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Comment Re:Total stupidity on authors part (Score 1) 58

In addition, the part of that money spent on computer centers will be useful even if AI doesn't pan out. It's not like investing in tulip bulbs. If AI doesn't pan out, it will just take a few years longer to pay for itself.

That said, AI will pan out. Even if there's no further development (HAH!) the current AIs will find an immense number of uses. It may well be "growing too fast", but that's not the same as worthless. (But expect well over half of the AI projects that are adopted in the next few years to fail. People don't yet understand the strengths and weaknesses. Unless, of course, AGI is actually developed. Then all bets are off because we REALLY don't understand what that woud result in.)

Comment Re:It's all based on the assumption that... (Score 1) 58

It's going to take more than one more efficient algorithm. OTOH, there've already been improvements in more than one algorithm. Nobody knows how far that could go, but the best evidence is that it could get a LOT more efficient. (Consider the power usage of a human brain...it uses a lot of power for an organ, but not really all that much.)

Comment Re: Imaginary assets like hallucinations? (Score 1) 58

I'm guessing this is a summary:
Banks are legally allowed to loan more money than they have in deposits...to a degree. They've occasionally been found to go well beyond that limit. And they aren't carefully audited often enough.

Whether that's an accurate summary or not, it's true, if a bit shy on details. (I don't know the details this decade. But there probably haven't been any basic changes in the last few decades.)

Comment Re:Not AI (Score 1) 130

AI is bullshit and vastly overrated.

Well, it's not really AI in any sense of the honest term; it's not a self aware machine. AI has become a marketing term for servers running a bunch of fancy scripts that produce dialogue that can pass for human speech fairly well. BUT... AI is a game changer economically because those fancy scripts are already killing jobs, jobs that won't be replaced by something else. So in that sense, AI isn't "bullshit". It's an extinction level event for entire classes of formerly human work. And the economic and social and political crisis that it will create has clearly already began.

Comment Re:4.3% (Score 3, Insightful) 130

That's a real problem, but it ignores that the labor statistics are manipulated for political ends, so you can't trust them.

It's not at all clear to me that we currently have low unemployment among those who would be seeking jobs if they thought they had a chance. (Once you've been unemployed for a while I believe they stop counting you. Admittedly, it's been over a decade since I looked into that.)

Comment Re:Not at all creepy (Score 1) 136

But as someone who was homeschooled, what are you going to do when you kids eventually have to interact with the shitshow that is the real world?

This presupposes that they don't get plenty of "real world" while they're homeschooling. As if they're in some hermetically sealed environment where bad things never touch them. When we homeschooled ours, one of my wife's single friends objected, asking us "what about socialization?". Well, what about it? There's still plenty of it with friends and family, church, and play. And when they're young adults, they're better able to deal with the scum of the world than a pre-teen or teenager thrown into the cage match that is modern public schools where you can't get to them. School is supposed to be about education, not be a Thunderdome where the weak are weeded out for the coming apocalypse. Whatever my sons missed in public schools, they're far better off not being in a concrete box where some hulking delinquent 3 to 4 years older than all his class peers is punching teachers or pulling a gun on students.

Comment Re:Not unusual (Score 1) 108

"Oath of Fealty" wasn't a dystopia, it was an attempt at utopia, that wasn't working out all that poorly. Nobody who didn't want to take part was forced to do so. Some people liked it and other people didn't. A few people hated it. The viewpoint character's assessment was (paraphrase)"not all cultures need to be the same".

Comment Re:The biggest mistake (Score 0, Troll) 88

Oh sorry we can't allow healthcare because a black guy instituted it.

"Racism" is not the answer to every fucking political disagreement. The black guy in question did just as well as a percentage of the electorate (or better) than the white guys in the three presidential elections since he left office.

The government is currently shut down because, apparently, the "affordable" care act is so affordable that the emergency subsidies put in place during Covid now need to be made permanent, or, apparently, even people with six figure incomes can't afford it. I don't see "skin color" being at issue there, do you?

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