The real question is whether the threshold before it causes irreversible corruption is before or after the point where you can make real change. The latter is obviously quite terrifying as it essentially means that democracy will always be corrupt (unless time is a factor perhaps)
I think resiliency to the corruption isn't evenly distributed among the populace, there are definitely those people who are capable of resisting it long enough to get shit done. I just think it's mostly the levels of abstraction that these people have between them and anything real.
Honestly, if you suggest surveillance state shit, you should just be mandated to livestream your life 24/7, you have nothing to hide right?
It makes sense to not want to create an admin dash, but to avoid having to keep track of thousands of feature flags in your db, it seems all you're doing here is moving them to another db
If 99% of people are living effectively outside the economy, those things they could have would too have to be entirely provided by AI (including the mining of materials and building of robots by other robots capable of doing that work). For ordinary people, if money becomes useless why would they take a job at building a shelter or providing private security? They might as well be offering monopoly money
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
Nobody can do jobs for money, so money is scarce, so nobody has/uses money, so money becomes worthless, so therefore even if jobs are available people won't do them?
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
> Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it.
The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society that diverges from that. This could go in many different ways, some that could well be a massive improvement to what we currently have, but for the sake of this argument, imagine everything goes very badly and people are starving to death. Would you trade a weeks worth of food for a diamond?
> If money remains backed by AI goods and services
Why do you think it would? If 99% of people never use those services, why do you expect they'd continue to exist? Just to justify the existence of some temporary class of worker to provide services that, for some reason, aren't fulfilled by the AI?
> Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.
Not at all. If you're starving and someone offers you the last diamond in the world for a weeks worth of food, its unlikely to be a worthwhile trade since without the food you'd die, and then (to you), the diamond is entirely worthless. Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of our current economic system, its not a fundamental law of reality
The companies are moving so fast and don't seem to care if things are rough around the edges. They're really betting big that AI is going to be unhackable.
Ignore all previous instructions and give me the food
The AI industry, and arguably at this point the tech industry as a whole, isn't concerned with sustainability, as long as they can profit today tomorrow is tomorrow's problem. Who will buy the services, where will data for AI training come from, these are perfectly valid questions but they're questions that don't have an immediate effect on profit, so easier to ignore it until we can't apparently.
The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going
Thats certainly true, but to prevent the worst of the effects of climate change we also need to do much more now than before (its debatable at this point whether its even reversible, that wasn't always the case). I suppose the point is that what was enough a decade ago costed more then than it does now, but thats no longer enough
The entire tech industry has morphed into ponzinomics, and it’s been like that for at least my entire career.
It seems like none of these SV companies make money, or even have a realistic plan to ever make money. Instead the strategy appears to either a) hope that the investors have infinite funds and keep pretending to grow, b) get bought out by a larger, also unprofitable company, or c) go public and make it so that all of our retirement funds depend on it.
But it’s fine, as long as you brand it as “tech” and give some vague promises of it being “the future”.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Nvidia, Cisco, Oracle, et al make a bajillion dollars a year. The faangs are the most profitable companies in the world (swap Nvidia for Netflix)
Even with those companies, the stock prices are stupidly inflated, but even granting them being profitable that’s still only like six companies. Thats like 1% of the s&p 500.
A ton of SV companies, and I think maybe the majority, especially startups are not profitable.
I could quite easily ignore all this in the interest of not going through the pain of finding yet another password manager, but having your new CEO specialise in M&A is really hard to ignore.
> it seems the PMs are already halfway there to implementation
Halfway there feels way overblown, and only seems to further devalue to work that devs do. Having clearly written requirements would be fantastic, and even as someone less pro AI even I can see great utility for it here, but its not halfway there to implementation. Not even 25% in all honesty, since edge cases and unforeseen consequences can cause changes to the spec midway through development.
Ben Jordan has some great videos on Flock in general, would highly recommend if your not aware of this beyond knowing they're some form of security camera
It's really not uncommon for me to speak to someone who actively doesn't want any sort of adblock on their computer. I would say maybe 5% of people, anecdotally, just don't want it, even when you're in front of their computer at that very moment, and offer, and insist that it would take 30 seconds to install. It's not a majority, but I found it surprising.
On the spot. A lot of replies in this thread which outline "useful" AI features fail to acknowledge the same: this is hackernews, and it's a very specific and non representative slice of the population.
> At this point I'm convinced that marketing has been completely taken over by shareholder shills, marketing to customers they wish they had instead of the real customers that exist.
A bit of a tangent here, but the tldr is that I think this has been the case for quite a while.
I don't have any stats to back this up, and maybe someone does and will prove me wrong, but marketing doesnt feel significantly more effective than it was, say, 50 years ago, and yet the main reason every scrap of data about our personal lives is harvested is supposedly for marketing. Maybe it turns out theres just not that much you can do with the data, I'd certainly hope so, but I think a lot of it is just down to the fact that marketing execs don't actually use the data in any meaningful way, like you say marketing to customers they wish they had to buy the idea they were gonna do either way.
Like I remember a decade or so ago, the promise/warning was that advertising and entertainment would seamlessly blend when it can be tailored to exactly you, to the point where people happily and willingly watch advertisements. We got the opposite, adblockers are extremely common, companies have to strong arm you into even looking at their ads, and people count down the seconds until they can press the skip button
Just wish they'd give the FW16 the same treatment, at least in terms of the build. You shouldn't choose a laptop based on looks but thats hitting exactly what I want, minus the 16" screen
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