That would be great if we actually had self-driving cars. What we've got now is a mess, using the public roads for a development environment.

That’s very uncharitable. There’s a lot of in-lab development and outdoor (but not public road) testing.

Ultimately, however, you’ve go to insert into the real world.

Do you have a better idea?

Yeah, don't grease politicians' palms, and do a much slower, well-controlled rollout. Driving involves so many variables and edge cases that if self-driving screwed up as much as AI hallucinates, we'd all be in trouble. It's not just accidents, it's stopping in the middle of the road, disrupting traffic, annoying other drivers to the point where they're likely to do something dangerous to get around them. Instead of asking the patrons if they liked their ride, try asking local residents who have to share the road with them, or first responders, or pedestrians -- or pet owners.

What are the concrete statistics you have in mind that signal that we've been too aggressive in rolling out, cutting too many corners?

A slower rollout wouldn't help anything because the cars would learn slower.

So what you seem to be asking is, can the environment and lived experience affect the structure of the brain, or is it fixed at birth? My understanding is that brain structure is malleable, at least at the neuron level, and that there are lots of measurable changes throughout life, many of them caused by our learning and experience.

That'll show 'em! I'll refuse to take their money!

pouting intensifies

If you want a robot that does back flips and dance moves, they've got you covered pretty well

"Hollywood," the short-hand reference to the concentration of entertainment companies in LA, is obsolete. It used to require physical proximity for the thousands involved in making a movie, and a lot of specialized and expensive soundstages and gear, with a large employee pool of experts. That also supported lots of non-movie entertainment, such as music and TV.

The advent of computer graphics, and now AI, makes that model unnecessary. It's possible to make a major movie anywhere now, with much cheaper gear and fewer people. And since the entertainment business has always been about profit (what else?), it makes little sense to continue to do things the old-fashioned expensive way.

Nostalgia will still support some vestiges of the Hollywood legend, but the world has moved on.

Lemme see. Come up with a theory of scientific progress (no data, studies, or charts, just a theory), claim there's no logical explanation for it, and then immediately jump to "aliens."

This article was obviously written by an alien. What other conclusion could there be?

Capitalism (at least our form of it) requires consumerism. Consumerism requires advertising. You may think it's just an annoyance, but it's the foundation of our economy. A dissatisfied consumer wants more; a satisfied consumer doesn't.

Making as much money as possible off consumers is considered the highest business goal. Of course that leads to developing expertise in manipulating them.

We're living in the "downside," if you want to call it that. I was just trying to point out that advertising is pervasive for a very good reason, because our society has created strong incentives and few barriers for it. And it's required to support our economy, otherwise all that stuff wouldn't get consumed.

Is it good or bad that so many (often disposable) things are getting consumed?

Totally. From power to cooling to bandwidth to expense, this is an embarrassingly stupid proposal from a supposedly high tech company. Is this some kind of PR move?

I totally agree. Even though the author states over and over that an LLM is just a pattern-matching machine, he still anthropomorphizes the responses. To say that an LLM "makes mistakes" is granting it a consciousness it doesn't possess.