All but 2 countries in South America have had the experience of democratically electing a leader only to have them overthrown in a US-backed coup. The US/CIA started with this obsession with the 1954 Guatemalan Coup specifically to maintain Guatemala as a banana republic. Chiquita owned most land in Guatemala and left is uncultivated to stifle competition. Jacobo Árbenz wanted to (slightly) tax this land to reduce poverty. Chiquita hired Edward Bernays (yes, that guy. The father of modern public relations, nephew of Freud, etc) for an influence campaign and eventually got CIA to launch Operation PBSuccess in 1953. The CIA/Chiquita gave very extensive lists of political opponents to murder during the coup.
One way to view current US politics is that the broader banana republic tendency ran out of South American governments to overthrow and moved back to the domestic government, which has now taken on all the corruption and extractive politics of South American CIA-backed dictatorships. The violence levels are not comparable .. yet. But having an explicitly political paramilitary force that's shot a few citizens in the street is not a good sign.
There's a well-known sociological concept called "imperial boomerang" that describes this. It's also seen in surveillance technologies used against oppressed people. As far back as the surveillance apparatus Britain built in Ireland which eventually came to roost on the British people themselves
I’ll never miss an opportunity to plug a very relevant Behind the Bastards - at this point it feels like an Xkcd for Very Bad Things, but I digress - [Part One: The Deadliest School in History](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2N77mwUI0pDOBOP6gIknkU) does a pretty good job of covering the School of the Americas
They also have a few on Bernays because of course they do
And perhaps the people who built and deployed the autocomplete and the connection as well.
Because --if you'll bear with me-- it may of course be much more involved: when (not if) AI models enter life-sustaining systems, such as hospitals, nuclear devices, or food logistics, one of them may get the others to sabotage something resulting in accidents, ranging from mild inconvenience to mass murder.
The person who connected the spicy autocomplete to the defibrillator, or the green house climate control, or the emergency button, is then not the one responsible. Responsibility lies elsewhere, and is nebulous. Think of the Boeing MAX scandal. Did anyone get punished?
That's why it's important to resist it now. Soon, the responsibility of which you speak is gone, and nobody will feel burdened when making decisions with unforeseeable consequences.
I used to hear things like “if cigarettes/alcohol were invented now, they would never allow it”, indicating that consumer protection used to be a thing, as early as 10-20 years ago. Now when AI hit the market it was obvious how bad and dangerous it was, yet governments (even the supposedly good ones in Europe which still [pretend to] do consumer protection) did nothing to protect their citizens from the harms AI was causing.
If we still did (or ever did) consumer protection like that cigarette/alcohol myth above indicates, then the makers of that tool would indeed be responsible for when their products does dangerous things.
Hopefully we never do something silly like making a lead pushing machine that operates at high velocity, then mass produce it, what a terrible precedence that would set.
I think you agree with the OP. In this way, the tool has no ethical problem (there are plenty around how they were trained and such, but that's besides the point), the problems are with how it's used. The ethical problem is how people are behaving and how they are abusing each other, not the tool they are using to exert that abuse.
I suppose it's a little bit of a "guns don't kill people" argument.
The tools have different ranges of uses. A knife can be used to cut things. But while humans are among the things you can cut with it, there is a staggering array of other options which are genuinely useful in everyday life.
A gun can be used to, uh, make small but deep perforations at a distance, by throwing apx. 7 grams of copper-encased lead at high velocity at the target, with somewhat poor precision. Oh, and such an impact does stress/shatter the material around the made perforation quite a lot. So... this thing really can't be used for much anything except for killing animals without getting into contact with them, due to the peculiar way the life is sustained in the animal organisms. This, too, can be useful in everyday life although I personally would advise you, if you find yourself in such a situation, to try and move to somewhere nicer.
These are sota models, not open source 7b parameter ones. They've put lots of effort into preventing prompt injections during the agentic reinforcement learning
It's probably not literally prompted to do that. It has access to a desktop and GitHub, and the blog posts are published through GitHub. It switches back and forth autonomously between different parts of the platform and reads and writes comments in the PR thread because that seems sensible.
The scale is there. I'm scraping, cleaning, token efficientizing dozens of sources every single hour. The lack of monies for embedding everything was a temporary problem.
HarmonyOS Next (Huawei) is independent from Android. So that leaves three options, even if Harmony is mostly China focussed. They have tons of users there.
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