Seeing as how austerity governments campaigned on reducing social benefits and achieved considerable success over the past few decades, I don't see how your solution consisting of granting people even more social benefits will ever happen. Unless there law and order is about to break down, there is no reason for the rich to leave all of that money "on the table".
This is basically a violation of the robustness principle ("be liberal in what you accept, be conservative in what you produce"), but I doubt there will be much improvement on this front seeing as tokens are fed back into the model. A succinct phrase is a compressed form of a longer sentence that expresses the same idea, so from the perspective of having to feed the model's output back into it, more tokens presumably work better by providing a greater of surface area for processing, so to speak. This is just my intuition, however.
That principle deserves to be violated. Invalid input is invalid. Rather than everyone everywhere trying to handle it and producing subtly different implicit extensions of whatever standard they’re nominally ingesting, everything should reject it so the producing system is forced to correct itself.
They probably don't care enough to notice the tells. I think that it's generally those ambivalent, skeptical or opposed to AI who notice, while those who wholeheartedly support AI see no reason to differentiate between it and humans and so do not even try to.
I don't think it's that simple. I'm not blanket opposed to it. I'm more along the lines of the author of the article. Use it for what it's good at, sift through unstructured info, convert information from one format to another, implement things that are planned out well with iterations and feedback, etc, and generally mapping out the capabilities.
I think those who are very opposed to AI often don't know much about the real limitations since they don't use it, and their complaints are often a year or more out of date.
I think the ideal demographic for spotting these are people who use the frontier LLMs a lot and they also have worked with text in detail, such as copywriters, people who have learned foreign languages and grammar etc., have edited articles for language and generally have a more "wordsmith" look at language and are sensitive to flow and rhythm of language on a more technical level.
I think there was a major jump in AI capabilities from Anthropic and OpenAI between the end of 2025 and the start of 2026 that made them far more reliable at programming correctly. I wonder what changed in the secret sauce.
I suspect the big jump came from the release of Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 and GPT-5.x-Codex between Nov ‘25 and Feb ‘26, which were trained with heavy reinforcement learning on long coding projects, rewarding only real success (like running code, using terminals, self-fixing bugs, and passing tests) while adding better memory for huge codebases and extra coding-specific training.
4.5 and 5.2. Transformative. I know dozens of CTOs who were piloting AI in the fall, took a day to do something real over Xmas and then came back to their orgs with a mandate to double down and experiment with software factories once they saw what the November drops enabled.
Nothing drastic I'd say. It's a continuous stream of small improvements just accumulating with each release, and someone just noticed a few releases away from a previous publicized-bad-capabilities release that there's major improvement between those points. So it looks like something major only due to the spacing between the capability surveys on the release timeline.
I feel like this makes very little sense, because a purchase is a trade - one resource (currency) for another (the product/service). If the product has no value, there is no reason to engage in the trade. This can only exist for the purpose of wealth transfer from the operator of the shopping robot to the seller of the useless products, or as a facade of some sort.
The novel is a bit of a dark comedy sci-fi. And even though many details are surprisingly accurate (for a story written a decade ago) robots buying crap produced by robots is IMO meant to illustrate an absurd racket to inflate demand.
By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free". If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free (as there would be no debt to receive or credit to provide).
And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.
Apple is not giving away something for free; rather, they are losing possible future gains from immediately putting the cash to work.
> By your measure, any company, in fact any entity, that isn't in the red is giving away something for "free".
If the debt is never called, yes, that is true. However, most companies don't get that luxury. For regular poor people, eventually those who control those companies need to call the debt to get the food, shelter, etc. they need to live and, when possible, things like entertainment, vacations, etc. to make life enjoyable. However, once you become rich, you transcend beyond that — where you cannot ever begin to call all the debt you've accumulated. It's a uniquely rich experience to be able to sit on billions of dollars worth of debt and not think twice about those who owe something.
> If Apple had made their products cheaper so that they just broke even, according to you, they would not have given away anything for free
Exactly. In that scenario both the buyer and seller exchange an equal amount of value. No debt lingers to be paid (or never paid, as the case may be) in the future. But Apple wants more. They want you to promise them something else in some hypothetical future.
Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.
And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.
> And, as soon as they spend the cash, somehow their sales have retroactively gone from being donations to fair transactions. Allowing the future to affect the past is clearly absurd.
According to you, any transaction in which one party A proffers a non-currency resource, and the other, B, offers currency, is in fact the signing of a contract in which B promises to provide the other party something in the future. However, A could then turn around and promise party C for its resources using B's promise - and effectively transfer this promise to C, which then holds the right to demand resources from B.
You are effectively just describing the fiat system of currency where B is the government.
Calling cash, which is fungible and transferrable, "debt", which generally denotes an obligation of some sort, obfuscates what your logic.
Once you pay Apple - ergo, transfer it IOUs that represent your promise to provide resources in the future - it has no way of holding you to your promise other than by giving you back your IOU or giving it to someone else. This does not square with the definition of "debt".
Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people. Of course a billionaire would not be able to "call all the debt [they have] accumulated". You're just saying that they maintain so much value that they can't ever trade it all for tangible goods and services. However, no-one except the government has to honour their request to trade their so-called "debt" that they have accumulated from others for actual resources.
> Framing it in terms of debt simply confuses people.
Quite possibly. But that doesn't actually matter because if they don't understand something they will ask questions until they do understand, just as it seems you now do. That's how communication works. It is bidirectional for good reason. I admittedly don't understand what you are trying to add with this. What are we supposed to learn from this?
I would argue that most people already understand money in the way you describe it: as a medium of exchange. Your description of money just frames this function through the idea of an obligation of some sort which doesn't exist actually for anyone except the government.
There is no framing beyond my intent. One may originally misinterpret my intent, but that's again why communication is bidirectional. I am still unsure of your intent in this. My failed interpretation is that you are trying to invent some kind of hypothetical communication problem that isn't one, but what are you actually trying to get across here?
What I'm trying to say is that I don't see any benefit in describing cash as "debt" and instead find it misleading as it implies an obligation to be fulfilled that doesn't actually exist for anyone except the government, and certainly not its customers.
In fact, to address an earlier comment:
> Not because they think you, average Joe who cannot think of anything to offer the world beyond simple labor, will actually ever come up with some magical thing they want to buy. But because they know that the idea of holding debt gives them social standing; prestige. They aren't taking your promise expecting something real in return — hence why the debt simply accumulates — they are taking your promise because having that promise on paper offers them value.
> And in some robot/AI future where humans no longer can even offer labor as something of marginal value, holding debt will still offer social standing and prestige all the same. Therefore there is no reason why these companies wouldn't continue to sell products to humans for fictional future promises, just like they already are.
The cash Average Joe proffers for a product - what you describe as "debt" - wouldn't be in Joe's possession without first being exchanged for Average Joe's simple labour. Simply put - Average Joe cannot be indebted to Apple without first trading his labour for someone else's indebtedness, which he then gives to Apple in return for his iPhone. If his labour has no value, he has no unit by which to even denominate any potential indebtedness he may offer.
1. Well, cash is debt. Obviously all things in life are dependent on perspective, but the framing should be useful to separate the idea of a company seeking cash not because they want the raw silver, or what have you. If you try to think too hard about it you might end up confused, but then you ask for clarification and then are no longer confused. This is where I fail to understand what you are trying to say. We get it. You didn't understand the intent originally. That is why you asked for clarification. But your subsequent comments indicate that, upon receiving that clarification, that you do now understand. So the communication worked perfectly. My continued flawed interpretation is that you still seem to be trying to invent some contrived hypothetical, but that doesn't make sense, so I will have to ask you to clarify once again. What are you trying to say here?
2. At least where democracy is found, the government and the customers are the exact same people. The distinction you are trying to draw isn't clear either. What do you think government is if not people?
1. Whether it is debt or not makes no difference so long as someone else will take it. You imply that Apple having cash means customers owe Apple something. I say that Apple having cash just means Apple could have something else in the place of cash in the future if someone chooses to take Apple's cash for it.
2. I disagree. An autocratic government is fully capable of issuing fiat currency, and a the government being obliged to provide resources in return for its currency is a concept orthogonal to democracy. It doesn't matter whose "debt" cash stems from. All that matters is that it can be traded easily.
Also, I updated my comment to point out more clearly where I disagree with your conclusions. (Apologies for such a late response. I hit HN's rate limit.)
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