I think in general people are a bit distrusting of a tech firm headed by billionaires with deep political ties that sells AI driven surveillance state technology to governments
Are we really saying that Anthropic claiming AI would take over industries was some benevolent ethical move rather than marketing their product as a cheap replacement for human labor that works in any industry? Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead?
Probably meaning C-Suite thought productivity was up because of AI, either because A) metrics showed high AI usage or more commits/LOC or B) we're mandating AI usage, why wouldn't it increase?
Pretty massive difference between "being employed" and "being employed with a decent wage". Yeah, there's plenty of low-wage service industry or gig economy work available to take you out of the unemployment statistic -- there's a lot less employment available that enables you to live a decent lifestyle (i.e. live somewhere without 4 roommates or raise a family)
I'm not interested in explaining to you something immediately evident that you clearly disagree with. If you don't feel that trillion dollar companies training commercial products on the free labor of human writers/artists/engineers/etc. without their consent or compensation isn't "stealing" you're welcome to that opinion, but I believe that's what the GP was implying.
>Yeah, but measuring things that are poorly understood (to wit: community environmental factors on health outcomes) is part of the scientific process.
Is this really poorly understood? I think that's (partially) their point. I think we all pretty well understand that income correlates with health and that poorer people will tend to live in less healthy environments.
I say it based on the fact that I experience consciousness and therefore know it is a phenomenon wholly separate from the outward effect I have on the world via speech or any other physical action.
>It assumes that there's some parallel realm of spirit that the brain is peculiarly able to tap into, but which computer programs that function in very similar ways to the brain don't tap into.
Ruling this out completely implies that modern science has a total and complete understanding of consciousness and the universe in its entirety, which it does not. I don't think it's unreasonable to leave open the possibility that there is an unexplained phenomenon that explains the conscious experience which is still bounded by the laws of physics.
>.. the difference between thinking and an extremely good simulacrum of thought is meaningless. They become the same thing.
Do they? To me it seems like you equate the process with the result, like saying if I gave you a gift, it doesn't matter whether I bought it or made it by hand, in either case I "made" it because the end result is the same. There is a conscious experience that (hopefully) all humans experience and can testify to, the question is whether or not an LLM predicting tokens based on a giant vector map is experiencing the same thing, which I'd say is obviously not happening. My point about chatbots is about exactly this -- 10 years ago even you would have laughed at somebody that said a hand-rolled chatbot was conscious/thinking, but because the output has improved, now suddenly it's all the same, and your brain is a computer, and Claude has feelings, blah blah.
This sort of tech-centric distillation of visceral human experience into simple analogies is so grating. We can simultaneously acknowledge that consciousness is not well defined and not "testable" with certainty while also acknowledging that there is something different between the conscious experience we are all aware of as humans, and instructions executing on a chip. The only thing that has changed in the discourse about AI and consciousness vs. "is my home desktop conscious in 2004" is the quality of the simulacrum that LLMs produce vs. pre-ML chatbots.
I mean, "AI Mode" is the default result when you Google something, so of course they're seeing high usage. Driving an increase in total queries is probably because instead of just Googling something and getting the right results like it was 10~ years ago, now you have to interrogate a chatbot or try multiple queries. I would think higher total queries is more an indicator that your search function isn't effective.