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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

To be fair, what have those poor starving children ever done for them, right?

What does *he* envision a hypothetical scenario where AI has taken over an extremely large amount of the labor?

I'll grant that it is an *unlikely* scenario, but should it come to pass that we manage huge reductions in the need for human labor, and large chunks of the population pretty much have to 'stop working' whether they like it or not, what does he imagine the outcome?

Make an argument that AI isn't going to be *that* game changing, sure. But I really dislike the argument that humans don't deserve to get by unless they are somehow needed for work. Everyone do their part, but if there aren't as many parts to be done...

Particularly rich from a spoiled guy who hasn't had to *really* work a day of his life...

You have a whole class of people who are paid just for having money.

So that means you need a whole class of people losing money just for not having money on a timely fashion.

Lovely system, surely not one that will break in a scary and violent way one day.

It's the latter.

A *lot* of companies have shit customer service, whether automated or even human and charge a premium for "not shit customer service".

And people eat that up, many of those companies have more 'premium' support customers than standard support customers.

Well, that's one economic outcome, and one I would welcome, I'm not quite so confident in humanity's ability to successfully navigate that, but it would be wonderful.

I'm highly doubtful we will achieve significant space exploration. The physics have been stubbornly unforgiving on this with no workarounds in sight. We *can* do some stuff within the solar system, though the payoff is questionable. Interstellar has even more unforgiving physics and even more uncertainty. With a *massive* expenditure of energy we might be able to get a probe to Proxima Centauri and data back within 15 years to have a better idea if it's even worth a hypothetical human expedition.

Frankly, we have no particular inkling of what it will take to get to AGI. Might be 6 months, might be decades. The current most popular approaches seem to hit the fundamental limits predicted by most technical people in the field, in spite of the snake oil business folks that have descended upon that subject area.

I've no idea what you picture as having made teachers obsolete, especially in the 80s. No, the TV cart was not a suitable replacement for a teacher.