No, stupidity is very general. The statistical association between different areas of ability, which is reified in the concept of IQ, is because people who are bad at one thing are bad at everything. The Stanford-Binet test was developed as a way to measure mental disability, not giftedness.
(Einstein would have had an unexceptional score on an IQ test, had he ever taken one. His schoolteachers thought him destined for failure.)
To put it another way, polymaths are unusual but idiots are everywhere. And people who are outstandingly good at say, computer engineering can be mediocre at philosophy or business administration.
Psychometrists distiguish between crystallized and fluid intelligence. Expertise is a combination of knowledge and ability. But ability itself is multifaceted, and raw talent goes untapped without the motivation to study and the opportunity to work.
For most areas of human endeavor, being smart enough is all that is required. Being a genius helped Albert Einstein reimagine physics, but did not make him a better patent clerk.
Speculation on Trump's use of GLP-1 receptor agonists is beneath the impeccably right-wing Economist. But clearly it would be too little too late to arrest his mental decline. He is too many cheeseburgers in.
The US is high-trust for insiders (rich white people). We allowed Donald Trump to loot the richest and most powerful society in history by imagining that he would follow the example of previous presidents instead of seeing him for the sociopathic con man that he has always been.
Conversely, the US is zero-trust for outsiders such as foreigners, racially disfavored groups, and the poor. Allegedly-dog-eating Haitians and the like. We have guns and are not shy about using them. Being killed by police is a leading cause of death for young men of color, as noted by Ice Cube, and confirmed by researchers at Rutgers (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116).
Agreed, although most of what humans do is pretty pointless in that context. Even if AI turns out to be a multiplier that makes everyone quicker and smarter, people will mostly just want to use it to make more money than the next guy. The history of capitalism suggests that the money-go-round will create useful technology along the way.
I agree with the author's overall conclusion about pricing LLMs, although I question some of the reasoning. He does not talk enough about one important input: the data used to train the models. To a first approximation, their utility is a function of the quantity of data available. Currently, the bulk of the training data is public (the internet) and that is a major reason why the performance of different models is not diverging more. One huge future area for AI is modeling the physical world and in that arena people are going to be creating their own empirical datasets. Waymo has achieved FSD and Tesla has not. It is not coincidental that Waymo has built a sophisticated platform to simulate the physical world.
> Tesla, who are Level 3 at best - curious, because with the ever-increasing rate of AI competence and their massive head start, you'd expect them to have cracked Level 4 by now.
Perhaps (1) Tesla's technology is incapable of level 4 (no LIDAR), or (2) Tesla is not as good at AI as its competitors, or (3) Tesla really truly is a droid company and the car thing was never a priority, or (4) the CEO is on drugs and should not be allowed to wave chainsaws around.
Vegans and street preachers are insufferable precisely because they have correctly identified a problem, but don't acknowledge any alternative to the one solution that they have chosen.
The US financial system is dysfunctional. Fossilized and insecure transactions are made viable by dragooning bank staff into law enforcement activities. Meanwhile payday loan sharks rip off the unbanked, and rich people exploit various forms of regulatory arbitrage.
Diamandis' utopia is a total absence of privacy, a level of intrusion experienced only by prisoners of authoritarian regimes. He does not acknowledge any limits on those who control the panopticon. This is the opposite of "accountability".
The shit sandwich is typically sent in the dead of night from a no-reply address. It would help my filtering process if HR personnel would standardize the subject line to COMPUTER SAYS NO.
To be fair, the blog author is a cancer researcher and would seem to have plenty of experience in the toxicology aspects. So I am confused why this post takes such a naive approach to the epidemiological data. There is a very obvious unmeasured confounding variable (sun exposure), and no real attempt to drill down on the evidence.
(Einstein would have had an unexceptional score on an IQ test, had he ever taken one. His schoolteachers thought him destined for failure.)
To put it another way, polymaths are unusual but idiots are everywhere. And people who are outstandingly good at say, computer engineering can be mediocre at philosophy or business administration.
Psychometrists distiguish between crystallized and fluid intelligence. Expertise is a combination of knowledge and ability. But ability itself is multifaceted, and raw talent goes untapped without the motivation to study and the opportunity to work.
For most areas of human endeavor, being smart enough is all that is required. Being a genius helped Albert Einstein reimagine physics, but did not make him a better patent clerk.