- LLM adoption varies across the org. Some are heavy users and some less. Some suspicious some less.
Where are we heading? Depends on model/harness capabilities. Likely some sort of mix where some projects will still require expert humans and others will just be vibe coded. How much we lean in that direction - we'll see.
I have no experience with VR boxing but I can tell you there's no comparison between e.g. a tournament Karate match and first person shooters. I never heard about this idea that studying under stress can help you perform in a test...
Judo isn't that healthy either. Many Judo-ka have hurt their backs from the damage accumulated from falls and there are other ways to injure yourself in Judo. If you're looking for those sorts of high stress combat situations you can get that with Karate styles that practice a lot less contact. There's still high pressure but a lot less than full contact fighting where you're just hitting and getting hit all the time. Some chance of injury but it's a lot rarer.
I do agree that getting constantly hit in the head is probably not a good idea (e.g. boxing). If you want the stress of public speaking join Toastmasters or something ;)
The problem isn't that AI can't give good service. The problem is it's going to be intentionally limited in the service it gives and its ability to make decisions.
Every automated service I ever interacted with was built in a way that it would not help you with anything that incurs a cost to the company that built it.
I think frontier models are really good at solving technical problems. So if your support call is "how do I do this with the product" and there is a way to do that then I agree it can be a great experience. At the point where you need to involve the engineering team and maybe get bugs fixed I imagine the AI will push back because the entire reason the AI is there is to solve cost and if it ends up creating bugs or bugging the engineering team it'll start consuming money instead of saving it. It probably could be engineered to do this but the incentives are pretty strong not do that.
For what purpose exactly? So I am a rich AI owner and my goal is to get more land to build another AI data center? And my robots will combat the other AI owner's robot of that land and resources? What sort of trade am I going to be doing with the other AI owners?
That feels a bit silly. I mean anything is possible. Anything is possible even if you take AI out of the picture. All countries are like North Korea and their rulers fight and trade. Or all of earth is government by one oppressive dictator. So far it seems the broader incentives/forces push us in a different direction.
AGI and robotics do potentially change some of the dynamics.
Why should someone richer pay more tax? We all get the same services from the state. So in practice he's probably paying x100 the median but you're saying he should pay x10,000,000. If you include the taxes his companies are paying then it's probably more like x5,000. It's not a given at all why he should be paying that much in the first place. And in fact, it didn't even used to be like that. Capital gains tax is a relatively new concept and even income tax isn't that old.
EDIT:
So supposedly in 2021 Musk paid $12B in taxes (which was an anomaly) and in most years he pays around 455 million federal taxes. There was one year where he took no income and paid no taxes. So the average American probably pays ~10K I would imagine.
I am almost certain (not sure how we can check) that Elon is paying a lot more taxes than the average person. He doesn't get more services for that money. The top 1% income earners pay something like 50% of the total individual's taxes + their companies pay a lot of taxes. He's basically subsidizing any service you're getting from the government.
We tax capital gains less because we want people to invest their money in companies. As I said, we can debate the tax rates, some might argue we should lower the tax on capital gains (double taxation?) some might argue we should raise it. We should absolutely have an evidence based rational discussion on these topics.
There is no economy without customers/consumption. Elon Musk's SPCX are worth zero if nobody wants to send anything to space and nobody can send anything to space if nobody has any money. Debt can fuel consumption to some degree but that has limits. Capital accumulation on its own does not impact the economy. You can put the number $10000000T against Elon's name and it will not change the economy at all. What changes the economy is how this money is deployed. Economies are not zero sum games and money is not a fixed quantity. That's not to say this is meaningless but it also doesn't mean that Elon now has your dollars.
Presumably Elon can borrow a lot of money against his paper money. That would be more typical than trying to liquidate. But yes, there is no way he can actually fully cash out on his net wealth, and he probably wouldn't even know what to do with it if he could.
What matters isn't Elon Musk (or any other person's) net worth. What matters is how this money is being deployed. If Elon has $1T in his basement and he's not doing things with this money then the net outcome is the removal of this money from the economy which is deflationary - makes your money go farther. If Elon invests it in things that produce broader value (e.g. create jobs, improve productivity, etc.) then it can be a net positive. It's not about the amount- it's about how it is deployed. One rich person (or country e.g.) can be your "oppressor" (more likely in non-democratic countries) and another could be your benefactor.
Making money is the incentive we have in capitalism for individuals to create value. Capitalism isn't perfect but it's the best system we know of. In systems where we don't allow people to become rich (in theory) we typically produce less value and end up with most of the value concentrated into one dictator (e.g. Russia, China, Saudi Arabia). We can argue about taxation etc. but fundamentally this is the system that has proved to be the best for everyone. We can argue about checks and balances as well but again in practice having rich people and western democracy correlates with better outcomes for everyone historically. If you propose we get rid of this system you need to make a reasonable argument for an alternative that is better. If you're arguing that life isn't always fair and luck plays a role- well yeah.
Clearly my example didn't resonate but in my mind there is no difference between me using my capital in my business and me using my capital in other people's business. A passive index investment is me using my capital in the broader economy. So I am a bricklayer. I take my capital. I give it someone to design a brick laying machine. Or I am a bricklayer. I take my capital. I invest in the S&P 500. When I have the brick laying design I go to someone with more money and negotiate them funding my brick laying machine company. Those are all capital gains. Where is that imaginary line? pg specifically talked about startup founders.
Capitalism isn't perfect but it's the best system we have. We need to educate people better about how it works and we need to regulate it so it's not abused. But capital gains, or interest, are "earned". They are also taxed, and when those taxes are used for the right goals by the government, result in improving things for everyone.
So if I'm a brick layer and I decide to innovate and build a machine that can lay bricks faster and cheaper, and I hire people to help me do that, suddenly I've not actually earned anything? If I'm a farmer and I use a horse and a plow to plow my field instead of with my bare hands then I've not earned anything? Putting your capital towards these things is absolutely "earning" and the modern economy is just a generalization of that which enables capital and need to find each other more readily.
We should all go back to being hunter-gatherers? Or how do you propose this is going to work?
I completely agree but cost conversations are difficult to have in most orgs especially when some of the costs are hard to measure (e.g. hiring, future time investments etc.). The goal of every (commercial anyways) software is to deliver maximum value at minimum cost.
In an existing system some combination of these attributes:
- High quality (e.g. low number of issues hit by customers, resilient to failures, efficient, secure etc.)
- Easy to maintain (well organized, broken down in a sensible way into components or layers)
- Easy to extend/adapt to future requirements (i.e. the designer was able to anticipate the likely direction of the system and account for that in the design)
Automated testing feels a bit orthogonal to me but a system that is easy to test is likely one with a better architecture. It's not strictly part of what I'd call architecture.
Less different technologies - YES!
Runs on fewer machines is a sign of an efficient/performant design. Less well designed systems exhibit bloat that is often made up for by running on more machines.
The problem is that bad architecture can be carried forward for a very long time at increasing cost.
The ability to differentiate good and bad architectures seems to be a lost art because to build this ability you need to have enough experience (e.g. the discussion in "The Mythical Man-Month"). Most software developers today have had no experience designing even a single system and many systems are often a random assortment of stuff thrown together by people without enough experience. What I call the "sort of works" architecture. It has big gaps but it sort of works and so there is continuous investment in trying to make it good, which is often a waste of time. You've lumped a bunch of stuff together to build something and now you're stuck with it.
AI as it is right now is probably a driver to make this worse because it makes it so much easier to throw random stuff together.