It’s worse than that. In every jurisdiction, the police department is a revenue generating organization. Overtime, beats, and promotions are rewarded to the officers who pull in the most revenue from tickets and citations. You can check this for yourself. Officer of the year in many jurisdictions are those who have the highest parking tickets written, the most DUI arrests and impounds, or the most traffic citations. In general are not those with the most convictions, public service records, or positive feedback from the community. The accountability the organization and their reporting chain has is to revenue, not to the law.
As part of a large research organization, I was involved in multiple studies about increased traffic fatalities. This work began in 2020, and was part of a larger epidemiological effort. Our findings contradict the headline, but are in agreement with the body of text. The most significant causal factor we found was the rise of mobile device ownership and usage. In fact, mobile device usage is the reason for the inflection of year over year decrease in traffic fatalities in 2012.
The article states that 10% of the fatality increase can be attributed to vehicle size. This is far below the actual increase, and while a contributing factor, not the primary one.
Usefulness is here, and has been for a while time. I have been consistent in my stance that AGI will be achieved in the demonstration of iterative, stable self improvement. This can be demonstrated in knowledge creation or skill acquisition.
I like this - calling it "usefulness" - I think that's actually something the community could get behind - AGU - where we are right now, and 2 terms for 2 milestones we have yet to reach - which could be reached in any order:
1. increases in consistency and quality to some specific measure
2. development of human-like qualities - "consciousness"? "Intuition"?
And then we toss the term AGI which is overloaded and ambiguous.
More automation may lead to more freedom in open ended exploration, stemming the dramatic decline that has happened in exploration. That would be a fantastic result.
And there is a distinct decline in open ended, personal exploration in academics. There are many reasons for this, but the syndrome is widespread throughout the West and throughout scientific disciplines. The first response to someone interested in recreating a published result or simply asking "What if?" is always "Who will pay for that?" Or more discretely, "Will it lead to a grant." Regardless if the cost is $100 in reagents and 8 hours of bench time in an idle lab, or $200 to machine a new reaction chamber the focus from administration is not enabling exploration but standing in line with your hand out.
To add to the collection of anecdata, your experience is similar to mine. I have been more exhausted recently by the complaints of AI submissions and pseudo analysis of AI comments than exhausted by the supposed AI generated comments themselves.
