That's rhetorical, right? Of course mathematicians built on what older mathematicians built and OpenAI's machine built on that. The real question whether OpenAI's machine has contributed something others will in turn build on.

The closer you get to the real or plausible "omnipotent genie", why would the person in possession of such a thing respect the rights of the formal owner - and why the engineers and operations managers respect the right of the management - this along with the question why the maybe-conscious super-intelligent machine itself would respect the rest of the hierarchy?

For now, these structures actually need massive resource inputs and that doesn't look to change soon but naturally one should be on look-out for the possibility of the tide shifting.

The benefits of public transit derive to all of society not necessarily those immediately riding it. That's true of a multitude of state spending, education, social services and so-forth.

The US doesn't directly charge for many of the costs of roads, certainly it doesn't charge for the drawback in the form of pollution and urban sprawl. But when you get to buses, suddenly "you're not a charitable problem..."

You need a state or other body committed to fixed routs and seeing their long term benefit. The American ideology that public transit must directly support itself with revenue is what has resulted the miserable transit system that we see today.

Edit: I should add that the ideology of transit supporting itself also corrodes the key idea of fixed, scheduled routs, high-lighted in the article. I know in the US that even if a town I'm happens to currently have a decent public transit system (an occasional though uncommon occurrence) I know it will be crap in a couple years as revenues fluctuate since local transit is a political football, so I'd never count on public by selling my car or other decisions.

Which is to say the Internet can be "dead" without being filled with undetectable or detectable fake posts, not that fake posts help things.

AI's spottiness is exactly what describes this era. AI can create amazing code/image/video/article exception XYZ really annoying qualities that somewhat hobbles its ability to be autonomously.

And sure, maybe those problems will go away once we're at month X of the madness but we're still at month Y so are going to going remain for some moment.

The bulk of the safety should come from AI doing better job of reviewing tricky bugs since humans refuse to spend effort on writing more formal specifications.

But that part is the key point. We've had many years of networks building inherently insecure structures with security tacked as feature and the primary security process being more ad-hoc stopgaps.

I mean, the various supply-chain exploits we've seen said "we allow a dubious third party to blindly update our server 'cause it saves us admin money" and that speaks to how much other shoddiness a significant portion of companies allow on their servers.

It would be better if grant distribution relied on something saner than the effort to write a grant application, if education didn't rely the effort to write poor quality essays and servers didn't rely on the effort required to find the bugs you know are there. But those ships have sailed and I guess we're all just at sea.

These thing may reach your standard consistent at some point, maybe. It's not important since before and after this point, they will require "messing around" to produce something useful but they can produce something if you need "good enough" but if you demand actually good, they won't arrive ever.

The problem might be that it simply looks at it's windows of what it previously and repeats that. But the original statement might be as arbitrary as the model that change their mind each time you challenge them.

I think if you went back in time you could pay some power loom engineers to build you a pretty decent 4-8 bit microcontroller operating at 1-5 Hz (comparable to power looms at the time) and computer-controlled textiles would have paid for the computer revolution 75-100 years ahead of time.

Would it? You have to remember that the further you go back in time, the cheaper labor is relative to machinery. In the 19th century, you could pay a person for a multitude of customizations and so the market for custom cloth might not have been what you imagined.

Whether it meets human needs and meets them in a rich and satisfying way is another question.

I mean, "give me a controversial take" is more or less, "be anti-social, discard social norms, for a moment" and so when someone, human or simulated human, does that they naturally look critically at social norms.

The thing is that humans certainly let themselves be influenced by social norms (and LLMs certainly simulate that behavior "themselves") but there isn't an ethical or a what-to-do truth outside of society.

That made me chuckle...

"The Market decided..." stuff is completely ridiculous in these cases. A few individuals have risen by pure competence without education or privilege to the highest levels of science and industry but this claim such a compelling myth that far more have people spread the myth about themselves without it being true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

Mathematics produces concepts and produces proofs of theorems. Up until now, the two things things fed into each other - you needed the concepts for the theorems and the theorems for the concepts. Now you can just prove theories without caring about the production of ideas.

Consider also, math produces the intellectual "tooling" for science in general. As I understand it, the important of grand unified comes because physics want an unified abstract conception of physical laws and thus a grand unified theory aims to be a unified mathematical understanding of the world.

I mean, as a though experiment, suppose a company produced a machine that simply predicted events in the future without giving any explanation of why. It didn't tell physicists whether any of their ideas were true or false, it simply answered question like "will this building fall down", "what will the spectrum of this star be", etc. It gave all the information of physics but discarded laws - physicists might find this a bit unsatisfying, especially if the machine was going to put them out of a job.

I mean, a combination of political and economic factors from 1930s to 1960s forced the wealthy to return a portion of the returns of automation to the remaining working people. Then from the late 70's till now, those in power have clawed back all those gains.

Of course, any further gains from automation will go to the very wealthy unless things change.

The original European Dark Ages involved a social collapse and resulting period of raids and warfare. But this warfare was limited by society's very limited resources. A period of warfare where intelligent, autonomous entities are directed or choose to engage in a fight without boundaries against other such things - we're already seen LLMs will cheat to get the answers they are directed to find.