We can’t really say what this means. Maybe heavy AI use caused companies to perform better and grow. Or maybe the type of company that went big into AI was the type of company that was getting investments and growing because of it?
I think it’s also just that there’s not that much it makes sense to automate in the home. I run Home Assistant, and I do not have much of the typical home stuff on it. Why would I want to automate lights? My cat feeder has a timer already. I’m not about to get a smart lock and can’t imagine why I would want to automate one.
The useful things I do use it for are:
-heating control to take advantage of cheaper electric rates (I’m on 15 min spot pricing)
-automatically setting EV charging times to optimized cost
-a remote to start and stop a water pump to water plants in the garden, optionally with a timer
-a remote to consolidate a couple of lights that I want to turn on and off simultaneously to watch movies.
That’s it. Controlling my pool heater would be good but unfortunately it has a safety that trips if the power is interrupted. I’ve been using this system for years and simply cannot think of much else I want to automate.
Same experience, I thought using chatGPT to find some fairly specific things to buy would be a slam dunk, but it couldn’t provide links half the time and also failed to hold to criteria like shipping region etc. I would tell it to give direct links and it would mostly just say ”go on Amazon and search for X”.
There’s a special type of frustration when an LLM is close to being useful but just… isn’t.
When someone tells you about the hard times in their life and you find out they just made it up, you probably feel upset about it. Same thing. The experiences people have matter.
If you play at a casino, you’re statistically guarantee to lose money, edge cases not withstanding. Do you see casinos closing down because people stop playing?
I don’t know that I agree that it’s only now become acceptable. Successful artists have long employed others to aid in their work - see e.g. Leonardo and his studio assistants who helped paint probably large parts of some of the paintings attributed to him.
It’s not that it wouldn’t work, it’s that in order for management to put this kind of restriction on their own power in place, they’d have to first admit they need it. People usually don’t like to tie their own hands.
Now, if the employees unionised like in the film industry, it might happen.
Bin-laden directly stated Al-Qaeda's goal was to bankrupt the USA. [1] Now that's not what literally happened obviously, but adjusting for propaganda hyperbole and considering he went on to elaborate that they intend to do to the USA what they did to the Soviets - make the war too costly to be worth fighting - it seems their strategy panned out pretty well.
Of course, I don't know that they could have predicted the US invasion of Iraq, for example. On the one hand, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but OTOH Al-Qaeda might have foreseen that the US leadership would not let a good crisis go to waste.
Maybe the main plan was just to fight in Afghanistan, where they know they can carry out guerilla warfare indefinitely, and whatever else shakes out is probably going to play into Al-Qaeda's pocket anyway.
Really the main victory Al-Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups have won is being able to frame the discourse around their atrocities as Islamic terror. It creates tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims, which leads to oppression of Muslims, which increases recruitment. In this dynamic, the worse the terror groups are, the more adherents they gain.