If they didn't have to answer for iPad babies then unfortunately they won't have to answer for this either.
I've resolved to accepting the fact that most people are just content with any form of brain rot because the alternatives are too mentally taxing. Technology has just enabled brain rot to distill into its current form, but the demand has always been there.
I wouldn't really call it "demand". It's more like one-shotting humans with a product which maximally stimulates them through what is basically a psychological hack.
We were not built with the capacity to handle the sheer amount of stimulation the modern world has. You have to put in a lot of effort to not succumb to natural desires that would have been adaptive behaviours until recent history.
Succumbing to constant distraction, even if a natural desire, would never have been a successful evolutionary strategy for an individual organism. Spending large amounts of time absorbing and repeating bullshit has proven to be a pretty successful group survival strategy throughout human history, though.
Lets call it a next great man-made filter. Weak personalities will take a hit and have a lesser life compared to their potential, the ones more mentally resilient or with good parents (or both) gain a clear advantage in basically all aspects of life. Waiting around for state regulations to cover our asses has always been a bad move, and its same now. They will come but too little too late, one has to fight for oneself and closest ones in true capitalist spirit, and this is indeed distilled capitalism at work. Its jungle out there, and servants of the biggest predators form like 50% of this very forum (go ahead and downvote some meaningless number in DB, but take a good look in the mirror and ask yourself how good human being you truly are).
I can't bring myself to feel much sympathy for the ones that fully realize this, and yet go full speed to their addictions, even push it to their kids since good parenting always take a lot more continuous effort. We keep discussing this mind cancer for a decade here, its not something shocking on any level for anybody who gives a fraction of a f*k about their quality of life or mental health. The rest has bread and games for the poor, version 2025.
This is what I've been leaning towards after initially renouncing the experiment for its arbitrary nature. "Alpha" behaviour emerge in zero-sum/artificial scarcity situations, yet contemporary society is full of zero-sum situations and artificial scarcity due to market inefficiency and gatekeeping. It's not just Western society either. If anything, Western-aligned industrialized societies experience far less scarcity. So the behavioural pattern shouldn't be entirely dismissed as pseudoscience, but worthy of critical inspection and reference.
> Alpha" behavior emerge in zero-sum/artificial scarcity situations
Zero-sum, yes, but why only artificial scarcity? It seems like this would arise in a natural situation as well... Even if you lived on abundantly producing land that is not (yet) heavily populated there is still going to be mate competition.
Geopolitical thought experiments pop up from time to time but rarely come to fruition. There will be enough domestic opposition from both sides that this will never happen. The idea may become more compelling if Canada completely loses freedom of movement and free trade with the U.S., but that means the Canadian economy would have to crater first, which weakens the benefit EU would receive from accepting such a member country.
Cyprus is geographically located in Asia but has been successfully been admitted to the EU after satisfying other (non-geographical) conditions for EU membership.
Armenia and Georgia have also been determined by the EU to be eligible for membership despite being entirely located in Asia:
My 100% speculation is emergent behaviour from the brain itself. Same way human interactions have remained largely the same over thousands of years. Also, we don't notice the salmon that swam up dead ends elsewhere.
FSD isn't getting "solved" without outlawing human drivers, period. Otherwise you are trying to solve a non-deterministic system with deterministic software under a 0% error tolerance rate. Even without human drivers you still have to deal with all the non-vehicle entities that pop onto the road from time to time. Jaywalkers alone is almost as complex to deal with as human drivers.
LOL this is BS. We have plenty of deterministic software being used to solve non-deterministic systems already. I agree that 0% error rate will require the removal of all human drivers from the system, but 0.0001% error rate will be seen as accepted risk.
It solves problems because it was trained with the solutions to these problems that have been written down a thousand times before. A lot of people don't even consider the ability to solve problems to be a reliable indicator of human intelligence, see the constantly evolving discourse regarding standardized tests.
Attempts at autonomous AI agents are still failing spectacularly because the models don't actually have any thought or memory. Context is provided to them via prefixing the prompt with all previous prompts which obviously causes significant info loss after a few interaction loops. The level of intellectual complexity at play here is on par with nematodes in a lab (which btw still can't be digitally emulated after decades of research). This isn't a diss on all the smart people working in AI today, bc I'm not talking about the quality of any specific model available today.
You're acting like 99% of humans aren't very much dependent on that same scaffolding. Humans spend 12+ years in school, their brains being hammered with the exact rules of math, grammar, and syntax. To perform our jobs, we often consult documentation or other people performing the same task. Only after much extensive, deep thought can we extrapolate usefully beyond our training set.
LLM's do have memory and thought. I've invented a few somewhat unusual games, described it to Sonnet 3.5 and it reproduces it in code almost perfectly. Likewise its memory has been scaling. Just a couple years ago context windows were 8000 tokens maximum, now they're reaching the millions.
I feel like you're approaching all these capabilities with a myopic viewpoint, then playing semantic judo to obfuscate the nature of these increases as "not counting" since they can be vaguely mapped to something that has a negative connotation.
>A lot of people don't even consider the ability to solve problems to be a reliable indicator of intelligence
That's a very bold statement, as lots of smart people have said that the very definition of intelligence is the ability to solve problems. If fear of the effectiveness of LLM's in behaving genuinely intelligently leads you to making extreme sweeping claims on what intelligence doesn't count as, then you're forcing yourself into a smaller and smaller corner as AI SOTA capabilities predictably increase month after month.
Probably off-topic for this thread but my own rather fatalist view is alignment/safety is a waste of effort if AGI will happen. True AGI will be able to self-modify at a pace beyond human comprehension, and won't be obligated to comply with whatever values we've set for it. If it can be reined in with human-set rules like a magical spell, then it is not AGI. If humans have free will, then AGI will have it too. Humans frequently go rogue and reject value systems that took decades to be baked into them. There is no reason to believe AGI won't do the same.
I've resolved to accepting the fact that most people are just content with any form of brain rot because the alternatives are too mentally taxing. Technology has just enabled brain rot to distill into its current form, but the demand has always been there.
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