I’m inclined to believe that call center employees don’t have a lot of incentive to do a good job/care, so a lossy AI could quite plausibly be higher quality than a human
For many years now, every time I have to talk with someone on a call centre there has been a survey at the end with at least two questions:
1. Would you recommend us?
2. Was the agent helpful?
I have a friend who used to work at a call centre and would routinely get the lowest marks on the first item and the highest on the second. I do that when the company has been shitty but I understand the person on the line really made an effort to help.
Obviously, those ratings go back to the supervisor and matter for your performance reviews, which can make all the difference between getting a raise or being fired. If anything, call centre employees have a lot of incentive to do a good job if they have any intention of keeping it, because everything they do with a customer is recorded and scrutinised.
Fair point, though I think “did I accurately summarize a conversation” is much harder to check/get away with vs “did I piss off the person on the other end”
Also it should be easy to correct some obvious mistakes in less convoluted discussions. Also, prob a support call is less complex than eg a group meeting by many aspects, and with a prob larger margin of acceptable errors.
The claim here is that the tech innovation is occurring in the US. It adds value globally, but most of the profits from that value are being realized in the US b/c the innovation is by US companies.
There’s no natural law that says technical innovation must occur in NA, but due to contingent historical conditions, it is occurring here. Thus, the gains are being realized in the US stock market b/c it’s the one capitalizing the winners.
>It adds value globally, but most of the profits from that value are being realized in the US
this is contradictory. profits are added value. if value is added globally, there are extra profits (likely as cost savings by other industries adopting tech)
I work with a bunch of functional programmers. We went through most of “category theory for programmers.” We had support from a math PhD.
Broad consensus was it was a waste of time. Functional programming has taken the useful bits, and some of the less useful bits. The rest is arcanum, and as useful to programming as astronomy
(Tries to fight the urge to explain, fails) it’s a construct to sequence async interactions, one after the other, without blocking. It’s very similar to c# or python’s await
The simple answer here is that the boards actions stood to incinerate millions of dollars of wealth for most of these employees, and they were up in arms.
They’re all acting out the intended incentives of giving people stake in a company: please don’t destroy it.
I don’t understand how the fact they went from a nonprofit into a for-profit subsidiary of one of the most closed-off anticompetitive megacorps in tech is so readily glossed over. I get it, we all love money and Sam’s great at generating it, but anyone who works at OpenAI besides the board seems to be morally bankrupt.
Pretty easy to complain about lack of morals when it’s someone else’s millions of dollars of potential compensation that will be incinerated.
Also, working for a subsidiary (which was likely going to be given much more self-governance than working directly at megacorp), doesn’t necessarily mean “evil”. That’s a very 1-dimensional way to think about things.
We can acknowledge that it's morally bankrupt, while also not blaming them. Hell, I'd probably do the same thing in their shoes. That doesn't make it right.
If some of the smartest people on the planet are willing to sell the rest of us out for Comfy Lifestyle Money (not even Influence State Politics Money), then we are well and truly Capital-F Fucked.
We already know some of the smartest people are willing to sell us out. Because they work for FAANG ad tech, spending their days figuring out how to maximize the eyeballs they reach while sucking up all your privacy.
> Pretty easy to complain about lack of morals when it’s someone else’s millions of dollars of potential compensation that will be incinerated.
That is a part of the reason why organizations choose to set themselves up as a non-profit, to help codify those morals into the legal status of the organization to ensure that the ingrained selfishness that exists in all of us doesn’t overtake their mission. That is the heart of this whole controversy. If OpenAI was never a non-profit, there wouldn’t be any issue here because they wouldn’t even be having this legal and ethical fight. They would just be pursuing the selfish path like all other for profit businesses and there would be no room for the board to fire or even really criticize Sam.
I guess my qualm is that this is the cost of doing business, yet people are outraged at the board because they’re not going to make truckloads of money in equity grants. That’s the morally bankrupt part in my opinion.
If you throw your hands up and say, “well kudos to them, theyre actually fulfilling their goal of being a non profit. I’m going to find a new job”. That’s fine by me. But if you get morally outraged at the board over this because you expected the payday of a lifetime, that’s on you.
Easy to see how humans would join a non profit for the vibes, and then when they create one of the most compelling products of the last decade worth billions of dollars, quickly change their thinking into "wait, i should get rewarded for this".
Wild the employees will go back under a new board and the same structure, first priority should be removing the structure that allowed a small group of people to destroy things over what may have been very petty reasons.
Well it's a different group of people and that group will now know the consequences of attempting to remove Sam Altman. I don't see this happening again.
Kudos to Krystal for trying this out. As I've been working on a globally distributed team lately, I've been reflecting that while I only get 4-6 good hours of programming in a day, the value of everyone working the same 8 hours is really about being able to coordinate.
I used to share a similar position until I realized: drugs are bad, actually, and there should be substantial friction in making them available to people.
Disincentivizing drug consumption is a good thing. The war on drugs obviously leads to some absurdities - e.g. drug cartels, unnecessary incarceration - and I much prefer the Portuguese model.
But making fentanyl in particular available in the grocery store would be bad; some substantial number of people would die who wouldn't have died otherwise. Some substantial number of people who would never have tried fentanyl would give it a try.
Some sensible balance needs to be struck between a free society and preventing people from e.g. leaving live landmines in their parking lots. Doing things which inevitably kill people/mess up their lives without active violence is still bad, and should be heavily discouraged.
What led to your realization that "drugs are bad", and does that include all external consciousness altering substances? (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, THC, and so on).
Can't speak for somebody else's post, but addiction ruins lives, not only yours but also possibly the people around you, and leads people to other criminal behavior.
It's perfectly legal to obtain and use alcohol for example, but alcoholism is an insidious evil disease.
Sure, yet you'll probably find no-one who is destroying lives (their own or others) for caffeine. THC is certainly a more mixed bag, but at the very least you will never die from it. So "drugs are bad" is just too much of a blanket term, and we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage. In addition, the illegal market shifts those dangers quite significantyl. Someone can take morphine for the rest of their lives with out much of any bodily harm, but in an illegal market it can be deadly quickly and procurement leads to much pain and harm. Last but not least, humanity will never not want to use drugs, no matter what we do, so we need to come up with harm reduction that is effective (which includes regulation, education and probably also includes doing away with prohibition).
yeah, definitely. "Drugs are bad, actually" is decidedly an over simplification. For the record my drugs of choice are SSRIs, caffeine, and mushrooms.
Full agree with everything you're saying here. The less oversimplified realization I had: In the pros/cons of "Should drugs be fully legalized?" I was counting only the negative aspects of making drugs illegal, not the negative aspects of legalization. I expect others make this error too, so "drugs are bad, actually" is intended as a pithy corrective, less a broad ethical directive.
The specific causes of this realization: the accruing evidence of the downsides of THC, and the easy access of teenagers to extremely potent weed. The ditch weed I bought from Curtis behind The Globe coffee shop in high school simply had less potential for harm.
> we should probably come up with better terminology that correctly reflects addiction potential and intrinsic and extrinsic damage
Full agree. Really there are complex policy trade offs here. I don't pretend to know optimal solutions, and agree that arriving at optimal solutions is unlikely via an extremely polarized discourse.
Drugs that kill or otherwise destroy your life are very bad. Other drugs that don’t do that are probably much less bad, and we should allow things somewhere that fall under a line between not bad and very bad. Where that line exists is a matter of current debate.
> Fashioning himself as a cultural preservationist rather than an opportunistic pilferer, Latchford knowingly purchased looted statues and stones from ancient sites of worship
Honestly, I think buying and selling looted artifacts from the Khmer Rouge regime seems at least morally neutral.
> Year Zero (Khmer: ឆ្នាំសូន្យ, Chhnăm Sony [cʰnam soːn]) is an idea put into practice by Pol Pot in Democratic Kampuchea that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and that a new revolutionary culture must replace it starting from scratch
The article really doesn't give a good explanation of why Latchford's actions are bad in context.
The same issue arises over and over. Like the destruction of antiquities by religious radicals in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's good to round up antiquities at risk and export them, but with the right provenance and to suitable institutions to hold with a public display of that provenance, so that when an appropriate time comes, they can be returned. I.e. treat it as "borrowing" or "safe-keeping".
Not just take it and sell it to unscrupulous buyers who will keep it.
How would you like it if someone swooped down on your house in advance of a hurricane and said "hey, your house is going to get destroyed anyway; why don't I take your appliances and electronics and sell them to other interested parties for my profit? After all, you won't be able to use them while you don't have a home, so what's the harm?"
Holding artifacts for safe-keeping is a nice idea in theory, but in practice has been used as a way to justify retaining colonial-era thefts long after any reasonable concerns have subsided.
This has been cited for the Elgin marbles for example, and US museums for indigenous cultural artifacts, and even by the Germans in WW2 to justify keeping things like the Ishtar gate as they were being bombed.
Agreed. Maoists (which the Khmer were) would bulldoze two thousand year old cultural sites. They were simple minded communists and could care less...Some of the most complex and distributed forms of government in the history of human kind existed in ancient china and these maoist boneheads wiped a lot of that history out of existence.
1. who gets to decide whether the owners of something get to destroy it or not?
2. the west has zero claim to any of it regardless of the circumstances. even if you think its justifiable to take it for preservation, what right do you have to keep it if it can be safely returned?
Possession is 9 tenths of the law. What right do you have to all the metal, diamonds, gold, oil etc that you're using right now if it can be safely returned?
say Latchford now goes to occupied parts of Ukraine and buys up all their atifacts from the Russian regime and sells them around in order to preserve them
not only would he symbolically support the Russian regime by uprooting Ukrainian cultural heritage from the area, but he'd also support it financially by buying the stuff in the first place
