If I call tech support or the bank or whatever, I don't want, need nor expect to see the other person's face. In general, video calling isn't widely used except in multi-person meetings, or when calling a loved one overseas. The avatar is not needed.

Also, give your AI agent a phone number where I can reach it, or give it its dedicated app or whatever, but default to "handset mode" like a regular phone call. Let me put it on speaker if and when I want to. Turning the interaction into a regular phone call will go a long way towards making the conversation feel more natural. Interacting with Siri and Alexa feels unnatural; adding an animated avatar to a disembodied voice won't help, even if the conversation itself flows naturally. I know, a phone call isn't suitable for every interaction, especially when collaborating or co-creating with someone, but it covers most cases.

But I guess a simple audio call is harder to monetize.

Exactly. "like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel's build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby" sounds like pure nightmare fuel. Like learning to swim in a shark tank.

Actually, Ayn Rand proposed something exactly like this...

The more fundamental problem is distributed responsibility and lack of transparency.

Until recently, drone strikes required a long sequence of command decisions, starting with intel gathering, analysis, decision, orders, and remote command of the device. No one is directly responsible when something goes wrong, the failure is distributed among many players with the result that no one has to bear the consequences.

For example, the "collateral murder" incident, where apache helicopters gunned down civilians and journalists.

In normal situations, we have Derek Chauvin, who was an individual who caused the death of one man. He went to trial, the evidence was examined, and guilt was assigned. Trials are more-or-less held in the public light, and journalists and interested parties can examine court records and in some cases reanalyze evidence (not all physical evidence is kept or available, but for example, DNA evidence can sometimes be reexamined).

That's how it's supposed to happen.

Contrast that with erroneously ordered drone strikes that hit civilians instead of legitimate targets.

I suppose the biggest, most egregious example would be George Bush taking the country to war because Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction", and of course one were found, and the security services swore up and down that they told him there were none, but he stated "well, the message didn't get through".

And skated responsibility. Completely.

To bring this closer to home, software engineers implement all sorts of insecure, inconvenient, and privacy violating features with no moral pushback. Even if it's completely obvious that something is an anti-feature, people do it because a) their job depends on it, and b) it's someone else's decision. And if there's a breech and ten million social security numbers get made public, the company simply fixes the problem and continues. No responsibility is assigned.

I was satisfied to see videos of the "narco terrorist" boats get destroyed, and then the survivors killed. Not the actual killing, but just knowing that the event was recorded and analyzed in the public sphere, and there was a conversation about it, and it was investigated. That seems like it was handled the right way.

Death is permanent, it can't be undone. If we're going to kill people, regardless of whether it's AI or anything else, it should be transparent and put into the public discourse.

No one is assigned blame for screwing up, that's the more fundamental problem.

I see plenty of people around me living a life without work, or doing only a little work on their own terms, who are not in jail or dead, and often seem pretty happy. You have options. But no one is going to hand them to you on a platter. Capitalist societies have created an utterly unprecedented standard of living, not for the ultra wealthy, but for the masses. And social democracies have taken the edge off capitalism by ensuring a minimum standard of living that is still pretty good, to those who cannot provide for themselves. But screw you if you demand others to provide you with a living, instead of working for it yourself.

With that said, things did get out of control. Regulatory oversight is a joke, and so is antitrust regulation (or the enforcement of it). Companies becoming too large for our own good, and private wealth growing so large that they can simply buy politicians, legislators and governments. That's nothing new, but one would hope that we learned from past mistakes, and taken measures against that.

Though in all of this, the machines are merely tools, none of this happened because of the machines. Social media and AI made control easier, but before that people were controlled by other means. In my own country, there is not much variety of opinion on television, and almost all of the national and regional newspapers (as well as a TV channel) have fallen in the hands of 2 wealthy families, and it shows: variety in opinion has given way to a sameness, across publications that used to span the spectrum from left to right. And it's not just the ultra rich pulling the strings; here in Europe, politicians seem to be withdrawing within a class of their own, with their own agenda. People increasingly voting for radical right parties is not because people have become more right wing, or because they have been unduly influenced by AI or social media, but because they have become disillusioned with the mainstream politicians.

It makes sense to teach them about AI, what it is good for and what not to use it for. Just like how we learned how to use a calculator in primary school, after we learned manual multiplication and long division. A lesson for AI could be to ask students to write an essay, and teach them how to use AI to do research, let it help to give structure to their text, how to check sources and accuracy, and so on. It would be used as a tool a few times, to teach them about the tool, after they learn how to go about such things without using AI.

And coding can be a very good teaching tool for that. That should be the goal of teaching coding in schools, that and trying to spark an interest in the subject in children. Not preparing them for a career in software engineering.

As for AI, it's not going away, and kids will be using it. So teach them the stuff about it they are less likely to pick up on their own. Such as the dangers and pitfalls.

If you're vain enough to want to stand out with exclusive emojis or animated whatevers, then spending money on a Nitro subscription makes rational sense.

Thus solving the problem once and for all.
- Yes, but...
ONCE AND FOR ALL!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It can destroy us if we entrust it with too much stuff. Let it run all the stores, and the logistics for those stores. And military logistics while we are at it. Maybe balance our power grid. Let it suggest governmental policy. Teach our kids.

It won't destroy us because it "decides" to; LLMs do not make decisions. It optimizes for certain goals, using shitty instructions and shitty training data. Which means that under certain conditions it can make completely unexpected and illogical actions, like those Chinese bipedal robots glitching out. So... it will destroy us because - under certain conditions - it will utterly suck at its job.

And here a bunch of us ignorant clods were thinking that owning mechanisms was the point of patents.

No but maybe they should.

It should be opt in. So that you are aware from the start what you are potentially getting in to.

My cat just took a dump in front of the litterbox. Somehow that seems slightly more relevant than this news.

Red light is thought to activate a regeneration mechanism within the body.

It interacts with some of the compounds in mitochondria that promotes healing and cellular recovery. It also has a biphasic effect: too little does nothing, too much does nothing, but the right amount can have therapeutic value.