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It has had significant quality of life increases for me. I use LLMs for everything from:

- travel and restaurant recommendations. my last few outings have been entirely LLM-advised and they turned out excellent. LLMs seem to have ingested every single Google review, photo, and menu of every business on Earth and can answer very nuanced questions like "is the garlic chicken at <restaurant, city> garnished with coriander?"

- fitness, nutrition, accounting, therapy, medical, legal, immigration advice (sure it's not a real professional but you know what, it's pretty fucking close, and any capability gap is made up by having perfect two-way communication which you don't get when talking with a human)

- coding (work, side projects, personal tools, documentation & pricing questions, "review this code", etc).

- I start reading most articles with the prompt "Summarize this article: <url>". I just started a non-fiction book by pasting into Claude: "There are 12 chapters in the book <book-name>. Can you give me a 2 sentence synopsis of each chapter?". It reduces the "activation energy" hump and screens if it's worth reading at all.

- I use the LLM in my Tesla for on-the-fly advice for parking and other things. You can simply ask "what's the best Boba place around here?" and it will give you a decent recommendation. You can also follow up with "does this place have ample parking?".

- I use the LLM in YouTube to summarize videos and ask specific questions and/or get timestamps to the parts I care about.

If your critical thinking skills are strong then LLM is a literal superpower.

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Not everyone works for Evil Corp. I work in the public sector and my work supports public health and safety initiatives. AI has allowed my team to get much more done than we would have otherwise which improves the quality of life of the people in my community.

So I would like to counter your cynicism with a “YMMV” depending on who you work for.

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Are you just automating lab reporting and results faster? That doesn’t exactly improve the health of others, a faster lab does not cure an ailment or provide a better cure.

Like cool my lung xray only took minutes to determine if I have a lesion instead of a week or a few days, but I still have cancer.

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For some people, getting lung cancer reported a week earlier will save their lives.

More importantly, if you can screen for cancer in a way that takes minutes instead of a week, imagine how accessible this technology will become.

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Faster scans means more scans. More scans means getting scans earlier and tracking abnormalities on scans over time. This can lead to earlier intervention, which means you get treatment for the cancer when it’s stage 2 instead of stage 3 or 4, which maybe is the difference between living a full life and dying young.
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Examples?
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If it doesn't help average people, why do millions of them pay for it?
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Ask DraftKings?
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You'd need this argument to be a lot more concrete as to why AI is like gambling.
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I actually have seen comparisons of using AI to a gacha game (quotas per time block, elements of chance, sycophancy in the output leading towards addiction or even psychosis in rare cases).

But I don't think the argument needs to be "AI is like gambling". The argument only needs to be "humans often behave irrationally and even self-destructively".

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This is not the argument. It's not a comparison to gambling but a comparison to something that does not materially improve a person's life. Economic expenditure does not equate to human benefit. This is the original argument, and the onus is on THAT person to explain why people spending for AI actually benefit, not the other way around.

Perhaps you can ask Claude to explain it to you.

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Gambling has consistently ranked above family for many in human history, so while it hurts a third party, the people involved genuinely believe in it.
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addiction? get lured in with the promises of enhanced productivity and knowledge asking, leave with half your brain rotted and a $200/month subscription
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Downvoters mind to explain?
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Boring doom and gloom.

AI probably did not take your job yet. How many AI queries did you use last month, and how much time has it saved compared to digging through the web?

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Only reading the first sentence maybe?
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