Alternate question: who actually likes disaster movies? They’re terrible.

So I finally got around to reading that terrifying article about the impending Pacific Northwest earthquake from The New Yorker, and how can these sort of comforting thoughts not raise some questions?

In fact, the science is robust, and one of the chief scientists behind it is Chris Goldfinger. Thanks to work done by him and his colleagues, we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten. Even those numbers do not fully reflect the danger—or, more to the point, how unprepared the Pacific Northwest is to face it.

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Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. FEMA calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.

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“Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

The part about the odds makes the reality of this particularly sobering. If those are firm numbers, and we are to the point of using phrases like, “when, not if,” and governments are historically bad at preparing properly for these things, what is a resident of Seattle or Portland to do?

You know a disaster is coming at some point in the next 50 years — and when it does, it is going to be catastrophic, and the odds are that something terrible will happen to you personally, and merely ‘being prepared’ is not enough to save you from some level of tragedy.

Assuming every passing day or month, the odds are ever so slightly higher that this will be it, what finally gets you to leave?

How long do you stay and enjoy the life you have in the city you love and gamble with your life?

Do you convince your friends and family to leave when you do? Do you stay if they won’t leave?

Hopefully no killer robots travel back from the future to prevent said ban.

And now for the flip side of the robots-replacing-humans coin. Not that I was going for an AI theme this week, but as it turns out, the world’s top AI scientists proposed an international ban on AI-controlled offensive weapons.

The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and professor Stephen Hawking along with 1,000 AI and robotics researchers.

The letter states: “AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of [autonomous weapons] is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

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Should one military power start developing systems capable of selecting targets and operating autonomously without direct human control, it would start an arms race similar to the one for the atom bomb, the authors argue. Unlike nuclear weapons, however, AI requires no specific hard-to-create materials and will be difficult to monitor.

“The endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting,” said the authors.

Time to have all the arguments we’ve had for years now about the ethics of drone warfare, with a new and exciting layer of sci-fi conjecture.

Assuming the nations and corporations of the world all comply, is there any argument against this ban?

If the world can’t agree on an outright ban, what does the new arms race look like?

If AI weapons do move forward, what regulations or limitations would you put in place to prevent disaster — or even apocalypse?

I can’t say why they chose a photo of a cheater looking at wedding photos instead of for a new mistress.

An especially tough ethical question today! Do we have sympathy for the victims of data theft when hackers decide to punish a site like Ashley Madison for making a business out of people cheating on their spouses? Or, as Heather Havrilevsky asks in NYMag, are we throwing stones when our houses (or in this case, our pasts) are made of glass?

As easy as it is to chuckle at a bunch of douche-bag dudes getting outed for cheating, consider for a minute the full scope of ramifications endemic to our new, easily hacked lives. Every last one of us is hopelessly vulnerable to hacking today, thanks to insecure smartphones; insecure databases; absurd, ever-changing, and increasingly invasive Terms of Service; and supposedly benevolent megacorporations that illegally suck private data off unsecured Wi-Fi systems and legally compile private information gleaned from multiple apps to sell it to data brokers like Experian who might, in turn, haplessly sell it to Vietnamese identity-theft crime rings. If that sounds like some kind of Orwellian paranoid fantasy, it may be time to wake up and smell your credit-card numbers hitting the Dark Web.

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This might be a good day for us to rethink our attitudes about the victims of hacking, whether it’s Sony’s Amy Pascal or the married dude next door, because the mob is coming for us, too. Do we really want to live in a world where no one is allowed to make mistakes? Are we arrogant enough to believe that we’ll never screw up? If we do screw up eventually, do we want our future personal failings to be judged and prosecuted by a self-righteous mob who may or may not share our values and ideas about right and wrong?

What rights do cheaters have in your mind, even if you are a person who says they would never, ever cheat?

If the answer is ‘they get what they deserve’, consider instead: what would you do if your most shameful secret was suddenly online?

Is there any scenario in which you, as a person being cheated on, would be able to get over it?

If the person you loved did it once, regretted it, and would almost certainly never do it again, would you want to know, or be better off never knowing?

Back to work, lazy emotions.

An interesting thought on the through-line that ties together all the great Pixar films of the last couple decades, from The Awl:

The basic Pixar story is that of an individual seeking to establish, refine, or preserve their function as an instrument within a system of labor. The only way Pixar is able to conceptualize a protagonist is to assign them a job (or a conspicuous lack of one) and arrange the mechanisms of plot to ensure that they fulfill that job. This is why Joy can only accept Sadness once she comes to understand what it is she does.

Pixar’s debut film organized a scenario involving sentient toys as a narrative about two men fighting for the same job. In not one but two sequels, it revisited those same characters in a narrative about how bad retirement is, and how awful it is to be made redundant. In Monsters, Inc., it developed a parallel universe populated by monsters and powered by childrens’ screams to tell a story about a workplace duo striving to be the most efficient employees. Up is ultimately a film about how unthinkable it is to retire; even elderly widowers must find a new vocation. In film after film, Pixar presents narratives chiefly concerned with characters trying to be the best at what they do, or otherwise prove their usefulness.

Does this change how you think of your favorite Pixar films?

Is there another, better unifying theme to the Pixar catalogue?

Is this a good, healthy thing for kids’ movies to be saying, or a strange and troubling thing to be teaching them?

Also rising: awkward mornings after.

A seemingly depressing statistic about young adults’ living situation comes from Fusion, who say:

The never-ending sleep-over continued in 2014: the share of 25-34 year-olds living with their parents increased again last year, new Census data show.

The overall ratio for this group climbed to 14.7% from 13.9%.

Here’s the chart, which is broken down by gender. Interestingly, the share of 18-24 year-olds who are living at home continued to decline, to 54.9% from 55.3%, which likely reflects extended schooling for this group.

As a non-homebound adult, my heart goes out to these souls whose growth has been stunted by lack of opportunity in the modern work force. But if the situation is this dire, considerations must be made.

If you have to live at home as an adult, what rules would you impose to stay sane while still living with your parents?

Are there unexpected benefits beyond saving on room and board? What are the biggest drawbacks?

How will living at home that much longer end up affecting this generation, for better or worse?