There's room for hope too

Can't wait for people to stop joking about how all the wildlife in australia is scary and deadly...

"The Australian landscape is alien and mysterious and will kill you" has been a trope since the very first white people looked at this continent, and it's tiring.

i don't really like it when western mythological terms are applied haphazardly to essentially unrelated ideas. this is a completely lost battle but a lóng is really not a dragon, it is its own thing with only surface level similarities

i especially dislike many works that try to fold all sorts of different mythologies into a single consistent schema because they tend to heavily privilege western conceptions in doing so- see 'dragonology' books twisting basically every mythical reptilian under the sun into the mould of 'a species of dragon', implicitly centring the beowulf-style firebreather as the default from which all other mythologies derive, or basically anything that does worldwide vampire bloodlines

relatedly a qílín is not a unicorn, a fènghuáng is not a phoenix, and a jiāngshī is not a vampire, and it can impede understanding when they're approached from the standpoint of being the 'chinese version' of these concepts from western myth

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI