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rebelos

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Except affirmative action is not the solution either because now you’ve put less meritorious people where they shouldn’t be (I apologize for the phrasing, but I think it’s important not to sugar coat this) as representatives of their disenfranchised group. As far as I can tell, in every environment I’ve been in, this often only serves to reaffirm and even intensify the bias. And the beneficiaries of affirmative action are furthermore made to feel like human asterisks, even if they’re talented and entirely deserving of an opportunity.

Let me counter with a couple of questions for you.

Do you believe the point of government is to protect people from harm? And, do you believe that, for example, making someone addicted to junk food and obese or addicted to their phone for 20+ hours out of their waking time per week are examples of harm?

Not everyone would answer yes to both questions. Some, like the original commenter I was replying to, believe that people should be free to destroy themselves, helped along by the external forces acting upon them.

You can only get the benefits as a founder if you have the same lever as the company (which you usually don't).

Messi has by far one of the worst attitudes I’ve ever seen in a star player so I have no idea where this is coming from. He was petulant, nasty, and classless at various times throughout this very tournament.

Worth noting that France was deeply unlucky. Virus hit the team just before the final. Benzema and Pogba missing. And Deschamps made some questionable decisions in my view.

And Mbappe still showed up and put in one of the most heroic performances I’ve ever seen in sports, basically carrying the entire team. Really looking forward to watching his career.

Sounds like this guy is only just realizing that technological progress invariably ends in complete obsolescence. What comes next is as yet unclear but also inevitable.

Every time crypto implodes (what are we, on the sixth extinction?) people love to stand by the sidelines and say "see I told you so!".

And each of those times there was more saturation of public interest to be achieved, which levitated prices across the entire asset class.

That’s now done.

Expect to see a steady waning of interest and prices until some stable state is achieved. The entities left in the space will predominantly be obstinate true believers and criminal enterprises.

Did you read his comment? His point is that this hidden costs system is grotesque. In fact, it is such a predatory tactic that it's either implicitly or explicitly outlawed in most parts of the developed world. It is also a convenient way to exploit many laborers beholden to tips, since a substantial part of their compensation is non-deterministic.

RealPage seems to have recognized that multiple competing landlords in the same region who are independently setting rates and concerned about vacancy is a kind of prisoner's dilemma situation. Seems obvious they exploited that opportunity. Absolutely diabolical.

Of course it matters: (1) at the macro level, fraud is a tax on the whole ecosystem that ultimately yields higher prices for consumers and (2) at the micro level, relatively better ad efficiency (less fraud) can drive business competitiveness (or even viability, in extreme cases).

This has been possible if not easy to accomplish for a very long time, so calling it "AI" seems like a bit of a stretch. I suspect most people can be fingerprinted according to a handful of less typical grammatical flourishes and reuse of certain uncommon words and turns of phrase. The only real challenge is scaling that up.

Gosh, we complain about people coming over the border

You wrote this and it sounded like you were endorsing an implicit open border policy. Did you have some more intermediate solution in mind? Recall that we do presently have a legal pathway for asylum seekers to immigrate to the US.

Providing security assistance would like like what?

We already do this. US agencies frequently cooperate with their counterparts in Mexico and elsewhere.

Is the Guardian a far left publication now? Because they’re saying there’s bipartisan agreement on border security and that Biden approved a border security package, but the tenor of the article somehow bizarrely postures Anduril and CBP as the criminals, for enforcing immigration law.

And there’s the argument that enforcing those laws is causing “migrants” to cross in more dangerous ways and is therefore somehow immoral, which is functionally equivalent to: “defending against criminals makes the criminals dumber and more likely to injure or kill themselves and therefore, respecting the interests of the criminals, we should soften our efforts at enforcing the law”.

How did we get here? It’s just so absurd it beggars belief.

AI is already displacing human labor, just try to talk to a non-robot when you call a customer service line these days.

You’re right. And my point is that substitution due to AI will accelerate. That’s where the informational surprise of my original comment lies.

You have a fatal misapprehension about how automation transforms a labor market. Higher productivity of certain kinds of work due to automation pushes labor supply elsewhere, making the “elsewhere” in turn both more competitive/demeaning (think Amazon warehouse workers peeing in bottles at the lower end of the market and Stripe engineers burning out at the upper end) and less remunerative.

The terminal point of this trend is complete human obsolescence, but the displacement along the way is additive, will likely accelerate in the coming decades due to advances in AI, and is especially problematic because there are limits to the elasticity of the labor pool (i.e. its ability to adapt to rapidly changing conditions).

I would furthermore predict that governments will be too slow to respond to this and that social upheaval will consequently escalate dramatically.

Come back to this comment in ten years and see how I did.

Neither of the 2 companies you posted marketing materials about is among "some of the most well-resourced companies in Silicon Valley".

Two of the founders of Adept AI are authors on the paper 'Attention Is All You Need'. If you don't understand the significance of that, then you're speaking well outside of what you're qualified to comment on. The company has also raised capital from top tier SV investors.

Runway ML has raised money from Lux Capital.

These companies are not just well-resourced, they are positioned in the upper echelon of the innovation business.

Now explain how you know, "AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades", to be true.

Because I didn't say it will "obsolete" human labor.

You're right that the word "will" is strong in that statement. But, since basically nothing is absolute in a philosophical sense and certainly no one can prognosticate with certainty, it's fair to read that as "will with high likelihood".

And your surgical nitpicking doesn't hamper my argument in quite the way you think it does. Frankly, I believe it's in defiance of the following HN guideline:

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

It's behind the horizon. You people should learn by the history of the whole field that progress is always slower than the marketing hype, usually by an enormous gap.

I'm going to quote my original comment:

seeds of AI that will terraform society and rapidly displace human labor over the coming decades

Then it's puzzling to accuse someone of calamitous blindness when you are not even engaging with the point of the post you're replying to.

At this point, I'm wondering if you're just provoking me deliberately. The comment I replied to said the following:

The promise of generalization that could lead to intelligent behavior has given way to people sharing amusing pictures or phrases that these models have generated, because that's what they do. It's cool, but it's basically become orthogonal to any AGI, or even AI with applications.

And then I posted evidence of concrete applications that are in progress at some of the most well-resourced companies in Silicon Valley. Absolutely groundbreaking stuff that more than prove sophisticated applications of contemporary AI are well on their way to being realized.

A lot of "histrionic phrases" to describe your reading comprehension ability are occurring to me right now, but I'll refrain from using them.

A pattern I'm seeing in the later replies here is that few of them are responding to the substance of my comments. Perhaps dang will clean this up.

EDIT Since you ninja edited this in:

Text to video and converting some selected requests into actions is all nice, but it hardly contradicts the GP's observation: it's nowhere near AGI.

If you review the root comment I made, you'll understand that I was never arguing with the GP about AGI in the first place.