Google's captcha (the one where you select the squares) is just such a painful experience, I actually get excited when I see Cloudflare's captcha. I'd estimate my Cmd+W rate when I see a gCaptcha is at least 25%.
The Chinese are not worried about AI taking anyone's job. In fact they're excited by it.
For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away. To a point where I think it should be classified as mass hysteria and looked into by public health authorities.
We should all introspect why so many of us perceive America as this very delicate thing that is hanging on with borrowed time and will fall apart at any moment. Because I don't think it's actually like this.
To be fair, losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries; especially when your whole industry is affected and your skill set has become obsolete. There’s not much of a social safety net to catch you.
The belief that there is no safety net is also part of the paranoia that I'm referring to. America is actually one of the most welfarist states in the world.
If your judgment of "badly distributed" comes from all the homeless people that you see, those people have fallen through like a dozen safety nets to get to that point and most of them cannot be helped.
You could literally hire a full-time dedicated team of 10 social workers and mental health professionals to care for 1 crazy SF hobo and it still wouldn't turn around their lives, they're too far gone.
You never see the iceberg of people who are successfully helped by American welfare.
This guilt is baseless and part of this mass hysteria.
I used to work at the American office of a Chinese company. Our counterparts in China earned about half as much as we did in the Bay Area (which is a top-tier salary in China and attracts the best people). On the surface there is really no reason for a Chinese tech company to set up an engineering office in the US. And yet many of them do.
One of my colleagues asked our manager whether he thinks our jobs in the US were stable because the teams in China cost so much less. The manager just said the talent quality is still a bit better in the Bay Area so it's worth it. That sounds like a tautology, but I think there's something deeper.
The problem in America is that a lot of companies have started thinking of talent as a "toll", a cost that you need to pay to get things done. If you think of it as a toll, then your objective becomes how to minimize it. I think that's wholly the wrong perspective.
> For some reason, there is this unbelievably thick air of paranoia in America where everyone is just waiting for the day when their job will go away
That is not just an AI problem. AI is just worsening a problem in USA society.
For years in the USA losing your job was not that big of a deal, because there were lots of other jobs to do, and they paid well.
The paranoia comes from the fact that people are discovering they have not saved anything and the jobs they need to merely survive (not even prosper anymore) are less and more difficult to obtain.
Hence the perceived value of the job you have is greater, and losing it looks worse.
The American dream was Homer Simpson, a simpleton with a huge house to his name, supporting a family as the (mostly) single earner. Today Homer would not be able to buy his own house, nor support his family.
Being poor is expensive. You have to pay rent for a house that will never be yours, often replace cheap things that break more often than the more expensive ones.You need money to make money, and that reinforces how money is essentially a zero-sum game. For billionaires to make even more, someone else has to make less.
TL;DR: It's not just AI. Americans are getting poorer. Poor is scary. And they don't have any social net like more socialist countries.
That reason would be the constant proclamation of such by business leaders, and these days, especially by AI company executives.
Just yesterday Elon Musk was in the news again for making noise about the need for a Universal Basic Income, with the clear implication of massive job market disruption.
A reason for the thick air of paranoia is that now, everyone knows someone that has been laid off. Simply so many that it is starting to hit home. Estimates are near 2008, and if you lived through that you know that help is not coming on a timescale that you could have to massively change your life.
You lose your job, two years go by, time to sell you your house and move. Hiring is a total circus right now as well, being subjected to a five course hiring obstacle course is a lot of time that you're burning your savings and or missing other opportunities. Compare this to nearly any time since 2012 when it was at most three, and maybe ONE was a technical.
Most people do not save in America, and even when you are employed the health care system does not take great care of you. All of this "choice" is presented as capitalism working, but really it's a set of land mines where two large entities decide how much they want to take from you (the hospital, and the insurance company). Since the pricing is opaque and the amount the insurance company pays is capricious, vaya con dios.
The line feels like don't get sick, and your own country has thrown you to the wolves (they're in on it). Similar to unemployment, and the other "safety nets" not managed centrally or well. Massive delays, and your mortgage is due.
Also, you are paying for all of these safety nets all the time when you are making money, but it is deeply gated when you need it. Sorry for the paragraphs, but watching a friend go through this now and it's very wild.
If you're able to save more than 10%/m, you are very ahead of the game.
As for USA losing the Mandate of Heaven, even people from other countries seem sad to see it happening. Informally, two different groups of Portuguese people I've talked to in the last two weeks in Lisbon had a sentiment of "how could this have happened to such a great country?" Mostly due to the extreme news reports coming from the US, ICE, war, rhetoric etc.
I recently watched a video about death cap mushrooms (the deadliest, supposedly), and apparently about 80% of people still survive (requires prompt medical treatment), not that they would want to repeat the experiment. Apparently, the mushrooms even taste good.
Anyway, edible normally means "safe to eat," not just "possible to eat." (As you are no doubt aware). IIRC, Elmer's glue is considered safe to eat though not necessarily appetising.
When that incident first happened and was on the news it was so weird.
Did she really expect to get away with that? It seemed so obvious and her attempts to not be culpable were terrible.
Reading that, there's a strong implication she tried to poison her husband once already, and that information was not allowed into this case!
Also, apparently she inherited $2 million?! Actually it's a little weird that she gets a page long "Early life and background" style section. Lots of public people have shorter ones. That's somewhat uncomfortable.
I was taught “Edible (fit to be eaten as food) vs Eatable (capable of being chewed up and swallowed)” but modern usage seems to treat them as synonyms (the former just being more pleasant to eat than the latter).
No more pedantic than the comment I was replying to. My advice would be not to use "eatable" at all because others will just think you're saying edible incorrectly.
Elmer's white glue is "non-toxic" but today, it is made with synthetics. Since my youth in the early 80s, Elmer's has never been particularly appetizing or appealing to put in my mouth.
I believe that the stereotypical "craft food" is actually paste, which is often based on starches like corn or wheat. Children are very likely to put paste in their mouths and try eating it, because it is indeed based on food products.
I've frankly never been in a school that provided a lot of paste, and the switch to Elmer's glue may have been a strategy to stop kids from consuming the food-based stuff. However, I was in a summer science course where we crafted "Oobleck" which is also sort of "edible" if you like eating clay that's been squeezed between the filthy little hands of 8-year-old boys.
I don't even think Khan Academy's original teaching revolution quite panned out.
I still remember when Khan Academy first came out, there was talk that teachers would go obsolete because teaching would become centralized and delivered over video.
Khan Academy to me is still just a YouTube channel trying very hard to be something more.
Well it wasn't really a teaching revolution. It was a marketing job around a YouTube channel that purported to be a teaching revolution.
The thing is people want more than material. They want the material to be accredited and examined. Otherwise there is no demonstrable credibility from doing it.
And there's a whole world out there of higher quality material with has that accreditation and examination structure around it. And it existed, sometimes for decades in the case of The Open University, before Khan Academy appeared. But it costs money.
Indeed, reverse classroom, everybody getting access to high quality content, video then interaction, learning paths, etc.
Well, in practice it's still about the amount of time a pupil does train with the right oversight and that is precisely the bottleneck that hasn't been alleviated.
I mean, it's both things. Humans are just really good at agriculture by now. Most countries, even those that we perceive as poor, produce crops well in surplus of their own nutritional needs and can often scale up to produce multiples more.
It's no exaggeration to say we can support feeding 100x the human population with current agricultural land and techniques (assuming you can modify their diets). Largely due to GMO, fertilizers, and industrial farming.
>The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
The fallacy in the line of thinking that "why don't we all just shake hands, say something nice, and get along with each other" comes from the erroneous belief that everyone in the world just wants peace and material prosperity for themselves and their people. This isn't the case, for countless reasons.
Peace is what you and I want, because we're living in highly privileged lives where maintaining the peaceful status quo (one in which we're on top) for as long as we live is the best outcome for us, and because we have a fairly rational view of life and the world (e.g. we are not convinced that killing a certain people is the only key to an eternity in "heaven", or have bought into some myth of ethnoracial/cultural exceptionalism that needs to be defended by any means). We also aren't emburdened by some great injustice for which we have a burning itch for vengeance (e.g. no one has bombed your whole family).
This just isn't the case for everyone in the world.
Of all things there's a relevant Tumblr post from nearly a decade ago that I often think everyone should consider (in agreement BTW):
"If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now."
That's a reflection/continuation of a very old meme (from before we called them memes). "Why your idea won't work" checklists were passed around USENET and other forums, and one of the checklist items was almost always something like "your idea requires immediate total cooperation from everyone at once".
This is formally known as a "collective action problem", and CAPs always make achieving a solution damn-near impossible.
I know a number of people who grew up in extreme poverty who are extremely well reasoned here and others who are extremely spoiled and fortunate who would gladly enter into a holy war.
I don't think you can quite generalize that much.
Additionally cooperation is an evolutionary advantage and world war is a species level threat now that we have nuclear weapons.
I don't believe that everyone wants peace. I believe the people who have the ability to shape policy and invest capital would want peace.
Which I think is also complicated. Kind of harkens back to the cliche that WW1 was caused by old people romanticizing war. Most letters between the heads of states confirmed they were anticipating industrial destruction and death but they felt the pressure to initiate war anyway.
I think it's a bit more complex than that, because sometimes even the people outside that bubble still don't want to rock the boat because they're comfortable enough, or worry that things could get even worse.
Still, your point is well taken. People's tendency to wish for calm and an unrocked boat when they think things are okay is something I've started calling "jasmine in Damascus" thinking, which is a phrase I came across in this article ( https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-03-14/syrian... ) with perspectives from Syrians on Assad and the Syrian civil war, in particular this bit:
> I hate when Syrians reminisce about the smell of jasmine in Damascus, or the cheap cost of living before the war as some sort of excuse for a regime like Assad to remain without anyone saying no, without anyone in history objecting at the very least…. I don’t think that life was worth it.
reply