That sounds like the market at work? Government doesn’t control what private companies stock, so it seems they’ve gotten some signal that the majority of their customers prefer energy-efficient products. If you’re a non-mainstream consumer, things are always going to be harder for you.
While we’re at it, why not let manufacturers reintroduce lead into paint and toys and let consumers choose what they want there too? The problem is that “consumer choice” is frequently a shield for amoral companies to take advantage of information asymmetry to externalize problems onto individuals. Individual consumers do not have time to deeply research every purchase they make and so it is not reasonable to expect them to handle these things themselves. Instead we have the Hobbesian contract where it is much more efficient to empower a government to centralize the handling of these common goals. It’s not smart or edgy to argue for the “free hand of the market” in these one-off topics, because none of these decisions are made in a vacuum but rather are part of a continuum of choices that the governed are mostly happy with (no such safety regime can ever be perfect).
I think there’s a difference in that this is about as good as LLM code is going to get in terms of code quality (as opposed to capability a la agentic functionality). LLM output can only be as good as its training data, and the proliferation of public LLM-generated code will only serve as a further anchor in future training. Humans on the other hand ideally will learn and improve with each code review and if they don’t want to you can replace them (to put it harshly).
I did not get the feeling that the author was against AI, but rather was bemoaning that students were using it to avoid learning. Philosophy is a good example of a subject where the knowledge is a means to developing your own cohesive principles. You don’t have to ever evolve your principles beyond their organic development, but why even bother taking a philosophy class at that point.
The ideal philosophy class is probably Aristotelian, with direct conversation between teacher and student. But this is inefficient, so college settled on using essays instead, where some of that conversation happened with the student themself as they worked through a comprehensive argument and then the teacher got to “efficiently” interject through either feedback or grading. This also resulted in asymmetric effort though, and AI is good at narrowing effort dynamics like that.
The author’s point was that the student’s effort isn’t a competition against the teacher to minmax a final grade but rather part of developing their thinking, so your “day of reckoning” seems to be cheering for students (and maybe people) to progressively offload more of their _thinking_ (not just their tasks) to AI? I’d argue that’s a bleak future indeed.
Where I disagree with the author is in worrying about devaluing a college degree. It shouldn’t be necessary for many career paths, and AI will make it increasingly equivalent to having existed in some town for 4 years (in its current incarnation). I’m all for that day of reckoning, where the students going to university want to be there for the sake of learning and not for credentialing. Most everyone else will get to fast-forward their professional lives.
You would have to grade every user on every knowledge axis though. Just because someone is an expert in software doesn’t mean you should believe their takes on medicine, no matter how good faith their model interactions appear. I’d argue that coming up with an automated way to determine the objective truthfulness of information would be among the greatest creations of humanity (basically “solving” philosophy), so this isn’t a small task.
Users can be adversarial to the “truth” (to the extent it exists) without being adversarial in intent.
Dinosaur bones are either 65 million year old remnants of ancient creatures or decoys planted by a God during a 7 day creation, and a large proportion of humans earnestly believe either take. Choosing which of these to believe involves a higher level decision about fundamental worldviews. This is an extreme example, but incorporating “honest” human feedback on vaccines, dark matter, and countless other topics won’t lead to de facto improvements.
I guess to put it another way: experts don’t learn from the masses. The average human isn’t an expert in anything, so incorporating the average feedback will pull a model away from expertise (imagine asking 100 people to give you grammar advice). You’d instead want to identify expert advice, but that’s impossible to do from looking at the advice itself without giving into a confirmation bias spiral. Humans use meta-signals like credentialing to augment their perception of received information, yet I doubt we’ll be having people upload their CV during signup to a chat service.
And at the cutting edge level of expertise, the only real “knowledgeable” counterparties are the physical systems of reality themselves. I’m curious how takeoff is possible for a brain in a bottle that can’t test and verify any of its own conjectures. It can continually extrapolate down chains of thought, but that’s most likely to just carry and amplify errors.
It’s all in the nuance. Currently the insurance companies have too much moral hazard, as they are able to extract profits during the “good” years (like AllState’s recent $3B stock buyback) and then deny or default during disasters. An extractive profit cap could allow companies to take in more than they spent and save it to prepare for major catastrophes. They wouldn’t have to simply disperse these funds back to policy holders or something. I’m sure that idea would need more refinement, but my overall point was that our regulations should directly target the incentives we actually care about. And we have to rely more on regulation in these situations because the market can’t properly price the risk of companies disappearing during major payout events.
I’d really argue that for-profit insurance companies are a bad idea in general, but that’s a higher-level debate. There’s an interesting idea where governments handle all disaster-related insurance handling but are then also able to have a more comprehensive approach to management (though that’d be hard to trust in the current US political climate).
Yeah, the solution isn’t divorcing risk (as communicated by cost) from reality. If the concern is usurious insurance rates, that’s where things like profit caps and other regulations come in. Society should want people to have fair insurance rates but not necessarily cheap rates.
Or coming to temporary clarity? Things like the “culture wars” are distractions pushed by the elites to keep the lower classes fighting amongst themselves and not their true enemy. But extractive robber barons are the real problem behind everyone’s life getting worse all the time, and for a brief moment everyone has seen that and been in alignment.
Penny-wise, pound-foolish isn’t a saying because it’s a total rarity. Plenty of people follow “common” practices that seem positive but are actually negative.
Cash is much easier to steal from your employer, let alone miscount, misplace, or even accidentally destroy. You’ll see most if not all of these outcomes occur if you work a service/retail job.
Are action or horror movies exploitation of the biological adrenaline drive? Every leisure activity is appealing to more than just hyper-rational thought.
IMO that blog series misses the point. Knowledgeable motivated developers can make great experiences with any technology, and conversely there are bad experiences built with every technology. That series blames the people involved for not being better, but that’s just blaming plane crashes on human error and calling it a day.
- If the UK GSD is anything like USDS, using them for comparison is like comparing a pro sports team to your local high school’s. They are an outlier specifically created to be better than the average, so tautologically their stuff will be better. Code For America is a similarly odd comparison.
- The US has a massive gap in pay and prestige between public and private sector developer jobs. It’s not that this means “worse” people work at public jobs, but in general they start less experienced and can wind up in a non-learning cycle as they don’t get mentorship/guidance from more expert folks, and if they do get good independently they leave. It’s really hard to convince people to take a pay cut to work these jobs, and many of the few willing to do so instead go to CFA, USDS, etc because they want prestige and avoid all the other inefficiencies in public jobs.
I could go on about the structural problems leading to this, but suffice it to say that blaming React and other JS frameworks is a miss. For some services it’s lucky they are online at all, and a slow web page is still orders of magnitude faster than physical mail or god forbid going to a physical office. The sites could definitely be better but this is not fundamentally a problem of technology choice.
Or it implies that society and technology have advanced in the meantime, expanding the scope of what the government is expected to do. For instance, at the end of WWII we did not have the federal highway system but the nation is much better off for that on-going expenditure. Most government interaction is now possible online which requires expensive staff and infra to maintain, but is certainly an improvement over having to do everything in person.
And to use your direct comparison, can you imagine what the data would look like if the US economy actually pivoted to a war footing with the existential urgency akin to that during WWII (which was vastly more expensive than WWI even)?
That’s a pretty glib stance. Plenty of people have difficulty finding a friend group and not everyone can be an island until they do (see the loneliness epidemic). Perhaps consider that there are other people with different life situations than yours for whom demanding individualized treatment does not work, and they may have much less choice about what technologies they have to use as a result.
You need app Foo on your phone for work (like Slack, maybe). Foo is in the App Store and worked great on your iPhone but decides they want to install via their own store so they can monetize employees’ data (location, whatever) to make more money. The new store launches, the new app version abuses private APIs, and the App Store version stops working. Your company announces that all employees need to download from the new source. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Sure, neither your company nor Foo should suck, but we all know plenty of companies that don’t care about employees or users.
Game company Bar decides to launch their own store and pull their game - we’ll call it Nortfite - from the App Store so they can add something shady like crypto features. Nortfite is a massive social game that all your friends play and it’s a huge part of your teenage social life. Your only device capable of playing it is your second-hand iPad. Do you really have a choice about staying in the walled garden? Who needs friends anyway, amirite?