Every payday loan company, the "we buy houses for cash" companies, rent-to-own companies, title loan companies, the entire buy-now-pay-later ecosystem, the timeshare industry.
Seriously dotancohen, get your people under control.
Nobody will sue you for that. In every age we have had people like you, wishing things would go back to "normal", and w.r.t. technology you lot never get your way, but neither do you cause problems for anybody else. All you're doing is pissing into the wind and getting yourself wet, as is your right.
I think this time is different. I’m not Gen Z, yet once my kids are out of school, I’m planning to leave tech behind as much as possible.
When I started in tech, at the dawn of the internet, it was an exciting field full of hope and the promise to empower and enrich the lives of people. Tech now is largely the opposite.
Enshitification is making things progressively worse. tech companies are creating systems and tools with dark patterns abound to ensure you no longer own anything, are under constant surveillance, and populations at large are manipulated through the magic of propaganda and illusory truth. Even the productivity gains are perversely used to not give people more time through fewer work days/hours but to instead give them more work. People are losing their connection to others and the world around them.
Everyone tends to focus on Orwell’s 1984, but I find Fahrenheit 451 to be the more prescient book. I used to be annoyed by the book people’s choice to leave society and wait for it to collapse so they could help rebuild. In my mind, they should have been mounting an resistance. Fair to say I understand the book people’s perspective so much more now.
Some of them are quite happy! Others are miserable; many are abused. It's a high-control group, that raises its children to believe the outside world as a terrible, scary place, and they are the only safe place to be.
Many people are happy in cults, or they couldn't function. But that doesn't mean that the cults are, overall, a positive thing.
You frame this as if all technology is inherently good and anyone who opposes it is just dumb and wasting their time. People used to think Segways were dumb. They used to think 3D TVs were dumb. They used to think lobotomies were dumb. They used to think Xray shoe sizing was dumb. They used to think uranium in household appliances and toys was dumb.
I hear that attitude about AI is much more positive in China. So people like him, in aggregate, could potentially be a danger and cause the US to give up the lead for the rest of century. Takes one bad election..
People who reject AI are a danger? Wow. This just sounds like setting up the foundation of narrative for having the government bail out these AI companies when bill finally comes due.
The narratives around the pressure to blindly accept AI is crazy. They try every angle from "you are a communist", to "you are too stupid".
I speculate it has a lot to do with surveillance capitalism. It's the same type of tactics that have been used for things like the banning of marijuana, or the health merits of cigarettes. Fear mongering and lying so a few robber Barron's can profiteer.
I think AI is useful. I think it was rolled out haphazardly similar to how people used to gargle radioactive isotopes or slather them on as after shave so others can profit quickly. There are so many issues with the technology that the press won't even cover yet because we all have to play stupid until trends emerge to report on otherwise billionaire defense contractors will send their figurative or possibly literal hit squads after us. We have to wait for the tumors to grow, the jaws to fall off before society will remember "maybe we shouldn't be slapping radioactive stuff all over ourselves so some wealthy white dude gets wealthier"
The future of ai is in small local models people pay 0 dollars to upgrade or use. Anything else is meritless exploitation and destruction. That's why the US will lose. Reality has a liberal bias. Tough pill for ai libertarians to swallow. So they mud fling.
Veritasium sold out to some rich fuck investors who're turning the channel into a slop factory (slowly phasing out Derrick's presence in the process, transitioning to hired actors and lame scripts.)
That stuff is just silly mostly-self-aware camp to keep the setting entertaining, don't overthink it. Everybody already knows and acknowledges that the series is absurd.
Every damn time anybody has trouble with an Apple product, we get this "Well that hasn't happened to me." Great for you, go get yourself a cookie and cram it up your ass.
Seriously dotancohen, get your people under control.
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