We'll have won politics the day people understand that individual responsibility doesn't work at scale, and that, on average, people just respond to incentives.
You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
> Developments to the model architecture contribute to the significantly improved performance from previous model families.
I wonder how significant this is. DeepMind was always more research-oriented that OpenAI, which mostly scaled things up. They may have come up with a significantly better architecture (Transformer MoE still leaves a lot of room).
While "quality of life first" remains true in spirit for a lot of French people, this hasn't been supported politically since 2000 (when legal weekly work time was reduced to 35 hours - many people do more but they are compensated for it). And even that law was an exception. In truth, France has taken the neoliberal turn of the 80s almost as much as other countries, and growth and competitiveness has been the only mantra of governments for 40 years. We're mostly protected by laws passed before the 50s.
How do you (especially Europeans) understand this move from Russia? Can it really sustain a war against us? Does it want to break NATO by proving the US won't move?
On this, read Daniel Susskind - A world without work (2020). He says exactly this: the new tasks created by AI can in good part themselves be done by AI, if not as soon as they appear then a few years of improvement later. This will inevitably affect the job market and the relative importance of capital and labor in the economy. Unchecked, this will worsen inequalities and create social unrest. His solution will not please everyone: Big State. Higher taxes and higher redistribution, in particular in the form of conditional basic income (he says universal isn't practically feasible, like what do you do with new migrants).
Fossil (in particular coal) thermal plants that were planned for shutdown are being kept online or restarted because of AI energy use. Tech had a pretty minor environmental footprint until now but it's growing rapidly due to AI, for use cases that are clearly not vital and for a good part garbage.
An idea I had is organizing week-ends in big houses with maybe 30 strangers of similar age. You make them have a great time, and afterwards you invite them to indicate the people they really liked. Over time you can make them see each other again and maybe do some recommendation engine to guess who in the community they will like but still haven't met.
The problem is that fossile fuel companies (and other polluting industries) don't just answer an existing demand but also influence on that demand: they lobby against environmental regulation, run influence campaigns against climate science, use greenwashing, etc. Those companies and their shareholders can't be taken out of the equation as they're not neutral.