And even good / bad is sometimes subjective and brain can adjust to it depend on whatever you like the taste for instance. Tell you this as a big fan of durian. Since there a lot of chemicals responsible for smell brain override reaction to fruit once you love the taste.
(I am reminded of a Fallout side quest, where you help a Museum retrieve artefacts and they talk about how the constitutions was moved around, maybe by airplane .. point being, history will be fun to reconstruct after a robot nuclear apocalypse)
I think it's simpler than that, and they're just trying to avoid liability.
With all of their claims about how GPT can pass the legal/medical bar etc. I wouldn't be surprised if they're eventually held accountable for some of the advice their model gives out.
This way, they're covered. Similarly, Epic could still build that feature, but they'd have to add a disclaimer like "AI generated, this does not constitute legal advice, consult a professional if needed".
One of the problems is that many of our society's systems are predicated on a growing population. Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person. People take more than they give. Fixing that will be painful, but possible.
More worrying is how many countries' birth rates have fallen below the replacement rate. Some SE Asian countries are interesting case studies here (Japan, S Korea), but it's not looking good, and much of western Europe is heading in the same direction. Maybe the worry is overblown and populations will eventually stabilize at a lower point, but currently it seems like a declining population will just add to the stressors that are putting people off from having children, so it could just as well keep snowballing.
All that's to say, I don't worry too much about over/underpopulation, but I do worry about a shrinking population.
> Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person.
Canada saw the demographic writing on the wall, and solved its public/government pension problem in the 1990s:
This is completely ludicrous. For retirement planning purposes, it is often recommended to assume you'll need 70% of your working age income for the same lifestyle (you have fewer expenses—live not having a chunk of your income go to retirement savings), but in many situations it could even be ≤50%:
To have the same (or more) in retirement generally means you "over saved" while working, and you could have had more resources for enjoyment of life earlier (after all, we don't know when our time will come).
> In France it is reported that retirees now have higher (average?) incomes than workers
It may not be exactly true, but it's close to be true, and then like you said the workers have way more expenses (rent, children).
I will point out that in the 90s we in France already knew that the retirement system was unsustainable. It is quite obvious if you look for 2 seconds at the population pyramid :-)
Generations of politicians tried and failed to do something about it, thanks to the left (and sometimes extreme right wing) saying that there was enough money and we just need to tax the rich more.
The problem with most current pension systems is the inability of the last boom to plan for that boom to become part of it. And people hating on immigration, not realising it is massively needed to offset the negative replenishment rate. We might also have a negative growth rate when the boom generation starts dying but that might not actually be a bad thing. Note: the boom lasted from about 1948 to 1974 so it will take a while.
> Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person.
I'm from a western country and I agree with your statement and have a similar fear. My country is doomed because of the pension system.
BUT this doesn't apply to China. Their system isn't structured this way, therefore this is mostly irrelevant for them.
As long as China have a working population bigger than most countries, as well such amazing universities, they will perform better than all those countries.
Even with the population decline, they'll still have more able workers than all western countries for at least the next 100 years.
In the current pension system (at least the ones in the Nordics), the new generation pays for the old generation. This mechanism is broken, as it expects (as you pointed out) an ever-growing population, which is of course unrealistic.
Fixing [*] the broken pension system in a sustainable way is politically unpalatable and seems to have been so for decades. Lifting the pension age is the only "innovative" action available that is even discussed nowadays anywhere in public, as if that were the only viable alternative, which of course it isn't.
I've pondered why. Hammering out the details of a new system and taking care of a transition period etc. cannot be unsurmountable problems. It probably has to do with pensioners being a large voter demographic, thus the reason is some form of political self-preservation on behalf of the traditionally large parties.
So, instead of changing things to the better, a broken system must be maintained. Since the system is not only broken, it's essentially untouchable, therefore political decision-taking has to accept possibly sub-optimal decisions in related areas to avoid disturbing anything. In a way, the brokenness leaks.
Then, a shrinking population only exacerbates the problems of the pension system, spreading the brokenness further into other societal systems and decisions. And that's a bad path to be in.
[*] In an example of a better-working alternative system, any pension contributions would be personal, kept in an account managed by the state. The money is (low risk) invested by the state, profits/dividends reinvested, etc. Once one becomes a pensioner, the money can be withdrawn in whole or parts. Add taxes somewhere, such as when withdrawing the money. The state guarantees the lowest level of pension, something like today. Simple enough, and not tied to "children pay for parents".
Might aswell outsource the responsibility of fund management to highly regulated third parties and you're basically describing Australia's superannuation scheme.
Issue is due to the same politics as everyone else, Australia is having trouble reigning in the state pension (ideally in this scheme meant as a fallback to provide a minimum subsistence level).
It's not like people sat down and said "clearly we'll have infinite population and hence a pyramid like scheme for social support for the elderly is ideal".
It was more likely something like "for the foreseeable future we'll have population growth and therefore a pyramid like scheme is a good solution for now".
Ideally the scheme should have already started adapting to the changing population dynamics, but humans for the most part (unfortunately) tend to kick problems down the road.
Politicians don't tend to get rewarded for solving tomorrow's problem when their populace tend to me more interested in having more money to spend right now.
So here we are, living large today with little regard for the cost to our future.
Thanks a lot! I really want to release the Android version too — if you drop me a message at hello@sobernotsorry.app, I’ll let you know as soon as it’s out
There's no inductive bias for a world model in multiheaded attention. LLMs are incentivized to learn the most straightforward interpretation/representation of the data you present.
If the data you present is low entropy, it'll memorize. You need to make the task sufficiently complex so that memorisation stops being the easiest solution.
I've found some AI assistance to be tremendously helpful (Claude Code, Gemini Deep Research) but there needs to be a human in the loop. Even in a professional setting where you can hold people accountable, this pops up.
If you're using AI, you need to be that human, because as soon as you create a PR / hackerone report, it should stop being the AI's PR/report, it should be yours. That means the responsibility for parsing and validating it is on you.
I've seen some people (particularly juniors) just act as a conduit between the AI and whoever is next in the chain. It's up to more senior people like me to push back hard on that kind of behaviour. AI-assisted whatever is fine, but your role is to take ownership of the code/PR/report before you send it to me.
> If you're using AI, you need to be that human, because as soon as you create a PR / hackerone report, it should stop being the AI's PR/report, it should be yours. That means the responsibility for parsing and validating it is on you.
And then add to that the pressure to majorly increase velocity and productivity with LLMs, that becomes less practical. Humans get squeezed and reduced to being fall guys for when the LLM screws up.
Also, Humans are just not suited to be the monitoring/sanity check layer for automation. It doesn't work for self-driving cars (because no one has that level of vigilance for passive monitoring), and it doesn't work well for many other kinds of output like code (because often it's a lot harder to reverse-engineer understanding from a review than to do it yourself).
We've going from being writers to editors: a particular human must still ultimately be responsible for signing off on their work, regardless of how it was put together.
This is also why you don't have your devs do QA. Someone has to be responsible for, and focused specifically on quality; otherwise responsibility will be dissolved among pointing fingers.
The movie personality of Tony Stark was supposedly inspired by Musk's persona (at least from before he began spending most of his time in a futile attempt to woo Trump)
"In 2022, Iron Man screenwriter Mark Fergus confirmed that Musk had partly inspired the screen version of the Marvel hero, as both men share tech prowess, arrogance and a short fuse. He told New York magazine that Stark was as if “Musk took the brilliance of [Steve] Jobs with the showmanship of [Donald] Trump,” adding: “He was the only one who had the fun factor and the celebrity vibe and actual business substance.”"
Edit: I'm not quite sure why Musk was brought up unprompted though, made it seem like he has something to do with this company, but it doesn't seem like that's the case?
Donald Trump has been a public figure for much longer than just the last ten years. By 2008, the Apprentice had already been running for four years. He ran for president in 2000. The portrayal of Biff Tannen in Back to the Future 2 (1989) was partially based on his public persona at the time.
The 1993 movie Super Mario Bros. features both a major and minor antagonist clearly modeled after Donald Trump. He was a well known, highly referenced figure for DECADES before he entered politics. Where are you getting this idea that nobody in 2008 could have been thinking about Donald Trump?
He was literally in the middle of his 13-year run on Network tv. If he hadn't won the presidency, that would be talked about as the apex of his time as a public figure.
And, having been a kid at the time, I remember excitedly talking with friends about how Elon Musk was the real life Tony Stark. We were young enough to be insulated from his controveries, and to not truly appreciate how impossible the Iron Man suit was.
It makes sense for unclassified to smell worse than good, and it'd probably be the biggest category by a long stretch.
(Pure speculation.)