521–530 of 607 posts
The interesting question of course is what paradigm shifts may be enabled by AI? Certainly all the use case emphasis so far has been on automation, whether that's businesses using agentic workflows to replace manual ones, or agentic coding tools to automate the coding (and to much less degree software engineering) process. So far it's all mechanical horses.
For example, maybe (I don't see it, but maybe) the need for software goes away entirely since it's just an intermediary to getting something done. What if the AI can just do things for you directly, given specific instructions? Rather than giving detailed instructions to an AI to help you code some software, you (or someone/something) instead just bypass that step and give it detailed instructions to do whatever the software would have been used to accomplish.
As another off the top of my head example, what about healthcare? Are doctors and doctors offices the tellers and banks? We need to advance from brittle LLMs to robust AGI first, but at-home diagnosis and prescription could certainly replace many routine doctors office visits.
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> the value just in the co-opting of another human being's attention? Thats a weird way of describing it. A machine telling me to exercise and eat right will be ignored, even if the advice is correct. A person I trust taking me aside, looking me in the eye and asking me the same would be taken far more seriously.
Maybe for you, but that model clearly doesn’t generalize, or dieticians and physical trainers would only have success stories to point to.
Turning dozens to hundreds of decisions per week for which the correct decision must be made in nearly every case, into a single decision per week for which the correct choice must be made, has proven wildly more effective than any of that (I mean glp-1 agonists).
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> This is garbage hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology. Go on then, how do you decide what people deserve? How do you negotiate with others who disagree with you? > examples above like public libraries I agree! The nice part about all these mechanisms is that they’re voluntary. If you’re suggesting that The Engineer’s actions should be constrained entirely by his own conscience and social pressure, then we agree. No…
You sure seem to know a lot about what people 'deserve' so I'm not sure I can hope to crack the rind of that particular coconut but I will leave you with this: Humans, by virtue of being living, thinking beings deserve lives of fulfillment, dignity, and security. The fact that we have, up until present, been unable (or perhaps unwilling) to achieve this does not mean it's not possible or desirable, only that we have…
You wanting people to have that doesn't mean that people deserve to have that. Fundamentally, no one deserves anything. We, as a species, lived for a hundred thousand years with absolutely nothing except what we could carve off the world by ourselves or with the help of small groups that chose to work with us. Everything else since then is a bonus (or sometimes a malus, but on average a bonus).
Also, as much as it sounds nice to declare such things as goals, deserved or not, it is indeed impossible, and probably not desirable, since, for starters, you can't even define what those things would be like. Those aren't actionable, they're at most occasional consequences of a system that is working to alleviate scarcity of resources.
Unfortunately, we're nowhere near that replicator.
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Oh, so seven /leaderships/ is what's made the difference? If a government did this (e.g., seven independent agencies competing for a moon landing), people would call it "fragmented," "uncoordinated," and "bureaucratic infighting."
Seven independent government agencies are still an arm of the same leadership. When complete organizational separation is introduced, the concerns you speak of go away. In the USA, the ARPA (you might recognize that name from the thing you're using right now) program regularly enables "seven" independent leaders to tackle a problem and this is widely considered a resounding success.
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Who ever said you have the right to a decent a secure life? People don’t universally agree about this. Some of us posit that we will never escape a state of competition for fundamentally scarce resources. And that the organizing principle of a free society should be peaceful coexistence, not mandatory cooperation. You figure out your own economic security, I’ll manage mine.
There are already enough resources that nobody should live in abject insecurity and poverty. Your position is fundamentally morally abhorrent to me. You're saying that your ability to take a little bit more for yourself is more important than a child not having polio, a mother feeding her child, a village having clean water. You are, in short, a tiny little microcosm of why humanity is doomed as a species.
The issues you mentioned are, in the vast majority of cases, caused by the lack of peaceful coexistence to begin with, because as long as me and everyone else is coexisting peacefully, getting more for myself isn't taking anything away from those in the situations you mentioned. Resources might be scarce, but that doesn't mean they're zero sum.
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Isn't it obvious why? We contact support services to fix material problems. 'This booking is wrong.' 'I want a refund for that.' AI systems aren't empowered to solve these problems. At best they can provide information. If the answer is information - the user can likely already find it online themselves (often from a better AI model than they're going to find running your support line). If they're calling, they most…
Do you know that to be true or are you speculating? As we argue on the orange site, companies are paying Sierra AI to integrate voice and text agents into their systems to look up account information and process refunds. Fallbacks to human agents are built in to these systems. We all hate phone trees because they never have the capability to handle exceptions to the most basic functions. We shout "speak to an agent!"…
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Fwiw in places like parts of the midwest housing is below cost of labor and materials. An existing house might be $70k and several bedrooms at that. You just can’t get anything built for that even if you build it all yourself.
I intended to make a weaker claim of ‘in general long run / maintainable’ circumstances and should have done so. Many low cost areas have bad crime problems, there is another little phenomenon where the wealthy by doing a poor job in governance can increase the price of their assets by making alternative assets (lower cost housing) less desirable due to the increase in crime.
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The Nordic model depends on sitting on an ocean of oil. > No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy. See Bernie Sanders! Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).
Maybe you should choose your words more carefully, Walter Bright. To eviscerate means to disembowel. Nobody is pushing to physically hurt the rich. But people are upset that their standards of living are declining while every opportunity to give more money to the rich is executed. Bernie Sanders asked for taxing the rich and the corporations. Taxing someone does not mean disembowel.
For example, do you remember when AOC proudly wore a dress with the words "Eat the rich" emblazoned on it? Nobody accused her of suggesting cannibalism.
Bernie Sanders has frequently stated that billionaires should not exist. He used to excoriate millionaires, until he became one himself.
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> My prediction is no, because productivity gains must benefit the lower classes to see a multiplier in the economy. Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable. The problem with services is that they're typically resistant to productiv…
"Baumol's cost disease hurts the lower classes by restricting their access to services like health care and education, and LLMs/agents make it possible to increase productivity in these areas in ways which were once unimaginable." You've expressed very clearly what LLMs would have to do in order to be economically transformative. "If you can get high quality medical advice for effectively nothing, if you can get high…