The answer there is simply that they make more money by keeping it closed. Why release something publicly if it means you lose your cash cow? No fear of the poor making money needed.
This seems a bit too cynical of a take to match what I've seen. I see mainly two distinct "AI can be dangerous" camps: the EA-adjacent camp centered around LessWrong and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the anti-generative-art camp worried about the threat to artists' livelihoods. The latter seems to be the closest to wanting an outright ban on the technology despite not being anywhere near the capitalist class. The former seems to take the stance that "we NEED a plan, and no one seems to have one that plausibly works", and is calling for more research into such plans rather than stopping the technology itself (partly because they see stopping it as an impossible feat). It hardly seems like they're doing this out of fear of anything but actual catastrophe.
The key thing is that they encourage kids to willingly spend time learning. https://www.wired.com/2012/06/dragonbox/ is a good article on the author's experience with a similar game and their kid
The real issue with prompting a la "Facebook for dogs" is how ridiculously underspecified such a prompt is. You see the problem with this very clearly in text to image models: you might have a specific idea of your dog in your head, but no matter how often you prompt "cute white Maltese dog with a tuft of fur across its eyes", you will never get something that would pass as your dog. (A more obvious challenge would be to try to generate an image of yourself if you are not a celebrity). The amount of words needed to replicate every detail exactly would amount to at least a short essay. You give an AI the prompt "Facebook for dogs" and it could take that in SO many different directions.
Another problem that I'm personally more concerned about is that this way of coding will allow for so many security flaws to be built into the code. Even if it builds something that matches your expectations for the prompt, what's stopping it from generating something vulnerable to attacks that leak all your users' data? Humans already struggle enough with this, and we're feeding all our flawed codebases into these models.
I think they were talking specifically about dating apps. You either go on a date right away or never talk to the person again. There is no room to slowly build a relationship after "bumping into each other" over time.
I wasn't implying you were advocating for that, I agree with you, I was just pointing out that justifying your position by appealing to tradition is not helpful in convincing others (though it is great for virtue signaling).
On the Japan note, I actually did an internship in Japan over the summer a few years back and the work-life balance I saw there was actually depressing. Lots has been written about Japanese work culture (and I've heard Korean work culture is similar), but thankfully, I don't see the US quite getting to that point. If anything, we're pushing firmly in the opposite direction. Most people I personally know (in software engineering) hold a healthy work-life balance and are all the happier for it.
Japan's issues with reproduction seem to mostly stem from that, but the source of the problem in the US to me seems to be either overly-high expectations or over-correcting cynicism, both influenced by pop culture. On one hand, we have groups who believe fervently that "perfection" as seen in movies is realistic and are disappointed constantly by reality. On the other hand, people who have grown disillusioned with the world see everything as a chance for disappointment and avoid commitment to anything, leading to self-sabotage.
I also feel that we'd be better off as a society if we emphasized and encouraged building strong inter-personal relationships over "pursuing a career", but appealing to tradition isn't a great argument. Building a strong social sense of unity and cohesion is good enough for me. On the other hand, "those values exist for a reason" is just as convincing as "we got rid of those values for a reason". Our societies also grew a lot with the help of slavery and child labor, but I doubt you'd see that as a good reason to bring those back.
So King Louis XVI witnessed the end of French monarchical rule because he failed to ban... what? Revolutions? Monarchy has nothing to do with whether or not the people in power believe in bans being useful.
> Even the danger of nuclear energy is less harmful compared to ChatGPT because you still need many experts to build an atomic bomb or a very expensive power plant that potentially turns a large area unusable for thousands of years. It's not that we haven't had multiple incidents proving that point.
I'm sure the victims of nuclear weapons and accidents would very much like to disagree. Misinformation (which seems to be the most dangerous harm mentioned) is hardly comparable to these things, even taking into account the expertise needed to create a nuclear bomb or power plant.
Also, the author complains that in the past you could tell what was misinformation by identifying typos. Plenty of misinformation lacked misspellings and grammar mistakes before ChatGPT, and this very article contained a few of its own. If anything, this will stop people from relying on writing style as a way of verifying the validity of a statement (which is silly), and start using critical thinking to do so. In the end, this is the only way to ever find "the truth", especially in areas where you have no prior knowledge as the author worries about. People aren't helpless to good writing.
This article makes a very good case for why the American economy is on the right track. However, I doubt this is what most respondents were thinking about when asked about "the direction of the country" (which to me already sounds like a question that biases people to answer in the negative). Brooks talks repeatedly about how the news media has influenced people's perceptions, but the news media he talks about has (from my perspective) spent more time on social issues rather than the economy, so of course there's a discrepancy there. He's tackling a fundamentally different question than the poll he mentioned. Just because America is on the right track economically does not mean that people are wrong to demand more from their country in other failing areas.
> the people who are most pessimistic about the country are not the working class but highly educated and affluent people—the people, that is, who spend more time engaging with news media.
I was surprised by this claim. I was always under the impression that poorer people spent more time consuming news media, and that the wealthier a person was, the less news they consumed. I don't know where I got such an impression, and I think I may have confused the statistics for television watching in general. Does anyone have a good source showing a correlation in either direction?
> A curious feature of the station is its powerful gravitational field, far stronger than would be suggested by its small mass. However, this probably represents a faulty reading by our instruments.
I know it's just fiction, but this is just outright contradictory. The gravitational field is determined by the mass, and even with faulty instruments, they can feel the strong gravity for themselves. "Small size" would likely have been better.
Aside from that nitpick, absolutely loved the story. Slowly realizing that the station is expanding around them and then reading the conclusion was riveting.
Main reasons are that 1) the site loads fast, and 2) the site has certain ux features I wanted, such as ingredient lists automatically being sorted by when the ingredient gets used and hovering over an ingredient in a recipe causing a tooltip to pop up reminding you how much of that ingredient is used
That's a different problem entirely. I don't want to host a website that makes me money via insane SEO and advertisements. It's literally just a private website me and my girlfriend use. We add recipes we enjoy and would want to cook again in the future. If an AI could code that for me, great!
Hang out with friends, play sports, eat good food, raise a family, go on hikes. An AI can automate your labor, but it can't automate your experiences. There are countless recordings on YouTube of people performing beautiful renditions of the Interstellar soundtrack on piano, yet that doesn't stop me from playing my mediocre version and slowly improving. The act of playing it myself brings me joy that listening to it could never do.
I love how the sheer simplicity of this comment manages to convey so much about humanity and our drive to do things we love. I feel a bit silly reacting like this, but it's truly beautiful.
A few months ago I spent three or four days putting together a website where I could store my cooking recipes in a nice, searchable format with some nice UI features that I wanted. Once AI is good enough, I'll be able to do the same without needing to brush up on how MongoDB works, or how to vertically center text in a div, or how to update the page's URL when navigating to a different recipe without triggering a full reload of the page. I couldn't care less about any of those things, I just wanted a cooking recipe website.
This exact comment could be made by a jazz soloist with a few words changed and be just as valid. I think you're underestimating how deep other fields, including artistic fields, are. Anything as competitive as an artistic field will always result in amounts of mastery needed at the top level that are barely noticeable to outside observers.
Work like this helps us work towards new approaches for the more difficult issues involved with replacing physical labor. The diffusion techniques that have gained popularity recently will surely enable new ways for machines to learn things that simply weren't possible before. Art is getting a lot of attention first because many people (including the developers working on making this possible) want to be able to create their own artwork and don't have the talent to put their mental images down on paper (or tablet). You worry that this prevents us from following more creative and interesting pursuits, but I feel that this enables us to follow those pursuits without the massive time investment needed to practice a skill. The future you describe is very bleak indeed, but I highly doubt those things won't be automated as well.
I think you'll find plenty of people who find that DAWs and music theory help them better find self-expression and celebrate life through their music. Any tool or framework that opens up new modes of achieving that self-expression should be celebrated, not shunned because it isn't as "pure" as more time and labor intensive methods. Would you rather someone be forced to dedicate a significant amount of time to studying music and art creation just to be able to find that self-expression?
Because tons of people want to make art, and a lot of art currently requires years of training to make anything close to "good". Making art more accessible to create is a boon to everyone who's dreamed of being able to make their own paintings and music, but doesn't have the skills required.
This date format works for just as much of the year as DD/MM/YYYY though, and is just as ambiguous as the other format is if you don't know who the author is.
This is exactly the problem I've had with Twitter as a social platform. The network is simply too big to the point that it's strange to me that the default means of posting is to literally everyone using the platform. Smaller discord communities I've been in rarely get into flame wars as often as people on Twitter since they tend to already be a self-selected group of like-minded people. Putting people with wildly different views in front of each other and incentivizing "hot takes" via like and retweet counters is very much the opposite of a healthy social environment.
It seems to me that the people you describe as being on "autopilot" tend to be people that, for whatever reason, do not place a lot of value on the concept of improving oneself (at least, improving oneself in the manner you described, via constant learning, curiosity, and open-mindedness). These people simply have other priorities/worries taking up their time - making money, taking care of family, etc. I myself feel much like you - if I'm not constantly studying something or learning a new skill, I feel like I am stagnating. However, it is hard to make the case for people to constantly accumulate knowledge when most people have the knowledge they need to get by and accomplish their goals. What benefit is it for me to practice piano as a software engineer? I get a profound sense of satisfaction at seeing my skill improve and deeper appreciation for professional musicians, but is it necessary for me to do so? What does the average person really get out of reading, say, Plato's dialogues, when it comes to things like establishing a stable life, climbing the corporate ladder, or paying their bills, if they already believe they have a grasp on things? What is the case to be made for continuous improvement over improvement to the point of necessity, and no further?