The movie that doesn't get enough credit at predicting the future, or what is now the present, is Captain America: The Winter Soldier. DOGE, Palantir, Larry Ellison's vision of nonstop AI surveillance, and all the data-sucking tech companies swearing fealty to the orange authoritarian are bringing the plot of that movie directly into reality, and I'm always surprised that it never gets mentioned.
Ha. That's the most outlandish part of the plot. In terms of enforcement and control, Black Mirror's Metalhead episode seems the more likely vision, where the robotic dogs are comparable to drones.
I hate to break it to you, but Palantir was founded 11 years before Winter Soldier came out. It was commentary on the current world and near Sci-Fi, not a far off warning. We've been operating under surveillance capitalism for over 2 decades now. Which is probably why it doesn't get mentioned. People had already acclimated to it being the unacceptable yet inevitable future while doing their best to perpetuate it while voicing disdain.
I hate to break it to you, but I'm well aware of surveillance capitalism and when Palantir was founded. And I didn't say Winter Soldier was a "far off warning". Maybe you need to check your reading comprehension skills.
The unification of government data on citizens under DOGE and the push to use AI for surveillance under an authoritarian government bring us far closer to the plot of Winter Soldier than the bread and butter surveillance capitalism we'd already been living under. I regret that I had to spell that out for you.
> The unification of government data on citizens under DOGE and the push to use AI for surveillance under an authoritarian government bring us far closer to the plot of Winter Soldier than the bread and butter surveillance capitalism we'd already been living under.
I never disagreed with this point.
My comment was only about the point that Winter Soldier "doesn't get enough credit." My point was that setting was not just "not novel" but already common place. Meaning Winter Soldier does not stand out as a unique representation. I want to stress "not a unique representation" != "not a representation".
It sounds like you're saying the setting was already commonplace in fictional media? But you don't reference such representations in your prior comment at all.
At any rate, while themes of technological surveillance and authoritarianism certainly predate Winter Soldier, I'm not aware of anything in popular culture prior to 2014 that really matches the moment _to the degree_ Winter Soldier does. And if you simply meant the actual state of America circa 2014, sure, Palantir existed, but DOGE and an authoritarian-controlled US military institution did not. ML, yes, but not the quasi-AGI of today that's a much closer match for the computerized Arnim Zola.
When I ask 20-somethings whether they’ve seen the matrix the answer is ‘no’ usually. They have little idea what they’re working towards, but are happy to be doing it so they have something to eat.
Yet they have seen Black Mirror and the likes, which also portray the future we’re heading towards. I’d argue even better because matrix is still far off.
But also, it’s not the 20-somethings building this people making decisions are in their 40’s and 50’s.
The Matrix was inspired by the Gnostic schools of thought. The authors obviously knew loads about esoteric spirituality and the occult sciences. People have been suggesting that we are trapped in a simulacrum / matrix for over two-thousand years. I personally believe The Matrix was somewhat of a documentary. I'm curious - why do you think a concept such as presented in The Matrix, is still far off?
I think we are close to Wally or Fifteen Million Credits, maybe even almost at the Oasis (as seen by IOI). But we have made little progress in direct brain stimulation of senses. We are also extremely far from robots that can do unsupervised complex work (work that requires a modicum of improvisation).
Of course we might already be in matrix or a simulation, but if that’s the case it doesn’t really change much.
The difference is that we don't have credits the way the characters do in Brooker's universe; we have social clout in the form of upvotes, likes, hearts, retweets, streaming subs, etc. most of which are monetised in some form or are otherwise a path to a sponsorship deal.
The popularity contest this all culminates in is, in reality, much larger in scale than what was imagined in Black Mirror. The platform itself is the popularity contest.
> We are also extremely far from robots that can do unsupervised complex work
Don't worry, they'll just sell teleoperated robots[0]. I'm absolutely positive this definitively 100% won't get outsourced and result in you getting a s̶l̶a̶v̶e̶ s̶e̶r̶v̶a̶n̶t̶ low cost helper from a third world country. The dehumanization is a feature!
[0] I'm not joking, they are openly stating this...
Some would argue that most stories in Western societies are echoing the Bible. The Matrix is in many ways the story of Jesus (Morpheus is John the Baptist).
Brain/computer interface that completely simulates inputs which drive perceptions which are indistinguishable from reality. At least, that’s what is portrayed in the movie. I’m not OP but this to me seems far off.
Fair point and thank you for sharing it! It definitely does feel far off in that aspect. I suppose though, that if we are all trapped in a false reality it is impossible to know (without escaping the false reality) how advanced base reality actually is. I always interpreted the whole jacking into the Matrix thing, metaphorically, but with a literal interpretation the OP's comment makes much more sense to me. Thanks again!
Matrix was a direct rip off of ghost in the shell series which did a much better job at capturing the essence of the issue in depth (the writers almost admit to it and there are videos out there that does scene by scene comparison). Ghost in the shell is majorly influenced by Buddhism. While there are obvious overlaps between platonism (that forms the core of gnostism - salvation through knowledge to the real world, and the current world ~= suffering and not real), it wouldn't be correct to attribute gnostism as the influence behind The Matrix.
I enjoyed Silo, but I think in the real world, completely destroying the world's ecosystem and a fraction of mankind surviving in tiny isolated bunkers for generations is more fantasy than scifi...
This is interesting, but techniques like CDCL seem to only ever find any one valuation that makes a proposition true. My homegrown solver finds all valuations that make a proposition true and then can eliminate redundancies, such that `X or not X and Y` gets simplified to `X or Y`, just to mention one example (proof: truth tables are identical). Are there any other SAT solvers out there that do something like that? My own one suffers from combinatorial explosion in the simplification stage when expressions get "complex" enough. But then, the simplification is NP-complete, AFAICT.
For problems with a very large number of solutions this quickly becomes inefficient. The blocking clauses will bog down the solver hard and waste tons of memory.
A more clever approach is to emulate depth-first search using a stack of assumption literals. The solver still retains learned conflict clauses so it's more efficient than naive DPLL.
I would also add that #SAT solvers, aiming at counting the number of solutions, are often implicitly solving the ALL-SAT in a more efficient manner than what you would have with modified CDCL solvers because they use other caching and decomposability techniques. Check knowledge compiler d4 for example https://github.com/crillab/d4v2 that can build some kind of circuits representing every solution in a factorized yet tractable way.
> [Apple] promised apps with no viruses and no risks; a place where everything was curated and safe.
Apart from the viruses, nothing of the above is true any more. Apple doesn't care if you're getting screwed over by an app, and neither does Google. If they can increase their profits by taking away our freedom and/or control over "our" devices, then it WILL happen, as sure as death and taxes.
All of this only goes to show how far we've come on our journey to profit optimization. We could optimize away those pesky humans completely if it weren't for the annoying fact that they are the source of all those profits.
Oh, but humans are actually not the source of all profit! This is where phenomena like click fraud become interesting.
Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
So this is where it gets really interesting right, the platforms are filled with bots, maybe a quarter? of the monetizable action occurring on them IS NOT HUMAN but lots of it gets paid for anyway.
It's turtles all the way down. One little hunk of software, serving up bits to another little hunk of software, constitutes perhaps a quarter of what they call "social" media.
We humans aren't the minority player in all this yet, the bots are still only 25%, but how much do you want to bet that those proportions will flip in our lifetimes?
The future of that whole big swathe of the Internet is probably that it will be 75% some weird shell game between algorithms, and 25% people who have completely lost their minds by participating in it and believing it's real.
I have no idea what this all means for the fate of economics and society but I do know that in my day to day life I'm a lot happier if I just steer clear of these weird little paperclip maximizing robots. To reference the original article, getting too involved with them literally makes you go crazy and think more often about suicide.
> Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it.
Bots lower the cost per click so they should have net zero impact on overall ad spend.
Imagine if the same number of humans were clicking on ads but the numbers of bots increased tenfold. Would total ad spend increase accordingly? No, it would remain the same because budgets don't magically increase. The average value of a click would just go down.
That's the one interesting thing about cesspools like OpenAI. They could be treasure troves for sociologists and others if commercial interests didn't bar them from access.
I spent about half an hour trying to figure out why some JSON in my browser was rendering è incorrectly, despite the output code and downloaded files being seemingly perfect. I came to the conclusion that the browsers (Safari and Chrome) don't use UTF-8 as the default renderer for everything and moved on.
Another funny thing here is that they say “but not limited to” (the listed encodings), but then say “must not support other encodings” (than the listed ones).
> the encodings defined in Encoding, including, but not limited to
where "Encoding" refers to https://encoding.spec.whatwg.org (probably that
should be a link.) So it just means "the other spec defines at least these,
but maybe others too." (e.g. EUC-JP is included in Encoding but not listed
in HTML.)
This looks so strange from a mathematical perspective. A Boolean type has exactly `true` and `false` as valid instances, but this one allows every 32-bit value. Par for the course of PLs that were arbitrarily invented instead of derived from maths.
