Not_mikey

Robots don't get drunk, or distracted, or text, or speed...

Anecdotally, I think the Waymos are more courteous than human drivers. Though waymo seems to be the best ones out so far, idk about the other services.

The actual survey result:

Asked whether "scaling up" current AI approaches could lead to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or a general purpose AI that matches or surpasses human cognition, an overwhelming 76 percent of respondents said it was "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed. 

So they're not saying the entire industry is a dead end, or even that the newest phase is. They're just saying they don't think this current technology will make AGI when scaled. I think most people agree, including the investors pouring billions into this. They arent betting this will turn to agi, they're betting that they have some application for the current ai. Are some of those applications dead ends, most definitely, are some of them revolutionary, maybe

Thus would be like asking a researcher in the 90s that if they scaled up the bandwidth and computing power of the average internet user would we see a vastly connected media sharing network, they'd probably say no. It took more than a decade of software, cultural and societal development to discover the applications for the internet.

it will be relatively easy to strip off

How so? If it's anything like llm text based "water marks" the watermark is an integral part of the output. For an llm it's about downrating certain words in the output, I'm guessing for photos you could do the same with certain colors, so if this variation of teal shows up more than this variation then it's made by ai.

I guess the difference with images is that since you're not doing the "guess the next word" aspect and feeding the output from the previous step into the next one, you can't generate the red green list from the previous output.

As a resident of the city that won the lawsuit, and thus doesn't have to pay for a $10 billion sewer renovation, I feel this is not in my favor

Seems to be more complaining about the lack of it. The better the skill based matchmaking is the larger those yellow slices would be. But a lot of gaming companies know about the gambling mindset of players who want to roll the dice and hope they get in the lobby where they stomp the other team so they'll make the matchmaking not as good and make it a coin flip on whether your on the stomping team, so the yellow slice becomes smaller.

Yeah, if you repeated this test with the person having access to a stack exchange or not you'd see the same results. Not much difference between someone mindlessly copying an answer from stack overflow vs copying it from AI. Both lead to more homogeneous answers and lower critical thinking skills.

They may not be more effective, how many consultants, contractors etc. are on the payroll since then?

A lot of time with these budget cuts some politician will come in and fire a bunch of people or a department, realize they actually do need that work done and then hire a contractor or a consultancy company to do the same work often for more . So the amount of people directly working for the federal government may be down but the amount of people who are working for the government through some middle man goes up to compensate.