> We have some of the highest living standards in the world. In caparison to the U.S.A. in particular, it's like a utopia.
Give it a few more decades of compounding lagging productivity, and that will no longer be true.
> The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
Productivity has nothing to do with cultural imperialism. China has dramatically increased their productivity, and that story has nothing to do with American imperialism
It’s real easy to say this right now, because the EU has only lagged its peers in productivity for only the last decade —- thus the compounding effects of lagging productivity are not yet evident. However several more decades of lagging productivity will eventually result in European living standards being several decades behind their peers.
If the EU thinks that low labor productivity is the path to happiness, going down that path is their prerogative, but long term that path will only lead to ruin. Lagging productivity has never in human history lead to civilizational success. Europe will be outcompeted and eventually dominated by its more productive peers.
The average human throughout human has existed at subsistence level. That means that nearly all of their time was spent producing/collecting the food to feed themselves.
The average American now spends just 10% of their wages on food. That effectively means, just 10% of Americans’s working life dedicated to food cultivation. That’s the result of economic productivity.
If an American is happy existing at a subsistence level, they’re free to slash their working hours to a tiny fraction of the average person. However, humans have unlimited material desires, which tends to keep us working.
Productivity is ultimately the measure of the efficiency of human labor. The more productive workers are, the more free time they’ll have to do whatever it is they want to do to make themselves happy.
In the short term, lagging productivity can be masked by debt spending and other measures, but in the long run, the only thing that increases human wealth and material abundance is labor productivity. Everything else is illusionary.
All human societies have sought to increase labor productivity. The first stone tools, agriculture, and nuclear reactors are all productivity-enhancing inventions. Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.
And to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing good about low productivity for workers. All that means is that you’re spending more time working for lower wages, to produce things of lower value.
EU productivity is already lagging its peers. Being locked out of having the most cutting edge technologies will further plunge the block into a productivity decay. Less productivity means everyone in Europe will get poorer, with declining living standards. This is not an outcome Europe can afford, especially considering its aging workforce.
There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.
Over the years, overregulation will continue to lock the EU out of bleeding-edge technologies. Every feature, every website, every innovation that doesn’t launch in the EU further plunges the bloc into technological irrelevance.
> I, on the other hand, work as a software developer and use ChatGPT as a discussion partner to get a better understanding of problem and solutions spaces. I don't expect ChatGPT to be correct but gladly take any inspiration or argument and use it to improve my own thinking process. And for this use case, I consider GPT4 absolutely invaluable. It's like a polite, knowledgeable, never busy, untirable colleague that is ready for my questions 24/7.
I often use ChatGPT as a starting point when researching new topics (usually in the software space). In the paragraphs of lies it generates, there are usually a few keywords you can put into Google to find accurate and reliable information.
If you ask ChatGPT an exceedingly trivial question, it’ll typically spend the next 60 seconds spewing out five paragraphs of corporate gobbledygook. And of course, because ChatGPT will lie to you, I often end up back on Google anyways to validate it’s claims.
Meanwhile, I could’ve found conclusive and correct answers directly from Google in about 10 seconds (I’m a fast Googler).
There are exceedingly few situations where I find ChatGPT is worth the effort. At least for factual Q&A-style queries like this.
Another tangent: I feel this speaks to the hazard on building on these generative AI APIs. Your product may work great on Day 1, but there’s no way to guarantee it’ll still work as well on Day 500. Either due the models being nerfed, or due to the models becoming stale over time.
My ChatGPT use is down. After the novelty wore off, it quickly became apparent that ChatGPT was exceedingly willing to outright lie to you. Which makes it not useful, unless you’re already a subject matter expert who can spot its lies. But if you’re a subject matter expert, you probably don’t need ChatGPT to help you in the first place; I can find answers on Google faster than ChatGPT can generate them.
I suppose it’s also useful for generating things like letters (things where exact truthiness doesn’t really matter). But even for that use case, I find ChatGPT creates overly verbose corporate gobbledygook whenever I ask it to generate text. So I just end up writing the text myself.
I’ll really be able to get my procrastination under control, now that Reddit has banned third party clients, and Twitter has limited users to viewing 600 tweets/day.
What’s worse is that CS is a transport simulator that’s heavily biased towards cars; to the point where every new game starts off with a giant unsightly freeway in the middle of your town.
I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.
ChatGPT promises to have iPhone-level impact, but as of today (April 16, 2023), its impact has largely been to accelerate existing workflows. Its impact is more akin to Photoshop (still, a monumental impact), than the introduction of the smartphone.
This may very well change months and years from now, but as of now it’s too early to claim it has iPhone-level impact.
Give it a few more decades of compounding lagging productivity, and that will no longer be true.
> The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.
Productivity has nothing to do with cultural imperialism. China has dramatically increased their productivity, and that story has nothing to do with American imperialism