haroldp

I have become a huge fan of AudioBooks lately, but how in the /hell/ do you listen to Infinite Jest?? With the end notes? With end notes of end notes? With whole chapters hidden in an end note? It was challenging enough on paper. That would do my nut in.

Yeah, sure but... if it's real fast, lets connect SSDs to it and have real fast swap. Whatever it is will be limited to the bus speed. And that's gonna be silly compared to RAM speed.

> Yeah but DDR3 was faster then and still is now

USB would be the limiter for both.

> Sometimes you just need the space and not the speed.

Your computer already supports that. It's called "swap".

In one of TR's books (perhaps Rough Riders?), he mentions watching Lincoln's funeral precession as a child, from his family home in New York.

And, “They have been carried away by monkeys!”

I was more thinking I could add it to my Asterisk server to honey-pot the spam callers into an infinite time waster cycle.

> If AI evolves at the same pace, and replacing labor (robots) and services (AI), I am not sure that human would turn around? How do you think we can turn things around ?

I see no indication that we are close to building a GAI, or that we are close to solving the hallucination problems that severely limit the utility LLMs without human managers. We don't understand how our own intelligence works, or even an ant's. The notion the we are close to replicating or exceeding it seems far fetched to me.

> What activity would require human involvement ?

Nurses, bar tenders, barbers... Hasn't anyone read Player Piano? :)

> How do you think we can turn things around ?

I dunno. Did anyone know how dangerous fire or deadly spear points world work out?

I get what you are saying, and I don't think you are wrong, but it has been like 100 monumental changes in 200 years. The demographic shift of the industrial revolution was particularly painful, to be sure. But we seem to be pretty good at coping with them, overall.

And again, I remain skeptical that general artificial intelligence is actually that close at hand.

> I was talking about the issues with comparing it to singular inventions like the cotton gin or jacquard loom

Ok, appreciate the clarification. But in that time frame there have been a number of really tectonic inventions that changed pretty much everything: steam power, ICE power, electrification, refrigeration, computing and the internet, just to name a few off the top of my head.

> There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions)

Same. I am both optimistic about human ability to find new jobs, and skeptical that "AI" is going to make that necessary in the new future.

There is likewise no indication that it won't. And if I am looking at a pattern where a thousand careers were destroyed by the advance of technology and were swiftly replaced by tens of thousands of new ones, it is not unreasonable to suspect that the pattern is likely repeat.

My job title did not even exist when I was born.

> Also that's a singular industry

200 years ago, 95% of the workers in my country worked in subsistence farming. Today, only 2% are farmers. The whole spectrum of labor has turned upside down and upside down again, in that time. It has certainly not been a singular industry.

Now that jacquard loom has left so many textile workers unemployed?