Maybe this is true if you only look at paid labor, but there are other ways in which elders add value to society, as they do a lot of invisiblized unpaid work. Their pensions play a role in supporting the economy, as much as people seem to only think of pensions as a burden to source and rarely as supporting the economy when it gets spent.
I get this feeling sometimes, like it is so unreliable at referring to context and getting details right it feels like deliberate random rewards to create the equivalent to a gambling addiction. About half my tokens feel wasted on trivial errors that i gave it the context for, on average. And any meta discussions / clarifications result in Claude telling me I did all the right things and there is nothing more I can do and it should have gotten it right from the provided input - which is disempowering but to be fair is at least better than chatGPT gaslighting users about improving prompts over and over to get no better result in the end.
There were already too few people for the tasks before this round of layoffs. The working order has been "do more with less, use AI" for over a year.
Every MS FTE whom I knew enough to have that kind of conversation with was stretched thin to the breaking point. Now half their team is gone, and the show must go on apparently. It does not seem viable to me, not even with AI.
Finally! A friend was an in-house reseacher at some car manufacturer, whose job is to usability tests car prototypes, including in real traffic.
She was telling me about one study in particular to try a new touch screen built behind the handbrake, pretty much at 5 o'clock behind the driver. I'm sure she's not the only one sharing usability reports about how dangerous touchscreens are while driving, but marketing needed to advertise one more screen than the competition... This was 5 years ago. Took them a while to pivot, but i guess better late than never.
There is a local taxicab provider here which uses a liveried fleet. All their cars have a customer-facing touchscreen mounted on the rear of the front passenger seat.
You would not believe the number of drivers who attempt to tamper directly with this screen, from their own seat, including while the vehicle is in operation. I have, at least once, terminated a ride early because of how unsafely the driver acted. There is never any reason for them to be interfering with a passenger control.
But drivers gonna drive, and more than a few are simply control freaks.
anecdata n=1: LLMs lack understanding of context, stakeholder sensitivities and nuance in word usage, to write reports with the required depth and at the quality bar I need. Maybe it is faster at generating BS reports with no substance, but I can still write my reports much better and much faster than LLMs so far, probably because the reports are merely the artefact of solving a complex problem.
Easier said than done these days. We had a coop managing out drinking water with local government support. Being a coop excluded them from grants and eventually the board burnt out and gave up. Local government now operates the thing - you'd think they'd be accountable to voters but they can only get grant money with strings attached. They can repair a few pipes only if they install chlorination that no one wants and will add more maintenance costs because of pressure from health and safety - the provider must guarantee water is safe at the end point so boiling water, which everyone does here, is no longer acceptable apparently. There isn't a big enough population that increasing the cost of water would make a difference.
All that to say, voters here do care about utilities, and the coop solution worked for about 25 years iirc but it can't work in today's "one solution fits all" regulatory context anymore, at least where i live. Things are far from that simple in practice.
> The field of AI research has a reputation for disregarding the value of other fields [...] It’s likely that, being unaware of much of the research in psychology on cognitive biases or how a psychic’s con works
Is the reputation warranted? Just a US thing? Or maybe the question is "since when did this change"? because in the mid 2000s in france at least, llm research was led by cognitive psychology professors who dabble in programming or had partnerships with a nearby technical university.
I am not based in the US, nor in France, so I can't say what the situation is there. I was only pointing out that quote to GP.
My experience isn't much, since I am neither doing AI nor cognitive science but I have seen cognitive scientists do cool stuff with AI as a means to study cognitive science, and I have seen CS researchers involving themselves into the world of AI with varying success.
I would not be as emphatic as the author of the article but I would say that a good portion of AI research lost the focus on what is intelligence and instead just aimed at getting computers to perform various tasks. Which is completely fine until these researchers start claiming that they have produced intelligent machines (a manifestation of the Dunning Kruger effect).
oh interesting, how do you define older here though?
I'm a bit skeptical because i read a similar comment about answering calls immediately vs. letting it go to the answering machine already being such a divide.
Makes me feel old for thinking anyone offended by my taking hours if not days to respond to a non urgent text is welcome to go be someone else's friend.
