Actually, there's a sweet solution to the writing and art crisis we are inflicting ourselves with in our AI craze. I call it "the island". Just find a nice tiny islet somewhere, make a few houses, and rent them by the week to writers/artists. No internet in the place. Rent out sanctioned devices; glorified typewriters without Internet access nor GPU nor CPU fast enough to run an LLM. Bring a notary to certify stuff was purely human-made. Have fun with like-minded individuals.
I always thought that the best we could do for targeted drug delivery was an adenovirus. But after seeing that parasite being only slightly bigger than a red blood cell, I think we can do better...
Even if they are a terrible idea, we should try it out. Specially if paid with private equity. Imagine the things we will learn, the STEM jobs this will create[^1], and the fact we will bootstrap other industries.
[^1]: Provided that ChatGPT doesn't hoard all of them :-)
I don't know, even ChatGPT 5.1 hallucinates API's that don't exist, though it's a step forward in that it also hallucinates the non existence of APIs that exist.
But I reckon that every time that humans have been able to improve their information processing in any way, the world has changed. Even if all we get is to have an LLM be right more times than it is wrong, the world will change again.
I often think what would happen if somebody were to engineer some sort of quasi universal cure to cancer, and they were to do it out of desperation. Say the cure works, and then this person wanted for it to reach more people right now. Would they become fugitives? Would the long arm of the law chase them to the confines of the world? What would the drugs lobby do if the billions of investment they must throw into drug certification are jeopardized by some Rambo?
I know for a fact that at least one of those companies also installs SIM cards in all their busses.
The only difference is who could potentially use the backdoor, and yes Sweden seems slightly less poised to attack Norway than China. At least these days. Because, let's face it, the Swedes owned Norway back in the day and them wanting their oil-rich lucky cousin back at home is deranged but not as much as the Chinese wanting the fjords....
I was thinking the same yesterday. We should all be busy curing cancer, becoming young forever and building space habitats. Instead...
It has to be said though that all the three things above are feared/considered taboo/cause for mocking, while making a quick buck at the cost of poisoning the commons gives universal bragging rights. Go figure.
This is very well thought-out. But if regulation has such power, shouldn't we find better ways to use it?
Yeah, I know, it's very hard to craft good legislation. In fact, there's this problem of agency: the will to have things be a certain way is not always in the humans, or does not always emanate from the direct needs of the people. Many of the problems of modern capitalism are because there's emergent agency from non-human things, i.e. corporations. In the case of US, agency emerging from the corporate world has purportedly sequestered democracy. But there also agency emerging from frenzied political parties that define themselves as opposition to each other with a salted no-mans-land in the middle. This emerging agency thing is not new; it existed before in other institutions, e.g. organized religion. In any case, the more things there are vying for power, the less power people have to govern themselves in a way that is fair.
With AI, there's a big chance we will at least super-charge non-human agency, and that if we can avoid the AIs themselves developing agency of their own.
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