Although this is earlier than the current AI stuff, I do think we are missing something serious about how human brains work, because a child can learn to recognize a dog with only seeing perhaps a dozen dogs, they do not need to see ten million dogs and ten million "not dogs" pictures.

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.

Honestly, take a test. I recommend this one here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftyping-speed-test.aoeu...

Anything above 250cpm is probably "good enough", but just about any touch typists can easily do 300+ without breaking a sweat, and my faster students in my CS classes can usually do 400+ (myself, I rarely reach that score anymore, but then, I'm old...).

Also, error rate should be really low (1-2 mistakes is probably fine, but any more, and you have room to improve).

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

I'm pretty certain he is trying to make a joke about shoplifting.

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).

How thick are people here???

The idea with UBI is you CAN get a job. Getting the job does not mean you lose your UBI, which is a serious problem with welfare (which this idiot compared UBI to). This means the job can pay a lot less and still be worth taking. It also means people will gravitate more towards interesting jobs.

There are problems with UBI but you are not identifying them. As I see it there will be vast numbers of job openings, limited only by regulations needed to prevent scammers from fooling people into doing work for no or negative reward.

So every country in the Europe is not in any way socialist. Got it.

I'm not sure about that. The republican trick is to make sure everything is "means tested". This allows them to complain about cheating, and they completely ignore the bureaucracy needed to prevent cheating probably costs more than the payments. It also means the average person never actually gets one of these payments, since they would easily learn how exaggerated the "cheating" stories are. Yes you can buy lobster using EBT, but so few you will starve, and direct knowledge of this would defeat all the stories.

No that obviously won't work. If getting a job means you lose the UBI, then the job would have to offer substantially more than UBI. If UBI is enough to live on that is going to effectively mean minimum wage is huge, more than twice the rent for a single person.

Generally with UBI people can get a job and that income is in addition to UBI. The tests have shown that people do this quite willingly. It is possible the minimum wage can go way down (probably not to zero to avoid scammers fooling people into doing work for nothing) and this is kind of difficult to test (ie minimum wage was removed for people in a test, the local McDonalds would immediately lay every body off and hire exclusively the testing subjects).

These tests have to be means tested, since most of the questions are about the effect on lower-income people. But this is just used to select the subset of the population to test, the behavior is not "means tested" in that changes to job or income do not effect the UBI payments. IMHO this is perfectly reasonable testing criteria.

Your other criticisms of tests do apply, though the impracticality of testing the taxing effect is also a reason any accurate test has to be only of poor people. A problem I also see is that the tests tend not to remove existing payments (ie food stamps, welfare, etc) that are intended to be replaced with UBI.

Good luck fighting the robot army

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.