That’s the key. The world is a delicate fabric that changes over time.
It’s nice (or frustrating) reading opinions. Forecasting the future is tricky.
While the world and us humans waste our time arguing, conflicting or dreaming, earth and the universe can easily introduce earthquakes, meteors and other unforeseen events that will have more impact than human made events we already cannot completely forecast.
Self-driving cars are easy though, 12-year-olds make them in high school STEM classes. You just give it a light sensor so it can follow a strip of white tape down the middle of the "road" and let it go from one place to the other.
Oh, until it hits an obstruction.
Okay well you add some sort of bumper switch to it so if it hits an obstruction it stops and backs up, to find a route round it.
Ah right, well, let's see, that didn't work so well when the obstruction was much smaller and squashier than the car.
Let's have some sort of distance sensors that - ah bollocks, they pick up everything including objects beside the road, and stop the car.
Okay what about some sort of camera and machine vision system? Great, that lets it "see" the road ahead and steer or brake to avoid obstacles! But it turns out it now needs to understand a bit of physics, at least enough to stop it booting it wide open through a sharp bend and ending up shiny side down.
Right so now it will drive at a sensible speed through bends, use a camera to look for obstructions, LIDAR to look for obstructions too, and it can actually follow road markings quite well, and even pick up speed from signs.
Ah. It can't actually be used around other vehicles because it can't anticipate what they're going to do, and keeps getting into bad situations that it then needs to brake and swerve to avoid.
Oh well, turns out self-driving cars aren't easy after all.
> I can’t believe those who seriously try and say America’s value is in consuming.
as a case against outsourcing manufacturing really doesn't understand the value that societies create when they are on the forefront of innovation.
Maybe, just maybe, at a certain point physical labour is not the best way to use your working population, but instead, you know, services, innovation, etc?
America has been doing pretty good in that regard over the past few decades.
(For disclosure, I'm not from America, but still think this is a silly article)
Where is China leading?
> You could imagine building this exact same thing with humans. Educate them, get them to sit at a desk, read code, find vulns. Actually, I can only really imagine that in China, have you seen the current graduates from the American universities?
Imagine, sure.
But why didn't anyone? I don't think it is a question of quality, though China simply being more populous than the USA* means there are more people at any given competence in any given domain, but cost, both monetary and opportunity.
AI's cheap. It would still be cheap compared to a human even if it cost 3000 USD/month for the token limit we get from the 20/month subscription.
That's the danger.
* by about 4x: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china%20population%2Fus...
That's why you may notice that in making AI, companies still use teams of highly motivated humans. Obviously they could have AIs holding the reigns of other AIs. Nothing technical is stopping them
For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away. To a point where I think it should be classified as mass hysteria and looked into by public health authorities.
We should all introspect why so many of us perceive America as this very delicate thing that is hanging on with borrowed time and will fall apart at any moment. Because I don't think it's actually like this.
> This isn’t like when stuff is made in China. Those are basically American factories, just located in another country where you don’t have to negotiate with American labor.
I guess you do need to be socialist to formulate that first sentence in the active instead of passive voice or wonder how it even was possible that America could build American factories in other countries without negotiating with any labor.
The part that is also missing is how China gladly took all the outsourced jobs, said "thanks guys!" and used them to become the rivaling power to the US it is today.
This piece was some self-indulgent rambling that didn’t really have any connective threads.
As the rest of the article alludes to, America is a services economy [0]. An industrial economy obviously doesn't have anything to fear from AI because their jobs don't primarily involve pressing buttons on a keyboard to justify their paycheck. That probably explains most of the difference; for China I'd imagine more AI -> More prosperity.
> A human is about 20 petaflops. All of this installed compute is only about a million people.
The number of effective humans might only be around a few million people. Gauss and Euler did a bit more for society than the average 20 petaflops of human flesh. One of the lessons of history is that being able to reliably connect a few really good humans has a lot more potential than a moderate number of more easily confused ones.
There are a lot of smartest cow in the herd phenomenons out there. Even a few hundred thousand AIs would probably outnumber the senior politicians of the world and reducing the damage those politicians do would be a huge win. Gargantuan. Possibly species level impacts like we've never yet seen if a major power like China did it.
> Oh sorry sorry, in a preemptive strike they obviously would have hit us if we didn’t attack them first. Yes yes, defensive preemptive attack. It’s just bullying. It’s stupid.
And I'm probably packing too much into one comment, but you can tell everyone knows this is stupid because the politicians consistently have to use lies instead of trying to argue things on the merits. As soon as people have to try and connect the actual facts to someone who isn't corrupt being better off the argument collapses. The worst people are the ones in the grip of that team-sports emotion where they just support "their side" despite the fact that a policy of war hurts the side engaging in it. The warmongers aren't even on the same side, they're their own lobby of psychopaths.
[0] A term which might be in for the "third world" euphemism treatment, but you never know.
From the outside it is really hard to comprehend. Was it FoxNews that poisoned the American mind or the social media brainwashing? How can a society allow a billionaire to cut programs in Africa that saved hundreds of thousands of lives that cost pennies when compared to any military adventures.
American culture has lost its near-monopoly on optimism. We're now almost as cynical as the Europeans. (:D)
That cynicism means civic disengagement, technological doomerism and general symptoms of depression. That collectively degrades the mostly bottom-up structures we've long relied on, requiring shifts to less-efficient (and hastily cobbled together) top-down command structures.
The ad-powered social media addiction stopped brainwashing?
If one wanted deeply pessimistic takes on America and Americans, there has been a media market for that since at least the advent of cable news. Mistaking TikTok, one expression of a phenomenon, for the general trend is mistaking a tree for a forest.
It is the original sin of the American healthcare system.
America was on the road to socialism from the 1930s to the 1950s but it all went to shit and here we are: back in the Gilded Age.
Decades of capitalist cruelty has created a social environment so toxic it enabled a clique of conmen to rise to the top.
Now, American hard and soft power are both being dismantled at a rapid pace. Former allies and trade partners are working around the US instead of with it now. It's leadership position has been abandoned, for no good reason at all.
The internal rot is being projected onto the global stage and I don't think Americans quite understand the consequences yet.
To this day, capitalist leaning societies outcompete socialist leaning societies. Just don’t go saying that either has ever truly existed. Socialism and capitalism are utopian fantasies. People are messy and our systems are too.