mlyle

I think I'm not speaking of the technology itself but the actual ways it's integrated into society. E.g. what is considered socially acceptable, what is given legal rights of passage on a sidewalk, or how we choose to build society/culture around technical implements.

And I agree it's not immediately obvious, but thinking a little more about second order effects before making a long term durable choice makes sense.

Tech's recent overall track record on impacts to quality of life is not great. And there's a lot of possible ways we can use advances that have different benefits and costs. Falling into them for the long term purely by accident isn't always avoidable, but it doesn't seem desirable.

i.e. it makes sense for society to make a conscious choice about how to trade off different interests for road users and sidewalk users, and to be willing to revise that choice based on experience rather than being stuck with inertia (while avoiding excessive churn and unpredictability).

I think you're not really hearing my point. I'm not speaking about evaluating things just on the aspect of eliminating jobs.

I am saying that I would hate to automate away most joy or most things people find purposeful, even if it increases purpose or joy for some people.

We've already given up a lot of our social fabric recently with tech. I think it makes sense to be conscious and careful to not make it much worse.

It's my guess that delivery bots are a net add to well being.

I think we should automate more of deliveries.

But I think we should also make deliberate choices to keep humans and human meaning in many things, even if they are less "efficient" by some chosen metric.

Automation and mechanization is desirable to the point that it serves core human wishes and desires-- and through some kind of global/social metric, not that it serve individual humans at the expense of everyone else.

Just because something must yield to you doesn't mean you have an infinite right to obstruct it.

It's quite possible (and likely!) for you simultaneously to have an obligation to yield and the other party to have an obligation to not block.

The benchmark announced in the article seems to be around weird edge cases (which are often important) and whether it can prompt the person with relevant information rather than just listening to what they want to do.

Top tier tax professionals can do pretty well on this benchmark (better than agents) but won't hit 100%.

The kind of people spending time preparing oodles of returns would not do very well on this metric, though (especially midway through that pile of returns, as opposed to "think carefully about this trick question").

Just make it so that the companies that employ the most per market cap are filled, so we can see how empty the rest are.

Yes-- my takes on it in the case of a delivery robot are elsewhere in thread. This is specifically addressing a person who said:

> 1A says she is free to protest human workers by getting in their way in public.

And the answer is, no, the first amendment does not let you block people and prevent them from proceeding in their work or other activities.

So that's existed for a long time in the form of OpenFlexure. The microscope is a pretty easy / fun build.

Standing in the sidewalk, and refusing to get out of the way of another sidewalk user.

I mean, I could block a wheelchair user by standing in a cut-out, too. Is that OK?

Is it not better for takeout food to be traveling this way than by car?

The article is talking about tumor sequencing:

> You may need to push for comprehensive genetic testing. Some doctors were weird about this and didn’t order it promptly, even after telling me they would. My surgeon, who told me he’d get it done, eventually referred me out to an oncologist. This caused a multi-month delay to getting genetic results, since the first results were done on the surgery tumor, not the biopsy tumor.

The quote further upthread lost the last bit, which is pretty clearly talking about tumor sequencing.

> Strictly speaking, BRCA is a genetic test for cancer (even if it's only a "risk factor"), and it's done on the regular genome, not on the cancer.

Yes... that's why I clarified that I believed we/the article were talking about tumor testing and not BRCA (which is mentioned in the second link I gave).