The term "brainwashing" is so misleading and fear-baity here. Humans are gullible and can be convinced of falsehoods. You have just as much if not more "brainwashing" power than any chatbot. The only difference is that a chatbot can reach more people faster, but we can also inoculate ourselves to the effectiveness of AI by things like "media literacy" and "skepticism". If you know that an AI can be programmed to promote falsehoods (or otherwise fed falsehoods), you can perhaps double check sources that an AI uses to promote their claims. It's not brain control its just media baby
> but we can also inoculate ourselves to the effectiveness of AI by things like "media literacy" and "skepticism".
The premise of the study implies otherwise. They took a group of "true believers" of conspiracies. Those who are skeptical of mainstream narratives. They were also told they are conversating with AI.
The study notes that these types of beliefs have not been shown to be swayed by other methods as such efforts have previously failed.
1. It's important to remember that having struggling poor people is expensive for the system. Emergency shelters, health issues that go untreated until they need emergency intervention, desperation crimes like theft (affecting policing and prisons), foster care, drug use intervention. These are all expenses that are reduced by a system like UBI. If you keep people healthy and fed, you can keep them peaceful and working and the program pays for itself.
2. I don't see the inflation effect as purely linear. Having $10 when things cost $10 is better than having $0 when things cost $5. There are thresholds that affect peoples ability to even engage with the market that you put your trust into. Also the market wants people to buy things, so it should welcome more people participating in it. And lets not forget that most of the price gouging over the past few years went straight to shareholder profits instead of increased supply costs, we can try to decentivize systems like that that profit off of economic crises.
> we should foster competition, incentivize innovation, and let markets do their thing
"letting markets do their thing" is contradictory to "fostering competition". Markets fundamentally drift towards consolidation. Source: the past sixty years. Markets do not fundamentally organically move towards progress. Often times the profitable thing is to pay workers shit wages and raise prices, and if you try to wait it out for a magical class of well financed competitors to come along and disrupt that status quo, millions of people will have been put into poverty in the interim.
Sixty years is perhaps too long, neoliberalism really kicked off in the 80s/90s with an increase in globalisation, and corporate consolidation through M&As ramped up quickly in the 2000s after financialisation of the economy went in high gear. If we backtrack to the last thirty to forty years and check which top 20 companies got to that spot through M&As it might paint a different picture.
Again, Exxon Mobil is the only overlap with 2020's list. (I presume that the references to "Exxon Mobil" in the 1990 and 1960 lists actually refer to pre-merger Exxon, since Mobil by itself is also on both lists).
I checked, and of the 2020 list, only AT&T, McKesson, and Exxon even existed in 1960 (Berkshire Hathaway kinda did, but they made shirts. Warren Buffet didn't come along and turn it into an investment operation until 1965.
Ah yes the old "banning things=bad" argument that doesn't offer alternatives to fixing the issues with AI. Just ignore the issues with environmental impact, plagiarism, CP and other non-consensual shit in the data sets, scamming capabilities! All the groups asking for regulation here have **funding** and that means they are evil but we are good for using this tool that is massively subsidized by megacorps that have a vested interest in this market.
'It's scary, ban it!' isn't a great argument either.
Especially when 'safety' has such a blurred definition, we could be talking about anything from the threat of global apocalypse to to the 'threat' of an AI merely being able to answer questions about 'wrong' political opinions.
Skynet isn't going to happen. The biggest threat from AI is taking jobs away and creating poverty while redirecting more wealth to the super-rich.
In the short term, we're likely to be facing a lot more convincing spam/bots and deepfakery in the run up to the election - but is that the fault of the AI, or the fault of the humans directly operating their new toys/tools?
Banning AI is simply useless. It's a technology that anyone with sufficient processing power and access to the internet can use, so trying to ban it is guaranteed to fail just like prohibiting alcohol would be.
The only thing we can do is limit how megacorps can openly abuse the technology.
It's just plainly retarded steering from progress. Only one who would profit from it would be a nations who wouldn't give a flying fuck about your ban. Exactly like with nuclear energy.
Less harmful would be to ban large models from being not open.
If you ban open large models in US, you'll cripple US and make few megacorps very rich, very quickly. You'll drain talent to other (also competing) states. Truly bad actors won't be affected, if anything they'll get advantage.
People draw weird analogies equating llama2 to nuclear device etc. nonsense but the closer analogy would be to ban on semiconductors of certain efficiency for US itself.
Similar idiotic argument as for banning cryptography.
I agree, but if there's enough political will (ie these orgs convince a large enough subset of the right people) the US can bully other nations to implement similar policities like it has done many times in the past.
once you understand that what they are trying to protect is the safety of their profits every of their argument start to make sense.
You can replace "US" with "US and states that agreed to do the same". The argument still stands, it just creates worse outcome for states that agreed to it.
In my lifetime school stopped being about teaching life skills and started being about college prep. I never had home ec, wood shop, auto shop, any life skill class. Hell even drivers ed was privatized in my town. I understand that these programs are expensive to keep running but that slack was not picked up by other community resources like community colleges. (theres also a lot to be said about the stigmatization of community college and adult education courses)
The decline in public funding of education and public transit in my lifetime have gotten us to this point
idk what their profit structure or founding story is, but the poison pill for every company is investment capital. The second you take VC money you are beholden to someone other than your coworkers and clients. If you can get off the ground and become sustainable on sales alone, you are golden. Stability is possible but the problem is that most VCs demand 10x return, not 1.25x return.
> It implies you are not living in a communist society, and therefore allowed a measure of control over your own life
OK red scare calm down. I think you overestimate how much control capitalism gives you. Criticizing the economy does not make you a commie. If you wanna lay down and accept oligarchy because you are afraid of communism be my guest, but I would highly suggest you fight for slightly better circumstances for yourself and your neighbors.
> STOP GIVING THEM MONEY
If oligarchy was limited to Bezos, Zuck, and Musk that would be easy! But billionaires kind of own everything? Our food supply is controlled by a handful of megacorps, our communication network is administered by a few others, real estate is a game for giant investment groups, health care is a fucking joke... It's impossible to elect to not participate in the economy, or at least its impractical for everyone to live off the grid.
Listen I know you think that communism means the goberment controls everything (it doesnt), but at least I can vote for my gov reps. I don't get a fucking vote when Blue Cross Blue Shield is deciding where I can go to the hospital.
actually no, I don't think anyone should look at the wealth spread in the US and think that it's normal or good. It's objectively dangerous and undemocratic. If someone can earn millions a day from passive investment but someone who actually provides meaningful goods and services day-to-day barely makes 50k a year, I think we have totally misunderstood as a society what to value and how to distribute resources
>There are plenty of people on earth living less than $1usd a day and would trade their situation gladly for a very comfortable $50kusd/year.
This is absolutely besides the point. I also wish as many people as possible could make enough money to live comfortable lives but it has nothing to do with the problem of people passively earning millions of dollars without contributing anything positive to society.
imagine if i told you that i think everyone deserves to make a wage that allows them to thrive and have stability.
Also consider that A) things are more expensive here and B) our economy is debt based and many people with homes and cars in the US have negative income after expenses, just because aesthetically our poverty looks different, it doesn't mean that it's good. It's not comparable.
Debt is heavily marketed, but ultimately a personal choice. For those who choose to live within their means and not take on debt, they don’t have most of their paycheck going out the door to pay for last month, or have negative income.
I’ve had people who make less than me tell me I live like a poor person. That’s ok. I know I’m doing fine and they have since told me about some of their money struggles, and have a lot of debt to deal with each month.
Maybe if people stopped using debt to pretend they had more than they do, we’d see more reasonable housing and car prices, as well as goods that are made with some quality and repairablity instead of things like fast fashion that simplely gets thrown away.
Companies doing business in the US go to where the demand is. People need to stop using debt to demand junk that makes things worse.
Step one could be ratching down the average home size. It has more than doubled since the 1950s, while the number of people in the house has gone down. A bigger home is naturally going to be more expensive to buy/build, but then it also takes more land, has higher property taxes, costs more to heat/cool, costs more to repair and maintain, has more rooms to furnish, and has more place to put stuff before a person needs to stop and question if this need all of it. Simply living in a more modest home or apartment can have a massive effect on a person’s finances.
if your opinion is that some people make millions a day and some people make $1 a day and thats just life and we shouldnt try to change that, I think you are fundamentally lost.
Also consider: where do the billionaires in the US get the resources to fuel their empires? Do they get their cobalt from slave labor mines in the Congo? Do you think maybe there is some kind of connection between corporate greed in America and people on the other side of the world making $1/day or less?
That is an entirely different problem and more of a red herring than a talking point.
"Better" is entirely relative and using a western-centric framework to assert a "hierarchy of goodness". However, it is not an objective frame, and there are plenty of detractors both endogenous and exogenous.
What is really of interest here is one, the consolidation of wealth into a pinhead of the population, and two the egregious and worsening condition of wealth distribution in the US. Which I would argue exacerbates the global condition through manifold conductors, in essence it's imperialism-via-market but in equal measure an unabashed use of threats in other capacities to keep other countries in line.
Most people, given the time (which they necessarily trade away) would, I expect, prefer a definitively ethical, sustainable, robust product - however this comes at a cost (which is what they purchase with their increasingly devalued time) and so what we end up with is a consumer-driven market where people don't have enough time to peer down the rabbit hole of ethics and sustainability, instead opting to take the wheel for what best appears to suit their demands. This is then papered over simply by hand waving that introducing the Western market regime is improving conditions globally, which I'll again point out that this is relative. And I think this then suffers further amplification because, it seems for a great many decades, that the US itself has been suffering a slow decline. This itself has many impacts, for instance it has been increasingly salient that something like home ownership is becoming less prominent and so the social fabric must be altered. These dynamics may take a lifetime to shift to meet equilibrium, so you'll have to forgive the many hundreds of millions of people for their disinterest in global affairs when the social contract their forebears penned them is burning to ash.
It's insane to consider people suffering from malnutrition, lack of education, food scarcity, lack of access to healthcare as "entitled brats". I just don't even understand how one comes to that conclusion.
you know all this shit is connected right? the rich in America exploit labor to accumulate profit -> funnel that shit into investments to passively increase their income -> investment firms squeeze their controlled companies to generate more profit to increase shareholder value -> companies outsource labor to the 3rd world to reduce costs and give savings to shareholders -> those foreign businesses exploit their workers to a greater degree because there is less/none regulation -> people in other countries get paid $1 a day
Fighting corporate greed in the US is in effect fighting for the rights of laborers internationally that are negatively affected by American business interests. No one who fights for this kind of change does so for selfish reasons, it's for all of us.
If your income is $0 it doesn't matter if prices go down by 20%. When the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" economy is designed to be sink or swim people are gonna drown when shit like this happens. It's not about "luddites are forcing us to do manual labor", it's "corporate greed is destroying our communities". If you want automation you should be fighting for things like Universal Healthcare and a UBI so people can survive periods of change.
You shouldn't just lazily lay down and accept the negatives of changes like this, you'll just create a techno-oligarchy. You should fight for change to be slow and deliberate to protect your neighbors instead of taking their floor.
I agree with you that generally people who complain about assistive devices do not consider any form of disability in their analysis. But the way that the consumer tech industry is shaped makes selling assistive devices really hard. Investors only want to invest in things that will be the next iPhone which makes actual assistive tech a really tough industry because the market is too small. So companies broaden try to broaden their reach but in order to do that they sacrifice the resilience, durability, reliability that those under-served communities really need. Most abled people can handle the 80% accuracy of a voice assistant, but for someone who needs an assistive device, that 20% failure rate can be brutal. The bar is so much higher to help those communities, and most companies wont bother.
Basically, if you want to make a medical assistive device, you kind of have to be all in on it, instead of trying to convince everyone that your device is the future of human-computer interaction (because its probably not and you'll just forget and ignore those communities)
it's not as black and white as you make it out to be. those social norms affect men's ability to endure hardship, find community, and empathize with the struggles of others. The article is not just talking about written rights, it is talking about achievement and happiness, which are emergent from a combination of written policy and social norms.
I disagree with the headline that "the left needs to talk about it" because fundamentally we do every day. The problem is that men tense up when we talk about things like "patriarchy" and "feminism", despite every piece of literature that explains that patriarchy and traditional (toxic) masculinity are actively harmful for men too. So men aren't listening to leftist talk about these issues and need to be baby-fed them using different words.
