People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other.
The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and balances of power shift rapidly.
If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate the downsides and spread the upsides.
I tried it and it was laughably bad. The auto park was worse than it was years ago, leaving me a foot out from the curb in an easy spot. Trying to use the self driving on city streets resulted in it stuttering and stopping immediately. The only thing that worked decently was highway driving, which it does without the self driving package anyway.
Given its performance I wouldn't dare trust it with any of my daily driving even if it was free.
Even on a law and implementation effort like this with such large impact there are maybe 10,000 people in the world involved who actually understand it in any significant sense, and they all have a strong reason not to post about it on a public forum, or even a private one.
And even those people will only understand a limited aspect or perspective.
So the people commenting can only comment based on their outside impressions and emotions about generalities and how the specific implementation details seem to affect they as an end user.
I try to take anything said with that in mind. There is information in the comments about user experience but anything else is at the level of bullshitting at the bar with your friends, and not to be taken personally.
> I found it quite frustrating how teams would be legitimately actively pursuing ideas that would be good for the world, without prioritizing short-term Google interests, only to be met with cynicism in the court of public opinion.
This is part and parcel of working for a visible/impactful organization. People will constantly write things, good and bad about the organization. Most of them, good and bad, will be wrong. They'll be based on falsehoods, misinterpretations, over-simplifications, political perspectives, etc.
This becomes a problem when people in the company assume that because most of the feedback is nonsense, that all of it is nonsense. That is especially temping when the feedback is hurtful to you or critical of your team or values.
I found a bit of Neil Gaiman's MasterClass very helpful when reading such feedback. Very roughly Gaiman said that when someone is telling you something doesn't work for them, and what you should do to fix it, you should believe them that it doesn't work for them, but that the author is much better placed than the reader to know how and if to fix it.
In my context I try to understand why someone is saying something, what information I can take from it, and whether there is anything within my expertise, control, or influence that can or should be done about it.
(If you take anything from this comment, I think it should be to go listen to Neil Gaiman talk about anything!)
I don't think that analogy applies. Both parties in this story did things in a 'work' context.
If I go on a work forum and describe my bad behaviour, behaviour that is harmful to others, and advocate for others to do it, I'm going to get in trouble, and possibly fired.
If I publicly discuss private work information, I'll definitely get fired.
If I mention the bad behaviour of someone at work publicly, without naming names, I might get a talking to, but probably won't be fired.
How a group reacts to those different things over time defines the norms and culture of the group.
What an excellent demonstration of what values/norms a group really cares about.
Biggar violated the all time favourite in-group rule: Don't talk out of school. Don't talk about fight club. Don't snitch.
The other founders violated a norm against pushing yourself ahead and taking advantage of others that doesn't even seem to hold in many groups, especially upper class/wealthy ones.
It must be uncomfortable being a google engineer on these products.
Having your work cancelled and thrown away is one of the most disheartening things as a developer.
It has to be back of mind for them when they are building. When it gets released they get to come see all the comments better on how long until Google kills it, and the people who won’t try it because of that risk.
I don't know what 'cortical representations' are exactly, but it seems generally true that experts in a domain build up gradually higher level pattern recognition in their area of expertise. Whether it is driving a car, playing a sport or game, or writing software.
As a beginning programmer I had to consciously think about fundamental concepts all the time, or grapple with my limited knowledge of a programming language, instead of thinking about the problem.
As an experienced programmer I think in higher level concepts and abstractions, and the fine code details happen without me consciously thinking about them particularly.
This actually makes learning a new programming language or IDE more painful now than it was when I was new. It probably takes me less time to get to an equal level of skill in language X than a beginner, but getting to the level of fluency where the low level details don't require conscious thought takes time and practice. Being slowed down so much while getting to that point is deeply frustrating.
I'm still not sure I made the right decision turning them down. On the one hand spending $5000 per month on rent feels crazy in Vancouver. On the other hand it is an incredible deal.
In the end what kept me from renting it is the likelihood of needing to move in a year or so. I prefer a bit more stability for my kids.
As far as I can tell most mansions are being rented out to high income locals, not to groups of college kids.
I toured a few of these in the last couple months and the nice ones had a parade of high income couples going through who would be perfectly happy to rent a $6,000,000 house for $5000 per month.
All the ones I saw explicitly disallowed subletting/group tenancies in the rental agreements.
The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and balances of power shift rapidly.
If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate the downsides and spread the upsides.