Soon programming will itself require a license. Only government approved individuals will be able to write code. CPUs will only boot software signed by the government.

"Software engineering" is one of the few large practices with 'engineering' in its name that has no mechanism for license granting and revocation for violation of professional standard.

That's not what is happening here, but we might see that happen in our lifetimes. Hopefully before someone writes the software that kills enough people to necessitate licensing, not after (since generally, such outcomes are how licensing comes into being).

You only need the license to work professionally, of course. You don't need a bridge building license to build with Lego.

See? It was never about children. Never fails.

Corporations literally buy the laws they want and Silicon Valley is the newest lobbying monster. Genuinely terrifying.

That's what Washington and Brussels are about: lobbying capitals and buying influence over how laws are made.

Give AI a medical license and all those critical health care jobs will literally disappear overnight.

It would require several breakthroughs in robotics and AI to automate a nurse's job. And then it would still be unlikely that this kind of automation is saving costs.

Job supply trends towards zero. The ultimate logical conclusion of this train of thought is there is no point in keeping the lower classes alive. Why do we need 15 billion humans if they do nothing but burden you with their maintenance costs? Let them die so that the quadrillionaires can enjoy the Earth with their perfect AI workforces catering to their every need.

The future is bleak. If this is the sort of dystopia I can look forward to, then I would rather have AI simply wipe out humanity as a whole.

In Azimov's Robot series the society that chose to live with robots gradually destructed itself by just living longer and not having so many children. The other part of humanity that avoided robots flourished (not without suffering). But that all required new planets for settlement (I am looking at you Elon).

Trying not to spoil a 40+ year old story, but Asimov eventually retconned that the flourishing of humanity was driven by a benevolent AI behind the curtain.

On the plus side: In that particular dystopian future, we may actually need more ditchdiggers for a time so that the dead may be buried.

At some point we're gonna have to abolish the economy itself. We need to transition to a post-scarcity society where everything is abundant and there's no need to economize.

Is AI helping us get there? I don’t think AI has done anything to reduce the scarcity of food, shelter, physical goods—things that people actually use money for

That is the future for significant shareholders, everyone else can starve.

It's the destructiveness that gets me. It's a perfectly good company, employees are happy, consumers are happy, profit is being made, it's sustaining itself... Then they come and just literally destroy all that.

This can't be good for society. I wonder why it's just not criminalized somehow.

> It's a perfectly good company [...] I wonder why it's just not criminalized somehow.

Not-an-expert here, but I think part of the problem is that it's hard to draw a nice legally-enforceable line that would distinguish when it's a "perfectly good" company versus one crying out for intervention.

For example, suppose a company is floundering because of executive mismanagement, outrageous compensation to the C-suite, etc. In that case, someone could LBO in, fix things up, and then sell the revitalized thing later and make a modest profit while improving the world.

It's... less likely, but they could.

And anyone who doesn't support this is obviously a child raping pedophile terrorist.

They don't matter. They'll be outlawed soon enough. Their ultimate objective is to make it illegal for a computer to run unauthorized software. One day they will make it so it's illegal for a computer to boot into a non-government approved operating system.

No doubt. There's some kind of extremely organized conspiracy to erode freedom worldwide by destroying general purpose computing and installing surveillance.

This junk has even showed up in my country. They used the exact same rationalizations. It was an obvious attempt to regulate social media in order to consolidate political power.

The purpose of the law is to surveil adults.

Nobody actually cares about children, they're just political weapons used to justify everything they want to do. Everybody knows only literal child rapists would ever dare to argue against child protection laws.

There is no surveillance in this law - please stop spreading FUD. Some other laws in other places, with similar stated purposes, mandate surveillance.

I'll say it again: the purpose of these laws as a whole is to surveil adults.

Even if this specific law isn't doing that right now, it's quite easy to see how it will eventually. Without surveillance, the law is ineffective. All you need to do is generate some moral outrage at how the children are supposedly bypassing the insecure system and bam, instant scope expansion.

Look at the metagame being played over the long term. It's got nothing to do with children and everything to do with control.

I do not see how adding an age checkbox in the user account creation page leads to mass surveillance.

This isn't enough! We can't trust the self-reported checkbox. The kids just install a system that always reports all accounts as 18+. We must make such systems illegal. How? I dunno, can't we make it so CPUs only run government signed code? Yeah, let's do that! Now the children will be safe!