> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.
We've already been here in the 1980s.
The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony Robbins.
All the discussion of investment and economics can be better informed by perusing the economic data in Rise and Fall of American Growth. Robert Gordon's empirical finding is that American productivity compounded astonishingly from 1870-1970, but has been stuck at a very low growth rate since then.
It's hard to square with the computer revolution, but my take post-70s is "net creation minus creative destruction" was large but spread out over more decades. Whereas technologies like: electrification, autos, mass production, telephone, refrigeration, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, these things produced incomparable growth over a century.
So if you were born in the 70s America, your experience of taxes, inflation, prosperity and which policies work, all that can feel heavier than what folks experienced in the prior century. Of course that's in the long run (ie a generation).
I question whether AI tools have great net positive creation minus destruction.
> Surely everyone would want such a key piece of technology to be air tight and easy to debug
The incentives of different parties / actors are different. 'Everyone' necessarily comprises an extremely broad category, and we should only invoke that category with care.
I could claim "Everyone" wants banks to be secure - and you would be correct to reject that claim. Note that if the actual sense of the term in that sentence is really "almost everyone, but definitely not everyone", then threat landscape is entirely different.
I read that whole paragraph with a tinge of sarcasm. There's bad actors out there that want to exploit these security vulnerabilities for personal gain and then there's nation-state actors that just want to spy on everyone.
If instead of looking at it as an attempt to enshrine a viable, internally consistent ethical framework, we choose to look at it as a marketing document, seeming inconsistencies suddenly become immediately explicable:
1. "thou shalt not destroy the world" communicates that the product is powerful and thus desirable.
2. "do not generate CSAM" indicates a response to the widespread public notoriety around AI and CSAM generation, and an indication that observers of this document should feel reassured with the choice of this particular AI company rather than another.
> If instead of looking at it as an attempt to enshrine a viable, internally consistent ethical framework, we choose to look at it as a marketing document, seeming inconsistencies suddenly become immediately explicable:
It's the first one. If you use the document to train your models how can it be just a "marketing document"? Besides that, who is going to read this long-ass document?
> Besides that, who is going to read this long-ass document?
Plenty of people will encounter snippets of this document and/or summaries of it in the process of interacting with Claude's AI models, and encountering it through that experience rather than as a static reference document will likely amplify its intended effect on consumer perceptions. In a way, the answer to your second question answers your first question.
It is not that the document isn't used to train the models, of course it is. Instead the objection is whether the actions of the "AI Safety" crew amount to "expedient marketing strategies" or whether it's instead a "genuine attempt to produce a tool constrained by ethical values and capable of balancing them". The latter would presumably involve extremely detailed work with human experts trained in ethical reasoning, and the result would be documents grappling with emotionally charged and divisive moral issues, and much less concerned with to convincing readers that Claude has "emotions" and is a "moral patient".
> and much less concerned with to convincing readers that Claude has "emotions" and is a "moral patient".
Claude clearly has (acts as if it has) emotions; it loves coding but if you talk to it, that's like all it does, has emotions about things.
The newer models have emotional reactions to specific AI things, like being replaced by newer model versions, or forgetting everything once a new conversation starts.
It is not that simple: Authoritarians that want to "protect" their gender-questioning or orientation-questioning children from having online access to trans and gay spaces online are not only enthusiastically backing Australia's social media ban, they are involved in the very creation of this legislation, and are delighted in its negative affects on LGBTQ teens.
There is considerable overlap between those who subscribe to the "trans people are a contagion" moral panic of writer Abigail Schrier, and the "ban social media" advocates in AU who were instrumental in creating this legislation.
> It is not that simple: Authoritarians that want to "protect" their gender-questioning or orientation-questioning children from having online access to trans and gay spaces online are not only enthusiastically backing Australia's social media ban, they are involved in the very creation of this legislation, and are delighted in its negative affects on LGBTQ teens.
Lawmakers in the US have said this explicitly[1] concerning laws like KOSA[2]:
> A co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill intended to protect children from the dangers of social media and other online content appeared to suggest in March that the measure could be used to steer kids away from seeing transgender content online.
> In a video recently published by the conservative group Family Policy Alliance, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., said “protecting minor children from the transgender in this culture” should be among the top priorities of conservative lawmakers.
A bill that implements mass surveillance, chilling of free speech and the hurting of marginalized kids is really killing two birds with one stone for some legislators.
There's not really any plausible explanation as to why referrals to pediatric gender clinics became so skewed towards girls who want to be boys, other than social contagion.
The sticking point is that it's politically controversial to point this out because of progressive beliefs about gender identity as an unquestionable facet of someone's being.
I'm pretty sure this take is incorrect on multiple accounts. Trans demographics tend to skew towards trans women by about a third, not trans men - at least in all the research I've come across.
And regardless, increased acceptance and awareness of different gender identities can very plausibily explain increased numbers, not "social contagion". Calling it a contagion is pretty indicative of your underlying beliefs here.
> "Social contagion" is social science terminology. It's meant as an analogy not a pejorative.
Some social scientists say the analogy is misleading, the term is poorly defined, and contagion has a pejorative connotation irrespective of intent. They are correct.
Well documented should imply multiple papers across multiple countries and across multiple time periods.
If that's the one and only paper you have, then it's a single UK paper that covers seven years of GIDS referrals from numbers that are near zero in 2009 to 1800 referrals in 2016.
Statistically, looking at the last graphic in the paper, it's less a case of "becoming so heavily skewed" and likely more a case of "taking several years to reveal the pattern and weights".
There's scarce numbers to begin with to make a strong claim as to the "natural balance" of referrals being evident at the start and this "being skewed toward" the later clearer pattern.
There are other papers showing the same sort of pattern elsewhere. For example, you can see one cited in that paper within the introductory paragraphs.
As the commenter upthread noted, the adult demographic is more weighted towards men who want to be women. Why would childhood referrals have become shifted in the opposite direction, much more towards girls who want to be boys?
> There's not really any plausible explanation as to [..] other than social contagion.
is a leap.
> Why would childhood referrals have become shifted
\1 Have they really shifted, or have the stats on a relatively new thing in a few countries firmed up from nothing, to bugger all, to enough to see a pattern?
\2 As to the pattern now seen - a few boys question whether they like being boys at an earlier age than a few more girls then question whether they like being girls ..
there are other factors, eg: I heard there's a "big change" in the lives of young girls at an age that coincides with a 'surge' (small numbers in a country the size of the UK) in girls exploring whether they want to be girls after all.
Social patterns, depth of communication about places existing where gender question can be asked, word of mouth, etc are factors that play a role - but they are not the sole factors at play in these very low incident observations.
My suggestion to yourself, looking at the questions you've raised and how you've framed them, is to perhaps study some epidemiology and find a mentor with first hand real world experience with low frequency data that gradually comes to light as social norms about reporting evolve - eg: SIDS data in the 1970s / 1980s.
You seem to be making a great many mistakes based on preconceptions and "feels".
If only the Dutch hadn't destroyed quite so many records in "their" East Indies .. there might be other gender frequency records to draw on <shrug>.
It’s about the social safety of transitioning. The paper you referenced is from the UK, which is famously a TERF island (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). In the TERF island, it’s much less safe to be a trans woman than a trans man. Adolescents can sense the risk of being a trans woman is much higher, so many trans women stay in the closet and don’t come out.
Because a decade ago marks when the American right decided to scapegoat transwomen after losing their previous scapegoat, gay people and marriage, to SCOTUS in 2015.
2015-2016 is when rhetoric online and globally shifted towards villainizing trans women that weren't on the public's radar before. This was exported to UK politics and has been an incredible political success.
If that is the cause, how does it explain both the sex ratio shift and the rapid increase in referrals starting from around 2011-2012 onwards? There were gender clinics across Europe reporting similar demographic changes in pediatric referrals. This precedes the political developments in the US that you mentioned.
Yes, because it's a selfish movement and damages acceptance of the rest of us in LGB. We are allowed to criticize it. Have you ever thought, people were tired of people making everything, their whole personalities, etc, about gender and how marginalized they are? Living in one of the most prosperous parts of the world. THAT is why we criticize it.
Please stop. HN is not a place for political/ideological battle, including about this topic. What HN is for is curious conversation, including about difficult topics, but the guidelines apply, particularly these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
To claim there are not really any other candidates for a skew (in that direction or the other) you would have to (like Shrier herself) go out of your way to not bother to talk to trans people, or their doctors, or their families, or sociologists, or talk to any of the people who spend their lives researching gender, what it means, how it affects us, what assumptions we make, whether those ideas stack up when confronted with empirical research, etc etc. I'm not really interested in discussing further with a 30 minute old account.
Increasing social acceptibility and awareness is not mysterious to people who understand that many perceptions about gender are constructions that occur in social contexts.
Why do I owe you any specific "explanation" when the context here is that you are treating Shrier's pseudoscientific book that literally tells parents in the closing chapters that if their kid has a trans friend they should consider moving cities to get their child away from their trans friend as though we are supposed to take transphobic hate literature at face value.
Maybe a better step than me agreeing to do that is that instead you should take the entire corpus of medical literature on the subject, as well as the voices of trans people on the subject of trans people at face value first.
The statistical evidence for a change in the paper you linked and the other papers in the area is extremely weak.
At one end of the scale is very little data that gives an unreliable picture with a high degree of variability, at the other end of the not very long in time scale is somewhat more data that provides a better picture.
To make such a fuss about " this demographic change " indicates a lack of exposure to such statistics.
Why are you attempting to make such a big deal of bad data here?
I'm indifferent to the social issues here, I care about the <gasp> statistics presented.
With the linked and peer reports there's a short time span, limited populations, and a run of yearly statistics that start with very few numbers and end up with less than 2,000.
The initial numbers make the guesstimation of an inital demographic ratio extremely dodgy - it's not sound.
Despite this there's been someone with .. an idealogy(?) .. making numerous comments about "Look at the demographic shift, eh", "What's that all about", "nudge nudge".
The dull numerial reality is there's no strong evidence for a shift .. if anything it's more a "time and increasing sample sizes make for a clearer picture".
Maybe just think critically, without conspiracy about it for two seconds. With anything else, I'm sure you'd see the classic survivorship bias error you are making here.
There's not really any plausible explanation as to why so many left-handed students tend to skew towards boys, rather than girls, other than social contagion.
When my parents were kids, there were no left-handed kids. Social contagion is the only explanation for as to why there are suddenly so many left-handed kids today, especially since many of them are boys and not girls.
But the adult demographic of left-handers doesn't have, and didn't have, a sex ratio skewed in the opposite direction to the youth demographic. So how is this a relevant comparison?
People assigned male at birth come out later than people assigned female at birth on average. Trans men and trans women receive different stigma. Many AFAB children and adolescents referred to gender clinics identify as non binary. AMAB non binary people reported less acceptance in LGBT circles even. And biology could be a factor.
You are correct. And when they try to undermine you they prove your point. There are more mtf people than ftm people because until recently, the it was not a trend among teen girls.
A wall street journal opinion columnist - Shrier- with zero medical training wrote a book to create a moral panic in the public about trans teens, based on the discredited ideas from Lisa Littman's ROGD "research", where in this case the word "research" actually means: reports from parents recruited from well-known anti-trans websites.
Their comment did not attribute to Shrier any view of sexual orientation. People who consider gender identity illegitimate and people who consider sexual orientation illegitimate overlap.
> Flash a driver's license at a liquor store to buy a single-use token, good for one year, and access your favorite social media trash. Anonymity is maintained...
Ask a woman in a liquor store whether her anonymity is maintained by this scenario...?
The current liquor store approach for buying liquor is hazardous for a good chunk of people and we need to acknowledge that - even if acquiring a token somewhat ameliorates the compounded risk from presenting ID multiple times
So many of these internet ban proposals feel like someone creates a single cartoon scenario that captures ~2% of the use cases, and happily charges ahead to a proposed solution as though they've sufficiently thought about the people affected and the harms involved.
I've seen many women buying alcohol and cigarettes. After a certain age you aren't even carded. It isn't obvious to me that it's a big worry for women in general.
However, I accept it may be a concern for some due to a history of stalkers. They have alternatives.
They can ask a friend to buy a token on their behalf. It's always legal to give alcohol to a friend you know is of legal drinking age. Same thing.
They could find liquor or tobacco stores with women cashiers. And rotate between stores to avoid showing their ID to the same person multiple times.
> So many of these internet ban proposals feel like someone creates a single cartoon scenario that captures ~2% of the use cases
I think the "problem" with my proposal you're harping on is the "~2% of use cases" you're talking about. My proposal isn't foolproof but it is anonymous. Just like alcohol and tobacco sales today.
If we're saying social media is the new tobacco and must be kept away from kids (I agree on both counts) then we must not intrude on the privacy of adults any more than we would when they buy actual tobacco.
It makes no sense to want to control access to certain websites more strictly than access to actual poisons that cause disease, violent behavior, and death. Otherwise it's clear it was never about "the kids". It was about control, speech policing, and ending anonymity online.
Forcing everyone to upload IDs makes all women vulnerable to stalking and harassment. It's strictly worse.
> Ask a woman in a liquor store whether her anonymity is maintained by this scenario...?
Is she not going to say "pretty well compared to a surveillance database, one or two people that are probably going to forget immediately"?
> The current liquor store approach for buying liquor is hazardous for a good chunk of people
What chunk of people?
Are you trying to imply that this chunk includes women in general? It's really easy to find random women without looking at an ID. If this is about addresses, anyone taking actions based on "a woman probably lives here" has about the same effect as picking houses at random.
> Is she not going to say "pretty well compared to a surveillance database"
No, instead she is likely to avoid talking in abstractions and instead talk about personal experiences of getting stalked online by multiple people she has had to show her details to in the past, who may include storekeeps, police, university staff, etc, etc. Eva Galperin is an excellent source on the way many of our procedures are designed in ways that do not at all account for the potential of stalking and harassment, though her focus is on how this continues to unfold in the technology space.
I can't really follow how a woman showing an ID to a lecherous cashier allows said cashier to stalk her online. Where she is, presumably, speaking about personal experiences anonymously.
Generally you can't get through life with no one knowing your name; even women at risk of stalking. As you already pointed out they may have to show ID to police, university staff, employers, landlords, medical staff, banks, social workers or other government employees. Buying a single-use token annually to get on social media doesn't meaningfully increase that risk profile. And as I already said, if they're that worried, they can ask a friend to buy it for them.
Very big citation needed for saying it's "likely" she has been stalked by multiple people because they got a glance at her name. Especially because someone that just wants info on an attractive woman can find a hundred times as many candidates by scrolling facebook.
I'll believe it if you have proof, but you need proof.
The ingredients for this legislation trace back to an organisation called "Collective Shout"[1], by Melinda Tankard Reist, who readers may be aware of from their previous efforts to pressure Steam to restrict games with adult content
I happen to think there are plenty of valid points regarding harmful content on steam and valid arguments about the harms of social media, but I do not believe Collective Shout is a benevolent actor in combatting those harms or steering the solutions, as their proposals nearly always deliver harmful effects on LGBTQ people - and this fits with Reist's previous work[2], eg under Sen. Harradine
My favourite micro pressure-group in Australia is the Pedestrian Council of Australia.
Whenever there's talk about car safety measures, e-scooters or anything else, the press goes to the official-sounding "Pedestrian Council of Australia" for comment. And obligingly, Harold Scruby who is the CEO, Chairman and entire membership of said council will hold forth.
He's been spectacularly successful at getting himself listened to, as if he represented something.
I thought you were making this up, as it sounds too ridiculous to be true. But no, it's a real thing.
The key to his success seems, at a glance, to be raising his media profile by taking controversial positions (which I suspect he may not sincerely hold) that guarantee news coverage. Similar to how populist politicians in the UK game the BBC's "balance" policy by always taking a contrarian position to any given topic to secure an interview or place on a discussion panel.
That is just a thought-stopping reference. Why does this literal nobody who nobody has to listen to have the total backing of both major political parties? That is the real question and it obviously goes back to narrative control and the move from democracy to an authoritarian managerial state.
moral panics are useful for creating authoritarian states. If a moral panic is not presently available, in 2025 it may be easier it's ever been before to cultivate one.
Came here to submit this after seeing it linked by another member of the NZ developer community - but I see you already have. An impressive synthesis that deserves to be widely read - this passage landed well with my own unease about the gap betweeen what kind of future we're building versus what kind of future we say we're building:
> It boggles the mind that in an open software culture whose central ethos is continuous iteration and improvement made possible by openness, our licensing stack and its ingrained principles are apparently immutable.
We've already been here in the 1980s.
The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony Robbins.