[joe_the_user]

The thing I find strange is that the other wealthy and powerful stand for the destruction of things that gave the US a huge competitive advantage. The average person isn't hit immediately by the destruction of science. But a far-sighted person with some power should by self-interest not want this.

And this, I think, points to the corruption of the entire political class in America with just being upshot.

[whatthedangit]

I believe that what we're not accounting for is the belief among many wealthy people that scientific research and all other intellectual labor will soon be automated by AI.

I believe that what those wealthy people aren't accounting for is the need for some class of humans to act as a translation layer between the expert AI systems and the rest of us in order to allow the discoveries and results to percolate through human institutions.

Or, rather, they may be underestimating the bottleneck that will be introduced by trying to hoard all of those results within their own circles of trust and influence.

[lanstin]

More fucking morons. The gap with biomedical research isn't in the realm of language models, but in the amount of information that exists in biology that we don't know. I'm not sure what percentage of all the genetic data on Earth we've sequenced, but it's not much, and we still don't quite have a mechanical understand of a single cell, much less some complex multicellular organisms with proteins affecting gene expression, cell membrane receptors being reused in 50 different tissue types, molecular secretion and diffusion altering our minds functioning, and electrical currents synchronizing brain firing at a distance.

No LLM trained on PubMed will be able to suss this all out - more data is needed.

Even in pure mathematics, where I am currently a grad student and as needed a big fan of trying to get LLMs to explain stuff to me at 1 am, they just aren't that good. If it's a popular question where I could have tried math overflow, sure, it's probably just going to get some details weirdly wrong, but for subtle complex concepts, it's not making some golden age of truth and understanding.

And God help the LLMs trying to understand physics that are trained on all the BS on Youtube and the blogs.

[DecoySalamander]

But are they wrong? I'm pretty sure that I can ask any LLM to produce a followup for "Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" and get one as good, or even better than the original. Lack of percolation would actually be an improvement.

[joe_the_user]

Sure, LLMs may indeed produce plausible bs akin to the classic bs paper you mention. But it should be considered that all science is being gutted, including unambiguously substantial fields (biology, physics, chemistry).

[lanstin]

You can see it just here - Paul Graham made money making a web store in the 1990s (which I can tell you wasn't that hard), then investing his money in a bunch of internet startup (a bit rarer, but I feel like a large percentage of the people that wanted to be rich and had 1 start-up success in the 1990s succeeded); he regards this as equivalent to inventing the standard model of particle physics or inventing the mRNA vaccines, rather than a reasonable capable person at a very lucky time to be good at programming.

Andreesson has the same blindness - he wrote the first web browsers (having not invented HTTP or the web or browsers) and parleyed that into a fortune by investing. I guess he's a skilled investor, a smart financial person, but there is no evidence that he has some special science expertise or extraordinary intelligence. From my observations, one can understand nothing about science or the physical world and do well with software and investing.

As far as "far-sighted," the history from 1980 onwards is the destruction of many things in society devoted to the long view in favor of short-term financialization.

[jethro_tell]

They don’t need anything else though. Technological advancements helps society as a whole but if you have more money that you could ever spend who cares?

You can buy another countries tech if it benefits you or just move.

[bloopernova]

The wealthy will just take their money and leave the country.

And for all you HN readers supporting these massive changes: you'd test changes beforehand and plan their deployment carefully if this were software. So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!?

And before the inevitable derail or whatabout attempt: Don't play political games with people's lives.

And, again, everything is political, including every aspect of discussions on HN.

[alienthrowaway]

> So why why do you support explicitly not doing those things when the livelihood of 300 million people depend on the economy being stable?!?

Culture warriors only care about about their "side" winning. It's not an intellectual battle, but an emotional one. Rules be damned, their side is winning and dishing out retribution for, and rolling back decades of defeat on the battle for social values - civil rights, race mixing, gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, and the gall to elect a black president, BLM, #metoo, etc.

[jimkleiber]

Precisely. This is probably not a long-term constructive plan, but rather "they punched me, I'm gonna punch them back 10x harder." (didn't Trump even say something like that before?)

Vengeance can make people do crazy things and the craziest thing is how people don't realize vengeance can destroy them just as much, if not more than their intended target. Not so much shooting ourselves in the foot, more like stabbing ourselves in the heart.

My life and work is to help people to realize how responding with hate or indifference will destroy us, and that responding with love is the only way through.

[bamboozled]

Where do you suppose they will go? Russia?

[aqueueaqueue]

Elon can live anywhere in the world. Very rich people are global citizens. They cannot be patriotic.

[jcgrillo]

We allow them to live. Never forget how much we outnumber them by.

[kadushka]

Who are "we"? Software engineers with comfortable lives? Minimum wage workers? Police force? Military?

[jcgrillo]

wE

[kadushka]

What if I don’t agree with you - am I still one of “we”?

[goatlover]

We also don't have a hive mind.

[kbelder]

So shrill.

[yibg]

A few countries may not want him after this.

[bamboozled]

Yeah, Elon is mostly wealthy because of the USA and what is gave him. The fact he wants to destroy it seems seriously self-destructive.