> You can't fix it by "not letting stupid people breed", you have to fix it through not letting people become stupid

This sentence seems to be somewhat self contradictory. Despite decades of trying to make it not so, it seems that intelligence remains primarily inherited from parents/ancestors.

Socioeconomic status, education, opportunities, etc all have no ability to improve iq. Nutrition only matters in the sense of malnutrition. So environmental factors can reduce IQ, but they cant do anything to raise it.

Attempting to "fix" it, which we have been doing in the first world for a while now, seems to be causing average intelligence to drop precipitously. the peak IQ in most nations is now firmly in the past 30-70 years back. I think we just have to give up on the idea that this is something to "fix" per se, and let people make their own choices as individuals.

> The most important part which is wrong however is the idea that people who never contributed much would easily find economically equivalent work.

There is a name for that opinion: luddism.

Every single new technology shifts jobs and work, and every single time people fantasize about permanent structural unemployment, and every single time people just move into new types of work and there is no such thing as structural unemployment. Luddites back then could never imagine a world where less than 95% of people worked in agriculture, and today's neo luddites cant imagine a world without hordes of graphic artists, paralegal functionaries, music techs, and such, but its coming regardless.

Fundamentally, what people are willing to pay for always comes down to work done by others. Things that are automated, at best, shape how people work, and what work attracts more or less pay. Just as a shovel helps you to dig, a DNN helps you slop out boilerplate text with errors, so you dont need to pay as many people to do it.

These two fundamentals never change when a new tool or technology is used

* some people get more productive to some degree using the new tools
* That frees up labor to do new things, and the economy as a whole grows, because the new things have value

Its possible there will be a growing field of content curation; The DNN's & LLM's basically explode when their outputs are fed back their inputs. So instead of making tons of derivative works de novo, many creative types will instead become art critics; helping to curate an input set to train the machines that synthesize generated works.

paying taxes is also negative growth, so that part doesnt even matter.

The reason for "AI" causing zero gain is because its not "AI"; its not people, its not independent economic actors with agencies.

The name "AI" is nothing but a marketing gimmick, a lie.

What we have are just tools; helpers. And like any tool, the best they can be is productivity enhancers for people. But what these tools excel at is mostly economically unimportant work; shoddy art, boilerplate text, remixed music. So they make something with nearly no impact require fewer people.

Even if every single B-grade graphic artist, musician, and every contract and legal functionary gets put out of work by these babble generators, no real economic impact would be felt because those fields never contributed much, so the people freed from such work would quickly find economically equivalent work of any kind.

If there is to be any gain from the whole overinvestment bubble, it will be improved search engine answers. Like today, they will still be questionable, full of random errors, and politically slanted by the local jurisdiction. But they will be slightly better for what they are.Just like with search engines, people who are adept at prompting queries and filtering through the results will be slightly more productive than people who are not.

But it will take an awful long time for their meagre gain to measurably exceed the insane overinvestment lost in "AI".

If hardware doesnt run linux super well, the hardware is garbage. Simple as.

> There is no specific need for bitcoin in the world, it's a solution looking for a problem.

lol, it literally solves 100% of everything that is mechanically wrong with modern society.

Bitcoin, or something much like it, is the standing Great Filter test of our species.

We either progress into the next level of economic organization with a sound money network of some kind, or we devolve into an eternal stagnation and death.

We cannot have an anti-merit civilization, that is contrary to the basic precepts of evolutionary survival of the fittest.

Disconnecting the motivational network which organizes behavior from actual human performance will only ensure anti-survival behavior dominates until we are all dead.

We can hope its bitcoin, so that it can happen in our lifetimes. Perhaps some future innovation will be much the same, and restore the social value network to a semblance of order in some distant future.

Until then, we are doomed to repeat cycles of war, civil unrest, boom and bust cycles, and ever increasing wealth inequality. Pollution and waste will increase astronomically with no correction. Things we used to do easily, such as building bridges or other infrastructure, will become increasingly untenable, and our environment will decay around us. The oceans will be full of the decaying monuments of wind turbines, lush valleys will be full of heavy metals from broken solar cells, the ocean will be a soup of plastics and garbage, and the land will be a version of "idocracy" with a species seemingly evolving back into an apelike existence.

> If markets decided today that Bitcoin was a more desirable currency than the Dollar, we would be wiping our asses with the Dollar by mid-day today.

That is the bitcoin game-theoretical endgame.

The dollar system has a ton of momentum, so it might not be quite so fast a transition as you think. People dont have a hive mind and dont all decide everything at once.

A ton of economics comes down to peoples memories of the past impacting their present actions. The only reason people accept dollar prices or values of things today is because they remember recent past prices. All prices are "sticky prices", all wages are "sticky wages". So even if some large contingent of people decided they no longer value the dollar network, it would still have value derived from the people who do value it.

If bitcoin continues to survive, and slowly appreciate vs the dollar network, a breaking point may come wherein that effect accelerates. Money systems follow the "network effect", and so long as bitcoin is not fading towards zero value/use, it remains a contender for a network flipover.

> There is nothing inherently valuable in any currency. Not gold, Dollars, Bitcoin, teeth, or anything else. All currency is printed out of thin air (yes, gold too). Today's currency is tomorrow's toilet paper.

Not quite correct; while no system has "inherent money value" which is fully created by human social behaviors, money system do in fact have attributes and qualities which affect how they do function as money networks.

Gold has a more limited supply, but it is slow to validate and extremely slow to transmit.

The dollar system is quicker to validate and transmit, but has a rapidly growing supply which devalues it against itself.

Bitcoin is a historical first: more transmissible and speed greater than the dollar network, combined with an absolute supply cap even more rigid than that of gold.

Those properties are strong enough to keep it in existence despite the network effect of the dollar. Really the only move the dollar system could make to fight back would be an extended period of non-inflation. That would allow the network effect to re-assert itself by removing bitcoins primary advantage.

It is unlikely the dollar system could sustain a large period of non-expansion, but a short burst of extreme deflation might have a similar effect. If neither of those two things happens, bitcoin will continue to slowly appreciate, eventually leading towards some kind of end-game scenario

I still dont understand why people got so bought-in to this "AI" boom, and the insane levels of over-investment with no horizon of return.

Yes its neat stuff.... some mild improvements in machine translation. Some big improvements in word salad and image salad generation... assuming you dont re-use the outputs as inputs, and have a use for such scraps. some mild improvements in pattern recognizes. And thats out it.

Why didnt people lose their minds for OCR or spell-checkers, which are similar levels of technological progress. This is arguably less important. Maybe the biggest impact of this stuff is going to be smaller development teams do a little more, with fewer artists. They can spam out a song, movie, or a game without hiring any artists maybe, so long as they dont mind quirky inconsistencies. They can even use it as a quick reference manual - its pretty good at being a stack-overflow type development aid... if used judiciously. Using it for real dev can be mixed gains; reviewing the code it writes for bugs is often slower than just writing it from scratch, but its nice to get a second POV especially when working in unfamiliar apis. It can also help spit out unimportant glue code, like visualizers, that dont have to be perfect.

Its probably the magic word "AI" which deep neural nets and large language models are very decidedly not. They are not alive, they dont think grow and learn. They are digital kitchen colenders, not living skynet robots.

The final paycheck is a 10% improvement in programmer efficiency, 15% improvement online search, and a 75% reduction in digital artists (the cases where imperfection is okay, non-artists can use it to push out something "good enough"). And that last bit might be temporary; eventually when 99% of all input samples came out of some deep neural net there just wont be any safe inputs to use, and the need for human artists to evolve things will rearise.

> activate the safety

I recommend doing a quick search for "glock safety" before your next venture into gun analogies.

It looks more like the usual recipe of: trying random things, having no idea whatsoever why something was popular, then when something works beating it to death with repetition and increasing political correctness until even the hardest core fans wont watch it, then reluctantly canceling it.

> That's not a "greed is good" Gordon Gekko speech

You say this, but then you say this:

> but because money is how we keep account of the things we do eat

If you think people should be able to coordinate the economy and grow/create the things they want, such as food, what you are saying is that greed is good. Wanting to be alive and having things to eat is greed; all wants and "needs" are just greed after all.

Its a political question; given the earths unknown but certainly finite ability to support human life, should people's wants and needs all be thrown equally into a market competition to see what gets satisfied, or should some learned elite decide the questions of whose wants to live are allowed and whose are not.

> At some point they will run out of other people's money to spend on energy solutions that can't make a profit ... but there's politics getting in the way.

Both of those statements are true; what you dont seem to realize yet is that you cannot both want to fix the "climate crisis" and want to believe in basic economics: that people's wants should be served by a market. You have to discard one or the other.

There is a way to us DNN/LLM "AI"s correctly; use them like a search engine.

Ask a hyper specific question, and scrutinize the answer given thoroughly.

In the same way that crowdsourced intelligence made google a useful tool for search, and social media created a great pool of questions and answers for that search to run over, DNN's are just an extension of search.

They are a wonderful improvement in the areas of (1) parsing the query and (2) re-jiggering the resultant hits.

(1) They can decode the user's question more accurately, and get a more searchable rewording of what the user is really looking for. Previous incarnations of search really needed you to find a magic word that matched perfectly to get the hits, and when you were using common words it became near impossible. But large language models seem able to do that with a much higher accuracy rate, and dont get hung up without magic keywords or magic phrases.

(2) Instead of merely presenting a raw list of sources, the LLM's actually read the pages, and try to parse out the specific bits you are searching for and ignore the rest of the page. They can also, to a limited extant, specialize the answer to match the query, based on interpolation of the page content. Again this is something that was previously impossible, and saves human time.

I would say, with judicious use of a search-engine DNN/LLM, any programmer should expect perhaps a 1% to 2% productivity increase on average.

Any programmer who tries to ask it to write code or solve problems will likely eat the worm, and suffer a 20%-50% decline in real productivity. Hopefully, any programmer caught doing this would face some kind of disciplinary action.

> It's not intelligence. It's processing.

Its like a souped up search engine;

Its very good at not only finding the answers to a query, but recognizing the question even if it is worded differently than it has been in the past, finding the existing answers, and presenting those answers even if it has to tweak or assemble or rearrange them.

What it cannot do is actually solve novel problems missing from its training set, any more than a search engine can find an match for a document that does not exist.

Exactly; if their plans were not profitable without endless supplies of tax money flowing into their pockets, they never really intended to build anything.

The established theory held. The gold exploded as expected.

The only interesting thing about this finding seems to be that they have a very fast thermometer, so fast it could get a reading of temperature within the trillionth of a second window as the gold was in the process of exploding.

Also, can anyone envision a "spaceflight" application of this? I wasnt aware speedy thermometers were a major barrier to space flight development.

if a hackathon amounts to gluing together a hosted 3rd party api with python... and only using its canned features in the most trivial way... it wasnt much of a "programming" contest in the first place.

It almost seems more like an advertisment for a hosted web service ... turns out thats exactly what it was...