At the moment I'm pretty inclined to hang up if I feel I'm wasting my time with a robot.
But maybe soon we will not even realise we speak to a robot, given the current speed of ai development.
I wonder how that will erode trust in calls. I moved from cold emailing and cold LinkedIn to cold calling because of the massive amounts of ai spam I have to compete with. But maybe cold calling will die soon as well if the robots emerge.
I've been car shopping recently, and it took me a full week to realize that every dealership I'd talked to had an LLM with a fake name handling customer intake. I was 4 emails deep with one before I stopped to think about how plausible their near-instant response times were.
I see a lot of different opinions here, from very positive to very negative.
I think the answer is, it's both.
When I was an employee sometimes I was happy, like when a promotion was lurking, and sometimes I was unhappy and stressed, when getting fired, when facing deadlines, ....
But when I started working for myself the amplitude of emotions became way stronger, every week I would fluctuate between feeling doomed forever or feeling like a genius.
Life with and without kids is the same: The emotional highs of having kids are way higher than anything I experienced without kids, but sometimes the lows are very low.
People can also have very different experiences because kids can be very different.
My kids have been really easy, no big problems, but sometimes I see other parents dealing with really serious issues with their kids.
It starts with babies, some of them sleep easily while other cry all the time, to teenagers who can be nice kids with no problem at school to being called to the director's office all the time and have to seriously worry about their future.
“Show me the incentive and i’ll show you the outcome”
I’ve learned a long time ago that we’re not always aware of how incentives drive our own behavior, it just happens naturally. This is exactly what’s happening with housing.
Our goal shouldn’t be to be coal free. Our goal should be to be 100% renewable.
If we set up our goals in terms of what we don’t want, we end up in the situation we are right now: high energy costs, very dependent on energy imports and a high risk of loosing our industry
No, our goal is to reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible.
Shutting down coal plants is a quick and easy win, as pretty much every possible replacement is less polluting. It might even make sense to replace them with gas turbines: base load today, peaker plant tomorrow, emergency source later on.
Reducing is frivolous today. We will break through the tipping point in 2030. This will be the coolest century this millennium. There's no way to stop it. We needed to shut down emissions years ago. The only thing we can do proactively is invest in moon-shot tech such as fusion and ocean wave generation and wait for the planet to recover.
> This will be the coolest century this millennium.
While you are making predictions 975 years out, could we see your projected graph of human population? Time estimate for establishment of a permanent extraterrestrial colony?
Coal is about as dirty as it gets (besides peat and lignite). _Even if you were not reducing CO2 output_, getting rid of coal would be greatly beneficial as you'd reduce COPD and other lung diseases.
I am not sure it's a matter of how you frame the issue, to be honest, although I have seen this argument used quite a lot.
100% renewables is the exact opposite of "100% non-renewables" and that's including also oil, gas, etc. So "coal" is only a part of the 100% non renewables, but it seems your goal is to get rid of all the non renewables.
And here the question is: why would you want a single goal? Why 100% renewable?
What drives us should be: save where it makes sense, don't where it doesn't. Iterate every 10 years and recheck.
All these single radical goals are literally killing our economy and society. And I am not just talking about coal free or renewable.
Even the "let's tear down the windfarms" is dumb because it's radical and non sense.
Or unrelated, even this "we need to digitalize everything" (although given our jobs we would profit the most) can lead to a lot of problems (privacy, security, etc).
I don't know why we have become so radical in the last 20 years.
> And here the question is: why would you want a single goal? Why 100% renewable?
Overlapping goals can coexist on varying time frames.
Setting aside nuclear (technically not "renewable", but also not carbon-based, and very energy dense) the goal is to stop releasing CO2 into the air from energy generation and return to pre-industrial levels.
This is because the surplus of CO2 generated so far has already caused clear and undeniable problems (not all of which are yet fully realized), and continued excess will only make things worse.
> What drives us should be: save where it makes sense, don't where it doesn't. Iterate every 10 years and recheck.
Solar is already economically competitive in many places and is expected to improve further.
Amsterdam also declared war against fatbikes. There are plenty of electrical bikes in Amsterdam, but only fatbikes are the problem according to the Amsterdam City Government.
It seems they are targeted as a proxy for the people who drive them, which are generally younger people.
Maybe every year we should ban the car brands with most accidents. Kinda the same idea?
Innovation brings a golden age, then innovation flattens, competition arises and branding becomes more important
Flying was having its golden age around the times of Concorde and 747, coffee bars were great when Starbucks reinvented the 3rd place and social media was cool when it just came out
It very much relates to that Steve Jobs clip about what happens when the marketing people take over the company
Many countries have avoided the complete brand/chain-ification of the US market.
Cafes and coffee places are still great, Starbucks did for them what McDonalds did for food. They're a known standard of quality. It might be low, but it's known. Starbucks didn't invent the 3rd place, or re-invent it.
As jobs moved from manufacturing to services, more people were able to work in a way that the "3rd place" offers. The ultimate extension of that is WFH.
The actual planes are much better today than in the "golden age ... of Concorde and 747", what ruined it was the security theater as a result of 9/11, and the race to the bottom of the service offerings.
Business classes (especially international and Asian airlines) is much much better, economy has more services (individual entertainment, USB, power etc), better seats, but much worse seat pitches, and nickel-and-diming every item possible (ticket transfers/changes, luggage, seat selection, meals, etc).
So not so much "Brand Age" for air travel, it's more a stratification.
> The actual planes are much better today than in the "golden age ... of Concorde and 747"
Although if what I learnt from QI is to be believed[0], the internal air quality is now much worse than when smoking was allowed because they don't recycle the air through filters as much (if at all) these days.
[0] I believe they're about 90% reliable with their "wacky" facts.
Very likely part of their bots output. The ultimate goal isn’t to make useful things, but to “teach” others how to do it and convince them how successful they can become.
There’s a whole new genre of blog posts that are just “finally thanks to AI everyone will know how smart I am. Watch in awe as I tell something to do stuff for me”
reply