No, AOL switched to drink coasters a LONG time ago.

Even adjusting for "all movement is somewhat useful for the skill of driving", an AI model driving consumes training material way more than a human will ever see in their lifetime if they popped right out of a womb and drove for every waking and sleeping moment of their life, several times over. The amount of input and feedback about spacial navigation from just moving about is still a tiny amount by both amount of movement and hours of movement of the training data.

Same for text processing, not only does it consume more than a human will ever see, it will consume more text than a human will ever see, hear, conceptualize across many lifetimes.

Yes, the AI scenarios have a more narrow scope of material but the volume of it is still inordinately more than a human will consume no matter how much you credit somewhat different experiences as "equivalent".

But it doesn't. For example, the lawyers that keep submitting court filings with fake references evidently have wrong assumptions about what AI is and is not (for now)

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com...

250 is less than 1/3 of 500?

A more typical use case for now would be using AI to generate some code, and then testing/fixing the code. Not running the AI every time to solve an instance of the problem.

Side note, I wonder if this paper compared AI performance to human performance. You think people can do towers of hanoi consistently?

The general point being made is that it does *not* do what they expect it to do, but it looks awfully close to doing that and sometimes does it right until it obnoxiously annoys people.

Most laypeople I've interacted with whose experience has been forced AI search overviews are annoyed by them because they got bit by incorrect results.

The problem is not that the technology is worthless, it's that the "potential" has been set upon by opportunistic grifters that have greatly distorted the capabilities and have started forcing it in various ways. It's hard to tell the signal from the noise when you have so many flim flam artists dominating the narrative.

Now the thing is, as a culture we greatly reward the humans that speak with baseless confidence and authority. They are politicians and executives. Put a competent candidate against a con-man and 9 times out of 10 the con-man wins. Most of the time only con-men are even realistically in the running.

It's at least beyond the current breed of "AI" technologies, even as those techniques get scaled to absurd levels they still struggle in various ways.

A nice concrete example, attempts at self driving require more time and distance of training data than a human could possibly experience across an entire lifetime. Then it can kind of compete with a human with about 12 hours of experience behind the wheel that's driven a few hundred miles. Similar story for text generation, after ingesting more material than a human could ever possibly ingest they can provide some interesting, yet limited results.

What did HyperCard even do?

It's kind of hard to explain, and honestly my memory of what you could do with Hypercard and how you actually did it is very fuzzy as it was so long ago.

But basically it was a visual programming languages, where the visual bits you drug around were then also backed by actual code that would do things. You would create a variety of cards, and in those cards could store data, move on to other cards, and so forth.

Some people used it to create games, but used it to create an inventory tracking system for a store, and probably some other stuff I have forgotten about.

In the end, it was a way to make programming a lot more approachable to people at a time when programming was VERY low level for the most part!

A key part of it was once you made a stack of cards it was very easy to share with other people as a kind of application (but one you could modify in any way you liked).

You might get a better feel reading this Tribute To Hypercard.

I can type 30ish WPM

If the words are things like length() or common programming phrases it's definitely much quicker.

I wouldn't describe myself as touch typing though, I need to see some of the keyboard to orient myself at times. My typing speed is not a hindrance to my work. I assume there are people smarter than me that perhaps would be able to have thoughts faster than I type, but in general typing is a very small slice of time for my work. If I typed instantly I'd be at most 10% more efficient.

Everyone always talks about Woz but it sure seems like Atkinson deserves nearly as much praise.

Sad to see one of the great ones go, but accomplished so much for so many and that is better than a lot of people manage.

Due to a disability, I can only type with my right hand. It definitely slows my typing. But, I have learned to work around this. For example, I use "sticky keys" which lets me type Shift, Ctrl, Alt, and release those keys. so, Ctrl+C is typed by pressing Ctrl then releasing it, then pressing C then releasing it. The regular way also works while "sticky keys" is enabled.

It's absolutely critical, further you have to do it in dvorak if you want any credibility.

This is a strong case for fixing the mechanisms that demand "full time" work, particularly benefits. Need to split especially health insurance off from employment status, one way or another. We need the flexibility to reduce working hours or years without being hit by the limitations of "part time work".

Also a good way to let some folks better assemble a 'full time' work life from multiple 'part time' jobs.

While more drastic measures may be premature, I do think it has always made sense to do something to break that "employer == path to health insurance" BS (as well as other benefits).

The issue then is that if UBI is insufficient to live on, then it can't really replace welfare for those who can't get a job at all.

Also, in this hypothetical, where there are negligible "job opportunities", it's not like folks even have an option to augment with earned income.

I agree with the concern about "just cut checks" gives a lot of risk of the rich to change the practical value of the numbers being doled out compared to measures to assure actual access to the relevant goods and services directly.