catreadingabook

Even if this caught on, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with another Wickard v. Filburn. Because if we don’t punish you for growing “too much” wheat, on your own land, for your own personal use, then how are we supposed to force you to buy it from us?

First of all, nice bait, looks delicious, think I’ll chow down.

I think this because I’ve spent over a decade of my life trying to understand where people come from and getting nowhere with helping them.

This mindset sounds closer to the problem than to the solution. Do you truly believe that the best way to interact with an extremist is to blindly judge them, then assume that they will question their entire worldview because one person, who has made no good faith effort to understand them, decides to call them names?

Many extremists, though perhaps not most, feel the way they do because they honestly believe they are doing the right thing. They listen to the lived experiences of people they trust and discount the words of people they do not. The blind judgment of others only ‘proves’ to them that it’s all one big conspiracy, everyone else are sheep, and that they are the only ones who can think for themselves.

Unfortunate. We’re the boiling frog fable all over again.

“… over the next century,” continues the article after the catchy headline.

Not that people dying is a good thing, but I was kind of hoping they’d be people alive right now. If 1/8th of the world treated climate change like it was personally going to kill them, we might still have a chance of turning things around. (As a bonus, can oil giants really keep their execs safe from 1 in 8 highly motivated people?)

Ok, let me be more specific so that it’s not open to uncharitable interpretation.

What happens when it becomes easy to make something as reliable and complete as, e.g., ChatGPT-4 without the hardware costs and other costs currently associated with it?

That’s true, but thinking about AI that is made to generate speech, processing power is still expensive enough that developers are careful with it. But what happens as memory gets cheaper and calculations get faster, and ordinary developers are able to train their own generative AI?

For example, what happens when a developer decides to train a LLM extensively on scam emails, and spammers love to buy copies of it - but the developer markets it as just “a helpful generative AI”? Or, what if a person trains their LLM on an extremist forum full of hate speech and disinformation, then offers it to a suicide prevention center as a 24/7 alternative to human labor? (Treating these as hypotheticals, where we assume the difference isn’t immediately obvious. Perhaps they also used some legitimate training data, so that most outputs seem innocent enough.)

To me it sounds more involved than selling just a word processor with autocorrect, but less involved than selling an instruction manual for committing crimes.

No way they don’t force you to agree to some “terms and conditions” along the lines of, “You accept full responsibility of all risk and if we get sued, you agree to pay on our behalf. And because we know you won’t read this, here’s all the risks so we can say you gave informed consent: …”

Completely speculating, because I don’t know many courts that have been willing to decide either way, but maybe:

If it causes harm in a way that was reasonably foreseeable, the person who turned it on and/or the person “operating” it might be generally liable on a theory of negligence (but not always).

If the harm was unpredictable, it might be on the manufacturer and the retailer under a theory of products liability (but not always).

Or it could be treated as “ferae naturae,” where owners are liable for their ‘dangerous animal’ pets because they knew the pets were dangerous and still decided to keep them (but not always).

If it’s an AI not associated with a physical device, maybe the programmer who “authored” the lines of code could be criminally liable for criminal “speech” (writing an AI) that incites and enables crime, even as a conspirator – that’s reeeaaally doubtful on Due Process grounds, but it would definitely light a fire under every developer’s chair to make sure their algorithms are explicitly trained against criminal behavior. (but still not always.)

The Vulcans might have approved. Something about the needs of the many…

De-worming animals is probably still for the best. Even hookworms can be fatal to dogs, for example. And there are other worm parasites way worse than hookworms, like roundworms that can burrow through the intestines and up into the host’s heart and brain. I wouldn’t take the risk.

Interesting, so what happens when an AI creates art that would infringe on a human’s copyright? Would AI art of Mickey Mouse be public domain, meaning AI could be the end of Disney’s insane licensing fee?

Edit: Nevermind, turns out this article is just editorialized. It isn’t public domain, it just isn’t eligible for the AI’s creator to copyright it if it’s fully autonomous.

afaik Amazon tries to offload the work of vetting its vendors by requiring them to have a registered trademark. This led to all the sketchy sellers making tons of fake companies with random strings of letters as names, knowing the USPTO is going to approve “AEGIJDU Clothing” because nobody is ever going to contest that name.

That’s why you see a ton of identical products listed with supposedly different, super random brand names, in case Amazon tries to take down one of the “vendors” (aka, one of the real vendor’s many fronts).

Galaxy brain idea: Just encrypt your messages manually. Agree on an algorithm and trade keys in-person, then send each other encrypted files that you decrypt with a separate program (and for added privacy, on a separate device that doesn’t have network access). It’s not convenient at all but the idea is hilarious.

There’s an urban myth at my university that two students did this to test rumors that the school emails were being monitored, and after a few weeks later IT emailed them asking them to stop.

The “high-tech solutions” were sustainable energy, banning mass animal farms, and regulating industrial pollution.

And even if we did come up with a big tech solution that works for now, literally every business would then think, “Nice, now we don’t have to care about our carbon footprint,” until even our tech can’t keep up anymore and we’re back at square one.