ignirtoq

We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.

Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is “in 10 years we’ll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently.” In their roadmap, there won’t be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.

What’s most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

But do you really want them touching it?

Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means “mean,” it can also mean “median” or “mode,” and I would argue the layperson saying “average” intends it to mean “typical,” which is closer to median (or even mode). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.

“Please note that I am not deducting points because you have certain beliefs,” the instructor wrote in feedback obtained by The Oklahoman. Instead, the instructor said the paper did “not answer the questions for the assignment.”

The paper “contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive” the criticism went on.

This is three-quarters into the article and should be at the top. The instructor took care to establish that the grade was not punitive based on the student’s belief but reflective of failing to meet objective criteria established as the requirement for the assignment.

Are we there yet? Is the bubble popping? Do we need the Ron Paul gif (or am I showing my age)?

Poverty, homelessness, and several diseases. We’ve had the technology to end world hunger arguably for at least 50 years.

AI is going to destroy a lot of software companies in a way I haven’t seen talked about yet: it will give CEOs exactly what they ask for.

Before you jump in with “AI produces garbage and isn’t reliable by design,” let me say I agree with you 100%, but for the sake of argument, assume for a moment it could produce a high quality product.

Once a company gets large enough, very often the CEO gets completely removed from how their company actually works. I know I’ve worked at several companies where the job of my boss was to shield me from corporate nonsense so I could make an actually good product. If I and/or my boss were replaced with AI that actually followed the corporate nonsense, the company would go belly-up quite quickly.

I think many CEOs are looking to replace huge fleets of workers with AI they can directly prompt. Even if it worked flawlessly, since they don’t know how their products actually bring value to their customers, they will speed-run torpedoing their company’s place in the market by their own ignorance, ego, and overconfidence.

That would only be true if what people had to spend their money on stayed the same, and the author goes through great detail showing that the individual components of what people have to spend their money on to “exist” (i.e. a minimum cost of economic participation) have changed drastically in 60 years. Not only that, some of those pieces (child care, health care, higher education) have increased in cost breathtakingly faster than inflation. Sure, you could reduce that to a statement that “therefore the inflation metric is wrong,” but the author goes on to show what a better, more representative metric would look like and tell us about the economy, and that’s a good discussion mostly orthogonal to whether the inflation calculation is correct.

This is an amazing breakdown of how catastrophically bad the definition of the federal poverty line is in the modern economy. They use sound logic and data to calculate that the value should not be around $31,000, but in fact closer to $140,000.

With this foundation, they revisit common graphs that economists trot out to “prove” life has objectively improved for the majority of Americans in the last 60 years, and show that they actually show the opposite. Those graphs are built on top of the poverty line, and that calculation is bunk, so the whole argument crumbles.

The obvious next step would be to calculate the improved poverty line at key points in America’s last 6 decades and generate corrected graphs, but that seems like a monumental effort. I feel like someone could make that into a dissertation.