anything.

Blueprints, flowcharts, artist renditions, etc. are all tools for telling the builders what to build and how it should look.

Autonomous coding will replace the builders.

You still have to precisely explain what you want done.

Higher level engineers tell coders what to code, but don’t write much code themselves.

Automation will replace most of the coders, but it won’t replace the people telling them what to build.

Go look it up yourself, you certainly won't believe anything I link.

And might be somewhat high maintenance.

The whole point, there has been verification.

The no longer existing islands have been found. The Inuit villages have been found.

And there was absolutely no way either people could have guessed. They remembered mostly accurate information through thousands of years of oral history.

You can be as skeptical as you want, it doesn’t change well documented facts.