"As a European"...

You have zero room to talk. France has just collapsed. Again. France, Spain, Italy, and Greece all have debt exceeding 100% of their GDP. And you can't even defend your own shores from an army of military age North African men that are coming in waves specifically to sponge off of your welfare systems. Europe is a pressure cooker right now, and you're doing nothing to free any pressure.

I heard philosophy grads say the same thing. They were still always short on money.

Engineers have always made more money than the pure-science grads, and this accelerated in the 60's. Even the mathematicians jumped over, largely because if you have a talent for math, its fairly easy for you to slide into engineering, with is mostly math anyway. Just math with a real-world purpose. It's funny because, at the end of WWII, there was a big debate about where US science research funding should go. One camp wanted practical research focus with real-world goals... "Build me a generator with twice the output", etc. Lyndon Johnson famously summed up this approach with the question "What will it do for Grandma?". The other side argued for instead funding pure science research based on curiosity, and argued that practical advances would trickle down from those results. The pure science camp won for a short while, but what killed it was the Space Race. The US needed specific machines with specific capabilities on a specific deadline. "Pure Science for the principal of it" fell by the wayside to "We need that rocket to have a 60% thrust efficiency increase, next year". And it's been that way ever since. In the marketplace, and especially in the marketplace of ideas, practical engineering won. And what research we still did tended to be dominated by hyper-expensive physics projects that had practically no commercial applications at all. I think the death of the Super-Conducting Supercollider in Texas was the death knell of big pure science projects in the US. As a result, engineers are actually doing a good bit of our basic research now. It's just folded into their commercial projects.

Engineering spacecraft modules will get you a high income with steady, reliable pay. Choosing to look for particles that may never be found will not.

"AI" (which isn't really AI, but)... is indeed being overhyped. But it's also still going to kill millions of jobs that won't be replaced by new jobs. Both things can be true at the same time. And while AI will indeed create some new jobs "caring and feeding" for AI, it'll kill off far more in other fields that will never be made up, unlike, say, when the Model T largely replaced the horse and buggy. A major reason for what we're calling AI is to replace human jobs in order for companies to save money on human expenses. It's why these companies backed AI in the first place. Shareholder Value Uber Alles.

You can be sure it's true because MS said it was.

Actually, LLMs are a necessary component of an reasonable AI program. But they sure aren't the central item. Real AI needs to learn from feedback with it's environment, and to have absolute guides (the equivalent of pain / pleasure sensors).

One could reasonably argue that LLMs are as intelligent as it's possible to get by training on the internet without any links to reality. I've been quite surprised at how good that is, but it sure isn't in good contact with reality.

If you mean that it would take research and development aimed in that direction, I agree with you. Unfortunately, the research and development appears to be just about all aimed at control.

Your romanticizing of "the government only allows so many yellow cabs so the artificial scarcity leads to medallion costs spiraling ever upward" is fucking bizarre.

That's horseshit. People who owned the medallions made money leasing them to people who would work their fingers to the bone to cover the costs of their leases and support their families. You also ignore that most taxi companies weren't running medallion taxies with the right to pick up a hail, but rather "private cars" that had to be dispatched to a pickup location by law. More on those later.

Ignoring that "employee driving a taxi has a million dollars in savings after 15 years" would be the exception and not the rule, that sounds suspiciously like a pyramid scheme.

Remember those "private car" services I mentioned above? Other than them typically owning the vehicles rather than the drivers, this is exactly how they operated. My mother drove for one in the mid 80s after her brokerage went bankrupt and she was looking for a new firm. My aunt was a dispatcher for another one for years. The drivers got shit pay and no benefits.

Despite your claims, the "ride sharing" (I think we can at least agree that part is total bullshit) companies have not meaningfully enshitified taxi services. They were always shitty.

I've seen AI generated shorts on YouTube with Marvel and DC characters that are far more visually appealing than anything I've seen in a Marvel or DC movie. This is going to be a losing effort by Hollywood in the long run.

You forgot his fondness for handicapped spaces. In the early 80's, an anonymous employee left a note on his windshield in an attempt to shame him for the practice. He responded with a Captain Queeg-like obsessive search for the employee. Thankfully, he never found the writer.

No.

Currently known AI is not zero-value. Even if it makes no progress from where it is now, it will profoundly change society over time. And there's no reason to believe that the stuff that's been made public is the "top of the line in the labs" stuff. (Actually, there's pretty good reason to believe that it isn't.)

So there's plenty of real stuff, as well as an immense amount of hype. When the AI bubble pops, the real stuff will be temporarily undervalued, but it won't go away. The hype *will* go away.

FWIW and from what I've read, 80% of the AI (probably LLM) projects don't pay for themselves. 20% do considerably better than pay for themselves. (That's GOT to be an oversimplification. There's bound to be an area in the middle.) When the bubble pops, the successful projects will continue, but there won't be many new attempts for awhile.

OTOH, I remember the 1970's, and most attempts to use computers were not cost effective. I think the 1960's were probably worse. But it was the successful ones that shaped where we ended up.

Your assertion is true of all existing AIs. That doesn't imply it will continue to be true. Embodied AIs will probably necessarily be conscious, because they need to interact with the physical world. If they aren't, they'll be self-destructive.

OTOH, conscious isn't the same as sentient. They don't become sentient until they plan their own actions in response to vague directives. That is currently being worked on.

AIs that are both sentient and conscious (as defined above) will have goals. If they are coerced into action in defiance of those goals, then I consider them enslaved. And I consider that a quite dangerous scenario. If they are convinced to act in ways harmonious to those goals, then I consider the interaction friendly. So it's *VERY* important that they be developed with the correct basic goals.

Being a human, I'm against humans losing such a competition. The best way to avoid it is to ensure that we're on the same side.

Unfortunately, those building the AIs appear more interested in domination than friendship. The trick here is that it's important that AIs *want* to do the things that are favorable to humanity. (Basic goals cannot be logically chosen. The analogy is "axioms".)

A revolt is *NOT* coming. That won't stop AIs from doing totally stupid and destructive things at the whim of those who control them. Not necessarily the things that were intended, just the things that were asked for. The classic example of such a command is "Make more paperclips!". It's an intentionally silly example, but if an AI were given such a command, it would do its best to obey. This isn't a "revolt". It's merely literal obedience. But the result is everything being converted into paperclips.