I’d say ‘a set of individuals’. The distinction is admittedly subtle.

Personally, I much prefer individuals.

Some individuals, at least.

As the Poet said: Make War, not Love.

Soon my life-long dream of using a shaver the size of my entire face will become reality. Eyebrows? Nose? Who needs them anyway?

If you have to supply your users with AI support to figure out how to configure your OS, you might be doing something wrong.

Almost certainly not, no. Evolution may work faster than once thought, but not that fast. The problem is that societal, and in particular, technological development is now vastly outstripping our ability to adapt. It’s not that people are getting dumber per se - it’s that they’re having to deal with vastly more stuff. All. The. Time. For example, consider the world as it was a scant century ago - virtually nothing in evolutionary terms. A person did not have to cope with what was going on on the other side of the planet, and probably wouldn’t even know for months if ever. Now? If an earthquake hits Paraguay, you’ll be aware in minutes.

And you’ll be expected to care.

Edit: Apologies. I wrote this comment as you were editing yours. It’s quite different now, but you know what you wrote previously, so I trust you’ll be able to interpret my response correctly.

Thank you. I appreciate you saying so.

The thing about LLMs in particular is that - when used like this - they constitute one such grave positive feedback loop. I have no principal problem with machine learning. It can be a great tool to illuminate otherwise completely opaque relationships in large scientific datasets for example, but a polynomial binary space partitioning of a hyper-dimensional phase space is just a statistical knowledge model. It does not have opinions. All it can do is to codify what appears to be the consensus of the input it’s given. Even assuming - which may well be far too generous - that the input is truly unbiased, at best all it’ll tell you is what a bunch of morons think is the truth. At worst, it’ll just tell you what you expect to hear. It’s what everybody else is already saying, after all.

And when what people think is the truth and what they want to hear are both nuts, this kind of LLM-echo chamber suddenly becomes unfathomably dangerous.

Of course, that has always been true. What concerns me now is the proportion of useful to useless people. Most societies are - while cybernetically complex - rather resilient. Network effects and self-organization can route around and compensate for a lot of damage, but there comes a point where having a few brilliant minds in the midst of a bunch of atavistic confused panicking knuckle-draggers just isn’t going to be enough to avoid cascading failure. I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback loops emerging, and I don’t like it.

As they say about collapsing systems: First slowly, then suddenly very, very quickly.

Our species really isn’t smart enough to live, is it?

I’m all for draining what little brains remain in the carcass. It’s not like they’re using them anyway.

Trump wouldn’t have made it more than 30 seconds on Korriban. Say what you will about the Sith, but at least they don’t tolerate incompetence.

Edit: Not that he would ever have hired fools in the first place, but can you imagine what Palps would have done to a PR team that couldn’t even get the very basics of propaganda right? Their prolonged suffering would have passed legendary without even slowing down and headed straight for outright mythological.

Those are some excellent points. The root cause seems to me to be the otherwise generally positive human capability for pack-bonding. There are people who can develop affection for their favorite toaster, let alone something that can trivially pass a Turing-test.

This… Is going to become a serious issue, isn’t it?

Look, I realize the frontal lobes of the average fifteen year old aren’t fully developed, I don’t want to be insensitive and I fully support the lawsuit - there must be accountability for what any entity, corporate or otherwise opts to publish, especially for direct user interaction - but if a person reenacts Romeo and Juliet with a goddamn AI chatbot and a gun, there’s something else seriously wrong.

To paraquote H. L. Mencken: For every problem, there is a solution that’s cheap, fast, easy to implement – and wrong.

Silver bullets and magic wands don’t really exist, I’m afraid. There’s amble reasons for DBA’s being well-paid people.

There’s basically three options: Either increase the hardware capabilities to be able to handle the amount of data you want to deal with, decrease the amount of data so that the hardware you’ve got can handle it at the level of performance you want or… Live with the status quo.

If throwing more hardware at the issue was an option, I presume you would just have done so. As for how to viably decrease the amount of data in your active set, well, that’s hard to say without knowledge of the data and what you want to do with it. Is it a historical dataset or time series? If so, do you need to integrate the entire series back until the dawn of time, or can you narrow the focus to a recent time window and shunt old data off to cold storage? Is all the data per sample required at all times, or can details that are only seldom needed be split off into separate detail tables that can be stored on separate physical drives at least?