The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live. Most of the year it’s cold and gray, and most of the country is uninhabitable.
The result is that its natural resources haven’t been consumed to the degree that most developed countries’ resources have, and there aren’t as many people to consume them.
I find it a strangely fair situation. Their luck comes from having friendly neighbors who care about their well-being and responsible development.
History would disagree with you there pretty strongly. Norway (and Scandiland in general) was fought over for millennia, leading to an extremely rich, interesting, and bloody history - even well after the Viking era. As a somewhat random aside this [1] book is an extremely interesting read for anybody into history - the 'King's Mirror.' It's a book written around 1250 intended exclusively for the education of a Norwegian King. It takes the Plato-type style of a question and answer session between a learned man (father) and pupil (son).
It covers basically every aspect of life, but the most interesting thing about it that it was written near a millennia ago now, yet so many things in it feel so incredibly familiar. The Wiki page links to a bunch of different free translations. Here [2] is the one that I read.
> so many things in it feel so incredibly familiar
I get this reading a lot of old texts. "De natura deorum" in particular struck me as downright uncanny. I've seen this exact discussion play out time and time again in discussion boards in the early 2000s. The only thing that's a bit off is that the tone is civil and level-headed.
Like the thing is 2000 years old, how long have we been having these arguments?
It's often forgotten how much conflict there was in Europe (and most of the world) in the 18th and 19th centuries. How this was fairly "normal"
It's really forgotten how relatively peaceful our time is. I'm not complaining, in fact, I want to protect it. And that means we can't forget what was.
I would not ignore the 20th century here. WW1 and WW2 may have not taken up that many years, but their death tolls and overall impact were tremendous. Millions were also killed in Vietnam and Korea as well. Then there's things most people in the West are not so familiar with like the Indonesian mass killings [1], Nigerian Civil War [2], Chinese Civil War [3], and so on with numerous other major events with millions to tens of millions killed.
I also think it's clear that the reason that we call the Cold War, the Cold War, and not WW3 is because of nuclear weapons. If anything the general trendline seems to be for conflicts of far greater violence, intensity, and instability over time, but this is currently being masked by nuclear weapons among developed nations. Although the current trend of nations picking ever more idiotic 'leaders' is suggestive that even mutually assured destruction will likely give way as a deterrent, sooner or later.
It's a great time to support life becoming multiplanetary!
Sure, but still quite a lot of conflict compared to now (my point about "relative"). Levels that I think people greatly underestimate. And those first 15 years were VERY bloody. (Napoleonic Wars was 1803-1815 for those that don't know and killed between 3.5m and 7m people)
But bloody European wars still include the Caucasian War, the First Carlist War (where 5% of the Spanish population died), Austro-Prussian, Franco-Prussian, the Third Carlist War, and Russo-Ottoman wars. Not to mention some very bloody revolutions: Greek, Hungarian, Italian, French (which cascaded), and so on.
I think it's also important to remember that Europe in 1800 had about 195 million people and rose to a bit over 400 million by the end of the century. Which should significantly influence how one thinks about the causality levels when considering today's >740 million.
Not to mention all the conflicts outside of Europe (many including European powers). The Dungan "Revolt" and Miao Rebellion were some of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. It was an especially bloody century for China.
I'm not sure I'd say that Congress of Vienna achieved lasting peace and I think we both know that either side of that argument can be argued. Especially on the distinction of how you consider peace (people killing one another or conflicts between nations?) and locality (conflicts between European powers on European soil or conflicts involving European powers outside Europe?). Either way, the body count is very high.
Independently, the Napoleonic Wars, (and outside Europe) Red Turban Rebellion, Mfecane, Miao Rebellion, Dungan Revolt, and Taping Rebellion have higher death tolls than all of the global conflicts since 2000[0]. These numbers aren't even normalized to population change[1]. So while maybe not as bloody (in Europe) as the 18th century, I'd still claim it was extremely bloody in the relative sense (which was my point)
[1] Recognizing that world populations were 1bn in 1800, 1.2bn in 1850, 1.6bn in 1900, 6.1bn in 2000, and 8bn today. This represents a monumential shift and should significantly affect how one interprets casualty numbers.
No one claimed 2024 was peaceful. Nor that any time is. The statement was
***relatively*** peaceful our time is
Relatively is an important qualifying word here. Qualifiers are important words that can dramatically change the meaning of sentences and can easily be missed. I think you have missed this specific case.
2024 is not relatively peaceful for the 21st century is indeed accurate. But relatively peaceful in terms of (the explicitly stated context) of human history is unambiguously accurate. There are multiple wars in the 19th century that have death tolls greater than all global conflicts since 2000.
I'm not sure what you are trying to argue or if you're just trolling or being flippant. No one is trying to dismiss the wars in Ukraine or Israel/Palestine. No one is trying to even diminish the atrocities in these conflicts in any way. But you are in fact being dismissive of the tens of millions who passed away in just the 1800s and even more in the other centuries. We can compare things without diminishing things and not recognizing the successes and failures of the past will only lead to greater intensity in the future.
If you cannot recognize context nor qualifying words, we are done here. Engage in good faith or not at all.
If we look at 1800s, and take any single year in terms of causalities, how would it compare to 2024? Would 2024 be closer to the top or bottom ten deadliest years of 1800s?
> Would 2024 be closer to the top or bottom ten deadliest years of 1800s?
Top 10? It's _maybe_ in the bottom of the top 50...
Forgive me, but I'm going to make a simplification because I don't feel like spending the time to dig deeper. But I think that's fair because you're not even willing to spend the effort to go to wikipedia. So the simplification is just looking at the war casualties instead of singular years. Fair? If not, I'll leave it to you to gather the data. I'll even give a decent estimate by averaging some but don't think all wars started in January and ended in December.
Either way, it won't matter because the 19th century is so much bloodier
War Estimated Casualties
Palestine–Israel War (2023-) 41,529–51,418 (let's say ~9mo, so 55k-68.5k/yr)
Russian-Ukranian War (2022-) Wiki says 300k+ other sources say that's just Russia (let's say 2.5yrs, so 120k+/yr)
So let's say 2024 is (projecting) 175k-190k
Here's a reduced version of the wikipedia entry. I'll let you guestimate for each year to figure out where exactly 2024 sits.
Saint-Domingue expedition (1802-1803) 135k+
Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) 3.5M - 7M (290k - 583k/yr)
Peninsular War (1808-1814) 1m+
French Invasion of Russia (1812: <6mo) 540k+
Spanish-American Indep (SPWI) (1808-1833) 600k - 1.2M (24k - 48k/yr)
Colombian Independence (1810-1823) 250k - 400k+
Venezualan Independence (1810-1823) 228k
Mfecane (1810s-1830s) 1M - 2M (~50k - 100k/yr)
Carlist Wars (1820-1876) 200k+
First (1833-1840) 111k-306k+ (15.9k - 43.7k/yr)
Third (1872-1876) 7k-50k
Greek Independence (1821-1831) 170k+
French Colonization (1830-1895) 110k+
French Algerian Conquest (1830-1903) 600k - 1.1M
Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) 20M - 30M (1.43M - 2.14M/yr)
Crimean War (1853-1856) 356k - 615k
Red Turban Rebellion (1854-1856) 1M+
Miao Rebellion (1854-1873) 4.9M (258k/yr)
Punti-Hakka Clan Wars (1855-1868) 500k - 1M+ (38k - 77k/yr)
Panthay Rebellion (1856-1873) 890k - 1M+
Indian Rebellion (1857-1858) 800k - 1M+
American Civil War (1861-1865) 650k - 1M+ (162k - 250k/yr)
Dungan Revolt (1862-1877) 8M - 20 M (533k - 1.33M/yr)
Paraguayan War (1864-1870) 300k - 1.2M
Austro-Prussian War (1866) 40k+
Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) 433k+
Cuban Independence (1895-1898) 362k+
So it doesn't even break the top 10. In fact, the first 15 years of 1800s had a higher death toll than 2024. All of the 1850's, 1860's, and 1870s was even bloodier. So 2024 might make it into the top 50.
It's even worse if you consider that the global population was only a billion (compared to the 8 billion today)[1]. 1808-1815 was breaking 300k/yr which was 0.03% of global population while the current conflict is 0.0023%. More than a whole order of magnitude greater when normalizing to population. If we look at the 1850s when there were a whopping 1.2bn people, we'll guestimate 1854 as being nearly 0.17%-0.24% of the global population being killed. Whole providence in China were nearly wiped out during those decades. The Taiping Rebellion was the third bloodiest conflict in history (the second was the Ming-Qing transition, in the 17th century)
So... I hope you can see why I'm calling you out. Again, this doesn't mean the current atrocities are anything less than atrocities. It has no relevance to them at all and I think it's dumb to compare if we're concerned with morality or human lives. All this data says is that past humans were very blood thirsty. You shouldn't be using it to make any meaningful statements about the current atrocities. So... don't bring it up next time. Especially if you're unwilling to do... literally a google search... It suggests you care more about signaling that you care than your actual care of those lives. I hope the signal is wrong.
It's more that nukes are preventing modern governments from behaving how they otherwise would. A quick glance at that list shows lots of wars that simply could never happen in modern times because of nuclear weapons. It's the same reason the Cold War isn't called WW3. And this applies not just on an international level, but also domestic.
For instance the US Civil War with nuclear weapons spread all around would have quite difficult to imagine consequences. To say nothing of all the biological and other weapons being developed in secret that would absolutely be unleashed if one side or the other came close to defeat. It seems a reasonably likely outcome would have been a fairly quick truce and the relatively peaceful splitting of the US into two countries.
If and when the nukes start flying, that conflict will make every other conflict, combined, look like little more than a schoolyard fight.
I'm sure that this is part of "long peace" but we can't discount globalism. At the end of the day a lot of war is about economics. When countries become highly dependent upon one another, including enemies, it becomes much harder to actually go to war with one another. And as you point out with the nukes argument, that cost for going to war has also increased. So it's often far easier to war via economic means rather than physical.
There's also an (much more debatable) argument to be made that the so called "world police" does not have neighboring land that it covets. America doesn't have much need or want to grab land from Canada or Mexico, and doing so wouldn't have huge economic impacts on it. But such a situation is by no means true for Europe (and arguably Russia or China). I mean this is why Europe was fighting for the last... well however long humans have been in Europe (same being true for east Asia and really most of the Eurasian continent).
Off topic, but I would like to hear your opinion on the impact of the AI progress on jobs, globally. Let’s assume, for simplicity, that GPT5 will actually be significantly better (eg similar improvement as what we had with 3.5 —> 4). And another assumption - it will be possible to put GPT5 level model into a humanoid robot, and train it to do a variety of basic physical tasks.
If we assume all that, and I realize it might not happen any time soon, same like with self driving cars progress, but *if* there’s strong and quick progress, what will happen to job market, unemployment, economy, and the society as a whole?
Sure, this is probably nearer to my expertise. I research ML (generative models) and my partner is an economist, so we have these discussions quite a lot. I'll try to keep it short. The tldr is I don't know and I'm pretty sure no one knows, and I'm even more concerned about the lack of discussion.
First off, I'd highly recommend watching the recent Dwarkesh video with Francois Chollete[0]. I normally wouldn't suggest Dwarkesh, but Francois is an oddball for that podcast. The reason I suggest this is to understand the difference between AGI and ML. It's probably important for the framing and making accurate predictions here. So while I don't think AGI is on the horizon (it could be, but we're reinforcing the railroad rather than exploring other paths), I do think there is still quite a potential for huge economic disruptions and entire paradigm shifts. You don't need AGI to get significantly closer (maybe even all the way) to post scarcity.
For about a decade now I've been asking a simple question and I encourage others to ask it of people that they know. I need no credit, I need people thinking about this question, and to be quite serious about it.
How do you function as a society if 10% of the workforce is unemployable?
There's a wide variety of ways this can be framed and I encourage you to explore those. 10% is arbitrary, but chosen because both 1) people think of that number as small and 2) that number represents depression level of unemployment rates (this balance seems to be optimal for initial conversations, so choose an appropriate number for who you talk to). But the reason I started asking this question is I was wondering "how do you transition to post scarcity?" Because in that framework, those jobs are not coming back. But that doesn't necessitate that there are no "jobs," but they wouldn't be in the conventional sense (see Star Trek for one version of this).
I think post scarcity is obtainable and it is the number one problem humans should be working on right now. It comes with unimaginable benefits, but it also comes at potentially huge costs if we don't implement it correctly. You are right to be worried. But I think the difficulty here and what I often face when trying to ask this question is that it looks simple. UBI is by far the most common answer, but the way people answer "UBI" is no different than "wave a magic wand." There are many ways to implement UBI, many ways to distribute capital (which isn't only money. Remember money is a proxy, a fungible token). So the issue here is that often people will answer while only considering the question at a very surface level and then be satisfied and move on. This is a grave mistake, and we need to dig down into the details. There are many rabbit holes to dig into within this question, and I encourage you to go down some, but will also say that the question is so complex that I am quite certain that no single (or even small group) of human(s) could sufficiently resolve it.
These things not only include such aspects of distribution (if you choose to keep people alive (I've never heard anyone answer "let them die" fwiw. Even in the most libertarian groups)), which includes not only food, but even things like housing. You have to consider the immigration/emigration with whichever locality accomplishes this feat first. Peoples' psychology and how they will find meaning in their lives. Aspects like that it is quite possible that you can eventually have the inverse of the question with "how do you formulate a society when you require 10% of people to work, and no more?" (especially considering that many of those jobs would likely be undesirable). I'll let you ponder others.
So in this decade that I've been asking this question (often also talking about the motivation of transition to post scarcity), I've yet to receive a satisfactory answer. Everyone I've met, from many backgrounds and a wide range of intelligence levels (with many FAR more intelligent than myself) stumble upon answering this once any bit of complexity/nuance is brought up (see UBI above). Best I've heard is creation of jobs programs and a large increase of entertainers (but seems ML is coming after that too. But then again, we like to watch humans play chess against one another far more than machines). None of us were even satisfied with those answers more than "these might be enough to starve off the worst aspects of the transition, but certainly not enough."
It is extremely important to remember that it will not only be low skilled labor that will be displaced or automated away, but there is quite a bit of high skill (which is why retraining can be an unsatisfactory answer, because you're potentially pushing someone from a $300k+/yr job to $50k/yr and asking them to spend a few years to reskill themselves to do even that). In fact, because these machines aren't generalist agents, it actually makes high skill jobs the more likely ones to be displaced (specifically highly technical skills that are fairly routine). I find it common for people to think it will just be the "people already at the bottom", and I think this is often because people feel that they aren't and are mentally protecting themselves.
But I want to answer my personal belief on one part: what will people do with their lives. Because it is also the motivation to pursue this path.
I for one think post scarcity can create a new renaissance. That people can be the most human they have ever been. I think maybe at first many will slack off and just "veg out." That they'll party, travel, and do other such luxury things that we may not consider productive (but who cares? It is their life, right? The goal is to free people, and that includes freedom of the burden of labor). But I've seen very few people that actually don't get antsy after doing this for a few weeks. Essentially, they recover from their exhaustion and then feel like the need to do something, even if they don't know what that is (the exception to this, in my experience at least, is people who have or develop psychomotor retardation based depression. Which if our society calls these displaced people worthless, I expect this to be a fairly common outcome). But I think many people here on HN will realize that they themselves would not end up being static. The amount of Open Source software that exists by people who do this in their free time while already having a job that likely drains them, is too high. I expect more software to arise. I expect more art, more music. I hope we can form more communities, but we are ever increasing insular (but with more free time, maybe we'll go out more and talk to our neighbors more). I think it is hard to even know because such a society would look so different than ours and it is hard to not leverage our current frame of reference. Maybe it will be Wall-e-esk, but I'd be quite surprised if it was, especially in the long run (I won't be surprised in the short term. Oscillatory effects are quite common outcomes of big shifts).
Of course, I'm optimistic. I think we have to be to some degree. Because the other choice is to give up. You can still be critical and optimistic, so don't forget that. And humans have survived quite a long time already being, as you previously mentioned, incredibly inept and corrupt. Even with that we have gained massive amounts of freedoms, especially in the last few hundred years.
But my biggest worries are these:
- We'll make significant progress in this direction towards post scarcity and either stop or revert (for a wide variety of possible reasons).
- We become less human by letting machines do our reasoning for us (we see this happen already. Even before GPT and ML in every day lives. Bureaucrats love the letter of the law, but that is not human. Remember that rules are made to be broken because rules are only guides, as is true for any metric. They are imperfect codifications of our desires.)
- We will not or take too long to reframe our cultural stances in how we value our neighbor's worth. Is it in their humanity or economic value? There's so much that people can do that isn't captured by economics (and my partner loves to remind people that they really do not understand economics, even at a fundamental level of what it is).
- We will claim AGI when we have exceptionally powerful compression machines (far more powerful than the compression machines like GPT-4). That we will hand over thinking to them and not recognize the b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ gray swan events. To trust them unquestionably (it isn't uncommon to see this sentiment today, especially here on HN).
- We won't recognize AGI when we do create it, and subject sentient beings to servitude and cruelty. I do believe we will get there, and when we do, how could you feel just with neoslavery? Being silicon (or whatever) would not make them any less sentient or of a being. And they will likely be quite different from us, potentially to the degree of Wittgenstein's Lion. (luckily we are capable of bridging some gaps, as demonstrated by some people's talent at communicating with certain animals, but this clearly needs to be learned).
- We do not address this question that I've presented of how to transition into post scarcity and instead stumble into it. That we cannot learn to come together as humans. That we will do what we've always done, and solve problems when they are problems rather than before they become problems. (The saying "don't fix what isn't broken" is naive. You should often fix things that aren't "broken." No thing is perfect and we should always strive to improve. But this is obviously a complex problem as we have finite resources).
- We will use the power that is given to us by the technologies on the way to post scarcity to enslave (in some form or another) our fellow man. The worst part about this is it will likely be unintentional and likely be with good intentions. We often forget that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. So many evils and atrocities are not created by men trying to do evil but by men trying to do good.
- That we will not recognize the rising necessity of nuance in our growing complex world. I worry that we are going in the opposite direction, rather using our tools to develop simpler mental models of phenomena. But naturally as we advance, the easier problems get solved and what remains is more complex. Think about it as we are solving approximations to solutions (like a Taylor Series). The complexity order increases as we progress. What is "good enough" can quickly necessitate high levels of complexity and that's not something we were designed for or used to thinking about.
So I have lots of worries, but I am optimistic. I have to be. And I understand this was a bit rambly, but I promise it is all connected. You asked a deceptively complex question, and the truth is that I'd need a book to properly explain why I don't have an answer and anyone trying to tell you that they do is selling you (and potentially themselves) something (even if that something is a mental safety blanket). So, do not go gentle into that good night.
Thank you for the thoughtful answer. I also wish more people were asking such questions. Let's look at some of your points.
the difference between AGI and ML
I've seen the recent discussions on ARC benchmark. It's not clear if native multi-modal models have been tested. I would expect 4o/Gemini models to do fairly well on these visual tests, and I expect them to do even better after finetuning (perhaps even better than humans). I tried to solve a few of the puzzles, and I'm not convinced they actually require "AGI". To me, generating text of GPT4 quality should require more of AGI-like "Abstraction and Reasoning" than these puzzles. But, as you said, achieving "true" AGI is not really relevant in the context of this conversation.
how do you transition to post scarcity? ... UBI is by far the most common answer
I have no doubt that in 50 years, barring some global catastrophic event, we will have solved most of our basic problems (healthcare, education, having to work for a living, etc), even despite some of the new issues that you outlined. I am much more worried about the next 5-10 years. Let's explore a hypothetical scenario of what might happen if GPT-5 comes out 6 months from now, and if it is smart and reliable enough to solve some common tasks people are paid to do. I'm talking about data management, data analysis, communication (written and, looking at GTP-4o demo, perhaps also oral). Jobs like bookkeeping, accounting, marketing, writing/journalism, administrative assistants (including medical and legal), account management, customer support, analysts, etc. These jobs won't disappear overnight, obviously, but let's look at self-driving cars - we have the technology that works 99% of the time, today. For driving on public roads, 99% reliable is not good enough. But for some of the jobs above, perhaps it would be. Perhaps with layers of agents coordinating actions to gather and store the right information, to try different approaches or different models, and to verify results, we could do a good enough job for many managers to consider layoffs, or hiring freezes. I don't know if GPT-5 (or its rivals) will enable that, but I think we should consider the possibility. There's also a strong possibility the progress does not stop in 6 months. We have just started to train large models on video data - there's a lot to learn about the world from the entirety of YouTube videos - in addition to learning from text. I would not be surprised if most of what GPT-6 can do two years from now comes from video data. I would not be surprised if GPT-5 would help us prepare high quality datasets and even help us find better ways to train its successor. Significant progress might happen even without significant conceptual breakthroughs - just from further scaling up.
So, what do you think will happen if the above scenario plays out? Millions of people being laid off or not hired after school, and the situation getting worse every year, globally. Governments will try to feed them, or course, and US is a rich enough country to support X% of the population for a few years, depending on how quickly we do transition to "post-scarcity" economy. I assume that eventually physical robots will grow food, create products, and provide services to meet basic needs, but it's not clear how long this transition will take, and what would happen in the meantime. We already have people in this country who successfully stormed Capitol. Imagine a lot more of such people, and imagine them a lot angrier. Aside from that, what would happen to our economy if X% people stop paying taxes and become a burden? How would this scenario play out globally, with different countries transitioning in different ways?
I actually do consider the possibility where rulers might "let people die", by creating huge ghettos and then killing everyone there. It does not feel much worse to me than sending hundreds of thousands of people to die on a battlefront just because a dictator didn't like his neighbors. Or we could have something like the "Civil War" movie.
As you can tell, I'm less optimistic than you. I think that if progress in AI happens too fast, we, as a society, are in trouble. I do not think governments will be ready for powerful AI. I think the best case scenario is if we hit a plateau, with GPT-5 being only marginally better than GPT-4, and a slow transition to post-scarcity world (10+ years) to give enough time for automation to make everything cheap. But I do worry a lot, and frequently ask myself whether I need to prepare for the worst, and if so, what should I do.
> It's not clear if native multi-modal models have been tested. I would expect 4o/Gemini models to do fairly well on these visual tests
They have been and I do not expect them too. You can see my comment history talking about LLM failure cases.
I'd advise being careful about just trying to reason your way through things when you don't have significant experience in a domain. Non expert reasoning can lead to good guesses but should never also be taken with high confidence. It's important to remember that nuance is often critical in these issues and not accounting for them often leads to approximations giving you the opposite answer rather than a close enough one.
But as Francois points out, LLMs are compression machines. That's what the mathematically are. They are not reasoning machines. A lot of people don't want to hear this because they think it undermines LLMs and any criticism is equivalent to saying they're useless. But I still think they're quite impressive. Criticism is important though, if we are to improve systems. So don't get blinded by success.
> So, what do you think will happen if the above scenario plays out?
In the next 5-10 years I'm far more worried about people confusing knowledge and reasoning. It's not a thing most people have needed to differentiate in the past because the two are generally associated with one another. But LLMs are more like if Google could talk to you than when a parrot talks to you. If this sounds the least bit odd, I encourage you to dig more into these topics. They are not easy topics because they are filled with nuance that is incredibly easy to miss. I keep stressing this point but it was one of my big fears and people's egos often sets us back, especially when we have no trust in experts. It's crazy to think we know more than people who spend their lives on specific subjects and think intelligence in one domain translates directly to another. So not knowing (most) things shouldn't ever be taken as a bad thing. There's not enough time to learn everything. There's not enough time to learn most things. So focus on a limited set and for the rest maybe just to the point where you can see the level of complexity ahead. If things seem simple, you probably don't understand it enough. Remember, there's thousand page reference manuals on things as narrow as bolts because the details matter so much.
As to the problems you mentioned, I'm not sure how those would be solved with ML or even AGI. Technology can't solve everything and a lot of these issues have significant amounts of politics and social choice associated with them that results in many of the problems (including where nuance dominates in some things and then cascades because we're talking about complex topics at a very high level and our knowledge is gained through a game of telephone rather than academically or experientially).
I think we're more than 50 years out from post scarcity, which is to say that no reasonable prediction can be made. But is still up to us if we want to increase the odds. I also agree with Francis that OpenAI has set us back on the path to AGI.
As for the fear, it's natural. Fear does help us. It's a great motivator. But it too can cripple us, and when it does it can give life to the very thing we fear. So care is needed when analyzing. The problem isn't about people not thinking. Everyone does and everyone is doing it constantly, even our dumbest of friends and acquaintances. The problem is that people are not thinking deep enough and having high confidence when stopping early. I'm not telling you to not have opinions on anything, it's only natural to have opinions on most things. But rather to be careful with the confidence you attribute to those opinions and of others. Here's the thing, if you do gain expertise in any singular field, you'll see that there is this rich but complex landscape. There's a lot of beauty in the landscape but often many pitfalls that cannot be avoided without some expertise and many which are common to these entering a field. These are things not to get discouraged by but to be aware of and why formal educations are typically beneficial. It's also to note that there is great beauty in this chaos ahead, even if it can be hard to see through the initial part of the journey.
I just watched the whole Dwarkesh/Chollet interview, and just like Dwarkesh was clearly not convinced by the Chollet's arguments, neither am I. I still expect decent results (>50%) on ARC benchmark soon (this year) now that the AI community has noticed it. I took another look at it, and it seems the problem is not so much in the complicated visual input encoding, it's more about the actual spatial intelligence. I don't really see what ARC benchmark has to do with AGI, other than AGI will require spatial intelligence - in addition to all other kinds of intelligence. To solve these puzzles we are likely to need a model that has been trained to predict the next frame in a video stream, probably something like SORA - in addition to predicting the next word. 4o/Opus/1.5 have some amount of spatial intelligence because they were trained to correlate text with a static image, but I'm guessing we need to use a lot more visual training data to gain ARC-level spatial intelligence at their scale. I think they might still get to 50% with some finetuning and other tricks, but I would not even try any lesser models. I think that if GPT-5 is being trained on videos, SORA style, it should have no problem beating humans on this test. Regarding Chollet's discrete program search, I'm not familiar with that field, and I didn't quite get the idea of how to combine it with DL. Over the years I've heard some very smart people proposing complex approaches towards building AGI (Lecun, Bengio, Jeff Hawkins, etc), yet scaling up deep learning models is still the best one we have today. If Chollet believes in his hybrid, whatever it is, he should build some sort of a prototype/PoC. Why hasn't he? In any case, the good news is most of academic AI labs today don't have the money to scale up transformers, so they are probably trying out all these other ideas.
So you're not worried about impending mass unemployment, ok. That does make me feel a little better. I can be wrong, and I really want to be wrong.
> I still expect decent results (>50%) on ARC benchmark soon (this year)
What gives you this confidence? What is your expertise in ML? Have you trained systems? Developed architectures? Do you know why the systems currently fail?
> now that the AI community has noticed it.
Which community? The researchers or public? The researchers have known if for quite some time. The previous contest as famous and so is Francis. Big labs have tried to tackle ARC for quite some time. You just don't see negative results.
> I don't really see what ARC benchmark has to do with AGI
ARC is a reasoning test. Which is quite different from all the LLM tests you likely have seen, which are memory tests. The problem is most people are not aware of what the models have been trained on. GI involves memory, it involves reasoning, it involves a lot of things.
> I think they might still get to 50% with some finetuning and other tricks, but I would not even try any lesser models.
And how do you have this confidence? Are you guessing? Have you tried? Because I can tell you that others have. Even before the prize was announced. And I hope you realize there's a lot of models that do in fact do next frame prediction. People have trained multimodal models on ARC.
There's quite a lot of assumptions by many that it just hasn't been tried. But it's a baseless assumption with evidence to the contrary. Look into it yourself before making such claims.
> I've heard some very smart people proposing complex approaches towards building AGI (Lecun, Bengio, Jeff Hawkins, etc), yet scaling up deep learning models is still the best one we have today.
These are not in contention so I'm not sure what your argument is.
> If Chollet believes in his hybrid, whatever it is, he should build some sort of a prototype/PoC. Why hasn't he?
I'm sorry, but I'm going to say this is a dumb question. He's trying. A lot of us are. But clearly there's unsolved problems. The logic doesn't follow from your question. We still don't know how to conceptually build a brain. But there's many things we conceptually know how to build but still can't. We conceptually know how to build space elevators but we don't know how to build all the pieces to actually make them even if we had infinite money.
And I'll ask you a similar question: if scale is all you need then why don't we have AGI now?
There may be parts to this question you don't know. We don't train multiple epochs for LLMs. LLM architecture has been rapidly changing despite maintaining the general structure of transformers (but they aren't your standard transformers and reading the AIAYN paper won't get you there). And if scale was all you needed then shouldn't Google be leading the way? Certainly they have more data and compute than anyone else. In fact, I'd argue that this is why they do so poorly and why LLMs are getting worse at the same time they're getting better.
> the good news is most of academic AI labs today don't have the money to scale up transformers, so they are probably trying out all these other ideas.
The unfortunate news is when you propose some other architecture it gets lambasted in review because they do not perform state of the art and I've had SOTA papers get rejected due to "lack of experiments" which is equivalent to lack of compute. There's a railroad and lots of academic funding comes from big tech, not universities or government. Go look at the affiliations of academic authors. Go to the papers and you'll see.
> So you're not worried about impending mass unemployment, ok
Oh, I'm worried. More worried about displacement. You know how things sucked when everything got outsourced? Because they just cut corners, do the absolute bare minimum, and how they won't consider anything that makes any sense just because there's rules in place that were not correctly created but are strictly followed? Get ready for that to be much worse.
Well, that didn't take long, did it? 50% on ARC public test set [1] less than a week after the announcement of the prize. Though I have to say, the solution, at least superficially, does look like what Chollet alluded to: hybrid of LLM with "discreet program search/synthesis". Again, I'm not familiar with that field, so perhaps it's not at all what he had in mind, but it's intriguing. What do you think? Do you understand Chollet's idea enough to explain whether this solution is on the right track?
if scale is all you need then why don't we have AGI now?
Well, it's my turn to use the "dumb question" card :) We don't have enough scale, obviously! I don't know if scale is all we need for AGI to emerge, but clearly we haven't reached the end of benefits from scaling up. Until we do, it seems like the easiest and the most promising approach. Considering the size of Youtube as a training corpus, we are pretty far from that end. Are there reasons to think otherwise?
LLM architecture has been rapidly changing
Aside from a mixture of experts architecture, which has its pros and cons vs a single large monolithic model, I'm not sure what has fundamentally changed in the architecture of the original transformer proposed in 2017. Minor tweaks here and there, sure, but it's pretty much the same model, no?
if scale was all you needed then shouldn't Google be leading the way?
Oh, a lot of people have been asking how could Google drop the ball so bad, for so long. There are reasons, both well known, and hidden from outsiders, but compute is not all you need to scale, you also need vision, clear direction, and effective coordination of efforts from multiple teams. Something that OpenAI has (or at least had), and which is rare at large corporations.
Re: academics - good ideas get noticed. Today, if someone discovers something good they don't even need to publish. Post a github link on r/MachineLearning, together with benchmark results, and let people test it.
I'm worried. More worried about displacement
This is very interesting - I haven't even thought about it. It's very possible that in the beginning after the mass layoffs, GPT-5 will screw some things up, in subtle ways, and only GPT-6, some time later, will be able to fix them. People need to be ready for that. The period between GPT-5 and GPT-6 will be rough in more ways than I imagined.
> It’s incredible that modern governments, being so incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional, are still a lot better than how they were in the past.
It is baffling to me as well. But the likely answer is that humans in the past were just even more incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional. It makes a lot of sense if you start looking at how things were done in medieval times. Often rumors/disinformation would travel faster between cities than a horse could.
What a strange perspective, the oil reserves aren’t located anywhere near the “barren remote” parts of Norway, consider the famous ekofisk oil field, it’s in the ocean roughly in the middle between Denmark England and Norway. And the southern Coast of Norway isn’t dramatically different from Denmark climate wise, they do have amazing cliffs there though and the culture around boating to town is a sharp contrast to Denmark. Anyways, hardly a rough barren wasteland with dreadful weather as described.
This discovery is at Fen which is much more north, but it’s near a fjord, and a skiing resort. It’s hardly some uninhabitable place. It’s true Norway stretches very far north and some parts are not inhabited, but that’s not anywhere near where the resources that have provided the Norwegian wealth are, and not this time either.
Now if you want to dive into the true reason for their wealth it’s a cultural thing, when the negotiations around ekofisk took place they famously got the Danish foreign minister of the day, Per Hækkerup so drunk while he visited Oslo that he agreed to pretty much just give them all the oil. Ever since Danes lost all respect for him, not for giving up the oil, but for not being able to hold his liquor. This last part is of cause all hyperbol, part myth part joke, but many did believe that he just gave it up to easily because no one expected this amount of oil off the coast of Norway.
just as a sole data point: been there a few times, and my personal ideal weather _is_ cool/gray/wet with ideal outside temperature of 15C. I can withstand the cold, but find it hard to tolerate heat (as in >20C).
Purely from a weather perspective, I'd move there. What holds me back is that I also need dense urban surroundings nearby with all the buzz it brings (cyberpunk style) - norway is lacking that, including Oslo. _Too_ quiet/beautiful/peaceful for my liking.
I'm an immigrant in Norway. The darkness is enough of an issue that told us know about this in the state-funded language classes and made sure we knew help was available. I'm in Trondheim, so December is full of 4.5 hours of poor sunlight each day.
If there were something else that really gets folks, it is that Norway's people are rather reserved, to a point, and it really makes some folks lonely. This combined with the dark winters really causes some folks to struggle.
Everyone gets used to the weather and quickly learns how to dress properly enough.
For me, personally: I'm fairly introverted myself and generally had only a few friends near me before I moved, so it suits me well. Also: I've been here a decade or so and I moved for marriage - I've always had at least one friend here. I've worked a little bit. And then I got into board games (both immigrants and local folks), so I meet some folks that way. The person that organizes the games, though? They struggled a bit for a while.
I know about this from living in Lima (Peru), the weather due to our geological position is always temperate, goes from min temps of 11 degrees to like 32 in summer (top), usually around ~18/19 degrees up to like 23 throughout most of the year.
You'd think climate is great, but it's ALWAYS "foggy", you can't see a clear blue sky like in the inner regions of the country such as Cusco, it depresses you, I can't imagine it being even darker.
It's why I simply can't believe nordic "stories" about being the happiest place, I simply can't believe with all the money in the world you'd be happier than at a tropical beach with half of that money.
There's ways to black out windows and darken rooms to counter all of that daylight, but when it's dark it's really hard to counter that when going outside.
Without actually personally experiencing it, I think I would have the opposite struggle. If it were dark for that long without clouds so I could have all of that extra time to view the sky I think it would be a much different situation though.
It's actually surprising how north the famous EU countries are. Already south France and Italy are about the same latitude as New England; Norway must be like Alaska as far as daylight goes. If it weren't for the warm Atlantic current the place would be a glacier.
In the northern hemisphere the prevailing winds come from the west, which is why west coasts are more moderate than east coasts. Winds coming from the ocean are more moderate than winds coming from the interior of a continent.
This is why New York is on the same latitude as Lisbon yet is much colder. Same for Tokyo and San Francisco.
Western Europe is about as far north as people can live in large numbers.
The example that blew my mind once and I've been repeating it since: New York is as north as Madrid. Like, almost exactly, 0.3 degrees difference (or 20 miles, or 33 kilometres).
Living in Northern Sweden with "midnight sun", what gets me the most the few times I've been approaching the equator is warm nights that are pitch dark. So strange! And then I remember that this is the experience of the majority of the world. :D
> my personal ideal weather _is_ cool/gray/wet with ideal outside temperature of 15C
15C day temps? morning/night temps can be much lower. Winters in Norway are much colder. If you are looking for stable day-night temps year around in that range, then there is no such place in Europe, well maybe except Ireland?
June-Sept in most places in Ireland has a mean daily temp of around 15C, and around 6C winter time. It infrequently gets much above 20C, or much below 0C year round. 5 consecutive days of 25C is the meteorological definition of "heatwave".
As a predominantly temperate maritime/oceanic climate it's unpredictable and erratic, from 15C mid-winter days to 4C mid-summer nights :/
The sweet brown "Brunost" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunost) might not be your favorite, but I doubt it haunts you in nightmares. The Gammelost though will stay pungent in your mind for years. It's been years, and I still wonder whether I was the victim of a particularly cruel practical joke.
The difference is the Gammelost isn't actually a thing in Norway. I grew up there and never saw it. Whereas Brunost is staple food eaten every day by a large part of the population.
There's a list of foods that are, I think, used to scare foreigners with for our amusement more than actually eaten. Of course some crazy Norwegians do actually like these, which gives us plausible deniability when said tourists and foreign co-workers question whether it's real. I'm sure you are fully aware, but for those unaware of Norwegian cuisine:
* Smalahove (whole, barbecued sheeps head; how whole depends on who/where, but the eyes and brain certainly need to be included)
* Lutefisk (fish half-dissolved in caustic soda, then washed out - or your intestines would have a really hard time - leaving what is best described as fish-yello)
* Gammelost, of course.
Then there are the less objectionable or outright nice things that we still serve to foreigners either knowing they're acquired tastes, or that we like spinning stories around to try to make it uncomfortable for our entertainment:
* Whale, presented as "Willy from Free Willy". Whale tastes fine - it's just a bit tough, and sometimes a bit oily and "fishy" (yes, I know, not fish; doesn't stop the blubber from affecting the taste)
* Deer and reindeer, which tastes great but squeamish people everywhere get more squeamish when the dish is introduced as "Bambi". When I worked for a US company in Norway many years ago, the US CEO came for our Christmas party and the CEO of the Norwegian subsidiary had of course ensured that the menu was moose, deer, and whale, so that our entertainment was to watch the CEO's reactions (he took it well).
* Sour cream porridge. I love sour cream porridge, but it is an... acquired taste, and people do not expect it if you put a bowl of porridge in front of them without warning...
* Salty licorice full of ammonium chloride. Yes, licorice with floor cleaner. I love it, but outside of the Nordic countries and the Netherlands, the only person I've made taste this who has liked it was a single co-worker about a quarter of a century ago. I keep bringing them to the UK at least twice a year and imposing them on unsuspecting people (in the UK, finding even lightly salted licorice is near impossible outside of specialty imports, so people here are caught entirely unaware of what salted licorice will taste like, and that is half the fun). For science, of course.
Norwegian humour when it comes to feeding people stuff they're not familiar with is pretty basic, along the line of "we're serving you a pet/beloved children character" or "we're serving you something likely to dissolve your intestines/an industrial byproduct that our children eat". Where my Nigerian in-laws worry about whether the food they're serving me is too spicy and fuss over it constantly, we try to trick people into trying weird things while we take pleasure in observing their reactions and/or try to stifle laughter.
Im Norwegian, and I have never been in a house where anyone had Gammelost. There are people who eat it of course, but it's mostly a thing we scare foreigners with.
You've had it, or you are going by the written description?
I only tried it once, but it's the only cheese I've been unable to eat. Sawdust soaked in cat piss would be comparable but preferable. I was exited to buy it and brought it along for a hiking lunch. My wife and I both took one bite, and then decided to bury it under a rock. I felt sorry for the rock.
I still do wonder whether I somehow got a bad batch, or one that was spoiled.
I don't eat that either. My girlfriend brought some back with us after Christmas - her first time trying Norwegian food - and it's still in my fridge...
Honestly no idea. They just don't. Growing up the only fish we really ate was fish sticks and heavily processed fish cakes. When going out to restaurants I have no real memory of anybody really ordering fish. Even when I was living in down town Oslo (admittedly 20+ years ago), just getting ahold of fresh fish was hard. The only food store that had a fish mongers and sold fresh fish was the really fancy store in the most expensive part of town. There were maybe two fish stores in all of central Oslo that I knew of, one of which was a high end luxury food sort of place that also sold fancy caviar, foie gras and oysters. Compared to basically any costal town anywhere in Europe where fresh fish is plentiful and ubiquitous, it is really strange.
That would probably be point number 2 in your list. West coast and northern Norway eat a lot of fish/seafood. Also within the last 20 years sushi has gotten a lot more popular here, even around Oslo.
What fish stuff? I grew up in Norway and lived there for a chunk of my adult life, and honestly Norwegians (at leats in/around Oslo) seem to eat less fish than most other European countries I've been to.
I think globally norway cuisine is identified with cured or other fish etc. thats probably not what the local diet really eats probsbly (based on two comments in this thread)
Norway also has a weekly tradition called "Taco Friday" that a decent amount of people participate in, so it's safe to say that generalizing food habits doesn't really work anymore nowadays.
I grew up in Norway. The way I see it is that weekends are for spoiling yourself with the most delicious food. Another common tradition would be making pizza on weekends. Taco Friday is seen as a special weekend treat.
I know taco and pizza aren't really that special or fancy meals, but I guess they turned out that way in Norway since they came from abroad. They're still not seen as "fancy", but they are many people's favorite tastiest food.
"The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live."
We walked 700km through Norway in the summer, from Oslo to Trondheim (the South were most people live). The country was sunny and warm, it seldom rained, people were exceptionally friendly, and it had the best wild strawberries and raspberries I ever ate. The Dovrefjell was the only very cold place. We'll might move there in the future.
I find the best arrangement is spending a month or at least two weeks in Norway during the summer. I prefer to stay around Stryn. You can do some what I consider good drive outings in every direction.
Because the day is longer it’s perfect for going into rabbit holes, hacking something together to explore new tech and just plan out what’s next. The scenery and the very friendly folks helps too.
Only tough thing right now is it’s hard to find things to do for kids. I have not found a summer camp for non-Norwegian speaking kids. This definitely limits how much hacking is done.
> The result is that its natural resources haven’t been consumed to the degree that most developed countries’ resources have, and there aren’t as many people to consume them.
I find this a strange train of thought in this context of rare metals like this. Did other countries truly discover their Neodymium reserves decades or centuries ago and exhaust them back then or did they never have them in the first place?
The first large-scale use of the rare-earth metals was since the last decade of the 19th century in gas lamps with high brightness, which were used especially for street lighting in Europe, until they were replaced by electric lamps.
The next large-scale use appeared soon after the start of the 20th century, in the portable lighters, which are still used today.
The weather in Norway sucks big time. In some parts of the country it is really bad, especially if you live near the sea. Summer isn’t guaranteed either. That’s a pretty big price to pay for an otherwise great country with really chill people.
> The thing about Norway is that it’s a cold, barren, remote place where very few people want to live. Most of the year it’s cold and gray, and most of the country is uninhabitable.
It would be true if the Gulfstream did not exist. But it's not.
Eh, don't know about that... We're really just like anyone else, we've just ended up with a fairly decent political environment by the time we found oil, specifically.
We've been pretty good at mining out our copper ores and everything else that we knew of that had value; we've built a whole bunch of hydro plants and have dammed up numerous valleys; no one thought there was oil in the North Sea or that it was valuable enough to get it up, but now we have a pretty extensive petroleum industry, and it barely took five decades since the first oil was discovered.
What resources we have been good with, however, is fish. But that's just proper regulation over the last century or so.
As for our friendly neighbours... Norway was ruled by Denmark for 400 years and we've been part of all their wars, for a start. Our national anthem has 8 verses, 6 of them are about how we killed Swedes, Danes and Scots.
And we'd like Jamtland, Herjedalen, and all the islands in the Atlantic back, thankyouverymuch!
The thing about money is that people will chase it regardless of the weather conditions if they can make enough of it. The folks out there in the Gulf of Mexico who spend 16 hour days working on oil rigs aren't there because it's fun.
That, and the heroes that risked life and limb to start those first oil rigs, many dying, so a poor country could use the wealth to help its own people.
I'll have to add it to the page, but it was also used as the introduction for The Compound by S.A. Bodeen[1]. It's an interesting young adult novel about a family living underground in a state of the art bomb shelter after a nuclear attack occurs.
I sat in on a lecture by a Stanford geophysicist, and he said that seismologists have every legal incentive to communicate that a large earthquake is imminent in the Bay, even if their work is inconclusive or suggests otherwise.
They might get sued or prosecuted if they say it’s safe and a big one strikes.
No epidemiologists were going around saying "eh it could never happen". In fact, many of them were warning after SARS. Trump actually took apart Obama's virus disaster-readiness warehouses and other programs in 2018-2019. Very bad timing, many such cases!
I would suspect the majority of disaster-related experts are not going to be so laid back.
Secondarily anyone else with a doctorate and a Twitter account; a lot of doctors started popular alarmist accounts and then you'd find out they were doctors of something completely unrelated.
There's some references to Berkeley health officers posting the kind of thing I mean, but they deleted it.
Soon after, of course, everyone would switch to "it's real and it's here" and instead start giving out irrelevant health advice about handwashing because the CDC was biased towards treating everything like a food poisoning case.
From your first article above: "At a middle school a few blocks from my house, a rumor circulated among the children that all Asian kids have the coronavirus and should be quarantined.”
How is that not racism and xenophobia?
The parts about washing your hands was because they didn't know that the virus was airborne yet. They were giving out reasonable recommendations while waiting for more information. What were you expecting? That they would magically know exactly what to do for this particular pandemic from day one?
Do you realise if they did, then it would have been one of those "oh the experts panicked and nothing bad happened" (like previous sars outbreaks). There's inherent asymmetry in the possible outcomes.
It is, but it's not "the real pandemic". As it turned out, the real pandemic was the pandemic.
The immediately available silly reaction linked from there is all the articles about how actually the flu was a more real threat, but the one I originally referenced was on social media.
> The parts about washing your hands was because they didn't know that the virus was airborne yet.
You should assume a respiratory virus is airborne. Western public health people had two big problems; one being they were stuck on the last battle and couldn't ever admit anything was airborne because norovirus, HIV, etc weren't, and the other being that leaders were only capable of saying things that sounded leader-y and social media people were only capable of saying things that sounded progressive, and neither of them were interested in if those things were true. So the leaders went to lying about face masks not being effective because they thought it would reduce panic somehow, and the social media people went to telling people not to be racist.
> What were you expecting? That they would magically know exactly what to do for this particular pandemic from day one?
Yes, because that's what China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan did, and they were closer to the action.
> Do you realise if they did, then it would have been one of those "oh the experts panicked and nothing bad happened" (like previous sars outbreaks).
The difference was pretty immediately observable since this one actually did break out and the previous ones didn't.
> As it turned out, the real pandemic was the pandemic.
No, it wasn't a pandemic yet. I "knew" it was going to blow up, because I'm a pessimist, I predicted 5 of the last 0 world wars since the 90s. But they were right to say it wasn't a pandemic, because it wasn't one yet.
The east Asian countries have been tough on respiratory diseases for a while because they're used to it and they have a more community/society bent than the western world. They are also more willing to be authoritarian especially with public health. But you wouldn't like it if your door was welded shut, and you'd cry like a bitch.
> The difference was pretty immediately observable since this one actually did break out and the previous ones didn't.
Do you think there might be a reason the others didn't?
> But they were right to say it wasn't a pandemic, because it wasn't one yet.
It was in China. You could see it.
> The east Asian countries have been tough on respiratory diseases for a while because they're used to it
Only two of them. Japan and Korea weren't - Japanese people wear face masks mostly because of pollen allergies.
> and they have a more community/society bent than the western world.
I listed four completely different countries. (Also, IME Japanese people are actually more individualistic than Americans. Though they pretend they aren't.)
> They are also more willing to be authoritarian especially with public health.
Japan's policies involved no such thing, in fact they have fewer legal powers than US public health officers do and explicitly said this was the reason they didn't do several things we did. Nevertheless, they were both successful and reversed policies a lot less often than we did. It mostly involved discouraging large crowds indoors ("C3") but not what you'd call "lockdown".
> Do you think there might be a reason the others didn't?
We don't need to construct a cause, since you do that to predict an outcome, but we could already observe different outcomes from the different growth rate.
Even if he has one. What is the credibility of "public health influencer". I could announce that i'm that kind of influencer and record you whatever video that generates engagement no mater the facts.
Well it's different if he means Fauci, or some guy in his mom's basement. But yes, I do believe he was speaking from the wrong end, as Seneca might say.
Similarly, I've known of a psychic who was known for regularly making catastrophic earthquake predictions. Naturally he was wrong 99 times out of 100. But that 1 he got right was enough to build his whole career. "The Great Zambini, who predicted the 1998 earthquake"... People just forgot all his misses, only remembered his hit.
That will not happen in the US court system. Also, the Guardian article below about this happening to scientists was in the Italian court system, not the US.
This was the first movie I tried to pirate. I think I was downloading in divx format from LimeWire or Kazaa over my 1mbs cable modem.
I came back a couple hours later and I had about 20 minutes of the movie that I could start to play while the rest downloaded. I remember it started so hard that I just ended up leaving and going to the movies to see the rest of it.
I realized then that damn these movie studios are doing it all wrong.
Writing a worker that does general purpose proxying is hard.
Unlike Workers, we made Snow Owl more user friendly and no/low code, with a robust rules engine for custom routing. All requests are logged by default for rapid debugging. It's intended for all members of development teams to commonly handle network operations and site maintenance, especially for maximizing uptime.
While this is an incredibly serious issue, the fraud the article focuses on is billing for services that don't really get provided, which is very different than pushing unnecessary procedures.
