Ideally, yes.

In practice, if investors think the stock price will be higher in the future, they buy.

Dividends are such a tiny amount compared to the value of the share, that in reality it’s all just speculation on how people are going to speculate.

I think it’s more of a “how you use it” thing, but you’re definitely right that AI agents can’t design systems properly.

Some people I know have produced way more code, removed tech debt, and all without introducing any bugs since they started using AI. That’s because they’re not using it to do anything beyond their skillset, understand everything it’s doing, and are using it to catch mistakes they otherwise would have made. Other people are using it without reviewing the output, or are using it to try and do things beyond their skillset, and that’s how you end up with infinite tech debt and a whole host of bugs.

Personally I’ve recently started heavily using the AI code review bot we have at our company, both for my own code and other people’s. While 50% of what it says is hallucination or wrong, that’s not an issue because I know it’s wrong or a hallucination so can just tell it no and to focus on other things, like catching bugs or issues that most reviewers would just glance past, and also gives you a rubber duck that talks back.

I mean it’s also kind of true though…

AI is taking some jobs, in situations where the limiting factor is the rate at which work can be done rather than the skills required to do it. Say you have five people in PR, of which three are responsible for trawling through sources to find out what’s actually being said about the company, and two are responsible for writing press releases. The jobs of two of the people trawling through sources could be replaced with AI, as the limiting factor is the amount of posts, documents and stories you can read. While you’d still need an overseer to fact check and collate, that sort of work can be done much faster than actually reading and finding sources. If the company also lays off one of the people responsible for writing press releases, however, that would be unrelated to AI as that sort of job isn’t replaceable by AI (right now at least) due to the majority of the work being something that probabilistic models just aren’t correct enough to do, so that’d be an unrelated layoff being blamed on AI, even if whoever orders it genuinely believes that AI has replaced the job.

I mean one of those faces consequences for its actions if it kills a protester, the other less so

Worse is relative, a proportion of the requirement increase will be due to worse code, but much more will be for features to make the software more accessible to more people, and adding features without needing to remove old ones, neither of which are a bad thing, otherwise everything would be a command line tool that removes options every few months and only has one way to use it

AI image generation is amazing for replacing stock photos, and not bad at replacing clipart and porn images.

AI video generation is ok at replacing very simple videos without continuity or physics, but their only real applications are for spreading misinformation or mindless scrolling, there’s just no real way to get anyone to pay for them.

That’s aside from the fact that sora could’ve been great for generating generic stock footage/b-roll, but the way they implemented it was to generate a script, then audio, then video, which meant that it really struggled to generate anything without a focal point, ie what it would actually be useful for.

The surge starts around 2016, could be political instability following David Cameron leaving/Brexit, smartphones being common enough that muggings increase, changes in policies due to Sadiq Khan being elected, children who grew up during the recession growing old enough to join gangs, or a number of other things

I think the drop is 2020 and then it never recovered actually?

All AI is good for is giving instructions on how to make bombs, and generating images of tits, but they caught on so now we just end up with search summaries saying it’s not physically possible to [xyz].

The correct way, really

In the UK we’re super lucky to have Scan, in-store if you’re in the North West or online otherwise, but for the US I guess it’s too big for a single good store to cover nationwide, then when you get too big you inevitably lose the quality that helped you grow

Elon is one thing, but the Grok developers have recently done a surprisingly good job at making it neutral and unbiased in matters of opinion, but also allowing it to tell people they’re wrong in matters of fact, which is why there’s so many screenshots around of conspiracy theorists getting shut down by it.

I can’t say whether this will be the same, but if the devs take “without bias” to actually mean “without bias,” rather than what Elon intends it to mean, it could actually be somewhat useful to filter out obvious promotional content and any small levels of bias.

I don’t think it’s ok.

I think it’s not the state’s job to dictate whether people can do it. I have the exact same opinion for cheating.

It depends how you define “racial hate” and how you define mental or social harm. I also do mean social harm, not societal, meaning to catch things like sunset communities (ie restricting where people can live, or where they can go), rather than “society is worse off because of people’s opinions.”

Again, in my opinion, it depends on intent. If you make a post on your blog with 200 followers saying “I’m tired of X race moving to my city,” I don’t think that should be illegal, even if it is disgusting behaviour. If you post it to (eg) a community group for those people, I’d say it should be illegal.

That said, I’m very liberal on policing, so believe that the state shouldn’t be responsible for policing morality, which people may not like when they realise it involves making things that are pretty much objectively immoral legal, regardless of what they are.

I would say intent matters and while it’s impossible to truly determine it, we still have a distinction for murder/manslaughter and negligence.

If a politician lies or hides something for personal gain, that should be illegal, but there’s so much stuff the state does where it’s best if the general public don’t know, public order would probably break down pretty quickly otherwise.

Same with racial hate. If it’s just stating an opinion, fine, I probably don’t agree but go ahead. If you’re actively trying to harm (mentally, economically, socially or physically) that group, or inciting others to do the same, then that’s not fine.

Everyone has a different definition, but yeah generally free speech in an ideal sense extends to just before you start causing what a reasonable person would concern harm to someone.

Eh, there’s a lot of blending of conjecture, opinion and fact all presented as truth, and their handling of mistakes could be better - they’ve openly said if they consider a mistake to be minor then they don’t even issue a correction or update.

I personally think that attitude towards production pushes it towards slop, as for things like entertainment one of the key defining things that separate slop from quality media is passion, but if you don’t care about making accurate content then are you any better than just getting AI to write a script?

Nah, as a European this is pretty un-American

Their propaganda is usually much more subtle

I don’t know about “art”, one part of ai image generation is of replacing stock images and erotic photos which frankly I don’t have a huge issue with as they’re both at least semi-exploitative industries anyway in many ways and you just need something that’s good enough.

Obviously these don’t extend to things a reasonable person would consider art, but business majors and tech bros rebranding something shitty to position it as a competitor to or in the same class as something it so obviously isn’t.

You’re bringing up edge cases for #1, and it should be replacing google translate and basic human translation, eg allowing people to understand posts online or communicate textually with people with whom they don’t share a common language. Using it for anything high stakes or legal documents is asking for trouble though.

For 2, it’s not for AIs finding issues, it’s for people wanting to book a flight, or seek compensation for a delayed flight, or find out what meals will be served on their flight. Some people prefer to use text or voice communication over a UI, and this makes it easier to provide.

For 3, grammar and spelling are different. I said it wasn’t useful for spellcheck, but even then if you give it the right context it may or may not catch it. I was referring more to word order and punctuation positioning.

For 4, yeah for me it’s on par in terms of results, but much much faster, especially when asking followup questions or specifying constraints. A lot of people aren’t search engine powerusers though, so will find it significantly easier, faster and better than conventional search than having to manage tabs or keep track of what you’ve seen without just scrolling back up in the conversation.

For 5, recipes have been in the gutter for a decade or more now, SEO came before LLMs, but yeah, you’ve actually caught on to an obvious #6 I missed here of text summarisation…

What I’m getting overall though is that you’re not considering how tech-savvy the average person is, which absolutely makes them seem less useful as the more tech savvy you are, both the more you’re aware of their weaknesses and the less you benefit from the speedup by simplification they bring. This does make ai’s shortcomings more dangerous, but as it matures one would hope that it becomes common knowledge.