gamacodre

With those examples though, how would we know ahead of time that they "shouldn't be explored?" They sure looked interesting and maybe even potentially beneficial a couple decades ago.

Now, of course, we know those algorithms warp regular users (and by extension societies). Or... maybe they don't? Some research has suggested that just putting this many people in direct communication with each other is the root cause of the problems we see. There could be other ways to fix those without shutting down the internet. How would we know without more exploration?

Yeah, I saw that link and had a few thoughts immediately collide in my head:

    - Wait, WTF? Really??
    - But but but it's a *chatbot*, not an authority 
    - We're doomed

As an anecdatum, one of my gen Y embedded engineers is using a little stick phone that can barely text, and avoids all social media except Discord (assuming that counts). One of the other younger folk in a different department has something similar. And we've only got around 100 people in this building.

> they convey the meaning and humor much better than the americanized voiceover

I'm glad this isn't just me. I occasionally watch anime and the English dubs are seemingly universally terrible compared to the originals. Subtitles are annoying but nothing like listening to someone mumble their way though a script.

I could be wrong, but my impression is that GDP is usually thought of (by non-economists) as a trailing index that has some sustainability baked in, by inertia if nothing else. Military spending would normally track reasonably well with that. What Russia is doing... doesn't sound sustainable.

> Instead, they should let people structure their feeds by news organization

Doesn't this immediately turn into the kind of problem TFA is bemoaning? Once a news organization gets traction (opt-ins in this case) on a platform, they'll inevitably start selling space in their feed to one or more crappy aggregators. To the C-suite this looks like free money, since somehow they always manage to convince themselves that the brand damage from it will be minimal or at least manageable.

It sucks.

I expect we'll experiment with that as soon as we get a man and a woman imperfectly supervised in a low-gravity environment for 9+ months.

Vertical integration in this space sounds like a really bad thing to me ("bad" in the sense of "likely to lead to the creation of products that erode human dignity in new and interesting ways").

We can surely build more efficient and capable hardware than our current evolved wetware, since all of the details of how to build it are generally externalized. If the chips had to fab themselves, it would be a different story.

The software is a different story. Sure, the brain does all sorts of things that aren't necessary for $TASK, but we aren't necessarily going to be able to correctly identify which are which. Is your inner experience of your arm motion needed to fully parse the meaning in "raise a glass to toast the bride and groom", or respond meaningfully to someone who says that? Or perhaps it doesn't really matter - language is already a decent tool for bridging disjoint creature realities, maybe it'll stretch to synthetic consciousness too.

I think the problem here would be figuring out how much of the brain's power draw to attribute to the multiplication. A brain is more akin to a motherboard than a single CPU, with all kinds of I/O, internal regulation, and other ancillary stuff going on all the time.

I think this is still just a difference in how the output is used. You're presenting text generation as factual and image generation as artistic. It could be reversed - no one will care if a fantasy story gets some in-milieu "facts" wrong, but a blueprint or architectural reference coming out of Stable Diffusion could ruin someone's year.

Geez, these companies just keep getting passed around and around. I was working for Time Warner Interactive (aka Tengen, the consumer arm of Atari Games) when Midway bought them in '96.

Those are more difficult, but we're in the process of killing them off too.

As usual, without much regard to consequences.

Couple of thoughts:

You are assuming that a pure function has access to some source of randomness. I think that's a bit less than pure unless a source of randomness is one of the inputs. Doesn't change your point at all, but it distracted me from what you were saying.

Speaking as someone who has occasionally invented new things, I think you underestimate the variety of outputs that can arise from a lifetime of accumulated experiential cruft and a situational fitting function (e.g. "we need a working teleporter to stay competitive"), without bringing in randomness at all.