2rafa
3hr ago
Yeah, it’s just that liability tolerance for SDCs is very low. That’s why Waymo cars drive extremely conservatively and they’ve been careful about expanding into routes where more aggressive driving is necessary, like airport pickup (although it’s coming). But it’s all going to happen pretty soon.
2rafa
4hr ago
The role of a translator is like the role of a consultant, it’s insurance. This gives it more job security than it would have divorced from the legal system. A translation firm guarantees its translation, the same way that if you fuck up and can blame McKinsey, you might keep your job.
Your clients pay you because if the machine fails, they have nobody to sue.
2rafa
9hr ago
AI cannot convincingly do anything that can be described as "humanities": the art, writing, and music that it produces can best be described as slop.
I mean this just isn’t true. Current models are good at writing. Are they as good as the best human writers? Not yet, but they aren’t far away and things like context windows or workarounds for them are going to be solved pretty quickly. Current AI art (ie the new multimodal OpenAI model) is, in terms of technical ability, as good as the best human artists working in digital art as a medium. You and I might agree that feeding family pictures into them to “make it like a studio ghibli movie” is indeed slop-inducing, but that’s just a matter of bad taste on the part of the prompter. The same is true for music.
To say that current gen generative AI isn’t good at writing / art / music you essentially have to redefine those things in what amounts to a tautology. Sure, if you only like listening to music that reflects the deep, real human emotion of its creator then you won’t like listening to AI music that you know is created by AI, but if you’re tricked you’ll have no idea. An autobiography that turns out to be made up is a bad autobiography, but it’s not bad writing.
The rest of your argument is just generic god of the gaps stuff, except lacking the quality and historical backing of a good religious apologia. Three years ago language models could barely string together a coherent sentence and online digital artists who work on commission were laughing over image models that created only bizarre abstract shape art. They’re not laughing now.
When will the AI penny drop?
I returned from lunch to find that a gray morning had given way to a beautiful spring afternoon in the City, the sun shining on courtyard flowers and through the pints of the insurance men standing outside the pub, who still start drinking at midday. I walked into the office, past the receptionists and security staff, then went up to our floor, passed the back office, the HR team who sit near us, our friendly sysadmin, my analysts, associate, my own boss. I sent some emails to a client, to our lawyers, to theirs, called our small graphics team who design graphics for pitchbooks and prospectuses for roadshows in Adobe whatever. I spoke to our team secretary about some flights and a hotel meeting room in a few weeks. I reviewed a bad model and fired off some pls fixes. I called our health insurance provider and spoke to a surprisingly nice woman about some extra information they need for a claim.
And I thought to myself can it really be that all this is about to end, not in the steady process envisioned by a prescient few a decade ago but in an all-encompassing crescendo that will soon overwhelm us all? I walk around now like a tourist in the world I have lived in my whole life, appreciating every strange interaction with another worker, the hum of commerce, the flow of labor. Even the commute has taken on a strange new meaning to me, because I know it might be over so soon.
All of these jobs, including my own, can be automated with current generation AI agents and some relatively minor additional work (much of which can itself be done by AI). Next generation agents (already in testing at leading labs) will be able to take screen and keystroke recordings (plus audio from calls if applicable) of, say, 20 people performing a niche white collar role over a few weeks and learn pretty much immediately know how to do it as well or better. This job destruction is only part of the puzzle, though, because as these roles go so do tens of millions of other middlemen, from recruiters and consultants and HR and accountants to millions employed at SaaS providers that build tools - like Salesforce, Trello, even Microsoft with Office - that will soon be largely or entirely redundant because whole workflows will be replaced by AI. The friction facilitators of technical modernity, from CRMs to emails to dashboards to spreadsheets to cloud document storage will be mostly valueless. Adobe alone, which those coworkers use to photoshop cute little cover images for M&A pitchbooks, is worth $173bn and yet has been surely rendered worthless, in the last couple of weeks alone, by new multimodal LLMs that allow for precise image generation and editing by prompt1. With them will come an almighty economic crash that will affect every business from residential property managing to plumbing, automobiles to restaurants. Like the old cartoon trope, it feels like we have run off a cliff but have yet to speak gravity into existence.
It was announced yesterday that employment in the securities industry on Wall Street hit a 30-year high (I suspect that that is ‘since records began’, but if not I suppose it coincides with the final end of open outcry trading). I wonder what that figure will be just a few years from now. This was a great bonus season (albeit mostly in trading), perhaps the last great one. My coworker spent the evening speaking to students at his old high school about careers in finance; students are being prepared for jobs that will not exist, a world that will not exist, by the time they graduate.
Walking through the city I feel a strange sense of foreboding, of a liminal time. Perhaps it is self-induced; I have spent much of the past six months obsessed by 1911 to 1914, the final years of the long 19th century, by Mann and Zweig and Proust. The German writer Florian Illies wrote a work of pop-history about 1913 called “the year before the storm”. Most of it has nothing to do with the coming war or the arms race; it is a portrait (in many ways) of peace and mundanity, of quiet progress, of sports tournaments and scientific advancement and banal artistic introspection, of what felt like a rational and evolutionary march toward modernity tempered by a faint dread, the kind you feel when you see flowers on their last good day. You know what will happen and yet are no less able to stop it than those who are comfortably oblivious.
In recent months I have spoken to almost all smartest people I know about the coming crisis. Most are still largely oblivious; “new jobs will be created”, “this will just make humans more productive”, “people said the same thing about the internet in the 90s”, and - of course - “it’s not real creativity”. A few - some quants, the smarter portfolio managers, a couple of VCs who realize that every pitch is from a company that wants to automate one business while relying for revenue on every other industry that will supposedly have just the same need for people and therefore middlemen SaaS contracts as it does today - realize what is coming, can talk about little else.
Many who never before expressed any fear or doubts about the future of capitalism have begun what can only be described as prepping, buying land in remote corners of Europe and North America where they have family connections (or sometimes none at all), buying crypto as a hedge rather than an investment, investigating residency in Switzerland and researching countries likely to best quickly adapt to an automated age in which service industry exports are liable to collapse (wealthy, domestic manufacturing, energy resources or nuclear power, reasonably low population density, produce most food domestically, some natural resources, political system capable of quick adaptation). America is blessed with many of these but its size, political divisions and regional, ethnic and cultural tensions, plus an ingrained highly individualistic culture mean it will struggle, at least for a time. A gay Japanese friend who previously swore he would never return to his homeland on account of the homophobia he had experienced there has started pouring huge money into his family’s ancestral village and directly told me he was expecting some kind of large scale economic and social collapse as a result of AI to force him to return home soon.
Unfortunately Britain, where manufacturing has been largely outsourced, most food and much fuel has to be imported and which is heavily reliant on exactly the professional services that will be automated first seems likely to have to go through one of the harshest transitions. A Scottish portfolio manager, probably in his 40s told me of the compound he is building on one of the remote islands off Scotland’s west coast. He grew up in Edinburgh, but was considering contributing a large amount of money towards some church repairs and the renovation of a beloved local store or pub of some kind to endear himself to the community in case he needed it. I presume that in big tech money, where I know far fewer people than others here, similar preparations are being made. I have made a few smaller preparations of my own, although what started as ‘just in case’ now occupies an ever greater place in my imagination.
For almost ten years we have discussed politics and society on this forum. Now events, at last, seem about to overwhelm us. It is unclear whether AGI will entrench, reshape or collapse existing power structures, will freeze or accelerate the culture war. Much depends on who exactly is in power when things happen, and on whether tools that create chaos (like those causing mass unemployment) arrive much before those that create order (mass autonomous police drone fleets, ubiquitous VR dopamine at negligible cost). It is also a twist of fate that so many involved in AI research were themselves loosely involved in the Silicon Valley circles that spawned the rationalist movement, and eventually through that, and Scott, this place. For a long time there was truth in the old internet adage that “nothing ever happens”. I think it will be hard to say the same five years from now.
1 Some part of me wants to resign and short the big SaaS firms that are going to crash first, but I’ve always been a bad gambler (and am lucky enough, mostly, to know it).
2rafa
1d ago
I can’t imagine any scenario in which an adult woman would play fight with an unrelated man she wasn’t attracted to, sure. I can’t even really imagining it happening in the context of something that wasn’t already a relationship or a date, except in the “best friends who are not-so-secretly in love with each other” way.
2rafa
1d ago
Dominant ideologies can afford to gatekeep; weaker ideologies can’t. The far left struggles because in some ways it is both strong (it largely agreed with the liberal consensus on social issues, tolerance, immigration, identity, prisons/justice etc) and in other ways it is weak (private property, capitalism, the existence of rich people). As you note, this means it struggles to build an electoral coalition beyond young middle class students who agree with the liberals on social issues but who are personally poor, and therefore sympathetic to leftist arguments around redistribution.
2rafa
1d ago
Deportees from countries that always accept returnees (ie developed countries) are pretty much always returned to them. If an Irish person overstays a visa and gets deported they are going home to Ireland on a commercial flight in most cases.
The issue is firstly with countries that don’t accept returnees because they don’t care or don’t want those people back, secondly with migrants who throw away all identity documents and don’t clarify or lie about where they’re from and thirdly - especially in Europe - with countries that the courts block deportation to.
That’s why third countries are so important, because they remove the incentive to hold up the deportation process because you’re not spending it in the country you’re trying to move to, but in a poor third country.
2rafa
1d ago
Over the past year, I have witnessed the slow extinction of fat people in the upper-middle class. They were always rare, at least in PMC social circles in major global cities like London and NYC, but there were always a few here and there, and there has been a significant and noticeable decline since the arrival of Ozempic. This is near-universally true among women and (formerly) obese men; pot-bellied men who are 20 or 30 pounds overweight continue not to care in many cases, although even their numbers have shrunk considerably.
In the medium term, I wonder what the social consequences will be. Since the explosion of obesity from the early-mid 1970s, classical notions of beauty have been complemented by what I guess you could call the “butterface”, someone facially unfortunate or mediocre (mid) but who has a somewhat more attractive - by virtue of not being fat, usually - body. In 1950, being skinny with an ugly face put you in the bottom quartile of hotness. In 2020, it probably put you around the middle, maybe even somewhat above average in the fattest places. Now, the value declines again, and the face card returns to its position on top.
2rafa
1d ago
The issue for game NPCs is ensuring total consistency with the setting and characters and not making up any lore at all. Even late generation LLMs still struggle with this in hallucination (I like to ask about the political backgrounds of Chinese politicians, many of which have no content online beyond two or three generations back, and I’ve seen even latest models completely BS).
AI is going to destroy cataclysmic amounts of value in so many middlemen sectors (like almost all of SaaS) as productivity surges and the jobs market craters. Hard to pick winners or losers; capitalism itself might radically change or vanish entirely. I’ve purchased some land and a small place in a remote-ish corner of NW Europe where my spouse has some connections, have something somewhere random in the US, and a relatively conservative portfolio in the market (although my work and being an American abroad makes all but the most basic strategy almost impossible). Weird things are about to happen.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s certainly not the kind of thing you advertise but it’s also certainly the kind of thing any allied government would flag as a risk during procurement. For the most part it’s irrelevant since allied militaries rely utterly on the US for all but the most basic operations. In a Falklands-type situation it could get dicey but the logic would be that the US would probably sit it out rather than actually shut down an ally’s capability.
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah, this is the most likely explanation. They likely just assumed that “JG” was either another JG or was supposed to be there for another reason and that somebody else was handling opsec / the group chat.
2rafa
2d ago
This is a forum for the discussion of unusual, niche and often radical politics. Responding to that debate by saying that you can't criticize one view because the opposite view is more socially popular and more visible in the media is an irrelevance when the question is not about which view is more popular but about the arguments themselves. SecureSignals would like to live in a world where the inverse of your description is true, so the debate occurs on that basis.
2rafa
2d ago
No, all of this is rhetorical tap-dancing around the fact that he cries fake tears for Arabs while dreaming of a white Israel that guards against his enemies more zealously than Israel does. Almost all dissident right criticism of Israeli conduct in Gaza is envy, it's that it's "unfair". It's not principled criticism of settler colonialism (see their views on Rhodesia and South Africa).
SS believes that Zionists ought to be held to account for their vicious criticism of post-Weimar German behavior and their simultaneous total embrace of it
This is a monumentally dumb argument. It's the literal inverse to "white nationalists can't complain about immigration because they immigrated to non-white territories en masse and took many of them over". If someone says mass immigration of Europeans to Rhodesia was good, but mass immigration of Somalis to Sweden is bad, should they be similarly "held to account"? 'Nooo, you can't possibly justify settlers fighting a war against barbarians who want to rape and kill them unless you ALSO justify them being expropriated and slaughtered in the land where they previously lived for a thousand years, which also led many of the survivors to flee to that very place'. Don't think so.
2rafa
2d ago
The person I’m replying to thinks that mythos is perhaps the greatest fraud and/or mistake of the 20th century.
Surely it’s just because the mega jails are for male inmates only, they likely don’t have excess capacity in the women’s prisons.
2rafa
2d ago
The Anglo-American presence in and involvement with the house of Saud predates Israel.
Why should Americans care about the cycle of violence in the Middle East? Their lives are of no relevance to those who reject banal Christian platitudes about the brotherhood of man or the universal value of human life, which I know you don’t share. Dispense with the fake tears for the Arabs; if they were being killed by someone other than the Jews you wouldn’t care at all for their suffering, even performatively.
2rafa
5d ago
Also the employment market for tech people is probably worse today than at any time since immediately after the financial crisis, so companies have more leeway to take actions employees disapprove of.
2rafa
5d ago
I would guess upwards of 95% of people who play cricket in America on a regular or semi-regular basis are of South Asian descent. In very big cities there will be a few expats from the UK / Australia / NZ / South Africa, and maybe some expats and immigrants from the former colonies in the Caribbean, but that’s it.
2rafa
5d ago
I was thinking that if Trump was really smart, he would have forced them to actually commit to hiring, say, 30% of their junior lawyer intake from a college Federalist Society approved list.
The human brain may always be more efficient on a watt basis, but that doesn’t really matter when we can generate / capture extraordinary amounts of energy.
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