Jobs were already lost because of AI capital investments. None of the hyper scalers had the cash flow to support the target investment levels and had to reduce labor.
I disagree. I think that constitutional scholars have always known that it's not the written laws that hold the executive in check. Our system was designed so that the 3 branches would check each other. The Federalist Paper #51 explicitly calls this out - "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." [0]
The problem with any system like you are suggesting where "we need to stop letting lawyers write laws, and instead start writing verified programs" is the same as always - who enforces the law?
The cause of the dysfunction we have now is that congress has failed to check the power of the executive. Congress should have impeached and removed Donald Trump for treason and other high crimes after January 6th. He should have been convicted and felt the full force of the law around his neck for trying to interfere with the function of congress and overthrow the election.
Every problem we face with our government right now traces back to the same issue: Congress is not doing its job. Congress has the power to impeach and remove the president for threatening to nuke Iran. Congress has the power to stop the executive branch from starting illegal wars overseas. Congress has the power to punish ICE for executing citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.
Congress has failed to exercise this power for several reasons, a major one being that both the house and senate are no longer representative of the American people. The house has been limited in membership ever since the reapportionment act and the senate was always designed to favor wealthy landowners in slave states.
This results in placing massively disproportionate power in the hands of a tiny fraction of voters just because they live in the middle of nowhere, which in turn makes it very easy for the rich and powerful to game the system. There is no way forward for us as a country without reforming congress.
It isn't just congress failing to their job. We The People are also responsible for not ousting the freeloaders in congress who are taking our tax money and not doing the job they were elected to do.
We are the final check on making sure that government is serving us and not the other way around. The founders were pretty open about what they expected from us if that could no longer be accomplished within the framework they were putting into place. I'd like to think that we can still vote our way out of this problem, but I fear that between attempts from the government to suppress voters and the surprisingly large number of people content with the idea of a fascist dictator (so long as he's wearing their team's colors) we might have a hard time overcoming the fear, apathy, and learned helplessness in the rest of the population necessary to effectively insist on the changes we need.
I'm not very familiar with the American system, but aren't congress elections prone to gerrymandering which means they don't reflect too accurately the preferences of the people?
Gerrymandering is one the most powerful ways they suppress votes. They also like to do things like limit the number of polling places and put them out of the way with limited hours, pass laws that require documents many people don't have (while making those documents more difficult to obtain), removing the right to vote from people with criminal histories (while more aggressively policing and convicting the people/communities they don't want voting), spreading disinformation about voting dates/times/locations, creating confusing ballots, having heavy police presence at polling places and putting up speed traps/check points near them, making mail-in voting difficult or unreliable, and actively discourage participation with messaging about how voting doesn't accomplish anything or even that your support of a broken/corrupt system makes you complicit in it.
Even our two party/first past the post system discourages voting by limiting the choice people have in who they can realistically support in the first place.
I believe that the problem is that they also set up Congress with its own check, between two houses. They made it deliberately hard to pass legislation, which means they cannot effectively balance the other two branches.
Congress spent decades ceding power to the executive because it realized it could not do anything itself. And now it's stuck.
Even if US companies only had the US market, they'd be massive — Google gets ~50% of its revenue from the US alone, Amazon over 60% from North America, and most other Big Tech is in that same range. The US market by itself is plenty huge. And the EU provides 20-30% of US Big Tech revenue. Even losing all of that (very unlikely even under protectionist policies), US tech companies would be doing well, with 70-80% of their current revenue.
Sure, full-blown protectionism everywhere would make the world including the US poorer (less specialization, less division of labor), but it would also harm EU exports, as the US is the EU's biggest importer, and moreover it wouldn't change the factors behind the growing US-EU gap. US-EU trade policies with each other are basically the same. The difference is internal, and mostly comes down to the US just not sabotaging the private sector as much.
The EU did retaliate to Trump's tariffs with its own.
Anyway, I wasn't making a point about recent developments. I was talking about more long-term trends showing that why the US has outpaced EU in economic growth.
Hah, I have been thinking about trying to study LLM psychology, nice to see that Anthropic is taking it seriously, because the mathematical psychology tools that can be invented here are going to be stunning, I suspect.
Imagine coding up a brand new type of filter that is driven by computational psychology and validated interventions, etc
I assume you say that in jest, but back in the early '90s I was seriously considering getting a major in psychology and a minor in CS for the fairly hot Human Factors jobs.
It's still too early to tell, but it might make sense at some point. If because of symmetry and universality we decide that llms are a protected class, but we also need to configure individual neurons, that configuration must be done by a specialist.
It might simply reduce down to a big batch of sliders and filters no different than a fancy audio equalizer: Anthropic was operating on neurons in bulk using steering vectors, essentially, as I understand it.
That's what I thought standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. Pictures just do not do it justice. Same thing with Starship. My brain knows it's massive, yet feels underwhelmed looking at it on video. Musk should let his ego build replica Saturn V and a Shuttle next the Starship launch pad so there will be proper perspective available
Have you been to the rocket garden at KSC? The Saturn V isn't vertical, but they've got almost everything from the Redstone and later vertical. I was in Florida in 2018 and I think they were getting ready to display a pair of SRBs. They did have Atlantis inside, too. And of course a horizontal Saturn V.
I saw that Saturn V as a child once, too. I think that the Saturn V really made me the person that I am today. Seeing something so huge, that is literally engineered down to every last tenth of a millimeter - that was profound for a young child. I could not believe how detailed that rocket was, yet so huge. There should be an engineering term for the size of a machine divided by the smallest critical engineered component of the machine. I don't think any machine would have beat that in the Saturn V's day - maybe some ocean liners?
I've never been to KSC. I've been to Houston a few times. I couldn't imagine trying to have a Saturn V permanently standing would be an easy feat with both locations susceptible to hurricanes and tornadoes. Walking the length of it is still pretty impressive.
I come from a construction family, so I'd put some of the famous sky scrapers in that category too. Especially thinking about the crazy beam walkers like that famous photo of the guys riding the I-beam up eating their lunch on the way up.
I saw the one in Houston for the first time last week. It was so cool. My favorite spacecraft as a kid, but in real life it was about 4x as big as I expected.
A few years ago Spacex did a homage to that photo, with the crew working on the Starship. One of those amazing Human For Scale photos that emphasize just how huge that rocket is.
That's a great point. And it raises the question if we consider the nanometer scale features of the processor against the size of the rocket as a whole.
reply