On one hand, this is insidious when targeting children.... On the other these kind of metrics are what pretty much every company tries to optimize.
We're going to get better and better at hacking the human brain - for good and evil and we're going to have to trade some free will and personal liberty to really keep the worst of it in check. The dark pattern bullshit is the easiest thing to regulate but I don't have a lot of hope for even that.
Which is fine. As the article points out, we value markets because they find ways to allocate resources effectively. Insider trading is illegal because it breaks the market.
Firms can optimize as they like, but if the net result is that the market ceases to function, then those behaviors get penalized.
The bigger concern is more around the pollution of the gas turbines. Populations around the DC are going to see higher rates of Asthma, Respiratory diseases, Heart problems, and certain cancers.
Shameless self plug but also worried about the silent quality regressions, I started building a tool to track coding agent performance over time.. https://github.com/s1liconcow/repogauge
Here is a sample report that tries out the cheaper models + the newest Kimi2.6 model against the 5.4 'gold' testcases from the repo: https://repogauge.org/sample_report.
8M is kinda small potatoes - which is essentially the AWS business model. Sure you could build a cheaper thing but that is hard and this thing is right here, easy(ish) to use, and your company won't regret using it until you've moved into a different role.
The problem with AI is that it isn't like any previous technology. There may be temporary jobs to fill in the gaps but they won't be careers. The AI will do the process engineering and self optimization. The prompt witchcraft is a good example because today its totally unnecessary and doesn't actually increase performance, and they'll continue to make it easier to direct/steer the models.
We're literally trying to build an intelligence to replace us.
The human species. "We" doesn't include everyone and doesn't necessarily imply the process happens through collaboration and planning (conspiracy). The race to automation is happening as expected; outside any group control and bound by competition. Game theory suggests the end result is us being replaced, if we make it that far. "We" as a species are the ones making it happen.
Assuming we get smarter than human AI but keep control of the guidance and off switches we will be in the position of a king or rich person with servants smarter than themselves of which we have many historical examples. I figure it will go kind of like that but with more equality amongst the humans than historically as we'll be able to vote in some sort of socialist like set up with all humans having fun which has not been possible in the past as you need someone/something to do the work to keep things going.
We're going to get better and better at hacking the human brain - for good and evil and we're going to have to trade some free will and personal liberty to really keep the worst of it in check. The dark pattern bullshit is the easiest thing to regulate but I don't have a lot of hope for even that.
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