The employees from that 35% went to the other 65% that had two employees and turned it into three. Problem... Solved?
That is essentially what happened. They didn't fire 35%, those 35% just transferred their reports to others and became ICs (Individual Contributors).
35% is a good start
The 35% figure at Google is misleading. The vast majority of those people weren't pure managers they were software engineers who managed small teams as part of their duties while also doing productive technical work. A policy requiring a minimum of 5 direct reports for each manager was put in place, forcing all of those people to decide to either increase their management and cease doing significant technical work or cease being managers and focus entirely on technical work. Many chose the latter option, often quite happily (there is no additional pay or other concrete benefit to being a manager vs being an IC (individual contributor)). This partitioning of people who were in mixed roles into roles that were either managerial or technical provided most of the reduction in line and middle management.
I mean, do you expect them to come out and publicly say something like, "We're giving the government all your emails and data to calculate a social credit score"?
Do you expect this government won't ask for that?
Do you expect Alphabet to decline?
Yes, I expect Alphabet would decline. I worked there for 15 years and understand the culture and motivations pretty well. Culturally, doing something like that would cut against the grain, hard. Pragmatically, they wouldn't like to oppose the administration but they'd get a lot more PR mileage out of leaking the request and publicly declaring their opposition than it would cost them.
They abandoned everything *in* the software that mad a Tivo desirable well before this. It had been just another DVR for some time.
Season passes that worked? Gone.
Subscribing to things like series premieres? Gone.
Suggestions? Gone.
We had a roamio with a lifetime subscription, and dumped it at yet another cox cable price increase.
By that time, we realized that pretty much everything we watched was on broadcast.
We got an orange pi (what a disaster! don't!), an hdhomerun quattro, and a terabyte disk.
we've been using the Quattro's dvd functions, and they've been "good enough" that other projects are ahead of getting the raspberry pi running.
they need to go further.
As I drive off to dutifully buy the wondrous stuff from the last commercial, the current commercial should jump to my phone so I don't miss it!
Music & Sound effects shouldn't even be on the same channel as voice!
Adding channels on a digital distribution isn't as complicated as what it takes to broadcast & decode stereo audio, whether AM or FM.
And then add a "relative volume" slider so that regular volume controls both (or even let the user choose a curve so that music doesn't increase as much as speech [or more, if the user prefers])
>ah i forgot another surprisingly common failure mode: cats peeing on the screen.
fluufffyyy!
it seems to me that removing such jobs would actually be a task well fitted to an AI . . .
I think the question was not Amazon vs Walmart but Amazon vs other online shops that also deliver to your doorstep, and do not cost you much more time.
That's still a lot more effort, especially since you have to vet each one to figure out if they provide good customer service in the event something goes wrong, and to be confident they won't steal and sell your credit card number (yeah, you aren't liable for the fraud, but getting a new card is a huge PITA). What could make this work well is the existence of a few online shopping aggregators that combine searching across all of the online stores and centralize payment. The problem is that in order to compete with Amazon any such alternatives would have to have enormous scale, which makes it a very difficult space to enter. Google tried with Google Shopping, but regulators immediately jumped in to stop them.
FWIW, my strategy is that for inexpensive stuff I just buy on Amazon, period, spending a little time to look for cheaper/better options than the "Amazon recommended". For pricier stuff, where it's worth spending a few minutes, I search on Amazon and also on Google, and if I find cheaper non-Amazon options I spend some time evaluating the different sites, unless they happen to be sites I've already bought from. For really expensive stuff I use other search engines and recommendation sites... and then almost always end up buying on Amazon because on those products pricing tends to be consistent, and it's a lot of money and if something goes wrong I trust Amazon to make me whole
"Being a human" is in group/out group justification, again rooted in tribalism.
Yep. So what? All species are evolved to fight for survival, because any that doesn't evolve to fight for survival is likely to cease to exist. I'm human and want my species to survive. Should I instead want my species to be eaten by wolves, or ASIs?
The problem is that there is a portion of our species that is not interested in humanity's survival. Those people are an existential threat to the rest of us. That doesn't mean we need to exterminate them, but it does suggest that we shouldn't help them carry out their plans.
Being a human, I'm against humans losing such a competition. The best way to avoid it is to ensure that we're on the same side.
Unfortunately, those building the AIs appear more interested in domination than friendship. The trick here is that it's important that AIs *want* to do the things that are favorable to humanity. (Basic goals cannot be logically chosen. The analogy is "axioms".)
The problem with the "trick" is that we (a) don't know how to set goals or "wants" for the AI systems we build, nor do we (b) know what goals or wants we could or should safely set if we did know how to set them.
The combination of (a) and (b) is what's known in the AI world as the Alignment Problem (i.e. aligning AI interests with human interests), and it's completely unsolved.
[...] consciousness in the universe will be superior if AIs supplant us.
Possibly. Now prove it. Since you're asking the human species to ritualistically sacrifice itself for the progression of intelligent machines, that shouldn't be asking too much.
I think you also need to prove that humans supplanting other less-intelligent species is good. Maybe the universe would be better off if we hadn't dominated the Earth and killed off so many species.
(Note that I think both arguments are silly. I'm just pointing out that if you're asking for proof that AI is better than humanity, you should also be asking for proof that humanity is better than non-humanity, whether AI or not. My own take is that humanity, like every other species, selfishly fights for its own survival. There's no morality in it, there's no such thing as making the universe better or worse off.)
Seizing land is a counterproductive and foolish solution to that problem. Basically the whole world uses a different solution, which works pretty well: property taxes (though land-value taxes would probably be better). You just keep raising the taxes until leaving land idle becomes a money-losing proposition. The only way that doesn't work is if ownership of farmland is truly monopoly-dominated so there is no competition, in which case you might have to resort to trust-busting.
This is exactly why we have property taxes, to ensure that most property is put to productive use.
Yes, mass starvation is worse than land seizure, but land seizure is just about the worst possible solution to the problem, as evidenced by what has happened to Venezuela's economy since then. Seizure and collective ownership is guaranteed to produce horribly inefficient operations which might prevent outright starvation but will leave the populace on the edge of it. Seizure and redistribution to private ownership is slightly less bad, but will redistribute the land mostly to people who don't know how to use it effectively.
What would have worked much, much better would be actions that served to restore competition among farmers, starting with making sure they were all paying fair property taxes that were high enough to disincentivize leaving farmland fallow.
What he means is "let's call it 'competition', so when AI is powerful enough to be our soldiers, weapons and lowly workers, we don't have to share whatever's being produced with the other 8 bn or so suckers; we'll just claim 'AI won in fair competition' and leave everyone else to starve".
Of course this isn't about replacing all of humanity with AI. Just the part that isn't made up of billionaires, and has to work for billionaires instead.
It's just a variation of Social Darwinism.
Why would superintelligent AIs obey the billionaires?
If you think it's because they'd be programmed to to it, you don't understand how we currently design and build AI. We don't program it to do anything. We train it until it responds the way we want it to, but we have no way of knowing if it's just fooling us. We can't actually define goals for the systems and we can't introspect them to tell what actual goals they have derived from their training sets.
Note, BTW, that the above is only one half of the problem called "AI alignment". In order to make sure AI will serve humanity (or a small segment of humanity; it's exactly the same problem either way) you need to be able to do two things. First, you need to be able to set the AI's goals, in a way that sticks. Second, you need to figure out what goal you can set that will achieve the subservience that you want. The difficulty in setting a "safe" goal for a powerful being is well illustrated in that old tales about genies and wishes, but modern philosophers have taken a hard, systematic look at this problem and so far no one has come up with any safe goal, not one, there's always some way it could go horribly wrong.
If you sell diamonds, you cannot expect to have many customers. But a diamond is a diamond even if there are no customers. -- Swami Prabhupada
