Interestingly, financial reward (extrinsic motivation) acts as a disincentive for some people, the types who do something for intrinsic motivation. The belief is that suddenly being paid to do something reduces that activity to merely a transaction, and that overall you may end up with fewer workers than you had before. Another danger is that you suddenly have people appearing who are only drawn by the money. If you gave developers nominal pay, like $10 or $20 an hour, you'd suddenly be overrun with very poor developers

In the UK it costs over £10 per day for my commute on the train. Hence I take the car instead, for half the cost and 10 times the convenience. An oil shock will probably take the car journey to a price that's still cheaper than the train - public transport is a ripoff

I'm no military expert but it was my understanding that the defining characteristic of an aircraft carrier is that they're bloody massive!

Is there a suggestion that we don't have space on Earth for solar farms and we need to launch crap into space now? Or is this just way cooler and therefore more attractive to VCs? Either way, I wouldn't want be the one explaining for the millionth time why this isn't going to increase global heating!

Unfortunately, the companies most likely to use SaaS or benefit from ditching it are the ones tied in by regulatory requirements. The ones with ISO compliance on their taglines, not to mention financial and HR audits etc. Good luck getting agents to write you software that satisfies all that red tape and does it again and again, every time you add new functionality. A little startup can easily get agents to write the software I imagine but bigger orgs are paying through the nose for boring predicability

In what circumstances would Humans use such weapons? Because I'd kind of hope that LLMs haven't had access to real military strategy!

Humans on the whole would fare badly if given more leisure (unemployment) by AI. Sure, we'd all like some more time to spend in the garden or go fishing but when that free time stretches out for decades, 90% of people will simply atrophy. Maybe some new paradigm will emerge for people to form communities around but for now I'd imagine most will turn into dumb social media consumers. The sad fact is that most essays and thoughts that school kids have will exist somewhere in a LLM (but better)

As per standard, I haven't read the linked article but I foresee problems with the proposal, namely that a) juniors simply won't get employed, so there won't be anyone for seniors to mentor and b) senior devs won't have free time to mentor anyone when AI has turned dev work into a production line (and execs are trying to squeeze every last drop out of their resources). Much like with manual trades, there has been massive underinvestment in training since companies want skilled personnel without the expense of actually training them

Is there a full house yet? Pretty much every psychedelic and dissociative seems to have been in the papers as reducing symptoms of major depression - perhaps scientists could talk together a bit rather than working in silos?

MS promising the end to white collar work should be seen as doom-mongering. Universities will became obsolete, everyone piles into (limited) blue collar jobs, countries with strong welfare systems lose their taxpayers. And worst of all, kids can't even afford gaming PCs!

The drug is helpful in preventing old guys from falling out of bed

It is beautifully ironic that the technology that promised greater leisure time should now enslave those users at the bleeding edge. I'm sure they're well compensated but this just illustrates the problem being faced - some people will be overworked and overpaid, and other people will be lose their jobs

I don't have much to do with this genre but surely the vast piles of this stuff give away that most of it is written by AI? What baffles me are the page counts - it seems like any novel in this genre needs to run to 600 or more page!

Surely if you want to expend lots of energy exercising processors then the trendy thing this year is in AI rather than crypto? Generating AI slop might not produce measurable impact, like an actual coin would, but company valuations go up directly in proportion to their AI presence

If RAM shortages don't impact the price then tech bros buying up Xboxes for AI datacentres will!