taneem

From the current state of the art in AI, let us extrapolate that a true "superintelligence" (SI) is inevitable in the future. Maybe not in the next 10 years, but definitely in the next 100.

It is also reasonable to assume that once an SI emerges it will grow exponentially in power and go far beyond our ability to understand. It will assume complete control of the environment around us.

If we assume these things, why would such an SI only emerge on Earth? There are trillions of worlds out there existing for billions of years (and that's just what we know of). How could we possibly think that life, and SIs can emerge only once? It must have emerged in other places too - and so it must have emerged at other times too.

But if an SI has already emerged in our universe, then we must be experiencing reality in a way that is controlled or influenced by the SI. That is - we must be living in a simulation controlled by the SI.

The Fermi Paradox may support this conclusion. We're not seeing any other sign of life and therefore emergence of other SIs, because the simulation is designed that way.

Curious to hear thoughts on this line of thinking.

This is a technical question really. With such deep layoffs, I think a lot of people expected that Twitter would fall apart as a service pretty soon. That hasn't happened, and the site and app, at least to me seems to be running perfectly fine. World Cup coverage has been totally normal.

Could some engineering folks chime in about how this is possible?

Why are home contractors often unreliable? Typical example: a contractor is scheduled to come in on day x, but creates delays and comes later than expected.

From what I've seen, both through personal experience and anecdata, it seems that home contractors are frequently unreliable both with respect to time commitments and quality of work.

I am wondering if this is fundamentally because contractors overbook and over-commit themselves because they can only compete with rates that force them to try and do too many jobs at once.

Or is it something that can be explained other reasons? E.g. - typical contractors simply don't have the background, training or perspective to build completely reliable service levels in their business?