I'm grateful that I spent a significant part of my life forced to solve problems and forced to struggle to produce the right words. In hindsight I know that that's where all the learning was. If I'd had a shortcut machine when I was young I'd have used it all the time, learned much less, and grown up dependent on it.
I'd argue that choosing words is a key skill because language is one of our tools for examining ideas and linking together parts of our brains in new ways.
Even just writing notes you'll never refer to again, you're making yourself codify vaguer ideas or impressions, test assumptions, and then compress the concept for later. It's an new external information channel between different regions of your head which seems to provide value.
Eh 1953 was more about what’s going to happen to the people left behind, e.g. Childhood’s End. The vast majority of people will be better off having the market-winning AI tell them what to do.
Or how about that vast majority gets a decent education and higher standard of living so they can spend time learning and thinking on their own? You and a lot of folks seem to take for granted our unjust economy and its consequences, when we could easily change it.
How is that relevant? You can give whatever support you like to humans, but machine learning is doing the same thing in general cognition that it has done in every competitive game. It doesn't matter how much education the humans get - if they try to make complex decisions using their brain then, silicon will outperform them at planning to achieve desirable outcomes. Material prosperity is a desirable outcome, machines will be able to plot a better path to it than some trained monkey. The only question is how long it'll take to resolve the engineering challenges.
There are some facts which makes it not outside the realm of possibility. Like computers being better at chess and go and giving directions to places or doing puzzles. (The picture-on-cardboard variety.)
If people are feeling entitled to a certain pace of spectacle and action as they write off everything in between as virtueless boredom, that's more damaging to the culture than a certain percentage simply no longer watching movies. That's how we get Netflix dumbing down their movies for everyone. There's nuance and value to a scene you may not immediately and consciously notice. And on a more meta level, pacing contributes to the overall experience of a movie even if there's not necessarily important subtext to a given scene that doesn't have action or explicit plot development.
Exactly. This is the holy grail of advertising. Seamless and undisclosed. That, and replacing vast amounts of labor, are some of the only uses that justify the level of investment in LLM AI.
It sounds like the Walmart approach has two fewer middlemen, which sounds nice to me. Walmart's interests are aligned with ours here. Whatever profit they have to give up as payment overhead will be passed along to us as higher prices.
I was asked for a web app for two business users to be able to create arbitrary/flexible data driven rule sets through a custom UI. I quickly gave them a "temporary" Django admin app where they could upload Excel spreadsheets representing the actual data use cases they had. They were ecstatic and never needed the fuller system they specced.
Geopolitics aside, tech dependence in general has tipped from net helping us to hurting us. AI dependence is going to make social media dependence look like nothing.
Big Tech is trying to push forward a model in which technicians use LLMs without understanding them. That's where all these "you don't need to learn coding" PRs converge towards.
That would be a nightmare scenario for almost everybody involved, but it's exactly the one in which the Trump admin believes and invests, and it is a possible future.
I was gifted $250 pro airpods that stopped working after a few months, and then the replacements they gave me stopped working again after a few months. I went back to using the $10 wired earbuds that have always worked fine.
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