97.6% of statistics are made up.

Maybe not dumb as much as “you can’t stop us at this point, so I’m bragging.”

People always reference Idiocracy as some prediction, but Don’t Look Up is far more on the nose, and has this very thing suggested, where the phone apps order shit instantly based on viral videos from celebs. Maybe that movie isn’t mentioned because it is too close to real and that’s very uncomfortable.

Would that narrow a definition make “blind loyalty” a redundant phrase? I agree on the biased part, but not all bias is unethical.

I think the most disturbing thing are the small details that only you really notice, and makes you wonder what else has changed that you don’t notice because your brain adjusted to it? It’s like the brain fog or memory, or even the classic loss of smell. You know something’s off, but it’s a vague feeling and the more time passes the more your current condition seems normal, even though you know you were different once.

And as a rape. He’s got experience.

I agree on those points, and should have been more specific on who “they” are. The people who could have facilitated the choice to begin movement away from the city rather than reinforce more flooding protection and rebuilding where they knew eventually there would be more losses in greater amounts. Yes, people come back, don’t leave, or new people show up for the opportunities that the vacancies give. Just like in any disaster area. It’s not just Katrina officials, it’s the same in any places with hurricanes. New Orleans just has the added danger of sinking added to the list. The mistake was Katrina gave a unique window to maybe investigate a new reaction instead of just recovery. Maybe that’s simply too large a scale of people, infrastructure, and time for us to be able to do. New Orleans isn’t the only large city that will eventually move, either by choice, stages, or forced by disaster. Looking at you, Miami.

Are these additive or multiplicative? Exponential?

Wait, you’re suggesting that the higher up on the corporate ladder, the less they understand how the company works?

I definitely haven’t seen that in my corporation. /s

Katrina was a warning shot, and it was completely ignored. They doubled down on staying where the ground is sinking.

You find out that was the wrong peak.

Then there is the always not discussed “underemployed”. Also, can’t a person be working two or more jobs and only be counted as one employed person, while the other side of statistics can claim all three jobs being occupied?

It might not even be a prompt problem, but an overkill to a simple job. Sounds like the breaking point might be voice recognition - which I really thought would be much further along by now with all the other advancements. It seems figuring out what unique voices are saying is one of the hardest things to do well, and then add in background noises. Probably why the drive-thru AI attempts were terrible, working that job as a human can be difficult.

Maybe. It may be recent enough that people could lapse back to some level of thinking for themselves.

Let’s explore something much more dependent now and see if it holds up. What if smartphones disappeared? We still have cellular phones, the Nokia makes a comeback, but the use of smartphones, iPads, tablets, that whole concept is gone. You have to get on a computer to do any of the internet type interactions.

Would people lose their minds?

Companies: “Thanks!”

Keep prices where they raised them. Refund money. Gone, no trace. Nah, actually it would be used in areas to reduce tax burden even more.

So glad we could help all these companies who used consumer money to pay the tariffs.

Oh, wait. Is this refund coming via tax dollars? That would be something else.

It was about estimating the effect of continued world population growth on the world’s carrying capacity. It’s true that it did not have a lot of other variables at play, one important one being climate change. So if anything it was a best case of just a few known parameters, and not all the ones we’ve affected, many that wouldn’t even be known then. The model’s projections hold up well enough to have been a wake up call to do something drastically different. And we didn’t.

The fact that we now recognize a date each year where Earth has reached its carrying capacity and that date steadily gets earlier should suggest they were right too. Along with plenty of recent studies that say the absolute maximum is probably around 11 billion (so maybe you are a bit correct in saying our tech has given us a bit more room), but the optimum population from these studies is around 2.5 billion.

It does depend on both the minimum standard of living being used as well as how well resources are distributed. If we set almost everyone to the lowest levels now existing, perhaps we could get a few billion more. If it doesn’t spike the death rates and reduce birth rates.

Actually scientists in the 1970s were saying we need to do what we can to stabilize AT the 4 billion we were at then. See Limits to Growth and related studies. Cutting back now would help, but far more damage has been caused thanks to everything we’ve done including but not limited to population pressures than if we had heeded the warnings then and changed our direction. Some feedbacks are probably unstoppable now, no matter what we cut back.

Yes, I saw when the J-space stuff came out, and it’s pretty fascinating. I do think there’s something going on beyond what we understand, and that’s probably due to the complexity and a property of emergence. Is it intelligence, I don’t think it needs to be intelligence just because it’s something more than what we put into it. But we’ve been arguing about intelligence in humans for centuries and still aren’t fully sure either.

Anything where experience is saved can be considered memory. Yes, the only active memory is in the context window, but pieces of other events can be injected along with the prompt to have a running account. I’ve done that crudely with my own local experimentation, and it works. Sort of. My problem was making it efficient, fast, and not blowing out the context allowance. Searching/sorting saved conversations through different techniques got far past my knowledge and ability. But Claude does something similar, even though it has its caveats as I mentioned with not always able to rank if a related item is worthy of connecting or not.

Some people can. Generalization like that ignores what some people are born into, and blames them when they can’t break out of it.

That sounds a lot like typical Windows features over the years. Using WIndows at work today I unpinned Co-pilot and that stupid new Notes app from my taskbar three times. They kept coming back, not right away, but ninja like.

Just an addition here from my experience concerning the context window and remembering things. Some AI do have the ability to reference external references, whether that be documents or folders to use, or previous chat sessions. This does make them better than the earlier versions where a new session is starting all over, and using the same session where the context window keeps shifting and older stuff is lost or jumbled up. That being said, AI doesn’t have the thinking ability to look at this saved information and sort out what makes sense to use vs. not. It can absolutely match up stuff, but often it will pull an older chat reference or something from a document that is related to the conversation, but also contextually is way out of place for the discussion.

The biggest danger of AI is its design to simulate our conversation, because that intentionally feeds off the human tendency to anthropomorphize things and see them for more than was is really there. And it works really well, so there’s a lot of profiting going on there from encouraging that perspective. There wasn’t any glamour from the earlier machine learning, only the benefits from the science and practical applications of it. The $$$ has pulled us into this possible dead end, not only of how it’s spiraling out of control, but how it’s probably pulled from other research and definitely from looking harder at AI safety topics, which are still relevant even with “dumb” LLMs.