True, their impact on daily life isn’t necessarily obvious if you’re living in a superpower protected by its nuclear umbrella (someone in Ukraine might feel differently).
Is nuclear deterrence actually still a thing at all? Has any conflict in the past quarter century or so played out any differently than would have if on 1 January 2000 aliens had permanently taken away humanity's ability to use nuclear weapons?
> Imprisoning someone for one year in the USA costs in the order of 100,000 dollars
There surely must be some way to decrease that by *at least* a factor of 4 or so, possibly by an order of magnitude, if we wanted to? (The poverty line for a 8-person household in the contiguous US in 2025 is $54,150.) Surely that might involve treating prisoners in rather questionable ways, but still way less questionable than f---ing killing them, IMO.
Another objection I have is that [waaay too many things are considered crimes that shouldn't be](https://archive.org/details/threefeloniesday0000silv) -- what fraction of people in prison are there for reasons comparable to any of your examples?
And then some people felt like they still wanted to do research on what the original ambition of AI had been, and wanted a term that'd distinguish them from all the other people who said they were doing "AI".
And then at some point all the latter people switched to saying "machine learning" instead.
1 is irrelevant to autotrophs (e.g. cyanobacteria), who can synthesize their own food from achiral CO2 using sunlight; 2 is pretty much guaranteed if it's the only mirror life form in the ecosystem; 3 is obvious if it's the mirror image of an already existing life form; and it doesn't have to do 4 and 5 to achieve 6 (even a mirror cyanobacterium not otherwise interacting with non-mirror life would keep replicating and replicating exponentially until the biosphere runs out of CO2 or whichever other achiral nutrient turns out to be the limiting factor)