Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Predictions = planning ahead (Score 5, Interesting) 181

The more interesting research on this topic that I've read claimed smarter people make better decisions because they are better at deferring decisions. They are comfortable with the uncertainty because of their confidence in their abilities. There is always a tradeoff between making the decision later when you have more information and making it earlier so you have more time to plan your execution. If you need more time to plan execution, you need to make decisions earlier. And your decisions will suffer because of this.

Comment Re:From the No Shit Department. (Score 2) 181

I don't think this research qualifies as "no shit." I think it qualifies as very poorly done and potentially wrong. Or at least the summary makes it seem that way. They asked these individuals a prediction question that existing knowledge significantly helps with. Existing knowledge that many if not most well educated people will have and people with less education probably won't. I know what the average life expectancy is for someone in the US because I have read it. I know that your life expectancy is different when you are 40 because you have already avoided dying for 40 years, and I understand this in large part because of the math education I have had and because I've read actuarial tables before.

If you wanted to test predictive power that is based on innate intelligence instead of education, you need to ask for predictions that a well read adult wouldn't have a significant advantage in making.

Comment Re:Unproven if AI replaces jobs (Score 3, Insightful) 53

Not hiring 30 staff is not the same as firing 30 staff.

It is not exactly the same because of the personal disruption a firing has on someone, but they are pretty close. I have been laid off once, but it was in a strong job market so I found another position with a significant pay increase within a month. Being laid off right now if far worse because it isn't as easy to find an equivalent position.

When looking at the economy overall, not hiring 30 people is the same as firing 30 people. Both result in 30 less jobs in the market. Considering the US population from age 18-65 is growing very slowly right now, technologies that slow the growth of new jobs could be very beneficial. But a shrinking job market, whether from layoffs or a lack of hiring after employee attrition, would still cause some significant damage to peoples' lives.

Comment Re:You Proably would not notice for Petrol Pumps (Score 1) 162

You two must be using different terminology, because there is no chance you have gone 10 years without seeing a single gas pump at a gas station down for maintenance. Gas stations around me have about 8 - 16 pumps, and the average gas pump is down for maintenance 2-4 hours per week. That means about 20% of the time at least one pump is down for maintenance on average (not accounting for times when more than one pump is down at a time), which aligns with what I would have guessed if I hadn't googled it (I guessed 25%).

Comment Re:Frenetic churn (Score 1) 206

I’ve been in charge of hiring and seen supposed mechanical engineering majors with a PhD and 10 years experience fail to explain, in high school physics simplicity, how a hammer works.

My favorite example of this was a mechanical engineering graduate student with a focus on thermodynamics I lived with in college. He bought a large box of FlaVorIce and put it in the freezer expecting them to freeze overnight. I told him they wouldn't freeze quickly if you don't spread them out (like my farmer father taught me as a kid), and he sarcastically stated that a f*ing thermodynamics engineer could figure out how to freeze water. Fast forward to the morning, and the 10 freeze pops I separated from the box were the only ones frozen. The rest of the box was barely even cold.

Comment Re:No it isn't (Score 1) 157

I don't know the history of IoT devices and don't know a good inflection point such as the release of ChatGPT to compare the speed of adoption, but I agree that is a good candidate. My gut says IoT took a lot longer to gain adoption than gen-AI technologies did after December 2022, but I'm not sure how to really compare the two. IoT is certainly more ubiquitous today than ChatGPT is, but that doesn't say anything about how rapid the adoption was. IoT predates Gen-AI by about 25-30 years. It would be like comparing the number of ChatGPT users with the number of Internet users.

Comment Re:The hype (Score 0) 157

I don't agree the level of hype is unprecedented. I'd point to flying cars, nuclear-powered household appliances, virtual reality in the 90s, and cold fusion as a few technologies off the top of my head that had a similar level of ridiculous hype. I'd agree the hype is more widespread this time, but I think that's just because we are further into the information age so most public discourse is more widespread.

Although as for the impact on my life and job, this feels pretty similar to the advent of the PC, Internet, and smartphones. Not quite yet today but AI keeps getting more useful for me every few months. The PC was mostly a toy for a couple decades, the Internet took over a decade to really become essential, and smartphones took about 5-10 years to become ubiquitous. Each time another radically impactful digital technology is introduced its adoption is quicker than the one which preceded it, so it's not surprising the same is true for the current class of AI technologies.

Comment Re:No it isn't (Score 1) 157

Which of those technologies do you think had the same rapid adoption as recent Gen-AI technologies like ChatGPT? Many of them were released at a time when less than 5% of the world's population had a personal computer, so how could they possibly have the same level of adoption as a technology released when over two-thirds of the world's population has access to the Internet?

A big reason AI is being adopted so quickly is because decades of advances and infrastructure that makes its adoption possible, but that doesn't change its adoption rate. It just explains it.

Comment Re:What's their logic here? (Score 1) 102

However, even though all that is in place, he was a SAG member, and there are certain agreements in use of that voice, AI generated or not.

The article seems to imply that SAG doesn't have these agreements in place. Their complaint is that the company didn't negotiate with SAG for appropriate terms, which means to me that no existing terms are in place to restrict what the company did. So why would they negotiate with SAG at all? I'm hoping to read something soon written by an actual lawyer explaining why SAG feels like they have a case here, because it isn't obvious even after reading their very brief legal filing.

Comment Re:Great hesitation my ⦠(Score 1) 72

I agree with your sentiment that this "great hesitation" explanation is horribly wrong, but not for the same reason. US tech sector employment is dropping because it was in a bubble. US Software developer and QA jobs tracked by the BLS grew by 35% from 2019 to 2023. This 7.8% annual increase was over 60% higher than the 10 years preceding this bubble, which was arguably caused by excessive Covid-related hiring.

AI is just being used as an excuse instead of admitting these companies over-hired for the last few years. This disruption will be messy and people's careers will be seriously hurt because of this mismanagement, but everything will get back to normal in a few years.

Comment Re:So still 20% below retail price? (Score 3, Interesting) 63

Right, because the suppliers who are buying from Nvidia and paying the higher prices absolutely are just going to eat the delta and leave their inflated prices the same to the end purchaser, reducing their own margins.

You are high on something very potent.

I'm not some quack job that thinks tariffs are paid by China, and in almost all cases tariff taxes are passed on to consumers, but this is one rare area where I'm not so sure. I think most of these costs will be passed on to scalpers, and those scalpers will have a hard time raising their prices any more than they already have. There are some companies finding ways to get Nvidia cards to consumers at or near MSRP, and the tariffs will directly make these cards more expensive, but I don't think that is what the majority of US consumers are paying.

It's just an opinion. I may be wrong. We shall see.

Comment Makes sense to me (Score 1, Interesting) 16

I used to read 5-6 non-fiction books per month, but that has dropped in half since I starting using LLMs for a significant amount of my continuous learning. I haven't stopped reading books, but I can usually get 80% of the insight in 20% of the time using AI. Now I focus my reading on filling that 20% gap.

I don't think AI is going to remove the rest of the EdTech industry, but it is bound to reduce the market size of non-AI education methods by quite a bit.

Comment Re:The best pope yet. (Score 1) 181

And I hope the next Pope is even better than Pope Francis. Each generation should hopefully be becoming more progressive than the last, leading to a more moral and inclusive Pope each time they are replaced.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Only a brain-damaged operating system would support task switching and not make the simple next step of supporting multitasking." -- George McFry

Working...