> COVID dropped US life expectancy by about 2 years.
It was a temporary blip. The most recent life expectancy numbers, published last month by the CDC, show that the life expectancy in the US rebounded, and it is at a historical all time high, for both sexes:
There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy, nor any so effective at destruction as a malevolent one.
If our democracy is sufficiently broken, if supermajority voter policy preferences continue to be dismissed by both parties, it might be that we just cannot survive under the old Constitutional order. The Right's open move towards a post-democratic future, and the proceduralist Center's continued failure to fully utilize their popular mandate to fix things that need fixing, implicitly authorizes a Left to develop that is more obsessed with expression of the popular will and with good governance, than it is with a 250 year old bureaucratic structure and "norms". Norms of restraint are a consensual exercise, and cannot persist unilaterally.
The way things are going, the trajectory, make even most 20th century hereditary monarchies look pretty decent. Especially ones that devolve most power to parliamentary bodies.
> There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy
Autocracies have lots of issues around eg building a sufficiently capable bureaucracy that isn't too corrupt to do things. It can make it harder, not easier. Democracy can lean on democratic legitimacy, constitutional traditions, and a history of allowing power transitions without anyone losing their heads or launching a civil war over it. Those are all really useful things that autocracies have to cope without. It's not like it's easy mode.
All of those can be mooted by the sort of dysfunction currently on offer.
Almost every bill for the past 15 years has been filibustered. More than half the Supreme Court is part of an organized partisan conspiracy, and a third has worked specifically fighting election laws to advantage their guy. The DHS stands as a rogue paramilitary that can be deployed when politically convenient as de facto martial law, the DOJ openly persecuting ethnically defined political opponents and daring Congress to do anything about it, when they're not trying to charge Congresspeople with crimes. People are being disappeared into concentration camps. We are unilaterally withdrawing from the military and economic empire that has served us since the 1940's, in the name of ethnic hatreds and Hitlerian brinksmanship. The economy now has more to do with the Fed chair than any pathetic exchange of goods and services we can string together.
This doesn't end well, and it's broken enough already that a return to Biden/Obama/Clinton type leadership couldn't possibly hope to fix it unless they can lock down leadership for the next couple generations; More damage can be done in a month than they can fix in four years. "Just win every election from now until the end of time" isn't a real strategy.
I don't know what comes next, but if we choose to burn the house down today rather than practice good maintenance, the next homeowner cannot succeed by employing good maintenance.
Similarly, if the neighbor burns your house down deliberately because he hates you, and you start the rebuild process without doing anything about your neighbor's existence, you shouldn't be surprised if you end up with more ashes.
> There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy
This is untrue.
The world is so complex that a single person or group can adapt and develop fast enough. We've seen what happens to planned economies. Their ineffectiveness is not due to malevolence.
Distribution of power not only serves as a protection to autocratic takeover but allows the system to be more flexible. The concentration of power can make some things more efficient but you trade flexibility.
Your sentence seems to imply that we will delegate all AI decisions to one person who can decide how he wants to use it - to build or destroy.
Strong agentic AIs are a death sentence memo pad (or a malevolent djinn lamp if you like) that anyone can write on, because the tools will be freely available to leverage. A plutonium breeder reactor in every backyard. Try not to think of paperclips.
Indeed, investors left to their own devices act in this way. Underlying such a single point-of-failure is an implied but immense hope and thus pressure for stability. I wonder what the prediction markets saying about current levels of geopolitical stability in Taiwan?
We don't even get that far in the US. It has been largely verboten in "nonpartisan" life, either socially or by dint of an active purge in eg academia and Hollywood, to discuss anything beneficial coming out of Soviet, Chinese, or Cuban administrations.
A partisan Republican will reliably interrupt you to shout nonsense, as if admitting a single positive outcome is trying to deceive them. As if a cost-benefit analysis can just be cut in half. As if these were not just authoritarian/totalitarian, but completely lacking domestic support.
This outcome was achieved with a great deal of money and propaganda over more than a century.
I often compare systems in terms of how well they tolerate adversity. To oversimplify, it feels like top-down command-and-control communism suffers under one powerful corrupting force. Capitalism can suffer from many kinds of market failures which get exacerbated when corrupt people in the surrounding government gain power.
At a distance, I've started to view disorganized, inefficient messes of systems as not all that bad in the grand scheme, because chaotic systems are often harder to co-opt.
If you get the MRI you are performing simultaneous blind tests for a thousand rare, unsuspected conditions. The blood test only tests for one of them, and eats 10ml of blood. There isn't enough blood in your body for all those tests.
We should arguably be, in an ideal healthcare system, getting annual MRIs with the other typical tests in a physical, and feeding that data into an AI, and have the AI issue recommendations for informed hazard & secondary testing/biopsy priorities. Tomographic analysis and differential diagnosis is exactly the sort of multidimensional pattern recognition task an AI is great at compared to a human doctor, if you can provide the training data.
Normalizing an annual MRI is the biomedical equivalent to survey astronomy and opening up those gargantuan datasets - you expect lots of simultaneous serendipitous discoveries in unrelated areas without securing an organizational mandate to fund a dedicated research effort into each one of them. The worst the process is ever going to be diagnostically is right now before we're collecting any data in a concerted fashion - every bit of training improves it.
The heuristic isn't going away because we have limited time. Let's say you can clock AI in the first paragraph.
There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good.
That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out.
People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.
I don't care as much about the combat as about the efficiency.
That's a big wing airfoil, and it's cheap foam, and it's not as mechanically complex as a helicopter. There is potential here for low-speed heavy lift. I wish they'd included a scale-up of batteries from "Tiny" to "Too heavy to loft", with sustained in place hover times and watts per kilogram as the performance metric.
That guy is 3 parts genius and two parts absolute madman. He's like Lilienthal and if he's not going to be more careful he'll end up the same way. 15 meters is all it took. When you fail with aircraft it is better if they don't work at all. He is now getting into an area where the accidents will get more severe until he becomes more careful or ends up in the hospital or worse.
It was a benevolent AI takeover. It just required some robo-motorcycles with scythe blades to deal with obstacles.
Like the AI in "Friendship is Optimal", which aims to (and this was very carefully considered) 'Satisfy humanity's values through friendship and ponies in a consensual manner.'
And E2EE platforms like Mega are now being censored on some platforms specifically because they're E2EE, and so the name itself must be treated as CSAM.
As people who want to talk about words like "megabytes" or "megapixels" or "megaphones" or "Megaman" or "Megan" on Facebook are finding out.
The Fall dropped Russian life expectancy by six years for males and three years for females.
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