A friend is a member of quite a few Facebook groups. She doubts my belief that these groups already contain ChatGPT-like influence operation chatbots, but was recently surprised when in one of the groups several participants discussed a photograph of a typical large chest of drawers while referring to it as a "locker". Maybe some people do refer to such furniture as a locker, or maybe the first person did for some reason and the others then just followed along to avoid confusion, but it made me wonder whether it was an example of a group of chatbots talking to each other and making up a nonsense name for the item. (She still doesn't believe me.)
We like to believe that the problem is just "our own adult psychosis", but I spend my days around many people over quite a range of ages (including elderly) and it is very obvious to me that cognitive abilities decline in the way shown in the charts you have probably seen (or, it feels to me, even more dramatically) and that it is apparent at an earlier age that we would like to think. Old people lose the ability to infer - if they know two Johns and I say something about one of them (just referred to as "John"), they will be confused even though it should be easy to infer which I meant. That might not be a surprise, but from my experience the same effect can be traced back linearly to much earlier ages, to those mature students in your university class, who were probably only 40, and who continually caused us to roll our eyes by asking questions with obvious answers - even at that age they had lost some of the ability we had to infer the answers from what we had already been taught. Such abilities are useful when coming up with ideas for new products, so I have no doubt that the likelihood of doing it successfully declines rapidly with age.
Progressive corporate tax rates (like personal income taxes, instead of the current flat corporate tax rates) would help small companies to compete with big ones simply and naturally without needing governments to decide what constitutes a monopoly.
I think the problem with prisons (both privately and publicly run) is that they have a monopoly over the lives of the prisoners, and, as we know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I propose that prisoners be allowed to select which rehabilitation provider they are assigned to. The rehabilitation provider must pay fines if the person reoffends after they have been released.
* There will be an increasingly severe recession. The response will greatly weaken the dollar, leading to a resurgence of inflation despite the sinking economy, a widespread feeling that America's best days are firmly behind it, and even greater animosity between those of different political persuasions.
* China will attempt to distract its population from their growing unrest, and to take advantage of a weakened America, by being more aggressive, including increasingly bold actions against Taiwan.
* Jeff Bezos will run for president on a platform of bringing courage and civility back to politics, as well as the promise of improving the economy. The severity of the recession will result in him being received with must less hostility than might have been expected.
What makes you think that the self driving technology being developed (by, you claim, "burning tens of billions") is only for "personal vehicles"? The same technology is what can enable the large fleets of self-driving minivans that are necessary for what you describe. Cities can impose a charge per mile driven (that fluctuates depending on current traffic) and people can then decide whether they wish to use a "personal" vehicle or order a self-driving Uber/Waymo minivan pooled ride.
They may not be very useful at the moment, but if progress in large language models continues at the current pace then I can imagine that conversational AI might be useful in several years. Investments by companies to establish and maintain voice assistant market share might thus eventually pay off.
Although I follow him, I get such a feeling of arrogance from his tweets (similar to the Repl.it guy) that, although the failure of a startup is sad, I can't help feeling some satisfaction from this development (also partly from the vindication as I was certain that this wouldn't work as soon as it was announced).
They are supporting the election campaigns of those whose viewpoints they like because they want to increase the chance that they will be elected. It's the same as regular people making campaign donations to the candidates they like.
I am quite certain that this was done by administrators who aren't part of and don't understand MIT culture and are just implementing what was done in the previous place they worked.
I think the solution is not to ban lobbying, etc., but rather to reduce the power of politicians so that there is no motivation to lobby or bribe them. For example, in my country the taxi drivers got politicians to ban Uber through protesting by blocking roads and probably pressuring their connections. I don't think politicians should have the power to be able to tell people that they are not allowed to pick up paying passengers if they want to, so there would have been no reason for the taxi drivers to gridlock the country as there would have been no potential benefit for them in doing so.
I don't think it needs to be free for over-represented demographics, just open source so that it is clear that the algorithm is designed in the best interests of users.
I like Andrej Karpathy's (I think) idea of training something like GPT-3 on each person and using the derived personality to identify those that you would get on well with (if the objective of the site is long term relationships). I suspect that a large leap forward is possible with something like this, although the technology is probably not ready yet.
I have lived and worked for at least several years in both the US and the EU (and I am from an EU country). People in America like to portray everything as being better in Europe, but from my experience life there is fine and there are certainly some things that I prefer, but overall I think the quality of life for a middle class person in the US is noticeably higher.
A corporate tax rate that increases with revenue would naturally disincentivize such monopolies/oligopolies (by making it easier for small companies to compete against them) without requiring the government micromanagement of deciding what is and what isn't a monopoly.
Blasphemy is a crime in many countries. Let's burn all of the books and block all of the websites that are guilty of it (without going through courts because that is too slow) so that the people, who we do not trust to make judgements for themselves, are not exposed to it!
I think your response reveals how accustomed you have become to the luxury of having plentiful resources. You ask how it is good for anyone to not spend substantially more on students with special needs, but in many of the poorer countries of the world this attitude would be baffling. In many cases these students will never be able to contribute enough to society to recover what was invested in them. Hard choices have to be made that cause sadness, but unfortunately that's the way it is. If your country becomes less anomalously wealthy in the future, you may also have to make such decisions.
I do not think discussions about transportation environmental cost usually sufficiently consider the productivity lost because of how long it takes to get places by public transport. We get a number of hours of productive work from each person every day, and so that productivity required all of the resources that the person consumed in a day. An extra hour of commuting every day, because I need to go from A to B, but because I take public transport I need to go A to C and then C to B and along the way need to make lots of stops, means that an extra fraction of the resources I consumed for that day will not be used for productivity.
Also, the diagrams showing public transport being more space efficient often seem to assume that the public transport will be at capacity. On my 30 minute bus ride, to/from a major downtown, I am not infrequently the only passenger on the whole bus.
Why should they have to be explicitly built and zoned for renting? Why shouldn't they be used by tourists? Just make it easy to build more so that there is enough for everyone.
the word "scheme" has negative connotations (of something shady) in America that it doesn't have in other countries. Also, it is very much an intentional policy of governments in some countries to encourage people to invest in a house as their retirement savings.
I reinstalled it using Wine last year. It ran well (only the cheat codes didn't work), but it didn't really transport me back to my youth the way I expected it to (I played it a lot at the time, so thought it might the way other games from my childhood, like King's Quest VI, do) and I grew bored of it after a day or two.
I suspect that many chat groups (such as Facebook groups), even small niche ones, already have GPT-3-like bots posting messages that seem to fit into the group but that are trained to provide opinions on certain topics that align with the message that the organisation/country controlling them wishes to push, or to nudge conversations in that direction.
The Bank of America app only lets you install it if your Google (or presumably Apple) account country is set as America. I am abroad but needed to use the app. I had to create a VPN on an American cloud instance and connect my phone to it so that I could set my country to America and install the app.
My cat jumps up to pull down on the handle of closed doors that she wants to open, then pulls the slightly open door with her paw so she can go through. When the front door is locked she finds which room I am in and scratches at the door (I keep the doors closed) until I come, then encourages me to follow her to the front door so that I can unlock it for her.