A few years ago, even before LLMs, I was getting concerned that I might be getting phone calls from/to computers. I came up with "What day is it?" as a mini Turing Test question. It was out-of-band information that a human would know and wouldn't get confused by time zones, yet would be unlikely that someone would go out of their way to add to a phone chat bot. The expected answer from a human would be something like "Saturday", or "the tenth". A computer not programmed for this would get confused, and too complicated of answer could potentially also indicate a computer. And now it seems like my old question is effective against LLM chat bots! Take that, clankers.

> It did happened before, but not on this scale and speed.

Check out Meltwater Pulses 1a and 1b.

Nah. The Program Committee members are the ones who pick the peer reviewers.

To be fair, though, usually reviewers are hard to motivate, and some are late or just drup out of sight, so as the program-committee area head you probably end up having to review the papers you can't find reviewers for.

But they are related.

Economic dominance allows you to fund the research that gives you technological dominance. Technological dominance allows you to produce next-generation munitions that give you military dominance. Military dominance means you can't be easily bullied to take away your economic dominance.

Sure. It reads very stilted; no actual human would write text like that these days.

I am not at all surprised about AI peer review.

Peer review is part of the fundamental basis verifying the integrity of the scientific enterprise, but it is done anonymously, gets you no credit, nobody knows whether you do a good job or a bad one, and is basically a time sink with little reward except a vague feeling that you did something useful. I personally do NOT use LLM models (for peer review or anything else), but I absolutely can see how it would be very tempting to do so, a tremendous time saver with no down side.

You can choose a lot of different things. The question remains, is this a viable way to structure an economic system in a world in which all of the necessities of life are produced with no (or almost no) labor?

Are you seriously proposing a world in which eight billion people are employed in producing master-crafted articles (and these master-crafted articles are "long term" purchases, hence with a small output needed.)?

Where do the peons get the money to buy mass-produced items?

A handful are master craftsmen. What about the other seven billion?

To be fair, this is nothing new. The entirety of the industrial revolution has been finding ways to use automation to decrease the amount of human labor used to make things (i.e., increase "productivity".)

The problem is that we do not have an economic system in which a society works when there is no need for human labor, and a small but rich fraction of the population owns the machinery that produces everything.

> It used to be my go-to site for all things computer related.

Me too.

They were slightly cheaper than Amazon for the same product, then I did a big project which got slightly downsized and I wound up with $400 in "restocking fees" for a couple of pieces of factory-hologram-tape sealed network gear, after I paid $100 in return shipping.

Learned my lesson real fast.

Or, there's the same amount of stuff worth reading, but it is being diluted by a much larger flow of sewage that isn't worth reading.

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/...

What in the world do you think happens to the output of sewage treatment plants? Do you think it's teleported to Pluto?

All the water you ever bathed in has effluents that have gone through the kidneys of scores of animals. Merely warming water by a few degrees is trivial.

Air cooling is quite inefficient compared to water cooling. The heat of vaporization of water, 2260 kJ/kg, is remarkable. It will remove a lot of heat. Even the thermal mass of water, with a specific heat of about 4.2 kJ K/kg, is pretty impressive.

Not sure why you think this is AI slop. It's an interesting argument. Not sure I agree, but it's a different take.

The connection is right in the subject line: it is comparing AI to a "sacred prestige competition." The central idea is that AI is like religion in that it promises great and wonderful rewards in the future if we make sacrifices in the present, and if we don't see any of these great and wonderful rewards: that's because we're not sacrificing enough. It becomes a death spiral: the worse things get, the more effort goes into propitiating the gods (rather than growing food).

The idea that some past societies have collapsedbecause when times were bad the theocracy responded by building more temples and making more and larger sacrifices instead of putting resources into solving their problems) is not new. I don't know if any actual historians credit this theory, but it's been proposed.

Them: Why don't you act your age?
Me: Well, I've never been this age before.