Arcades have to charge more than a quarter per play now due to inflation. The price isn’t just you renting the machine for the duration of the play, it’s you paying a small slice of the rent on the arcade location, the income of the workers, the maintenance of the machines, and the electricity for the lights, AC/heating, and so on. No arcades would exist today if they could only charge quarters.
It doesn’t matter. Even if it were constantly streaming the current volume level, the energy to transmit the value “100” is the same as to transmit “5”, so your phone doesn’t drain any faster to constantly tell the earbuds the volume is high versus low.
We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.
Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is “in 10 years we’ll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently.” In their roadmap, there won’t be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.
What’s most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.
“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”
Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means “mean,” it can also mean “median” or “mode,” and I would argue the layperson saying “average” intends it to mean “typical,” which is closer to median (or even mode). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.
Are they even giving reasons anymore? Or is the “antitrust agency” just a guy napping in a corner they periodically wake up just to give a thumbs up?