The human faces of the machine are our only hope. The alternative is, in the short term, a machine face of the machine, whom you can't argue with and who will summarily deny your benefits with no chance of appeal. In the long term, the alternative is no machine at all.
The purpose of this machine is, ultimately, to give people government benefits. The people who hate that the government gives out benefits at all, when in power, do everything they can to make the machine more hostile and less functional. They then take anecdotes like these as evidence that the machine should be smaller and do less.
Karen is not your enemy, the policy makers who want to give Karen less agency (and who make rules like "you can't accept emails") are your enemies. They want you to hate Karen and Karen to hate you. Ultimately they want to fire Karen and reduce government disbursements to zero. They are reading this thread with glee.
See, here's the thing. All the planning and whatnot for the human facing part of the org was done years in advance, and nobody factors/designs in bottom-up change from the consumers of the process. If you aren't willing to comply, you are written off as not the target demographic. Physical production/bureaucracy/software development, it's all the same shit. Just different labels, and by the time the process bumps into you, it's already ossified. Literally the only way to change things is targeting actual executives. They are the only ones with the authority to change things, and they do everything possible to hide themselves/insulate themselves from having to do it. Even then though, it may be for naught. Governmental bureaucrats are often limited by statute/politics/resources. The lack of care we experience on a day to day basis is the system working as designed. Should it be designed that way? Probably not. But until we can figure out a better way to do things, or we stop all being asshats to one another, this is what we have to work with.
The whole reason this is a story is that the government won't just refuse to contract, it will put the equivalent of soft sanctions on the company because Anthropic refuses to contract.
The "disparate impact" test applies mainly in civil rights act litigation, and it's extremely hard to make a case under that theory. It's a three-part test, and showing that a particular policy has a disparate impact on one race is just the first hurdle.
You also have to prove that the party acted with malice: either the policy exists for explicitly racist reasons, or the race-neutral justification is pretextual. If you can do that, you _also_ have to prove that there is a less-discriminatory alternative policy that achieves the same goal.
It is definitely not de facto illegal to have a racially lopsided student body -- the school might be asked to justify the specific policy or practice that led to that outcome on race-neutral grounds, but saying "GPA and test scores" would be more than enough.
There is no disparate impact language in the civil rights title VI itself, but the language does appear in the enforcement regulatory frameworks issued by the federal agencies, including the department of education.
Title VI gives agencies authority to enforce Title VI, and many of those agencies added in disparate impact language into their own enforcement language (I think under the Obama administration, but I might be wrong about that).
I love this article because I think this is the conversation we should be having. Lots of advertising is harmful, some of it is useful on balance, and some of it is too hard to ban without infringing on other desirable speech. But I do think we should be critically thinking about all advertising and outlawing certain flavors of it.
Billboards let landlords skim extra money by making the public space significantly more hostile to everyone else. Fuck em.
> His great transgression, according to Berlin, was to say aloud what everyone knows but no one will admit: multiple ideals cannot be simultaneously attained. We can’t have everything good all at once.
Everyone will admit this. No one honestly believes all virtues are equally and simultaneously attainable. At any given time, certain things must be prioritized.
But some of us believe that it's not a zero-sum game; that "human nature" is not set in stone, and that it is a worthy project to try and engineer conditions which allow more of humanity's virtues to flourish. Machiavelli would seem to dismiss the possibility that a society can reorient itself towards empathy, charity, and equality without imploding. He also seems to believe that it's correct to trade individual prosperity for state power and glory.
I… don’t think so? Machiavelli was challenging the zero-sum 14-1500s Catholic Christian thinking that the world was set in stone by God and that providence was beyond humanity’s control. This is what he means by encouraging “ambition” among elites - a conscious act to produce the betterment of the state and those within it. Indeed he hoped virtues would flourish in such an environment - but was not optimistic about the odds.
> Machiavelli would seem to dismiss the possibility that a society can reorient itself towards empathy, charity, and equality without imploding.
He’d dismiss a state founded on ideals, yes, but he’s in favor of human progress, even if he’s pessimistic about what that yields. Remember in his era to be ambitious and want to change things was to go against God.
It’s easy to dislike Machiavelli as he’s cynical and amoral but he’s a modern thinker in many ways.
> Machiavelli would seem to dismiss the possibility that a society can reorient itself towards empathy, charity, and equality without imploding.
Pretty much accurate. Machiavelli viewed the 'average person' as capricious and most rulers as corrupt. He viewed the mix of the two as a recipe for societal decay that could only be controlled by rulers of benevolent intent but willing to act without virtue to prevent decay and disorder. In Discourses, Machiavelli reveals his hope that virtue might be pervasive in a republic, but he did not view human nature as necessarily aligned with that goal.
The author is just going for a roundabout version of "[unspecified group] are a bunch of virtue-signaling hypocrites", and giving the reader some latitude to fill in the unspecified group.
But how can it be anything other than a zero-sum game? We are biomechanical units with a limited lifespan. We rent out this lifespan to the highest bidder we can access. And then we die.
And if one of the bio robots happens to be in a different position in the hierarchy (a founder maybe) - their task is to arrange the other biorobots just so and extract maximum output from them before they expire.
Sure, one can work to maximize the extraction and perhaps that's progress in someone's view. But it seems more geared towards ignoring the basic biology of the units involved and pushing them as hard as possible. They are a renewable resource after all, so churning through them faster means more efficiency.
In other words, anyone claiming that life is not a zero-sum game better be ready to demonstrate how immortality is possible. Otherwise it's bovine excrement.
> But how can it be anything other than a zero-sum game? We are biomechanical units with a limited lifespan. We rent out this lifespan to the highest bidder we can access. And then we die.
Do you recall the spontaneous (yet short lived) concern everyone (well, right thinking people at least) had for the well-being of their fellow human (well, fellow countrymen at least) during the COVID phenomenon?
It seems to me that people can be nice to each other, provided you tell them an adequately persuasive story.
No, I don't recall that. I recall a lot of flame wars and virtue signaling about mask wearing. I recall a lot of denial of science because of ideology and fear. And a lot of name calling.
I think it's that both were websites that catapulted you into truly random, non-targeted interactions -- Omegle with a random person, StumbleUpon with a random site.
Please re-read your parent. Same concept here. If you make it that comfortable, then why work? Keep in mind that there will always be people who want things the programs won't provide that they're literally willing to kill for - drugs, the newest iPhone, in-style basketball shoes, etc.
Now, I do agree in a parallel way, but with a different solution. If we fix structural problems preventing people from being, or having hope of being, productive members of society, than that can prevent some crime.
the distinction is real in the model of the turing machine, and it's close to real in many of the machines and programs we've built so far. It's not real in nature, in brains. Code is data and vice versa. A memory is a program that runs and reinforces itself.
Before we started restricting execution to areas of memory designated as code regions for security reasons, self-modifying code was a technique occasionally used to reduce memory footprint or optimize hot loops. IIRC early MS-DOS used that trick, implemented by Gates himself.
The purpose of this machine is, ultimately, to give people government benefits. The people who hate that the government gives out benefits at all, when in power, do everything they can to make the machine more hostile and less functional. They then take anecdotes like these as evidence that the machine should be smaller and do less.
Karen is not your enemy, the policy makers who want to give Karen less agency (and who make rules like "you can't accept emails") are your enemies. They want you to hate Karen and Karen to hate you. Ultimately they want to fire Karen and reduce government disbursements to zero. They are reading this thread with glee.
See, e.g., the case studies in https://virginia-eubanks.com/automating-inequality/.
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