Katie J. Wells quote from near the end of the interview:
...when you have very very low expectations for public government, Silicon Valley looks like an OK alternative... the technology in your pocket somehow looks more useful.
This says so much about citizenship and the relationship between democracy, autocracy, and technology.
In truth, nate relied heavily on teams of human workers—primarily located overseas—to manually process transactions in secret, mimicking what users believed was being done by automation
Yet another example of "AI" being neither artificial nor intelligent.
Authoritarianism in all its forms depends on people acting against their own interests, in this case seeing the abdication of agency and giving up of rights as something positive, as almost a relief. Let the leader decide for you! Let the leader, who is an agent of divine providence, decide your destiny! Getting people to believe this is one of the main functions of personality cults that depict the leader as infallible.
Very similar to how Big Tech provides us with convenience while robbing us of our agencies.
This weakness became impossible to ignore earlier this month, when Anita Natasha Akida (popularly called Tasha), a Nigerian reality TV star, called out Grok. People had been prompting the bot to generate edited versions of her photos, and Grok responded with humiliating and inappropriate images. Grok replied and apologized to her. It promised never to edit her images again. Minutes later, it broke that promise and generated another image mocking her.
Because a LLM doesn't have any intelligence/cognitive ability or agency to "apologize", let alone "remember" it.
In particular, the manufacturing of semiconductors, which underpin advanced AI hardware, is an extremely resource and energy-intensive process.
E.g. Taiwan is drying up and experiencing brownouts, if only there's more international support.
Meanwhile, nuclear energy is being touted as a solution, but it is largely a dangerous distraction. The long timelines of Small Modular Reactors and safety risks of restarting decommissioned nuclear plants, as exemplified by Microsoft’s controversial plan to reopen the Three Mile Island site, further undermine the credibility of this approach. Without addressing the escalating energy demands of AI and their contribution to the climate crisis, the promise of AI as a “climate solution” is pure fiction.
Good point. At the same time, is there any way for nuclear energy to be part of the solution? I am genuinely torn on this.
Governments must prohibit planned obsolescence and champion the right to repair. Current hardware business models encourage devices, including servers needed for AI, to break prematurely in a practice called planned obsolescence. Industry and policymakers should incentivise circularity and longevity to extend the life of existing hardware. Furthermore, the right to repair and freely modify technology products should be strengthened.
Aligns with motivations for open source tech.
They represent the bare minimum required to mitigate the ongoing harm to our economies, societies, and shared planet.
I.e. a floor or the first step, instead of the end and the only step.
misled investors by exploiting the promise and allure of AI technology to build a false narrative about innovation that never existed. This type of deception not only victimizes innocent investors
The crime was misleading investors, not anyone else, which is very telling. The hype around "AI" - and actually hiring remote workers to do the job - and misleading customers/users doesn't matter.
Also discussed here: https://old.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/1jygobw/ceo_of_ai_shopping_app_faces_40_years_for_using/
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. George Bernard Shaw never said these words, but Charles F. Brannan did.
Great quote about the non-scarcity of ideas. Compare to Thomas Jefferson's quote about candles.
In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians? https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers: https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
James Boyle's quote about "ecology" in bringing about a movement.
As the introduction has already shown, in our current system this makes total sense: Because you need to become the one company for a thing. The central social media platform, the shopping platform, the whatever. Even startups adopt the practices and methods of bigger cooperation – because that’s their aspiration: Becoming the next Goomazonbook.
I like the term "Goomazonbook".
Some of you might have heard the phrase “corporations don’t want to make money, they want to make all the money” (I think I heard it first from James Stephanie Sterling talking about video game publishers).
Useful quote "corporations don’t want to make money, they want to make all the money".
A gyrotron uses high-power, linear-beam vacuum tubes to generate millimeter-length electromagnetic waves. Invented by Soviet scientists in the 1960s, gyrotrons are used in nuclear fusion research experiments to heat and control plasma. Quaise has raised $95 million from investors, including Japan’s Mitsubishi, to develop technology that would enable it to quickly and efficiently drill up to 20 km deep, closer to the Earth’s core than ever before
Fusion power tech adapted to ease geothermal power. IMO a good example of remixing knowledge from one domain to another. And, for example, if you think fusion isn't worth pursuing, then we might not get this cross-cutting adaptation that's valuable for advancing renewable energy.
Oh, compliance moats are definitely real – think of the calls for AI companies to license their training data. AI companies can easily do this – they'll just buy training data from giant media companies – the very same companies that hope to use models to replace creative workers with algorithms. Create a new copyright over training data won't eliminate AI – it'll just confine AI to the largest, best capitalized companies, who will gladly provide tools to corporations hoping to fire their workforces: https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids
Concentration of power.