On engaging with deniers, he realized that denial was the only rational choice those people had. Climate change meant that their way of life, their livelihoods, history, homes, family and more, was gone.

Disbelief was a way to have control over the impossible.

Journalism has been decimated with advertising dollars moving to Google and Meta. This creates 2 camps of journalists, one who attempt to report as if the old standards hold, and others who are the media wings of political parties.

Educating people is always Good. However, no education will empower individuals enough to be competitive with people whose job it is to keep them ignorant.

The rich will move away, and the people left behind will be the ones who don’t have the capacity to make any other choice.

The entire issue of incentives to consume being a reason to blame consumers, is obviated when there are entire industries that have spent significant amounts of money and capital to ensure that voters cannot come to a consensus.

The science on global warming was clear eons ago. The true revolution has been in scientists learning how weak facts are when going up against media machines.

In a nutshell, you have an issue where part of the information economy/market is captured. To the point that agenda can get set by theories or podcasts that have little truck with reality. Any checks or reviews of the claims, simply do not get surfaced within that ecosystem. This creates a more efficient system for political messaging.

You cannot have an effective democratic system when your consensus building mechanisms have been (intentionally) compromised and weakened.

As long as I have paid attention to American politics, it’s always had a major undercurrent of “all government bad”, with a subtext of “this thing I know about is an exception”.

The best I can say is that genAI is a self reported a 20% efficiency boost, and for a very (very) small group of people, it’s maybe a 2-3x boost. (And if you are at a frontier lab, you go fly into the big bucket of exceptions)

At this point, for most use cases, AI productivity is either the equivalent of giving people 3D printers, and seeing little benefit, or signing up for an outsourcing service, just without the development of human capital anywhere.

I suspect this is surprising to folk because they aren’t the ones busy figuring out how to use LLMs for illegal acts.

In general, HN users focus on making stuff, and not the safety side of things, or the scale of harms being enabled via LLMs and generative AI.

If you are on the safety side of things the ratio of misuse to fair use is inverted and everything is at scale.

Transparency won for now, but OpenAI will also have to contend with the long tail of harms LLMs enable, and that’s going to conflict with letting customers have all the features of frontier models.

Either way, we do not want a repeat of that.

Plus too big to fail as a US malaise, that then toppled the rest of the economy.

The EU is taking steps to prevent that, so this is laudable.

LLMs are, for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of outsourced workers.

Google created a summary, not just sharing search results.

Google is responsible for the output it created and then published.

If they had only surfaced search results, then they would not be liable for what other people generated.

Google’s scale does not protect it from this liability.

Let someone else sacrifice the safety of their populace.

Heck - self driving is the fastest way to authoritarian government in practice. I’m surprised more people on HN haven’t cottoned on to that fact.

A self driving system will naturally build networks to share road state.

This network will eventually shift over to the government having the ability to manage how traffic should move during emergencies.

And at that point the government can easily decide where your car should go.

The inevitability of this outcome is blindingly obvious.

It’s highly beneficial to let other nations experiment and simply be followers.

Your formulation isn't wrong, however it covers only one scenario. What happens when the locality cannot afford the cost to attract people to their region?

This is not even theoretical, its what happened to the rest of the world, as their best and brightest immigrated to America or Europe.

You could say "them's the breaks" and I would understand. However people vote for solutions, so how would you cover the worst case scenario?

You are asking all the later gen engineers at major tech firms to blow their salaries up.

There used to be an ethos to do the right thing, however the people who came to tech later aren’t driven by the same values. They (understandably) would like to get paid rather than go on a crusade.

Incentives make the world go round.

AFAIK, Russia’s Internet Research Agency was the first organization to weaponize social media and the internet.

Information sharing networks with humans in it can only track so many things, or spend limited time on consumption. The more stuff on the network, the harder it is for things to be seen. The stuff that gets seen is content that is evolved to gain attention, or is resourced to gain attention.

This is as inevitable as sunrise.