Late comment but if technology brought down the price of food then people could spend less on food, more on other good and services. Or the same on higher quality food. You don't need an increasing population for that. The improvement in agriculture could mean some farmers would have to find other work. So you can have economic growth with a stagnant or falling population. And you can rather easily have economic growth on a per-capita basis with no overall GDP growth, like is common in Japan today.
About the farmer needing to change jobs, in the interview that is the subject of this thread Ilya Sutskever speaks with wonder about humans' ability to generalize their intelligence across different domains with very little training. Cheaper food prices could mean people eat out or order-in more and then some ex-farmers might enter restaurant or food preparation businesses. People would still be getting wealthier, even without the tailwind of a growing population.
I think there feeling is, you say you want us to build our products in the U.S. but then our essential workers aren't allowed in so it's an impossible demand.
Instead of extending hours in classrooms, which might feel like torture, what about no-tech libraries for individual work like homework? Or with a coffeeshop vibe. I'd personally say four hours a day but I'm guessing two might be what many found reasonable. If you finished your work early you could read what you'd like. Town and city libraries could be enlisted for this along with the school libraries, which might need to be expanded to fit all of these kids. Add sports and you get a serious full day for kids, not the kind of half day they have now in the U.S. That additionally lightens the load on working parents.
You may like to check out Iain McGilchrist's take on schizophrenia, which essentially he says is a relative excess of rationality ("if then else" thinking) and a deficit of reasonableness (as in sensible context inhabiting).
A few on this list are interesting because they replicated some times and not others.
I'd like to see a list of experiments that succeeded in replicating.
Humans have a direct connection to our world through sensation and valence, pleasure, pain, then fear, hope, desire, up to love. Our consciousness is animal and as much or more pre-linguistic as linguistic. This grounds our symbolic language and is what attaches it to real life. We can feel instantly that we know or don't know. Yes we make errors and hallucinate, but I'm not going to make up an API out of the blue; I'll know by feeling that what I'm doing is mistaken.
It's insane that this has to be explained to a fellow living person. There must be some mass psychosis going on if even seemingly coherent and rational people can make this mistake.
We’re all prone to anthropomorphizing from time to time. It’s the mechanizing of humans that concerns me more than the humanizing of these tools, those aren’t equivalent.
Perception and understanding are different things. Just because you have wiring in your body to perceive certain vibrations in spacetime in certain ways, does not mean that you fully grasp reality - you have some data about reality, but that data comprises an incomplete, human-biased world model.
Yeah we'll end up on a "yes and no" level of accord here. Yes I agree that understanding and perception aren't always the same, or maybe I'd put it that understanding can go beyond perception, which I think is what you mean when you say "incomplete." But I'd say, "Sorry but no, I respectfully disagree" in that at least from my point of view, we can't equate human experience with "data" and doing so, or viewing people as machines, cosmos as machine, everything as merely material in a dead way out of which somehow springs this perhaps even illusion of "life" that turns out to be a machine after all, this kind of view risks extremely deep and dangerous -- eventually even perilous -- error. As we debated this, assuming I'm not mischaracterizing your position but it does seem to lead in that direction, I'd shore up my arguments with support from phenomenologists, I'd try to use recent physics of various flavors though I'm very very much out of my depth here but at least enough to puncture the scientific materialism bias, Wittgenstein, from the likes of McGilchrist and neuro and psychological sources, even Searle's "Seeing Things as They Are" which argues that perception is not made of data. I'd be against someone like a Daniel Dennett (though I'm sure he was a swell fellow) or Richard Dawkins. Would I prevail in the discussion? Of course I'm not sure, and realize now that I might, in LLM style, sound like I know more than I actually do!
Yeah, LLMs are entirely different from "writing" because they're creative agents. So, writing allows me to give my thoughts several passes, to edit over time. It's like I can have several of me to think, write and edit, spaced over time.
LLMs are like I have someone else to do some or all of the thinking and writing and editing. So I do less thinking.
A bicycle lets my own energy go father. Writing.
A car lets me use an entirely different energy source. LLMs.
Which one is better for my physical fitness?
Btw the idea about Tolstoy and others keeping those massive books in their head and cranking them out over a month is fascinating. Any evidence or others who imagine the same?
In Tolstoy's case, he was a count and surely had the funds, no?
I’ve read Tolstoy’s diaries and he mentions the thought process he uses to write small novels. First he thinks about what should happen, then he writes (or dictates) the text. Thinking takes a few weeks, sometimes a month, then writing is pretty quick. There is some editing, but nothing like we do nowadays.
Bigger novels such as war and peace were written episodically.
About the farmer needing to change jobs, in the interview that is the subject of this thread Ilya Sutskever speaks with wonder about humans' ability to generalize their intelligence across different domains with very little training. Cheaper food prices could mean people eat out or order-in more and then some ex-farmers might enter restaurant or food preparation businesses. People would still be getting wealthier, even without the tailwind of a growing population.
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