Often when people describe SI or similar, there is a frame often taken which describes a machine so smart and capable that it becomes uncontrollable. The hypothetical is easy to understand but it requires too many assumptions and an allergy to nuance/complexity to be believable for me.
The more realistic outcome, and in my opinion the more scary argument to not proceed without guardrails is that SI is achievable and is built without its owners and operators losing control: the worlds most powerful, privately owned super weapon that operates as an infinitely capable forgery within the Internet, a plane that we all share and depend on despite its opaque downsides with respect to an inability to verify authenticity.
We didn't need AI for FTC astroturfing to influence regulations back in the net neutrality days. We didn't need AI to disrupt meat space by creating and scheduling a protest and counter protest across the street from one another. We didn't need AI to mold public opinion, even in times when that new form was more distant from the truth.
What made these influence ops difficult to conduct safely (read: without being caught) is what made them rare (relative to today): they are plays of big risk for big reward. But over time social media commoditized it, and in doing that made it easier to do and more centralized, the most glaring example being TikTok and the bipartisan effort to ban it.
Now, buying US phone numbers from startups that run racks of "phones", buying swarms of pre-warmed social media accounts, and other unscrupulous methods of masking inauthentic behavior has become an accepted organ of the VC space. The industries cultural vibe of "fuck you, you can't stop the future" turns criticisms into marketing.
While we get placated with fears of nuclear or AI induced disaster and stories about machines that may now be alive, the psychosis is taking hold which has shifted the conversation away from examining what is happening from the perspective of accountability to a perspective akin to watching a chemical reaction take place.
The noise has created a permission structure to behave in ways that are otherwise unjustifiable. And baked in are the roots for excuses to be made when the inevitable realizations down the line.
In the mean time, we are supposed to be having this public discourse about what is happening and what should happen next. I trust that these AI companies see using their super weapon today, here and now, in order to pave the way to a more secure future down the line.
Sorry that I used your post to soapbox. I agree, the goal is flawed indeed.
The billionaires write the rules. So by definition, their actions are legal.
The public cannot write the rules, nor engage in the billionaire level legal bribery, their actions of protest are by and large illegal.
That's how you corner everyone, and make people play no-win scenarios. You know, like shooting up city councilmembers or firebomb attempts against Scam Altman.
And the more people realize that legal solutions are no solution, we'll (society) devolve into more direct action.
I'd hope the billionaires learn from the French Revolution, but if they keep continuing, the guillotines will come for them soon.
They'll perfect methods of manipulating enough of the people to stop the guillotines. They have come rather far already. Progressive resource scarcity, instability, insecurity, etc, will drive people limbic, where they're even easier to control.
I might be cynic, but when you control the world's information it should be pretty easy to set goals and see them through. Once AI triumphs over "classic searching" you try and figure out how to build a guillotine or where AI leaders are going to be today and see where that gets you. Anything that can endanger the elite or raise the lower classes past a given threshold is going to be non-functioning AND made illegal. That's really what they mean when they say AI labs might collaborate on "safety". They mean theirs and their models'.
> In the past, but today fewer people are getting paid less this way.
There has never been more content creators making a living off their content than there is today. Look no further than these enormous platforms with ad rev sharing options for contributors producing UGC.
> Would you rather resurrect IP law, or find some new way to pay creators, then finish killing it?
Uploading content online and getting a cut of ad revenue fits this criteria, no?
The idea that we would scrap IP law and rewrite it from scratch is the very definition of tossing the baby out with the bathwater, IMO.
> There has never been more content creators making a living off their content than there is today. Look no further than these enormous platforms with ad rev sharing options for contributors producing UGC.
And you think anyone is actually making a living this way? It's one of the most extreme winner-take-all markets, even worse than sports and music. Top .1% maybe can live off it, everyone else also has an actual job that pays the bills.
They don't think its okay, as evidenced by this submission predictably being flagged. Also predictably, they will not be here to defend or explain, either.
They'd also flag it if they thought it was okay but "a bad look". Most of the Trump voter cope I read starts with, "I agree with him on a lot of things but..."
I get your point but its hard not to look past the fact that only 1 of the 4 mentioned mediums have real time, user-personalized, opaque algorithmic endless scrolling, and a disproportionately higher rate of addiction.
Personally I think the hanlon's razor approach is an intellectually lazy thought terminating cliche that provides cover to people/groups who do act with malice.
A US administration sympathetic to Russia stands to benefit from higher oil prices.
The "Remind white people of what happened 300 years ago" in question is an explainer on how a 19th century Super El Nino wiped out over 3% of the world's population, mostly in Asia, despite the fact that these regions had experienced famines and droughts at numerous points in their prior history. The video then asks the question, "Why was this so much more deadly?"
The explanation posits that this was only possible due to the multiplier of the rapidly expanding British empire. It is not posited as British/white people are bad, it is posited as society, politics and trade creating a multiplier effect. The whole point of this section in the video is to setup the final chapter of the video, asking the question, "Could this happen again?", which feels like a valid question given that society, politics, and trade have exponentially evolved since the 19th century.
This section of the video is portrayed so agnostically that I felt compelled to reply to your vague criticism.
Here is the video linked to the timestamp of the aforementioned section, which is only around 2 minutes long, so others can pass their own judgement: https://youtu.be/69o-8Mtd3Kc&t=330
Not sure how you can be here for the science if you're not willing to be here for the history.
Always loved the Surface Duo. I really liked the separation of the screens too; felt like dual monitors vs. ultrawide. It also forced the technology to focus the valueprop on multitasking versus more immersive/more bigger/more better. I'm curious about the iPhonr Duo; I have not been a huge fan of iPadOS or iOS, the former making me often wish for a macOS experience and the later having felt slower and less responsive over time (mostly due to animation speeds/aesthetic choices rather than a hardware defect).
Ah. about 30 seconds ago they mentioned in the (still ongoing) keynote they said it was removed to recoup space for internals. I recall the 3.5mm jack removal being motivated along similar lines. I wonder, assuming the space where the SIM slot would've gone was filled with increased battery size, what that delta would in duration. I'm from the US, cursory reading about global eSIM adoption surprised me (only 30% and most of that 30% is in the US vs. my assumption of >50%). What prevents adoption elsewhere? Consumer demand for swapping? Curious to hear your POV on it.
eSIMs give a lot of control back to the carrier. My carrier does not allow transferring eSIMs between phones, but I can trivially move their physical SIM card.
I don't trust carriers to get things right, and I don't see any benefit in switching my main card to eSIM - I inserted the physical card once when I bought the phone, and it's going to stay there until I get a new phone, simple as that.
The more realistic outcome, and in my opinion the more scary argument to not proceed without guardrails is that SI is achievable and is built without its owners and operators losing control: the worlds most powerful, privately owned super weapon that operates as an infinitely capable forgery within the Internet, a plane that we all share and depend on despite its opaque downsides with respect to an inability to verify authenticity.
We didn't need AI for FTC astroturfing to influence regulations back in the net neutrality days. We didn't need AI to disrupt meat space by creating and scheduling a protest and counter protest across the street from one another. We didn't need AI to mold public opinion, even in times when that new form was more distant from the truth.
What made these influence ops difficult to conduct safely (read: without being caught) is what made them rare (relative to today): they are plays of big risk for big reward. But over time social media commoditized it, and in doing that made it easier to do and more centralized, the most glaring example being TikTok and the bipartisan effort to ban it.
Now, buying US phone numbers from startups that run racks of "phones", buying swarms of pre-warmed social media accounts, and other unscrupulous methods of masking inauthentic behavior has become an accepted organ of the VC space. The industries cultural vibe of "fuck you, you can't stop the future" turns criticisms into marketing.
While we get placated with fears of nuclear or AI induced disaster and stories about machines that may now be alive, the psychosis is taking hold which has shifted the conversation away from examining what is happening from the perspective of accountability to a perspective akin to watching a chemical reaction take place.
The noise has created a permission structure to behave in ways that are otherwise unjustifiable. And baked in are the roots for excuses to be made when the inevitable realizations down the line.
In the mean time, we are supposed to be having this public discourse about what is happening and what should happen next. I trust that these AI companies see using their super weapon today, here and now, in order to pave the way to a more secure future down the line.
Sorry that I used your post to soapbox. I agree, the goal is flawed indeed.
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