I used to have an easier time ignoring the mass surveillance angle. If I'm 1 in 300,000,000, then someone would have to have a good reason to waste resources on investigating little ole' me. But with AI, safety via obfuscation no longer exists (to the degree it ever did). It doesn't matter if I'm 1 of 30 records or 1 of 30 billion records - the difference is a a few minutes of processing time.
Every technological revolution spreads more rapidly than the last, so it's novel almost by definition. The internet gradual expanded over 2-3 decades, long enough to give most people, and the economy, the chance to keep up. This is happening far more rapidly.
Honestly I think what is missing is not developers but designers. Or, I should say, designers hired to create competent designs that serve people well and not to instead manipulate users. If you want better front ends - get more and better designers! As for front-end code, I don't expect to ever write a line of that again in my life.
As an American with mostly headline-level knowledge of Canadian politics, this Mark Carney seems unusually competent and effective, as far as heads-of-state go.
Will Ferguson wrote a book named _Bastards and Boneheads_ [0] that told the history of Canada's prime ministers as one or the other. The bastards made history, the boneheads are remembered for their folly.
Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau were bastards, and supremely consequential in Canadian history. Joe Clark and Paul Martin were boneheads.
Which ones Harper and Justin Trudeau are may be too soon to tell, but Carney is clearly a bastard.
Swimming downstream is easier than swimming upstream. Admitting basic reality we all talk about—eg that canada is a vassal state of the us—is only difficult until the cash river stops.
Mark is a technocrat. He started his political career after a long, successful stint as an economist and central bank governor. Nobody is perfect but he is about the best leader Canada can hope for to lead it out of the current funk it is in. Pivoting away from a long-term trading partner is not an easy process.
Frankly, the issues that Canada faces now stem from a long history of questionable policies, starting from when Diefenbaker shuttered the Arrow and stripped the talent and parts to be scooped up by Boeing, Lockheed et al all the way to when Mulroney & Reagan signed the FTA dooming Canada's private sector. None of this has been good for Canada's sovereignty and long term independence/success. A non-trivial amount of the SV luminaries that have started companies which showcase American inventiveness have a Canadian passport even though they don't advertise it.
The strained relationship with the US right now is actually providing ample opportunity for Canada to make some strategic long term bets without the "US foreign policy alignment" overhang. I'm optimistic.
The end of driving as a profession is going to hit the economy hard. Teamsters may have the organizational strength and political influence to protect themselves. But they only represent ~20% of US truck drivers and none of the other ~3 million people who drive for a living in this country.
I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
I'm sure it would be much easier to solve with extra $10 trillion a year, which is pocket money compared to what goes into adtech, sloptech, attacking Iran and similar endeavors.
the joke is that we've been saying fusion is just around the corner for more than 50 years, self-driving cars have been just around the corner for 10... so far
> The end of driving as a profession is going to hit the economy hard.
They should just learn to code! /s
> I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
More seriously, I agree with this, but the problems are going to extend way beyond just transportation workers.
These are problems we could theoretically find solutions for, but we're headed into it at warp speed with an already absolutely broken political system and massive levels of wealth inequality.
I find it far more likely that the solution to this all ends up being chaos and bloodshed rather than properly managed preventive policy changes.
Society is fragile and operates in tension, a shared delusion like a currency. If workers burn down every autonomous truck on the road, there simply is not enough law enforcement to prevent them from doing so. There are only 1 million US soliders on US soil [1], there are 100 million workers. If they can't solve cargo theft incurring ~$35B/year in losses, how would they solve this? There are millions of trucks on US roads at any one time.
> I don't see either American labor or American government being anywhere near strong enough or capable enough to facilitate a soft landing.
Certainly not yet, but a resolution will present itself. The quality of which is to be determined of course.
(not advocating either way, simply enumerating the risk model; I am privileged that my day job is to get paid to think like a threat actor across various verticals and model accordingly)
This is of course a dangerous suggestion, but also, never in the history of the world has the destruction of a technology that was replacing workers ever turned out well for the workers. At best it briefly delayed adoption.
When has it worked out for workers? Genuine question. If its not offshoring manufacturing (China before, South East Asia today) and services (India primarily), its importing labor to depress wages and keep workers in economic peril (there are approximately 720,000 to 750,000 foreign-born truck drivers in the United States, representing about 18% to 20% of the total commercial driving workforce, as of this comment) to encourage compliance with the status quo [1] [2].
If you work with workers so that they will have a safe landing through a just transition, such that longshoreman experienced when the cargo container revolutionized shipping [3] [4], you might get worker buy in. If you say you will with no evidence you will follow through, you will not get buy in, and whatever is the downstream impact of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers becoming redundant rapidly without a safety net.
Despite hope not being a strategy, as an observer, I hope that policymakers make a choice that leads to a net favorable outcome. If they do not, that is a choice.
That is possible, but unfortunately I think more realistic scenario is that instead of raising up and losing their chains, the masses will get brainwashed by algorithms and end up convinced it is the minorities fault or something.
Laziness on my part, my apologies, pick your system vulnerability to your preferences. Physical disablement, some flavor of cyber RCE, sensor spoofing or blinding, etc. Could be as easy as slowing in front of the vehicle to force it to a stop.
Jargon isn't a scam. I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer. People using dumb terms to describe this doesn't make it less true.
AI has real benefits, that are game-changing in some areas, even if AI never improve from their current capabilities.
People are claiming (whether they truly believe it or not) that AI has incredible capabilities and benefits that they don't currently have, and may never have.
There's plenty of scamming going on. The fact that AI has real game-changing capabilities just makes the scams harder to detect. People tend to like to see things as more black-and-white than they actually are, and scammers take advantage of that.
> I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer
In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?
The argument is that the sweet deal we're getting now, which involves Anthropic practically giving away a product while they lose lots of money, might not be sustainable for them.
> It produces code, declares victory, and moves on.
Not when I'm in charge. It proposes changes based on my detailed instructions, I review the proposed changes, only then do I have it implement code, and then I review it again. I understand my AI agent would prefer a quicker way but for the meantime, I'm still the one in charge.
Waymo and Baidu are the only big players and both are working on launching in foreign markets for the first time this year, in addition to big expansions in their home markets. But country roads are not on the agenda. I predict an eventual public-private partnership to bring AVs to rural areas. It would be a cost-effective way to support the healthcare of ageing rural populations who are facing hospital closures.
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