Opinion: Bad Things Will Happen When The Ai Sentience Debate Goes Mainstream

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto) TikTok owner ByteDance is preparing to sue the US government now that President Biden has signed into law a bill that will ban TikTok in the US if its Chinese owner doesn't sell the company within 270 days. While it's impossible to predict the outcome with certainty, law professors speaking to Ars believe that ByteDance will have a strong First Amendment case in its lawsuit against the US. One reason for this belief is that just a few months ago, a US District Court judge blocked a Montana state law that attempted to ban TikTok.

Enlarge / A DOS prompt. Microsoft has open-sourced another bit of computing history this week: The company teamed up with IBM to release the source code of 1988's MS-DOS 4.00, a version better known for its unpopularity, bugginess, and convoluted development history than its utility as a computer operating system. The MS-DOS 4.00 code is available on Microsoft's MS-DOS GitHub page along with versions 1.25 and 2.0, which Microsoft open-sourced in cooperation with the Computer History Museum back in 2014.

Enlarge / A 2014 Tesla Model S driving on Autopilot rear-ended a Culver City fire truck that was parked in the high-occupancy vehicle lane on Interstate 405. (credit: Culver City Firefighters Local 1927 / Facebook) Tesla's lousy week continues. On Tuesday, the electric car maker posted its quarterly results showing precipitous falls in sales and profitability.

Enlarge / The slide-on Joy-Con connection point shown in the center of the image may be a thing of the past on the Switch 2 The iconic slide-in "click" of the Switch Joy-Cons may be replaced with a magnetic attachment mechanism in the Switch 2, according to a report from Spanish-language gaming news site Vandal. The site notes that this new design could make direct Switch 2 backward compatibility with existing Switch Joy-Cons "difficult." Even so, we can envision some sort of optional magnetic shim that could make older Joy-Cons attachable with the new system's magnetic connection points.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Jeffrey Greenberg) The Food and Drug Administration reported late Thursday that about 20 percent of retail milk samples from around the country tested positive for genetic fragments of the bird flu, aka highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus H5N1. While retail milk is still considered to be safe, the finding suggests that the spread of the virus in cows is more extensive than is currently known. The FDA used a test called quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), which can only detect the presence of genetic fragments.

Enlarge / A newly revealed research proposal from 1971 shows that Richard Nixon’s science advisors embarked on an extensive analysis of the potential risks of climate change. (credit: Oliver Atkins/National Archives) In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with Inside Climate News. The plan would have established six global and 10 regional monitoring stations in remote locations to collect data on carbon dioxide, solar radiation, aerosols and other factors that exert influence on the atmosphere.