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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • You’re making an indie movie on your iPhone with friends. You sell one ticket. You now owe: Apple, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s estate (inventor of the camera), every cinematographer who first devised the type of shots you’re using, the writers since the beginning of time that created the types of story elements in the script, the mathematicians and scientists that developed lense technology, the car manufacturers that aided your ability to transport you to the set, the guy who’s YouTube tutorial you watched to figure out lighting, etc, etc, etc.

    Your black and white framing appears to provide a clear ethical framework until you dig a millimeter into it. The reality is that society only exists because of the work that all of the individuals within it produce. Things like copyright are an adapter to our capitalistic economy to ensure people’s work that can be copied, are protected enough that they have the opportunity to make money off of it. It exists so somebody else can’t immediately turn around and sell the same book someone else wrote, or just change a few words and do as such. This protection was meant to last 15 to 20 years. Then enter the public domain for anyone to copy and rewrite as they please.

    Current copyright is an utter bastardization of its intended use. Massive corporations are trying to act like they’re fighting for the little guy to own their IP forever. But they buy up all that IP for pennies compared to how they turn around and commoditize it. Then they own all of what society produces in perpetuity. They can sit on their dragon hoards and laugh as they gobble up any new creation that strays too close. And people wonder why everything is a sequel of a sequel of a sequel owned by massive corporations.







  • Totally get where you’re coming from. Corporate greed seems like the boogie man behind capitalism. It’s easy to understand: make line go up. But I’m afraid the dark parts of capitalism are spookier than that. They don’t just want money. If that were the case they’d sell all those expensive corporate offices and let people be more productive at home.

    They want people to lord over, they want the power to surveil them. To make them do team building exercises. They call themselves a family. They take team pictures with the CEO smiling in front. People think of them as heartless machines. But machines would try and make people happy, that’s when they work the best. No, they’re happy to have offices full of people twiddling their thumbs, they’re narcissists. Their whole incentive to climb the ladder is to be standing on someone else’s head.

    Who are you king of, if there’s only robots around you?


  • I think it’s important to consider these elements and try to mitigate them as we move forward. But they’ll never be completely fixed.

    If anything has the power to collapse capitalism, it’s AI automation. Capitalism is all about keeping people working for the benefit of those above with the threat of not getting what you need to survive. That threat is predicated by there not being enough to go around.

    Once we’re able to make an enormous surplus without the labor of the common man; the basis of capitalism begins to crumble. I fear that if we give corporations time, they’ll try and make the world run on AI WITHOUT anyone losing jobs. That terrifies me more, because people will accept the status quo but lose the only power they ever had in capitalism: The combined value of their labor. A strike doesn’t work so well if your whole job is pushing a button to make AI do it.

    I think the beginning of AI will be painful for the reasons we both have outlined. But I believe that’s growing pains towards a better future. Giving corps time to boil the frog won’t be good. Keeping the corps fighting each other to be the first by pushing this tech forward is the quickest way for them to create their own obsolescence.


  • Yeah, because it’s good stuff to point out and think on… But ultimately inconsequential as the previous comment points out. The world is getting AI eventually, the question is do we want to be the first ones with the keys?

    All the same arguments could have been made about the internet. Inb4 someone makes the incredibly likewarm take that the internet was a mistake. It was inevitable, if we had “pumped-the-brakes” on it we wouldn’t have found some clean way to implement the internet where no one gets hurt. Someone who wasn’t concerned about ethics would have got there first to set the standard.

    Actually a better analogy for AI might be the nuclear bomb. If we slow down someone else will get their first. Silicone Valley doesn’t have the best track record with ethics. But call me crazy, I’d rather them figure it out before China or Russia. Because they sure as shit ain’t using their brakes.


  • It’s still ideas the group agrees with. The idea is: that we all disagree with this idea. It’s subtle, until you look at the same story on CNN vs Fox. Two bubbles discussing the same issue with two VERY different emotional valences.

    To put it another way: the discussion of these ideas that are oppositional to the community, is not with the intention of seriously considering them. It’s with the intention of dismissing them in a group act of catharsis. It maintains the bubble and safely dispatches an idea that threatened to burst it.


  • We also do it to ourselves. Everyone has someone in their life they’d rather mute. But they’re forced to coexist with them. Online is so appealing because you can find communities of like minded individuals. Then forget all about those other opinions you don’t like.

    You grow in this bubble as they grow in theirs. By the next time you’re forced to interact, you feel so alien and unpleasant to one another it’s confusing and frightening. Corporations are right there to sell you on a story about how the other side are demons destroying the world. We gobble it up.








  • Yeah Tesla is down to 20% because of the massive EV boom THEY started. Saying Starlink is one of the ISP monopolies people can choose from, is an oxymoronic statement. Agreed about SpaceX. Pay your amazing eng team!

    I’m not saying Elon is a great leader. But the odds 3 things he owns happened to take off isn’t likely a total coincidence. Maybe he’s just better than average at predictions. But to act like it isn’t what it is because you don’t like the guy, kinda undercuts legitimate criticism.