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Comment Re:Neither are we (Score 1) 175

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".

Comment Re:Mixed feelings (Score 1) 88

Why do we need a national ID card. I'm happy without one.

Every few years, whoever is in government decides they like the idea of a national ID card. Whoever is in opposition states that this is a horrible idea.

Bear in mind that this will have absolutely no effect on the number of refugees. The conservatives would have forced them on people as they got out of their boats. The current lot will have to think of something else...

Comment Re:A new crisis (Score 4, Interesting) 126

Actually, the warning was first sounded the warning was Svante Arrhenius in 1896, when he determined the UV absorption properties of CO2 and came to the pretty fucking obvious conclusion, based on chemistry and thermodynamics, that if you increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, you will inevitably, as a basic function of physics, increase energy absorption.

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 175

And for normal users it is just a blackbox that does what they expect it to do.

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.

Comment Re:Not artificial intelligence (Score 2) 175

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.

Comment Re:Neither are we (Score 1) 175

it's somehow beyond any conceivable algorithm or scale we can possibly fathom.

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.

Comment Re: Why is Apple so afraid? (Score 1) 100

I'd wager very damned few apps are ever distributed via sideloading. meta makes Facebook and Messenger available via sideloading, mainly to get around some locked-down non-Alphabet Android devices, but for the vast majority of users, if it's not on the default app store on their device, it might as well not exist.

Comment Re:The question is... (Score 1) 327

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).

Comment Re:UBI can't work (Score 1) 327

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.

Comment Re:It's not that (Score 4, Interesting) 327

The overall labor participation percentage in 1950 was 59%. Now it's 62%. The absolute max over the last 75 years was 67% around the year 2000.

Every generation laments the up and coming generation as hopelessly stupid and lazy. You can find writing to that effect dating back hundreds of years. It's like every generation forgets they were the "lazy and stupid" generation growing up.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 327

As you said, we can't "test" UBI.

The attempted tests are always plagued by at least some of the limitations:
- Small enough so that the larger economy made no adjustments to them
- Limited duration so participants *know* they need a long term strategy
- Trivial and/or unreliable amounts of money
- Means tested, only the ones that need it pay
- No modelling of the "taxpayer" half of the equation

We have repeatedly shown welfare can be an effective way of breaking the "chicken and egg" problem of hard to get good work when you are poor, hard not to be poor when you can't get good work.

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