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Between 37% to 42% of the US belongs to the top 1%.Wikipedia article with visualizations and sources of data:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Correction: Between 37% to 42% of the US belongs to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://indianexpress.com/arti...

THIS !!

There is fundamental difference between building automation tools with AI, and using them repeatedly; which is what most tech savvy people do instead of making AI to do the work for you each time.

For example, PowerPoint presentation creation involves creating a template on time with your logos, colors, and standard images loaded. For each deck you create, you add boiler plate content, then add the content that is specific to the topic you are talking about. Even there, you can use a lot of the tools like SmartArt to automate the appearance of content. Using AI to follow this approach reduces token usage by approximately 70%. However, to do this, you need to understand PowerPoint and the extensive automation tools built into it. Instead, every exec I work with asks Claude to generate the entire presentation, and is stunned by their token usage

I am a gullible fool willing to pay for your so called "sensationalist garbage". I have this unreasonable desire to support purveyors of my chosen poison - i.e. I would like to continue to provide revenue to my chosen garbage creators. It is imperative therefore that I protect their source of income. I for one, will gladly support their copyright, and their right to monetize "sensationalist garbage". If they have chosen to NOT make it available for free, and have explicitly requested that others not scrape and repurpose their "sensationalist garbage", It behooves me to accept those terms when consuming it.

The content does not matter - copyright protection and acceptable use restrictions need to be supported. Without it, we are going to hit all sort of problems in the very near term.

If I want to use your personal data to train my LLM, I need to get permission from you. I "pay" for this by either offering giving you a free service (Google, Facebook); or offering you better service in return (Apple, Amazon). For all copyrighted data, I expect to pay for the data.

I can train my AI on open source code that is on GitHub, but if I want to train it on Oracle or SAP software, I need to get their permission, pay them for it, and promise that what I have trained the AI to do cannot be used to re-create the software. Their source code and documentation is on the other side of a pay wall. They have a reasonable expectation that their paying customers do not hack the paywall, and suck in all the documentation and code to train their AI. If they choose to make part of their software available for free to entice people to sign up, the expectation remains that copyright will be respected.

So, when we are talking about news and opinion pieces, why should the rules change?

The reason the AI engines are as cheap as they are is that they were trained on copyrighted data without permission, and are able to create new content.

I love the power and productivity lift that AI tools are giving me, but this fundamental truth does continue to trouble a lot of people.

I wish I had points to upvote you. Excellent articulation

I was ranting about this to my colleagues for a while - then I came across a few kids who made me pause and agree with "big hairy gorilla" up above. For the last 10 years, I have been bemoaning the fact that most kids I deal with cannot do things from first principles. They can search for code fragments and use them without understanding them at all. 100% of the Java programmers I work with on Java Spring cannot explain what "aspect oriented programming" or "inversion of control" means. Their argument is they do not need to understand the theory to use the frameworks. Sorry folks - thats why your code is such crap. You cannot recognize a cross cutting concern is if it jumps up and down and screams at you. More recently, I have started seeing these exceptional kids - under 23 year olds - who have spent the effort to understand the theory, and are using AI to scale like crazy. They are writing more code than teams of 15 people, and the code is elegant and better than what most people would write. The prompts they use, and the markdown guideline frameworks they have created are the secret sauce. Their wording is precise, and they use the terms consistently, with the right meaning. I shared my favorite book - the mythical man month - with them, and the next thing I saw was a set of guidelines to help them police their own work to prevent falling down some of the behavior traps that Brooks talks about. E.g. "the tendency towards irreducible number of errors in complex systems - they created a complexity score to test their own reasoning. I suffer from "sunk cost fallacy" in so much of my code. These kids do not. at all They took in the traditional complexity models and stripped out the ones that did not make sense in the AI world, and suddenly the layering in the system became much better. Complexity of design too high? Scrap and go back to fix it. I dont too much muscle memory to do that, scrapping code hurts, even though I did not actually write it. These kids are learning a whole new muscle memory for the new world. So ... savants are going to take over the world. This joke : https://www.reddit.com/r/linux...

There are 2 different topics here:

1) Humans moving away from reading to listening

2) AI putting professional voice actors out of work

For topic 1 I love the idea that mankind enjoys story telling around the camp fire more than the written word. I will wait for the research and opinion folks to tell me how to think about that.:-)

The rise of AI readers is the more interesting topic to me though. I think we are six months away from being able to train a personal AI on my favorite voice actor and have that AI agent read any text for me. So ... have James Earl Jones read Hobbit for me. I remember the fun we had with Garmin's celebrity voices ... Darth Vader or Wallace of Wallace and Gromit providing driving directions. So, if I have a DRM free version of a book, then I can create an audiobook out if it for free. That is going to kill a lot of the Audiobook market as well. I know this article is panicking about the end of hardback books. In six months, we are going to either read about the return with a vengeance of DRM protection, or a similar article about the catastrophic drop in audiobook sales.

There was a great short story from Ralph Williams called "Business as Usual during Alterations" on how mankind is disrupted through the introduction of a "duplicator". The short story gives a great summary of how disruptive it becomes, and how humans need to change to adapt. I seriously recommend folks read it ...

Pretty much what's happening around us right now.

I am entering the "get off my lawn" stage in life and being ordered off the stage by many younger folks, so take some of what I say with that in mind.

Through my entire career the ACM and Computer Society are where I have gone to be amazed, challenged and forced to re-assess what I know. While 70% of research is crap, agreed, 30% is freaking brilliant, and can leave you stunned and excited considering the possibilities.

It really saddens me to see the way this kind of open ended research being discounted off hand as irrelevant and dated. It feels to me that we have become so enamored with echo chambers that original thought and ideas have become "irrelevant". AI is fantastic at taking what has happened before and repeating it. I find it taking away so much of the mindless grind that it is becoming truly liberating. I believe that that appropriate use of AI frees us up to do so much more of this kind of original thinking.

For folks in the IT industry, I would humbly request everyone to take advantage of the open access to these documents and find at least one idea that challenges you each week. It can only help :-).

Exactly first thought that came to me as well. Said this out aloud to friends around lunch table, and the comment was - in most places nature is integral to what humans consider as "acceptable living conditions"; and that if we factor that in, the % of nature is higher. I dont think I see it that way. I suggested that herds of Bison, Elephants or Wilderbeast shaped the land they live in. The fragile unearthly landscape of places like Bryce Canyon in the US or the wilds of China exist because humans stayed away for the thousands of years they took to form. What would it take for us to live in 30% or 40%, and leave the rest 100% to nature? Can we give up enough to support this?

Could not agree more. There are so many behaviors that we assume are human only - altruism, empathy both within and beyond own species, jealousy - that have been observed in other species. Understanding what "thought" means, how decisions are taken etc. are going to be incredibly important. To your point, there seems to have been some really messy evolution that ended up in what passes for intelligence in humans.

I love the "3 laws of robotics" as a framework for recognizing that some of these must be built into our future AI overlords so that they don't wipe us out just because it was statistically the best way to achieve peace and tranquility. Understanding the "mechanics" of decision making, reasoning, innovation, empathy, etc. something we can build into systems.

In "stranger in a strange land", Heinlein offers this very process definition of "love" - where the happiness of another being becomes important for yours. May be teaching AI to "love" humans is going to be critical for future systems. Today most drivers are biological and driven by the need to ensure success of the species. Abstract love as we see in our pets might be something we want to understand and build into the AI systems of the future.

I wish I had Karma points to upvote you. It's crazy how every post just seems to bring out more crazies . It's not just the death of social discourse; it's like the entire world has been taken over by sugar overdosed ADHD kids :-(

See: https://solidproject.org/

Sir Tim had proposed this a while back and it does work. A group of friends set this up overnight to share info between ourselves on things we could borrow from each other - board games, powertools, etc. Took a couple of hours to set up - mostly because we all love arguing about stupid stuff.

With this tech I could set up my own medical data server if I want,. For my less tech savvy mom I can get her set up on a commercial server. Granting permission can be scripted, and can use credentials managed on a trusted server, so access grants can be automated if I am unconscious; but only to people who have been vetted by an authority I trust. I and my family can always see who was granted access to what data, and we can withdraw access at any time.

Completely decentralized, no single repository. All of the upsides, very few down sides.So why not this? Might it be that no great oligarch (and lets be honest thats what Bezos, Musk and Tim are; and Trump is trying to become) gets to own it?

It would be awesome if smart folks like the ones on Slashdot could get behind a community movement like this, and arm twist the government that is supposed to represent our needs to force hospitals to accept this as an alternative to a centralized on that requires I give up all rights to my own data.

Quick search and the first decent article that came up: https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/science-blog/how-birds-sense-magnetic-field-earth-help-them-navigate

So, like silicon chips and transistors are high energy replacements for low energy neurons, we have created a complex high energy requiring alternative.

Humans could do with some kind of ethical & non "end of the world causing" way we can create completely new organic machines that can do some of these things. It's like Babbage trying to create a thinking machine with the technology he had then. The only difference is we know about the technology to do this now, but don't trust ourselves as a species to let ourselves use it. First use case will probably be an organic cruise missile with huge bird wings >.