When I lived in India everyone would always tell me how everyone drives so much safer there because they're more aware etc (similar reasoning as we're seeing in this thread), but man, the national crash statistics say otherwise.
Not to mention I lost count of how many dozens of accidents I witnessed in my year there. I've personally been in 3 rickshaw crashes.
I haven't formed an opinion yet, but tangentially, since you hope for the collapse of these orgs, what do you propose we do to incentivize higher quality information sources online?
Wikipedia isn't perfect by any means and I don't read it as often as I used to, but it's still a wealth of information for a huge depth of knowledge, and gets updated regularly by people invested in the topic. So if all these info sources start collapsing when people turn to AI, at a certain point our data sources get stale. And as of right now I don't see what system is replacing that.
Yeah, the more data that comes out on the "AI employment disruption" the more it becomes apparent that AI is just an investor-friendly excuse to do the layoffs they were going to do anyway.
I'm not sure if it's more frustrating or just laughably absurd how often I have experiences like this. Like where an LLM chatbot (mostly Gemini) or other AI tool gives me sample prompts to click and test (so they can show their capabilities, give inspiration etc) and it fails right off the bat.
Out of all things you'd think they'd at least invest some time to run some quality control on the demo options lol.
To your point about automation, I'm increasingly wondering whether the "post-labor economy" would be anywhere near as idealistic as it's typically presented. If people aren't working, they're presumably not paying taxes, and without taxes, there's much less incentive for a government to make choices in the people's best interest.
Or put another way, perhaps there's no representation without taxation.
Strongly disagree with this sentiment. Influence can have a lot of sources, from institutional authority to simply being persuasive, which is distinct from manipulation.
In this context influence and persuasion are being used interchangeably, but persuasion is the act of winning someone over to your point of view, so they understand the topic as you do. It respects their autonomy and acknowledges that people can change their mind when presented with different perspectives. Oftentimes, being likeable (or at least respectable) is a prerequisite for getting someone to listen to you in the first place, so it's a central pillar to being influential.
Manipulation on the other hand, doesn't respect someone's autonomy. It might involve deception, threats, coercion, etc, but it ultimately aims to make someone do something that they don't want to do.
If you're getting a little kid to eat his dinner for instance, persuasion might appeal to his motivations (e.g. having more energy to run faster), while manipulation might look like saying not eating would make his mom sad (guilt tripping), or that he wouldn't get to play with his favorite toy (threat).
Reminds me of when Bjork was protesting the construction of a new hydropower plant in Iceland, when the Director of Iceland's National power company (behind the project) was actually her uncle. I used to be romantically involved with someone in his side of the family and noticed Bjork was conspicuously absent from any family gatherings he hosted, of which there were many.
Is this before or after you account for the initial training impact? Because that would need to be factored in for a good faith calculation here, much as the companies would rather we didn't.
That was my initial opinion, but more recently it's been established that there's quite a bit of a cat and mouse game here – people have come up with elaborate workarounds to avoid getting booted or limited by the platform, while the platforms come up with increasingly sophisticated monitoring to catch them before they win too much.
Though to your point I think these big winners are not representative of most users, who in my experience often think they're beating the system but in reality just don't log their losses very well. The house always wins etc etc.
While some ideas are more obvious than others I always wonder whether the same insights occurred independently (of each other -- excuse the poor choice of words), or if the ideas can all trace their roots back to the same teachings.
Fascinating how much this varies by culture too. People generally have attitudes similar to you in Nordic countries, or even Seattle, but then you go to South American countries, or India, and it feels like everyone talks to everyone all the time.
I've noticed every airport is different, and major airports are usually more likely to have the big fancy looking scanners that help keep the crowd moving along, without taking everything out. Smaller airports seem to have less of that tech and are thus often more of a hassle.
And yet somehow, airport security staff frequently get impatient when people in line ask whether to remove their shoes, laptop, etc. As if the travelers are stupid for asking.
Yeah, I've trekked the Annapurna circuit as well as EBC and was struck by just how much better Annapurna was. And Annapurna isn't exactly unpopular, just way less overrun than EBC and way more scenic
> If you look at his track record, it's hard to explain without resorting to accusations of a humiliation fetish.
It may not have been a nasty name but damn that was brutal.