Yes, and many of those who know think countermeasures suddenly became futile. Rather, the time when mitigation is easiest and most effective is always exactly now. So, whatever anti-collapse action (or inaction) you all put off or planned for “later”, start it today. You will never again have a chance to have this impact.

when in reality there was no prior test to ensure the individual could do the task at all

Why would such a test be needed? I presume the researchers did the reasonable thing and assigned the participants to the two groups randomly.

I ask the bizfolks: would YOU allow a guy in a suit with no prior engineering knowledge, but with an ai design the structural elements for a bridge for thousands of vehicles a day?

They would allow it. The difference is that our societies decided that liability for builders of bridges is a sensible thing and nonnegotiable, but for reasons unknown to me you can release any piece of crappy software to the public without any liability whatsoever as long as you tack on it some terms and conditions that absolve you of warranty and liability. This is unthinkable with all other commodities. When it comes to software, the people in charge turn off their brains.

So there will be trillions spent on land and energy wasting data centers to get a dressed up ELIZA that will not solve a single world problem (like hunger, homelessness, poverty, ecological collapse). Simply great! Why not end capitalism right now? It is the only reasonable path at this point.

Because they always think they’re the exception and everyone else is doing it wrong.

They are wrong in this belief because being idiots they don’t have the capacity to be aware that they are idiots. But generally this belief is true. It is more positively expressed in these words: “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” When I look at the dismal state of software, I see crap everywhere. With the rise of slop generators this is bound to become worse.

I sell individual cables. Some are new (some in original packaging), some are used.

If it was about real AI – not stochastic parrots – I would be all for it. What happened to those developments that started in the 70s where you have automatic formal proofs that a piece of code does what it is supposed to do? That is intelligent. Producing slop more voluminous and convoluted than humans could produce or understand is not intelligent software architecture just like fixing a hole in a roof by throwing what sticks at it is not intelligent building architecture. Both may do the job for some time. But what are the long-term costs and who is capable to clean up? In my opinion, what’s most desired is tools that are bug free, do what they should without annoying the user, and are radically simplified in their architecture. (For example, I would be happy with a perfectly working product that does what NFS or Samba aspire and fail to do for decades.) Apparently, AI can’t deliver that. To have the billionth app that is a browser wrapper and shows me exactly one website is much more important.

I started to sell cables I don’t need anymore, this year. Works great and keeps the copper in the ground.

Runs on anything that runs Linux:

NAME
       pdftotext - Portable Document Format (PDF) to text converter (version 3.03)

SYNOPSIS
       pdftotext [options] PDF-file [text-file]

DESCRIPTION
       Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.

       Pdftotext reads the PDF file, PDF-file, and writes a text file, text-file.  If text-file is not speci‐
       fied,  pdftotext  converts file.pdf to file.txt.  If text-file is ´-', the text is sent to stdout.  If
       PDF-file is ´-', it reads the PDF file from stdin.

Tankies whining: “B-but voting does not change anything at all. It does not matter who gets elected. All parties have the exact same policies. LBJ and DJT are the same guy, they are one person.”