We need to plan for the world we're most likely to be living in in addition to the one we want to live in but probably won't. The latter energy isn't entirely wasted, but it's also not as essential to our immediate survival.

The next best thing to do is talk with people in the scene and find out what they consider a trustworthy source. Any single person trying to offer you pills is a potential scammer or worse, you need to verify from other sources whether they're legit.

There's probably a better than 50% chance you'll get something close enough to what you want regardless, because incentives are aligned with everyone having a good time. But just like everywhere else, bad actors will always exist.

They are not the same.

I agree fully with you on the potential for energy waste. We always do that, though, with nearly everything. How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen? The question is how much value people feel they're getting. People are having a whole lot more feelings about AI than they ever could about cryptocurrencies, and that train aint stoppin'.

False beliefs are not a neutral thing to ignore. The way people react to them has strikingly tangible consequences for the rest of us.

A frightening number of people already believe all kinds of wildly irrational things about AI, and I don't see any way this doesn't become an increasingly complex issue we will all continue to have to deal with for the rest of our lives. In addition to everyone who comes after us.

Some kids have major problems finding healthy, positive relationships with other kids in real life, often for very arbitrary reasons. For a subset of those, interacting through screens eliminates a ton (if not the entirety) of the friction of IRL interaction.

What it really all boils down to for me is that relationships are deeply important. Once upon a time, I thought I could be an island. I was wrong. Maybe there are a few who can do it, but not me, and probably not most of us.

Giving kids access to a bunch of rural land to explore is a great middle ground for those who can do it.

The big question to me is whether the people who lost those jobs will have better opportunities in the future. That's kind of up to all of us.

Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted, but I do feel it helped me become a more resilient and independent person. I moved out of my parents' house at 18 and never had to go back for more than a few weeks. I have persevered through a widely varied array of very difficult situations.

In some ways, I'm not sure I would've made it as far as I have without those experiences as a kid. Of course, maybe I could've done even better if I had stayed home and studied more, and maybe avoided some of those difficult situations? But I am glad to say I am okay with how things turned out.

I definitely believe overly sheltered kids are missing something important. There is a better balance we can strike, I think.

One of the big problems I see currently is all the wild accusations being thrown around by seemingly half the internet that every little thing has been AI manipulated upon the tiniest suspicion. We will go mad tearing each other apart if we keep escalating this behavior.

Yes, some of it is blatantly obvious, but not to everyone-- so I think those casting aspersions need to really back up their claims with more than one or two bits of 'evidence'. I have been accused of using AI to write comments (which I have thus far never done), and I know I'm not the only one by a long shot. Such a waste of time and energy. Ignore it and move on if something smells off to you.

Also I am just so, so tired of the em-dash argument. Humans have been using it for a looong time. Let it go.

I quickly learned as an adult that whether you're a person of faith or not, it's not pointless at all. It's the foundation of everything. Philosophy is how you explain the deeper reasons behind why you follow whatever religion you do, or adhere more meaningfully to whatever kind of agnosticism, atheism and/or 'spirituality' (with or without woo) you espouse.

Funny enough, this is actually one of the few things which has bothered me with the AI boom, and I'm mostly pro-acceleration. A lot of what's happening seems inevitable. But surprisingly, knowing that cat or dog or bird or lizard or butterfly or whatever has a strong chance of being generated really does take something out of it to my mind. And I say that also knowing the extreme amount of staging which has long gone on with traditional nature videography. Somehow, knowing the animal is real means something... I'm still trying to figure out how to better understand and express this.

I get your point. But regardless of whether we can definitively establish if any of these Generative AI LLM agents are conscious (we cannot, because we can't even say the same of our fellow humans, see Philosophical Zombies), the bigger issue which we are already in the midst of is that many people believe and behave as if they were, and how that downstream behavior has very real consequences in our world which cannot be ignored.

The results of people anthropomorphizing needs to be dealt with more than the actual process itself (which we have no way to stop anyhow).

These agents have mostly conquered the realm of intelligent-seeming expression of complex ideas through language. Speaking about their actions in terms of ethical concepts is not only appropriate, but necessary.

Doing this with thousands of people - let alone hundreds of millions - eventually becomes statistically impossible. There is a hard cap defined by energy requirements somewhere for any given system. Large scale ethical alignment is simply not a solvable problem in our current situation.

> it is not trivial software in the worst sense, it tries to do too much, while not being particularly good at any one of those things, and is way too rigid

I'm fairly convinced that at least half the criticism Dawkins has received is more a result of him being (perhaps overly) stubborn about semantics than any actual antipathy, bigotry or hatred.

He wants language to match what has been solidly established & entrenched in academia. It's just that for better or worse, the general public is largely uninterested in or actively opposed to that very language. Eventually, enough of those people will get involved enough in academia to bring more nuance to the language. Meanwhile, academics are going to be academic and cite authoritative books and stuff and nitpick over tiny details. That's what they do. This shouldn't be surprising.

As a former philosophy student, the ethical concerns of generative AI and modern LLMs were immediately obvious to me. If your average human can interact with an agent over a long conversation and not have the slightest clue it's not another conscious human, we have a problem. That problem is here now-- for a couple years at this point. And it's getting worse.

The issue is not whether or not the agent is conscious. Philosophy says we can't know (granted, it also says the same about us). The much more serious problem is how people react to the assumption that an agent is conscious. This is a very real problem we are now stuck with for as long as this civilization survives. In my opinion, this is what Dawkins should have said. I have no idea if he would agree or not, so my opinion of him will remain in limbo.

I personally believe widely available self-driving cars which don't operate at a loss will continue to elude us until we accept the tradeoffs of dedicated lanes, a standardized vehicle-to-vehicle communication protocol, and roadside sensors. We were lied to.

Yep. The IoT home automation stuff is still less performant than much older, wired solutions where whole systems were designed at once in a set-and-forget mode and didn't have weird sync issues or delays. I remember seeing the 'home of the future' exhibit at Epcot like 20+ years ago and these IoT setups are often still a total joke in comparison because of all the protocol issues and fiddling with various interfaces needed.

Just like how the analog wired POTS phone systems were more performant in many ways than pretty much any IP based voice setup.

I simply got tired of messing with stuff that kept breaking in unexpected ways. It wasn't saving time, it was adding a lot of totally unnecessary stress and actually taking time away from me-- for little more than an occasional spark of novelty. Being able to use voice accurately & repeatably for simple task requests is probably the only standout advancement.

My 'nerdy colleagues' and myself can get a lot of enjoyment out of tinkering with this new agentic hotness. However, very few of us I think are really getting something that's actually saving us time in the long run (at least in our personal lives), and it's going to take a while to figure out what's actually realistically reproducible toward that end at a reasonable cost.

Adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, blind spot detection and emergency braking are all the modern automation I want in a personal vehicle at this point. Other drivers are unpredictable, I want to choose how I respond to their various forms of idiocy and not delegate to a black box.