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Unlike many people, I am definitely on the AI-train: this is a revolutionary technology that will transform the way we live. I do think that people and companies that learn to make use of this technology most effectively will gain compounding benefits over time, just like how it seems households that has a computer 30-40 years ago (either through wealthy parents and/or educated parents) really helped prepare their children for big and better things (although obviously having wealthy and/or educated parents already help a lot too).
If one looks at the AI Index of Ramp (corporate spend management platform), one will find that in monthly AI spend, the top 1% of companies are now hovering close to $10k/month/employee, with a big drop off that follows where top 10% of companies are only spending $800/month/employee, and the median company is only spending $15.70/month/employee. In short, being AI-pilled shows up on the balance sheets. In an interview with Derek Thompson (btw, the other author of Abundance) on his podcast Plain English, Ramp's lead economist Ara Kharazian says: "All of the companies in that top 1% are extremely technically advanced. They are concentrated in the information sector, so software and media or finance or technical services." I do believe these companies are on to something, these are evidentially smart collective of people with clear objectives (increase productivity, reduce cost, maximize profit, etc.)
On a personal level, after 1 year ish of using Claude/Codex as a software engineer, I've noticed many benefits of AI usage (though . I've shared before that it has freed up time, for example, to engage with this forum. I've also been on and know of multiple projects with which would have never even been greenlit if not for AI-use, such as integrating with an external partner on a legacy platform in a computer language no one in my company knows (tbf, it is a C-family language). There has been many complaints about software reliability in the AI-era, with one poster child being GitHub that got bad enough where prominent projects left for supposedly greener pastures. My company did the opposite in that we are migrating from Atlassian's bitbucket to github, I think in part because of what I summed up in an internal message at the time when asked of should we or not: "a migration to GitHub is essentially a bet on AI, because Microsoft/GitHub for sure will be at the frontier of AI features compared to Atlassian/Bitbucket." Regarding the perception of reduced software reliability in the AI-era, I fondly remember early Q2 this year, when the VP of Support and Operations came to my team and the CEO to complain about the increasing amount of outages; I sat down for about a day, counting up number of changes-features-fixes per release and number of incidents caused by each release before presenting to everyone in a meeting my findings: the rate of errors (number of incident / number of changes-features-fixes) actually reduced per release, but because we were releasing so often due to increased cadence and productivity, the raw number of errors increased. The aforementioned VP btw has come to learn to appreciate AI a lot, even if he doesn't quite understand the terminal still.
This brings me to the thread down low between @RandomRanger and @MaiqTheTrue which provoked this chain of thought, bolded mine:
I found a source for the stat btw.
Why is there more stress and suffering now that would lead to the tripling of teenage suicides? Ask the random person on the street, they'll just point everywhere and tell you to look around and say: "everything is so hard now". I think what is so hard about life in the US, and I guess the modern age, is complexity. Life these days are too complext. It's simple enough (heh) to look at computers as a technology that drives societal complexity. Computers makes certain problems extremely simple ("find the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile using this column of data in Excel"), but then it leads to new problems that are more complex ("now that we know the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile, what does that mean to us?"). Fifty years ago, it was simple enough to understand your own finances, at most you had a bank account, paper checks for the monthly payments on car and your house, and pay in cash for everything else. Now consumers look at managing multiple credit cards, point rewards and loyalty programs for various companies, managing their own IRA/401K/brokerage, etc. Fifty years ago, you marry the person you met in school or the person you met at work, now gotta navigate dating apps, hookup culture, shifting and varied interpersonal relationship expectations, etc. The following statement from @FCfromSSC points to it well:
And of course btw, complexity is a subsidy for the rich, because only the rich can afford to navigate all the complexities.
So what will AI do to/for us? Personally again, I think AI has greatly simplified my life. There are many questions that I wouldn't even know where to begin to ask, now I just ask. But a colleague has recently confided in me that he thinks of quitting before the year ends, "the rate at which we're going, it's just too fast". I was perplexed at that because I thought AI would have made his life easier like AI did mine. But maybe it wont? what do you think?
The increase in suicides from 1950 --> 1990 was mostly caused by:
"Societal complexity" might have had a nonzero impact around the margins, but it was almost certainly much less important than the other reasons.
Firearms and youth alcohol use were more common in the fifties, not less.
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In 1950 and ammunition were something that anyone with the scratch could simply order through the mail or pick up off the shelf at their local home goods store. The federal requirement for a license to manufacture or sell firearms and ammunition doesn't come along till 1968, and background checks not until the '80s.
Similarly when my Grandmother was teaching high school in the 60s and 70s the school had a gun club and a marksmanship team, and as a result there are photos of students and teachers walking around the school with rifles over their shoulders like it's no big deal.
Point being that the availability of firearms declined dramatically between 1950 and 1990, only recently (within the last decade or so) has that trend reversed.
I'm talking about "availability" in terms of the teens getting access to firearms, and in particular handguns. In the 1950s fewer than 1 in 7 households had a handgun while by the 1990s almost half of households had one. Teens largely wouldn't go out and buy a gun on their own prerogative so the laws don't mean much to them. What matters is if the parents had a gun somewhere in the house.
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This is also wrong. The nice thing about pro-gun control statistics is that so many of them are so bad that you can track their source just because no one else simultaneously invented the same fake number, and this is one of those. The actual version of this is from Cook 1993, sourced at your favorite piracy group, and it claimed:
I'm not confident Cook's number reals - the only other cite referencing a Gallup 1959 poll on handgun ownership is Eskine, and it gives 16%, on top of the normal survey problems - but the dependence on gun-owning households make this a claim eating its own tail.
Meanwhile, the number of households with firearms decreased in that timeframe; Cook's 'about one half' is only true if you draw a line with a fat sharpie. 'Official' federal surveys gave numbers of all firearm ownership around 35% of households in the 1990s; there were books written about the whole theory that gun owners were becoming rarer but more dogmatic in that time frame. Note the conflict with the original claim, now fully abandoned without so much as a whoopsie-diddle.
again
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If you are talking about the availability of handguns say "handguns"
Fair enough, but it is the case that red America now has ubiquitious handgun ownership, and back in the day the gun at home was more likely to be a hunting rifle.
Suicide by long gun is a Russian political joke, not a practical problem.
Do you actually think that suicide by long gun is not a practical problem? That's probably what people would use, if handguns were not available. It's quite easily achieved.
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Most red Americans have pistols but that’s not exactly new, and teens are much more likely to have access to the household shotgun than to a handgun or AR-15.
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There's nothing funny about a man taking his own life by shooting himself in the back three times with his double-barreled shotgun.
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It's really hard for me to believe this given the big gun control act of 1968 and various pushes at the state level in the 1970s. How exactly did firearms become more readily available between 1950 and 1990?
This seems more plausible, but I would want to see the evidence for this. A lot of things changed between 1950 and 1990.
This is something I'm also skeptical about, at least as to alcohol. Before the 1980s, you could buy alcohol in many states at age 18. Which meant that just about everyone in your typical high school had access to alcohol.
This also seems plausible to me as well, and in fact it's kind of a null hypothesis.
The main issue I see though is that a lot of things changed between 1950 and 1990 in the US and the rest of the West. So it's very difficult to really know what's behind (reported) higher suicide rates.
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