No, but AIs will be able to generate a statistically accurate simulacrum of a set of people like us.

I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making the data available to your brain for pattern recognition. Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.

So, yeah—education reminds you that you might be wrong, while memorizing things gives you a tool to prove yourself wrong.

Yeah—“job creation” only makes sense in the timeframe of making incremental changes to industry to adjust to changes in the labor pool. On the timeframe of decisions that alter future demographics, “job creation” is a distorted and detrimental lens.

Only if you ignore the opportunity cost—i.e., the number of terrestrial jobs that could have been created with the same investment.

Nice try, FBI stylometric profiler.

Ones I haven’t seen mentioned so far:

• Rashomon
• Dr. Strangelove
• Princess Mononoke
• Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers
• Ran

Private health insurance.

Two likely possibilities:

• They’re tuning out the social aspects of the situation enough that the DMN can disengage, or
• They’re so habituated to the task that they no longer need to consciously think about it (what OP calls “muscle memory”).

Or in theory, they might have learned the skill in such a way that the DMN can do it without the FPN—like if they treat it as a form of storytelling.

We have two distinct brain networks whose activity is mutually exclusive: the default mode network (DMN) and the frontoparietal network (FPN, AKA central executive or task positive network). The DMN handles social relationships (among other things), while the FPN handles complex problem-solving—so if you’re engaged in what your brain thinks is a social interaction, it activates the DMN and deactivates the FPN.

Depends on whether you see the primary function of houses as housing people, or as providing their owners with a competitive return on investment.

We can’t do both at once.

Shotcut?

“Inspire” literally means “to breathe in”.

And that’s the problem: they don’t inspire me, but we must inspire them.

I don’t have a thermostat, but I have indoor and outdoor temp and humidity sensors, and a window position sensor. HA notifies me (via lighting color) if I should open the window because the outdoor conditions are better than indoors, or vice versa.

In the sense that both words derive from a Latin root meaning “to separate”.

Civil disobedience can overlap with both direct action and protest. But that’s my point: we were only ever taught about the latter.

One misconception I had about civil disobedience from what I’d learned in school is that it’s a reliable means of drawing attention to your cause: your willingness to expose yourself to legal consequences will communicate to the public how critical you consider the issue to be.

What I learned from witnessing it first-hand is that officials and the media will invent their own narratives about your actions out of whole cloth, and the statement the public thinks you’re making may bear no relation to your intentions.

For over three billion years, all we know of the evolution of life is from the chemical signatures it left behind, and from the genetic information of the surviving descendants. From that we can conclude that all current life arose from a common origin roughly coinciding with the first chemical signatures of living activity, and the most parsimonious explanation is that life arose on earth only once. But it’s also plausible that some of that early chemical activity was produced by forms of life that arose independently, but were displaced by ours before the emergence of multicellular organisms.

Fully-stocked cruise ships.

“ostensibly”

I’ve never heard of that being used to steal a password—for one thing, it wouldn’t reveal the order in which you pressed the keys, so it would still leave n! possibilities (24 possibilities for a 4-digit pin, or 40,320 for an 8-letter password). And in any case, if someone were to examine the keys afterward, it’s more likely they could see which keys you wiped if you just wiped the ones you used (and if you wiped all of them, it would make it easier to steal the password of the next user).

The bigger thing to worry about is a hidden camera recording your key presses—and to counter that, I position my fingers over all the keys I’ll use and then move all my fingers with each press, so it’s harder to see which key was actually pressed.