I mean, this is also Martin Fowler, a luminary in the field. His site should be able to handle the HN hug of death, particularly if he's bashing the latest-and-greatest tools. As is, he looks like an old man shouting about cars being bad while his horse drops dead at the side of the road.
I personally don't see the correlation between what he's been saying about AI and his blog site's reliability requirements. It's a blog, not some high availability service.
Also, was Henry Ford asking for regulation because his cars may destroy our civilization as we knew it?
Basic economic theory states that only holds if the goods / services being provided are equivalent in the eyes of consumers. It seems self evident here that consumers do not consider them equivalent.
You said that the AI industry feels they're replaceable. I'm not saying that AI does equivalent work, I'm saying that AI companies don't choose the prices for art, they just play in the market.
An important thing to consider is how much of their uptime without incidents is not the normal working hours. Their incident-free uptime on 9-5 EST, Mon-Fri, is probably like 60%.
A large majority of basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars. One mustn't underestimate the importance of DOD, NIH, and NSF grants in ongoing technological innovation.
> A large majority of basic scientific research is funded by tax dollars.
Used to be. The US government only funds 40% of basic scientific research now.
This is due to large increases investment from private industry, which now rivals the US government even for basic scientific research in addition to funding the vast majority of other research. US government funding didn't decrease, the pie just became much larger.
NSF regularly publishes detailed reports on US R&D funding. The trend toward industry funding eclipsing US government funding started in the 1960s.
What's your actually point? Reading between the lines I'm seeing the following logic.
1) The free market develops and sell products.
2) The government buys the products that the free market has produced.
3) Therefore the free market isn't viable without government tax money? Therefore socialism? Silicon Valley wouldn't be as successful without govt spending money on things it needs? Help me out here.
This is clearly heading in a direction where the USA is going to elect a huge number of socialists, who in turn are going to enact massive taxes on billionaires and break up the monopolies.[1]
This is why I think the billionaire oligarchs are literally mentally ill. They've won the entire game. They control everything. They live like gods, they twitch a pinky and millions dance.
But their response to all of this power is to seek even more of it, destabilizing the very system that has them on top. You would think self-preservation would kick in. The fact that it is not and that their greed knows apparently no bounds is going to lead to their extinction.
For a long time I thought it was hyperbolic to say so, but no longer -- the billionaires are mentally ill.
I very much doubt that. There isn't enough class solidarity to pull it off.
There will be a few who brand themselves as such. But actually seizing the means of production and handing them over to the people? -- The oligarchs will burn this country to the ground before they permit that to happen.
It would of course be lose-lose for everyone. But if a significant proportion of the population starts believing (rationally or not) that they have nothing left to lose it could be problematic.
I too don't believe that GP's dream is going to happen, but the current momentum is much stronger than in the OWS days. Maybe it's less visible to some because the world has moved into online algorithmic bubbles rather than people camping in front of Wall Street. If they were more scared back then than they are now, it's not because the current momentum is actually weaker.
This is obviously intentional.
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