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We have been on this track for a long time: cars were supposed to save time in transit, but people started living farther from city centres (c.f. Marchetti's constant). E-Mail and instant messaging were supposed to eliminate wait time from postal services, but we now send orders of magnitude more messages and social norms have shifted such that faster replies are expected.
"AI" backed productivity increases are only impressive relative to non-AI users. The idilliac dream of working one or two days a week with agents in the background "doing the rest" is delusional. Like all previous technologies once it reaches mass adoption everyone will be working at a faster pace, because our society is obsessed with speed.
That idea was pushed to its limit by the Koopman operator theory. The argument sounds quite good at first, but unfortunately it can’t really work for all cases in its current formulation [1].
The Fourier and Wavelet transforms are different as they are self-adjoint operators (=> form an orthogonal basis) on the space of functions (and not on a finite dimensional vector space of weights that parametrize a net) that simplify some usually hard operators such as derivatives and integrals, by reducing them to multiplications and divisions or to a sparse algebra.
So in a certain sense these methods are looking at projections, which are unhelpful when thinking about NN weights since they are all mixed with each other in a very non-linear way.
The basic premise under GP's statements is that although not perfect, we should use the technology in such a way that it maximizes the well being of the largest number of people, even if comes at the expense of a few.
But therein lies a problem: we cannot really measure well being (or utility). This becomes obvious if you look at individuals instead of the aggregate: imagine LLM therapy becomes widespread and a famous high profile person and your (not famous) daughter end up in "the few" for which LLM therapy goes terribly wrong and commit suicide. The loss of the famous person will cause thousands (perhaps millions) people to be a bit sad, and the loss of your daughter will cause you unimaginable pain. Which one is greater? Can they even be be compared? And how many people with a successful LLM therapy are enough to compensate for either one?
Unmeasurable well-being then makes these moral calculations at best inexact and at worst completely meaningless. And if they are truly meaningless, how can they inform your LLM therapy policy decisions?
Suppose for the sake of the argument we accept the above, and there is a way to measure well being. Then would it be just? Justice is a fuzzy concept, but imagine we reverse the example above: many people lose their lives because of bad LLM therapy, but one very famous person in the entertainment industry is saved by LLM therapy. Let's suppose then that this famous persons' well being plus the millions of spectators' improved well-being (through their entertainment) is worth enough to compensate the people who died.
This means saving a famous funny person justifies the death of many. This does not feel just, does it?
There is a vast amount of literature on this topic (criticisms of utilitarianism).
> A newly−invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn−out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves
* Animal Farm - George Orwell
* The Fall - Albert Camus
* Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
* One hundred years of solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
* The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
I know smartphones are extremely valuable as I have learned a lot from the internet, and they are great tools when you have no other options, but they are already starting to become the default way of doing anything, and that way is solitary. AR devices would only exacerbate this trend by just being even more convenient to use. I love the technology but I wouldn’t want to live in a future where asking to your AR glasses before of your friends is the norm.
I’m not sure what is the best way to move forward without sounding like a luddite.
After having read the two rather strongly opinionated pieces "Amusing ourselves to death" [1] and "Avoid news" [2] they have mostly convinced me that "breaking news" is rarely of value in our everyday life, and I would rather have less of it.
[1] https://ia800101.us.archive.org/27/items/Various_PDFs/NeilPo...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130117104220if_/http://dobelli...
The author mentioned by GP is currently working on a similar questions collecting, reviewing and categorizing known literature in these open access documents [1][2]. I suggest you take a look if you are interested in the topic.
> For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use, and I feel that I use it very differently than folks that use Instagram, for example. Can they be effectively conflated?
Well, I would say no. But to have a meaningful discussion we need to first agree on what is meant here with "social media". Clearly, this law has been passed with the intent to affect Meta / ByteDance / Reddit and similar companies with a business model that hinges on capturing as much attention of their users as possible, which is very different from HackerNews. Most accusations to social media begin bad are towards of the former type.
> but I would be very curious to see a scientific justification for banning it for kids under 16.
From [1], it seems to me that there is a non-negligible amount of literature that has been accumulating, that could be used to justify the ban. Though, Australia is not a technocracy (I hope), so I would say that there is also a certain degree of "purely social" reasons why they might want to curb the access of social media companies to their youth.
[1]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-...
[2] : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vVAtMCQnz8WVxtSNQev_e1cG...
IMO the title of the post should be "Ice Skater"
[1]: https://www.analog.com/en/resources/analog-dialogue/articles...
Interesting stuff, I wish I had more time to learn about what they where doing.
If I had to guess it's probably because they want to keep it closed-source and that is a nightmare with linux distro packaging. I have also used the tables via the webapp like you for many years.
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/design/stories/DPT-RP1/
https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/sony-digital...
I am also not a fan of the subscription model & pricing scheme but I guess that is how they want to pay back their investors. However, besides this they are (relatively speaking) also a pretty open company with a sizable community on github maitaning a lot of custom tools / applications. They do not provide official support for these modifications, but these tablets are definitely not locked-in like an ipad or impossible to tinker with because of obscure undocumented chinese hardware
Of course not. Startegic calculations for warfare should not be conflated with a moral justifications for military actions. We have to come to terms with the fact that it was a morally unjustifiable decision, regardless of the effects it had on the war. This is something that too many people forget today.
> Why even have laws of war then
I think laws of war (the ones that work) are only an attempt to change the incentives that are presented to the belligerents during warfare, in such a way that the confilct is less damaging. They are not much about making the belligerents more morally virtuous in any sense other than a consequentialist / utlitarian one.