There hasn't been direct democracy in the USA, ever.

We are not a direct democracy.

It's a MASSIVE security risk. What you tell ChatGPT is not private, if you knowingly or unknowingly tell ChatGPT secret information you have no control over where that information may go. Especially for a company for Apple that lives & breaths on surprise product releases.

The mall I used to ride my bike to as a child, where my favorite Arcade (Aladdin's Castle) & had a toy store (K.B. Toys) was leveled to the ground about 20 years ago, with the exception of like two restaurants at the corner of the building.

It's now some fake ass 'downtown' like outdoor mall, in Michigan, with terrible parking & it's just gross.

I miss Meadowbrook Mall, man, I miss it a lot.

I was gonna say "The Arcade" but you made me remember the entire mall it resided in got blown up.

Bingo. He's following a WELL KNOWN playbook of making the company both leaner in terms of expenses, and trying to add revenue, with zero care about long term viability of the company.

The goal is to make the books look better then they are, so that you can dupe investors into thinking the turd you just shined up isn't a turd.

EVERYTHING he's doing is logical when you look at it in that sense, they are throwing a coat of wax on a used lemon to dump it on some unsuspecting suckers for a profit.

I'm very weary. The books where very China centric, understandable being written by a Chineese author, and fear a white washing.

Also, even though I loved the books, there was something... odd about them. I'm not sure if it was something lost in translation, or just that some of it felt. IDK over simplified, childish? I think it's a combination of all of them, and I really wonder what they'll have to do to make a TV Show from that source material to have mass appeal here in the west.

Yeah, but us Michiganders know Culvers is gross & steer clear.

Well, GOT was a Western novel being adapted for TV to suit a Western audience. I fear what they will do with 3BP, given it's very Chinese centric mindset. Even the English translation of the novel had to move a few chapters around to make sense to us.

Planet of the Apes TV series is hilarious to me. It really feels like Coy & Vance Duke where sent to the Planet Of The Apes.

What your saying doesn't exist is an Artificial General Intelligence, something approaching the conscious human mind. Your right that doesn't exist.

AI doesn't just mean that though.

What we're dealing with right now is the computer equivalent of growing mouse brain cells in a petre dish, plugging them into inputs and outputs & getting them to do useful things for us.

The way you describe chat GPT not being creative, is also theoretically how our own brains work in the creative processes. If you study story structure & mythology you'd find that ALL successful stories boil down to a very minimalist set of archetypes & types of conflict.

Now lets really break your brain, are you & I able to make our own choices? Is the ego, the voice in our own skulls, the conscious mind really ever making any decisions?

There are a great many studies that seem to indicate decisions are made well before our conscious selves are aware of them.

We are far more driven by emotion & instinct then any of us care to admit.