He certainly seems to enjoy the same kind of privilege of an infinite rebuy that Elon gets. It really does feel like there's a limit of nine digits on the money counter and once you get more than a billion dollars it just overflows to infinity. There seems to be no amount of bad investments they can make or money they can lose that would actually matter or make them come back to the same economy the rest of us live in.

The fact that the 2014 presentation opens with "SoftBank=goose" just makes the 2026 metaphor even harder to parse. Is SoftBank itself the goose? Is the goose the hypothetical ASI that OpenAI is definitely going to build and monetize any day now? Am I the goose? I certainly feel undervalued sometimes, maybe I'm the goose.

At this point I'm expecting the next big startup to literally call itself Golden Calf

I vote we preserve this term for future and past bubbles as well.

Maybe my experiences are unusual, but I've seen more harassment and general shittiness from other commuters than I ever have from homeless people camping nearby. Not saying it doesn't happen, but I feel like we're back to the problem of harassment and violence already being illegal. Going back to the immediate question here, removing the benches doesn't make harassment or assholery any more difficult or more consequential.

Is there any chance this is just an awkward translation?

I imagine there's a certain level of generic fringe attraction at work here too. Some people are just particularly drawn to hidden knowledge or forbidden arcane arts or secrets of the universe or whatever you want to call it. Places like SFZC appear to be at the outer edges of the broader cultic milieu.

I mean it seems like a lot of that could be avoided by, for example, keeping the goddamn bathrooms open (or making there be public bathrooms). Drugs are already illegal. The station is still a roof over your head, making it preferable to the street whether or not there are benches.

Ironically it seems like the most direct harm done by homeless people sleeping on the benches is that those benches aren't usable by commuters who may need to rest. And this certainly makes that problem go away, I guess. Wouldn't exactly call it solved.

It's also funny to note that at least 2/5 of the points are actively bad advice. Naively extrapolating from a trend line is one of the most common errors people make when trying to make a prediction, especially when you're already prone to letting the aesthetic of data lead you astray. Trusting in a kind of "normalcy bias" or whatever you want to call the assumption that the world will continue to be pretty normal is one of the better ways to hedge against that.

Also I've said it before but the name "technological singularity" literally comes from the idea that at the hypothetical rate of change they're posting all our existing models of what is possible or probable break down like the laws of physics at the center of a black hole. If you're reasoning from a pre-singularity model then definitionally there is no expectation that it should continue to hold true. I don't think I need to get too deep into why the whole singularitarian concept is pretty sketchy in its own right, but since it still lies at the heart of the science fiction driving these people's predictions I think its worth acknowledging that it does suggest its own nonsense.

There was a line in the piece you linked from Wired that seemed to imply that the AAI gulag might be a holding cell for engineers who zuck didn't want to just lay off (presumably to avoid spooking investors and tanking morale even harder) but also didn't want to have on their previous role of actually working on Facebook/insta/whatever.

What I find most interesting in all this is that none of the coverage I've seen has said that crimes happened in its vicinity that it failed to detect, only that it didn't issue any citations or whatever. Which is wild if you consider that they basically had it doing laps of a parking garage or whatever. You would think that if it was encouraging people to not rob those cars or whatever that it was doing its job, much like how ostensibly a speed camera is supposed to discourage people from speeding rather than just issue fines.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this obelisk-looking-ass robopig was actually succeeding, I just think that the criteria being used to declare it a failure say some really bad things about the state of policing.

I mean, I think he is entirely too credulous of people who claim to be doing things better with AI and discounts a lot of the possible costs of AI systems that malfunction silently and produce plausible bullshit. But I think that those elements complicate his point more than they fully contradict it. Like, consider his last example. Lawyers looking for possible cases for something like the innocence project have to start somewhere, and I can fully believe that the kind of statistical analysis marketing itself as AI is going to be able to pick out viable leads better than doing it randomly or alphabetically or whatever, and that might save the lawyers time and let them help more people than they otherwise would have. But by replacing a naive algorithm with an opaque one you're essentially baking in any underlying biases in the current system. The people who aren't going to get seen now are still probably not going to get seen unless they're right on the margins somehow, and that "somehow" is almost certainly going to be racism, sexism, etc. But by moving that bias from the immediate decision and placing it in the AI model it becomes that much harder to unpack, identify, and address. Like, I fully agree that much if not most of the harm being done by AI right now is more tied to the business and economic structures that it's embedded in rather than the technology itself. There are very good reasons why so many crypto/metaverse/nft grifters moved straight to AI, and when they try and move on to quantum or web67 or whatever else comes next they will keep right on hurting the world in the same ways unless something about those structures changes. But that doesnt necessary mean we shouldn't also focus on the harms and limitations that are inherent to the way these things function rather than how they're used.