I'd do the same thing I'd do with anyone that has a different opinion than me: try my best to have an honest and open discussion with them to understand their point of view and get to the heart of why they believe said thing, without forcefully tearing apart their beliefs. A core part of that process is avoiding saying anything that could cause them to feel shame for believing something that I don't, even if I truly believe they are wrong, and just doing what I can to earnestly hear them out. The optional thing afterwards, if they seem open to it, is express my own beliefs in a way that's palatable and easily understood. Basically explain it in a language they understand, and in a way that we can think about and understand and discuss together, not taking offense to any attempts at questioning or poking holes in my beliefs because that is the discovery process imo for trying something new.
Online is a little trickier because you don't know if they're a dog. Well, now a days it's even harder, because they could also not have a fully developed frontal lobe, or worse, they could be a bot, troll, or both.
I don't know, it's kinda terrifying how this line of thinking is spreading even on HN. AI as we have it now is just a turbocharged autocomplete, with a really good information access. It's not smart, or dumb, or anything "human" .
I hate these kinds of questions where you try to imply it's actually the same thing as what our brains are doing. Stop it. I think it would be an affront to your own intelligence to entertain this as a serious question, so I will not.
My thoughts on this are as serious as it gets - AI in it's current state is no more than clever statistics. I will not be comparing how my own brain functions to what is effectively a linear algebra machine, as it's insulting to the intelligence of everyone here - what kind of serious thought would you like to have here, exactly?
I don't disagree but what we really should have dropped "AI" a long time ago for "statistical machine intelligence". Machine learning then is just what statistical machine intelligence does.
We could have then just swapped "AI" for "SMI" and avoided all this confusion.
It also would avoid pointless statements like "It is JUST statistical machine intelligence". As if statistical machine intelligence is not extraordinarily powerful.
The real difference though is not in "intelligence", is it in "being". It is not as much an insult to our intelligence as it is an insult to our "being" when people pretend that LLMs have some kind of "being".
The strange thing to me is Gemini just tells me these things so I don't know how people get confused:
"A rock exists. A calculator exists. Neither of them has "being."
I am closer to a calculator than a human.
A calculator doesn't "know" math; it executes logic gates to produce a result.
I am a hyper-complex calculator for language. I calculate the probability of the next word rather than the sum of numbers."
You’re very adamant about not doing an obvious comparison. You want to stop thinking at that point. It’s an emotional reaction, not an intellectual one. Quite an interesting one as well, that possibly suggests a threat response.
The assumption you seem to keep making is that things like “clever statistics” and “linear algebra” simply have no bearing on human intelligence. Why do you think that? Is it a religious view, that e.g. you believe humans have a soul that somehow connects to our intelligence, making it forever out of reach of machine emulation?
Because unless that’s your position, then the question of how human intelligence differs from current machine intelligence, the question that you simply refuse to contemplate, is one of the more important questions in this space.
The insult I see to intelligence here is the total lack of intellectual curiosity that wants to shoot down an entire line of thinking for reasons that apparently can’t be articulated.
>>here is the total lack of intellectual curiosity that wants to shoot down an entire line of thinking for reasons that apparently can’t be articulated.
It's the same energy as watching a Joe Rogan podcast where yet another guest goes "well they say there's global warming yet I was cold yesterday, I'm not saying it's fake but really we should think about that". These questions about AI and our brains aren't meant to stimulate intellectual curiosity and provoke deep interesting discussions - they are almost always asked just to pretend the AI is something that it's not - a human like intelligence where since our brains also work "kinda like that" it means it must be the same - and the nearest equivalence is how my iron heats water so in essence it's the same as my stomach since it can also do this.
>>the question that you simply refuse to contemplate
I don't refuse to contemplate it, I just think the answer is so painfully obvious the question is either naive or uninformed or antagonistic in nature - there is no "machine intelligence" - it's not a religious conviction, because I don't think you need one to realise that a calculator isn't smart for adding together numbers larger than I could do in my own head.
>ChatGPT (o3): Scored 136 on the Mensa Norway IQ test in April 2025
If you don't want to believe it, you need to change the goal posts; Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI.. since AI is also better at creating test than us maybe we could ask AI to do it, hang on..
>Is there a test that in some way measures intelligence, but that humans generally test better than AI?
Answer:Thinking, Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated.
Edit, i managed to get one to answer me; the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI). Created by AI researcher François Chollet, this test consists of visual puzzles that require inferring a rule from a few examples and applying it to a new situation.
So we do have A test which is specifically designed for us to pass and AI to fail, where we can currently pass better than AI... hurrah we're smarter!
The validity of IQ tests as a measure of broad intelligence has been in question for far longer than LLMs have existed. And if it’s not a proper test for humans, it’s not a proper test to compare humans to anything else, be it LLMs or chimps.
To be intelligent is to realise that any test for intelligence is at best a proxy for some parts of it. There's no objective way to measure intelligence as a whole, we can't even objectively define intelligence.
I believe intelligence is difficult to pin down in words but easy to spot intuitively - and so are deltas in intelligence.
E.g watch a Steve jobs interview and a Sam Altman one (at the same age). The difference in the mode of articulation, simplicity in communication, obsession over details etc are huge. This is what superior intelligence to me looks like - you know it when you see it.
>Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI
Easy? The best LLMs score 40% on Butter-Bench [1],
while the mean human score is 95%. LLMs struggled the most with multi-step
spatial planning and social understanding.
That is really interesting; Though i suspect its just a effect of differing training data, humans are to a larger degree trained on spacial data, while LLMs are trained to a larger degree on raw information and text.
Still it may be lasting limitation if robotics don't catch up to AI anytime soon.
Don't know what to make of the Safety Risks test, threatening to power down AI in order to manipulate it, and most act like we would and comply. fascinating.
There's a lot of things going on in the western world, both financial and social in nature. It's not good in the sense of being pleasant/contributing to growth and betterment, but it's a correction nonetheless.
That's my take on it anyway. Hedge bets. Dive under the wave. Survive the next few years.
Come on man, I think it's safe to say a tradition that favor's men over women is reasonably sexist, especially given the time the tradition established women were property.
I don't think Belgium's feelings will get hurt, besides wait until you learn about all the other things that Leopold II did.
> For the communist model to work, the state has to own everything.
At first I used co-op's because I just assumed you meant democratically controlled companies rather than "communism" and now I know you don't know what communism means.
"state has to own anything" is an extremely funny idea for a stateless society.
> "state has to own anything" is an extremely funny idea for a stateless society
Within a realistic geopolitical framework, it’s really not.
What Marx have you read? It's one thing to be ignorant. It's another to throw out quips like 'now I know you don't know what communism means' and then spout a faulty internet meme of an idea one is trying to relate to.
Engels is the one who wrote about it, not Marx, which you'd know if you knew what communism means. While Marx agreed with Engels words, he doesn't explicitly talk about it:
> State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not "abolished". It dies out.
I suggest you give Anti-Dühring a read, it's not that dense and has some valuable insight into society even if you don't agree with Marxism or communism.
That's so naive. Economic central planning is a fool's errand. Regardless of how good the computers are, it can never work because it's impossible to gather accurate demand data. Only free market economics can ever work at scale over the long term.
Go ahead, plan my Christmas Eve. What time I wake up, what time I leave the house, which routes I take, what things I buy. Assign the kWhs of electricity and liters of water and fuel that I'll use up, plan ingredients for my meals of the day.
The belief that a central "digital planning engine" could plan the lives of an entire society is an incredibly naive idea from early cybernetics. This doesn't work even in small thought experiments because of information limits. No central system can access all the local knowledge and constantly changing circumstances.
Free market economics is working great for the vast majority of people. Median living standards in capitalism countries are higher than ever. Regardless of ideology the data is quite clear on this point.
crazy, because the two biggest cases of economic central planning are the USSR which grew faster than any civilization ever (a literacy rate of 30% to 100% in 60 years) and China who is currently making the United States world power look like a toddler.
There's clearly something to central planning, it's still up in the air if you can totally plan an economy centrally. I tend to agree with Chibber.
All land in China is state owned, what in the world are you talking about? I can't tell if you don't know about China's state-capitalism or if you're trying to do purity politics about economic governance. Literally no one would describe china as "not centrally planned"
As I stated above, economic central planning can never work over the long term. The USSR didn't last very long, and it turns out that most of their economic statistics were fake anyway. Communists always lie about everything.
China still doesn't exert much power in world affairs. And their economic successes over the past few decades have come about by embracing free market principles. The stuff they tried to centrally plan has largely failed.
Literally no expert believes the USSR fell because of economic central planning. It is truly absurd to look at a 60 historic industrialization and urbanization and see "failure" in the long term.
> China still doesn't exert much power in world affairs.
> I raise this because a general strike is back on the table, likely for May Day 2028 (5/1/28):
I say this as an out socialist, member of the DSA, and strong advocate for unions: No it's not. I love Shawn Fain to death, I am a huge fan of his work and strategies, but the idea that an American General Strike is two years away? Most americans won't join a union despite having extremely positive opinions of unions.
There has been decades of propaganda about how unions destroy jobs in the United States and most software engineers have grown up in those decades.
I'm not trying to argue that Unions are exact right answer (perhaps something like worker's councils would be better) but the underlying issue is that collective action in the United States has been effectively demonized for a very long time (going back to blaming unions for our uncompetitive cars vs. Japan).
A neutral observation: The pro-union camp really needs some better messaging if they want any hope of overcoming these objections.
Nearly every pro-union discussion I see online or even politician speaking to a crowd feels like they're in full-on preaching to the choir mode, where they don't even consider how to address anyone skeptical of unionization. It's always presented as the obvious choice. Any skepticism or critical questions are dismissed as the result of consuming propaganda (like the comment above).
If the hardcore pro-union people want to get anywhere, they need to stop treating anyone with critical questions or skepticism as being misinformed or the victim of propaganda.
Speakers like Pete Buttigieg are a good model for addressing mixed audiences without alienating the other side right off the bat. Not everyone is going to agree with him, but he does a much better job of speaking to a mixed audience as a group of people with differing opinions than most.
It's almost like all of the forms of communication and media people pay attention to is owned by billionaires with a vested interest in promoting anti-union views.
As a group we're probably the most profoundly ignorant people on the planet when it comes to labor relations. We can't even reason about this because we (again, as a group) have practically no experience and even less interest in the subject.
The union issue vs. Japan is a perfect example because you only need to sit in the cars both countries were making at the time to understand why we were uncompetitive.
There has also been decades of corruption in management (see donations to ballrooms) and yet nobody is saying it will take decades to overcome management.
The problems with management aren't the result of any one person - it is the ownership class, their lack of any feeling of societal obligation, the lack of consequences for their actions, and their ownership of media and messaging.
A lot of states are right to work states, so joining a union is just giving your money to someone else with no protections if they can just fire you regardless of union status. At least that's something I've been told before
Whoever told you that is misinformed, because the power of unions does not stem from forcing all employees to join the union. Even in right-to-work states, unions have the power to negotiate contracts which include protections, and workers who join unions are protected from retaliation under federal law. There is an extreme counterbalance in the form of employers misleading employees that unions do not benefit them, as you helpfully demonstrated with this comment.
There are definitely examples of shops where you cannot be an employee without being in the union. I worked for a company that was going through a union vote which ended in the vote failing. Part of the conversation was if the vote succeeded would becoming a union member be required to maintain employment. The answer was a solid yes. Luckily, I didn't have to find a new job because of it since the vote failed
You've jumped to a conclusion that was not there to be made. I live in a right to work state. That does not mean the places I was talking about requiring union membership to be an employee are in my state.
Unions would actually prevent this problem, because in response to a wrongful firing they can apply collective pressure. That's not why Americans don't want to join a union.
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