I saw a slghtly odd youtube video by a small creator who thinks it was at least partly because the gods stopped talking to people.
No, hear me out.
Obviously they weren't real, but the Youtuber said (based on sources) people used to talk to the gods, like you might talk to a cat. And the gods spoke back (and we all know cat owners who insist the cat is replying).
As societies became more sophisticated, this stopped. Around the time of the collapse, rulers complained that the gods were silent. The usual interpretation is that the gods did not help, but what if they literally stopped "hearing" the god's replies?
You couldn't have a conversation with Zeus in the town square anymore without people saying you were nuts, unless you were a ruler. But the sophisticated, skeptical societies also became fractured and disloyal (especially when only their rulers were arguing with Zeus over why the peasants weren't taking them seriously), and social institutions (which were stuck in the past) couldn't keep up.
Now do maternal death rate. Like I said, a good place to have cancer but they aren't good at stuff that matters.
The US leans aggressive on tests and heroic end of life care. I doubt you really disagree (except maybe on whether you think it's the right call). That is where the money is, since the insurance company can be forced to pay. It's kind of good for the rest of the world though if the US wants to pay (in both money and other issues) to be early adoptors.
Read "When doctors die", the US is the total opposite - everything goes to the big ticket aggressive (and yes, modern and cutting edge) treatment where it's hitting diminishing returns. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6179868/
The US healthcare system just upsells on unnessessary crap. It's junk volume or at best it's heroic high tech solutions mostly making up for the fact that people stay away from hospitals until it's too late.
Life expectancy shows that while the US is the best place to have stage 4 cancer, it's probably not the best place overall. Most places do the 80/20 stuff better.
But yeah, you are right that the US does some stuff well. Just not efficiently.
Everyone is gonna say nurses are underpaid. It's a caring, female dominated profession, it's a motherlove sentiment. And they are not paid as well as doctors.
Yeah, most pink / blue collar workers in the US are badly underpaid, but IIRC ones in the health sector are some of the best off, relative to medium salaries.
Compare teachers and nurses. In most countries they make about the same AFAIK (and I'd say nurses do deserve more, telling a parent Billy did badly on a math test has got to be easier than explaining a bad medical test). But in the US it's about 75k vs 95k. There's a huge premium for working in health in the USA, EVEN in the underpaid blue collar end.
Doctors make out even better in the US, and the c suite in health can have salaries that are just insane.
And the US also pays a TON of tax dollars to a broken, overregulated system.
IIRC if you look at the cost of Medicaide, Medicare, VA, and other federal and state spending it's the same as most other countries per capita or as a percent of GDP. The US taxpayer pays about as much as Canadians to fund their public system, then pays the same amount again for private cover since it's not universal.
No I'm not making a typo. Medicare, Medicaide, and the US system is such a rip off that per capita Americans are paying similar tax dollars to their joke of a public system.
But no one wants to fix it. US doctors are overpaid. US nurses are over paid. Dug companies. Admin. Lawyers. Everyone who makes the system work, and everyone who makes the system a mess are paid a fortune for it.
Individual gains from llm seem much larger than net productivity increases. I think a major source of this discrepency is people creating more work for their coworkers at the speed of slop. Especially the people with no idea.
"I did a Chat output, please fix and review it " is the kind of thing that empowers the people who used to have a minimal productivity, and now lets them to wreck things on an industrial scale.
As an Australian it's hilarious to hear that. We have less than 10% the density of the USA. And yeah, we blame everything on density too, even though 90% of the country is a desert with noone in it (so no need to lay cable or build roads there), and we are one of the most urbanised countries in the word (IIRC most of the population lives in 3 cities).
If you know what you are doing it is a power tool.
If you don't know what you are doing it's also a power tool - if you measure a lot of devs then the bad ones (or anyone having a bad day, or the wrong fit for a project) can make work for everyone else at an outrageous pace.
Partly the jank is just a cost thing. Even major studios struggle with branching and merging stateful quest lines in game. I guess From picked a system that is cheap, robust, but kind of annoying for players, who forgive it because they otherwise love the game.
To some extent it's a design decision maybe. From makes games that are harsh and unforgiving, but not too harsh - you can mess up bits of quests but not end up unable to get an ending (afaik) which kind of matches the gameplay (harsh but not rage-quit inducing).
It's hard and expensive to do branching games. Most games just fake it with a "branch and merge" system (save Carley or Doug, but the one you save is still going to leave the party forever in 20 minutes).
Fromsoft wants to do major seperate quest lines, so they have to cut corners elsewhere. I guess they choose a robust system that is sometimes annoying for the player.
IMO the WORST thing you can use chat for is advice in a field you are unfamiliar with. It's way better at search and grunt work when you already know what you want.
All IMO:
Syncophancy (and in extreme cases AI psychosis) is a huge problem when you take advice from AI.
It's risky to learn a new field as you often just fall for a superficial, glib explaination and just nod along without learning. AI will do that because humans will train it to - everyone likes a pop science style easy and fake explaination.
OTOH if you just want advice, the AI will need context. Advice is worthless without context. And the AI will use the context to tell you what the dumb human (you) will agree with - that's implicitly what humans want it to do, it's how we will train the AI.
I don't see it getting better either - as long as a human in the loop fine tunes the AI, the smarter the AI the better it is at telling the human what the human wants.
Scary stuff if a major current use of AI is self help.
Banning all technology because someone might misuse it is an illogical extreme.
As far as I can tell the ruling is more nuanced. If AI is defaming you, there needs to be a way to correct the record.
A company being open to liability does not mean it is always liable, just that it can be if it really messes up (especially if there are aggravating circumstances, e.g. you need to drag them to court to issue a correction).
You can draw a line somewhere. Peole argue against conciousness by constructing (deliberately or not) an example where the line is drawn in a silly place.
No, hear me out.
Obviously they weren't real, but the Youtuber said (based on sources) people used to talk to the gods, like you might talk to a cat. And the gods spoke back (and we all know cat owners who insist the cat is replying).
As societies became more sophisticated, this stopped. Around the time of the collapse, rulers complained that the gods were silent. The usual interpretation is that the gods did not help, but what if they literally stopped "hearing" the god's replies?
You couldn't have a conversation with Zeus in the town square anymore without people saying you were nuts, unless you were a ruler. But the sophisticated, skeptical societies also became fractured and disloyal (especially when only their rulers were arguing with Zeus over why the peasants weren't taking them seriously), and social institutions (which were stuck in the past) couldn't keep up.