ModelRepublic.org is run by Tyler Johnson and funded by Dustin Moskovitz.
A16z funds small tech. This includes companies that do Crypto and AI. You may not like it, but these are products and services that consumers want to use.
Attacking the authors isn't useful. Are they incorrect in their reporting? Does a16z not knowingly fund any of these immoral companies? Are any of the quotes from senior leadership exceptionally cherrypicked or outright faked?
> You may not like it, but these are products and services that consumers want to use.
The human brain's reward machinery is not and should not be the arbiter of what a healthy society allows to be advertised and sold. Truth becomes a liability when your competitors can deceive without consequence. We are sacrificing societal values for economic value and destroying the fabric of trust that a healthy society foundationally requires in the process. This article is a list of degeneracy bred by mindless and ideological deference to the flavor of unbridled capitalism sold to us by those who stand to benefit from it most.
Unbridled capitalism undoes itself, and those responsible for the undoing are the sole victors. Maybe then those cheering from the sidelines will come to the realization - moot, at that point - that the machiavellian ends were never for us, only the means.
That's a very weird framework and dichotomy you have there. Try untangling yourself out of it by considering some empirical facts, for example, hospitals acquired by private equity often have worse outcomes.
> private equity acquisition was associated with a 25.4% increase in hospital-acquired conditions, which was driven by falls and central line–associated bloodstream infections
> Medicare beneficiaries in the emergency departments of private equity hospitals experienced seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits after acquisition relative to hospitals that were not acquired by private equity, the team found. This rise represented a 13 percent increase from a baseline of 52 deaths per 10,000 visits
This is certainly true to an extent, but it ignores some big problems with fee for service. The biggest one is that incentives between patients and providers are not aligned, which means more than 10% of healthcare provided in the US is wasteful stuff the provider knows is unnecessary but prescribes anyway because it makes them money. There are real opportunities to save money without making outcomes worse, in fact, if we stop doing useless stuff that leaves more time to treat people with real issues.
What's the point of "state of the art healthcare" if it's only for rich people? If Jeff Bezos and I get the exact same health issue - say, some form of cancer, we're going to have radically different treatments and mostly likely outcomes. His will be "state of the art", mine will (hopefully) be good, but definitely not be like his.
Malcolm Gladwell is a massive charlatan and hack. Seeing tech bros use him to discuss healthcare policy (Malcom Gladwell is neither a health professional, public health expert, nor has he worked in the healthcare industry in any real capacity, nor has he ever discussed the plight of workers in the US once during his entire career) feels on point for out of touch our industry is.
None of the best minds in AI Research are from the United States. We would not be were we are without the work of foreign scientists. There are more STEM students in China than we have students in the United States, and those universities don't give out automatic As like we do here in the United States.
I hate to burst the New Scientist's bubble, but this is nothing new. We have had systems for decades that operated under "Fire and Forget". We have missles that either go to a pre-designated point or chase a heat or radar signature once they are fired.
Human soldiers kill civilians and other soldiers on the same side. It is called "friendly fire". It is horrible, and should be avoided, but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model.
What "choosing the target" means has been fuzzy for a long time too. We've had beyond-visible-range missiles for a long time that are basically "fly to this grid square and find a target".
I don't think people realize how much horsepower are in missiles now.
The JSM has at least one multicore computer + IR camera + RF homing for target identification (plus GPS, terrain matching/following and inertial for navigation). It can automatically identify not only the best target (and recognize and ignore decoys etc), but also the optimal weak spots to impact.
The stats of USA using human-guided drones to kill people. A civilian/military ratio and numbers was worse that 11.9.
Heck, check the American drone war crime video Wikileaks published. The one that made the USA so angry that it decided to attack and destroy the journalists.
Only the USA has enough war experience and drones for us to have high confidence stats on the performance of human drone operators (military vs. civilian targets) vs. AI.
Stats from Russia/Ukraine are not good. And the ones that exist, could be dismissed for various reasons ("Russians are savages so it doesn't count", "Ukraine is defending itself in existential war so it doesn't count").
With the USA the stats are available and no valid excuses exist to throw the data away. The US military is not defending itself and is supposed to be the most powerful, advanced (tech and policy) and professional military in the world. They are the best case scenario for the human drone operators' performance one has. And yet:
I am amused about how emotional people get about AI killing people. In my mind the idea that someone sitting at a screen chosing to blow up other humans is frankly far more terrifying.
Agree. That's why autopilots in airplanes have a much better track record than flesh pilots. And when the autopilot screws up, there is a clear path to improvement, to make sure that the situation will never repeat itself. With humans, people continue to make the same mistakes, no matter how many times it happened before (even for the same pilots).
Here are some facts about Cuba and oil. The Cuban government was getting free oil from Venezuella. That ended on Jan. 3rd. Cuba was taking that oil, and reselling most of it on the open oil market. Cuba also has their own oil wells, so they can produce oil if they need it. Cuba was also having power outages prior to Jan 3rd.
Cuba also used to have the best economony in the Caribbean prior to 1959 when the Castro's took over. They switched from a free market ecomony to a state run socialist economy.
https://github.com/microsoft/BASIC-M6502
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