OK, AI could be used transparently to fill out forms and write down what the doctor talks to into a microphone, assist in the health staff with some tasks in the form of interchangeable tools. What we don't need is another layer of blackbox magic making everything even more murky.
"excited about this partnership, which we believe will unlock even greater focus for our team and customers as we continue to strive towards our global mission to be the most innovative and trusted video platform in the world for businesses"
There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.
Maybe "unlock even greater focus for our team" means to unlock their focus to find other jobs but it's quite perverse. I agree with the OP, that "Words no longer appear to mean things"
> There's no hint of laying off all the staff here though. Now it sounds like they "were" excited to lay off people to maximize profits.
What? Just because a statement says "we're excited to do X" doesn't mean they're not also planning to do A, B, C, Y and Z.
I'm not defending the layoff. It just seems weird to interpret the statement itself as somehow being misleading about a subject that it literally didn't mention.
There's letter and spirit of the word. You're arguing against the spirit of the word because the letter of the word is technically impossible to prove as a lie right now.
We call this lawful evil logic for a reason. It's how you empower stuff like Jim Crow laws (or the current US administration in general. "Well he isn't going to actually invade a NATO ally, he's just saying he wants Greenland. I want a Ferrari!")
That's an insightful question about Greenland, which Denmark desperately wanted to retain in the 1950s to the extent of unilaterally making it a 'part' of the Kingdom without consulting the Greenlanders.
Ironically it was only Belgium that spoke out, based on its own colonial dirty laundry.
It’s a bit like the shift from film to digital in one very specific sense: the marginal cost of trying again virtually collapsed. When every take cost money and setup time, creators pre-optimized in their head and often never explored half their ideas. When takes became cheap, creators externalized thought as they could try, look, adjust, and discover things they wouldn’t otherwise. Creators could wander more. They could afford to be wrong because of not constantly paying a tax for being clumsy or incomplete, they became more willing to follow a hunch and that's valuable space to explore.
Digital didn’t magically improve art, but it let many more creatives enter the loop of idea, attempt and feedback. LLMs feel similar: they don’t give you better ideas by themselves, but they remove the friction that used to stop you from even finding out whether an idea was viable. That changes how often you learn, and how far you’re willing to push a thought before abandoning it. I've done so many little projects myself that I would have never had time for and feel that I learned something from it, of course not as much if I had all the pre LLM friction, but it should still count for something as I would never have attempted them without this assistance.
Edit: However, the danger isn’t that we’ll have too many ideas, it’s that we’ll confuse movement with progress.
When friction is high, we’re forced to pre-compress thought, to rehearse internally, to notice contradictions before externalizing them. That marination phase (when doing something slowly) does real work: it builds mental models, sharpens the taste and teaches us what not to bother to try. Some of that vanishes when the loop becomes cheap enough that we can just spray possibilities into the world and see what sticks.
A low-friction loop biases us toward breadth over depth. We can skim the surface of many directions without ever sitting long enough in one to feel its resistance. The skill of holding a half formed idea in our head, letting it collide with other thoughts, noticing where it feels weak, atrophies if every vague notion immediately becomes a prompt.
There’s also a cultural effect. When everyone can produce endlessly, the environment fills with half-baked or shallow artifacts. Discovery becomes harder as signal to noise drops.
And on a personal level, it can hollow out satisfaction. Friction used to give weight to output. Finishing something meant you had wrestled with it. If every idea can be instantiated in seconds, each one feels disposable. You can end up in a state of perpetual prototyping, never committing long enough for anything to become yours.
So the slippery slope is not laziness, it is shallowness, not that people won’t think, but people won’t sit with thoughts. The challenge here is to preserve deliberate slowness inside a world that no longer requires it: to use the cheap loop for exploration, while still cultivating the ability to pause, compress, and choose what deserves to exist at all.
It's not just willingness, as the OP mentions, being forced out of the house lots of things happen, some of them social. Having everything in the house, from work to shopping to entertainment is a convenience that could even save you some money, but it has a cost down the line.
Yeah I'm very willing to socialize and actually do far more than pretty much anyone I know, even those without kids (but maybe not as much as a 25 year old just getting started in the world and living in SF like I once was). I'm lucky in that regard I guess.
LLMs lack agency in the sense that they have no goals, preferences, or commitments. Humans do, even when our ideas are derivative. We can decide that this is the right choice and move forward, subjectively and imperfectly. That capacity to commit under uncertainty is part of what agency actually is.
There's a certain large European country with plenty of resources that is pretty famous for scaling its tank production just a couple years before the US did.
It is possible that neither are more manipuled tough it's impossible to tell. What seems clear from your example above is that both are manipulated, just in different ways and with google's incentive. It is understandable that countries came to the conclusion that this is posing a threat to their national security.
"Manipulated" has strong negative connotations, but it could just mean that the results are chosen and controlled by the search engine. In which case, it's a meaningless statement. The entire purpose of any search engine is to choose results for queries.
Or it can mean the results were altered from some ideal baseline algorithm that we consider unmanipulated. The only obvious candidate for this baseline would be the search engine's regular algorithm. But if you're saying that's not the baseline, then it's unclear what you consider to be the true baseline and therefore unclear what "manipulated" means.
I agree that countries may consider search engines, social media, or anything else that can affect flow of information to be a national security threat.
And what, exactly, is the national security threat here? If Google is manipulating results to favor its advertisers or the political positions of its owners, that's what all publishers do, and have always done and nobody ever called it a national security threat. The "national security threat" here seems to be that they are showing people content that the government doesn't want them to see.
