Certainly, AI may come up with novel ideas, but will AI be able to recognize them as novel or as worthwhile? Humans have accidentally stumbled on useful innovations, but they were smart enough to recognize that their oopsies were beneficial. Penicillin was discovered when an attempt to grow bacteria was disrupted the accidental introduction of a mold. Rubber became useful when Charles Goodyear dropped a rubber/sulfur mixture on a Hot stove and learned how to harden it.
“if Democrats get in power and just borrow more and more and more, it could make the problem worse.” Are not the Republicans the party of spend these days? Not tax and spend as they don’t like taxes, just spend and add to the deficit.
Regarding Dems and the top fifth of earners: What you see here seems to me to be evidence that the Democrat voting base consists of the classes of people most resistant to demagoguery. Not fully resistant of course, but much more resistant to the least credible and most dangerous charlatans.
These are also the voters who, if they have decent principles, can best afford to stand on them. The Democrat voters still more often than others seem to operate on the presumption that policies should be pursued in good faith based on reasons (even if often misguided or mistaken). They remain much more characterized by respect for expertise, confidence in the scientific method, and deference to well-founded institutions and authority.
I am not surprised they are pursuing tax policy aimed at turning the tide of the 2017 bills that obviously targeted the well-off professional.
In my memory, there's a group of people who tinkered in their garage. Inventors we not always PhDs in well equipped labs. I used to remember people's phone numbers, I can barely remember my wife's, and couldn't even begin to tell what my two daughters are.
I never used the slide rule, but I'll bet the people who did knew all the principles of how it worked and why it was useful. Do we mourn the death of the slide rule? I remember the controversy over the personal calculator and whether it could be used in class.
What I do know is that other than the uber curious, most Americans will be content to ask their personal agent. I wonder if engineering can be sustained? Would you trust a human or a computer to tell the stress load on a bridge? Humans often are fallible.
Do students today read Dante's Inferno and just read the Cliffs Notes
Of course there are problems with AI but they will be solved, just as the speed limit placed on trains was determined as 25MPH because otherwise our bones would be shaken out of our bodies. When I remember my undergraduate days spent in libraries looking for books I needed to read in order to write an essay, my memories are of the fact that most of that time was wasted. If AI can remove that waste, or even a large portion of it, it will transform our knowledge and the time we have for other things, like understanding quadratic equations. Roll on the day when you can pick an investment without the need to read the comparative history of the investment companies over a period of years.
Glad to see your take on the Acemoglu paper. And you stated better than I the idea that hallucinations could randomly produce brilliance, the way 2022-era ChatGPT came up with books that I *should* have written and now I am.
Certainly, AI may come up with novel ideas, but will AI be able to recognize them as novel or as worthwhile? Humans have accidentally stumbled on useful innovations, but they were smart enough to recognize that their oopsies were beneficial. Penicillin was discovered when an attempt to grow bacteria was disrupted the accidental introduction of a mold. Rubber became useful when Charles Goodyear dropped a rubber/sulfur mixture on a Hot stove and learned how to harden it.
“if Democrats get in power and just borrow more and more and more, it could make the problem worse.” Are not the Republicans the party of spend these days? Not tax and spend as they don’t like taxes, just spend and add to the deficit.
Regarding Dems and the top fifth of earners: What you see here seems to me to be evidence that the Democrat voting base consists of the classes of people most resistant to demagoguery. Not fully resistant of course, but much more resistant to the least credible and most dangerous charlatans.
These are also the voters who, if they have decent principles, can best afford to stand on them. The Democrat voters still more often than others seem to operate on the presumption that policies should be pursued in good faith based on reasons (even if often misguided or mistaken). They remain much more characterized by respect for expertise, confidence in the scientific method, and deference to well-founded institutions and authority.
I am not surprised they are pursuing tax policy aimed at turning the tide of the 2017 bills that obviously targeted the well-off professional.
In my memory, there's a group of people who tinkered in their garage. Inventors we not always PhDs in well equipped labs. I used to remember people's phone numbers, I can barely remember my wife's, and couldn't even begin to tell what my two daughters are.
I never used the slide rule, but I'll bet the people who did knew all the principles of how it worked and why it was useful. Do we mourn the death of the slide rule? I remember the controversy over the personal calculator and whether it could be used in class.
What I do know is that other than the uber curious, most Americans will be content to ask their personal agent. I wonder if engineering can be sustained? Would you trust a human or a computer to tell the stress load on a bridge? Humans often are fallible.
Do students today read Dante's Inferno and just read the Cliffs Notes
Of course there are problems with AI but they will be solved, just as the speed limit placed on trains was determined as 25MPH because otherwise our bones would be shaken out of our bodies. When I remember my undergraduate days spent in libraries looking for books I needed to read in order to write an essay, my memories are of the fact that most of that time was wasted. If AI can remove that waste, or even a large portion of it, it will transform our knowledge and the time we have for other things, like understanding quadratic equations. Roll on the day when you can pick an investment without the need to read the comparative history of the investment companies over a period of years.
Glad to see your take on the Acemoglu paper. And you stated better than I the idea that hallucinations could randomly produce brilliance, the way 2022-era ChatGPT came up with books that I *should* have written and now I am.
Any day that starts with John Prine’s wisdom is a good day. Thank you for that!