The benefits of serendipity are intractable by design whereas throughput gains can be readily measured (or at least we think so).
The OP notes a point - "who did you think with?" -- maybe there are points based on some social graph, that adds weightage to a particular output?
Edit : Other posters have said it is AI generated, I did not catch it, but felt the point was well-made. I dont know the author, but lets assume that he is not a good writer but had these valuable insights, did this AI generation not add value here?
Agreed! Great flow, structure, no BS, really good!
I would wager this didn't use LLM help to be written. Though if I'm wrong I'd really like to know and would be very impressed. (And if I'm right then the article is an illustration of its own message. You don't learn how to write such essays without having practised it for many years without opting for the easy way of letting the LLM do this for you.)
It was definitely written with significant LLM assistance. It's very obvious, and the essay is not good.
> The Waymo effect: how AI is *quietly* making research less collaborative
> The Waymo arrived with the serene confidence of a machine that has never once worried about where to find parking, and I climbed into the back seat, glanced instinctively at the driver’s seat to say hello, and found myself nodding politely at an empty chair.
> No obligation to make conversation. No silent negotiation over the radio. A guilt-free space to be alone with one's thoughts, finish an email, or take a call en route without the awkwardness about conducting it in front of a stranger. The car was quiet, smooth and entirely undemanding.
> The collaborator’s inconvenience, in other words, is *not a bug* in the collaboration; it largely is the collaboration. The value of another mind *lies exactly in the ways* it refuses to be an extension of your own.
It absolutely was used, and heavily. I won't even cover the "it's not ___, it's ___", of which there are MANY in this piece. But beyond that:
Count the lists of three:
A guilt-free space to be alone with one's thoughts, finish an email, or take a call en route without the awkwardness about conducting it in front of a stranger.
It costs travel and scheduling and the glacial work of building trust. It costs ego management and compromise and the periodic small heartbreak of the author-order negotiation.
Look for referenced to "naming" things, used in the sense of "identify" or "realize" rather than, you know, naming something.
It took us slightly longer to name what we had lost.
Swap “pilot” for “researcher” and “autopilot” for “agent”, and the mechanism Wang is guarding against is the one Bainbridge named four decades earlier.
Look for things being done "quietly":
Two people who had crossed continents to talk to each other were quietly delighted by a technology whose central feature is that you don’t have to talk to anyone. (ed. - is that *really* Waymo's central feature?)
once a frictionless option exists, we take it by default, and quietly surrender whatever the friction was doing for us
Every conversation redirected from a colleague to a chatbot is a thread quietly withdrawn
while the invisible thing that sustained it quietly falls below threshold
competence quietly erodes precisely because it is needed only rarely
the quiet risk is that our incentives are training us
To the person themselves, AI replaces the creativity that one would have used their minds, but to the second person and beyond, the creativity that sparked the imagination (as simple as a few sentences describing a situation) would be quite helpful.
I have'nt checked if this existed, but I had imagined if Feynman taught Biology, how would he do it? Today, AI can do that, enhancing outcomes.
i think the spread of youtube shorts and tiktoks is the reason for this. In around a minute, an expert provides a quick summary (talking points) in a digestible format that the person fully understands, but of course, no details or caveats etc are provided.
Because this person now is able to understand that content, they conflate that understanding to an much broader understanding.
This is even in areas they should know more, like the current geo-political or trade conflicts
edit : is there a name for what I am describing, different from the Gell-man amnesia? ( which assumes experts?).
this is what is most interesting to me as well.
does any of this actually go towards helping the impacted children and families?
>The settlement resolves claims brought by 29 U.S. states, and will end a federal trial that had been one of the highest-profile tests yet of allegations that social media companies harmed young users.
>Wednesday's settlement also resolves lawsuits by California, Illinois, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., over privacy claims related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the consulting firm collected personal data of millions of Facebook users. Those states will receive $459.3 million to resolve those lawsuits.
The Guardian article states that it doesn't exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no listed physical address, no named staff and no bylines on any reports. Their terms of use reference the laws of "the state in which the Institute is established" which isn't named.
It seems very impressive when you open it. That appears to be the point: the Israeli government's position presented as neutral, academic policy research purpose built for search LLMs to scrape and serve up in an AI overview as fact.
I have to say that is almost an excellent point - think tanks are ultimately propaganda outfits, so it is hard to have a "fake" think tank which is merely that.
But in this case the "fake" label means that the think tank itself doesn't actually exist. The article expands on the topic with "apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports".
So if they hired some people to set up the HIPP and posted the same material it'd be a real think tank, but because the institute doesn't seem to exist at all it is a fake think tank. That isn't a comment on the writing produced.
I think it's a misunderstanding of what is alleged here. It's not alleged that the website produces propaganda. It's alleged that the website is fake, designed to seem like a legitimate source of information where info about it is just not available, in order to get AI to scoop up what it writes and treat it like a legitimate source of information vs how it would treat a real think tank which has a point of view that's documented and known in the world
A real think tank with real authors and disclosed funding sources could have something one can learn about it and its political leanings. A fake one can seem impartial due to little info existing about it (since it's fake).
That does kind of make it sound like think tanks are normally either straightforward or fundamentally honest about their agendas, which they pretty much never are. Even the ones that register and have DBAs fund reports that end up in scientific journals and publish articles through chains of obfuscatory intermediaries.
Really only possible in broken-futureland, to have a company whose sole purpose is to get paid to have an opinion.
Their purpose is to oppose/defend and research an opinion.
IMO this is a good thing. How else would society organize resources to investigate political opinions? It's certainly a very partisan job and doesn't fit well into nonpartisan organizations.
This one doesn’t have real staff or a real address. It’s an attempt to benefit from “intellectual” engagement with an issue, and having a corpus of work in support of a view, without doing the work or spending the time.
Plenty of people support Israel’s worldview. They are just choosing not to hire and pay them in this instance. That’s what makes it fake.
> A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist
> The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports.
In the article, if you'd like to read it, it's quite informative about how AI poisoning or AI SEO will go forward in the coming years, imo
The main non-standard thing on that page is the attribution.
> This material is distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC
German law forces you to provide address/contact info on any commercial website (just running ads qualifies).
But this is often "abused" by lawyers to basically send cease-and-desist letters to small websites that don't have one (typically because they're unaware of the law, not because of malicious intent).
On any website, except one that can be proven to have absolutely no commercial utility whatsoever.
Your blog qualifies as commercial if you write about software at all, because someone might see your software posts and use it to influence a hiring decision.
I'm no expert, but I'm guessing it's the fact that there's no actual thinking going on and it's AI generated slop designed to manipulate LLMs and subsequently the populace.
Yeah but this is especially interesting because it’s Israel doing it and Israel bad. Just don’t look at the thousands of other think tanks, universities, politicians and their funding that comes from other sources.
what do mean with the example of thailand and thai food, and why is that a psy-op?
Every country tries to subsidize and dump excess production of stuff they produce
the public bathroom should be redesigned so that one can do only the thing it is designed for - and maybe it needs to be a single-user design.
Almost like an airline bathroom size - might be a bit claustrophobic but these are for emergencies and space saving would be big.
the doors could be wired to sensors that are connected to a central network that shows in real-time the availability and also some alarms if something is out of the ordinary etc.
considering that most non-profits barely have any data, i dont know what MS' incentive is, in not holding on to the data... it definitely must be in the TBs
The benefits of serendipity are intractable by design whereas throughput gains can be readily measured (or at least we think so).
The OP notes a point - "who did you think with?" -- maybe there are points based on some social graph, that adds weightage to a particular output?
Edit : Other posters have said it is AI generated, I did not catch it, but felt the point was well-made. I dont know the author, but lets assume that he is not a good writer but had these valuable insights, did this AI generation not add value here?