Also Black Cube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Cube

It's from the old Tom Lehrer song, "Wernher von Braun."

I've never seen someone take it as a suggestion before.

I imagined it as kind of a shorthand for "you should be spending my tokens on looking for / addressing issues like X, Y, and Z," where X, Y, and Z are the sorts of things that an expert in [insert domain here] would be likely to care most about.

At some point we have to just admit we're mass cargo-culting here and that these secret invocations people swear by have the same epistemic value as medieval superstitions.

I don't know, I was never one to "assign roles" to AI myself, but if it ends up working for some people in practice, then I guess it might be worth examining why.

right, but the thing is how do they know what an expect in [insert domain here] would care about? Obviously by finding content created by

people who claim to be experts in [domain] people who others claim to be experts in [domain]

hopefully valuing membership in group two over membership in group 1.

And then in a couple years the AI gets better at "using AI" than the bottom 99.999% of knowledge workers, who are now out of work.

Distilling the entirety of thousands of years of human intellectual output: totally cool.

Distilling the answers of one LLM: totally uncool.

Yeah, MS doesn't quite exemplify good-faith competitive spirit, does it?

Some people will probably be curious regardless of their environment but I think there are others who could be swayed into developing curiosity (or not) by life experiences. And an ever-present "just gimme the answer now" button could be a powerful force pulling them toward the "incurious" side.

They've been singing the same old song since the Cold War, "either support everything the US does or you're a commie/terrorist." Yawn.

Fascinating hypothesis. I wonder if technological and economic progress makes "nuclearisation" inevitable, i.e. people can just move wherever the best money is at.

I would change it from `can` to `almost forced to`. Since I am seeing nuclearisation live, here are a few observations.

Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.

So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.

Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.

it's more like people are forced to move where the jobs are. mobility is demanded by the industry.

Interesting. Once you have a cellphone to amuse yourself, perpetuating the species is just too much bother?

Phone + PC/TV probably takes an hour or two of people their day on average. If they didn't have access to it I assume they'd be meeting up with other people out of boredom and that'd lead to sex, doesn't seem too strange.

I suspect on average it's much higher than an hour or two.

The average American watches 4 to 4.5 hours of TV per day. [1]

Half of people watch more.

[1] https://adwave.com/resources/average-daily-tv-viewing-time

Or you spend all your time on your phone and can't understand why you're just not getting ahead in life.

Maybe people don't meet in person any more because they call each other = less teen pregnancy instincts.