[zug_zug]

Part of what's going on here -- why we have this gap in what we say we fear and how we act, is just a human deficiency.

I remember when Covid got out of control in China a lot of people around me [in NY] had this energy of "so what it'll never come to us." I'm not saying that they believed that, or had some rational opinion, but they had an emotional energy of "It's not big deal." The emotional response can be much slower than the intellectual response, even if that fuse is already lit and the eventuality is indisputable.

Some people are good at not having that disconnect. They see the internet in 1980 and they know that someday 60 years from now it'll be the majority of shopping, even though 95% of people they talk to don't know what it is and laugh about it.

AI is a little-bit in that stage... It's true that most people know what it is, but our emotional response has not caught up to the reality of all of the implications of thinking machines that are gaining 5+ iq points per year.

We should be starting to write the laws now.

[californical]

But it’s worth being careful - you could’ve said the same thing 3 years ago about NFTs. They were taking off and people made very convincing arguments about how it was the future of concert tickets, and eventually commerce in general.

If we started writing lots of laws around NFTs, it would just be a bunch of pointless (at best), or actively harmful laws.

Nobody cares about NFTs today, but there were genuinely good ideas about how they’d change commerce being spouted by a small group of people.

People can say “this is the future” while most people dismiss them, and honestly the people predicting tectonic shifts are usually wrong.

I don’t think that the current LLM craze is headed for the same destiny as NFTs, but I don’t think that the “LLM is the new world order” crowd is necessarily more likely to be correct just because they’re visionaries.

[AstroBen]

Some of my friends bought a tonne of bitcoin when it was around ~$100 because it was clearly the future. I'm still not sure if I was an idiot or smart to reject that

[csa]

> I'm still not sure if I was an idiot or smart to reject that

Both.

Smart because you realized that BTC is an incredibly flawed currency, or store of value, or whatever you want to call it.

Idiot because you grossly underestimated the desire of the general public to gamble on the “next big thing”.

[andirk]

Regular stonks are incredibly flawed, or whatever you want to call it, and the general public gambles on them as "the next big thing". None of that is unique to BTC, albeit more extreme with BTC. One should look at a potential investment as both its real world usage _and_ increased speculation.