Unfortunately what you're describing is precisely the opposite of the meaning of 'democratised'. A more accurate term would be commoditised. In this case the capacity to manipulate events becomes as tied to wealth as it is to access to information.
Yeah, I really only mean 'democratized' in the sense that there's suddenly a populace of influence. Whether or not that influence is 'fair' in a democratic sense is clearly not the case, but there's a tipping point in how influential it actually is.
If you're an elected lawmaker, and there's a bill on the floor which gives your district $500,000 in hospital funding but there's $10,000,000,000 in volume just on the 'no' side of the bet, how's that going to influence your decision making?
They may have dropped from the level of death during the war itself. A transnational conflict that involved every continent on earth. But I'd be shocked if the numbers dead from war in the post war period did not exceed the median number of civilian victims of war pre-WW1 or in the post war period. The World Wars normalised the idea of total war, of death squads and killing fields and mechanised genocide. Those have continued apace, everywhere from the Congo to Cambodia. At the time they were novelties in 'the civilised' world.
I asked ChatGPT to compute the rate of total deaths (civilians + military) since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Here's what it came up with:
Period. Approx average deaths from war
1815–1913 ~5–15 per 100k per year
1914–1945 ~100–200 per 100k per year
1946–1989 ~5–10 per 100k per year
1990–today ~1–3 per 100k per year
I know AI is not 100% reliable but it searched on many sources to compute that.
I checked some of them and the conclusion is in line with them.
Here's the "bottomline":
> Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the per-capita death rate from war has fallen substantially, with the huge exception of the 1914–1945 world-war era, which produced the highest war mortality rates in modern history.
TBH this surprised me. I thought that with much better killing machines in the 20th century, we'd be more efficient at killing, and as we're still having wars as usual that would mean death rates would increase... but it seems I was quite wrong.
Alas we're seeing a reversion to historical norms. The "civilized" world was a temporary and localized phenomenon. The usual pattern in conflicts between societies was always genocide: kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, smash the cultural artifacts, and steal anything of value. Probably thousands of societies have been utterly erased that way. Hopefully we can arrest the gradual worldwide regression to barbarism but I'm not optimistic.
People love repeating this stuff, a form of navel-gazing: 'Norms' is used by bad people to support their obviously bad ideas - 'I know this sucks, but it's inevitable!'.
Instead of complaining, do what prior generations did and stand up and build something.
We contact support services to fix material problems. 'This booking is wrong.' 'I want a refund for that.' AI systems aren't empowered to solve these problems. At best they can provide information. If the answer is information - the user can likely already find it online themselves (often from a better AI model than they're going to find running your support line). If they're calling, they most often want something done.
Yeah, it's like trying to use an ORM to find data in the database that's invalid due to a bug. You can't see things in the system that break the premises of the system by using the system, and the fact that some things are "supposed to be impossible" doesn't change the reality of what's actually occurring in the data store.
So customer support needs to know how the systems works and need to understand what the data means, but also has to know when the system is factually incorrect. Customer support has to know when the second party is speaking the truth.
Do you know that to be true or are you speculating?
As we argue on the orange site, companies are paying Sierra AI to integrate voice and text agents into their systems to look up account information and process refunds. Fallbacks to human agents are built in to these systems.
We all hate phone trees because they never have the capability to handle exceptions to the most basic functions. We shout "speak to an agent!" into the phone because their website and phone trees only handle the happy path.
One hundred percent. I work in film, and recently had an argument with a friend around this point. He's incredibly healthy, and frequently works a large number of unsociable hours. I was pointing out that filmmaking hours make no concession for family or age. He'd convinced himself that he'll have no more difficulty doing 80 hour weeks in his forties and fifties than he does in his mid thirties, because he 'takes care of himself'. The implication being that everyone could work those hours if they just ate better and held multiple martial arts belts as he does. It was no use pointing out that he'd confused cause and effect.
For set related jobs, the hours are the shoot. If the shoot runs long, everybody's on set. It's an exploitative - and in my view, completely unnecessary - culture. The marriages, parental relationships and health costs cannot be justified by the supposed necessity of dollar savings. But currently - especially in the US, film sets all to often work sweatshop hours. More enlightened practices, like 'French hours' (a ten hour day), are also possible. The films created under these conditions don't seem any worse, and the people involved are inarguably happier and healthier.
Counterpoint, I very much enjoyed the sequels (all but the last). They added three dimensional characters, especially women and explored a variety of aspects of first contact. They're a believable examination of how humans recreate the same social ills over and over, given the opportunity for utopia.
I thought they were reasonably interesting as well, though not quite the same vibe as the original.
Maybe it's that whole sense of wonder thing. When you have no idea why this thing was built and sent here, it's easy to imagine it was something exotic, amazing, high and mighty, wholesome, etc. When it's revealed that the reason was quite ordinary and kind of distasteful to modern human sensibilities, it's kind of a let-down.
> Truth is, once youth passes, over time people become increasingly disinterested in others.
I find almost exactly the opposite is true. As you age your perceived value lessens, while you find the nuances of human behaviour ever more fascinating. Meanwhile many of the current cohort of twenty somethings seem disinterested in everything, including one another.
I would extend that to thirty somethings, so my generation as well.
Over time most of the people this age in my extended social circle kind of... faded. I don't know what caused this but I find myself increasingly socialising with younger people because they still haven't retreated to the comfort of their "me time" activities.
In the US, I think that not doing the boring thing, which is spending time during 20s working or studying for a handful of career paths, climbing up the career ladder, saving up for downpayment for land in the richer areas of a handful of expensive cities, etc comes with huge costs.
The cost is that when you are 40 and you either have stable finances such that you can provide your kids with an acceptable amount of healthcare and education and housing stability, and you will be able to retire, or you get to 40 and you have to start sacrificing the goal of raising kids within the aforementioned parameters.
Maybe that is how it always was, it just wasn't a "known" thing so people didn't incorporate it into the decision making when they were 20.
Great example of narrow rationality. Huge amount of Americas current problems can be traced back to a poorly educated population. Universal access to third level education, combined with a school system designed to educate - in direct opposition to current goal of producing labour units for corporate; would massively improve pretty much ever aspect of American life.
The market lens is myopic, the market cannot be expected to produce social goods in proportion to necessity - that's not any part of its function.
I agree that the student loan system is insane. Students need grants to cover cost of living while they focus on learning, education itself of course should be free.
>combined with a school system designed to educate - in direct opposition to current goal of producing labour units for corporate; would massively improve pretty much ever aspect of American life.
"producing labour units for corporate" at least pays the bills. What's the alternative? Education is for "finding yourself" or whatever? That's a nice platitude, but "finding yourself" with a film studies course doesn't pay the bills, and is arguably the reason why there's a student loan crisis in the first place.
A liberal education serves a social function. It makes human beings.
There's a student loan crisis because US education is dominated by for profit colleges (in start contrast to most other countries) and because student loans lack ordinary consumer productions (in stark contrast to all other countries).
In the US students act as guarantors for debt obligations between the government and commercial institutions. The reverse of the usual arrangement.
> in direct opposition to current goal of producing labour units for corporate
I never understood this characterization. How do the schools implement a goal for producing labor units?
> education itself of course should be free
People don't value what they get for free. If you sign up for a course in welding, are you going to be more or less diligent in learning it if you have to pay the tuition?
No education is free, it's paid in time and effort. I value my degree because it was difficult, not because it had a cost attached. One that could be purchased without effort would have no value.
That's factually wrong - extrinsic demands decrease intrinsic motivation. There's a tonne of research on this. Similarly negative conditioning is less effective than positive.
I don't think there's a country in Europe that funds childcare remotely to the level of cost. The most generous I'm aware of is certain states / cities in Germany that provide free 'Kita', essentially Kindergarten. In addition to maternity leave, national insurance etc. But this certainly doesn't cover the numerous costs (including time off work etc) associated with having kids.
Would be an interesting experiment to actually pay people to have kids - i.e.: financially reward them in accordance with the costs involved. I suspect, as with an actual liveable UBI, the results would differ radically.
We do pay people to have kids in the USA - once you're on welfare. Your WIC and EBT allowances go up per kid.
And even if you're not that poor, you get subsidized kids through things like the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit. It's annoying that while some of those support 3+ kids, many "top out" at three and stop increasing.
I've often thought of searching for "sponsorships" for additional children (though we'd probably have them anyway) - not sure I want my son to be named Facebook X AI though ;)
You've missed my point... Those allowances and subsidies don't remotely cover the cost of having children. Especially in the US with the wild costs of hospital childbirth itself.
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