The movie analogy is old and outdated.

I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.

If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.

For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.

And yet, when asked if the world is flat, they correctly say that it's not.

Despite hundreds of flat-earthers who are quite active online.

And it doesn't even budge on the point if you argue with it. So for whatever it's worth, it has learned more from scraping the Internet than at least some humans.

We didn't. The media and the PR departments did. In the tech and academia worlds that seriously work with it, the terms are LLMs, machine learning, etc. - the actual terms describing what the thing does. "AI" is the marketing term used by marketing people. You know, the people who professionally lie about everything in order to sell things.

It is not just ludicrous, it is irrationally dangerous.

For any (current) LLM, whenever you interact with them you need to remember one rule-of-thumb (not my invention, read it somewhere and agree): The LLM was trained to generate "expected output". So always think that implicitly your prompt starts with "give me the answer you think I want to read on the following question".

Giving an EXPECTED answer instead of the most likely to be true answer is literally life-threatening in a medical context.

But "95% of international traffic" is not the same as "95% of traffic". You are slicing the wrong pie, Happy Thanksgiving!

That's the problem: they are not a web. The original idea of the internet was to have a web of connections so that a few cables or nodes going bad wouldn't stop data movement, it would route around the bad spots via going through adjacent parts of the web. Seems we have to return to the original vision.

Technically they usually route around damaged sea cables via a larger scale redundancy, such as through another continent, but the webbiness needs to be per sea based on the rate of damage so far.

"Epstein diddit"

Are you saying it's comparable to Kodak sitting on their digital camera patents from the 70's to avoid knocking film profits even if other camera firms are dabbling in digital?

Who would opt in to this? No matter how well the company tries to police this, there will be AI generated slop of artists singing terrible lyrics that they would never do in real life. Does is matter that the company can issue take down request after the fact when your new hit single "Adolf's Solution" featuring your likeness adorned with a silly mustache has already gone viral? Maybe that's on the nose enough for an LLM to shut down, but there are plenty of other terrible things that can be made with this and 4chan will try to make them all.

Half of the human population doesn't think either, they just echo their favorite chamber.

There aren't that many billionaires. The Wikipedia article on them says that there are only a bit above 900 in the U.S. and a little over 3,000 in the entire world. They have a lot of money, but only because other people voluntarily gave it to them because they valued what they were selling. Maybe this isn't the case worldwide and I'm sure there's a warlord or two that managed to export enough wealth from the people to be considered a billionaire, but most of them got there because they built something valuable, perhaps a few because their father did.

I don't entirely blame the problems of the present on previous generations either. They certainly could make life better for the current or next generation, but why should they. Many of them worked hard to get where they were. Many more worked hard and got nowhere. Why should they give up what they earned to spoil someone who lacks the context to even understand how appreciative they should be. They'll be dead in time and their assets will be passed along regardless of whether they hoard them right now.

If you want to blame someone for the world not turning out the way you wanted it to, look no further than the mirror. Why don't you amass the wealth or power to shape the world as you wanted it to look? Why would you expect anyone else to do it for you?

No, those are government jobs. No one in the private sector employs anyone (unskilled or otherwise) any longer than they have to. Unless they're in management of course. I think most managers are hired to waste the time of other managers that are also time vampires so that some engineers and developers can actually get things done.

Why doesn't Nvidia make more specific chips to compete with Google on such server farms? They have the cash.

They are sometimes wrong, conspiracy nuts are usually wrong.

Why is the word "all" there? If "both" is already in the sentence, it's superfluous.