> There IS value being created, or people wouldn't use the tools.
But for who and where is it realized? Ireland’s massive data centers aren’t there to serve Ireland’s tiny population. The value is exported overseas and profits realized overseas.
So what really matters for Ireland (and any country/region hosting these data centers) is whether the benefits in terms of capital spending + the few ongoing jobs created outweighs any increased electricity and environmental costs faced by everyone else.
It’s not your property they care about. They usually want this because it includes liability insurance if you damage their property or someone else’s, or your negligence causes harm to someone.
What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.
How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.
You’re extremely confident about this just based on your experience of it not happening to you. It’s good that it hasn’t driven you into a house but that doesn’t mean it can’t fail in a way that does drive someone else into a house.
Your example would call more to create an "information technology" subject in schools, that updates its curriculum to include changes like the development of AI. Thus, you go to that class, some of your coursework in the year is going to involve learning about AI and how it works, what it can and cannot do, using it for some project, so on. Not using AI for doing your homework in every other subject.
It’s a tax. So the government wouldn’t be buying anything. OpenAI (for example) would need to issue 100% new shares and give them to the government to hold in this new sovereign wealth fund. This the new sovereign wealth fund holds 50% of the company.
I don’t know how you decide what companies are targeted though. OpenAI/Anthropic are pure AI plays. But what about an AMZN or AAPL that have AI as only a part of their business.
This would be an incredible $1,800 from each taxpayer sent overseas to the Iranian regime. On top of what’s already been spent and the inflation caused. In any other time in history just this alone (ignoring all the other scandals) would lead to something like a landslide 100 seat swing in the house. The fact polls show we’ll be lucky to see 10 seats switch shows how incredibly broken our information environment has become.
It looks like when you sum up: the cost to generate information using an LLM + the cost to actually verify the information, the result on average is the same as not using the LLM. That does not mean some times it isn’t faster and cheaper. It just means other times it’s slower and more costly. This along with different people’s tolerance for accuracy explains why we see such diverging experiences with it.
So in order to make it pan out the forces at play are trying to make everyone believe we now have to accept wrong, even dangerous results.
NZ is even worse than Australia on the housing tax vs shares tax front. No housing taxes. Yet they have what is effectively an annual wealth tax on shares (FIF) even on their pitiful retirement savings schemes. This discourages saving in shares and encourages putting money in real estate.
Seems AI has made it cheap to produce information but now you have to spend more time parsing the information. And it’s now the less competent/useful people spending less time producing more information with the more useful people spending more of their valuable time parsing that information. This is why I’m skeptical of LLMs ever becoming a net benefit in most organizations.
> What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism.
To me it felt we were slowly making the world better for all. Progress was happening and would continue to happen.
Now it feels like we are rapidly on the path to a dystopian Elysium like future. A dystopia for everyone but the sociopathic ultra wealthy that want to rule over us. And they’re not even hiding their intent from us anymore.
This is where the media (or your media bubble) failed you. Trump was always this way. In his first term he significantly increased the amount of bombs dropped and number of countries bombed over previous presidents.
Democrats shouldn’t have wasted effort on trying to reduce student loans simply because the constituency (students) didn’t even give them recognition for it. They simply blamed Biden when SCOTUS blocked it.
But more generally we shouldn’t do one off things like this when we still haven’t fixed the cause of the problem. A better policy would be to start by making community college or first two years of college free or something like that.
The way AI is being used feels like it is proving that, in many orgs, what has always mattered has been the appearance of work, not results of work. Will we wake up in a few years and find out we’ve fired all the doers and are now overloaded with the fakers?