You're dead right, it would be the one killer move to remove a lot of perverse incentives, fix the internet, possibly even social media, and all live in a happier world. The whole economy would stop paying the ad tax to Google and Meta.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.
People already complain about having 10 differently monthly subscriptions for internet stuff. If you remove ads people will need 30 to do the same stuff they do now.
> Developments to the model architecture contribute to the significantly improved performance from previous model families.
I wonder how significant this is. DeepMind was always more research-oriented that OpenAI, which mostly scaled things up. They may have come up with a significantly better architecture (Transformer MoE still leaves a lot of room).
While "quality of life first" remains true in spirit for a lot of French people, this hasn't been supported politically since 2000 (when legal weekly work time was reduced to 35 hours - many people do more but they are compensated for it). And even that law was an exception. In truth, France has taken the neoliberal turn of the 80s almost as much as other countries, and growth and competitiveness has been the only mantra of governments for 40 years. We're mostly protected by laws passed before the 50s.
How do you (especially Europeans) understand this move from Russia? Can it really sustain a war against us? Does it want to break NATO by proving the US won't move?
What move, you mean about the drones? I first want to be sure about what happened. Remember that few years ago you were still being labeled as "Russian propaganda" if you had doubts about the NS incident.
Now we're expected to believe a rag-tag crew of Ukrainians used a leaky sailboat to simultaneously detonate deep water pipelines, lol.
Denmark and Sweden gave up thier investigations quite quickly, probably they arrived at the truth but couldn't say it, only Germany was strong-armed into keeping the charade going.
I think they are like the mafia in many ways and like to threaten people and leave horses heads in beds and the like. It's a way to try to intimidate others not to mess with them. I'm not sure it's going to work in this case.
I think the idea from putin is, they are done in 20 years anyway from a population/financial position anyway. There only chance is to expand and take over populations to rebuild their ability to survive as a country.
Is this something that you would have done? I don't see how russia's survivability would be improved by expanding it's sphere of control, but, on the contrary it would stretch resources thin.
Russia is burning money, even with the billions they get from EU to pay for gas they are reaching the end of their "runway" and if there are no big changes and the economy goes to hell, Putin will very quickly get very unpopular with Russians. This seems like a desperate move to provoke a larger war which can keep Putin in power for a while longer.
I have heard this move characterized as "horizontal escalation". Putin is stuck in Ukraine (hasn't taken anything strategically significant, controls less territory than 3 years ago). So he tries to widen the confrontation geographically.
Have you heard about accelerationism? This is an ideology of influential far right wing politicians and activists. They want to introduce as much world instability as they can, to break any existing structures where they a the losers. Then they hope when everything goes to hell, they will be the first to pick up the biggest pieces for themselves. This is Putin's real aim and this is why Trump is so baffled this whole year, he is giving Putin a victory and a way to exit the war one time after another and Putin rejects it repeatedly. This is because winning this war is not Putin's aim. His aim is total chaos in Europe, dissolution of the EU and NATO, and then he will pick up eastern scraps to form USSR 2.0. This is why trading thousand men for thousand square meters is acceptable to him. Wellbeing of humans or economy is a secondary thought to him.
This strategy is known as "disaster capitalism" and was explored by Naomi Klein in her book "The Shock Doctrine". Which details how UofChicago economists experimented on South America in addition to natural disasters, etc. The rich love to burn everything down so they can buy what's left for pennies. It's sick.
It's hybrid warfare, disrupting the economy by shutting down airports, increasing fear in the population to pressure us to not escalate it further "or else..."; I don't believe it's an attempt to break NATO, they want to keep the harassment and disruptions at as low cost as possible, and these drones flying over important hubs (airports, ports, bases) are quite cheap while causing relatively larger annoyances.
They can't sustain, economically speaking, a war against EU/NATO but Putin can definitely play on our fears much harder than we can play on Russians fears.
Thanks for the tip. I added this to my audio book queue.
It's pretty interesting how today's cars come with features like remote braking and monitoring cameras, all designed to make driving less demanding for us. So as these researchers work to make vehicles less distracting, these cool features somehow end up making us even more distracted. It's an ironic cycle that leaves you more distracted, and maybe more unsafe.
On this, read Daniel Susskind - A world without work (2020). He says exactly this: the new tasks created by AI can in good part themselves be done by AI, if not as soon as they appear then a few years of improvement later. This will inevitably affect the job market and the relative importance of capital and labor in the economy. Unchecked, this will worsen inequalities and create social unrest. His solution will not please everyone: Big State. Higher taxes and higher redistribution, in particular in the form of conditional basic income (he says universal isn't practically feasible, like what do you do with new migrants).
Characterizing government along only one axis, such as “big” versus “small”, can overlook important differences having to do with: legal authority, direct versus indirect programs, tax base, law enforcement, and more.
In the future, I could imagine some libertarians having their come to AI Jesus moment getting behind a smallish government that primarily collects taxes and transfers wealth while guiding (but not operating directly) a minimal set of services.
Fossil (in particular coal) thermal plants that were planned for shutdown are being kept online or restarted because of AI energy use. Tech had a pretty minor environmental footprint until now but it's growing rapidly due to AI, for use cases that are clearly not vital and for a good part garbage.
An idea I had is organizing week-ends in big houses with maybe 30 strangers of similar age. You make them have a great time, and afterwards you invite them to indicate the people they really liked. Over time you can make them see each other again and maybe do some recommendation engine to guess who in the community they will like but still haven't met.
The problem is that fossile fuel companies (and other polluting industries) don't just answer an existing demand but also influence on that demand: they lobby against environmental regulation, run influence campaigns against climate science, use greenwashing, etc. Those companies and their shareholders can't be taken out of the equation as they're not neutral.
And it's not that impractical : just make a consumer-run search engine for products and services.