Lugh

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
 

“There is a perception that the economy is changing, and workers have to make a drastic decision: to undergo training or to go into retirement because the investment in their own human capital is not worth it,” Giuntella says.

As the world's leading manufacturing nation, it is no surprise that Chinese people are feeling the headwinds of robotic automation first. Mainstream neoliberal economics says AI & robotics will provide more jobs than they take away. Yet, here we see evidence of the contrary.

As goes China today, the rest of the world will soon follow. If robot and AI employees are so cheap to employ, who will buy the expensive goods and services from human-employee businesses?

The recent US election seems more evidence that the neoliberal model of capitalism is crumbling and in decay everywhere. Maybe whatever replaces it will have to honestly face up to the economic realities of AI & robots.

Research Paper

Financial Times article

 

Trump's plan seem to be to purge the US military of any generals that don't agree with him, and his Secretary of Defence pick, has spoken of the need for using the military against US citizens he sees as leftist.

If this is how things play out, how likely is it some states like California may talk of secession, or armed resistance organizes against the military?

[–] Lugh 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There is certainly progress to be made with multi-modality, but I wonder if they've already exhausted scaling LLMs based on data.

[–] Lugh 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

To think six months ago they were valuing OpenAI at $80 billion. I don't think so ...

[–] Lugh 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Good riddance - don't forget your coat on the way out.

[–] Lugh 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I really suspect this is how the plateau of productivity will look for machine learning.

It seems finding more data to scale up LLMs is a bottleneck too.

[–] Lugh 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

He perpetually over-promises. I'm more amazed they've let him lead America's space efforts for going back to the Moon. There's no way his stated timeline with StarShip will be achieved.

[–] Lugh 2 points 11 months ago

Many people will have heard of 'Havana Syndrome' - a medical condition reported primarily by U.S. diplomatic, intelligence, and military officials stationed in overseas locations. Most of the affected individuals reported an acute onset of symptoms associated with a perceived localized loud sound, followed by chronic symptoms that lasted for months, such as balance and cognitive problems, insomnia, and headaches. Some people disputed if 'Havana Syndrome' was real. However here we see the perfect mechanism for making something similar happen.

There's probably upsides to this. Medicines like Ozempic seem to profoundly change human behavior for positive outcomes. This could have the same potential.

[–] Lugh 2 points 11 months ago

Even more insane is the price. 10c per 1 km. Wow. If they were that cheap in the west who would want to spend the several hundreds of dollars/euros per month it costs to own a car.

[–] Lugh 2 points 11 months ago

Thanks, I subscribed to them.

[–] Lugh 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Google logins and similar?

I've never seen that done, but I'm going to look into it, as it would be good.

trick for ordinary users is getting here with minimum clicks.

Yes, added to that the clunkiness of finding and subscribing to other instances is a huge turn off. I wish we could have "special" accounts for new users, that were already subscribed to a top 50-100 curated instances. Sadly, AFAIK You can't do that.

[–] Lugh 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There's 2 issues here.

  1. We want to be very selective with our use of automod & pinned posts/comments. It can easily move to accusations of spam.

  2. We've tried emphasizing the open-source, no-tracking aspect before. It doesn't seem to attract much interest.

Most Redditors are casual users there for content. Only a small minority care about the issues that motivate the fediverse. What we'd like to do is bring some of the large group here; but they will have to be motivated by something else.

We have regular posting here now, often with topics not on the sub-reddit. My hunch is that an approach like - "Like r/futurology? - come to our other site for extra content" - might work better.

[–] Lugh 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Science fiction has given us the idea of super-advanced android robots like those in 'Westworld', 'Megan', or 'Humans'. But long before that point is reached, much simpler robots will be widespread and very useful. It feels like we are on the verge of that happening. There are almost twenty humanoid robot start-ups around the world. Here we can see how many of them may soon be successful.

Multimodal AI is already here. The robot start-ups don't have to build it, they just have to integrate it into their existing products. These robots can be cheap or expensive, but that doesn't matter so much. The real power is in the AI.

[–] Lugh 5 points 11 months ago

Declining living standards, stagnant wages and Inflation is already leading to political instability around the world. The rise in support for fascism and the far right are directly linked to these factors. It seems climate change is already making these problems worse.

There's another knock-on effect from this. One of the traditional central bank responses to inflation is higher interest rates. America has so much government debt it's spending more money on the interest payments than it is on the military. Those annual interest payments are now at $1 trillion. It seems climate change will make them bigger by pushing up interest rates.

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