thenoblesunfish

We are still going to be interested in teaching people to think. We are still going to be intrinsically interested in mathematics. Many (most?) of us here have gotten immense pleasure and growth out of solving a problem, or understanding something well enough to explain. Even though the answer was known or someone else could explain it better. AI doesn't change that, really. So we have to find new ways to assess students. It doesn't mean anything fundamental about education. I don't even think it's such a fundamental challenge to math. Most of these things we are trying to prove are, to an engineer, either irrelevant or known empirically already. People want and need to try to understand. They will continue to.

I am not really comforted by this argument against the singularity. It seems to rely on the fact that the evolving intelligence doesn't have access to the real world. Okay, but I wasn't really worried about the singularity inside a datacenter. I was worried about it once we wired up all the robots and sensors and power switches to AI controlled systems. We are still doing that, right?

It seems like an assumption here is that any language will be equally performant at runtime, for a given number of tokens burned to produce the code. I have never used any functional language for anything real (except maybe Mathematica). Is that true?

Cool! As the other comments suggest, I could think of plenty of ways you could do this, probably much more efficiently than having a GUI, once you figured it out. But I would still like something that felt like less software engineering or data science and more "this is how I would do it manually in Audacity, do this for me automatically on a batch of files"

Task I want but have been too lazy - I have a favorite podcast, that I often fall asleep to. Certain parts with music etc. wake me up. I'd like to chop those parts out as automatically as possible. Can I do that here by e.g. giving some example edits to a few files, and asking to remove similar stuff from other files?

You know what's are great goverment run (or supported with money) dating programs? University. Erasmus. Things like Americorps. Even if the literal match is on the apps I feel like those sorts of environments are great.

It's the same problem as when a journalist or nonfiction author writes a thoughtful, nuanced piece of work, and some editor slaps a catchy title and subtitle on.

They are rich. But then again plenty of people have multi-million dollar homes. I am sure there are some in your city. In some cities a million dollar home is becoming a normal price. Many people have hobbies and pastimes that they spend many tens of thousands of dollars on. Think about boats. Or how much some hotels and resorts, full of people, cost. These people are, again, rich, but so are millions of other people who don't tell you the details on the internet.

I hope that this will expose the true value of education. It's a new scale perhaps, but not a new problem. We sit in classrooms even though books and YouTube videos make available the teachings of far more illustrious teachers than the one in front of us. We watch things written out agonizingly slowly in chalk. We learned to do algebra and calculus even though we had our TI-86s and Mathematica. We learn in Haskell and Scheme even though those are rarely used later. We write toy compilers and write essays and repeat experiments with known outcomes in labs. We do it to learn how to think, how to build. We just have to be even more deliberate about it now.

My point is that nihilism and egotism are coming for you with or without children.

(And I, like many more than will admit, didn't want children, but my partner did)

Yup. Several of these people I know left it too late and went through a lot with IVF or adoption of just not having the kids they wanted.

True - ultimately I will have to, as that is the only escape from suffering.

You are probably right! But you might be assuming I wanted kids before I realized it wasn't all I'd hoped. I never really wanted them but said ok to my partner. I figured that most of the nicer and more fulfilled older people I knew had kids. Then again now I wonder if that's because there are plenty of older fulfilled people without kids off doing their thing and not interacting with the likes of me.

One is 6 years, the other is 6 months.

Once you have kids you quickly discover that you get forced into it. You have to engage. If you don't, they scream. They get in trouble at school. They are unhappy and it breaks your heart. Once you have no choice but to do something, you will find it's better to find meaning in it. Meaning is ultimately something you create for yourself.