A good article about a genuinely great and important book. One quibble.
> Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire.
I don't think they think that. People this powerful who choose to surround themselves with fawning sycophants are undoubtably being told daily that the whole world is understanding and routing for them in their "perfectly reasonable response to these vicious attacks."
Said experts do not seem to have included this core analysis in the report.
Since housing starts are more likely in areas seeing rapid housing price appreciation, and construction employs many illegal workers, you could make just as strong of a case that increased housing costs drive unauthorized migration rather than the other way around.
That's why it's so hard, and so important, to disentangle correlation and causation.
However, they seem to simply assert causality. It would seem far more likely that people (illegal or not) move to areas experiencing economic booms that, among other things, is push up home prices.
Palantir is clearly a mind-boggling on-the-nose, but terrible name to those familiar with the book.
The Palantiri consistently provided their users technically accurate intelligence that lead to disastrous strategic decisions.
Denethor committed suicide out of despair, after a palantir showed him the black fleet approaching, but he did not know that it was actually Aragorn who had captured the fleet and was coming with reinforcements.
We don't know specifically how the palantir deceived Saruman, but it's pretty clear it was one of the key factors in his corruption and downfall.
And even Sauron himself was misled in this way! The palantir showed him, correctly, that a hobbit and Aragorn were at Helm's Deep, and he concluded that Aragorn had the ring. So he prematurely moved his armies out of Mordor and left the plains and Mt Doom unguarded, which permitted the destruction of the ring.
I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.
The Luddites (or at least their successors) won, and we are lucky that they did.
I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.
If you look at what their actual demands, the pattern is clear. They lobbied for support for unemployed, the right to vote, improved safely and labor conditions across all industries, and enforcing the labor laws that were already on the books. Banning machines was not part of their demands.
The Luddites were part of a larger labor movement that spanned multiple industries.
I think that is the core truth of the matter. Technology itself does not make life better.
I recently published an article about the Luddites. If you look at their actual demands, they were not anti-tech. They were labor activists. Life got much, much worse for most people in the industrial revolution until the laws they advocated were finally implemented.
This will be just another minor cost of doing business unless they are treated like human drivers in at least two other ways.
1) If theses companies get enough points on their license, their license is revoked. Not just for that vehicle, but for all of their vehicles. (The number of points would need to be adjusted for number of miles driven.)
2) Senior executives could be held criminally liable for vehicular manslaughter the way a normal drivers are. A death doesn't mean someone is going to prison, but their would be a police investigation. If an exec decided to ship a product with a known bug that lead to someone's death it should be treated with the same seriousness as a drunk driver killing someone.
I used to be a professional musician, and I can't work if there is any music playing the the background. It drove my ex-wife nuts because she could not stand the silence. We ended up playing background sounds from coffee shops, which worked for both of us.
But recently there is one big exception!
I can listen to AI-generated instrumental jazz or blues in the background, and it does not distract me after the first few seconds. I think it's because the music doesn't go anywhere. It's just kind of noodling.
As a musician, I feel kind of bad listening to AI music, but it is amazing in this use case.
talk is cheap, so what is he doing today to make that happen? Is he supporting NGOs or politicians focused on making this happen, or is he just musing that it would be nice? (I honestly don't know, but I've only seen the non-committal musing.)
There is this ongoing flack in our "billionaire-said-a-thing" news where billionaires imply that their tech will result in huge benefits that will be delivered by someone else once they amass their fortunes.
Musk is the most obvious. He publicly proclaims his mission to create technology that ensures we all live better, healthier lives, while routinely violating labor, safety, and environmental laws and insisting his employees work 60-hour weeks with minimal vacation in order to give him a shot at becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
If you look at their actual demands its clear the the Luddites were not actually opposed to the new technology, but the new business practices.
It's an interesting parallel to AI today, where criticism of the business practices of AI firms tends to be written of as fear of new technology by people who will be "left behind".
> People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?
It's not binary.
People are absolutely willing to sacrifice some of their freedoms to save lives. That's why we have speed limits, seat-belt and helmet laws, automobile safety regulations, DWI laws, etc.
I thought about that as well. It's certainly a concern.
In the end I decided that the concrete benefits from giving Anthropic access to this kind of data outweigh the potential risks. Granted, they might be banking on me making this exact, naieve calculation, but still.
The saving grace of the SP500 and most similar indexes is that they are cap-weighted. So if SpaceX only, floats 5% only that 5% of their capitalization counts for index calculation.
The Nasdaq100 is more complicated. SpaceX's 5% would be counted as about 25% of their total market cap for indexing.
A Multitudes study recently cited in Scientific American showed exactly this.
AI led to not only longer hours overall, but also a shift from development to bug fixing and a 19.6% increase in out-of-hour commits. So longer hours, less interesting tasks, and more weekend work.
> Lukashenka knew that arresting children for eating ice cream would make him a laughingstock abroad. Zuckerberg knows that threatening Wynn-Williams for standing in wooden silence on a stage makes him look like history's most guillotineable billionaire.
I don't think they think that. People this powerful who choose to surround themselves with fawning sycophants are undoubtably being told daily that the whole world is understanding and routing for them in their "perfectly reasonable response to these vicious attacks."