The price of oil at the price of water (ecology apart) should be a good thing.
Automation should be, obviously, a good thing, because more is produced with less labor. What it says of ourselves and our politics that so many people (me included) are afraid of it?
In a sane world, we would realize that, in a post-work world, the owner of the robots have all the power, so the robots should be owned in common. The solution is political.
Throughout history Empires have bet their entire futures on the predictions of seers, magicians and done so with enthusiasm. When political leaders think their court magicians can give them an edge, they'll throw the baby out with the bathwater to take advantage of it. It seems to me that the Machine Learning engineers and AI companies are the court magicians of our time.
I certainly don't have much faith in the current political structures, they're uneducated on most subjects they're in charge of and taking the magicians at their word, the magicians have just gotten smarter and don't call it magic anymore.
I would actually call it magic though, just actually real. Imagine explaining to political strategists from 100 years ago, the ability to influence politicians remotely, while they sit in a room by themselves a la dictating what target politicians see on their phones and feed them content to steer them in a certain directions.. Its almost like a synthetic remote viewing.. And if that doesn't work, you also have buckets of cash :|
What do we “need” more of? Here in France we need more doctors, more nurseries, more teachers… I don’t see AI helping much there in short to middle term (with teachers all research points to AI making it massively worse even)
Globally I think we need better access to quality nutrition and more affordable medicine. Generally cheaper energy.
Counter-argument: what if LLMs can help alleviate a doctor's work by providing quick diagnostic for simple cases?
How much time does a doctor spend writing prescriptions for cough-like symptoms?
How much time does an ophthalmologist spend measuring eye sight?
I totally agree that this is a bit of a radical opinion, and not everybody would be pleased with the idea of a program making diagnosis, so I am not fully advocating for it, but I think that we should not limit the potential of AI.
Also, to point out to France specifically. We need more teachers, yet new teachers are treated as commodities (you have to relocate to wherever the Education nationale tells you to go and in most cases, that means new teachers are relocated to difficult areas).
We need more doctors, yet the number of new doctors each year is fixed by the number of people that are allowed to pass the exam.
Wait, my job is not cushy. I think hard all day long, I endure levels of frustration that would cripple most, and I do it because I have no choice, I must build the thing I see or be tormented by its possibility. Cushy? Right.
How is that 1st world, there are plenty of people that "think hard" and deal with really hard problems in the "3rd World"
Give compiler engineering for medical devices a whirl for 14 hours a day for a month or so and let me know if you think it's "cushy". Not everything is making apps and games, sometimes your mistakes can mean life or death. Lots of SWE isn't cushy at all, or necessarily well paid.
Go get a bachelors and masters in EE while being eating just two bowls of rice and lentils everyday for 5 years and let me know if that's cushy.
As compared to risking life and limbs every day in a mine, breathing in cancerous powders, finding yourself with most of your joints fucked at 45, likely carrying PTSD from accidents happened to you or your colleagues... Yes, "hard thinking" looks pretty cushy in comparison.
Have you any idea how many people die every day on their workplace in manufacturing, construction, or mining; or how many develop chronic issues from agriculture...? And all for salaries that are a tenth of the average developer (in the developed world; elsewhere, more like a hundredth). Come on now.
Everyone has problems and everyone is entitled to feel aggrieved by their condition, but one should maintain a reasonable degree of perspective at all times.
There is no such thing that you can always keep adding more of and have it automatically be effective.
I tend to automate too much because it's fun, but if I'm being objective in many cases it has been more work than doing the stuff manually. Because of laziness I tend to way overestimate how much time and effort it would took to do something manually if I just rolled my sleeved and simply did it.
Whether automating something actually produces more with less labor depends on nuance of each specific case, it's definitely not a given. People tend to be very biased when judging the actual productivity. E.g. is someone who quickly closes tickets but causes disproportionate amount of production issues, money losing bugs or review work on others really that productive in the end?
You can buy things from your local Amazon or national equivalent that come from outside using this systems, so, you are not so restricted to EU sellers.
I suppose the most problematic would be traveling. I recently when outside the EU and was surprise how smooth the process was using my Visa card, to the point I didn't use any local currency.
On the other hand, I recently buy books from the UK and it get stuck for two weeks in customs, and it had nothing to do with the payment platform. I had not realized how difficult is to import something from outside the EU, even for personal use.
you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
[..] That's a gigantic task, [..]"
Yeah, but is not that suppose to be like 'The Task'. Like, literally, beyond immediate survival, the thing all human groups work towards? I know, sometimes doesn't look like it.
You make it to look like if, out of the blue, they attacked they neighbor. Not mention of what the reason of China (right or wrong) could be. Then you complain of uncritically spreading propaganda.
From Wikipedia: "There had been a series of border skirmishes between the two countries after the 1959 Tibetan uprising, when India granted asylum to the Dalai Lama. Chinese military action grew increasingly aggressive after India rejected proposed Chinese diplomatic settlements throughout 1960–1962, with China resuming previously banned "forward patrols" in Ladakh after 30 April 1962."
It literally was out of the blue. There were minimal troops stationed there. India had streets named after the friendship agreement with China, there were slogans that went “Indians and Chinese are brothers”. Brothers can have minor disagreements, but we have their back and they have hours.
The border was guarded about as well as the US-Canada border on the Indian side.
The surprise war caught India completely off guard. The surprise was so effective that China captured all the territory they wanted, killed thousands of Indian troops and declared a unilateral ceasefire before India could marshal a response.
Prime Minister Nehru was badly shocked by this betrayal. He never recovered from it. His health deteriorated rapidly and he died a little over a year later.
Consider that maybe a 2 minute skim of Wikipedia teaches you very little. Certainly not as much as reading many books on this subject, which I have.
Is it, though? Japan and America also have good relations, despite the latter nuking the former twice. Germany and other EU states are close now despite being on opposite sites in two world wars. Some/most countries manage to move on from past conflicts.
The target in Gaza is, very clearly, to get rid of the civilians. Not only in Gaza but in the West Bank.
They want to annex all that if they have to kill civilians they will kill civilians. In fact, they don't even hide it, just go to check the statements from members of the Israeli government.
That's the reality 'no matter what your beliefs are', by the way.
https://pypi.org/project/z4-solver/
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