The “good old days” were much harder. In 1865 the average British worker worked 124,000 hours over their life (like the US & Japan). In 1980, only 69,000 hours, despite living longer. Since then, it dropped slower, by 6%. We went from spending 50% of our lives working to 20%!

The belief you need to know some secret to prompting is stopping people from playing with AI systems. Seriously, you can get 90% of the way to fantastic results by just asking the AI to ask you questions.

This is quite the paper! It gave 25 AI agents motivations & memory, and put them in a simulated town. Not only did they engage in complex behavior (including throwing a Valentine’s Day party) but the actions were rated more human than humans roleplaying. arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03442.pdf

You need to accept failure to innovate big. Innovation advances through a combination of small tweaks & giant leaps. In this paper on programming contests, there were 16 small improvements for every leap, and most leaps made things worse, but when they succeeded they were huge.