Ehhh that's a lot more complicated than that. But sure. How many would die naturally in the same given period due to things such as disease and natural outcomes, I prefer facts to biased and somewhat radical sources. We already know the constant population during certain periods so why not extrapolate how many died to famine rather than claim it as a glob that it is not? It worsens the claims that these people are trying to portray and actually makes the Indian government look much worse. As if demanding the money and reparations rather than a conversation. It's not hard to see why nobody is taking it seriously.
Except for the fact that it does so on an unprecide dented scale allowing small groups of people to do things without necessarily being caught allowing for far more effective ways of control. Even without it, it's hard to argue for the existence of online forums when hackernews is a classic example of why it doesn't work when the majority of the 'intellectuals' have an inflated belief and understanding on topics they have no basic understand on. It's so bad that none of the actual subject matter experts talk here besides ones with financial interests in the products themselves and the experts fearful of retribution. The irony is almost comedic.
It really can't and it doesn't really work the way you think it does which is ironic that you'd think people on this site would be informed but I guess ycombinator has a financial conflict of interest in doing so. I wouldn't be surprised if they make posts on this topic with a very heavy bias like they do for a lot of their own investments.
I remember being shown this software almost a decade ago in dealing with chat in online video gaming and it ended becoming a serious conversation at the ACM SIG CHI about it's use and abuse for spreading certain things. At the end of the day, we realized it was an arms race and the only way to win, was to simply not play. But of course these ideas were rejected for it went against the financial interests of the parties involved.
The point is not what we (techies) think about the usefulness of ChatGPT. The point is that managers will definitely think ChatGPT is worth doing... Just like they think Jira/Scrum/Agile/etc. is worth our time. I definitely see management paying for ChatGPT.
It’s also impossible to imagine correctly. Back in 2009, I was completely convinced that we’d be able to go into a car dealership and buy a brand new vehicle which had no steering wheel because the self-driving AI was just that good, within 10 years. Seemed reasonable at the time on the basis of the DARPA Grand Challenge results, but even 13 years later, it didn’t happen.
I think this is the crucial point, just as in all AI applications the way it deals with corner cases will decide its impact on the job market. And corner cases are usually where AI has consistently been performing badly.
Just as a reminder, after we had spectacular results on ImageNet, highly respected AI researchers were predicting the end of the radiologist occupation. Turns out that even when some state-of-the-art CV classification algorithm is used on any kind of scan, you still need a radiologist to look at the image basically in the same way as before.
If you write large-scale applications with the help of a system like ChatGPT you will still need to create accurate test coverage and an understanding of the problem that is essentially equivalent to that of the people writing the code themselves. Whether all of this would in the end actually lead to large enough productivity increases depends on how error-prone the AI generated code will be and given that it takes a lot more time to dig into unfamiliar codebases than those you've written yourself, I think it's anything but obvious that this will have a huge overall impact on the industry. But obviously I might be biased here, since I have a stake in the game.
There's also mathematically excellent reasons why that happened.
Self-driving cars are an impossibly complex problem.
Statistics are statistics.
Predicting the minority class correctly 99% of the time isn't good enough for autonomous driving. A car has to break for little Suzie 100% of the time.
However, generating 1,000 lines of code for a CRUD app? That's 99% bug free?
That's a helluva lot better than I can do.
As with all things. The solution is watch what the domain experts do.
The equivalent is closer to a CRUD app that serves 99% of requests correctly. Which is nowhere near good enough to use.
But even if we do go with 99% bug free for the sake of argument, the usefulness depends on the type of bug. How harmful is it? How easy is it to detect?
I had my wife (a physician) ask ChatGPT medical questions and it was almost always subtly but dangerously and confidently wrong. It looked fine to me but it took an expert to spot the flaws. And frequently it required specialist knowledge that a physician outside of my wife’s specialty wouldn’t even know to find the problems.
If you need a senior engineer to read and understand every line of code this thing spits out I don’t see it as providing more than advanced autocomplete in real world use (which to be fair could be quite helpful).
It frequently takes more time to read and really comprehend a junior engineers PR than it would have to just do it myself. The only reason I’m not is mentoring.
Just because your prediction was wrong doesn’t mean that we aren’t leaps and bounds ahead of where we were. Seems like that is the crux of people’s argument. Because it’s not perfect yet it’s not impressive.
Hm, well that's not the impression I want to create. I certainly think any human intelligence task can be equaled by an AI at some point, I just feel uncertain about any specific timescale.
And GPT-3 et al has a lot of knowledge, even if it messes up certain expert level details. Rather than comparing against domain experts, my anchor point here is the sort of mistakes that novelists, script writers, and journalists make when writing about any given topic.
Whatever you saw a decade ago, it definitely wasn’t this.
I do recommend you play with it. But if you don’t feel like signing up with their free account, here’s a screen recording of me asking it some random general knowledge questions and instructing it to use a different language in the response each time: https://youtu.be/XX2rbcrXblk
I had to look up MegaHal, apparently that was based at least in part on a hidden Markov Model.
Using "it" in this way to refer to both that and GPT-family LLMs, or similarly saying "I remember being shown this software almost a decade ago" like the other commenter, is like saying "I remember seeing Kitty Hawk fly, and there's no way that can get someone across the Atlantic" when being presented with a chance to a free seat on the first flight of the Concord. (Actual human level intelligence in this analogy is a spaceship we still have not built, that's not where I'm going with this).
It’s not clear to me MegaHAL language models are less powerful than transformer models. The difference is the “largeness”, but that’s a hardware/dataset/budget detail.
While it's never going to replace the man behind the machine.
It still seems highly likely that "stitching libraries together" development workflows in 10-15 years will involve large amounts of copy-editing the output of large language models.
The trajectory of improvements, from GitHub Copilot to ChatGPT, is too steep.
Web development workflows honestly are often already at the stage of stitching together the output of large language models (Stack Overflow being the most well known such language model). I'm still surprised it pulls the salaries it does.
In my opinion, the only way it takes 10 years to get there is if all progress stops within the next 30 days.
Because it can literally almost do that stitching libraries together task now, if you give it a compiler and runtime environment and have it iterate on errors. Open AI has said they will release a big update before Christmas. This could include an API. And if we assume a text-only environment. But we already have the first text-to-video models, so we should assume that ChatGPT like systems will be built with multimodal models such that they would include information about UI interactions etc. in the near future. No reason to suppose that those advances would take ten years. We are seeing major improvements every 6-12 months.
And this is why the rich stopped going to the club after the 70s and instead created their own private country clubs. Fun fact, contrary to popular opinion the majority of these clubs do not offer alcohol.
I knew a well known chef that worked at a lot of these venues the people buying alcohol were upper middle class businessmen. High society doesn't really drink. Especially at social events. It was a surprise to me when he took me with him as a kid.
I don't mean that. It's very uncommon for the wealthy to drink. It's not really a thing. They all think it's a scam and they don't like their kids near it either. It's the reason so many girls do horseback riding. It's a controlled environment.
The lives people dream of are often expressions of fantasies and desires to escape their current situation. Personally everything is the same. I've never found joy from any of them.
Environment and way of upbringing has changed _massively_ over the last three generations. It would be weird if everybody stayed the same. Gen Z/A grew up with iPads glued to their hands (or, many of them). Of course they will approach things differently, and communicate differently.
My parents just can’t fathom the idea that I‘d do more with and for my kids than the bare minimum required. And I don’t think that’s entirely an individual change, but rather a generational one, too.
Ancient observer here - we all know that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes and people are just hairless (mostly), crazy bonobos at heart. The expectation that things will be different somehow goes away if you pay attention to history.
This is a great point, we treat all the dopamine and novelty uptick when escaping our normal life, but we then return and spend 90% of our life in exactly the same rut.
I think the trick is to design the 90% to work based on realities, not fantasies. We think that moving to bali, surfing every day, drinking coconuts and participate in ayahuasca is somewhat extraordinary or can sustain our connection to it long-term, but thats not really the case. Every place, every fantasy has a trade-off and is usually short lived.
So coming back to `present`. Its fixing our daily life that is desperately needed in order not to dream of that 2 weeks bahamas escapism. But I suppose that is what is meant here as slow life and how can we design it... unfortunately still haven't found the answer to this.
They should actually hope they do not ever achieve their dreams. Because they would likely find that the contentment and happiness they were hoping to get does not materialize. In fact, they end up feeling worse. Because not only will they find they do not feel more content or happier, but that they have also lost the illusion that 'if only' they had this or that that their condition would improve. They discover that what they have been experiencing is, in fact, the human condition.
Algorithm interviews never worked it was just a filtering mechanism so they could access cheaper labor. The reality is you have no idea if someone is qualified for their job until you hire them. Everything else are just signals. Fuzzy at best.
It's a poor filter and well tech salaries are artificially high the reality is most companies can afford to hire tens of thousands of developers to work on projects but instead then only hire the bare minimum.
If I were Musk or Bezos, the temptation to rig a Contact-style scenario would be well beyond merely overwhelming.
Guessing the orbital mechanics needed to station-keep a signal source at a given apparent sidereal position, far enough from Earth to simulate parallax at infinity, are unworkable.
Professional shyster making something like the Georgia guides tones or golden tablets to "discover" and then use as the basis of a religion, is the first thing that comes to mind.
Oh, you mean dinosaurs! There's basically never been a full one found. The closest one ever was found under dubious circumstances. The process for extracting them is to make tiny chips in rock and casts as you go along pretty much allowing you to shape as desired. The sites are of course highly guarded. Of course the most complete was the ever popular TRex.
Dinosaur paleontology is a religious racket. Sure there was lots of megafauna and their were some large flightless birds with various levels of feathering. Like anything though money corrupts and the money behind dinosaurs is huge. Every kid has toys, books, theres movies, TV shows, museums, etc.
They're not carving stone when digging out the fossils. And the average fossil digger is not Michaelangelo or capable of sculpting a negative dinosaur skeleton out of solid rock. Just imagine hundreds of people on a dig trying to get the symmetry and proportions right. The answer is that the material inside the impression left by the decaying bones is softer than the rock it's encased in.
Sure, dinos for kids are big money, but there's just a massive amount of proof they existed. The fact that an industry exists monetizing a natural phenomenon doesn't automatically mean the phenomenon doesn't exist. That's the "anything mainstream must be fake" conspiracy theory. Some mainstream things are real. What proof is there for the world being created in seven days besides a single book of stories invented a couple thousand years ago? And by the way, don't parents buy their kids a lot of religious things... way more than dinosaur dolls?
[edit] if I'm just missing the sarcasm here, sorry, it's been a long day.
This is obviously not intended as an informational post or as one that would be likely to be taken as fact by most people. You'll never be able to recover the time you spent typing all that.
Are we considering the UK the entirety of Northern Europe now? That's a bold claim. If I recall correctly most of northern Europe stayed in poverty long after the end of the British East India Company
I wasn’t clear in my comment: note that the Dutch India Company was a precursor to the EIC and there was a lot of competition between the two( among other powers). The concept of LLC was mainly invented there. The book covers these points extensively and contrast the development in Southern Europe.
making absurd statements that generalizes countries based on another country's company deserves confrontation. What does Sweden have to do with a British company? seems very culturally insensitive
Sweden did have an east India company. The Chalmers university was funded by a English man called Chalmers who made his fortune in the East India company.
As with mass migration to the US, British colonization did enrich much of western/Northern Europe and opened up a world of opportunities.
Slavery still exists today. It's everywhere we just choose to ignore it for the small chance that one of us will become insanely wealthy. It's just greed. Everyone is capable of it in any time.
