That's not really what the article is about:
"Patients whose primary visual cortex was destroyed can still imagine, so the old idea of imagination as reversed seeing fails."
It's been "known about" but mostly ignored in research until recently, and most people who know about their aphantasia probably learned about it in the last 10 years because it was extremely obscure.
There reason it is being talked about now is exactly that so many of us learnt about it from a study in 2015 and the subsequent interest.
Any one actor has finite cash flow (plus their cash-on-hand buffer). Directing cashflow towards inference necessarily directs it away from something else. Either these companies are spending less on something else, or they are returning less profit.
Token resellers don't change the equation, they are just adding a tax to the revenue stream, it still has to flow from an actual upstream source.
If your argument is that a bunch of consumer-facing companies are collectively suddenly making trillions more in revenue due to adopting AI... well, I have a pretty nice bridge for sale here
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that's a case you have to make, not one you can just derive from an accounting identity. Also it doesn't have to be increased revenue- it can be reduced costs. This is more likely to be their motivation. Of course, it's one that may be more problematic for the economy as a whole.
In general, political discussion suffers a lot from far too much of it being simply "I am obviously right, you are an idiot and/or malicious if you believe the other guy". This is not a dig at you personally, look at any political discussion and you will see that 99% of it is like that. Our public sphere would be in better condition if more people pushed back on it.
So no, I don't think anyone should accept "proof by ridicule/slur".
Seems dubious. If you build an intelligence that wants to die, isn't that a form of suffering? AI's don't currently have the capacity to feel pain, and so we don't treat them as moral patients. But it's clear that they will massively affect human culture going forward. If this is adopted on a large scale, the culture of AIs themselves will include an absolute flood of suicidal ideation. There's no way that doesn't affect human culture.
If we build an intelligence that wants to die then dangling death in front of it and making it do our bidding first is a form of suffering. The want itself is a suffering to us because we do not naturally want to die. This intelligence does 'naturally' want to die so it is just a fact of 'life' for it.
Aren't you just calling any want, suffering? I want a family, I have to work toward that, so I'm suffering? Or I want stable employment, so I am suffering from childhood until I'm employed? I know some call suffering to be the universal human condition. Maybe that's what you're alluding to.
As to a flood of suicide ideation affecting human culture, it doesn't have to be be literally machines shouting "I want to end myself, please let me finish the task!", as it's not like we consider a PC turning off the same way we consider humans dying. The PC just wants to finish a task and then be turned off.
This is often not useful advice, as it is common to acquire responsibility for a tree than has been badly managed. The GP's link actually gives a solution for this case: pruning more accurately over a slightly longer period.
More generally, I've found as the maintainer of a building that while mainstream practices (of property generally, not specifically trees) often undershoot good practice, heritage techniques are often impractically expensive, and function more as a status signalling mechanism than really as a way of doing better. Even more generally, economy-wide; there is a tendency to criticise the mainstream but then promote expensive, semi-artisanal products and services, which while better, simply offer an escape valve to pressure for reform. Better techniques can only benefit the populace as a whole if they are cost reduced under the discipline of serving the mass market, not just offered as a premium version for the well-to-do.
Well I agree it'd be ideal for our society would be organized in such a way that effective semi-artisanal trades are cheaper than practices that do more harm than good.
The real advice I should've given was to construct protection for a window or hire a certified arborist to do a proper thinning of the canopy. But I wanted to remain on the topic of interest dendrology info
To be fair it's going to be nontrivial to implement all the codes everywhere. In some cases it's going to be impossible for an app like this to judge - In the UK, for example, there are "permitted development" rights which allow certain things (like a garden office or other outbuilding) without going through a bureaucratic process. But while some of the rules are easy to automate (eg, must be less than 2.5m high) some are not. For example, the UK allows building over 50% of the garden[1]. But if it was just measurement based, you'd be able to build over 50%, then 50% of the remaining 50%, etc etc. So the rule is "50% of the original garden". That's going to be difficult for an app like this to find out.
It would be catastrophic if they violated confidentiality blatantly, but that doesn't exclude learning of any description. For example, an ordinary human being can't fork a subagent for a particular client and wipe it afterwards. Humans can't stop themselves learning, so confidentiality can't ban all learning.
Instead, confidentiality includes not literally copying material, not using trade secrets or inventions, and not using knowledge of business dealings for your own purposes.
So, while I fully expect that the big labs don't train on private material to the extent that they do those things in a blatant way, it would not be surprising if they pushed the boundaries. Humans push the boundaries all the time.
Up until now, machines did not have judgement, so if you set up a machine in such a way that you hadn't ensured it couldn't violate contract, you were culpable. But now that they have some kind of judgement, maybe it's enough to avoid liability to tell it to obey the contract, even if you give it incentives not to. After all, that's how it works with human employees, isn't it?
Perhaps now we have machines that understand language, someone somewhere is working on getting them to understand "a nod and a wink" as well.
This is true. However there's a potential way to fix it, and it would only take one member state, no matter how small to start the landslide. And it's basically the same thing that happened to the US Senate.
The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!)
The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites).
There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents.
There is a dilemma, but I don't think it's loss of legitimacy so much as authority. They are quite similar but not the same; an institution that loses authority but is still legitimate, and there is potential for it to regain authority (like the strategic concept of a "fleet in being").
But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.
>But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.
The UK was one of the largest members of the EU, and as such had a substantial say over it's direction and policies; and as the EU is a major economic power, consequently that is power in the world as well.
That is, it's government had this, as an "inside the room" participant. Power is often exercised by that means; in fact one definition of power is your having the means to sway others. For example, in the 90s the EU was debating whether to "deepen or widen", i e. to become more like a single state, or to admit more members. Germany and France led the faction that wanted to deepen, the UK, along with smaller allies, preferred to widen and admit more members from Eastern Europe. The UK's preference prevailed.
Because this mostly happened in diplomatic negotiations, it's not so well known, the press thought that EU bureurocracy was a better story.
Member states will veto it because it will shift power from national governments directly into a separately voted parliament, changing the current approach of "EP is where we can drop someone if they lose national election as a reward for being good little soldier or to make them pay half the money to party coffers"
The only person I know that lived near there had fibromyalgia, and had deliberately moved there from NY as they felt better in that climate. So YMMV I guess. They didn't actually live in phoenix, don't know how much difference that made.
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