Comment by rustyhancock
4 hours ago
Life is full of variable reward schemes. Probably why we evolved to be so enamoured by them.
Sometimes I think we put the Carr before the horse. We gamble because evolution promotes that approach.
Yes I could go for the reliable option. But taking a punt is worth a shot if the cost is low.
The cost of AI is low.
What is a problem is people getting wrapped up in just one more pull of the slot machine handle.
I use AI often. But fairly often I simply bin its reponse and get to work on my own. A decent amount of the time I can work with the response given to make a decent result.
Sometimes, rarely, it gives me what I need right off the bat.
> The cost of AI is low
If we're only talking about money spent on prompting AI, maybe. The damage to online trust is massive imo. So is the damage done by looting the commons to build them.
Typical privatize the profits socialize the costs bullshit
>Life is full of variable reward schemes. Probably why we evolved to be so enamoured by them.
Important to point out that that every high culture produced restrictions on exactly those behaviors, gambling was a universal vice when that concept still mattered.
America in particular had a work culture that favored well, work and technical excellence. Now work is for suckers, thinking is for suckers, precision not worth it when you can have some machine do it half-right.
"Yes I could go for the reliable option. But taking a punt is worth a shot if the cost is low.", might as well be the national slogan from vibe-coding to the department of defense. Even the venture capital industry that excels at slot machine sectors was itself already a slot machine.
I doubt gambling is in nature. Investments based on reason pay off. Evolution shapes for sensical moves.
Humans invented gambling as a rigged game that mimics what's in nature, perversed for profit.
The "natural" form of gambling is this.
You need to collect food, do you go to where you know there are berries (low value but high likelihood of finding), or scout off to find a herd of deer? (High value but low likelihood of finding).
Looking for deer wouldnt be walking off in a random direction. You check water holes, known clearings, known fields.
Each of these is an operation (walk to X and look), each has a low probability of meeting a deer.
This is a variable reward scheme.
The result is optmize foraging practices - you mostly hunt for deer then fall back to berries. In larger groups some will gather berries some will hunt.
Contrary to popular thought hunter and gatherer were not separate occupations.
But we don't say a hunter is out gambling. We say out hunting. That there is investment, uncertainty, risks, and invariably some randomness in the returns, it's certainly not random. Gambling for the the most if not the whole part is random.
Broadly speaking, gambling is just making decisions without knowing the future. It's everywhere.
Gambling is taking a bet without any clue about the future.
Nothing is done with certainty what the future will be. Yet we don't say we are constantly gambling, without some people do.