The article is quite confusing for starting with examples of travel accidents which will have a strong human cause but tries to make a case for a AI-only disaster. There is still a strong human factor in every AI tool, for example the best answers come when the model can search for human content. Perhaps humans searching for an AI-only disaster is just a means to shed responsibility from the humans? That seems far more dangerous than anything AI can do.
It's not surprising at all because I guess as one would expect, schoolyard rules applies in a game, not company rules. Seniority is still going strong at school, perhaps since the age difference is low or because there is lower opportunity for merit-based respect.
At companies, basically everyone should be speaking polite Japanese regardless of seniority. Harassment has been a big deal and companies have gotten a lot stricter on it these past years, so at large corporations there will be far less of senior members talking down to low members as did happen before. One reason companies can change like this is at most, HR is a much stronger org than product, i.e. the ideal career path for a manager tends to be to move from product to HR, at least at the ones we wouldn't refer to as "tech companies".
SMBs will still feel quite old though since they don't have strong HR like the big companies. I don't know much about government but do have the impression that they would also still have these issues. But I think corporate Japan has gotten a lot better than you might be thinking.
It's normal - at least for the big US companies, even with a large presence the culture is highly American. I remember when a VP of APAC sent a org email expressing strong feelings about the Black Lives Matter protests, and it was quite awkward since that wasn't really an issue discussed outside the US - he couldn't even understand how it couldn't be an issue for everyone.
Getting to hit the culture filter very early in interviews is probably a better outcome than ending up at the company and feeling awkward, not sure how intentional that is though.
Sometimes there aren't multiple sides, especially when it comes to science reporting. You have fact-based reporting, and then you have conspiracy theories.
How would you handle news where there is sufficient evidence to show one set of reporting is accurate and relatively unbiased, but another report is all made up and designed to inflame its audience?
In this example it sounds like there are multiple sides, just that one is baseless. Even these though I have found come from somewhere, maybe a misunderstanding or a conflation of unrelated topics. While not unlikely intentional on the author's side, the readers are not so sinister I think. Being able to read this while grounded with the other more factual side helps when discussing with those I may otherwise generally disagree with. It has felt somewhat like language learning, understanding it helps with communication with people with a very different background.
Admittedly it takes more time to do this, and I can see not being able to invest that in a general sense. I personally think it's worth it.
That's rarely the case with science reporting. The subjects that are sufficiently rigorous to allow no reasonable debate (the physical sciences) are rarely political enough to inspire unreasonable debate.
On the other hand, the subjects that are politically contentious are not rigorous and leave plenty of room for reasonable debate.
If anything, science reporting tends to err the other way, uncritically reporting sensational results that contradict one other, have not been confirmed, or fail to replicate.
I rarely see a popular science article that doesn't report the results of a single experiment as if they were instantly established fact.
I agree with what you say about sensationalist science reporting. It's very common to take one study and then have dummies who aren't scientists report on it as if we've just found out how to live forever. Science is very tricky because it's complicated and the barrier to entry is high - you can't just extrapolate things out like that.
However, there's also the other side of things, which is mostly established science. Which, you're right, don't typically spark political debate... but they do sometimes. Vaccines, climate change, cholesterol, seed oils. The RFK Jr faction of anti-science is rife these days.
I'm not familiar with all the details of RFK Jr's position, the public debate about it, nor how many of the things reported in the news are accurate (truth being the first casualty of politics).
But I just looked for those topics in the official Make America Healthy Again report [1].
The positions in that report on those topics were not so unreasonable. It says seed oils are a concern because they are ultra-processed fats, only mentions cholesterol in the context of PFAS, and says "vaccines benefit children by protecting them from infectious diseases" but we may not need to give children nearly 30 doses of them.[2]
I do think his general position that processed food is unhealthy is not only reasonable, it generally matches conventional modern medical thinking, even if he is wrong about a few details.
And of course people looking for political ammunition only look for details they can use against him.
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