511–520 of 557 posts
This read like a Philip K. Dick, Ubik-style advertisement for a dystopian future, and I’m pretty amazed it is an actual blog post by a corporate leader in 2025. Maybe Sam and Dario should be nominated for Hugos or something…
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That's just self checkout. Some places, like Ica, have self scanning which works so much better. You just scan the bar code as you pick things up - which is just in one motion as you put things in your bag. No need to unpack as you pay. Yes you do need to be a member to use the system, but that's a very small price to pay for the convenience and speed of avoiding all lines and stress of the regular checkout.
Yeah there's like 15 places in sweden which have this, and it's "the norm"?
“We” are not wondering whether AI can write “a beautifully written novel.” Yes, some people are. Other people know a novel cannot be written by a machine— because a novel is human by definition, and AI is not human, by definition. It’s like wondering if a machine can express heartfelt condolences. Certainly a machine can string words together that humans associate with other humans who express heartfelt condolences,…
> because a novel is human by definition I thought a novel was just a decent length fiction book? The purpose of fiction at least isn't to express true feeling, it's to instill feeling in the reader. To that end it doesn't matter the process that produces the words. Is AI going to win the Pulitzer any time soon? Nah. Is AI going to be able to produce novel length works of fiction that are good enough for at least som…
Anything is good enough if your standards are low.
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You assume there are enough trees on the desertic island to build the ship that will allow us to reach the brave new world full of resources. We don't know that. It seems to be a leap of faith, based on the possibility of numerous successive achievements (IA, then fusion, then robots, then interplanetary mining, etc.) where each new step is always reachable. Like in a video game. Maybe the necessary amount of oil (or…
We have no shortage of energy or matter in the solar system to accomplish these goals. To unlock these resources we need to turn to self replicating machines that can stand up lunar and asteroid mining to build sufficient orbital manufacturing capacity.
If we deplete our oil stocks (even non-conventional) before discovering the multiple replacements we'd need at large scale for logistics, electronics, hardware, healthcare, heavy vehicles and tools, etc. we won't get anywhere close your solar system matter. Maybe we should have rationed it 70 years ago, to give us more time to research the next breakthrough, instead of investing in all the modern life shenanigans like buying dozens of $5 pieces of clothes from Shein or Temu because it make us feel good in the schoolyard or on Instagram. The "trust the science bro, if it's possible we'll make it, let the human genius do its thing" is dangerous.
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Yeah there's like 15 places in sweden which have this, and it's "the norm"?
Sweden is a big country so I could definitely be wrong about how things look across it. However, in the greater Gothenburg area every Ica I've visited has it - that includes everything from big ones in the city and shopping malls to small ones in the suburbs 30km outside the city (where I live).
Going from "a supermarket near my home" to "every single supermarket in sweden" is kinda of a big leap.
Try ICA in Olskroken or Godhemsgatan for example…
I Most supermarkets have self checkout, but even that isn't omnipresent (and it's usually slower).
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Housing prices are being driven up by the fact that we don't build enough housing. That should be the end of the discussion. What you describe is just a symptom of not having enough housing. If we just built more housing then there wouldn't be any business angle for the corporations buying up housing.
Well, why dont we build more housing?
> Scientific progress is the biggest driver of overall progress > There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before Real wages haven’t risen since 1980. Wealth inequality has. Most people have much less political power than they used to as wealth…
>Air quality (no more leaded gasoline)
>Life expectancy
>Cancer survival rates
>Access to information
>Infant mortality
>Violent crime rates across the western world
>Access to education
>Clean water and food for 4+ billion people
>HIV treatment
>etc
The negativity on this site is insane. They will deny the greatest scientific achievements if it lets them dunk on AI or whoever is the enemy of the week.
Some reasoning tokens on this post: >Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp And also: >cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. Which is a meter-worthy resource. So intelligence effect on people's lives is in the order of magnitude of one second of a toaster use each day, in present value. This begs the question: what could you do with a toaster-second say 5 years…
Another way for intelligence to get too cheap to meter is for the cost to fall so low it becomes hyperabundant. If you were to, for instance, take AI2027 as a benchmark and think ultimately we'll achieve something like the equivalent of John von Neumann in a box with a 2T dense equivalent parameter model and it will match such a Nobel prize winner's productivity when running inference at say 15 tokens a second (as fast as people can read) then you only need in principle 60 teraflops of AI infernce compute, which is roughly 2x the current Apple Neural Engine. So plausibly by the time you get to the 2030s, every laptop, smartphone, etc will be easily able to run models as powerful as the smartest people.
Somewhat longer term, I'm sure Altman expects the entire process to be automated and for the computational efficiency to rise significantly. If you take recent estimates from various players in the reversible computing space, you'd guesstimate that you ought to be able to do 60tflops by the late 2030s using under 0.1W or ~1kWh/yr which Helion could produce for ~1¢. I do feel like 1 year of cognitive labor from the smartest person a penny or two renders intelligence too cheap to meter out on a per-hour basis.
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> The regulators managed to invert the learning curve [0] This is conjecture. If you wanted to establish this, you would have to show that cost of (skilled) labor was unchanging or negligible. It is also important to consider that nuclear power deaths/damages are much more localized and traceable than excess deaths from air pollution, and thus much less acceptable to the voting population-- you could argue that this…
Those are constant dollars. Are you claiming that the real cost of labour went up 4- to 8-fold in the nuclear industry? Why did that happen? The median nuclear plant construction worker would be making $240k/annum type wages. And as I recall I've not heard of that sort of wage rise outside a regulatory failure or somewhere like China undergoing a massive economic boom. > It is also important to consider that nuclear…
> Those are constant dollars. Are you claiming that the real cost of labour went up 4- to 8-fold in the nuclear industry?
I'm not saying that is the only effect. But if you want to blame "onerous regulations" for nuclear power being so expensive, then you have to at least put bounds on other factors driving cost (and you also have to show those relaxed regulations would not have led to a significant amount of additional incidents; the current rate of 2 meltdowns for ~500ish reactor sites is already problematic enough).
I personally think that collective standards regarding risk and pollution have risen significantly since the early days of nuclear power, and a lot of things that were done back then would be considered unacceptably reckless/negligient nowadays (=> Hanford became a superfund site for a reason), so claiming that those historical costs are repeatable seems very dubious in the first place to me.
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We have no shortage of energy or matter in the solar system to accomplish these goals. To unlock these resources we need to turn to self replicating machines that can stand up lunar and asteroid mining to build sufficient orbital manufacturing capacity.
You completely ignore the point of my metaphor. Do you have enough trees to build the brig to reach these resources? If we deplete our oil stocks (even non-conventional) before discovering the multiple replacements we'd need at large scale for logistics, electronics, hardware, healthcare, heavy vehicles and tools, etc. we won't get anywhere close your solar system matter. Maybe we should have rationed it 70 years ago…
* 1/3 of the food that we produce is completely wasted.
* 43% of the world's population is overweight and 16% is obese.
* Livestock uses 77% of all agricultural land, yet provides only 18% of global calories and 37% of protein.
* 60% of hydrocarbon production is used for transportation with more than half of that going to personal use.
* The world generates ∼50 million tons of electronic waste per year, but only ∼17% is formally recycled.
There's a lot of slack in the system. We can easily improve the efficiency of society with no material loss and tons of quality of life improvements for people.
We won't. but we could. And the reason we won't is because there isn't really and there won't really be any existential pressure to do so.
So the species at large will keep plodding along as we do, driving from fast food drive-thru to fast food drive thru stuffing cheese burgers into our faces while clever people work to make things like elegant self replicating machines that can colonize the solar system.
This is just how it's gonna go man.