Cue autobiographical bestseller, "Reading Lolita in NSW."

Since code-generating AIs were likely trained on them, they won't go too far, though.

The 50% number is a bit mysterious, but if I understand the text of the article correctly, it essentially means that if we do not account for the noise added by accidents and such, we get a Pearson correlation of life expectancies of monozygotic twins of ~0.23. If we correct for accidents, the correlation rises to 0.5, hence 50% (with some further analysis they go up to 0.55, hence "above 50%" in the abstract). Now, in practical terms, this means that, given a MZ twin who died recently of natural causes, we could obtain an estimate for ourselves, but only if we make additional assumptions. A correlation coefficient alone is not very informative.

>Now, in practical terms, this means that, given a MZ twin who died recently of natural causes, we could obtain an estimate for ourselves,

Uh... am I misreading your comment, or are you suggesting that when your identical twin dies of non-accidental death, you can be pretty sure you're about to croak in the next wee days or weeks yourself? Very difficult to engineer that alarm bell (you either have a twin, or not), and too damned late to matter.

With a correlation of ~0.5 the window will be much wider than weeks or months, and it's more like, "If your MZ twin died of completely natural causes at 70, it is unlikely that you will live to 120."

Most of what he writes (including the part on the skycam) applies to soccer as well.

Maybe, but soccer doesn't have very many situations where there are ~14 players standing in spitting distance of each other and a 6 inch shift in the position of the ball or a single player has huge implications for the outcome of the game.

Aren't free kicks an example of this? There must be a few in every soccer game, no?

But I don't know how many times the 14 player scenario happens per game in American Football, is it a lot more?

Soccer fans also miss out on an hour of commercials each game (it's easy to skip the ones at halftime).

I guess he means that the authors can still be decent people in their private and even professional lives and not general scoundrels who wouldn't stop at actively harming other people to gain something.

Hmm. I wonder how he knows these bad-doers are good people.

In real life, not disney movies made for simple minded children, lazy apathy is what most real evil looks like. Please see "the banality of evil."

At which point do you cross the line? Somebody who murders to take someone else's money is ultimately just too lazy to provide value in return for money, so they're not evil?

When apathy results in harm to others and benefits to oneself, those others are allowed to appropriately label that apathy as evil.

You can call them bad or shitty or something else.

True evil is different.

If someone wants to be bad or shitty in a way that harms nobody but themselves, then more power to them. That's freedom.

If someone wants to be bad or shitty in a way that makes their lives own better while making the lives of everyone around them worse, that's evil and parasitic, and I'm not going to wring my hands about labeling it as such.

I'd rather if the article would stick to the facts

Well, there is this stoic British way of looking at the world and preserving the sense of self worth and then there is the ending of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is just pure cosmic despair in the face of the bureaucratic void. It was also true for me that once I saw how pathologically bleak Adams's worldview is I couldn't even really laugh at the jokes any more.

I think part of the negative attitude towards the effects of AI stems from the fact that it demolishes a lot of structure. The traditional institutes maintain well-structured, low-entropy societies in terms of knowledge: one goes to a lawyer for legal advice or to a doctor for medical advice, one goes/send one's children to a university for higher education, etc. One knows what to do and whom to ask. With the advent of internet, this started to change, and now the old system is almost useless: as you note, it may be more efficient to go to AI for legal advice, and AI is definitely more knowledgeable about most things than most university teachers, if used correctly. In the limit, the society as it existed before is not simply transformed but is completely gone: everybody is a fully autonomous agent with a $AI_PROVIDER subscription. Ditto for professional groups and other types of association that were needed to organise and disseminate knowledge (what is a lawyer these days? a person with a $LEGAL_AI_PROVIDER subscription, if this is even a thing? what is a SWE?). Now we live in a maximum-entropy situation. How do values evolve and disseminate in this scenario? Everybody has an AI-supported opinion about what is right. How do we agree? How do we decided on the next steps? AI doesn't give us a structure for that.

> AI is definitely more knowledgeable about most things than most university teachers

I think this is under-appreciated so much. Yes, every university professor is going to know more about quite a lot of things than ChatGPT does, especially in their specialty, but there is no university professor on earth who knows as much about as many things as ChatGPT, nor do they have the patience or time to spend explaining what they know to people at scale, in an interactive way.

I was randomly watching a video about calculus on youtube this morning and didn't understand something (Feynman's integration trick) and then spent 90 minutes talking to ChatGPT getting some clarity on the topic, and finding related work and more reading to do about it, along with help working through more examples. I don't go to college. I don't have a college math teacher on call. Wikipedia is useless for learning anything in math that you don't already know. ChatGPT has endless patience to drill down on individual topics and explaining things at different levels of expertise.

This is just a capability for individual learning that _didn't exist before ai_ and we have barely begun to unlock it for people.

The authors are quick to assume "the inevitable atrophy of human skills and knowledge". But skills and knowledge have not been propped up by some low-fi institutional magic: they stem from the necessity of achieving practical goals, as well as general human curiosity and competitiveness. Sure, there will be a period of slop sloshing around everywhere, but the main drives for excellence (or at least passable performance) are not going anywhere.