He’s simply gone to the Garda (Irish police) and reported a “crime” (that Google have apparently broken the law). The Garda will “investigate”, inevitably find that, no, the law designed to arrest blackhats breaking into computer systems does not cover this scenario despite its vague wording, and inform the complainant accordingly.
A small waste of police time and taxpayer money, reported on by trashy clickbait websites as though it’s some meaningful event in order to drive arguments in the comments on the legitimacy of the complaint.
Yeah that's interesting though because there are a lot of other rules they'll need to follow in order to comply with the new regulations. So it's gonna be interesting to see how they approach it. It's also going to be interesting to see how the fediverse will respond to this because it would be such an outlier in terms of size and resources.
I think most instances will just have to block it, honestly. Unless it... provides fediverse access only to well-behaved accounts or something? This _could_ work, but would be a pretty bizarre user experience.
Assuming it just federates as-is, though, I don't think it'll last a day on most instances.
Yeah but how do you even define well-behaved? That can become complicated real fast. My bet is that they'll just allow people to follow an account using the classic @username@threads.net and they'll allow for export of the content and that's about it.
The Bungie purchase isn’t puzzling if you look at Sony’s future trajectory. They have 10 or so live-service titles in development, and have stated very openly that they aim to greatly expand their offerings in that area going forward. There are only a handful of studios that have created successful live service games and even fewer that haven’t leant on popular existing IP (such as Call of Duty: Warzone) to do so, Bungie (and Epic) are pretty much the pioneers in this space, and Bungie have learnt a lot from their trials cultivating the Destiny franchise.
Sony purchased Bungie to essentially teach them how to make successful live service games, not for the IP. They hold so much power inside PlayStation studios that they, as per the recent The Last of Us factions leaks, review and determine if a multiplayer title meets their requirements for success (factions didn’t).
I don’t think it’s a good thing (as I personally disapprove of the way Destiny operates & see a focus on these sorts of games from Sony as a major blunder) but the business logic of the purchase is obvious.
Do you think you would feel the same about Aloy if she were presented as a male character?
As the protagonist of the story she’s privy to information and intelligence far beyond the knowledge of much of the rest of the cast. She’s treated as a literal outsider for much of the early story and is often held back from completing vital goals by archaic and arbitrary belief systems throughout both games.
The character is arguably too nice and accommodating to those blocking progress, given the situation, yet your complaint is fairly common.
Absolutely yes. Maybe there are male game characters like that, but I clearly don't remember them. Do you have any examples?
You can be snarky by the way. She is not snarky. She's just superior to the "dumb plebs" and whiny at the same time.
I can't currently think of stupid annoying completely superior male protagonists, but they are quite common in certain types of anime. If the comments on streaming platforms are any indication on their popularity, for the most part, unless the story is extreme parody, they are usually universally disliked.
I don’t really agree with your interpretation of the character, I would argue she’s more understandably frustrated and desperate given the context of the story than whiny. To me that makes her a more realistic and well-rounded character. She’s certainly nothing close to an anime cliche even at the characters more stubborn or impulsive moments.
Edward Kenway (Assassins Creed: Black Flag) is a similar character that comes to mind, though I concede it is difficult to think of many open world video-game characters that deviate from blank-slate people pleasers.
Given the current emerging wealth gap and all trends in the Western world I fear you’d have to be incredibly naive to think the long term goal here is to benefit the average person.
This is simply a play by capital to reduce and remove expensive knowledge worker roles and drag them more in line with the rest of the population already struggling to get by. You won’t be a “25 year old retiree” because that’s bad for those in charge.
You’ll be a “25 year old working 3 jobs just to scrape by on your rent because you’re just a warm body and we can replace you easily”.
UBI is political fantasy, the US can’t even offer proper universal healthcare - you genuinely believe they’d pursue that when the alternative is more power and an even greater reliance on capital?
There's a flaw in this analysis. You only consider the local effects of labor becoming redundant, while ignoring the larger global effects of improved efficiency and how the gains of efficiency are inevitably spread around due to competition.
Apply your analysis to the automation and scaling up of the factory and agriculture. According to your premises, such things should have been negative for the average person's material wellbeing. These sectors have become more efficient, which means less demand for labor, which means more power for capital.
But, observation (massive poverty alleviation) contradicts this conclusion, which means your premises are wrong. The premises are wrong because there are mechanisms built into both capitalism itself (competition between supply, i.e. between capital, driving down economic rents) as well as the attenuation from government (welfare state) which mean the gains from efficiency aren't all captured into the pockets of capital. They get spread around.
> naive to think the long term goal here is to benefit the average person.
The goal is always profit. Sometimes profit is aligned with what benefits the average person. Sometimes it isn't. A bad outcome doesn't necessarily follow from this.
You speak of competition, but the logical end goal here is a handful of companies in control of something that automates large quantities of the current knowledge economy in a way never yet before seen, in a capitalist society already struggling to deal with vast wealth disparity; handing unprecedented power to a handful of people who have already proven they have no regard for the common person.
I don’t agree that there is a historical precedent for the kind of situation this could put the world.
It may all be moot as I doubt the technology will advance to the level we are discussing, but in that scenario I would like you to be correct, but strongly doubt it. We shall see I guess.
> You speak of competition, but the logical end goal here is a handful of companies in control of something that automates large quantities of the current knowledge economy in a way never yet before seen, in a capitalist society already struggling to deal with vast wealth disparity; handing unprecedented power to a handful of people who have already proven they have no regard for the common person.
Right, but the outcomes aren't zero-sum. Two things have been simultaneously true in the past. Power accumulating in the hands of capital and wealth disparity increasing (true), and material conditions for the bottom improving (true). This is because there are mechanisms (both naturally within capitalism, as well as via government) that make it impossible for capital to capture all of the upside, even if they are able to capture most of it.
While I agree there is no theory or historical precedent that can predict what the world will look like when AGI arrives -- it's such a paradigm breaking event, and there are many ways we could end up in a dystopia -- I don't see a better alternative approach when it comes to forming a tentative view (specifically pertaining to material conditions).
I believe you’re simply taking the wording too literally.
You may not cease so exist, but a decent role for you in society might. The capital class have invested tens of billions of dollars into AI in the hopes that it will be enough to replace and heavily reduce the wages of knowledge and creative work.
Given the increasing wealth gap already emerging it’s highly likely the long term goal of technology like this (however overhyped it might currently be) is to essentially enslave the population.
Knowledge workers have had it good for a long time. This technology will attempt to ensure you have no further role. That’s what the OP is worried about, not some philosophical nonsense about the self, the long term possibility this profession, and thus a huge part of their identity, becomes obsolete.
"AI in the hopes that it will be enough to replace and heavily reduce the wages of knowledge and creative work"
But that's not true because the best stuff capable of generating AI art today is open source and capable of running on commodity hardware? People might've invested, but if Microsoft can generate nice pictures, so can a lot of people now, at the same or even better quality.
There isn't a lot of proof that ChatGPT will be in the hands of OpenAI alone forever, so likely everyone will have similarly capable machines in the near future.
The only thing humans need to do to get the future right, is learn to live peacefully with each other, and the algorithms, can we may have a very incredible future on our hands.
We fear machines killing us because it's what we do to each other, if we didn't have these tendencies, maybe an AGI would accidentally kill us, but that would be better than it killing us because it learned violence and paranoia from us. It would of course suck, but it would suck less.
I feel like you’re missing the larger picture here.
You’re focusing the discussion around art. Historically art has always been a difficult way to make money. Open source tools that make it trivial will just reduce the number of individuals able to make a living creating art. The same is true across all areas of knowledge work should this technology eventually reach the promised heights. Any work that requires specialised knowledge on a computer would become as simple as creating art, and thus can be paid less and performed by a wider range of people. It will save the capital class a substantial amount of money and ensure that those left employed have even less power.
“There isn't a lot of proof that ChatGPT will be in the hands of OpenAI alone forever, so likely everyone will have similarly capable machines in the near future.”
Microsoft didn’t invest 10
billion dollars in an eventual open source project. There’s no way these tools or their source will be available to all, you’d have to be rather naive and completely ignorant of the history of the people involved in funding OpenAI to believe that (and I don’t just mean Microsoft).
Hence my belief that these tools will eventually be used to further the already growing class divide. Those with capital will have full control of the means of production, employees won’t need specialised knowledge (and thus have no bargaining power to extract decent salary and working conditions). Knowledge work has led to the best conditions for the working class in history. Its destruction is not a good thing unless you’re a member of the “elite”, which, as you’re posting on HN, you’re probably not.
I have no idea what you’re talking about in the final two paragraphs, this isn’t a science fiction film, nobody is talking about a Terminator scenario. This is a capitalism problem that tools like this will only intensify. There is little evidence to suggest a utopian vision, but plenty to suggest the opposite.
If you're trying to tell me a lot of people aren't talking about scenes from sci-fi movies actually happening within the next 1-20 year(s) you're not being honest with yourself?
I’m not saying that, I just believe those people are myopic and completely missing the wider picture because they’d rather delude themselves with fantasy and thought experiments than consider the crude reality of the economic situation.
This technology doesn’t need to be AGI to complete its objective. It just needs to be good enough to replace or
lower the skill threshold for humans in current knowledge roles.
If I were a wealthy capitalist I’d find it hysterical. I’m about to ensure vast portions of the current middle class are my future wage slaves and those same people, rather than realising the threat, are pontificating about science fiction or actively supporting the development of my technology thinking it’ll make them “more productive!”.
He’s simply gone to the Garda (Irish police) and reported a “crime” (that Google have apparently broken the law). The Garda will “investigate”, inevitably find that, no, the law designed to arrest blackhats breaking into computer systems does not cover this scenario despite its vague wording, and inform the complainant accordingly.
A small waste of police time and taxpayer money, reported on by trashy clickbait websites as though it’s some meaningful event in order to drive arguments in the comments on the legitimacy of the complaint.