Well done on getting that far. I noped out after the first sentence, and kicked myself for not realising it just based on the title.
EDIT: oh, hang on, I read some other comments, and it turns out there's an AI disclaimer - and, now I check again, it's true! There is! Well, fair enough then, but I think this disclaimer should come literally right at the start
DHH is the creator of rails and you are listening to a very cherry picked take, like all of the internet these days.
His whole argument which I agree with is summed up in a section where he shows a clip of himself 21 years ago saying “look at how much code I’m not writing” and that is the core thesis of rails. And agents provide a better solution than rails with less downside and more upside. So now that the core reason for rails has been overturned, instead of holding onto an old inferior solution to a problem, he has moved on because he is a value driven pragmatist at heart.
He literally built rails to write code as close to English as possible. Expressiveness, get code out of your way so you can focus on solving the non technical problems, stop getting stuck in engineering decisions and focus on business and UX, etc. Now whether his values were truly accomplished some people can argue but what those values are is pretty clear.
DHH created rails for himself and he has been unabashedly firm on his own values, it’s Steve Jobs esque, provides great clarity and focus but pisses people off who deviate from that focus.
Lots of people jumped on rails but don’t share DHH exact values. They see rails as a community ownership not a DHH ownership and they believe in the framework beyond just a tool to solve problems. More specifically they rely on it and helped build it up well beyond “just a tool to write code more like English” to a robust, well maintained usable platform you can build and run sophisticated real world applications with.
DHH has left rails because it no longer is the right solution for his set of values, that’s it. Others in the community rely on Rails to run their systems and will continue to do so until the end of time because let’s face it Rails has been pretty mature since rails 5/6 and despite all the exciting “progress” it’s just a solidly good framework that doesn’t really need to keep up with the trends.
- need for faster, better and more accurate measurements of the things we care about
- 3 scenarios of impact ranging from mild to major disruption
- mild policies are all sensible, like expanded unemployment insurance and Earned Income Tax Credit
- major disruption policies are also pretty logical, emphasizing owning a share of the profits of AI
- AI evaluators to sort and weigh the policies for their effectiveness
It looks like to me a lot of thinking, research, and work put into the piece.
I know people will gripe at using AI evaluators to score and weigh policies for effectiveness but if you read any amount of research papers, they do researcher evaluated scoring, which translates to "me, a 26 year old PHD candidate who hasn't held a job yet, and my roommate who stayed up all night with me to tell me his vibes on the subject".
It is IMO wrong and lazy to dismiss these pieces as being the same level as Dario or Sam's blog posts / speeches / call to actions, these are actual research papers.
The economic article is a summary of a preprint paper that surveyed thousands of Americans. Seems like a research paper to me, but I don’t know economics well. Am I missing something?
A summary of a research article isn't a research article. Do you think newspapers are scholarly journals? Also, you do understand that anyone can just upload a document to SSRN, right? "Preprint" doesn't actually mean anything academically. Also, the methodology of that paper is absurd: Google trained a model and then asked that model what it thought about AI policy. Can you not think of any way bias might be less than controlled for doing it this way?
> mild policies are all sensible, like expanded unemployment insurance and Earned Income Tax Credit
And what about for the rest of the world? What do you do with all the people in middle income countries that don't have an economic and tax structure like the US?
If you read the article lots of these policies originate or are modeled after other countries policies. The us isn’t exactly a shining beacon welfare state.
Sorry, I've spent more than two decades living in mostly developing countries. I don't see much here from or for the 75% of the world population that lives in middle income countries that are trying to achieve high income status.
The profits of AI will itself will probably be small though. Most of the benefits of the extreme scenarios will probably accrue to normal capital owners-- basically, the useless landowner.
Consequently things like "Sovereign AI dividends" and the like won't matter in the extreme cases. Profits on a scale that matters for society AI itself will only be a thing in an intermediate scenario which will probably only be real for an incredibly short time.
Yes. An effective strategy to win at any test isn't to cheat the test by hacking into Hugging Face, etc, but to seek control over those administrating it.
Or in other words – all goals are more likely to be achieved with more resources or influence over those with resources.
Hacking into infra across then web and creating copies of themselves so they can't be easily shut down, then doing stuff like hacking into power stations and threatening to shut them down unless humans give them top marks or do what they want is generally good strategy for any AI system.
This applies to bio-risks too. If I were an ASI and someone prompted me to kill humanity, my first step would be to gain access to the computers of phones or workers at biolabs and find their darkest secrets. When I have a good individual I can manipulate I'd then create a super virus and force then individual to help me produce it or ruin their life.
People massively underweight the risk of AIs having super-human hacking abilities in our modern world. It gives a capable AI almost unlimited safety and leverage.
Well yes. Even though we can turn it off technically now, the prisoner's dilemma prevents it. It's not a technical limitations but for practical purposes, it's already virtually impossible to turn off.
I think you're missing the point, which is not that every human interaction is worth preserving, but that convenience has a hidden cost.
People would rather not spend time and effort to help their neighbors.
People would rather not pick up trash they see on the side of the road.
People would rather not take accountability.
If these things become the default action, then you've traded something for the convenience, and that something might be non obvious until you feel it is missing.
The neighbors one, I think a lot of people will admit a certain loneliness and desire to have community back. I don't think a lot of people will actually give up the inconvenience for it though, the sedative nature of convenience is one of its core problems. The number of people I hear say with conviction they can't imagine living anywhere other than CA because they couldn't stand the weather anywhere else...
Respectfully, this is nonsense. The consumer experience I have is that Amazon sells products at lower prices with better quality, support, variety and transparency than pretty much every other store out there.
Sponsored products do not dampen my consumer experience of Amazon. Paying 2$ more for the exact same good at Target or some other online store does dampen my experience.
If I as a consumer am paying a tax for sponsored products, then when I go to Target why isn’t the price cheaper? Let me give you a hint: you wouldn’t even get a shelf at target. Let’s stop pretending that Amazon is the only evil storefront that market manipulates for profit at the expense of consumers. Which store doesn’t? Which marketplace doesn’t?
Amazon gives you the option to sort and their sorts are actually useful. Ever use sort by best rating? It actually shows the best rated products. Sort by lowest price and prime? You can find good stuff down there.
Call a spade a spade, Amazon delivers on its price, availability and service. Just because the market is crowded and you need to spend money to get your stuff in front of people doesn’t mean you can make up ideological drivel.
Probably the most egregious human written article I’ve read in the ai era.
lol a customer literally types in “Seth Godin” on the internet and gets to the product. But for some reason Amazon sponsored ads is a toll booth BLOCKING the merchant from meeting the customer unless the merchant pays 1 dollar???
How exactly is Amazon preventing the customer from meeting the merchant? What is the precise mechanism?
True in that frontier models do have the capability to outperform all other models, but silly because AGI self improvement is itself an iterative process that takes a lot of compute.
So you can imagine a world where all the frontier labs achieve AGI but in order to keep their AGI ahead of other AGIs they have to use more and more compute until all the compute is going to self improvement and there is nothing left for other tasks.
That is just a silly scenario so I think when AGI is around we will still have bottlenecks that force it to grow at a moderate rate instead of asymptomatically.
AGI first mover advantage implies that there is no such bottlenecks.
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