pj_mukh

"I can't take a scan of myself"

Radiologists don't do this, that's just rad techs. There's specifically been an explosion in the need for AI review of real radiology analysis and handling complex patient situations.

I think the most likely situation with AI lawyers is simply Jevon's paradox. We'll simply ask for lawyer support in 1000's of more situations where we didn't before.

It's so counter-intuitive that even seasoned AI researchers get it wrong. It happened to radiologists, it's about to happen to Lawyers too [1].

[1]:https://fortune.com/2026/05/04/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hint...

The professionalization of rubber ducking. I like it.

I think we get hung up on definitions and end conditions when we are more likely to feel the effects of the asymptotic regions ala AGI or Full Automation

The exact situation I laid out: “If it takes 10 construction workers at $60,000/annum to build one home, I can forsee the descendants of current AI tech enabling 10 construction workers at $150,000/annum building 5 homes in the same time with an even larger profit margin for the corporation involved.”

Is the most likely condition if we let this technology grow healthily with the exact “full automation” end condition being beyond the point of diminishing returns.

This is a lot of very wealthy workers building products for a lot of people with revenue growing but margins plateauing and therefore absolute profits growing as well. This is an exact repeat of the Industrial Revolution situation,

If it’s a monopoly yes. But there are massive profits in full automation. I’m not expecting costs to go to zero but it’s the only pathway to things getting cheaper by a lot.

"At this point, tech biz leaders are massively over-reaching and trying to influence the rest of us:"

I realize this is what's happening on the headlines, but most of the technology being "deployed" is back-office automation, robotics etc. that no one writes about and none of the tech baddies have monopolistic control over. I refuse to let muxk, thiel, Karp to run the conversation and setup the reaction either. It is exciting and dramatic but not necessarily influential.

"by providing food or housing" vs "if it was used to increase profits"

Why..not both? I know this question is naive, but there is nothing that "hard-codes" AI to only increase profits at the cost of providing food or housing for much cheaper prices. Yes a Private equity firm could later insert itself and jack up prices and play such games, but that isn't baked into the technology itself.

And as such, the technology seems the wrong thing to be litigating.

Than an even better question for the pope is:

If a technology existed that reduced the cost of producing a critical thing (think food, housing, medical care) down to near zero, however, it made the humans currently building the thing redundant, should we build it? Would it be okay to use the hyper-optimization power of Capitalism to build such a technology faster?

Under this logic, would the Pope have built a Hammer? a Knife?

I am hoping the Pope has a cleaner view of AI quietly automating the drudgery in the back offices and not just robot dogs with machine guns. And with that view, should we build it?

I would love for the Pope to answer this question:

If a technology existed that reduced the cost of producing a critical thing (think food, housing, medical care) down to near zero, however, it made the humans currently building the thing redundant, should we build it? Would it be okay to use the hyper-optimization power of Capitalism to build such a technology faster?

Before someone yells at me about this not being the current situation, I think that is the endgame of most of this AI development and in fact the endgame is even more comforting: If it takes 10 construction workers at $60,000/annum to build one home, I can forsee the descendants of current AI tech enabling 10 construction workers at $150,000/annum building 5 homes in the same time with an even larger profit margin for the corporation involved.

But as a clear moral quandary, I think the Pope should consider the first situation.

"promises are pretty scammy in that they may be true at some point in time"

You think the Frontier lab revenue reports are faked? [1]

[1]: https://cryptobriefing.com/anthropic-revenue-surge-10-billio...

The value in building creative tools (esp writing) for writers and educators will be a rounding error compared to all the back office automation that is eating the lion shares of tokens. I just don’t think the media or mainstream thought is even aware of this because you don’t “see” it like that AI slop advertisement.

"AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs."

This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away.

My point stands, they're in for a Rude awakening.

This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them.

Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.

And moreover,

The headline is backwards, the companies cutting headcount for AI have already lost, that's why they're cutting. Most of these companies are losing market share or are in dying markets and need to cut headcount. They're just blaming AI because it's convenient and forward-looking.

"Don't they have simulators to test every weird and unexpected road condition offline? "

I remember when this was brought up in a Cruise (RIP) crash. The situation was that another human driver had hit and run a pedestrian who had been flung across the street and under a Cruise self-driving car. The cars were getting complaints for making too many emergency stops in the middle of the street, so it dutifully dragged the lady in the under-carriage a couple of more feet to get off to the side of the road.

Suffice to say that that had not coming up in simulation.

P.S: Lady survived but the Human hit and run driver is still at large. No one wrote about them or cared.

Do these major publications charge per article? They should, but they don't. So their whole sell is that in aggregate (so access to all, including old articles) they are worth paying monthly for.

In which case archive is a major revenue slumper

Isn’t their explicit claim that they’re doing this to extend battery life? I thought this was already litigated?

Of course they could give the user options but then they could also let the user swap batteries. Those are just not things Apple does.

The Jevon's paradox of personal projects. Amazing.

Are you sure you didn't run out credits and set effort to low? This exact thing happened to me when I did that. It just became, kinda lazy.

Wait but that’s the crux of his argument that he was “wronged”. Not “wronged but only once xAI started competing with OpenAI”. He can’t prove the former, if the latter is true.

If anyone is/was truly still wronged by OpenAI changing corporate structure they are still able to sue and prove damages. Yet surprisingly no one has come forward on this.

“There are federal laws about schools and their agents recording students as it relates to their education”

And there is no indication that the professor here planned to violate any of them.

“How do you think things like Flock came to be?”

Not from a benign study about better teaching methods, or of anything akin to it. Video is a rich data source. I hope researches get to use it more. I’m not selling all that out just because one completely unrelated private company misuses data.

You can’t guarantee any of that in any footage taken in public. Or public school.

Just a good faith attempt.

Again just want to point out this is a university researcher trying to measure better ways to teach kids not Flock trying to get started early on their school to prison pipeline. I feel like we’ve lost the plot here.

We don’t have to make that number a goal. Contrary to popular pessimistic thought, not everything we measure becomes a goal. Most things we measure are actually ignored.

I think to pre-emptively disregard research like this because “well it could be misused” is folly

“ material for commercial AI products”

Where was there any indication this was that?

"The goal of this study is to better understand children’s everyday learning experiences and to develop Al tools that can help assess classroom interaction quality"

This..feels like a worthy goal. Just switch the study to opt-in instead of opt-out and 404media can't get the "ER-MEH-GERD AI" click bait. This is not generative AI and the lead-researcher is an early-childhood education specialist [1].

My kid went to a UC Berkeley adjacent pre-school and had researchers come by all the time, filming and taking notes (after consent forms were signed). They would share their studies with us later, it was very illuminating.

[1]: https://education.uw.edu/about/directory/gail-e-joseph

Actual generous interpretation: The adaptation required as workplaces adopt AI is the same as the ones immigrants have to go through in a new country. There's new modes of thinking, new workflows and an expanded surface of responsibility. Those that expect an easy definable role they can plug themselves into, to get the comfortable jobs (tm) of yesterday will not find those readily. They are there though, they just look different. The working immigrant (usually) doesn't find a spot for them to plug into, they have to hustle and adapt to find such a spot.

Corporate bosses have been screaming for more "hustle-y" employees for decades so that is nothing new.

Not for long [1].

[1]: https://openthemagazine.com/india/the-baby-slump-the-fear-of...

I get into the this conversation a lot, when you point out the obvious historical context to "all this change", the response is always "Oh so you want to do nothing?" or "helpless to stop what's happening". That's not the implication of historical context. But it screams for a change in narrative, we aren't helpless, we live in the greatest time, and it can be even greater.

If we are to continue the march of civilization our algorithmic feed driven mania would just be just a blip. But if we give into the hysteria, I am afraid this is the beginning of the end. Our birth rate is dwindling because people are anxious [1], posts like this are not helping.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/opinion/birthrate-kids-pa...

I think the March of Capitalism has been (at least in part) to make the luxuries of yore become commodified middle-class must-haves.

150 years ago, only the lords could afford a wash-up man, a laundry man, a cook, a tailor, a night out at the theater. Now we have airfryers, instant pots, fast fashion, washing machines, dishwashers and Netflix.

What does that look like for a Humboldtian education?