The checks and balances do exist, they're just not being used. It took some extreme circumstances and decades of work for a single party to seize control of all the levers of government, and active collusion to continuously enable this level of dysfunction. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of people scattered across the various branches of federal government, both elected and career bureaucrats, who could put a stop to this at any time but choose not to. An extremely vocal, and not-insignificant sized chunk of the populace fanatically supports these actions. This is not a broken system, this is a fully functional well oiled machine being used skillfully to do horrible things.
Of course we did. We all switched from early social media sites that didn't employ such algorithms to those that did, and when new social media platforms came around we progressively moved to more algorithmic ones. Hell half the reason I switched from myspace to facebook was the opportunity to do all the facebook quizzes which were just "let's see how much information I can feed the algorithm". We all want a steady stream of content we find personally interesting and engaging, why wouldn't we? Our issue with most of these sites is when the algorithm fails to give us what we want, and we complain "I didn't ask to see this" but the fact is we are asking to see something, and we receive it often enough to stay on these platforms.
Speak for yourself. I was quite content with the separation of social life and video platforms/engagement media. And don't make it sound like poor Facebook was forced to invent algorithm because of users.
For context, Yoon is the 5th south korean president to serve a prison sentence; and a 6th committed suicide while under investigation, which is 42% of all korean presidents.
He's in very heavy makeup in Guardians of the Galaxy (and his blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Captain Marvel), and while you can get a good look at his face in The Hobbit, his character doesn't get much screentime and isn't especially prominent - and indeed I don't think the Hobbit trilogy really turned any actors into household names which weren't already.
I love Lee Pace but there really hasn't been a blockbuster where he's front and center.
That's fair. I think his starring moment was really Pushing Daisies, but that kind of thing is not for everyone; even just the hyperreal aesthetic would be a barrier for some.
No, Joe wants to have substance and vision. The tragedy of his character is his slow realization that he just doesn't have it. Indeed it's the tragedy of all the main cast that each has some of what it takes to make something truly revolutionary, but they lack some key aspect. They each know that another has the missing piece they need, but they can't sustainably maintain a relationship with them.
There's a line in the first season that runs as an undercurrent through the whole show ("Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing"). Joe originally says this to make the viewer think about technology, evoking the dawn of the personal computer and subsequently the internet. But later on, you're invited to re-interpret that statement as being about people: computers and technology were the thing that got the main characters to work together. It's the -people- that are the thing.
Part of what makes the show so good is that it's one of the few renditions in TV / movies of the joy of engineering something, and the constant tension that comes from working with great people. Great people inspire you, but they also challenge you. The show does a great job of portraying realistic conflicts that arise between different personality types and roles, as well as cleverly exposing the limitations of those personalities. With just Gordon, you'll get a stable and well engineered product but it won't be revolutionary. Joe has the vision but he can't actually _do_ the substantive part. Cameron has great substance and technical ability, but she's impractical and inflexible. Donna is responsible, effective, and clear-eyed - but unchecked, purely rational decisions erode the soul of a company into nothing. These differences frustrate our characters, and yet there can be no success without them.
I think many of us spend our whole careers chasing those rare moments where the right people are in the room solving problems, butting heads, but ultimately doing things they could never do all by themselves.
I think it's best appreciated as an original space opera that just happens to have the same name, especially given that so much of the show is genuinely original.
Pretty much all of this rests on the assumption that recent changes in software hiring practices are primarily driven by AI, and that such changes will continue and spread across industries without foreseeable limit.
The reality is that higher interest rates hit software particularly hard because less venture capital is being thrown at traditional software development. When money is tight, cutting new hires decreases to push off layoffs, and when layoffs happen experienced potential hires become cheap, displacing inexperienced entry level hires. No one is telling their boss "reduce my budget, the AI is so good I don't need these people anymore" they are getting told by their boss "find a way to make due with 3 fewer people." We should expect overtaxed workers to try and find ways to utilize AI to take up some of this slack, and higher ups may spin a tale of increased efficiency, but the fact is AI adoption is a symptom, not a cause. The hiring decrease and layoffs happened at plenty of places that have failed to adopt AI as well.
Given that the current situation is unique to the circumstances, it does not hold that software portends the fate of all white collar work. That being said, we can certainly expect AI to improve, and attempts to be made to replicate and improve upon any genuine efficiency gains made in the present experiment. But the fact is that while AI may make certain tasks easier, that will lead to reorganization of the labor force more than disappearance. When mechanization of agriculture reduced the labor required to produce enough food to sustain people, people stopped being farmers. It was a major societal shift, and there were certainly issues, but we don't have 90% of our population made up of unemployed farmers who can't afford to buy food, nor even a large percentage of the population who wants to farm but is forced to work a much less desirable job.
Comparative advantage will guarantee people are still doing something. There will always be tasks which would benefit from human input, and there will always be more such tasks. We may not currently place much value in these tasks, but by virtue of AI doing the other tasks, the relative value of fully automated tasks will decrease and the tasks which require human labor will become more highly valued. In a world where the best paid people are ditch diggers, and ditch diggers can afford yachts because yacht production is fully automated, who cares what the wage of the ditch digger actually is?
Wealth concentration is a concern, but not because it will make it impossible for the vast majority to live a decent life. Instead the economic lives (and likely socio-political lives as well) of these two groups will simply diverge. This is extremely concerning from a standpoint of justice, but it's really orthogonal to AI. We've had such aristocracies many times before - they arise because of a failure of social institutions, not technology. We've been on the path towards them long before AI came along, and there is no compelling evidence that AI has accelerated the process. As far as economics is concerned though, your quality of life will continue to improve, even if some billionaire's improves faster.
The alternative is higher n. The study makes a claim, it does not present the evidence necessary to back up that claim. Until someone does a larger study, no conclusion should be drawn.
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