> The B2B SaaS Consultant
patron saint: Matt Yglesias
AI will quietly boost total factor productivity by some single-digit percentage and you think that's actually a huge deal, wonkily speaking. You're bullish in a spreadsheet way, not a singularity way. You've explained the Jevons paradox to someone who didn't ask.
I wouldn’t put MattY as the patron saint for this category, as I think he expects it to be substantially more transformative than this. Maybe Derek Thompson would be a better pick?
"Are AIs conscious? Do we have responsibilities toward them?"
Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but if an AI were to have a first person perspective, would that necessarily change how we operate? There's not an option for me to pick here as conscious, but no further consideration warranted.
There are plenty of arguably conscious beings we already subjucate in one way or another. People for labour, animals as livestock, dogs as companions and so on.
I think people think that if AI were conscious that would materially change how we interact with them and how we use them for society. But I have my doubts about that, given our nature.
I think humans ascribe consciousness to themselves and others, and this is a useful trait in understanding how another being is going to act. Perhaps I have answered my own question. We are concerned with how a conscious AI may act if it has a sense of independence?
I don't see how this is calibrated. Did they give it to some huge cohort of people we haven't heard about? Or did they just imagine the answers their archetypes, like Aella and Ed Zitron, would have given, and then manually plot a space around them?
"Manually" would be a charitable reading. Most of these prompts and answers appear AI generated. On your average HN front page submission, there is literally no effort too easy nor too important that won't be offloaded to the nearest LLM.
I find these answer options constraining. Most are on a single spectrum of good/bad for each question, ignoring alternatives like resignation, inevitability, indifference, and N/A. For example, someone could think that genAI is the next step towards humanity and machine divergence. Or, maybe they think it's the first step towards man's negation, but that that's somehow a good thing. Basically, the biggest error (among others) is it conflates perception (or prediction) with ethics.
Since the repo for it starts with one giant monster commit, I assume AI is asking these questions, which means I'm wasting my time by even pointing this out, like one would do if they "won" an argument with a Claude session.
That's the kind of question a quiz like this should really ask: When man talks to slop instead of fellow man, what happens to mankind?
Multiple choice invariably tells you more about the people writing the tests than the people answering them. It reveals their assumptions and biases.
A good one was the response that said tech companies aren’t paying enough attention to “safety”. Safety is not even remotely the real issue: the impact on society is. No interpretation of safety that I’ve seen characterizes it in those terms, but they should. Mass job losses are a safety issue for society, for example.
It's very appropriate that the entirety of this appears to be AI-generated. The archetype "map" viewable if you click "See all 30 archetypes" at the bottom looks like the LLM must have bumped its head pretty hard.
I wouldn’t put MattY as the patron saint for this category, as I think he expects it to be substantially more transformative than this. Maybe Derek Thompson would be a better pick?
Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but if an AI were to have a first person perspective, would that necessarily change how we operate? There's not an option for me to pick here as conscious, but no further consideration warranted.
There are plenty of arguably conscious beings we already subjucate in one way or another. People for labour, animals as livestock, dogs as companions and so on.
I think people think that if AI were conscious that would materially change how we interact with them and how we use them for society. But I have my doubts about that, given our nature.
I think humans ascribe consciousness to themselves and others, and this is a useful trait in understanding how another being is going to act. Perhaps I have answered my own question. We are concerned with how a conscious AI may act if it has a sense of independence?
Since the repo for it starts with one giant monster commit, I assume AI is asking these questions, which means I'm wasting my time by even pointing this out, like one would do if they "won" an argument with a Claude session.
That's the kind of question a quiz like this should really ask: When man talks to slop instead of fellow man, what happens to mankind?
A good one was the response that said tech companies aren’t paying enough attention to “safety”. Safety is not even remotely the real issue: the impact on society is. No interpretation of safety that I’ve seen characterizes it in those terms, but they should. Mass job losses are a safety issue for society, for example.