(In all seriousness, I'm very happy it's becoming more fashionable to not drink)
What is fashionable: to drink a lot for many years, then stop drinking and blather on about how much better life is.
Might just be drink being less affordable, or other drugs being more affordable rather than a fashion decision
Or they're just joyless teetotalers who've replaced their friends with SSRIs and amphetamines.
Inebriation is vulnerability. It's too risky to drink around other people these days, which is the entire point of it. I don't even see/smell anybody smoking weed despite it being legal and accessible...my local dispensary is a ghost town.
Loosened social inhibitions is a footgun, and drinking alone is miserable, so why bother?
Web3 was part two.
If your mission is whatever noble sounding thing most investors claim then yes, it is very limited.
On the topic of the article. Employment and unemployment are social constructs and how AI changes them is up to us.
It won't inevitably lead to a post-scarcity society or to mass poverty.
What happens will depend on what you, the reader, do. Do you assume it will all work out? Do you get active in remaking the social contract? Do you try to exploit the situation for your own ends?
> Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology
This is very far from the main point: accuracy of the claim that AI will wipe out (in this case health-related) jobs (and/or make health-related services cheaper). "involved" here is so vague as to be meaningless.
> clearly AI is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down
It may be crystal clear to you that AI will bring the cost of popular education down, but it is not clear to me at all, and adding "clearly" and "obviously" to some future claim does not make it any more convincing. He's trying to work with existing trends and data, you are saying "clearly the trend will reverse just because".
I realize the original post was written by somebody who has a reputation for saying one thing and doing something completely different, etc. etc.
Let me rephrase: AI is better at human beings at the sort of pattern-matching work that radiology entails, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed (I'll say in 20 years, if you want to check back down the line a bit and see how I did). This will both improve patient outcomes (fewer mistakes) and lower costs. Some radiologists will remain in supervisory/research/needing to have a human to rubber stamp type roles.
> It may be crystal clear to you that AI will bring the cost of popular education down, but it is not clear to me at all, and adding "clearly" and "obviously" to some future claim does not make it any more convincing. He's trying to work with existing trends and data, you are saying "clearly the trend will reverse just because".
I'm not saying anything "just because." I'm saying that technological changes in the form of AI will cause the trend to change, as technological changes have caused numerous economic upheavals. Nonetheless, I will be more specific - AI will give everyone a completely knowledgeable, fully personalized tutor. It will be able to very specifically identify places where a student is having difficulty and create custom exercises that are tailored to not only the subject, but also the student's optimal methods of learning. It will be able to custom tailor curriculum to fit a student's specific knowledge and career goals. The relative inefficiency of the large-scale lecture model of higher education will be so significant that the value it'll retain will just lie in the brand cache of the institute of higher learning (effectively, you passed the Stanford admissions AI's muster, so you're smart).
I want to see a GPT-based implementation of A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer-like open world that constantly teaches. We have a lot of the precursors needed to attempt it and give it a shot.
In place of paid mechanical Turk tutors I want to create an epistemological engine consisting of 3 main things: an inventory system of composable pieces of collected knowledge about the game world, a set of story writing design tools to create vignettes and connect pieces of narrative… a kind of narrative procedural generation system, and finally a set of original ui elements to showcase how the “knowbits” can be used to interact with the games narrative. AI will be used for character actors.
If it is obvious to all, then the word is meant to point out how stupid the listener is.
If it's not obvious to all then the speaker is just trying to shut down a conversation.
Clearly I'm right about this. It's obvious.
But, i get the gist of it, we can probably find many more niches that might suffer.
My take on the bigger point is, I wouldn't be so sure about the economy-wide apocalypse. I agree with what he said about the outsourcing scare of 2000's, and if pure cost+customization of education, for example, were an issue, you could conceivably hire a very good personal tutor (professor even) from a low-COL English speaking country, even like 15 years ago, or build yourself your own full custom curriculum for free from MIT videos and plentiful other information that has been around forever, mostly for free. Yet, colleges haven't been abandoned, people are taking on more and more debt every year just to be a part of that system. This is probably not technological in nature. Same for healthcare, there are so much money (and technology) getting poured into that but the system keeps getting more expensive and not too much more efficient, will probably start regressing at some point.
My personal point of curiosity was that autonomous driving, which 10 years ago was promised to have fully arrived 5 years ago, which among other things would have turned 2,000,000 not-very-retrainable-in-such-numbers truck drivers in the US into basically near-homeless people. Well, it hasn't really happened:
> from 2020 you will become a permanent backseat driver
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/13/self-driv...
We've been, too, promised that AI will revolutionize healthcare, e.g. that Watson will replace your doctor (at least, according to the IBM and friends' pitches). Watson turned out to be less than a rounding error in the healthcare equation (i think they got rid of parts of it by now).
The point being, to me it's not very clear cut, and some of what MA pointed out seems really to be caused not by inferior pre-ChatGPT technology but for more societal/economical reasons and incentives (perverse or not).
While it is possible in theory for AI to handle these tasks, they are complex and difficult problems to solve. There is currently no evidence to suggest that AI will replace radiologists in the two decades. Therefore, it is important to recognize the valuable role that radiologists play in patient care and not underestimate the challenges that remain in developing AI technology that can effectively replicate their expertise.
“clearly TV is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down”
… and that is exactly what happened. Since 1960 every kid in the world “clearly” gets the absolute best education imaginable thanks to the economy of scale afforded by TV broadcasting. It’s basic economics. Oh wait.
Books also increased productivity in the same way.
Would remote learning reduce costs? Yes.
Will AI systems reduce cost, yes.
What cost did the school save themselves here? The paid for televisions, so TV increased costs.
It appears to me that e.g., HS graduate standards have been gradually lowered over time, particularly the further back you go. Maybe this is independent of the screens.
But there are absolutely numerous use cases where being able to display graphics on a screen (or even better interactively) is a massive benefit. Think of any sort of science that's better shown with animation than just a static image on a page for example.
The actual net impact of screens in classrooms, however, appears to me to be extremely negative, and I think learning outcomes bear that out.
If you want a concrete example of a few places that aren't going to be held back by regulation and bureaucracy: China, India, most of Africa. They have bureaucracies of course but they are also booming economies and very much making the difference via technology. People are going to push boundaries with what is possible technically and some places are going to be more comfortable doing that than others. Ultimately, the willingness to push boundaries is what will lead to breakthrough results. If the US is not willing, too complacent, or too scared, that just means it happens elsewhere.
All this is true regardless of AI. But of course given that we have that, people are going to use that in anger for all sorts of things. Some misguided, some foolish, and some very productive and practical. Andreesen is arguing that flat panels are cheap and education is expensive. Flat panels are cheap because they are not made in the US and the production of those is not bogged down by how inefficient things have become in the US. For the same reason, you are better off getting your education outside of the US. Education is more or less free in other parts of the world. It's only this expensive in the US. Probably silicon valley is the worst place in the world to get one in terms of economics. Which is why a lot of the people working there are coming from abroad. Which is where they get most of their education.
Probably education is at the forefront of what AI can do short term btw. I've played a bit with chat gpt and it's an obviously awesome educational tool. It's like this patient tutor that is willing to explore any subject and answer any question. It might be a bit off with the facts and all the bat shit crazy hallucination. But that sounds like it should be a fixable problem. Once that is fixed, there will be no shortage of teachers any more. Anyone willing to learn will be able to learn and receive an education that is completely tailored to them. Anything, anyone, anywhere. Kids are using chat gpt already to fool their teachers. The next logical step is replacing them entirely. That's not going to take a lot of time. And it won't cost anywhere near a million dollars.
Lack of bureaucracy and government control are not defining features of these places.
The first time I heard of him was in 2016: https://www.fastcompany.com/3056581/marc-andreessen-riles-up...
As far as I'm concerned, he's always been kooky.
then he went off and founded netscape, creating the dot-com boom
since then he's mostly been running a successful vc firm
so yeah he's always been 'kooky'
https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/research/project-highlights/nc...
You should add your Matrix to your contact page.
Edit: Also, is there going to be another der* release this year? They and therefore you have taught me more than I'd learned in the last five years otherwise.
i hope the things you learned from them were mostly true
i was planning to do one in december but i felt like i didn't have much material because i had a pretty unproductive year in 02022, and i'm increasingly dissatisfied with the medium
you're right about matrix
That doesn't follow, particularly in construction.
There are many regulations that require something which is nominally better but is a trade off against cost, making the lower cost alternative unavailable. Much of that increase goes to the construction contractors as labor costs or markups on more expensive materials, so it's their unions and trade organizations lobbying in favor of the cost increase. The regulatory capture is by the construction workers.
They're also aligned with anyone who wants housing costs to stay high, including realtors and real estate investors. So yes, the rich folks at the top will protect the jobs of the construction workers when the high construction costs help them keep rents high.
> AI is simply already illegal across most of the economy, soon to be virtually all of the economy.
This just isn't true - AI won't necessarily be a product in the sectors he's talking about, but it'll absolutely improve them. Hospital services? AI is clearly going to be involved, at least in things like radiology. College tuition? I suppose that depends on how much the value of higher education remains in scarce brand names vs. education, but clearly AI is going to open up educational opportunities in a way that brings the costs way down.
And then AI will eventually (and to be clear, it might be a while) get us to general-purpose robots. He says "Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine." but in an industry like construction, if you accept what he's saying, all of that control is in the hands of the rich folks at the top. What he's suggesting is that they'll protect the jobs of construction workers when they can replace them with cheaper, more efficient robots who are exempt from safety standards.