Some potential causes of the scarcity of breakthroughs in the last 10 years:
1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs.
2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.
3. Tech giants of the past 10 years were slurping the most promising talent with high salaries and burning them out.
4. Filters that sift new founders and hackers are created by people who don't deal with the problems most people deal with.
7. Hackers at hackathons are not dealing with problems most people deal with. A number of hackathons I've participated in had very similar solutions pitched - you could name the categories, and see them all over again in each hackathon years apart. Usually catering to the tech or the sponsors instead of actual products anyone wanted to use.
> 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.
Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering.
Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term.
But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.
An idea is tarpit until someone, or some new tech, or regulation cracks it.
YC has a rare opportunity and it squanders it. It is a hub that gathers most problems and approaches to them in each discipline and many many failures on them at least once a quarter and all of that goes down the drain, instead of being published and explored publicly. The energy of bright new founders is not spent re-hashing the old but exploring the new. YC can still evolve into a science hub for things people want with much more impact than it does now. New founders want to protect IP and hold back competition, so publish the failed ideas and approaches - make it a competition. Show the full length and breadth of tarpit zones and any time they may be cracking. This way new energy goes towards better VC returns instead of falling into old cracks. Build a Yelp of things people want that need to be built or solved.
The plot lines are dead. Hollywood has zero originality in plots lately. They think consumers go to theaters to see special effects on a big screen, but the reality is the more special effects a movie has the more dull to non-existent the plot is.
Special effects when done right make the movie a lot more watchable. There is a decade-old movie (besides many others), Oblivion, which I can re-watch repeatedly. The effects there seem to have been done with the right purpose and meaning. Of course, there are a lot more but this is the one I remember from my recent re-watch.
Agree on Oblivion, also like it a lot and rewatch it from time to time.
Saw The Abyss[1] at the big screen recently, and that too held up very well in terms of special effects, despite being 35 years old and breaking CGI ground when it was released.
I think research shows that this is the opposite. People reserve going to the movie theater for big expensive releases. They get "plot line" shows and movies for a low fee on Netflix or free on some streaming service.
I’ve been dissecting stock market data with code to see how dark pool and automated trading behaviors are evolving and impacting the market. The market is the most adverse possible brain battle where actors constantly try to outsmart and make money off of each-other. Greed and fear playing out and conditions changing constantly. AI is also used but it gets funny when the market adapts and plays against past behavior to take advantage of AI traders as well.
Also curious about what you find out. I also thought that the cool billionaire kids were using "private rooms"[0] now and dark pools were for poor boomer hundred-millionaires! :-)
If their page was written by the AI model, that doesn’t bode well. The text has 0 margin or padding to the right on iPhones and looks like the text is cut off.
Or fake their death, and lavish attention (and cash) on them until a couple of decades later the government notices they exist, it would be an interesting demographic.
Perhaps you can cite when this was tested in court, because "robot punches man" isn't something I've noted in the headlines. Otherwise, it's nothing but speculation.
Vehicles have defects and sometimes the manufacturer is at fault for accidents.
The upstream poster is correct. This new law has no relevance to who is liable. It would simply remove "the AI did it" as a valid defense in any case (with whatever exceptions are defined in the existing law referenced).
You can always be sued, and this may be a difficult defense to make in practice, but drivers are not generally liable for accidents caused by mechanical failure if the cause is manufacturing defect.
Sure, if you can demonstrate that there’s no reasonable way the fault could have been predicted or avoided then that can get you off the hook.
However if your tire blows out you’d be expected to demonstrate that you regularly inspect them for ware or damage and there hasn’t been a recall etc. That same level of proactive care is going to be applied to self driving systems.
I don’t see anyone really disputing that. To the extent I’ve participated in this thread it has been to make clear:
1. Both car manufacturers and car drivers can be liable, even with self-driving cars. Any confusion here is likely due to conflating the car with the car manufacturer.
2. The proposed law wouldn’t assign liability, it would simply remove “the AI did it” as a possible legal defense.
What I think people are ignoring is choosing to be an early adopter of fully autonomous self driving vehicles is itself going to be questioned.
Being the first member of the general public to use a 100% self driving car the first day it’s available might even be considered reckless if it then crashes that day.
Later of is a model is preforming poorly operating such a vehicle could be called into question etc.
>Presumably it’s also your responsibility to pick and maintain a working self driving system.
I guess it's reasonable to say I should apply updates and get the car serviced and make sure the sensors are not obstructed, yes. Then the difference between "self driving" and "assisting" technology would be a matter of guarantee the manufacturer advertises.
Would it (hypothetically) be reasonable for me to expect that the thing will suddenly break on a highway in normal conditions without anything obstructing the way forward? No, I don't think so. Can I do something to prevent it or foresee it, except not using the self-driving technology at all? Can I choose to have a different self-driving tech installed in my car and retrain the model or control it's behavior in any way at all?
There are different answers to that and I guess the answers will also change over time.
I don’t think it’s that binary. You have some duty to make an effort of maintenance but there can still be accidents that are just technical faults no one is really responsible for.
It’s true in some cases the manufacturer or car mechanic etc is at fault rather than the owner, but it’s difficult to offload responsibility to a 3rd party.
People (or rather their insurers) successfully argue that to a jury all the time. If your vehicle is serviced by a professional mechanic according to the manufacturer's recommendations, it's very difficult to argue that you're liable for the consequences if your brakes suddenly fail. You took all reasonable steps to ensure that your vehicle was in a roadworthy condition. If you didn't bother to follow the manufacturer's recommendations, then you're on your own.
You’re making this seem easier than it is. Even just convincing people the brakes actually failed is a hurdle.
Someone trying to defend themselves by saying the brakes failed needs to show the brakes alone are the cause of the accident rather just a contributing factor. So there was no alternative like using a parking brake and the driver didn’t get into an unsafe situation.
Similarly the failure must be sudden and not predictable etc.
That wouldn't work anyway. In basically every jurisdiction, operators of vehicles are expected to retain control of the vehicle regardless of self driving status.
I think it’s useful for legislators to do their job and explicitly define and clarify the boundaries of the law. You can’t necessarily just rely on precedent for new things.
This is a poor signal, at least in my experience. It is possible that no one looks at my profile, but I have a semi-famous acquaintance (we've had dinner but not at one's house) and 80% of my friend suggestions are 1 mutal with that person.
I do interact a lot so maybe people click to see if I also look touched? Either way I have a unique enough name that I'd notice if anyone was viewing my profile via that side-channel.
The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people, until the resources really needed are blown out. In capitalism, companies specialize on human needs and if a need goes away, investments can go down rapidly, unless the feedback loop is guarded by some government regulation. But when government is doing the investing, the whims or corruption of politicians has no feedback loop.
This is why a lot of the academic work on economic planning over the last ~30 years has been on shifting the coordination and decision making down on the hierarchy closer to where it's relevant and where the people impacted by some decision have the most to say about it, and instead aggregating statistics and issues upwards for high-level visibility (instead of taking a "top down" approach to planning). This naturally involves leveraging the communication infra and analysis tools we have today that just didn't exist in the past.
Being an industry full of people who's mostly worked their whole careers in centrally planned institutions I have full faith that they'll screw it up. Academia has (to use a broad brush) been lusting after various flavors of central planning for a century. Why would they stop now?
(That's a serious question, why are conditions different now?)
> The problem with centralized totalitarian/socialist/dictatorial governments is that they can be hijacked by an idea and over-execute on it with no feedback from the people
This sounds like a political-economic analog of AIs consuming AI slop.
It’s a feature. Less white collar workers are needed because of AI. Instead of trying to fit in where culture is designed for attrition, find out what humans need and build something you own, using AI if you have to.
It is a class of engineering that often focuses on biomimicry, neurology, and evolutionary biology in some projects.
I would recommend looking around at the various approaches. Some are less ridiculous than others, and don't need a power generation plant to run the devices.
1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs.
2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.
3. Tech giants of the past 10 years were slurping the most promising talent with high salaries and burning them out.
4. Filters that sift new founders and hackers are created by people who don't deal with the problems most people deal with.
7. Hackers at hackathons are not dealing with problems most people deal with. A number of hackathons I've participated in had very similar solutions pitched - you could name the categories, and see them all over again in each hackathon years apart. Usually catering to the tech or the sponsors instead of actual products anyone wanted to use.
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