> In some ways, this just feels like a reversion to the mean for humanity.
No it doesn't, this is ridiculous. All of you guys with your "this is just like the printing press" arguments are so intellectually lazy, think a little more about the problems of scale and speed and the way information spreads in the modern world.
Making AI-voice videos of Trump and Biden playing Minecraft is one thing, they clearly sound overly robotic and that makes it funny, but being able to perfectly replicate voices is a realistic way is a technology that has very little real-life utility and so, so many real-life downsides.
Literally what is the point of this tech? To eliminate voice actors? I don't buy for a second their supposed use-cases of accessibility or assisting people with disabilities. We're gonna enable people to fake voices realistically off of 15 seconds of for example a voicemail just so media companies can save a few bucks? This is actually madness.
The only "legitimate" use I can think of is making call center AI agents sound like people. And all the other ones involve getting enough of someone's "voiceprint" to impersonate them to get money or ruin reputations.
The fact that so many of them believe in that effective altruism nonsense shows why none of these people should ever be in control of such vast amounts of power and resources. They think they should have all the money and power because they're tech CEOs and have a maniacally unhinged confidence in their understanding of complex global societal issues / are straight-up lying because they're greedy, and the rest of us peons should just bow to their will.
Tech comapanies and CEOs are experts in the fine art of exploiting the prisoner's dilemma to quickly amass wealth at great societal expense, all within the system. I'm afraid the only way to solve this problem is a combination of educating society by making them more aware and taking tech companies down by mass public opposition / mob rule.
It's insane that this protection exists for "prominent figures" but nobody else. The same damage that can be done to prominent figures can be done to regular people, they acknowledge the damage can be done, and yet they're still rolling this out? The more OpenAI does the more it's clear they don't give a single damn about the consequences of their technology.
Murdering a random civilian and murdering a public official are also very different levels of damage, but we still outlaw and prosecute both of them. This is the same thing.
Not to mention, what constitutes a political leader? Just the upper echelon? What about local civil servants? Mayors, cops, judges? Are they gonna have a database of every public or political figure in the country? No they won't. This is absurd.
Many jurisdictions actually do have higher penalties for crimes of violence committed against public officials than ordinary citizens. Assault a USPS postal worker at a post office and you automatically have a higher sentence than assaulting a UPS worker at a UPS store.
> The other job seeker loses, your boss loses, you win
Yes, that is how our economic system works. What, are you under the illusion we still have some kind of social contract or moral responsibility toward society? If my CEO doesn't, why the hell should I?
For the record I don't think it's good, but I didn't invent the game, we're all just trying to play it as best we can.
It’s about the moral contract with yourself, but that’s your business and no one else’s. If you compare your values to those of your CEO, or anyone, then you’ve likely lost sight of that. You become fearful of being who you want to be and fixated on attachment and loss prevention.
I've never worked two jobs like that, but if an opportunity presented itself, I'd probably take it. I'll save my morals for people who actually care about me.
You can be perfectly moral in your personal life while being amoral in your professional life when it comes to matters like these. Trying to be moral in an inherently amoral environment is just opening yourself up for exploitation.
This isn't how I think of morality. Im mostly just being pedantic here but it stuck out to me in a weird way so here's an internet comment with my thought.
You can do whatever you think is right for you and I have no judgement for you either way, I just don't personally use morality to describe this kind of situation.
I think I agree with some of your underlying sentiment about the normal work and human experience being ruthless and cruel, and I understand the foolishness and danger in treating bad people like they are good by deciding to do that is your moral decision it isn't someone outside or morality in some way.
Morality is only really tested when it isn't the easy or most profitable way.
imo it's not useful to act as if the social contract is completely gone or that it will ever be completely gone and I say that as someone who surprises himself every year with how much further I have to lower my expectations on humanity. But... there will always be some kind of social contract because life without trust isn't possible, you'd have to be a machine under total surveillance with iron clad checks on every twitch of your finger otherwise.This is all just the ebb and flow of capitalist desires: One side tries to extract every bit of profit out of you and the other side tries to do the same. In that struggle hopefully both sides end up in an equilibrium that is humane and fair and no single side wins.
> nonsensical conspiracy theories that match their ideological priors
People's lived experiences in many parts of the country don't match what they're being told. If macro trends go one way but microtrends all over the country go the other way, then the macrotrend analysis is functionally meaningless for millions of people. That's not a conspiracy theory, and hand-waving so many people's lived experiences away because it doesn't match YOUR ideological prior is not taking the discussion seriously and fundamentally and possibly wilfully misunderstanding the issue. Insisting that people everywhere saying life is harder than it was pre-pandemic or 10 years ago or whatever are wrong "because the charts say so" is silly.
I think people get too hung up on the aggregate numbers which can hide large populations experiencing things differently. Wage growth may have been higher than inflation for some quintiles overall, but for literally millions of people in those quintiles who didn’t job hop and got typical raises or got laid off or whatever, the average experience wasn’t their experience. And when prices are obviously going up, most people will feel like they are falling behind even if they objectively are treading water.
The official inflation numbers have shown high inflation over the past few years. If you feel like prices have gone up a lot the CPI does not contradict your lived experience in any way.
Meaningless when housing costs have soared. They've made wage gains because it's literally not worth it to work for $8/hr anymore and companies were unable to find workers.
Wages for the lowest quintile have gone up in real terms, meaning adjusted for inflation (including shelter costs). None of your economic beliefs are grounded reality, you just make up beliefs that flatter your politics and downvote everyone who disagrees with you.
It would be good to get real numbers, the problem is inflation does not hit everyone equally; for example my house is paid off, the housing components do not affect me at all. So if they are growing faster than the rest of the basket it does not reflect in my life.
So real gains may or may not exist without looking at the individual or individual cohort you are talking about.
Indeed. Even if the IRS was ‘gotten rid of’ you will still need some sort of agency to intake taxes. How does America have a military, or roads, or public education sans taxes?
And yet Craig Newmark is a billionaire and the owners of Reddit aren't. $900 million in revenue means nothing if you jettison it into the stratosphere.
The people who cultivate Reddit communities are not the owners of Reddit, or the paid engineers of Reddit. Reddit isn't good because of Steve, or any of its leaders, the good and bad parts alike are 100% because of its users and unpaid moderators. Reddit is a tool, and the users have used the tool to create a massive site that contains a gigantic variety of subcultures, including ones that hate each other.
Any "innovations" Reddit has made in the past decade have been making the UI worse and borderline unusable in poor attempts to monetize the site. It offers video hosting that it does poorly, an "improved UI" that it does poorly, chat that it does poorly, some nebulous web3 things that it also did poorly, and now is going to pretend that using Reddit as a training set won't result in a very unskilled, and exceedingly confident of its own correctness, chatbot. Spez has no vision for Reddit, and clearly neither does Paul. The way to make Reddit great is to empower the communities and moderators, and instead Reddit has done the opposite, because - let's be real here - Steve Huffman doesn't want to create a cool website or a useful tool, he wants to IPO and become a billionaire and ride off into the sunset.
No it doesn't, this is ridiculous. All of you guys with your "this is just like the printing press" arguments are so intellectually lazy, think a little more about the problems of scale and speed and the way information spreads in the modern world.