Or just implement vastly more automated ticketing systems. They are standard in many countries. They could be implemented with limited-purview privacy preserving architectures where that aligns with expectations and values.
But people speeding, driving aggressively, driving anti-socially (by trying to speed past lines and cut in at the front), running lights and stops... this could be squashed forever, saving lives and ultimately making life more pleasant for everyone.
But they won't be implemented with a privacy preserving architecture. They'll be outsourced to a third party with unknown privacy and security, and eventually be treated as a revenue generator, leading cities to implement rule changes that enhance revenue at the cost of privacy and safety.
It's so frustrating. These things are trivially solved. There's basically a 50/50 shot, every time the light cycles, that someone will illegally take a right on red on the street outside my house. All you need is a single cop sitting there and watching. Or just one camera! Argh.
As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.
So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.
Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.
Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.
Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.
So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?
Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"...
She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.
It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.
It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.
Various parts of their corporate structure and previous business/financial relationships are tied to the notion of “AGI” being achieved — which is poorly defined and likely to become a semantic/legal debate more than a scientific one.
So them pushing that language in their pr/marketing activity is not a surprise and not really even meant to be scientifically meaningful.
And as advertisers get declining human views on their ads, the value of the business model will dwindle until it needs to be replaced by other forms of revenue. Content that can't shift business models and requires revenue to continue will die off.
Edit: Maybe that's fine, maybe that's bad. Maybe new models will emerge and things will reshape. But I'm just supporting the case that AI agents will pressure the current "free" content economy.
I'm also and I pay for the services that I use to not see ads, but I don't pay for every single one. For example a local classified website is financed by ads, and I don't think anybody will pay for just looking at stuff there. Maybe they can switch to the model where the person puting the thing for sale would pay but hat is something where we are not currently.
I didn’t take that to be his point. I assume he says “economically efficient” because he means their strongest skillsets don’t have (m)any other uses and they wouldn’t be realizing their potential by leaving those skills unused.
He probably overstates that case, especially talking to early career interns that haven’t yet narrowed their specialization and could pivot to other highly quantitative roles that use other high level math.
He’s also probably flattering his audience, to whom “math research” is more likely to be status-bearing.
But people speeding, driving aggressively, driving anti-socially (by trying to speed past lines and cut in at the front), running lights and stops... this could be squashed forever, saving lives and ultimately making life more pleasant for everyone.