I feel like the deeper truth highlighted here is that being pro-nuclear, or anti-anti-nuclear, is very much a “reddit” style opinion.

Whatever the actual truth is, that is. It seems to fall neatly into the “I know something and can make a ‘well actyooally’ argument about it” category without having expertise like being on top of the historical financial performance and context of the technology, about which I personally know nothing.

(edited because my original reply was uselessly mean)

Wow … nice to see!

Reminds me of a shower thought I had a while ago: why aren’t more churches/temples basically groves in forests? Even in an urban environment, why not cultivate some grand trees as a little forested oasis?

You could still put covers against rain and lights, fires and heaters against the dark and cold. Statues, murals and structures too.

Dunno, maybe I just like trees a lot.

Yep, and now you will see it everywhere.

And it’s quite insidious too. What’s the woman to do when offered such a position, even if the dynamic is known and Crystal clear?!

I recall learning somewhere that part of the reason was that Peter had never contributed to the song writing and when he tried submitting some tapes of riffs, Mikael really wanted to incorporate Peter’s music but in the end turned it all down for not being good enough. This was from an interview with Mikael. So presumably there was some aspect of not really being part of the band as much as Peter wanted to be?

One my most embarrassing personal moments with tech is that I wasn’t immediately revolted when I learned that captcha was being used to farm training data. I just didn’t think it through, and didn’t think I needed to think it through. A hang over from the era of Google in the naughties I suppose.

Still … fool me once …

I’m pretty sure a major problem with AI is that people don’t know how to talk about the actual problem.

It’s mega-corps replacing people while “stealing” their intellectual output. It’s a reshaping of the “social contract”. It’s those making bank quickly pushing the whole world in a direction that may just be a really bad idea (like we’re no longer in control of our own world/lives at all).

It poses the question: is all tech progress good or is it sometimes “bad” such that we actually want to design our own fate and sometimes just be comfortable with what we have and what we are?

Does this whole post-industrial revolution world need techno-hype to be happy? Or can we collectively just touch grass and settle a bit more.

At the risk of dogpiling on a well known thing …

I distinctly remember when I first heard the theme, watching Enterprise for the first time, and I seriously thought it was either a joke or a blatant rip off of Trek.

I really didn’t believe it was Star Trek by the same people who’d made 90s TNG era trek. It being a prequel was part of that (like how is Star Trek about looking backwards?!). But so obviously US hokey populism was just a major turn off … as a youngster then I “knew” that’s not what Trek was. And while I was somewhat wrong (US idealism is kinda what it’s about), I think I was right in the right way.

Just another refugee from reddit and looking to build a community here.

Well I for one welcome you!!

Thanks for the link/video!

Amazing!

More “Software brain” BS. Sure, many/most people are unthinkingly consumeristic. But it’s been a weird few decades for the tech industry where a lot of its ideas have been taken up as “the inevitable future”. There’s no guarantee that that relationship between the population and the industry holds, and the industry sure is full of people that have only lived in that bubble in time.

Cue the pirates of the Caribbean scene/ where captain Barbosa tells you you’re “in one”

You best start believing dystopian sci-fi stories, you’re in one

My hot take is that mainstream software technology hasn’t worked out how to be useful enough to be good in education and is now currupyrd by get rich quick start up mentalities, when really it needs the kind of open ended research that created the PC in the 60s & 70s.

Generally speaking, in a Bret Victor kind of way, enhancing human thinking behaviours and practices just feels like a purpose that has been left behind, probably since web and big data took over.

What do you think has changed in a year?

My take would be that many average office workers are pretty accepting of being told what to do, and are being told to use AI, and that the technology is more or less sticking the landing, at least enough to get used.

They all look pretty big to me on a map.

Having never visited … I’m still blown away by this being a lake (that is fresh water right?)

I think the threat is greater still.

Without jobs, and living off of whatever state based support, what leverage will the jobless have in society? How easy will it be to simply dismiss and ignore this economically disenfranchised cohort? To forcefully abuse them if it’s politically convenient? To completely prevent them from moving economic class. It certainly won’t be a clean jump to Star Trek “utopia”.

And beyond that of course are AI apocalypse scenarios. With machines increasingly running the world, what leverage will humanity have over it?

Hmmm … what would be the evolutionary perspective on this? A Lamarckian process overlaid on a Mendelian/genetic process through epigenetic modulation, passing on modifications based on parents’ local experiences of the current environment?

To us expecting to live 80 years, it might seem silly. But for mammals hoping to just survive, it may make lots of sense.

The dirty little secret is that the education system is a conformity production line, even gate keeping wealthy society by a student’s ability to conform.

Find exams dumb and pointless and never get a good justification for their significance and so struggle to care and perform well at them? Sorry, you’re out of the pipeline.

Which doesn’t mean learning and assessment are useless. It’s just clear that the emphasis of the system is very mechanical.

Interestingly, I don’t think I share this sentiment.

I’m no fan and personally don’t use AI (I barely touched it early ChatGPT days). But people use it to do things in successful fulfilment of their initial purpose.

I’ve seen it. Maybe I’ve seen the successes and not the failures in some cases. And I’ve certainly seen badly failed attempts to use it, but in those cases I’m happy to ascribe the failure substantially to a misapplication of the tool (which to be fair certainly invites gross misapplication).

My point though is that I don’t think an absolutist “AI is never useful” position is persuasive any more nor absolutely accurate.

Which, in my view, makes addressing the “rest of the situation” all the more fundamental. Indeed, I think everything g other than its efficacy was always the important part.

Part of the problem is that ethical arguments are difficult for people and many just switch off when it comes to the common good. Which is all of course part of the problem too.

But I think that’s gravity of the situation right now: our collective instincts may be misaligned for the moment. Our personal habits vulnerable from our prior corruptions. And our societal architectures already mutated, perhaps beyond repair, and therefore ill equipped for this.

Doomy, yes, but you’ve got to fight the fight you’re in, not the one you’d wish you’d won.

Another way I could put this counter, is that I feel like so much of what’s bad about AI was bad before AI, and that society from 2005-2020 badly mishandled technology. Whether AI “works” or not doesn’t matter. So long as it can fit into the same shape and meet the same urges that tech did 2005-2020, it will be adopted. But if the consequences of its adoption are graver than what came before, then the whole stack of that history needs to be addressed.