Trump has AI stocks in his portfolio. He makes money when AI does well. So long as that is true, he is going to continue to promulgate the wonders of AI. That is something you can trust, because it is motivated by greed.

If he ever divests those assets, his position may change, of course.

They also want to manage their reputations. They don't want to appear glib about the harm that their products have already caused and are likely to cause, because they know they will be held accountable at some point.

Incidentally, any talk of guardrails for the AI agents risks making people feel too safe. Guardrails will only inhibit AIs that were trained by and are in use by legitimate law-abiding institutions. The cat is out of the bag, and governments and criminal organizations absolutely will acquire and/or construct AIs of their own that have no guardrails, and use those to attack anything they care to.

What we desperately need is a global shift to a higher gear on the implementation of good technical security measures, so that all our important systems can repel these new attacks. We can and should use AI to help us achieve this quickly.

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

There is a real and large market for buggy software. Nobody likes the bugs, of course, but everybody loves for the software to be cheap. Many business ventures are deliriously happy to use cheap buggy software that sometimes creates problems for their team, so long as most of the time it makes a lot of money.

For such markets, Agile is great. Developers very quickly churn out buggy software which can be sold for cheap precisely because it was churned out quickly. The magic phrase is "good enough." It's not perfect, it was never intended to be. It's cheap and "good enough," and so it outsells everything else on the market because the other packages are priced way too high. And they are priced too high because they spend too much time developing perfect software.

Many technicians have a really hard time with this. They want to take pride in their work, do things well, make software that is reliable and performant and not buggy. They will go on and on about how unwise and short-sighted it is to churn out buggy crap under deadlines that are too short to allow for property quality control. And, in a different market, they would be right. But in a market where the client wants cheap software quickly, and has a tolerance for bugs, the way the business wins is by churning out cheap buggy crap.

In other words: Agile.

When I use AI to generate my code, I generally do it in small steps. I do all the design work myself and just break out the implementation for the AI, and I never give it too much work at once, for the very reasons you just complained about.

Its a bit more of an issue when I must code review work done by junior devs who literally did just try to tell the AI to do it all for them. That experience has been similar to what you are describing, for me at least. I am unsure if these devs are actually getting better at coding, or if we are moving towards a peculiar future in which the generation of senior devs who actually understand code well enough to make effective use of AI have all retired, leaving behind a generation of people who can only feed requirements to an AI and then flail when it doesn't work.

It seems like the issue of AI hallucination is widely promulgated and widely known. I mean, this site has an overrepresentation of technicians who tend to think of highly esoteric tech information as common knowledge just because they work with it every day.....but I don't think this quirk of AI behavior is in that category.

And yet, people keep making this same mistake precisely where it matters. We get stories like this every other day. I have seen it at my own job, where my own boss who still has some semblance of technical talent was downplaying the risk of AI hallucination in a pipeline that would have the AI directly manipulating mission critical data prior to an import.

It is surreal how people want the AI hallucination problem to just stop being a problem the moment it is inconvenient for them. People who should know better let their wish for a reliable AI override their knowledge that AI is not reliable, and they just move forward with it.

I fear things are going to get worse, because we really seem to be failing to learn the obvious lesson here.

When the predicted event is ten years out, that means that it is still pure science fiction.

Everyone acts in their own best interest.

Big Tech messaging about what kids should learn is designed to benefit Big Tech in some way. Any truth-value to their statements would be secondary.

The fact that a message comes from "Big Tech" should never be used to give it credence, but merely to determine who would benefit. Evaluation of benefits to anyone else must be done independently.

May AI will acquire control of the orbital weapons and use them to kill all humans!

We might create a powerful AI that manages to acquire control over weaponized robots, and send them out to do the job.

But humans are so frightened of this that anything we might call "warbot" or "killerOS" or whatever will be dead on arrival. It would require a different marketing strategy.

Someone will sneak it under the radar by making it sound like some sort of positive, joyful AI operating system. Maybe we would call it something like....

Joyful OS.....
HappyOS....

Or maybe...

GLaDOS........

I think you responded to someone else's comment.

"Staying ahead of everyone else is hard. It costs a lot of money, and we don't have effective monetization in place yet. So, we want everyone else to slow down so it will be easy for us to maintain our position of top dog while we figure out how to become profitable."

That's what I took away from the call for a slowdown, anyway.

I see the future of movies as being AI-generated, with viewers providing scripts, actors, directors, and whatever else they care about, either their own or rented. You'll choose everything and the AI will generate it real time. You'll be able to adjust parameters on the fly -- funnier, darker, more introspective, more action -- overall or per actor. You'll be able to talk to the characters, provide real and misleading clues to detectives, tell the AI to throw in a car accident or a broken sidewalk just to see the characters react to it and change the story for a few seconds.

It will certainly be possible within 50 years. Might be possible within 25 years. What it will do is destroy top actors' salaries. Why rent some famous actor's visage for $5 when you can make one up from scratch or pick some new actor for $1?

You'll also be able to remake old movies. There are stories about famous movies who had to settle for an actor because their first choice was unavailable or too expensive; so change to their first choice, see how it changes everything. They'll be out of copyright and cheap, and probably have a dozen businesses offering their own take on the same actor.

It's going to relegate live actors to stage work, which may or may not be live streamed. The days of $10 million acting gigs will be over. And actors won't be nearly as insufferable pontificating on things they think they learned from roles.

I think it is funny that the tech community tends to take a very dim view of AI drones and other weaponization of artificial intelligence, and yet, the very instant we get our hands on something that we can train to play doom, we do.

"If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.”
  Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time