paganel
I personally hardly have that impression, as in the days of the Romantics and of Werther's sufferings are now way past us.
I guess this is related to Israel, isn't it? Meaning a fab they had installed there. Or maybe I'm thinking of the wrong Intel property blowing up.
Do America’s poor have a standard thing like a roof on top of their heads? Nevermind a castle, just a basic house which has already been paid for.
I understood that and I genuinely sympathise with the daylight-related syndromes people up there in the North have to deal with, but you also have to understand that further South we also become depressed if the Sun comes down too early, especially in the summer. So from an utility and democracy point of view the wellbeing of the majority (and the vote of said majority) should take prevalence over the wellbeing of the minority.
We don't care about the people living in the North, there are more of us living not in North and as we live in a democracy (the EU) the majority vote should cound on this.
This is surely an exaggeration.
As a counter-point, I personally don't even notice it. Also, I live in Romania, so every trip West of the border, even just to Hungary, means a one-hour change, so, again, no big deal.
By this point "the public" just doesn't care for this sort of stuff, we just want (stabler, for those still employed) jobs and day-to-day life that is not expensive as hell anymore. What the middle-class elites now call "democracy" has just become a glasperlenspiel, i.e. nothing of real interest to us, the masses, just a social differentiator between said well-to-do middle-classes.
More generally, the sooner us, the masses, spell it out that democracy is well and truly dead the better, that way maybe we can do something to alleviate our situation, but I'm afraid that won't happen anytime soon.
It's just a lame gimmick, this is not 2024 anymore, people have started to get sick of this AI thingie, especially when it comes to video/image generation. That Simon guy with his pelican is the exception that can only be seen on tech forums like this one.
As to why US (and probably also some Chinese) companies have started pouring hundreds of billions into AI-image generation is beyond my comprehension, but on the other hand I'm no economic genius.
Real life is full of unknown unknowns, AI risks putting you on the wrong path without you even realizing it.
It doesn't help a bit that (almost? I'd say all) AI products are very confident while they're guiding you on that unknown unknown path, so of course that you don't realize soon enough the epistemological situation said AI product has driven you into.
If oftentimes happens that you don't know that that's the wrong answer, or you don't realize it right away, for that matter, and hence that's I think that AI is a new (and very big and important) source of information entropy.
Just a recent personal example, yesterday I was curious about the historical figure that was present in an online photo taken in 1930s Romania. Google's Gemini was very quick to point out that that was (military dictator) Ion Antonescu [1], which it was obvious that he wasn't. I wrote down that that wasn't in fact Ion Antonescu, at which point Gemini was very quickly and very surely providing me the info that that guy indeed wasn't Ion Antonescu, but (former Foreign Affairs) minister Manoilescu. At this point I wasn't so sure myself, I don't have a visual image of Manoilescu in my head, so (ironically) I had to AI-dumb google for Manoilescu's available online images and it seemed like Gemini had been wrong a second time. I didn't bother asking it for a third time.
Just to put things into perspective, here in Romania it is illegal to mention Ion Antonescu's name (and propaganda image) in a positive matter, as in one risks prison for doing that, now, just imagine that the political powers that be here decide to use an AI-tool like Gemini in order to identify potential law-breakers in that respect. People would risk going to jail just because Google's Gemini was completely wrong in identifying a WW2 military dictator. Absolutely atrocious product(s).
I've mentioned it explicitly, people like me don't want learning, we want exploration, actually getting to stuff. We don't want any new information, we've already got plenty of that, we want an actual change of our physical location in the Solar System.
More generally, I think that this insistence on "learning" instead of "exploring" is similar to how in the late Middle Ages the scholastics were all too happy to rehash the same treatises on Aristotle and the like, seeing that as the epitome of the intelectual human condition. It took some Portuguese and Spaniards from the outskirts of the continent to put all that upside down and actually discover the world at our disposal.
As was most of South America to the European man when Magellan did his thing.
No Western company will be allowed to choose a Chinese cloud provider by their legal department or by their stakeholders. Which leaves only the US cloud providers as viable sources (as us, Europeans, have been too busy building our revenues based on turism and other such non-tech thingies instead of building real stuff).
This is not what we were expecting from space exploration back in the '80s (let's say). I don't personally care what we might "learn" by sending robots to Venus or Mars, I want us (humans as a species) to be able to have new Magellans.
[1] https://www.fnac.com/a1723295/Marc-Bloch-L-Histoire-la-Guerr...
That’s how we got to abominations like two MFA operations in order to login to a basic web interface/web product, no-one sane would have ever paid for that originally.
This is AI-generated.
It didn't win the Americans and the Israelis the war, to the contrary, it gave them (the Americans and the Israelis) the illusion that they could win it based on air power alone as a result of the Douhet doctrine.
There's also the fact that index funds have de facto become pension funds in most of the Western world, so Western politicians are trying to do their damn best to keep the stock exchanges afloat (i.e. always going up) in order to keep those aged 45-50 and older on their side when it comes to voting. We've last had a market crash in 2008-2009 (the covid thing was just a blip), I don't see today's politicians allowing a crash like that to happen if they can help it.
So in fact putting one's money into index funds is betting on the current political system continuing doing its thing, no need to involve any advanced maths.
I’m saying that this wouldn’t have happened had our society not become “mathematics-ised” at some point (I’m talking about said society’s technical and scientific elites, of course). I’m also saying that outsourcing our “mathematics-mind” to AI (which seems the current process we’re now part of) will not allow for similar “mathematics-ing” to take place into the future. I’ll come with an even stronger claim and say that we risk losing the “mathematics-ing” we now associate with most of our sciences.
I don't necessarily think that that is true, as almost every social science has been turned into maths one way or another, beginning with Economics. Heck, even mundane stuff like sports (think football/soccer) has now been absorbed by data, which you can see as applied maths.
Yes, I do know that advanced maths doesn't currently explain Arteta's system at Arsenal but we're generally talking about that same semantic area of interest, i.e. if the interest on maths were to subside as a result of AI taking that interest away from us then we will have no more data/stats-focused Artetas in the future (and possible no AI-like thingie also).
What's a "fake" email account? According to the law, that is. Does that mean that having more than one (let's say) email account might now be considered as "fake", and hence potentially illegal?
We must be living in two different political worlds. "Vote for us or you'll lose your social-related benefits" is already an existing thing when it comes to elections in the Western world.
> And what aspect of that arrangement looks like servitude?
Choosing your (political, in this case) masters on account of said political masters throwing you some crumbles from time to time, this is indeed servitude.
Why? What should we talk about instead as members of a polis? About endless consoomerism and other such hedonistic stuff?
Then you'd have the State giving money directly to the likes of Unilever (think tooth-paste) and big agro-business (think bread). Subsidising transport instead is the lesser of many evils.
> And let the market find efficiencies with reduced transportation distances.
Market doesn't work when it comes to most of us.
> Or better yet, just subsidize the poorest among us,
This is just praying to bringing in servitude amongst us, it will go like this: "we will stop subsidising your daily bread if you stop voting for us". The same goes for the idea of UBI more generally speaking.