People are beginning to understand.
- Cameras film me and my family and neighbors everywhere in daily life => Obviously an issue
- Something about secret agencies maybe (?) reading along my messages => “I’ve got nothing to hide in there anyway”
The Butlerian Jihad has started.
I'll let you know when it's time
You must never play your hand like this or you risk being dunked on for your excessiveness.
2020's woke was like this btw.
Hmm wait a minute, unless that small minority is politically well connected with a lot of media access. Then they could manufacture a fake backlash. Much like the backlash to "woke!" Ok nevermind it is the same.
For another, apply AI where it's good but stop forcing it where it doesn't belong. Ask the users, they know.
I guess video games are a problem too. And social media. They wrote about it on their Facebook Group. The news one, where they repost TikToks of people pointing at another video and nod, not the one where they talk about Candy Crush.
Nothing about these conversations makes sense.
That it's likely to be used to mine your personal data and be used to create AI slop in exchange for more global warming are just reasons to hate it more, but I think it's not the primary hate point.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
I first heard about Elon Musk in my teens when I was reading astronomy magazines and wishing Robert Zubrin was running NASA. Why wasn't Nasa progressing? We stopped going to the moon and made a space truck to ferry satellites and ISS nodules into LEO for $2B a pop and 1/100 odds of fatality. Anyway here comes this SV guy wishing he could put a greenhouse on mars and see if a plant would grow in Martian regolith...
I'm still waiting for that experiment, Mr. Musk.
People keep talking about how we're going to enter some kind of positive feeback loop where the chatbots design better chatbot chassis but so far we've just started generating articles about that prediction at a higher rate. This is typical of the gains from LLMs: not a qualitative improvement, but a quantitative improvement. I'd sooner believe we're about to build a Paperclip Maximizer than a Singularity Machine.
These signals seem to validate rather than disprove the direction.
It's the same as how communities respond to egregious law enforcement abuses. Accusations get nowhere as opposed to undeniable video of things like George Floyd.
Cameras on our streets? Well, those were put there by local law enforcement and city councils, who are much more accessible (even though I'm sure they wish they weren't). If the camera is still there, it's still a problem. And if all other options fail, well, someone is probably willing to take the risk to cut that camera down.
Dragnet surveillance by the CIA was a bit harder to oppose.
The Snowden leaks had too much of an abstract bogeyman. PRISM couldn't inspire critical mass outrage because, at the time, Big Tech was still genuinely useful and, besides, the Big Tech involved could be sidestepped with some inconvenience. Flock is neither directly useful nor avoidable unless you resolve to never leave your house.
Metadata tracking is, again, too abstract of a concept, too much a statistical what-if. Compare that with Flock which tracks your very countenance.
Most importantly IMO, Flock has a physical manifestation on which people can direct their anger. There is a "frontend" to actively subvert as opposed to a mere "backend" to avoid.
The datacenter meeting for our board was the largest I've ever seen in town. They had to move it to the school auditorium when 1000+ people showed up the first time.
Just adding a “libertarian vs. authoritarian” axis to both labels changes things up wildly. And shows me at least a little bit how someone can label themselves conservative and also be totally fine with the surveillance state. Or totally against it.
This is about the right time for the children, nieces, and nephews of the first and second big generations of post-Web software engineers, IT workers, etc. to be getting old enough to become a political force. There's been an explosion of tech workers since the mid-90s, and that means an explosion of people related to them as well. The kids who watched their parents be stacked ranked at Amazon, saw the difference in how MS treated contractors and employees, listened to their corporate IT parents talk about how hostile MS is, etc. all learned that the big tech companies are not anyone's friend even if the specifics of the tech go over their heads. And while the workers themselves might keep their heads down and be quiet in public for the sake of their careers, their kids and relatives are less constrained.
And they can talk to each other and find that it's a common sentiment. Since they don't necessarily have technical careers or hobbies, they're also able to export this sentiment to a wider variety of people through overlapping hobbies and interests (e.g. the IT guy at a school in suburban Ohio has a kid who's a theatre nerd, and the kid is good at communicating their anti big tech position to this 'new' group of people).
The distribution of knowledge about how tech companies operate is shifting and diffusing into channels and communities it didn't before.
also, snowden is a traitor. putin's stooge
The conservatives you speak about are conserving ideologies they thought were revolutionary.
What both have in common is that they don't like change.
atriarch•59m ago
The economic model since the industrial revolution is approaching it's metamorphosis: robotic servants that can do everything for everyone. Who, in that world, can spend the fiat and for what? I think many humans would prefer going back to picking potatoes out of the ground for a bit of silver than to lose agency to the machine. Everyone else is either bunker prepping or plugging into the matrix.
Will we arrive at the Jetsons? Or Warhammer 40k?
arionhardison•39m ago
> This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? Capitalism makes it even worse because we are judged based on what we output, does that even make sense anymore? I think the article is confusing because the "state: is confusing; to me at least.
.... 3 responses ....
> Thats totally fair, and TBH - I am also very concerned for my wellbeing as well; I and many others are not doing so well because, in my case I no longer see this "vapid" state of existence as ephermial. I have been reading more and more; I guess looking ot knowledge as some eort of ends vs a means to an end for once. Camus, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dostoevsky's underground man etc...
Camus: The universe was always going to stay silent when you demand meaning from it; the answer isn't a better metric, it's to push the rock anyway ("imagine Sisyphus happy").
Dostoevsky [underground man]: Refusing to be a piano key in someone's optimized Crystal Palace
Stokely Carmichael: "Racism is not a question of attitude, it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism."
My conclusion: AI didn't take our meaning, It made me realize I have always been looking in the wrong place and thus reacting ignoratly when I felt "denied" this thing I feel entitled to.
Love.
Edit: Love; paradoxically, ive felt both entitled to and unworthy of so I'm not sure WTF to do with that.
To wit: Our love of self is so closely tied to our output and if we have no output do we have value?
Edit: tl;dr - I am not sure I understand the point of anything anymore and many others feel the same way. I do not think this is some "existential crisis" I believe it is a logical conclusion to draw given the evidence presented by the day and age we live in.
spacecadet•37m ago
quadrifoliate•33m ago
Not true at all. If you have a robotic servant that can "do everything" for anywhere close to an affordable amount for even a middle-class person, please post a link and specify what it can do.
There a big gap between a tool that can spew out large amounts of code and something you trust to not screw up your house. Once I can tell a robot to do a simple plumbing task in my house, I'll believe in this metamorphosis you're talking about.
space_fountain•21m ago
stonogo•33m ago
Why do people keep positing this? The robots get better every year, but they don't get better fast enough to make me think there will be a robot servant doing anything for anyone in my lifetime. As has been the case for the past fifty years or so, they're either hyperspecialized or remote controlled by people, and neither of those spell doom for the economy.
arionhardison•28m ago
Edit: In terms of AI/LLM's etc..
atriarch•20m ago
We don't need to engineer plumbing robots - they will engineer themselves. We will see a silicon Cambrian Explosion. Maybe next year maybe in 500, but it's inevitable with the current economic incentives.
trickypr•8m ago
beej71•3m ago
watwut•31m ago
Then we can take down monopolies, tax large corporations, regulate them, empower anti white colar crime agencies again and regulate finance.
That will actually do. Bullshitters and sociopaths are too empowered. That is an issue, and acute one.
CamperBob2•18m ago
Translation: I've never picked potatoes for a living
dgellow•10m ago