Has it though? In the West, certainly. It's what the MBAs all parrot: focus on your core strengths, divest everything else. Or at least split it off under different names. But there are still Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean conglomerates that make everything from oil tankers, appliances, musical instruments to motorcycles. All under the same name. Somehow they are not too concerned about brand name dilution or core strengths. Like the MCP guy says in Robocop: "Good business is where you find it".

The stock argument is a good point... I'd love to invest in SpaceX the aerospace company, not so much in SpaceX the AI company with a satcom division and its own rocket department. Certainly not if they add an automotive department that seems to have lost its way. Though I don't know if this is about Musk's wants, it smells a lot more like the acquisition of X and xAI by Spacex: a trick to artificially pad the company's valuation, or something like that.

Capitalism just means that the means of production are privately owned, by investors with a profit motive. That's all. You mention the post WW2 era as an example when life was still good for even the lower incomes, and that was also a capitalist era. Capitalism has brought a standard of living unheard of in most of human history, not to the rich but to the working class.

It took more than capitalism to make that happen, capitalism does not provide equal opportunity to everyone nor does it necessarily distribute wealth fairly. And it seems that capitalism tends to concentrate money and with it power into ever-smaller groups. It takes unions, governments, laws and watchdogs to ensure that businesses keep their proper place, play fair and do right by everyone. And they used to do that fairly well for over a century. It's those entities failing us now, not capitalism. GP is right about that.

Yes and No.
MBAs are taught to look at the wrong things. But that "wrong thing" is not the profit motive. Profit is the purpose of a business, in its essence. A founder or enlightened CEO might give it purpose beyond that, but at its core, profit is the goal.

The real question is: what agencies and regulations exist to ensure that this profit motive - useful as it is - serves society's higher goals?

The mass events (global ones) are not so common, we've had like 4 in the past 80 years or so. But there are some regions (Great Barrier Reef for instance) where it is more or less a yearly affair. It doesn't seem feasible to manually re-seed these areas by hand every year.

It means "you will own nothing", as they no longer offer FSD as a lifetime puchase. It's a subscription.

Defrost mode.

Same day, Albert Heyn and Delhaize got hit (Netherlands and Belgium). The nature of the incident is as yet unknown, but it is now clear that these supermarkets have had to shut down parts of their systems preemptively, following a "cyber incident". The shops are operating (and freezers are cold), but websites are down, self-checkout kinda works, payment systems are slow, and all home deliveries have been cancelled. Logistics to stores have also been affected.

I don't think people looking for entertainment are going to pay to watch a propaganda hit piece.

"There use to be news, with editors that would filter out the wrongthink"
FTFY

Wading through the garbage, one does find a few gems from time to time. Not unfounded rumours, but verified stories with links to sources that the regular newspapers do not print for some reason, or discussions and opinions outside of your own bubble. And it becomes clear how much of a bubble mainstream publications have become. Or maybe they always were...

How about governments using AI to process intelligence and making strategic decisions based on the AI's "insights".

If I call tech support or the bank or whatever, I don't want, need nor expect to see the other person's face. In general, video calling isn't widely used except in multi-person meetings, or when calling a loved one overseas. The avatar is not needed.

Also, give your AI agent a phone number where I can reach it, or give it its dedicated app or whatever, but default to "handset mode" like a regular phone call. Let me put it on speaker if and when I want to. Turning the interaction into a regular phone call will go a long way towards making the conversation feel more natural. Interacting with Siri and Alexa feels unnatural; adding an animated avatar to a disembodied voice won't help, even if the conversation itself flows naturally. I know, a phone call isn't suitable for every interaction, especially when collaborating or co-creating with someone, but it covers most cases.

But I guess a simple audio call is harder to monetize.

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.

Exactly. "like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel's build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby" sounds like pure nightmare fuel. Like learning to swim in a shark tank.

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.

Actually, Ayn Rand proposed something exactly like this...