cm2187

When I was at university, a student caught cheating was cause for being expelled.

I am recruiting college kids right now, impeccable pedigrees, elite universities. Our recruitment process involves the kids recording videos where they answer questions as a pre-screening. They are explicitly told not to use AI for the exercise. I have the Claude and ChatGPT answer to those questions on my screen while I review their responses. 40% read it pretty much verbatim. The paradox is I don't even care whether they knew the answer or not, but to me it's an integrity test.

Where are the successful alternatives?

You could have said the same thing 20 years ago about wikipedia and the internet in general. A kid in a poor school on the other side of the world has access to the same wealth of knowledge than a student in a Ivy League university. But that hasn't made universities useless, and very few of those kids in poor schools (that wouldn't have gone to a elite university) picked up the opportunity.

If anything, AI in education I think will lead to a divergence. Mediocre students will be even more mediocre as they will use it as a substitute for learning, with AI doing their homework. Good students will leverage it to learn and understand things even faster.

There are also tax considerations, even movies get shot away from Hollywood.

Fair comparison. Texas just needs to flood the valleys of its famous mountain chain and collect the melted snow with dams to match Sweden's 40% hydro electricity production.

AI will make developers infinitely more productive. You will need one or two guys to do the work that requires a whole team before. That means cheaper software.

The demand for software is huge, the number of manual processes that can be automated in any organisation, small or large, is humongous. The Jevons paradox will play at full, as software gets cheaper we will consume even more of it, and I think there will paradoxically be more software developer jobs.

But does that mean that UTC time will diverge from common time zones by more than a fixed number of hours (and minutes for a few esoteric time zones)?

Weekend hobby!

I also wonder what this guy was paid by those AI labs...

Like a selfie of me at the conference?

I was at a conference last year where one of the speakers was from National Grid. Not only these morons had in mind that electricity demand should decrease (even before AI, it was obvious that demand would go up as we are moving away from fossil fuel with both heating and transportation going electric).

But their great idea to deal with the shortage is intermittent availability of power. You won't be able to wash your clothes when you feel like, you will have to adapt to when there is spare power, like in developing countries. This is just a regression in technological progress.

I saw the same messaging in France where the current president started his mandate with a grand programme to switch off a third of nuclear power plants.

If anyone thinks adults are in charge, let alone engineers, you are greatly mistaken.

Age is an important factor. Don't underestimate that after 40-50, few people like to change their habits and learn new things (and for some that comes even earlier). Doesn't mean they aren't smart, I have seen that first hand with relatives: engineers, medical doctors, one even running for a nobel price at one point. But computers and the internet came too late for them, they either ignored them, or used them barely understanding how they work, even though they can technically understand the physics and logic of every component they are made of. You don't teach new tricks to an old dog.

AI is going to massively transform how most professions work. It will take longer than I think most people expect (I'd say 5-10 years), but there will be an unrecognisable before vs after, like with the appearance of personal computers.

Actually it looks like that changed recently, it seems to be able to render now

Seconded. OpenSCAD is a bit tedious to use from scratch but claude is pretty decent at generating the code. It can't render the script though so it tends to make silly mistakes