Generational Dynamics World View News

Discussion of Web Log and Analysis topics from the Generational Dynamics web site.
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Tom Mazanec
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Re: Generational Dynamics World View News

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guest wrote:
Fri Jan 20, 2023 7:11 am
EDIT: I have just spoken to my cousin/guardian. He has purchased property out in the boonies and is preparing it as a fallout shelter.
A bit late in the game for that.
That's what I am afraid of :roll:
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

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Tom Mazanec
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As Russia, China & India ‘Support’ Iran With Its Nuclear Bid, Did West Lose An Opportunity To Stop Tehran?
EXPERT REVIEWS
By
Guest Author
January 17, 2023
https://eurasiantimes.com/india-china-r ... -did-west/

Russia vs West tank fight next phase of Ukraine war
Next battlefields will feature vast open spaces conducive to tank warfare pitting the UK-supplied Challenger 2 against Russia’s T-90
By GABRIEL HONRADA
JANUARY 18, 2023
https://asiatimes.com/2023/01/russia-vs ... raine-war/

Revisiting Russian objectives in the Ukraine
31150 ViewsJanuary 17, 2023
https://thesaker.is/revisiting-russian- ... e-ukraine/

ACURA ViewPoint: Guest Post by Branko Marcetic: Diplomatic Cables Show Russia Saw NATO Expansion as a Red Line
ACURA VIEWPOINTJanuary 16, 2023
https://usrussiaaccord.org/acura-viewpo ... -red-line/

Game-Changing Russia
35401 ViewsJanuary 17, 2023
https://thesaker.is/game-changing-russia/
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

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Re: Generational Dynamics World View News

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How ChatGPT Will Destabilize White-Collar Work
No technology in modern memory has caused mass job loss among highly educated workers. Will generative AI be an exception?

By Annie Lowrey
In the next five years, it is likely that AI will begin to reduce employment for college-educated workers. As the technology continues to advance, it will be able to perform tasks that were previously thought to require a high level of education and skill. This could lead to a displacement of workers in certain industries, as companies look to cut costs by automating processes. While it is difficult to predict the exact extent of this trend, it is clear that AI will have a significant impact on the job market for college-educated workers. It will be important for individuals to stay up to date on the latest developments in AI and to consider how their skills and expertise can be leveraged in a world where machines are increasingly able to perform many tasks.


There you have it, I guess: ChatGPT is coming for my job and yours, according to ChatGPT itself. The artificially intelligent content creator, whose name is short for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” was released two months ago by OpenAI, one of the country’s most influential artificial-intelligence research laboratories. The technology is, put simply, amazing. It generated that first paragraph instantly, working with this prompt: “Write a five-sentence paragraph in the style of The Atlantic about whether AI will begin to reduce employment for college-educated workers in the next five years.”

ChatGPT is just one of many mind-blowing generative AI tools released recently, including the image generators Midjourney and DALL-E and the video generator Synthesia. The upside of these AI tools is easy to see: They’re going to produce a tremendous amount of digital content, quickly and cheaply. Students are already using ChatGPT to help them write essays. Businesses are using ChatGPT to create copy for their websites and promotional materials, and to respond to customer-service inquiries. Lawyers are using it to produce legal briefs (ChatGPT passes the torts and evidence sections of the Multistate Bar Examination, by the way) and academics to produce footnotes.

Read: Will ChatGPT kill the student essay?


Yet an extraordinary downside is also easy to see: What happens when services like ChatGPT start putting copywriters, journalists, customer-service agents, paralegals, coders, and digital marketers out of a job? For years, tech thinkers have been warning that flexible, creative AI will be a threat to white-collar employment, as robots replace skilled office workers whose jobs were once considered immune to automation. In the most extreme iteration, analysts imagine AI altering the employment landscape permanently. One Oxford study estimates that 47 percent of U.S. jobs might be at risk.

No single technology in modern memory has caused mass job loss among highly educated workers. Will generative AI really be an exception? No one can answer this question, given how new the technology is and given how slowly employment can adjust in response to technological change. But AI really is different, technology experts told me—a range of tasks that up until now were impossible to automate are becoming automatable. “Before, progress was linear and predictable. You figured out the steps and the computer followed them. It followed the procedure; it didn’t learn and it didn’t improvise,” the MIT professor David Autor, one of the world’s foremost experts on employment and technological change, told me. ChatGPT and the like do improvise, promising to destabilize a lot of white-collar work, regardless of whether they eliminate jobs or not.

People and businesses are just figuring out how to use emerging AI technologies, let alone how to use them to create new products, streamline their business operations, and make employees more efficient. If history is any guide, this process could take longer than you might think. Consider electricity. The circuit, electric lights, and rudimentary electric motors were developed in the early 1800s. But another century passed before the widespread adoption of electricity in the United States began to lift GDP. Or take computers. They became commercially available in the early 1950s but did not show up in the productivity stats until the late 1990s.


Some technologies clearly improve productivity and reduce the need for labor. Automated machine tools, for instance, depress manufacturing employment while lifting output and productivity, as do many of the forms of machinery invented and employed since the Industrial Revolution. But other technologies—even amazing ones—show surprisingly muted effects. How about the internet, which has revolutionized almost every facet of communications in the past four decades? Despite altering how we date and talk and read and watch and vote and emote and record our own life stories, launching a zillion businesses, and creating however many fortunes, the internet “fails the hurdle test as a Great Invention,” the economist Robert Gordon argued in 2000, because it “provides information and entertainment more cheaply and conveniently than before, but much of its use involves substitution of existing activities from one medium to another.” Nearly a quarter century later, the internet still hasn’t spurred a productivity revolution. Smartphones haven’t either.

So is AI like the smartphone or is it like an automated machine tool? Is it about to change the way that work gets done without eliminating many jobs in aggregate, or is it about to turn San Francisco into the Rust Belt?

Predicting where technology will cause job losses is hard, Autor noted. Remember the freak-out several years ago over the possibility of self-driving automobiles eliminating work for truck drivers? But AI is much more flexible than a system like Excel, much more creative than a Google Doc. What’s more, AI systems get better and better and better as they get more use and absorb more data, whereas engineers often need to laboriously and painstakingly update other types of software.

As a rule, when companies can substitute machines for people, they will. AI can do work currently done by paralegals, copywriters, digital-content producers, executive assistants, entry-level computer programmers, and, yes, some journalists. That means such jobs might change, and soon. But even if ChatGPT can spit out a pretty good paragraph on AI, it can’t interview AI and labor experts, nor can it find historical documents, nor can it assess the quality of studies of technological change and employment. It creates content out of what is already out there, with no authority, no understanding, no ability to correct itself, no way to identify genuinely new or interesting ideas. That implies that AI might make original journalism more valuable and investigative journalists more productive, while creating an enormous profusion of simpler content. AI might spit out listicles and summaries of public meetings, while humans will write in-depth stories. “In many ways, AI will help people use expertise better,” Autor said. “It means that we’ll specialize more.”

Fred Benenson: AI is coming for your favorite menial tasks

AI could also make a wide variety of industries more efficient, with muted effects on overall employment. Matt Wampler is a co-founder of an AI-powered small business called ClearCOGS. He’s been a “restaurant guy” his whole career, he told me. Restaurants and grocery stores, he says, tend to run on thin margins, yet still tend to waste a considerable amount of food. People order more spaghetti than burgers; buns get thrown out. “Restaurants just lag behind on technology,” he told me. “They’re all about people. It’s people serving people; it’s people managing people. And in that very human-centric world, the default way of handling problems is to hand it to a person. Phil’s going to do it.”


ClearCOGS takes restaurants’ customer-order history, supply data, and labor data and uses AI-powered modeling to make their books leaner and more profitable. If people are starting to order more spaghetti than burgers, the system will prompt the chef or manager to buy more pasta and fewer rolls. “We put this in place in some of my cousin’s sandwich shops,” Wampler told me. “Simple answers to simple questions. The question they needed answered was, there’s an assistant manager on the night shift and a couple hours before close, he has to decide whether to bake another tray of bread or not. We provide that answer.” This use of ChatGPT isn’t eliminating human jobs, really; neighborhood sandwich joints aren’t hiring McKinsey consultants. But it might make food service more efficient as a whole.

Even if it doesn’t boost the economy, AI could still change the texture of our lives and alter how we spend our time, like social media did before it. Video games might become more immersive. Shops might have far better copywriting and sales visuals. Movies might look cooler. Videos in the depths of YouTube might become far weirder and more beautiful. We might also see far more formulaic content than we already do. (Much more ominously, there might be a huge amount of plausible-seeming disinformation online.)

For workers, Autor noted, the great risk is that AI technologies cause too sudden a change in what kind of labor employers want. Certain specializations might get wiped out, leaving thousands of call-center operators or marketing workers unemployed. But he stressed the benefits of having such technology in our hands. Productivity has languished for decades. Machines doing a little more work would have a big upside, after all.
What do you make of this technology, John?

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Tom Mazanec
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Re: Generational Dynamics World View News

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Since he expects the Singularity in seven years, I suspect he is quite interested.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

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Re: Generational Dynamics World View News

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Tom Mazanec wrote:
Sat Jan 21, 2023 2:59 pm
Since he expects the Singularity in seven years, I suspect he is quite interested.
Sounds like The Singularity will arrive sooner.

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Bob Butler
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Re: Generational Dynamics World View News

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Guest wrote:
Sat Jan 21, 2023 12:03 am
What do you make of this technology, John?
If more can be done by fewer people, and goods are distributed to people who do stuff, one would think that each should work less. Reduce the 40 hour work week?

FullMoon
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Re: Generational Dynamics World View News

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https://thehill.com/opinion/internation ... was-a-lie/
'Outside of China, domestic measures within states — for example, the new House committee on the China threat, chaired by Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) — are necessary as well. This committee can focus attention on the CCP’s aggression; its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology to which Xi adheres, which is a major source of China’s belligerence; its gross human rights violations; and China’s attacks on the American people, through fentanyl and other means, as well as through technologies and apps such as TikTok. Their investigations and testimony can combat false narratives such as Liu’s and explain to the American people why the CCP is their enemy and why all Americans should identify the regime as their foe.'

https://youtu.be/rrDC4DSi6m0
Gallagher might be actually fighting for us. He seems to understand and articulate the situation quite well.

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Re: Generational Dynamics World View News

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Germany is clearly just a vasal satellite state of Russia.
And even more clearly, half the Germany politicians are bought, paid for and owned by Putin.
Watching herr olaf squirm on the hook of Western moral outrage would be hilarious, if not so tragic due to the Ukranian lives being lost while he obfuscates.

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Tom Mazanec
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Re: Generational Dynamics World View News

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Guest wrote:
Sat Jan 21, 2023 9:42 pm
Tom Mazanec wrote:
Sat Jan 21, 2023 2:59 pm
Since he expects the Singularity in seven years, I suspect he is quite interested.
Sounds like The Singularity will arrive sooner.
This video projects Turing Test capable AI (the take-off point of the Singularity) this year!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5HNeahRYDM
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

User avatar
Tom Mazanec
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Re: Generational Dynamics World View News

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Putin’s Secret Attack Plan Would Be Ukrainian Nightmare
Anna Nemtsova
Fri, January 20, 2023 at 4:48 AM EST
https://news.yahoo.com/putin-secret-att ... 58834.html

SPY SHIP? Russian ‘intelligence gathering ship’ off the Hawaii coast being monitored by US Coast Guard
Rebecca Lee
Published: 11:11 ET, Jan 19 2023Updated: 12:28 ET, Jan 19 2023
https://www.the-sun.com/news/7175119/ru ... ast-guard/

The Ukraine War is Over Except for Some More Dying
Bob Moriarty
Archives
Jan 20, 2023
http://www.321gold.com/editorials/moria ... 12023.html

Austin Warns US Allies Time Is Short Before Russian Offensive
Ukraine Needs Tanks Now, Says Top Military Advisor
ByCourtney McBride
January 20, 2023 at 4:02 PM ESTUpdated onJanuary 20, 2023 at 5:42 PM EST
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ify%20wall
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

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