What if - evolutionarily we just haven't evolved for birth control?
What if - given a choice, women just don't want to have 2.1 children on average?
No one wants to touch this topic, because it's super offensive and probably political, but it seems like the most plausible to me.
And clearly we're not going back. No one is going to ban birth control, and they probably shouldn't. But then where do we go from here? Basically all genes of non enthusiastic parents will die out over the next 100-200 years, and we will get more enthusiastic parent genes succeeding, and population grows again? Or we literally just die out...
We’re certainly not dying out. At minimum, eventually civilisation would crack badly enough that we can no longer make contraceptives, nor other entertainment to distract from sex.
Which I’m fairly sure is part of the picture. Evolution didn’t build us to want sex; it built us to crave stimulation, which is more generally useful, then made reproduction into fallback entertainment.
Depends on what you mean by "we". Humanity? Yeah, impossible to die out by fertility crisis merely due to lifestyle. The fewer babies are born, the more unoccupied space there is, making it more and more attractive to have kids. But if you mean "Americans" or "ethnic population", it's very much possible to die out. It happened to native Americans, it can happen to your group. If birth control collapses in your country, you can still be supplied by another one from across the globe who secretly or openly cheers for your collapse. Same goes for shipping you drugs, see history. As for space becoming available from your low fertility, alas that doesn't work when you're being invaded and your land settled in by a more fertile country.
I also used it for advice on a massive personal decision, but I specifically asked it to debate with me and persuade me of the other side. I specifically prompted it for things I am not thinking about, or ways I could be wrong.
It was extremely good at the other side too. You just have to ask. I can imagine most people don't try this, but LLMs literally just do what you ask them to. And they're extremely good and weighing both sides if that's what you specifically want.
So who's fault is it if you only ask for one side, or if the LLM is too sycophantic? I'm not sure it's the LLMs fault actually.
This has also been my experience - asking it to take the devil's advocate of the other side of the coin and assume the persona of 'X relevant highly rational type with deep knowledge in the field' both have a lot of utility. You can do this in more than one dimension, too.
> There’s no democracy in being mostly beholden to a few companies which own the largest and most powerful models, who can cut you off at any time, jack up the prices to inaccessibility, or unilaterally change the terms of the deal.
LOL. Maybe you are referring to OpenAI and Anthropic? Yes they have codex and opus. But about 1-2 months behind them is Grok, Gemini, and then 2-3 months behind them are all the other models available in cursor, from chinese open source models to composer etc.
How you can possibly use this "big company takes everything away" narrative is ridiculous, when you can probably use models for free that are abour 2 months behind the best models. This is probably the most uncentralised tech boom ever.
(I mean openAI is in such a bad state, I wouldn't be surprised if they lose almost their entire lead and user base within 6-12 months and are basically at the level of small chinese llm developers).
I agree with your general point, but there's an important qualifier:
> when you can probably use models for free that are about 2 months behind the best models.
You can use them for free, but training of near-SOTA foundation models is currently not an open-source process, and it's funded almost exclusively by large and/or wealthy corporations. That's a weak point at the moment from the perspective of openness.
> shed partisan tendencies and critically review policy initiatives
You could take a good will attitude to DOGE then. I think many (including Elon) genuinely believed they could cut fraud and waste. But by their own admission, they were only mostly an advisory committee.
You can only do so much. Congress still has authority, and that's how it works, that's how the system is intended. And the reason DOGE hasn't done much is exactly because congress isn't willing to cut spending. It NEVER will. It didn't under any president including Reagan.
So basically you have an ever increasing deficit and spending because the way the political system is setup drives this. In fact, it happens in basically every democracy, so maybe it's just something that happens in democracies.
So - you could call the promise of DOGE lies, but I think they were a lie from Trump and not Elon. I think Trump promised Elon cuts, to get his help in the election, then backtracked, and that's exactly why Elon stormed out, he didn't get what he wanted.
And the US government is still massively overspending. Trump didn't really cut anything.
Yeah, I remember people saying that about making 1m model 3s per year, landing rockets, getting 10k+ satellite privately into orbit, and getting millions of subscribers using internet via those satellites.
Maybe just maybe the guy does actually get things done, and if you didn't hate him you'd see that?
(yes, there are some things he hasn't gotten done. That doesn't take away from what he has gotten done)
Please understand that his companies succeeding in some things doesn’t make the things that are exaggerated, overpromised, or just plain naked hype with no backing somehow practical. It’s an interesting effect of our age that for some figures to some people if any criticism is considered unwarranted then all criticism must be disregarded.
It reminds me of growing up in the evangelical church and all the pastors who’d still keep their followers even after they show up in new cars or fly first class, taking the tithes from old ladies on their pension.
That's really understating things. He has promised so many things at various times that the "hits" are at best 10% of what he says. You can't just cherry pick his successes and say "well maybe this will work too" with a track record like that.
This mofo threw a Nazi salute and danced around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw. Then he illegally downloaded the entire US treasury payment database and ran it through his AI and faced zero consequences. After promising to find a trillion in fraud and abuse, he left after less than half a year and declared there wasn't that much fraud after all.
To most normal people this long history of overblown claims and complete failures would disqualify him from serious consideration. To most normal people, a massive illegal siphoning of US government data would be beyond the pale and worthy of jail time.
But in today's age, there's enough smoke and mirrors that such a charlatan can just float on a sea of adulations right on past any consequences.
I actually think the public markets have a lot less faith in openai than softbank does. They need these crazy investors. Public markets would not value openai at $1.4trn. So they can't go public. It would reveal how bad things are.
He hasn't offered any production services to third parties whatsoever (seems to end at patents/standards gifting) - I wouldn't expect a fab open to third parties at all - if anything it'll be reserved for tesla/space-x/x.ai usage and candidly I don't think there's enough demand there to justify the capex involved in a fab.
I strongly suspect some sort of fab built by Elon associated companies will be announced soon. Almost all supply can be bought by Tesla and xAI.
Fab costs follow Rock's Law which is that the cost of building a fab doubles every 4 years.
Right now, it costs TSMC roughly $25-$40b for each N2 fab. It's going to cost $50b - $80b for an A14 fab 4 years from now. And then $100b - $160b again.
You need many customers in order to justify the cost. Tesla and xAI themselves won't be enough.
Standing up a modern-node EUVL fab is harder than rocket science. Tesla and xAI don't have the capex to do it, and the silicon they manufacture would be competing against much more experienced fabs like Samsung and Intel.
Frankly it is hopeless, I would be dumbfounded if Elon ever walked through the doors of ASML.
And so can you run local models which can generate far worse material.
And horny teens have always fantasist about celebrities, or that girl they have a crush one etc. And there always had been people people cutting physical images together to place the head of their obsession on some erotic magazine sourced body.
But like you saied it's creating a feed of all the people which have been sexualized against their will.
There is a huge difference between someone doing something in your mind (or room) and it staying there and it being posted international for billions of people to see (and download, and re-post, and cherry pick preferred pictures and then feed into AI model which will actually full undress people etc.)
and a huge company making money from not just sexualizing people against their will, but also putting creating a public feed about all the people they have sexualized against their will
and then the owner going out of their way to claim that that is all free speech they won't change anything and anyone who tries is fascist, communist, evil etc.
except that definitions of what free speech means vary largely between countries and huge parts of the world have definitions where stuff like "creating sexualized images of people against their will" (or systematic harassment, cyber mobbing, death threads, and a bunch of other things) are very clearly _not_ covered by free speech.
realistically speaking this is also AI output, i.e. not speech of a person (weather natural or legal/company), i.e. it's questionably if Grok posting generated images does even count as speech (in the US and many other countries)...
What if - given a choice, women just don't want to have 2.1 children on average?
No one wants to touch this topic, because it's super offensive and probably political, but it seems like the most plausible to me.
And clearly we're not going back. No one is going to ban birth control, and they probably shouldn't. But then where do we go from here? Basically all genes of non enthusiastic parents will die out over the next 100-200 years, and we will get more enthusiastic parent genes succeeding, and population grows again? Or we literally just die out...