I'm sure all my friends who are artists, writers, and programmers will be glad to hear that "progress" is the reason their careers have been forcibly ended, and they've had to get "jobs" as Uber drivers and Walmart greeters.

And if any of them is selfish enough to say that's not a good thing, I'll make a point of telling them they are "backwards."

The argument against this logic is that most companies who employ developers are not in the business of making an arbitrarily large number of software products. Many companies have just one product (or service), which is often tied to a non-software product or service, e.g. banks, schools, hairdressers, etc. So, their development needs are very finite.

Yes, society as a whole has a much larger appetite for software, but society-as-a-whole doesn't hire developers: specific firms hire them, and they hire them to work on specific projects that theoretically have "finish lines" which could potentially be reached in the near term if the development they can afford were more productive -- which is what AI threatens to do.

And these firms only form around activities that they think can support a profit stream. But many of society's software needs might not lend themselves to harvesting a profit, for the obvious reason that many areas of human life are not mediated by financial transactions. And yes, AI devbots will probably make it easier to fill unprofitable gaps, but the reason people are concerned about AI coming for dev jobs is that people need jobs to pay for shelter and food. So, society's bottomless appetite for software is not going to salvage this situation.

You're mis-describing the situation.

Who is building AI? Giant tech companies, which are owned by extremely wealthy people. It is their wishes that matter, because they literally give the orders. "Whoever pays the piper calls the tune."

Giant tech companies spend a lot of their money paying for salaries and gig developers. They wish they could spend less money on those things, because then a much larger share of their revenue could be profit.

Teaching AI to write is an obvious step toward not having to pay humans.

Nobody said "I want to be dependent on AI." What they are saying, what they have been saying, shouting at the top of their lungs every single day for decades, is "I hate paying my employees, I hate having to pay them a fair wage, I hate having to pay for their benefits, I hate having to hire additional people to manage all the employees I hate paying, and I hate that wielding all my power requires me to persuade and negotiate with these humans instead of simply dictating."

They will not stop until they reach the ideal workforce size: 1 employee, who they can just give orders to, and then that employee does the "gruntwork" of wielding huge technology to accomplish the mission.

Also from the article:

> Auchincloss said part of the decision to read a ChatGPT-generated text was to help spur debate on AI and the challenges and opportunities created by it. He said he doesn’t want to see a repeat of the advent of social media, which started small and ballooned faster than Congress could react. > > ... > > Lawmakers and others shouldn’t be reflexively hostile to the new technology, but also shouldn’t wait too long before drafting policies or new laws to help regulate it, Auchincloss said.

> The efficiency falls dramatically when the sand is used to just return power to the electricity grid.

It seems like a major drawback that the stored energy can only be used as heat.

Still, a step in the right direction. Bonus points for being based on an absurdly common and valueless material.

So: more people voted for Putin in 2000 than there are eligible voters in Ukraine today?

And also: Russia's last "relatively fair" election was more than twenty years ago?

Ooof.

A person could probably pass that same entrance exam simply by writing "Ayn Rand is right" over and over until the bell.

For the record, George Mason University is a fringe, ultra-Libertarian school that served as the embryo for the political schemes of the Koch brothers.

At one point, GMU leadership had to beg the chair of the Economics department to please teach some genuine economics in addition to the ideology, because the students they were graduating at the time were unable to find employment since their basic skills were crap.

Source: Democracy in Chains, which follows the activities of Charles Koch's pet economist, James M. Buchanan, who ended up with near total control of GMU through his own position and through his influence over GMU's largest funders (the Kochs).

Claude might be good NLP + AI, but GMU is a diploma mill for cranks, so I wouldn't put a lot of store in this milestone. GMU's Law and Economics programs will take any body that can fog a mirror while quoting Ayn Rand.

LATE EDIT: my original comment (above, unedited) is sometimes imprecise about the whole university vs the Law & Econ department. My assertion is that GMU's L & E department is a diploma mill for cranks. I don't know anything about the rest of the school.

I stand by all my original statements, with the proviso they are mostly limited to L & E. And, because Claude took the L & E exam, I stand by my conclusion as well.

If you were a student in a different department at GMU, maybe you got a good education. Good for you! Although, it's a real shame you gave your tuition money to an organization that happily hosts a factory for weaponizable misinformation.

I can't help but wonder about the knot in that necktie. If I had to guess, it looks like a double windsor got a bit out of hand.