Comment by greggoB
1 day ago
I am very much weirder out by it, yeah. Seems some societies are just excessively desperate for some kind, any kind, of fuel for economic growth, to the point this is where attention is now. The term "post capitalism" being thrown around feels less ridiculous than it did in years gone past.
Truth is even weirder. plenty of growth is possible but modern liberal democracy requires that all progress must be contingent on the production of enormous amounts of text that nobody would ever read.
3 years ago, the Wall Street journal covered a company trying to use AI to generate documents required for the approval of new nuclear reactor reactor designs, which sounds dangerous, until you get to the point where they'd cite 2 million pages as necessary for a typical application. [1] I don't need to explain why no individual or institution could read that, much less examine it in detail. I remember a rather funny question I found in a comment to that story - "How many pages of those 2 million could contain pornographic images before anyone notices?"
It's obvious why companies are so desperate for training data - a text generator of sufficient quality is more conductive to the growth of the nuclear industry than any scientific breakthrough in nuclear physics. (And of course, if you want to prevent the development of a nuclear reactor by your competitors, being able to produce millions of pages of high-quality objections will do the trick.)
And it's not just nuclear power. When it comes to stuff like building rail lines, apartments or power plants (both conventional and renewable), you'd find that the main bottleneck is the necessity to produce documents. And of course, many documents can be subject to judicial review - a process that consumes even more text.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-targets-nuclear-to-pow...
Well that's why a plan can take years to be approved.
There also is the liability angle, where no one necessarily reads the document until the document is relevant to some situation in the future. Then you better have that document on hand.
According to the article, the “application” (which I imagine was also broken down into smaller pieces as they went back and forth to regulators during the review process) was 12,000 pages in total.
The 2 million number is for “supporting” materials which isn’t really defined. It definitely makes for a better soundbite to claim millions.
It seems reality is trying really hard to outcompete even the weirdest sci-fi dystopias.
Today we are living this dystopian life. Imagine you train an llm on all the millions of complaints that say comcast or some other semi-disfunctional company gets. Or police reports of accidents. Or suicide reports, or any of the endless human misery that is out there in the world.
Even though I'm fortunate in so many ways to be in the west - even with the current destructive us government situation, the world is still full of endless misery that I don't ever experience. Like someone living in a war torn country, Gaza, lots of other places.
Any kind of fuel for giving active investors that FOMO tingle which then forces the steamroll of index funds to blindly follow.
I guess the appropriation "any sufficiently advanced stock market is indistinguishable from entertainment" doesn't quite stop at equating the trade floor with a casino. At some point, entertainment also becomes the modus operandi of corporations.