I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.
I am owned by several dogs and cats. I have been playing non-computer roleplaying games for almost five decades. I am interested in all kinds of gadgets, particularly multitools, knives, flashlights, and pens.
I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.
What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.
Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.
I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.
A Tilley LTM8 to keep the sun off my head without holding in heat. They aren’t exactly stylish, but they work well and seem to be nearly indestructible.
Paper tape would probably work, as long as you could find a reliable reader for it. I’m actually old enough to have used it and the readers often had problems. Getting rid of the mechanical aspects of the reader and replacing them with light sensors would go a long way toward fixing that.
Magnetic tape only lasts for a decade or two.
This could be considered a trojan.
Lawmakers ask the President to fix a bad law they passed because they can’t actually pass a law to correct it. Whatever the Republican-controlled House is doing, it does not include governing.
There is some evidence to suggest that the Saudis were involved in setting it up. Beyond that, there were endless conspiracy theories, none of which were widely believed. I’ve talked about it with a lot of people over the years and have yet to meet a single conspiracy theorist. The vast majority have never believed in a 9/11 conspiracy.
That’s a far better summary than anything I’ve seen in the press. Good work!
I love the idea!
The biggest problem with corporate governance is that precedent in US law is absolutely clear that the only financial responsibility is to the shareholders. If we expanded that to include employees and customers our world would look very different after a while.
The sad thing is that the corporate sociopaths who made the bad decisions all made huge amounts of money doing it. The fact that they destroyed the company means nothing to them. And it will not mean anything to the next corporations that hire those same people as executives.
If you strip the DRM and keep a local copy of your digital content, you are no longer at the mercy of whatever services the provide it. Then you can keep a backup in case something happens to your primary copies.
GalaxyQuest included an alleged commentary track that was all in Thermian. No one should ever listen to it, but my hat is off to whoever put it together.
The right wing has been actively working to undermine our educational system since the early 80’s. A poorly educated populace, particularly one without critical thinking skills, is much easier to manipulate. After four decades of underfunding, restrictive policies, and anti-intellectual propaganda, those efforts are really paying off.
Newt Gingrich and his co-conspirators have been waging war against the people of this country since Reagan was elected. And they are now dangerously close to winning that war.
I love this image, but you know that Clippy would be holding the gun sideways, gangster style.
The earlier generation of tech leaders were just as bad as the current ones. Bill Gates was willing to do almost anything to hold onto his near monopoly and to squeeze as much money out of it as possible. Larry Ellison has made a life’s work out of taking over software projects that benefited everyone, then brutally killing them. I actually met Steve Jobs several times and he was an awful person who made his fortune by exploiting more talented people. And so on.
There were plenty of decent tech innovators, as there are now. Then, as now, they did not end up running huge corporations.
I’m sure there were others, but the only exceptions I can think of were from the generation before that. Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded HP and made it a great place to work, a center of innovation, and a very profitable company, until they retired. And it all went to hell rather quickly.
I’ve just been looking for something to replace One Note. The timing of this announcement worked out really well for me. :-)
Thanks!
I would be happy to see it replaced by something better, but I don’t want it to disappear. Having any kind of reference for source reliability, even just as a reminder to think about it, helps provide perspective on political posts.
We live in an era where it has become normal to dump masses of bullshit online in the hope that sheer volume will convince people it’s true. Pointing out the credibility gap between NPR and Fox News is important.
Well, clearly, their executive team all need to be in the office. Their actual workers can be trusted to work from home.
Exactly. The rich will be able to buy privacy, while the rest become ever easier to exploit.