Agreed - just like the Fortune article talking about (Edit: Morgan Stanley, not GS) saying "the AI revolution is coming next year, and will decimate tons of industries, and no one is ready for it". They quote Altman and Musk. Gee - what did you expect from those two snake-oil salesmen?
A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of science fiction"? It saves me a bit of typing here and there with some good pattern matching. Trying to get it to do anything more than a few lines gives me gibberish, or an infinite loop of "Oh, you're right, I need to do X, not Y", over and over - and that's Opus 4.5 or whatever the recent one is.
Would you give it access to your bank account, your 401k, trust it to sell your house, etc? I sure wouldn't.
>A really good pattern-matching engine is an "insane leap of science fiction"?
Yes, literally. The ship computer voice interface in Star Trek was complete science fiction until 2022. Now its ability to understand speech and respond seem quaint in comparison to current AI.
2015 laptop, spinning rust. Nevertheless, it was at least somewhat acceptable at purchase, but crapware installed with successive system updates brought it to a standstill. An SSD might've helped, but not by much. I wiped it and put Kubuntu on it to give to my wife, for whom it ran acceptably. She gave it back when she got a shiny new MacBook Air.
A SSD would have made an absolutely massive difference.
Source: I have clients that still have 2nd/3rd gen i5 systems running 3-4 GB of RAM with Windows 10 and they're tolerable solely thanks to SSDs. Swapping that much on a hard drive would just be painful to use.
Nobody should be interactively using a computer post-2018ish (whenever SSDs fell below $1/GB) that's booting and running primary applications off spinning rust. They're perfectly fine for bulk storage drives but anyone waiting for an operating system booting off one has wasted enough of their life in the last year to have paid for the SSD. Companies that wouldn't spend $100 on an upgrade are literally throwing money away paying their employees to wait on a shit computer.
People with those characteristics are often wealthy: can't have "real skin in the game" if you're just a pleb with a mortgage, 2 kids and 2 cars in a middle-class neighborhood, right? At which point, once again, those with $$ are more equal than others.
Sure, they might be better informed - which lets them figure out how best to corrupt the system.
Edit: in fact, I could see a strong reason to DISALLOW anyone in the top 1% to vote or spend any $$ towards the election.
Yes, part of the solution could be strongly curtailing how we apply the first amendment to political spending. Maybe elections should all be taxpayer funded, access to media guaranteed, etc. And if we do allow donations, it has to be something fairly trivial. Maximum $50 or something per person regardless of net worth.
The unregulated, unlimited money situation we have now is a big part of the problem.
I mean... Maybe the things I'd LIKE to work on are getting my car around the race track faster. Very few people will pay me for that - especially if I'm not a very good driver. But I enjoy it immensely. I'd MUCH rather do that than work.
And right now, due to having to work, maintenance on my house is a bit behind.. Would also prefer to catch up on that - but again, no one is paying me to do that.
I mean, if I could live at my current level (middle class) without working, I would gladly do so, and let others also live at the same level, anywhere in the world, freely (if it was in my power). I do give to charity, always have, but, the crazier things get, the less secure I feel in giving $$ away.
Even replicators need feedstock - people who own the rocks or sand or whatever feeds them will start charging an arm and a leg. Sure, I could feed it dirt and rocks from my own property, but only for so long before I'm undermining the foundation of my own house. To say nothing of people who live in apartments.
And then, if everyone has equal $$, how do you decide who gets to live in the better locations / nicer housing?
And then you let them train themselves and no one notices when they "accidentally" remove the guardrail prompts from the next version. And another 10 years later, almost no one remembers how "The Guardian" learns new things or how to stop it from being evil.
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