What I'm most worried about is how farming will adapt. Either food production needs to shift to geograhically new areas, or we'll need massive storm-proof greenhouses where hostile weather conditions don't matter. Large scale desalination of seawater will be likely needed too.
Given enough money, anything is possible of course. In my country we grow things like cucumber and tomatoes during winter in heated greenhouses with artificial light, even though it's dark and freezing outside. They just cost 2-3x more than same stuff produced further south.
I believe most of the misery could be still avoided with massive amount of investment into green technology, AI and robotics to take care of the old and so on. But if Americans continue to elect people who hate science and have ideological love for fossil fuels, then we're probably doomed indeed.
If most people are unemployed, modern capitalism as we know it will collapse. I'm not sure that's in the interests of the billionaires. Perhaps some kind of a social safety net will be implemented.
But I do agree, there is no reason to be enthusiastic about any progress in AI, when the goal is simply automating people's jobs away.
Babies can at least manipulate the physical world. Large language model can never be defined as AGI until it can control a general purpose robot, similar to how human brain controls our body's motor functions.
Personally I loved history, social science and geography, but none of that has been useful in working life. Being good at mathematics is prerequisite for nearly all well-paying jobs, humanities are not of much use except for being able to write and read well.
Remember that school isn't only about acquiring skills to leverage your lifetime earnings. Education is about understanding and learning the world as a whole. So understanding humanities history the land that we live in and everything else under the sun is important.
Imagine that all we were was measured by the salary that we make and not humans and human civilization. Might as well just hand over our lives to the robots now.
Obviously extremist attitudes don't disappear overnight when a regime promoting them disappears. Still, I would prefer to see a comparison to other parts of the world. Were antidemocratic, racist and antisemitic attitudes more common in postwar West Germany compared to other countries?
What is particularly lacking in research is perspectives from countries beyond Western world. Humankind's history is full of racism and xenophobia everywhere, but most research has a Western perspective.
Every study would be better if it were meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. But those cost a lot, and scientists make do with the resources at hand. But I think this study has value in its own right. I doubt this study was the only one looking at these sentiments during that time period; this is just the one that got posted today.
I think you can lay out your perspective as too narrow when trying to evaluate opinions and behavior and I believe this study has fallen victim to it, at least partially.
Racism played and still plays a huge part but the resentment against Jews was primarily caused because the Nazis convinced people successfully that they are the victims of a Jewish conspiracy around the world. The typical mechanism of populism. Of course this manipulation only works if a basic resentment already exists, which was true for Jews since time immemorial.
And this resentment did not vanish over night. I would argue that little of it remains today however. At least against Jews in Germany. There are of course very vocal exception. And it is a crowds that is indeed very dependent on outside confirmation.
Yeah, I'm no fan of Musk or Trump, but I think Twitter always was a spam-infested, hateful cesspool where people with online-addiction yelled at each other. There was nothing for Musk to ruin, because the whole concept was rotten from the start. Allowing only short messages doesn't promote intelligent discussion, it does the opposite.
The question is, why wouldn't nearly all other white collar jobs be professions of the past as well? Does the average MBA or whatever possess some unique knowledge that you couldn't generate with an LLM fed with company data? What is the alternative career path?
I think software engineers who also understand business may yet have an advantage over pure business people, who don't understand technology. They should be able to tell AI what to do, and evaluate the outcome. Of course "coders" who simply produce code from pre-defined requirements will probably not have a good career.
This is typical of automation. First, there are numerous workers, then they are reduced to supervisors, then they are gone.
The future of business will be managing AI, so I agree with what you're saying. However most software engineers have a very strong low level understanding of programming. Not a business sense of application
To be honest, if the bottom 50th percent of coding talent is going to be obsolete, I wonder what happens to rest of the "knowledge workers" in those companies. I mean people whose jobs consist of attending Teams meetings, making fancy powerpoint slides and reports, perhaps even excel if they are really competent. None of that is any more challenging for LLM than writing code. In fact replacing these jobs should be easier, since presentations and slides do not actually do anything, unlike a program that must perform a certain action correctly.
I've heard compelling arguments that we passed the "more people than jobs" threshold during the green revolution and as a civilization have collectively retrofitted UBI in the form of "fake email jobs" and endless layers of management. This also would explain https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ pretty well.
Either AI shatters this charade, or we make up some new laws to restrain it and continue to pretend all is well.
Exactly. There's some need, perhaps, to keep these tools "up to date" because someone in a non-free country is going to use them in a horrendous manner and we should maybe know more about them (maybe).
However, there is no good reason in a free society that this stuff should be widely accessible. Really, it should be illegal without a clearance, or need-to-know. We don't let just anyone handle the nukes...
Given enough money, anything is possible of course. In my country we grow things like cucumber and tomatoes during winter in heated greenhouses with artificial light, even though it's dark and freezing outside. They just cost 2-3x more than same stuff produced further south.