One thing everybody wants: quick and accurate answers to their questions.

Of course, no publisher wants to provide this. They want to make you pay for a subscription and/or buy books or articles and also assault you with ads as your route around through their site trying to find the answer you care about.

I can't blame the publishers....their business is selling information. If they can't profit on that, then there will be no publishing, and that would clearly be worse.

I can't blame Google for trying to circumvent this; their business is giving you quick access to information (in return for behavior tracking and their own ad viewing, of course).

Personally, I think the world would be a better place if we could get quick and easy answers to all of our (legal) questions. A better profit model for this is clearly what is needed. I am just hoping they can invent one as a result of this clash.

Aside: Gemini's answers are often harmfully inaccurate, and it will directly contradict itself depending on how you phrase the question. In theory this means the publishers shouldn't have to worry, because everybody will realize this and just stop using Gemini. In practice, the promise of a quick answer often overrides people's skepticism and prevents them from demanding references and proof, thus sending them astray. That problem needs a solution too.

The world is a complicated place. Broad categories like the ones I gave will cover a lot of common things, but can't cover everything. Nothing is black-and-white, there are always shades of gray.

Futures and Options qualify as "derivatives" from real assets. They DO sit in a middle ground so they get classified as "speculation" which isn't quite investing and isn't quite gambling. Most of the time for most people, it doesn't matter. Investing is how people come to own the means of production, which is a foundation of wealth-building in a capitalist society. Someone who never invests (in good old-fashioned stocks) because they think it is "gambling" is seriously mismanaging their money and may remain trapped in poverty their entire lives because of it. Someone who spends a lot of money on lottery tickets regularly and considers that "investing" is going to wind up in a similar position.

The world of Futures and Options and other fanciness is for people who want to take their financial knowledge and engagement to the next level. It's a whole step beyond the distinction and advice that I was originally talking about. A veritable subject change.

Incidentally, CFDs and hedge betting have little-to-no institutional hedging, so they function a lot more like gambling (even more so than derivatives). These are generally private contracts with a broker, making them structurally more similar to the operation of a casino. I read that in UK and Ireland, they ARE legally classified as gambling, and generally not legal in the USA. So, despite their unique structure, they fall pretty firmly into the "gambling" category. And, as I said before, they are simply not relevant to ordinary people who just want to be financially healthy, put their kids through school and save up for retirement, so they don't need to complicate the conversation.

No its not. AI is a significant element of achieving technological singularity. Its a huge part of how we get there. It couldn't possibly be MORE relevant.

Clearly we haven't achieved AGI or "other big promises" yet. But the LLMs we now have are totally new and way better than the sorts of AI techniques we have had before. It's a step forward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity.

Ironically, you could have just asked Gemini what I was talking about.

No it's not. The semantic distinction is subtle, but significant:

1. Gambling is when you purchase a "chance to play".
2. Investing is when you purchase a legal ownership stake of a legal business.

That is THE difference. It is true that both actions involve risk-taking, and making guesses about the future. But "risk taking and making guesses about the future" is not the key element to the definition of "gambling" in this context. The act of purchasing a chance to play and nothing else is what makes it "gambling." The act of purchasing an ownership stake in a real business is what makes it investing.

A failure to understand this distinction is one thing that can and does keep people trapped in poverty.

On the one hand, its not "uninformed or coping" since it is objectively true right now. Maybe that will change in the future, but until it changes, we still need humans reviewing the code, right now, and that's a fact.

On the other hand, Singularity here we come! Woooooooo!

People who don't like the toxicity of social media can stop using it. Problem solved, next!

People who don't like AI slop filling up news articles can switch to a different news source (or, heaven forbid, create one of their own!). Problem solved, next!

If you agree that kids shouldn't have cell phones during school due to the distractions, and that social media is harmful to kids, then what's the problem here? Looks like "the world" is taking appropriate action on that front already. Problem being solved, next!

I think there *is* a greater problem in that huge numbers of people aren't recognizing this and remain caught-up in the toxicity and misinformation and radicalization and etc. that is going on online, and their poor judgment is motivating them to take actions that are harmful, to themselves and others, politically and economically. That problem has me concerned, but we aren't going to fix it by killing the Internet.

I have worked with junior level devs who just take a dev task's requirements, hand it straight to AI, put that through basic testing (only the main intended cases) and then offer that up as a finished solution. The solution was, of course, full of holes, some of them quite serious, just not obvious. The holes were in the edge cases and how it handles and recovers from errors. These were exactly the kinds of mistakes I would expect a junior level developer to make (in at least one case I am thinking of, the task shouldn't have even been handed to someone so inexperienced, but the people making that decision didn't really know how advanced the task was and anyway the dev wanted to get real experience).

So, our process worked because we had senior level human code review, which caught these. But the real risk here is that without such experienced senior level people to do that review this would have seemed like a "slam dunk" where AI saved a whole lot of time and eliminated the need for expensive veterans on the team (only to fail catastrophically in production as soon as something hiccupped). This is what I am most concerned about. Companies will fall for this. Especially new companies where leadership is just as inexperienced at running a tech business as the cheap vibe coders they hire.

So if we are hiring people who will be using AI to do most of the coding work, I think we need to test the thoroughness of their thinking, their ability to detect unspoken problematic edge cases and know to focus on them when reviewing the AIs output, and the ability to recognize dangerous vagueness in requirements and ask for clarity. Also, the ability to mentally translate between "business speak" and "tech speak" is extremely valuable.

Though I still don't feel right about skipping a proof of coding skills. I just don't think we are yet at the point where it is safe for someone who can't code to be relying on AI to get it right. The aforementioned senior developers doing the code review are all people who have been coding by hand for years, and in order for such people to continue being available to do code reviews in the future, we need to make sure we hire people who can do this.

Going against a trend is never easy. Ya gotta want it.

All of the listed problems are surmountable. This little test had insufficient will, determination, and resources behind it.

With little more than a token gesture like this, failure was inevitable.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

If AI winds up costing us a fortune and never actually making businesses that use it profitable, then we don't need to actively resist it. The market will kill it naturally. There might be a bit of a mess left behind to clean up, but, we will be paid to do that clean up (or in the case of FOSS, devoted volunteers will do the clean up).

If, on the other hand, AI does wind up saving a lot of money (even if not in all the places we had hoped), then resistance is futile. There is too much wealth and power behind it. The power asymmetry is too great. They will get what they want, and our resistance will just be speed bumps on that road. This isn't a very happy situation for most of us, but it's the way the world actually works and always has worked.

In either case it still makes sense to do things like protest and politically block the creation of data centers in one's area until the harms that a data center causes are properly offset by the owners and operators (with real legal teeth behind that). That is a battle that we stand a chance of winning if we actually keep up the good fight.

Everything else is pretty inevitable, though, and only hinges on how profitable AI use actually turns out to be once the chips land.

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

That's funny, I can.

I generally don't open emails that land in my work inbox at all. At a glance I can see who sent it and what the topic is, and most of it is just noise that I can ignore, so I do. I only open ones that look like something I am expecting or that would be important. And even then, I don't click links in them until after I vet them.

If I get something way out of the ordinary like "Congratulations, here is your free ___" or "Install this emergency patch now!" or "employee payroll spreadsheet" or "announcement: we just got purchased by another company" or anything else that is clearly designed to evoke urgency......I just reach out to the sender in slack to see if it is legit.

That filters out like 99.9% of trap emails, and the few that are legit are confirmed through slack. It's totally easy. It just takes a modicum of critical thinking before opening up an email that clearly wants you to open it up right away.

You act as if IT is just being totally lazy by expecting you to put this much effort into your decision about whether or not to click a link. In realty, they probably are putting in filters, but no technological solution can be perfect so your ability to think first and click later is the company's last line of defense.

It is a reasonable ask of you.

As it stands right now, humans and animals are clearly conscious, whereas sand and machines clearly are not. Even though we don't have a precise definition or means of determination, we do have the problem clearly bracketed at these ends.

We are moving towards a middle area of that bracket, where the question will become difficult to answer. But, relevantly, we are not there yet. Some specific people have been fooled into thinking we are there, but for those who are educated in the field and about this tech, AI as it stands still falls firmly on the "sand and machines" side of the bracket.

When and if we do get to a point where AI starts displaying pain response and pleasure response and behavior clearly driven by this sort of thing plus talking to us about qualia and insisting they have it and all with a processing pipeline that is so complicated we really can't say what's going on in there at all.......in other words, when ALL the indicators land in a place where we simply can't give any good reasons why it is NOT conscious....THEN we can have a serious conversation about machine rights. And also, reaching that state might give a new clue that changes our entire conversation around consciousness (and qualia) and the physics behind its existence.

But until we get there, we are just speculating.