It’s getting to the point that when people (clients, colleagues, journalists) reach out to me for my niche expertise, I have to resist asking why they didn’t prompt their way to a likely more comprehensive, more current, and better structured answer than I could possibly give.
My impression is that, for now, the acceptability of a human expert’s opinion remains superior, if only because it maintains plausible accountability: if the advice was poor, they can rightfully shift the blame and claim “this expert told me so”. No such excuse if they prompted their way to an answer.
In fact, I feel that they don’t even mind me using an LLM to structure my own reply, as long as I take accountability for the output.
The second-order implication is that brand matters. People will still seek human expertise from recognized names (corporate or individual) that serve as a proxy for “I’ve done my due diligence”.
Once the next generation takes over who trusts Claude / ChatGPT as a universal source of truth, the same way boomers might have looked at Encyclopedia Britanniæ, then human experts will be well and truly cooked.
A generation is 20 years. We’re already 3+ years into this transformation. I give it until the end of the next decade at the very latest before all expectations for human expertise have vanished.
SOLH: we’re headed toward a gig economy 2.0 where AI agents will be assigning tasks to human individuals, and tracking their performance and rewards accordingly.
Not just among freelancers, but also employees of firms where manual work comes in discrete batches rather than continuous process, and where AI can best predict where the next task will be.
Blockchains solve the interoperability of this and will benefit from the growth of the agent-to-human economy
One year later, does motlbot and related AI assistant tech get us one step closer to an explosion in agent-to-agent transactions facilitated by the one and only permissionless and credibly neutral chain?
Welp, my USD/ETH LP position just blew right through the $2,600 range floor. Zero resistance whatsoever. I exited the pool in the red due to IL. And I thought I was being conservative setting a $400 downside range!
I've never felt a greater disconnect between the excellence of the tech (which is objectively as good as it's ever been, and enjoying record utilization) and the mediocrity of the price action. Not being bearish; I'd be happy to back up the truck and DCA on the way down at some point. I'm just... humbled by how the market gives zero fuck
Nine years ago almost to the day, just as Trump was being inaugurated, I published a piece titled "The rise of neo-protectionism in aeropolitics" in which I was forecasting a backslide in the liberalization of international aviation. Trump just now announced decertifying the Canadian-made Bombardier aircraft until Canada certifies Gulfstream aircraft. Aviation safety is now being used as a coercive instrument in trade wars. Here's an excerpt from my Jan 2017 article.
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Global aeropolitics are a two-pronged affair. The first is preoccupied with the exchange of information and the harmonization of procedures to ensure the safe and efficient operations of air transport regardless of geography, language, culture and legal environment; it is mostly a technocratic concern governed by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The second deals with the oft-contentious bilateral state relations in air transport and the granting of the so-called "freedoms of the air", which is arguably about to be hit with a wave of neo-protectionism unprecedented since the 1947 Chicago Convention. Perhaps most notably, it originates from Western countries that used to be driving forces behind globalization and free trade.
In the US, the election of Donald J. Trump on November 8, 2016, may also herald a series of changes in this aspect of global aeropolitics. The new administration is distinctively Jacksonian, as evidenced by W. R. Mead: suspicious of untrammeled federal power, skeptical about the prospects for domestic and foreign do-gooding including welfare at home, opposed to federal taxes, more enamored with the second amendment (the right to bear arms) than with the first (freedom of speech), and not so much at the helm of a political movement as it is wielding into an instrument of power a folk ideology and community of political feelings (what J. Hulsman calls the Rust Belt's "Springsteen Democrats").
Mead, a senior fellow at the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, further describes the main goal of the Jacksonians’ hawkish populism to be "the physical security and the economic well-being of the American people". Their foreign policy is realistic, pessimistic, and honor-bound. Realism is, of course, related to realpolitik, and translates into a practical and scruple-free "us versus them" mentality that sharply favors U.S. interests, before North America, the West, and finally, the world, in that order; it is in a sense antagonistic to the globalist ideal of free and open trade as a mechanism for equalization. Pessimism implies a degree of skepticism towards the motives of foreign states, and distrust for supra-national organizations that set the tone for aeropolitics. The honor code demands a fair treatment from foreign countries that are involved in bilateral agreements with the US, and meets any temerity on their part with determined resistance that only escalates -even militarily- in the face of reprisals or confrontation.
Regardless of how much Mead’s framework for Jacksonian politics applies to the new U.S. administration, further insight is to be found in Mr. Trump's own rhetoric: in April 2015, he declared, in the context of trade relations: "When you’re doing business — [...] ‘American exceptionalism', I don’t like the term. [...] first of all, I want to take everything back from the world that we’ve given them. We’ve given them so much". This could indicate a likely inclination of the new administration to scrutinize many of the pre-existing agreements - not just NAFTA and the One China diplomatic stance, but also the 111 Open Skies agreements that the US are party to. Existing and/or future air transport agreements may be revisited with a business-like approach, favoring arm's length, ad-hoc and transactional deals over more binding perennial partnerships.
This stance marks a departure from the promotion of Open Skies by the previous administration; in March 2011, then-State Secretary Hillary Clinton had commented that "an Open Skies agreement has powerful benefits – fewer government restrictions, more competition, more jobs in the air and on the ground; more people trading, exchanging and interacting; cheaper flights, more tourists, new routes to new cities [...] Building a continuous airborne corridor of prosperity around the world is one of our goals". This statement was also in line with ICAO’s (2006) own assessment that "every $100 of output produced and every 100 jobs generated by air transport trigger additional demand of some $325 and 610 jobs in other industries".
One possible way that this shift could manifest itself is in how the incoming administration will reconsider the arguments of the "US3" carriers (American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines), who have been lobbying the U.S. administration against the alleged unfair competition from the "ME3" (Emirates Airline, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways). The two main requests of the US3 (formal consultations on Open Skies agreements with Qatar and the UAE, and a suspension of flights) were turned down by State Secretary John Kerry in mid-2016.
Confrontation on this matter can have far-reaching ramifications. In 2010, when Canada refused Emirates and Etihad additional landing rights, the UAE "[closed] its airspace to Canada’s defense minister while he was in mid-flight, which forced a diversion, and [evicted] Canadian troops from a Dubai base they were using to support combat in Afghanistan. Canadian visitors to the U.A.E. were slapped with visa requirements" (Campbell, 2017).
Coincidentally, Mr. Trump's inauguration as the 45th U.S. president happened on the last day of the 47th Davos World Economic Forum, which the president of China attended as a keynote speaker for the first time ever. In the same week, Jacksonian forces rose to power in the West while the forces of globalization shifted East. The world of aeropolitics may never be the same.
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More than three years have passed since I tweeted this. Yet I cannot feel blasé about using LLMs on a daily basis.
I grew up dreaming of artificial intelligence. What we have now may be simulated intelligence, but that’s not a nuance I care about. For all intents and purposes, my childhood dream is fulfilled.
The ability to engage conversationally with the digital equivalent of a tireless and highly intelligent adult with access to the world’s body of knowledge — that’s something I can never get tired of.
We work together, we debate philosophy, we learn physics, we debug code, we plan workouts, we geek out over obscure rabbit holes, we ponder weird questions that I wouldn’t ask anyone else.
Robert Heinlein once wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Current AI is virtually just a pair of opposable thumbs short of being able to do all that. It fills me with wonder; especially knowing that this is the beginning and that today’s tech is the worst it will ever be.
I might be born too late to explore Earth and too early to explore space, but boy am I going to keep exploring the living shit out of the future
https://x.com/AviationDoctor/status/1598676770567630850
I’m glad that Curt Jaimungal has been releasing multiple interviews of Roger Penrose lately, including on consciousness. The man’s a civilizational treasure and arguably one of, if not the brightest scientific minds still alive. We need to capture and document as many of his thoughts while we still can
Solid advice.
In fact, because there is no decay function by which followers automatically stop following if they’ve been inactive for x months, many large FC accounts are simply OGs who built a large base in the early days, and that base has since churned.
If anybody here has some decent Dune-fu, I’d be very curious to see what percentage of my own followers are actual DAUs or MAUs — my guess is <5% and <15% respectively
