I don't think Adams is talking about how reluctant the hero is but about failure and misfortune.
Frodo definitely doesn't want to be there but he is far from being a failure. He saves Middle-earth, goes home to the Shire and saves that too, and is regarded as such an incredible mortal that he's invited to live in Valinor with the elves (this is a very big deal and I believe has only ever happened for Frodo and his buddies).
The same goes for Harry Potter. He's a loser at the beginning but after going to Hogwarts he's very much a hero that saves the day by being good at everything and exceptionally brave.
Also, I'd say there are plenty of reluctant heroes in American literature and film. Luke Skywalker hesitates to go save Leia in the first film, Spider-man straight up quits being Spider-man multiple times, John McClane just happened to be there when terrorists attack.
Frodo is determined and reasonably competent, but he ultimately fails his quest. In the end, Frodo is not strong enough to let the Ring go, but he instead claims it as his own. Middle-earth is only saved, because Frodo decided to spare Gollum earlier. Gollum proves treacherous yet again, fights for the Ring, wins, and falls to his doom.
When the hobbits return home, Merry and Pippin (and to lesser extent Sam) are the ones leading the liberation of Shire. Frodo has been traumatized by his experiences and no longer wants to see any violence, no matter the cause. But he cannot adjust to civilian life either. He is invited to live in Valinor. Not as much as an honor, but because his involvement with the One Ring has made him a relic of the past, like the elves. Middle-earth is no longer a place for him.
> This post is my first foray into content like this. I wanted to scratch the itch of an interesting maths problem, with a light-hearted spin that I hope you enjoyed as much as I did making it.
Really impressive imo. I don't remember the last time I was this engaged reading an article on HN.
> It’s entirely possible that some dangerous capability is hidden in ChatGPT, but nobody’s figured out the right prompt just yet.
This sounds a little dramatic. The capabilities of ChatGPT are known. It generates text and images. The qualities of the content of the generated text and images is not fully known.
Think of the news about the kid who got recommended to suicide by ChatGPT, or chatgpt providing the user information on how to do illegal activities, these capabilities are the ones that the author it's referring to
And that sounds a little reductive. There's a lot that can be done with text and images. Some of the most influential people and organizations in the world wield their power with text and images.
> The capabilities of ChatGPT are known. It generates text and images
There's a big difference between generating text which does someone's homework and text which changes peoples opinion about the world (e.g. the r/changemyview experiment done by Meta, in which their AI was better than almost all humans (it was 99th percentile) at changing peoples view, and not a single user was able to spot it as being AI[1])
If you're disagreeing with the precise wording of "capabilities" vs "qualities of the content", then sure, use whatever words make sense to you. But I don't think that's an interesting discussion to have.
Yeah, and to riff off the headline, if something dangerous is connected to and taking commands from ChatGPT then you better make sure there’s a way to turn it off.
Plus there is the 'monkeys with typewriters' problem with both danger and hypothetical good. In contrast, ChatGPT may technically reply to the right prompt with a universal cancer cure/vaccine. Psuedorandomly generating it wouldn't help as you wouldn't recognize it from all of the other queries of things we don't know of as true or false.
Likewise what to ask it for how to make some sort of horrific toxic chemical, nuclear bomb, or similar isn't much good if you cannot recognize it and dangerous capability depends heavily on what you have available to you. Any idiot can be dangerous with C4 and detonator or bleach and ammonia. Even if ChatGPT could give entirely accurate instructions on how to build an atomic bomb it wouldn't do much good because you wouldn't be able to source the tools and materials without setting off red flags.
> I really think we are headed towards and over supply of content where there will be more stuff to read, watch, listen with very real value in all of them.
Yes, but not uniformly so - some niches are very popular, but there's plenty of obscure ones where if you're a fan you literally know everyone making music in some very niche genre because there are so few of them.
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