You’re right that LLMs specifically have no guarantees about accuracy nor veracity of the text they generate but I posit that that’s the same with people, especially when filtered through the socialization process. The difference is in the kind of errors machines make compared to ones that humans make.

It’s frustrating we’re using anthropomorphic concepts like hallucinations when describing LLM behaviors when the fundamental units of computation and thus failures of computation are so different at every level.

I sincerely hope that the game doesn’t become prophetic in the manner Idiocracy has.

For me as someone that grew up in the region the people, nature, and weather are sufficient enough for me. Having lived in several other large metro areas in the US I’ve pretty much felt like an alien species even though it’s not like I don’t feel welcome. In the PNW being weird and unconventional is kind of celebrated regardless of socioeconomic castes historically, but that’s certainly eroded as the problems of hyper growth have strained everyone.

It’s a pity that creating anything of value takes at least an order of magnitude more effort than to destroy something, but I suppose this is why we’re funding back-ups and archives of all this data out there.

But essentially creating self-fulfilling prophecies or moving goalposts is one of the oldest tricks in the book by dishonest folks of any ideological alignment. In an alternate universe where socialism / central planning is the default ideology if we wanted to make as unfair of a comparison demonizing private sector we'd have asked half of Silicon Valley companies to forego VC funding, not allow them to do M&A, demand that they be able to serve the general public for even the most obscure of problems, and so forth. That sets them up for failure out of the gate by measuring them against the criteria of the status quo and eliminates any of their advantages over a centralized planning system. And in fact, a large part of these ridiculous restrictions is exactly why NGOs are structured to fail to make much progress on any of the important societal problems they work on.

Almost all the most pressing problems for the human species seem to be Wicked Problem classes and it's part of why I don't have a lot of expectation that any of them will be solved even _if_ catastrophic events like constant war and mass deaths happen. I also have doubts that whoever survives any of these kinds of events would be more genetically predisposed to solving these problems in the future either.

But hey, it's not like the US is a democracy exactly given that public opinion generally doesn't translate into policy changes anymore.