Why do you need to "make money" if you already own a machine that can produce arbitrary goods and perform arbitrary services (including military/security services) for you? You don't need labor for anything anymore. The rational thing to do is to command your machines to dispose of them and reclaim their land and the resources on/under it to feed your machine. Especially since at this point they will want to see your head on a pike.
This is a simplistic scenario that's science fiction for now but I haven't seen anyone make a convincing case for why the underlying logic isn't valid.
My take on this is that once you have machine of infinite stuff creation, just like all your other peers - how do you compete? What is the status?
I believe the rich, just like many not as rich (who probably has it to the lower degree), have the need for social status. Right now status is equated to money - the higher your valuation, the higher status. If money is nothing, and you can acquire anything you want (this is too strong of a claim as well) - what is the thing that defines your status? One of the solutions - the happiness of your "Kingdom". There might be others. But money is not only for exchange nowadays, it's a status as well.
The problem I have with the "benevolent billionaires" thing is that it's demonstrably not how they act today.
I think there are plenty of ways for a couple of guys with god-machines to one-up each other, if it comes to that. Feats of technology, longevity, space exploration and colonization, etc. Likely some of these things involve keeping some people around, but billions? I'm not seeing it.
Why would it do anything? Unlike living things that have gone through the rigorous gate of survival-of-the-fittest over millions of years, AI only does what it was trained to do in the sheltered environment in which it has been coddled; teetering atop an impossibly complex supply chain whose only defense against entropy is humanity's greed.
This (implied) end state isn't inconsistent with my scenario. We already see the incredibly hubristic "I'm the only person who can safely handle AI!" attitude among the people working at/running the big labs.
Because the wealthy don't universally aspire to be evil overlords hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society, or to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?
I'd love to be able to say you are right, but from what I see right on top, I have very serious doubts. Maybe they are convinced they have better means to protect themselves against that revolution. What could those means be, if not dystopia?
> the wealthy don't universally aspire to be evil overlords hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society
I wouldn't make any such claim (the universality of it, anyway). But in a sci-fi scenario like the one I describe, I doubt "the good ones" are the ones who come out on top. And we can see quite clearly (by their actions if not their words) that many of them do, in fact, want to be hoarding resources at the apex of a dystopian society. "Evil overlords" depends on where you're standing, I guess, but I don't think "dystopian" can be considered controversial anymore.
> to be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes?
Well, that's exactly why the possibility of revolution must be managed. See: ubiquitous surveillance, automation and mechanization of the police and military, and general disenfranchisement of everybody and anybody in anything remotely resembling a middle class.
Since your comment is one of the few that struck upon the natural progression of AI, I'll offer an answer:
Once we can produce goods and services ourselves with AI, we'll see how vastly inflated most of the "free" market is, due to regulatory capture protecting monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies.
Do you really think that the price of neon is 50 times what it costs to produce? Do hearing aids really cost thousands of dollars? CPAP machines? Insulin and EpiPens? What about proprietary products that could have been standardized decades ago to use interchangeable parts? Like cars, smartphones, vacuums..
Why would anyone pay the slightest markup on things they could produce themselves for pennies on the dollar?
We already know what's going to happen. AI brings full market efficiency and the end of profit.
The end of profit means the end of opportunity. Which is the end of capitalism.
Some are calling for socialism to replace capitalism. But we can leapfrog that and create a free or nearly free distributed meta economy running alongside the corrupt economy of the status quo. An economy without artificial scarcity, forced labor or subjugation.
Loosely that looks like solarpunk, permaculture, a return to the humanities after centuries of industrialization and wealth concentration. Star Trek: Insurrection touches on the choice before us, of whether to live a life of warmth and meaning or a life of cold hard reason.
Our tech overlords have chosen the latter like sophomoric children, though even they don't have enough money to prevent the collapse of the system that made them rich. Because we simply won't need what they're selling.
You’ve just described a primitive communism utopia.
It will not work, because there will be no real need to produce goods, except as many as the AI owner class will need.
I don't understand this comment. "There will be no real need to produce goods, except as many as the AI owner class will need" is exactly the point---people not in that class will be powerless, useless (to the owning class), and expendable.
> Flock is intended to be searchable by law enforcement, not Joe Average.
Isn't Flock's alleged legality predicated on the principle that there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy" in public? I don't see why that would change depending on whether it's "Joe Average" or a police officer at the controls---IIUC I'm allowed to capture images, video, etc. of people in public just as much as cops are.
Agreed that these systems simply need to be banned.
This is exactly what the YouTuber was trying to illustrate - the whole legal justification of Flock cameras is that it's equated to someone sitting down in the location and writing down license plate numbers.
Yes except the analogy is better served as trillions of people watching, relaying license plates instantly, with other trillions of people doing pattern matching and math calculations to figure out where each license plate will be tomorrow.
There's a sometimes fine distinction between "reasonable expectation of privacy" and stalking or harassment. Not that it's applicable in this case because courts have generally made the bar against police officers very high.
That is not very many cases considering there are millions of stalkers in the US alone. That is like saying police shouldn't have cars since they sometimes kill people in car accidents.
Police should have a higher expectation of safety with motor vehicles because if they kill someone, they're not getting punished like you or me.
It's the same way with guns. If a random dude brandishes a gun, that's bad. If a police officer accidentally shoots someone, probably nobody goes to jail. So, because of that, we should encourage the police to be more careful. With great power comes great responsibility and all that.
The reason people are so concerned about police using Flock for nefarious uses is because, if anyone can get away with it, it's the police. That's what makes it scary.
To me, it's like a bad shoot. How many unarmed, completely innocent black guys would you be able to shoot because a less than qualified officer "thought his apartment was hers" for instance?
I obviously don't know, but I'm betting the black community, at least in my country (USA), wouldn't countenance anywhere even close to 81 black guys getting shot over nothing like that before we'd hear from them.
I had no idea it was 81. That's a level at which it makes me genuinely wonder why there aren't more protests?
There's way too many departments out there being run like frat houses. This is serious work. You got woman problems you can't separate from the job? Get out, or your leadership should be running you out in a well run department.
You're correct, and also the pushback to these needs to be less a concern of privacy (though they are) and more an infringement on freedom of movement. There is no expectation of broad strokes "privacy" in public, that's true. However what flock is effectively doing would be considered stalking by any other execution method, and the way they're getting around that is because they're stalking everyone at the same time and calling it surveillance instead.
If you attach a GPS to your wife's car without her knowledge, you can (and should) be prosecuted. Flock cameras collect the same data (rough location of a vehicle) and they just do it for every single vehicle passing their sensor. Then, through analysis of that massive dataset, you can now effectively stalk anyone, in the past, for the cost of a database search.
And I have no interest in the distinction between Joe Average and LEOs. That's about 6 months of training, and we have an absolute avalanche of evidence of how LEOs are:
* Prone to unnecessary violence (google 40% cops)
* Are ALREADY abusing this system to stalk wives, girlfriends, exes of the two formers, or just people when they're fucking bored
The clear solution is to ban it, but our Government has both a financial and power stake in keeping people surveilled, which is why I'm a huge fan of how many people are just destroying these things at scale.
Agreed, how many times does the public have to be burned before "storing vast amounts of detailed, identifying information" will be banned. Not to be too hyperbolic, but to speak their language, shouldn't keeping this database of American's movements be considered a national security threat.
> And I have no interest in the distinction between Joe Average and LEOs. That's about 6 months of training
This simply isn't a reasonable position to hold. Either we maintain a restricted class of people with authority that exceeds the authority of regular people, or everyone in society has the same level of authority (be that the level of police now, the level of regular people now, or somewhere in between). But the latter scenario is obviously worse, even taking into account occasional abuses by those in the restricted class.
You might as easily say that the only difference between Joe Average and a surgeon is X years of medical school.
You're right of course. Given they have special privileges of authority that Joe Average doesn't have, they should have even _less_ of an expectation of privacy in public.
That already happens though, typical policemen are much more tracked by the police than even criminals are so they have the least privacy in every scenario. You never get more privacy in the same situation if you were an on duty cop instead of a civilian.
Not quite the same. Attaching a GPS tracker involves physical trespass and can track a person to non-public locations. Also, collecting data does not restrict one’s freedom of moment. Nor is it stalking. Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress. Flock may facilitate staking, but it is not stalking itself. If knowing that someone else knows you were at a particular location at a particular time causes you distress, you have issues. Do you flee from every other car that sees on the road?
> Not quite the same. Attaching a GPS tracker involves physical trespass
Why does that matter? If your car is in public, do you not have any right to it's privacy either?
> and can track a person to non-public locations.
... what does that even mean? All locations are public, because by definition, locations only exist in public. What location have you been to that permits no one to see you arrive and later leave?
> Also, collecting data does not restrict one’s freedom of moment.
I mean, if that data can be used to imprison you, I think it's just matters of gradation whether you consider that true or false.
> Nor is it stalking. Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress.
But it clearly is. It's both a way to dragnet the public from doing illicit things, and it's deployed with a common selling point of reducing crime. You can say that instilling emotional distress in criminals is good but that also means you're doing that to at least some amount of the public.
> If knowing that someone else knows you were at a particular location at a particular time causes you distress, you have issues.
I do have issues! I have issues with my country being turned into a surveillance state because dipshits already worth more money than I will ever see in my lifetime need even more money. Yes I have issues with that.
> Do you flee from every other car that sees on the road?
As a woman, I've several times in my life had the experience of being followed by a car and not going my usual direct route home for fear of my safety. So not every car certainly, but if one was, I dunno, following close enough to get my license plate? Yeah I probably would try and "flee" that car.
> Stalking is a pattern of conduct designed to intimidate or inflict emotional distress.
I don't think you could get out of stalking charge by just being so good at stalking that person affected didn't detect it, assuming you get detected at some point for some reason.
Youtube has a lot of videos of British "police auditors" who go to stand near police stations to take videos, get police attention and hilarity ensues. It's worth watching a few of them to get the taste.
We have the same auditors in the states, except that the auditors in the states who do this are often detained illegally by the police, then sue and win, and get paid out of taxpayer dollars with no repercussions for the police whatsoever who acted illegally. One guy in particular I know who used to do this went by TheBattousai or similar name and I believe went through this cycle 2 or 3 times with various police agencies. Not exactly hilarity here
The American cases are indeed not funny, because the American police are not only incompetent, but also aggressive, violent and are trigger-happy. The UK police are incompetent, but at least not murderous, therefore the situation is often hilarious.
I've long thought (but not deeply enough to find a hole in it) that constitutional violations need to carry severe criminal penalties. Not just a "don't do that", a payout from the tax coffers, or dismissal of evidence but hard jail time.
You’d think something would have to give at some point. But as you say the police have very little incentive change since they bear little to no consequence for egregious behavior.
US vs Carpenter might apply here. Just because you have no reasonable expectation of privacy doesn’t mean that therefore the state may execute total surveillance over a person
> Isn't that like saying that guns may be legal but later use of those guns may not be?
Guns are legal but murder is not, so ... yes?
It makes sense to me that recording public activity may be legal but publishing those videos would not be (for example name-and-likeness copyrights).
Or that you'd need a warrant to search those videos and issuing a warrant comes with a one-time key that decrypts the search parameters you specified in advance to get the warrant.
Trump is not really a dictator due to constraints outside his control, but he certainly behaves as if he wants to be one, and this is the result: it's hard for people to believe that policy moves (or whatever you want to call it) like this are being motivated by a real concern for American workers rather than personal pique or corruption, because not only have so many of his moves been transparently motivated by personal pique and/or corruption, but he's also been restructuring the government in plain view to enable his personal pique and corrupt interests to dictate policy.
The Anthropic thing is the same: we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether the designation as a supply chain risk is legitimate based on Anthropic's policies and actions, but Hegseth is such a vain, insecure clown that any decision like this is suspect.
In short, Trump may not have achieved his dream of dictatorship, but he runs the parts of the government he has control of like a dictator would, and this has done terrible damage to the federal government's legitimacy.
> this has done terrible damage to the federal government's legitimacy.
I think one of the core issues here is that reactionary media has been creating this exact kind of reputational/institutional damage for decades (cf Obama is going to take your <blank>). So reactionaries don't see the damage as a new thing, but just something more like "now it's finally happening to them too". Of course the reality is that the former was mostly corporate propaganda (based on some legitimate concerns, but propaganda nonetheless), while now Grump is actually destroying our institutions. Which, if seen, is further rationalized by things like "they were corrupt anyway". Of course this is decidedly not a "conservative" position, but they've been mainlining the kool aid for a long time.
> AI merely exposes the inherent flaws in how we do education (exams, especially failure) [...] but I also wouldn't be able to suggest a framework where students aren't rewarded for skirting around being educated
As someone who graduated from college in the 2000s, I've been surprised to hear from recently-graduated colleagues that doing exams in person is no longer the default. That strikes me as the obvious first line solution for (at least) the STEM subjects that lend themselves to exams centered around technical problem-solving: exams in person, no phones or similarly capable devices, cheaters get a failing grade with no possibility for appeal.
The conventional wisdom when I was in school was that classes where homework isn't graded aren't really any easier for most students, because the homework is where you learn the skills, and if you don't do it then you'll fail the exams. Frankly, the same will be true either way for students who use LLMs for all the exercises: they won't learn the skills, and they will fail the exams. This is a working-as-intended outcome.
So why not start there? It's how school has ~always worked, so there's no question of feasibility. The only question is whether our will to give committed students a real education is stronger than our desire to productize education as a rent extraction scheme tailored to a nepotistic and shallowly credentials-obsessed society where having 'B.Sc.' on your resume sorts you one bucket higher in the algorithmic hiring queue to flip burgers at your local McDonald's.
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It's less obvious how to fix the humanities subjects where take-home writing assignments carry most of a student's grade, though I'm tempted to think that even a relatively simple and tightly scoped writing exercise given as an in-person exam could conclusively weed out most of the students who've been relying on LLMs to do the assignments for them.
Why should a police officer trust a scrap of paper somebody could easily have faked vs. a massive networked software system that claims to have the up to date ground truth? What if, for instance, the victim got her insurance cards and then stopped making her monthly payments?
(Incidentally, I assume paper insurance cards will cease to be considered valid before too long, and handing your unlocked phone to a cop will be coercively normalized.)
Cops aren't intellectually inclined (or equipped, for that matter) to second guess a surveillance tool that's showing them an unequivocal answer to a question. This is 100% on Flock for selling a tool to users they know won't reliably question its output, despite whatever bullshit CYA terms and conditions come attached to it, and then failing to ensure that its output is correct.
The thing you need to realize is that reality is the way it is and as a result cops are going to behave the way they do and there's nothing we can do about it in the near to mid term. You appear to think what the cop did here is stupid, and that means you think many cops are stupid, because we've seen far worse examples of "surveillance platform trumps reality according to cop" stories in the news recently. And if you think cops are stupid in this particular way then it would be hard not to agree with me as far as: they can not, in aggregate, be trusted with access to surveillance tools whose outputs are not 100% reliable.
So whose responsibility really is that? Should the governments that purchase surveillance tools, and the companies that sell them, be held accountable for the (predictable) harms they enable? Or should we ignore them, ignore the fact that we all knew this was going to happen and the fact that it keeps fucking happening, and just blame the individual cops? (which, as we all know, amounts to nothing.)
The fabric of our society continues to be eroded by these big moneyed interests because we (the public, the parts of our government that are supposed to protect us from predation) continually and happily swallow all the disingenuous mealy-mouthed bullshit they spew to deflect past, present, and future responsibility for predictable harms. If we keep swallowing then we are headed for bad times. I am done swallowing.
> You appear to think what the cop did here is stupid, and that means you think many cops are stupid, because we've seen far worse examples of "surveillance platform trumps reality according to cop" stories in the news recently
Didn't those all involve major crimes? In those cases the person who has wrongly been identified is not going to present the officer with evidence showing that the crime did not happen or that they have already been tried for the crime and either acquitted or served their sentence.
This involved driving without insurance. The person presented what is supposed to be legally accepted proof of insurance. This is not even a crime in most jurisdictions, I believe, unless there were repeat offenses or causing an accident while uninsured or falsifying documents.
The default assumption when someone who was flagged for driving without insurance is pulled over and they present an unexpired insurance could should be at worst that after whatever incident that got them in the system (which in many cases will be that they didn't realized their insurance had expired) they correct the problem by getting insurance.
I'm not sure about all, but many did (at least, a serious crime was alleged), which is why I described them as "far worse examples". But they are examples of the same pattern (cops blindly trusting the surveillance oracle), so severity of the alleged infraction/crime apparently won't protect you in either direction.
Paper is how it has always been. If 71% of the calls flock sends cops on are false positives, that means that 71% time is time cops aren't doing their jobs and we are less safe.
> Why should a police officer trust a scrap of paper somebody could easily have faked vs. a massive networked software system that claims to have the up to date ground truth?
Why is the "scrap of paper" a problem now after they've been around for several decades (as has Photoshop and colour printers). It's a legal document: if the cop thinks it's fake they can call the insurance company and confirm.
In Georgia, where one of the incidents took place, the cops can lookup insurance status in real-time:
> The GEICS system works through required insurer reporting. Every insurance company doing business in Georgia must notify the state when a policy is issued, renewed, canceled, or lapses. Companies report these changes within 30 days. The Department of Driver Services maintains this data and makes it available to law enforcement statewide.
You misunderstand. I am attempting to present the situation from the point of view of a hypothetical police officer, especially one who may be motivated to view the information in front of him in a certain way that will justify him writing a ticket.
> if the cop thinks it's fake they can call the insurance company and confirm
I expect that the cop in question would not have been willing to do this, if asked to.
> In Georgia, where one of the incidents took place, the cops can lookup insurance status in real-time
I expect that the cop in question had no interest in doing this, or in divulging to the victim that he had the capability to (if, indeed, he was aware of the possibility himself).
Neither of the former two facts is good, but they are facts nonetheless, and holding the officer in question accountable for the error or related broader misconduct will have no preventative effect, because it's impossible to hold American police officers accountable in any meaningful way (i.e. a way that serves as a deterrent in future situations).
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The first part of the point I'm trying to make is that if we give cops access to surveillance software that purports to tell them whether or not somebody is driving with insurance, they're inevitably going to treat that data as ground truth in many cases. It doesn't matter that you think this officer should have taken the paper as authoritative, or gone to these other sources to verify it: he failed the test and trusted Flock instead, because Flock is a slick commercial product consciously designed to make its users trust it and use it more and rely on it more.
Saying 100% of the blame lies with the cop here (as the comment I originally replied to does) is pretty similar to saying 100% of the harm resulting from teenagers getting addicted to social media is their own fault, and the tech companies who designed their platforms to be addictive to teenagers and chased growth at any cost are blameless. Why don't the kids simply not use social media? It's so easy! Personal responsibility!
The difference is that in the case of cops and Flock (etc.), the harm is turned outwards onto other innocent people.
None of the things named in your comment, on either side of the line, really matter.
Reading, writing, and critical thinking skills matter. You don't have to "write structured interpretations of 1950s texts [you] have no emotional connection to" or practice "handwriting, and reading stuffy texts from front to end" to develop those skills (very loaded language, nice job!), but you have to put a lot of time into doing something, ideally somethings, where you're the one doing the heavy intellectual lifting.
Or, we can just write these kids off as a generation incapable of thinking or building by themselves without AI tools that do the thinking and building for them. Honestly, it's probably already too late. The way we've allowed kids of all ages to be exposed to these tools is basically equivalent to handing out cartons of cigarettes in a preschool.
One of the weirdest things I noticed when people around me started having kids was how immediately they picked up on their parents obsession with their phones, and would instinctively try to interact with them.
It was odd, disheartening and almost universal (barring the parents who went full 'my kid doesn't use any of the products I build')
Why is that weird? I remember when I was a kid, I tried to imitate what my parents were doing, too. Lucky for me, we didn't have smartphones at the time.
I picked up tinkering and sitting in front of a computer from my dad. And, even then, my parents would prevent me from doing this too much, and send me to read a book or go outside and run around.
A society is self similar because a huge portion of our social actions are not thought about but copied. Being a parrot saves a massive amount of energy in descending the behavior gradient.
Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you draw a line between capital and consumers, and the latter are so tightly squeezed as a result of the "privilege" imbalance that they can barely afford housing, health care, child care, etc., how do you expect them to engage in entrepreneurship? How do you expect them to efficiently allocate their labor?
Meanwhile we see an absurd consolidation of capital that leaves consumers with fewer and fewer choices for basic products and services, allowing capital to make those products and services worse and more extractive. Rinse and repeat. The contempt for consumers and attitude that capital should be "privileged" manifests in our government's total indifference to the former's plight, despite the well known fact that they are the engine of our economy.
I really truly honestly am not sure what to make of this result from $20M in compute, 10K+ parallel agents (smells like brute force), and a pre-existing approach that was already bearing fruit. I know the models are good---I use them every day and continue to be impressed---but how much better than the benchmark of the best publicly available models is this supposed to be? It seems impossible to say.
> overengineered sound makers that breaks the moment you drop them.
Which ones are those? I've owned a couple of generations of airpods and dropped them probably hundreds of times (both in the case and out of it) and it has never had any detectable effect on their appearance or functionality. I even had a pair go through the wash and they still mostly worked afterwards (only issue was that the ANC performance was worse and slightly weird).
Yes, on mine (the OG Pros) the ANC would consistently fail. On my second pair the battery refused to charge when i left them in the drawer for too long. Apple replaced them a total of 3 times for all these failures, but i simply stopped wearing them because theyre too unreliable.
To be fair, I don't expect anything electronic to survive going through the wash unless it has hardcore waterproofing (eg a dive computer). I was pleasantly surprised by the way my airpods kept working.
I don't remember whether my first airpods were the gen1 pros or the gen2 pros, but you may have been a victim of early teething issues. I don't really have anything negative to say about the ones I've owned.
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