The difference is that people building atomic weapons knew what they were building. OpenAI/Anthropic have no idea how emergent intelligence works. They're just running in the dark towards the cliff. Leaving it in their hands is the same risk as leaving it to any random guy, because random guy and the labs have the same understanding of what they're building. I'm tired of us treating labs like they're somehow uniquely good at AI. They are not. They simply have enough capital to train. If training was affordable they would have no edge whatsoever.
Probably. I mean I don't think anyone would choose Lawyer as the leading profession for leadership. It's a "largely useless" profession outside of it's very narrow context.
Is it? Uber has been a net loss for society. It increased overall VMT, especially in urban areas, and drove riders away from transit. On the whole this is both bad for cities and bad for city dwellers. We have more traffic and less transit, precisely the opposite of what we should be aiming for.
If corporations can selectively ignore whatever laws they don't like, we won't have a functioning society anymore. Our society is predicated on equality under the law. If general trust in that principle breaks down I don't see how democracy survives.
Except that's not how it was in 2004 before Citizens United. So.. yes, in your made up hypothetical it doesn't look good. But in reality, where we all live, it worked better than the current rules
I mean.. it also sends the message that you can ignore the law if you're rich. $1.5B is like a single failed training run for Anthropic. They burn that in a long weekend because somebody forgot to abort a hyper parameter search.
We won't know how close we are to takeoff until takeoff. My main critique of AI is that takeoff is dangerous, and we're basically running towards the cliff as fast as we can. Will you grow wings before you fall to your death? That's basically the bet we're making, if you believe in takeoff.
Silver lining is that if it goes bad we probably won't live long (as a species) to say "I told you so"
The excess money goes into assets that people need to survive/thrive. In SF/Bay Area a lot of it goes into land appreciation (housing prices). The end effect is rampant homelessness (did you know a full 1% of SF is homeless), delayed family formation, and an ever-growing state bill to subsidize landowners.
Excess isn't a problem, it's the distribution of the excess. Right now (in America) pretty much all of it goes to the top couple percent. The bottom ~40% of Americans have, by all practical measures, experienced a reduction in standard of living compared to 1980. Like, yes, they can afford more trivialities. TVs are cheap, particle-board furniture is cheap, and so on. But the actually important things like healthcare, education, and housing have moved further out of reach.
So yes, it's nice that my Anthropic friends can retire to work on, in one case, their fantasy novels. I'm very happy they can focus on something they love (and I look forward to reading their books). However, that much capital concentration leads to a hefty chunk of our (really rather rich) country struggling to service basic needs (like having a roof).
Is it? I switched to Kiro and it's essentially identical.. well a bit better because you get a better idea of what the harness is doing, but otherwise identical.
Sure, but 98% of what you buy is is either in the set of SKUs near you or substitutable for them. Near you only applies if you live among actual density of course.
Sounds like you want to have unequal representation. Or rather, you want to keep your privilege by preventing other people from gaining equal footing. You are right that this is a pretty central element of American society. However, I think we're at our best when we concede that this sort of thinking is counter-productive in the end. Cooperation is really the core mechanism for societal growth, so any efforts to prevent cooperation (in this case, by creating a subclass) is eventually self-defeating
> The problem I have with the immigration of today is that the levels of cultural distance are much, much higher than Ellis island.
Sounds like a good thing to me. More diversity means we can incorporate the best ideas from everyone, instead of a select few. But I suppose not everyone likes to try new things