Collapse generally takes decades or centuries. For the current global interconnected civilization it will likely take longer, as this civilizatoin has been quite stable since the Great Divergence of the 15th or 16th century.

Reliable accounts of people during a civilization collapse are essentially nonexistent, and the retelling likely benefits from hindsight. That said, it seems unlikely that anyone living through it would have been able to confidently identity a collapse that was due to systemic human-caused problems. And I think that is the case today, we might want to jump to conclusions and go "ah ha! this is the thing that will destroy us!" but actually providing a convincing argument backed by evidence is difficult if not impossible.

So what do we do? I think there are two categories of approaches. Either assume that since society has been stable in the past, that it will continue to be stable in the future. That AI is just another small contribution that society has to adapt to, and we'll do so like we always have. Or, we act a little more defensively. We argue that while we don't know that a collapse is coming, we act cautiously and with purpose to avoid triggering scenarios that have in the past led to a collapse. So don't have massive famines, don't have social upheavels that leave people without jobs or homes. Etc. Basically, if you detect that strife is on the horizon, take steps to avoid it.

We would have to require manufactures to include safe and simple recovery processes.

And regulating businesses is filthy Communism, so maybe that will fly in the UK and EU, but never in the good old USofA.

I like the idea from a neat and tidy legal principle. But what you propose is not what I've seen in practice. Amazon is perhaps the one doing the largest scale book destruction, because they already had the equipment for their earlier book digitization projects. Anthropic is a close second as far as I'm aware. Others like Google have a mix of destructive and nondestructive, with no public information on the amount of either.

Remind us all again where "six months before ChatGPT was released" sits relative to the Covid pandemic?

To save you some Googling, that'd be March 11, 2020 (or earlier depending on how long CCP was hiding it) < November 30, 2022 < May 5, 2023.

This comment is a real head scratcher to me. So off the mark I blurted out a laugh when I saw it.

I'm not aware of any technology that can build a society where adults hold literacy and numeracy, that does not involve a lot of repetitive practice and rote learning. Even numerical theory as presented in common core mathematics (which I applaud) requires practice and repetition to retain. And the exercises in common core that Internet loves to complain about is an example of that practice.

I was (as a citizen) given the voluntary option to correct the paperwork issues. Or to be subjected to searches and questioning.
And that offer is not even what they are supposed to do. They're legally supposed to just take your stuff and hold you for questioning.

After researching it, there was really little I could do. The statute is pretty clear for about 80% of what went down.

a border search? yes, you can be detained and questioned for an unspecified amount of time.

When they take your phone, you'll get a property claim slip. And until you unlock your phone, you won't get it back. So it's effectively indefinite.

David Deming is conveniently ignoring the middle of Covid when people were being literally paid not to work.

This is almost trivially obvious across the white-collar universe. Companies aren't hiring junior-level employees because in many cases, AI can do almost as good of a job for a tiny fraction of the price.

The reality is, of course, more nuanced. Case in point, Most fields have both back-office and front-end workers. If you're back office, you'd better be 40+ and at the peak of your career, because new juniors and (paid) interns are literally nonexistant over the past few years.

On the flip side - Someone needs to run cable, and ironically enough, the one thing robots don't seem good at replacing is the shit-work of the real world.

A massive disinformation campaign must follow in order to preserve the oligarchy.

First, I want to say I'm staunchly anti-establishment. Fuck Uncle Sam, fuck ICE, fuck Cheeto - And yes, while we're at it, fuck Biden, Clinton, and any other puppets of the pedogarchy you care to name.

All that said, the incident you describe is not a situation we should be defending (at least not until we're ready to actually declare war on our own government). The people involved drove up in a van full of weapons, dropped off a goddamned sniper right before arriving, and their sniper shot a cop when the "peaceful" plan to launch fireworks at a prison unsurprisingly went south.

Unless we've completely abandoned any pretext of rule-of-law, there's absolutely nothing defensible about that situation. FAFO, and they did.

and by "detain you" ... overnight is typical if you pissed them off. your won't get your phone back ever

I didn't word that carefully. You're not "denied" entry. In my experience they give you the option to turn back. If you insist you are legally allowed to enter the country and still refuse a search, then they will detain you and your devices until you comply.

Your Prime Time sitcoms and news casts are likely already written by AI.

After a while I get a lot of excuses from Claude. So I clear the session. And start with new prompts. Generally I have to break the problem down into smaller pieces and connect the dots before the AI agent will agree that what I want to do is not only possible, it's the correct way to do it.

For what it's worth, I've had junior engineers get stuck and push back in a similar way. It's fine. If you don't know the answer, I can teach a human to methodically work through a problem to find answers. With an agent with limited memory and a small token window, there's only so far I can carry it. And each time I go into it, I have to repeat the process with the next session. That situation isn't likely to stand though, we'll soon see more AI models that are better and cost me even more money to run.

I'd like Android-in-docker. Run Android and have a perfectly usable phone. Normal PIN entry. Normal apps. Can make phone calls. Pretty limited text message log. And then start the docker container with your accounts, chat programs, etc. The key thing is I would want it to take over the messaging services while the container is running instead of having everything going to the outer dumb layer.

Not only is this good for agitators fighting government overreach. But it seems like a good way to have a work account on your phone without Google's terrible work profile feature that hands your phone's reset and lock requirements over to your corporate IT. and good for people who want to practice some better security and data hygiene in this era where 1 in 5 people experience identity theft, and AI tools are going to make that more like 4 in 5 in a year or two.