I suspect that the team was given impossible goals to hit. Probably aggressive deadlines too. The same story everywhere.

I am not saying that makes it ok to cheat. I am just saying that problems like this start at the top, so being "really upset and losing confidence" is no evidence that leadership stands blameless for the team's failure.

So the observation here is that this trend of using AI instead of entry level people will, eventually, leave the job market empty of mid-level people, since nobody got the real-world experience that they need to become mid-level people.

Even if true, it still doesn't make sense for any individual business to hire and pay entry level people that they no longer need. If they do this, they are basically running a charity at that point, and likely violating their fiduciary duties. Each individual business needs to cut costs in whatever ways make sense for the health of the business. The problem of not being able to find the people they need isn't actually a problem until later.

So, even if every single business owner in the world reads these warnings and nods in agreement with them, they still have no incentive to hire entry level people. That would just increase their costs while allowing their competitors to keep their costs low. It wouldn't be rational for them to hire these people they don't need.

The most likely way this plays out (assuming it is actually true) is: when the day comes that mid-level people are needed but none are available, entry-level people will be hired instead, right into mid-level roles. Also, senior level people will be retained longer, paid more, possibly even invited out of retirement, to train and coach these entry-level people who are needed in mid-level roles.

There you go, problem solved. It might be a bit pricey when the day comes, quality and reliability might take a hit, but those costs will be felt industry-wide so all companies will at least be on equal footing.

At no point will warnings about a talent drought prevent any employers from using AI instead of humans as much as they possibly can.

I have studied the Bible in depth. I was referring to the Fundamentalist Christian interpretation of the Bible, which is a popular one these days.

I am well aware that there are fringe groups (such as "universalists") who actually read the scriptures in original greek and point out fun facts like how Jesus never once even uttered the word "hell" and the entire doctrine is derived from some amazing mental gymnastics. Are you one of those? I certainly hope so, for you sanity's sake.

The Bible is an interesting source of information for historians, cultural historians, anthropologists, psychologists, mythologists, and even philosophers. So long as it is remembered that every word in it was put to paper by fallible human hands, of humans who lived in many different time periods and had many different motivations and didn't all agree with each other, then I don't have any more of a problem with it than I would with any other ancient text.

The moment you believe that a magical man in the sky used divine powers to ensure the accuracy of its very outlandish claims, that's where we part ways.

By that same token, having access to cheap foreign labor is a privilege, not a right. When abused, people can and will resort to collective bargaining techniques in order to protect their livelihoods, and that includes union formation and political lobbying to limit the availability of cheap foreign labor.

The door swings both ways.

It is true that religion is effective at motivating people to go murder until murdered. Though many people consider that to be more of a curse than a blessing, since war is quite horrible and is usually the result of simple greed and power-lust on the part of the nation's leaders. It's simply not the sort of thing that people should be willing to do under most circumstances. Incidentally, the "security of a nation" can be protected by a paid military force that includes atheists as well as members of any religion since their motivations stem from a desire to protect their home (and to earn a living) rather than religious indoctrination.

Morality and ethics, as it turns out, are not unique to Christianity nor even to religion. Though many religious people tend to think so since their only exposure to these things has been through their religion. Your assumption that non-Christian people "value nothing" just shows your own ignorance.

But the bottom line is very simple: Christianity is founded on unprovable and (quite frankly) strange claims about reality. This assertion that there exists a person with supernatural powers who watches and cares about every little thing we do, with reward and/or punishment in store for us, is just silly! The cultural experience of learning that "Santa Clause" is not real, and that people you trust have been lying to you about that all along, is supposed to imbue within us a healthy distrust for stories exactly like this one. Doubt is not some kind of sin; it is honest and necessary to protect ourselves from charlatans.

I thought it was ironic that the summary includes a quote calling Hanuman a "demon god." According to the Bible, the god of Christianity has no inhibitions about terrorizing people with natural disasters and disease, and eventually deciding to keep people alive forever just so he can keep torturing them with fire forever. Insofar as demon gods go, Jehova is the worst of them all!

Fortunately, there is absolutely no good reason to believe any of these stories.

If that happens, there will of course be repercussions.

Whenever we try to imagine the impact a tech or trend will have on the world, we assume that nothing else changes. That is never true. Humans are the most highly adaptive animals on the planet.

For example, we imagine that the tech giants will just fire all the developers, use AI to do it all, there won't be any jobs for developers (nor their managers and etc.), the middle class will shrink down to nothing, and the world will just carry on like that.

But, if it actually does become that easy to vibe code successfully on the scale needed for valuable apps, then that means that literally everyone will be able to make them. Nobody will need to buy microsoft office if they can just ask ChatGPT to whip up a word processor that can use standard file formats. Big Tech as we know it will have the rug pulled right out from under them by the army of technical neanderthals who can now produce their own database engines.

And even that is still being way too narrow minded. The implications here are overwhelming and spill out into every industry that involves knowledge-work. The businesses that can gleefully eliminate their workforce will all find their services are no longer needed.

And that is only the beginning.

Would that include micro-animals like dust mites, and similar, that we kill every time we take a shower?

I definitely think that stingless bees have more of a right to exist than the stinger-bearing varieties. I would be happy to see the stingless ones completely displace the stinger-bearing ones.

And while we are at it, we need stingless wasps, stingless scorpions, non-blood-sucking mosquitoes, and vegetarian ticks that only eat weeds.

The word "conscious" (and the family of related words) is sloppily defined. This is not a defect. In fact, it is a powerful feature of our language (and our mental abilities that allow us to process language) that we can operate really well with sloppily-defined concepts. It allows for very speedy information exchange on very practical matters (especially useful when in combat or other emergency situations).

But this same feature makes in-depth analysis difficult, especially when it presents logical traps (fallacies) that we can innocently fall into.

Our commonsense understanding of consciousness is rooted in our very practical need to quickly divide up the world of our experience into the categories of "conscious" and "not-conscious." Rocks, clouds, the wind, shadows....all not conscious. People, wild animals, divine beings (to the extent that one believes in them) all conscious. The point here is that the sloppiness of the definition is rooted in a stark practical reality for us: we interact differently with conscious beings than with inert matter, so we need to be able to make very quick snap-judgments about which is which.

For most of the history of our existence, this was enough. We just tossed plants over in the "not conscious" group and ran with it. Computers, too, went right into the "not conscious" group, and that was good enough.

This commonsense idea of consciousness is not very helpful when we dive deeply into the edge cases, especially the ones that are new in the history of our species. As AI becomes more sophisticated, we wind up with something that has elements common to both categories (its a metalic/plastic construct, so generally not conscious, but it can engage with us in lucid dialog and solve engineering problems and so on, so generally conscious).

We aren't going to be able to resolve this dilemma with what we have on-hand. Our basic intuition about what consciousness is does not give us a clear answer (and it will just become more fuzzy as the tech improves), and further scientific research is hard to do properly since such research must begin with clear and unambiguous definitions (which we don't have, for the reasons given above).

So, for now, it is still easier to toss these things in the "not conscious" bucket and move on, but if the hopes and dreams of interested parties come true, it will become a lot more difficult to do so in the near future.

All the same applies to the word "life" incidentally. And though we can clearly have things that are alive but not conscious (such as a human in a coma), AI raises the interesting question of whether we can ever have something that is conscious but not alive. At this point though, such a discussion is entirely semantics without substance. However, in the future, if the tech actually does make the leaps we hope fore, that discussion will become more poigniant.

It is common that people who devotedly study science don't also study philosophy. As such, there is a lot of misunderstanding among scientists (academic and/or professional) as to what philosophy is and, relevantly, what kind of material has already been thoroughly covered.

This sounds like a group of scientists are simply wandering into philosophical territory, and could benefit from an education on that front with emphasis on such questions of life and consciousness.

I watched documentaries on police response to school shootings. A very common theme is: the shooters shoot themselves as soon as they see an armed response.

Former police response strategies that involved surrounding the building in an attempt to catch the perpetrator and going in cautiously with in groups wound up just costing innocent lives. The response that involved police just charging in as soon as they got there resulted in halted shootings as soon as the shooters saw them.

And, it should be obvious that there is a reason why shooters pick schools instead of police departments to target.

So, these and similar facts point directly to the tactical viability of keeping armed staff in schools. It is a significant deterrent to the shooters and it gives staff the ability to stop shooters quickly if the (for some reason) do turn up there.

Facts like this don't work well, however, on people who simply have a deep emotional bias against firearms.

It sounds crazy to people who live in dense cities where they are constantly swimming through an ocean of strangers.

Out in rural areas (of which Texas has a significant number) people live much further from their neighbors, police protection is spread thin, and families have to fend off dangerous wild animals in their back yards as well as protect themselves from criminals.

In that environment, it is just a given that everyone is going to have firearms. It would be insane not to.

So it really doesn't matter if these policies, which make sense given how much of Texas lives, sound crazy to other parts of the world where things are different. What makes sense in one place doesn't make sense in the other.

School shootings are terrible, but in the USA, kids are still over 100 times more likely to die in a car accident than in a school shooting.

And there are many other causes of death that are higher than school shootings as well. School shootings are relatively low on the list.

Of course, they are still terrible, but if we are going to prioritize child safety, the numbers make it clear that children in the USA face many much greater threats than school shootings, and so we would do well to focus on those.

Are there steps we could take to make vehicular travel safer in the USA? Absolutely. Would they save children's lives? Absolutely. So, it seems clear what our priority here should be.

Hey there AC, you seem to be confused about the difference between the words "fact" and "belief."

You believe that WFH is inefficient for most positions, but the available evidence show otherwise. Therefore, your belief is not a fact.

They have the numbers to prove that, for their company, WFH isn't as profitable as in-office.

No, they don't.

The C-Suite that you rail against is entirely profit motivated.

No they aren't. They are human beings, and as such, they have many motivations including emotional and outright irrational motivations, including their own sense of pride and power. Furthermore, they suffer from ignorance and cognitive distortion just like all other humans, so they are driven by many false beliefs about what will maximize profit. The end result is often called "human error" and results in policies that don't maximize profit and even harm it a little bit, but remain good enough (and strongly-enough believed-in) that they keep at it.

The superiority of working from home, both for the employee and the business, varies greatly depending on the nature of the job. But the common and widespread belief among managers (and above) is that employees can't be trusted and slack off when they work from home. This is true for some people, false for others, but it motivates blanket policies that punish people who would be better off working from home (and would serve the company better that way).