The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the

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So AI leaders promise that investing trillions into data centers will lead to a cure for cancer and various other downstream benefits, without stopping to think about how these inputs will translate into the desired outputs. It also leads them to support some extreme policies, such as investment in AI science at the expense of human scientists, and... See more

How bad could it be? If you ask the researchers at Anthropic, even if progress stalls out here, current algorithms will automate all white collar work within the next five years: it’s just a matter of collecting the relevant data and spoonfeeding it to the models. In the worst-case scenario, highly repetitive manual labour becomes the last frontier... See more