An obvious manipulation tactic on the path to abolish cash. "Think of the children!"
A better alternative, remove small coins. They serve no purpose nowadays, inflation made them obsolete. They are even more expensive to make then their inherent worth.
The only purpose left for using small coins is for psychological manipulation, by pricing items at 0,99 instead of 1,00. This has been proven a successful tactic for supermarkets and vendors, to the detriment of buyers, who are manipulated into thinking something is "cheaper", because the price is reduced by 1% or less.
A few European countries, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy already use the practice of rounding to 5 with no issues whatsoever, thereby basically removing smaller coins.
I see your rational, non-political reply got downvoted while wild, biased speculations did not.
This posting rule
"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
explicitly asks not to do this. Yet here we are.
Once AGI is many times smarter than humans, the 'guiding' evaporates as foolish irrational thinking. There is no way around the fact when AGI acquires 10 times, 100, 1000 times human intelligence, we are suddenly completely powerless to change anything anymore.
AGI can go wrong in innumerable ways, most of which we cannot even imagine now, because we are limited by our 1 times human intelligence.
The liftoff conditions literally have to be near perfect.
So the question is, can humanity trust the power hungry billionaire CEOs to understand the danger and choose a path for maximum safety? Looking at how it is going so far, I would say absolutely not.
> [...] 1000 times human intelligence, we are suddenly completely powerless [...] The liftoff conditions literally have to be near perfect.
I don't consider models suddenly lifting off and acquiring 1000 times human intelligence to be a realistic outcome. To my understanding, that belief is usually based around the idea that if you have a model that can refine its own architecture, say by 20%, then the next iteration can use that increased capacity to refine even further, say an additional 20%, leading to exponential growth. But that ignores diminishing returns; after obvious inefficiencies and low-hanging fruit are taken care of, squeezing out even an extra 10% is likely beyond what the slightly-better model is capable of.
I do think it's possible to fight against diminishing returns and chip away towards/past human-level intelligence, but it'll be through concerted effort (longer training runs of improved architectures with more data on larger clusters of better GPUs) and not an overnight explosion just from one researcher somewhere letting an LLM modify its own code.
> can humanity trust the power hungry billionaire CEOs to understand the danger and choose a path for maximum safety
Those power-hunger billionaire CEOs who shall remain nameless, such as Altman and Musk, are fear-mongering about such a doomsday. Goal seems to be regulatory capture and diverting attention away from the more realistic issues like use for employee surveillance[0].
The usual suspects are pesticides, emulsifiers, preservatives/additives, genetically engineered food, highly processed food and then overall plain worse eating, as in lack of: unprocessed, fiber, freshness.
The problem is that there is so much money in food made by big companies nowadays, for every reputable study you will get 10 studies paid by those companies that proclaim the opposite.
Saw a study the other day that linked certain colon cancers with the prevalence of a particular strain of bacteria that is usually exclusively found in the mouth. Correlation != causation and all that, but that does kind of correspond with what seem to be generational shifts in certain sexual practices.
Thanks for clarifying - I usually assume that when someone makes a subjective claim about how something "seems" that the "to me" part is implied, obvious even, but I forgot where I was. By the way, do you have a peer reviewed study to back up your claims?
The universal answer as to why (there is no fair, working system implemented) is, as usual, 'cui bono?'
Any strategy to make whistleblowing power-balanced is by proxy heavily undermined by all forces that do not want it.
Those forces, big corporations and their third-party henchmen, have heavy financial interests to bring down any just way of whistleblowing. They have a lot more money, time, manpower, influence and corrupt people who execute the dirty work.
To have incorruptible lawmakers lay the ground work is only the first step.
Then the laws have to pass in their original intention, ie. waterproof wording without loopholes. Any unintentional loopholes have to be identified and fixed.
Then the law has to uphold to "accidental" mistakes, misinterpretation and misrepresentation, official or secret changes, additional laws that reverse them, ....
Absolutely.
We already know why the interest groups focus on the communications, instead of proven ways.
Because it is a false flag operation. The topic is used as a vehicle to undermine private encrypted communication.
And it was glorious.
And it proofed a important point. Any resource that can be poured into system to shift the balance of power, must be limited or else the system will be exhausted, hacked and shifted. To not take this power imbalance into account, means to shift power to the already powerful.
My earlier comment was downvoted in record time for stating the same, so I made a new post. What's the reason to have such a guideline? I suspect manipulative downvotes to silence my opinion. Otherwise, why not comment and correct my fallacies instead?
I mean it's explained pretty clearly in the second sentence.
> It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
People are here to talk about interesting topics. That you are being downvoted is not a very interesting topic to anyone but yourself. You pointing it out also isn't going to magically make the downvotes go away.
> I suspect manipulative downvotes to silence my opinion.
It takes 501 karma to unlock downvoting. People aren't here making dozens of accounts just to take away your fake internet points.
I have read plenty of threads where completely legitimate comments are downvoted to the point you cannot read them anymore, it is the same for other users' comments. This is not my personal ego trip. (and by the way, I make it a habit to always upvote those comments independent of content, just because I despise censorship through the backdoor)
The reason why it still should be allowed to talk about it is to hinder, or raise awareness of vote manipulation in the comments.
"it is boring" is not a logical explanation, but maybe that's just me.
A better alternative, remove small coins. They serve no purpose nowadays, inflation made them obsolete. They are even more expensive to make then their inherent worth.
The only purpose left for using small coins is for psychological manipulation, by pricing items at 0,99 instead of 1,00. This has been proven a successful tactic for supermarkets and vendors, to the detriment of buyers, who are manipulated into thinking something is "cheaper", because the price is reduced by 1% or less.
A few European countries, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy already use the practice of rounding to 5 with no issues whatsoever, thereby basically removing smaller coins.