This article is scratching the surface of the concept of desynchronization from the theory of social acceleration and the sociology of speed. Any technology that is supposed to create idle time, once it reaches mass adoptions has the opposite effect of speeding up everything else.

We have been on this track for a long time: cars were supposed to save time in transit, but people started living farther from city centres (c.f. Marchetti's constant). E-Mail and instant messaging were supposed to eliminate wait time from postal services, but we now send orders of magnitude more messages and social norms have shifted such that faster replies are expected.

"AI" backed productivity increases are only impressive relative to non-AI users. The idilliac dream of working one or two days a week with agents in the background "doing the rest" is delusional. Like all previous technologies once it reaches mass adoption everyone will be working at a faster pace, because our society is obsessed with speed.

If anyone is saying "yeah, but this time will be different", just look at our society now.

Arguably the only jobs which are necessary in society are related to food, heating, shelter and maybe some healthcare. Everything else - what most people are doing - is just feeding the never ending treadmill of consumer desire and bureaucratic expansion. If everyone adjusted their desired living standards and possessions to those of just a few centuries ago, almost all of us wouldn't need to work.

Yet here we are, still on the treadmill! It's pretty clear that making certain types of work no longer needed will just create new demands and wants, and new types of work for us to do. That appears to be human nature.

You are wrong. Cars have made it possible for people to commute way more easily than the alternative where cars don’t exist.

Cars allowed people to live far away which allows for lower housing cost therefore decreased overall cost of living.

Before posting such a daring response, I suggest you use your favourite search engine and read up on the following topics: Red Queen Race, Jevons Paradox, Induced Demand, Technology Treadmill.

How do you explain people losing their jobs to AI atm?

> Sometimes models that seem nonlinear turns linear if those nonlinearities are pushed into the basis functions, so one can still hope.

That idea was pushed to its limit by the Koopman operator theory. The argument sounds quite good at first, but unfortunately it can’t really work for all cases in its current formulation [1].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08177

Quite so. Quite so indeed.

We know that under benign conditions and infinite dimensional basis must exist but finding it from finite samples is very non-trivial, we don't know how to do it in the general case.

From the abstract and skimming a few sections of the first paper, imho it is not really the same. The paper is moving the loss gradient to the tangent dual space where weights reside for better performance in gradient descent, but as far as I understand neither the loss function nor the neural net are analyzed in a new way.

The Fourier and Wavelet transforms are different as they are self-adjoint operators (=> form an orthogonal basis) on the space of functions (and not on a finite dimensional vector space of weights that parametrize a net) that simplify some usually hard operators such as derivatives and integrals, by reducing them to multiplications and divisions or to a sparse algebra.

So in a certain sense these methods are looking at projections, which are unhelpful when thinking about NN weights since they are all mixed with each other in a very non-linear way.

Since as you say this utilitarian view is rather common, perhaps it would good to show _why_ this is problematic by presenting a counterargument.

The basic premise under GP's statements is that although not perfect, we should use the technology in such a way that it maximizes the well being of the largest number of people, even if comes at the expense of a few.

But therein lies a problem: we cannot really measure well being (or utility). This becomes obvious if you look at individuals instead of the aggregate: imagine LLM therapy becomes widespread and a famous high profile person and your (not famous) daughter end up in "the few" for which LLM therapy goes terribly wrong and commit suicide. The loss of the famous person will cause thousands (perhaps millions) people to be a bit sad, and the loss of your daughter will cause you unimaginable pain. Which one is greater? Can they even be be compared? And how many people with a successful LLM therapy are enough to compensate for either one?

Unmeasurable well-being then makes these moral calculations at best inexact and at worst completely meaningless. And if they are truly meaningless, how can they inform your LLM therapy policy decisions?

Suppose for the sake of the argument we accept the above, and there is a way to measure well being. Then would it be just? Justice is a fuzzy concept, but imagine we reverse the example above: many people lose their lives because of bad LLM therapy, but one very famous person in the entertainment industry is saved by LLM therapy. Let's suppose then that this famous persons' well being plus the millions of spectators' improved well-being (through their entertainment) is worth enough to compensate the people who died.

This means saving a famous funny person justifies the death of many. This does not feel just, does it?

There is a vast amount of literature on this topic (criticisms of utilitarianism).

We have no problem doing this in other areas. Airline safety, for example, is analyzed quantitatively by assigning a monetary value to an individual human life and then running the numbers. If some new safety equipment costs more money than the value of the lives it would save, it's not used. If a rule would save lives in one way but cost more lives in another way, it's not enacted. A famous example of this is the rule for lap infants. Requiring proper child seats for infants on airliners would improve safety and save lives. It also increases cost and hassle for families with infants, which would cause some of those families to choose driving over flying for their travel. Driving is much more dangerous and this would cost lives. The FAA studied this and determined that requiring child seats would be a net negative because of this, and that's why it's not mandated.

There's no need to overcomplicate it. Assume each life has equal value and proceed from there.

This is either incredible satire or you’re a lunatic.

I'm just showing the logical consequences of utilitarian thinking, not endorsing it.

I don't think this is the reason. Since Apple stopped making new interesting product lines they are very attentive about not having one line cannibalize the sales of the other(s) as it happened with the iPod and iPhone. This is also the reason why iPads will never run macOS and vice-versa.

It has definitely been overused by too many authors. This reminds me a passage of Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language":

> A newly−invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn−out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves

My favourite (fiction) book this year was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. An amazingly intricate storyline with a perfect ending.

Roughly sorted by thickness (for the editions I own), these are among my favourites and arguably a good starting point

* Animal Farm - George Orwell

* The Fall - Albert Camus

* Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

* One hundred years of solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

* The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

Master and Margarita is wonderfully burlesque and beautiful, and not that thick ;-)

While I certainly appreciate the practicality of these technologies I do feel uneasy when thinking about a future where more or less everyone owns AR devices, as they denormalize interacting with others to do these activities. I was taught how to cook first from my mother and I later learned more with a flatmate. Similarly, when I had a flat tire my friends who were more into cars helped me out. Both have helped me develop and strengthen good personal relationships which I still have to this day.

I know smartphones are extremely valuable as I have learned a lot from the internet, and they are great tools when you have no other options, but they are already starting to become the default way of doing anything, and that way is solitary. AR devices would only exacerbate this trend by just being even more convenient to use. I love the technology but I wouldn’t want to live in a future where asking to your AR glasses before of your friends is the norm.

I’m not sure what is the best way to move forward without sounding like a luddite.

Perhaps you would no longer ask your friends about changing tires, but AR will open up new opportunities for interacting with them. Maybe virtually visiting a different country together, or studying new language together with a (virtual) native speaker.

Also, flat tire on a unfamiliar road, especially a remote location, can be very stressful. More likely your friends wouldn’t be there.