Similar stuff that's worked for me includes:
Alcohol is also a drug. If Dalrymple really means "drugs" when he says "drugs", it would follow that he's advocating for prohibition to protect alcoholics from themselves.
We seem to have found a relatively tolerable equilibrium around alcohol where the substance is widely available, the majority of individuals who can enjoy it recreationally are free to do so, and yet it's legally just as intolerable for an intoxicated person to harm others as it would be for a sober person to take the same actions. Some individuals have addiction problems, and we have varyingly effective programs in place to help them deal with that, but ultimately the right of the majority to enjoy it responsibly (and the rights of the businesses to sell it to those who can use it responsibly) trump the "rights" of the minority to be protected from themselves by the government.
Maybe to get the same equilibrium around other drugs, we would need harsher punishments for the antisocial behaviors that we're actually trying to prevent by banning the drugs themselves. All I know is that anyone who unironically makes "ban the intoxicants" claims without considering what we can learn from our most widely accepted and normalized intoxicants is speaking on some level other than the literal and logical.
One lens to view AI is as a prediction engine -- predict what color to make each pixel, predict what word to put next.
Whoever is first to applying this predictive skill to stock markets will probably make immense amounts of money. Then again, people are probably already trying to do this, which creates a situation unlike that from which we derive the historic data to train on, which might render it impossible?
On the gripping hand, large slow and powerful institutions want to make the numbers go up and to the right.
I've also never had an item I can imagine stomaching every day.
FWIW, this is likely to be a worse problem with a meal replacement than a protein bar, and a worse problem with a protein bar than a frozen option.
bring to work
That adds complexity. Are there social norms at work which necessitate eating with others? If so, having a shake or similar every day may not meet those needs.
I sure wish I could skip breakfast and/or lunch and only have one sit-down meal with my family in the evening
Are you aware of the concept of OMAD (one meal a day)? I don't think it's super likely that this is the right solution for you, but it seems like you'd learn useful things about the best solution for your food-is-inconvenient problem by considering it as an option and determining why you would rule it out. Basically unless you're diabetic or attempting to gain weight, you can just have all your day's calories in a single meal instead of spread across multiple. Again, there are many reasons why this might not be a good fit, but it seems worth making sure that it's in your overton window as an option that works for some people.
(edit to add)
packaged in sizes more suitable for full meals?
a "full meal" for someone who's smaller, sedentary, or pursuing weight loss can be a protein bar. A "full meal" for someone who's larger, more active, or pursuing weight gain can be 10x that amount, at the extreme. We sort of have a standard daily intake of 2,000kcal from nutrition facts, but not even food packaging attempts to prescribe how many meals an individual eats in a day, how they distribute their intake across those meals, and therefore asking whether an item is packaged in a size suitable for a "full meal" is like asking whether a piece of software will run on "a computer".
we do not have a robot that is perfectly capable of executing the "saving grandma" task
Do you mean to imply that humans are perfectly capable of executing the "saving grandma" task?
Opening a door in a burning building at the wrong time can cause the entire building to explode by introducing enough oxygen to suddenly combust a lot of uncombusted gases.
I'm not convinced that there exists a "perfect solution" to any task with 0 unintended consequences, though, so my opinions probably aren't all that helpful in the matter.
I notice that I am confused: I experience comparable price and convenience, and superior subjective experience of eating, by purchasing pre-made frozen meals and microwaving them. I experience comparable price and superior travel convenience by throwing a protein bar in my bag on the way out the door.
Possible reasons one might prefer a meal replacement over comparably easy "real" food include:
Based on observing the eating behaviors of many friends and acquaintances, I'd speculate that the soylent-style "meal replacement" market has split between meal delivery services that offer better flavor/variety/nutrition for equivalent ease, and protein/supplement products that offer more optimized and targeted nutrition than the originals. In short, I suspect but cannot prove that demand for soylent/huel has decreased because options more pleasant to eat and otherwise cost/convenience equivalent have become more mainstream.
Anyways, could you clarify what successful meal replacement would mean to you, if you would like suggestions on how to get there?
Depth of specialization to the individual is an interesting question. I suspect that if this was a mature field, we'd have names for distinct subtypes of assistant skillset -- like how an android app dev isn't quite the same as an ios app dev, although often one person can do whichever skillset a situation demands.
I suspect that low-skill candidates would gravitate toward one assistance subtype or another, and lack of skill would show up in their inability to identify which subtype a situation calls for and then adapt to it. But on taskrabbit, we don't need the same tasker to be good at picking up groceries and also building furniture, as long as we're clear enough about which task we're asking for...
Oops! I only realized in your reply that you're considering "reliability" the load-bearing element. Yes, the hiring pipeline will look like a background noise of consistent interest from the unqualified, and sporadic hits from excellent candidates. You're approaching it from the perspective that the background noise of incompetents is the more important part, whereas I think that the availability of an adequate candidate eventually is the important part.
I think this because basically anywhere that hires can reliably find unqualified applicants. For a role where people stay in the job for 6 months, for instance, you only need to find a suitable replacement once every 6 months... so "reliably" being able to find an excellent candidate every day seems simply irrelevant.
Joining the few places that will have leverage over what happens.
I agree that this is good if one has sufficient skill and knowledge to improve outcomes. What if one has reason to suspect that joining a key AI lab would be a net negative toward their success, compared to if they hired someone else? For instance I interview disproportionately well compared to my actual efficacy in tech roles -- I get hired based on the best of my work, but that best work is a low percentage of my actual output (f which most is barely average and some is conterproductive), so it seems like someone in my situation might actually do harm by seeking greater leverage?
I'm not claiming that we've solved any substance abuse! I'm claiming that you and Dalrymple appear to be ignoring the potential lessons we can learn from the equilibrium that society has reached with the most widely used and abused modern intoxicant. The equilibrium doesn't have to be perfect, nor to solve every problem, in order to be a relatively stable and well-tolerated compromise between allowing individual freedom and punishing misbehavior.